Hey. I'm Bruce Bierman and I teach the joy of Jewish dance.
Circle dances, line dances, Yemenite dances, Israeli, Mizrahi, Sephardic dances
I teach all of that
when I tell people that I teach Jewish dance today,
I lot of people say, "What is Jewish dance?"
You mean Israeli dance right?
I say actually no Israeli dance falls within the umbrella of Jewish dance
but it's one of the newest forms created in the 30s and 40s in Israel
but Yemenite goes back and then came Hasidic and Klezmer
and there's Yiddish theatre dancing and contemporary Jewish dance as well.
So the umbrella is pretty big.
I want to show you some Yemenite gestures.
I tend to do a lot of gestures in Jewish dance it's one of the
elements that moved throughout the Diaspora
from ancient Israel to Yemen to Poland even to Israel
it's the hands that kept Jewish and Middle Eastern in in the Orient
And there's literally hundreds of different gestures in Jewish dance
I want to play you a Yemenite song.
It's a famous poem by Shalom Shabazi,
one of the great Yemenite poets called Im Nin Alu.
Ofra Haza made a very famous record about it.
This is Mizrahi dance. It's all in the shoulders.
All right so this is Hasidic dance and also the hands carried over.
Steps not so important as the gestures.
Klezmer dance. A little different from Hasidic. Here we go
A lot of percussion
So even in Israeli dance, the hands come in
originally a Hasidic tune
There's many characters in Torah that break out in dance and song
and of course Miriam the great prophetess was one of the key ones
and there's a great Midrash about Miriam written by Rabbi Meor V'Shemesh
and he says it was Miriam's dances her circle dances
that represented the Utopia of where we want to go
If you're in Berkeley you can come study Jewish dance with me.
There are great teachers some of my teachers in Yiddish dance and Yemenite dance who
live in New York, Chicago, Israel as well
everywhere you go right now there's groups of people
dancing and singing
and it's one of the most easiest, cheapest technologies
to increase joy and happiness in community
so get out there
dance, raise your spirits, raise the simcha
dance to the beat of your own rhythm and your own style
and come on let's dance!