Dance Program  

Dancing at KlezKamp is the connective thread of the community: it knits together young and old and gives both dancers and musicians the chance to viscerally experience an unbroken connection with previous generations.

Ikh Aleyn ken oykh Tantsn: Improvising Alone and in Couples/PM1 Steve Weintraub

Yiddish dance is largely an improvisatory form, and you don’t need a circle of people. Learn to improvise alone or with a partner of either gender to freylekhs, khosdl, honga, and terkish. And some challenging couple dances will be learned, including the elegant Polka Mazurka.

Basic Yiddish Dance/PM2 Deborah Strauss

If you have never danced to klezmer before, this is the class for you. Taught by fiddler extraordinaire Deborah Strauss, this is also a perfect place for musicians to deepen their musical understanding of Yiddish rhythm, phrasing and gesture by moving their feet on the other side of the bandstand!

Staging Simkhe Dances: Yiddish Dance Dramaturgy/AM2 Jill Gellerman

Many simkhe dances are inherently dramatic (think broyges tants), have influenced Yiddish theater, like The Dybbuk, or play a key role in Hasidic folk performances (Purim-shpiln). This class will recreate these dances, reviewing film clips and choreographic strategies as resources for staging them. Like a dramaturge, we’ll keep one eye on the dance itself and the other eye on the process that makes the dance dramatic, examining underlying theatrical and musical structures from conception to onstage embodiment.

Make Them Dance!/PM2 (see Instrumental Music)

Klezmillenial Dance/AM1 Steve Weintraub

Join choreographer Steve Weintraub in further explorations of post-traditional Yiddish dance for performance. Be prepared to be very physically active, to be experimental, and to learn and memorize a fun new dance that we will create together.