Harris, a dance historian, therapist, lecturer and teacher, will speak on “Jews and the American Dance” at a Hadassah-sponsored lecture at Congregation Beth El in Berkeley on Tuesday, Nov. 12.
“Most people don’t know how important Jews, particularly Jewish women are, in the development of modern dance,” says Harris.
Modern dance was introduced to Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the early years of the 20th century by two wealthy Jewish women, Alice and Irene Lewisohn. The sister and wife of Adolph Lewisohn, a major donor to City College of New York, the Lewisohns set up classes in the performing arts at the Playhouse of the Henry Street Settlement House.
“[The Lewisohns] were trying to make primitive children into something more cultivated,” Harris says.
Modern dance was in its infancy and the concept was revolutionary. For one thing, Jewish women performing on stage was looked down on by the older generation. For another, modern dance was a new style, rejecting the elitism of expensive shoes, costumes and strict form of the European ballet.
“These were people dancing in bare feet and shmatas,” says Harris. “They followed the tradition that Isadora Duncan started, using the body much more freely than ballet did.”
Among the people hired to teach dance was Martha Graham. Although Graham was mainly interested in personal development, she defined the modern dance technique, and the women of the tenement adapted it to the politics of their lives.
For these women, who lacked a role in the growing workers’ and socialist movements around them, dance became their medium.
“For 50 cents you got a class in dance and a lesson in Marxism,” says Harris. “[The dancers] reached a lot of the early audiences through their passion and excitement.”
Since modern dance was accessible to a large group of people on a participatory level, the classes attracted not only Jewish children but African Americans and anyone else who had no place else to study dance, Harris says.
The dances were used as political statements in union rallies of the 1930s and ’40s, where performers had an assembled audience.
According to Harris, “concert dance” did not exist as an art form until fairly recently. Dancers never got paid and they had no union. It wasn’t until Hollywood popularized musical comedy that most people had occasion to watch people perform dance. From this grew the concert dance performance, Harris says.
Modern dance also found its place in the Israeli independence movement. “When Israel was first established, they danced Bible stories and Kaddish,” says Harris of pageants staged by the dancers. “From this, early Israeli folk dancing was developed. They made a tradition out of nothing.”
Harris credits three Jewish women who emerged from the New York settlement house tradition as leaders in the development of modern dance in this country: Helen Becker (Tamiris), Anna Sokolow and Sophie Maslow. All were children of sweatshop workers struggling to make the transition from immigrant to American. Eventually all three moved from the tenements to the theater.
Becker, under the stage names of Tamiris, became a choreographer in Hollywood and on Broadway. Her credits include “Annie Get Your Gun” and “Up in Central Park.” Sokolow followed the same route choreographing “Hair,” “Candide” and “Street Scenes.”
In 1933 Maslow founded the New Dance Group, which still exists. According to Harris, this was the most important modern dance school in New York for nearly two decades.
Although Harris came along some 20 years after these three modern dance pioneers, she is a product of the “tenement to theater” phenomenon. Harris studied under Merce Cunningham, touring in a VW bus, and was a student in the New Dance Group.
Later branching out as historian and lecturer, Harris kept dance as her focus. She teaches an ongoing class, “Lifelong Movement” for older adults, at the Modern Dance Center in Berkeley and is currently working on a book about the history of modern dance in America.