By Lisa Traiger
Choreographer Ronan Koresh is marking his 20th anniversary in Philadelphia. He is known for abrasive critiques, but tears come to his eyes when dancers get their moves just right.
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By Lisa Traiger
Warsaw-based playwright Tadeusz Slobodzianek’s “Our Class,” is about neighbors becomming enemies, and is the most controversial play in contemporary Poland. Now, it debuts in Philadelphia.
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By Lisa Traiger
Liz Lerman, whose choreography has long grappled with issues of Jewish identity, is stepping down after 35 years at the helm of the Dance Exchange.
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By Lisa Traiger
At New York’s 60th annual Israel Folk Dance Festival, held in April, a few dozen dancers at the opening session circled to their favorite Hebrew songs, those that recalled a time when Israel was a vibrant new nation. With plenty of gray heads and bottle brunettes among them, the middle-aged and older crowd didn’t bode well for a festival meant to convey the youth, vitality and creativity of Israeli dance in the 21st century. Only later that Friday evening, in the 92nd Street Y’s second-floor Buttenweiser Hall, when nearly 100 teenagers from Caracas, Venezuela and North Miami Beach showed up clutching shopping bags and cell phones, did the program step up the pace.
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By Lisa Traiger
In 1924 there was just one Israeli folk dance, “Hora Agadati,” created in Tel Aviv. Within a year of gaining statehood, Israel could boast 75 folk dances. And by 2005 there were 4,678, according to Dina Roginsky, an anthropologist and lecturer at Yale University who has studied the growth of Israeli folk dance.
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