DAVID SACHS
Senior Copy Editor
dances as a child. She had also
danced and acted for two decades
with a Jewish theater company in
Los Angeles under director-choreog-
rapher Benjamin Zemach.
With Rochlin, Goodman found
someone she could learn from. "She
was so wonderful that I wanted to
videotape her, and I decided to get a
group of people together. I found
mostly older people who had their
own life experiences in Jewish dance.
I filmed them along with Miriam
performing two shers and a freilach."
A sher, explains Goodman, is a square
dance with a pattern and formality. A
dangled handkerchief provides the only
tantalizing contact allowed between the
sexes — no touching or hanky-panky is
permitted. A freilach tends to be more
ad hoc, performed in a circle or a line.
"The tape not only teaches actual
dances, steps and counts, but also
talks a lot about the style and flavor
of how dance was in the shtetl 100
years ago," said the filmmaker.
"It's all part of regaining knowl-
edge of that time — to carry it for-
ward and to build .on it." ❑
iddish dance is the tradi-
tional way to fully engage
the whirlwind spell of the
klezmer music revival —
the joyous melodies so popular now
at weddings, synagogue concerts and
campus coffeehouses.
But other than by scrutinizing vin-
tage Yiddish movies like Yiddle With
a Fiddle, those who wanted to dance
like their European ancestors had no
instructional video to turn to, says
Los Angeles modern-dance choreogra-
pher and performer Karen Goodman.
To remedy this, the Oak Park
High and Wayne State grad has pro-
duced, directed and written her own
video Come Let Us Dance, which
offers not only a step-by-step jump-
start to Yiddish dance, but also a his-
toric appreciation of this waning
facet of Jewish cultural heritage.
Goodman, who has danced pro-
fessionally on both coasts and oper-
ated her own studio in Los Angeles
for two decades, had an awakening
to the importance that dance plays
in Jewish life when
she came across
several references
to dance in her
Torah study.
"I realized with
my background in
Western perform-
ing dance and my
exposure to folk
dance from all over
the world that the
one dance that I
didn't know about
was my own her-
itage," she said.
"It began as
personal
Native Detroit filmmaker Karen Goodman gets historical per-
research. I want-
spective from her Yiddish &ince video's star, Miriam Rochlin.
ed to find people
who knew these
old shers and freilachs that I remem-
The 48-minute video Come Let
bered from my childhood without a
Us Dance is available for $34.99
clear idea of how to perform them."
through Ergo Media Inc.,
Goodman found 81-year-old
www.je-wishvideo.com
Miriam Rochlin, who learned the
or by calling (877) 539-4748.
dances from Nathan Vizonsky, the
Goodman's Web site for the video,
choreographer-dancer who authored
vvvvvv.yiddishdancevideo.com
the 1942 book Ten Jewish Folk
will soon feature additional dance
Dances. Rochlin, a Holocaust refugee
steps, vocabulary and information.
from Germany, studied Jewish
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