Dance of Transformation: From Family to Dynasty for King David in 2 Samuel 6
By admin | March 29, 2011
Dancers love to find incidents of dancing and its importance throughout history. I am no exception. Neither are F. Berk and D. Rosenblatt in their article in The Second Jewish Catalog: “According to the Encyclopedia Judaica, the high level of interest and development in choreography can be noted by the fact that the Bible has eleven verb forms to describe dancing.” The eleven verb forms don’t exactly prove, in my opinion, a development of choreography in the Bible, but it does mean that dance was a part of early Hebraic culture. A search of the dancing moments in the Hebrew Bible is a little like uncovering a moving past that has been stilled through time, assimilation, and layers of interpretation.
Many of the instances of dancing mentioned in the Hebrew Bible are led by women, and often after a war victory of some sort, (Exodus 15:20, Judges 11:34, 1 Samuel 18:6). Some are led by women during the summer festival of Tu B’Av, where women in Shiloh dance in a field to secure future husbands (Judges 21:21, 21:23). Some of the dances by women use taunting or mocking lyrics or chants, as in 1 Samuel 18:6. There is a famous female dancer in Song of Songs (Song 7:1). Non-gendered instances of dance are found in the Psalms, such as Psalm 150:4 and 149:3. However, the dancing that this author has found written about the most by scholars is performed by a man, King David, while bringing the Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem. The scholarship of an arguably marginalized form of human expression (at least seen as marginalized in contemporary American culture) creates a further marginalization due to gender.
This paper will follow the scholar’s lineage by focusing on David’s dancing journey with the Ark, both before and after Uzzah’s death upon touching the Ark in 2 Samuel 6. This story is repeated in 1 Chronicles 13, 15 – 16. Uncovering more of the women’s role in dance in the Hebrew Bible will have to be left to other writers, but I will refer to some of the qualities of the women’s dances in order to investigate possible meanings behind King David’s dancing. Specifically, I will focus on how the dance of King David serves as a metaphor of transition between the rule of the Saul royal family to the larger and more dynastic Davidic rule which transforms a people into a nation, meaning a people with a centralized city and within the next generation a centralized Temple. The word “nation” and the idea of nation-building belies some of the sources I have used; the focus I take is on telling the story of a transformational shift between Saul and David that also led to the aggrandizing of David within Jewish tradition and some Biblical scholarship. I will focus on the act of dancing itself and how this act helped create this shift from the perspective of a David-loving scholarship, and from the perspective, as I see it, of the writer/narrator of 2 Samuel 6. The celebrations of the dancing women mentioned above also mark changes of status, as when Miriam danced with the women to mark the new freedom of the Israelite slaves (Exodus 15:20), and in David’s case the transformation seems even more connected to the dance itself: how it is performed, what precedes and what follows his dancing.
Hebrew words for David’s actions in 2 Samuel 6 and in 1 Chronicles 15:29 include rqd and krkr, meaning skip and whirl, respectively. Mayer Gruber finds corroborations with Curt Sachs’ interpretation of the word rqd through noticing that rqd is used in the Hebrew Bible as the “activity of rams (Psalm 114:4-6), calves (Psalm 29:6) and he-goats (Isaiah 13:21). “The interpretation of kirker [krkr] as a whirling dance is based primarily on the view that kirker is an intensive of the verb karar ‘rotate’.” Gruber finds further support for krkr as dancing, specifically as whirling or pirouetting, through the numerous uses of the verb and derived nouns in Rabbinic Hebrew and Aramaic referring to dancing. The verb pzz is used in 2 Samuel 6:16 as rqd is in 1 Chronicles 15:29. In his short conversation with Michal after she sees him dancing, David says he intends to do more dancing, and uses the verb shq, which besides dancing also connotes ‘to play.’
Tal Ilan finds that throughout the Hebrew Bible and rabbinic literature, the verbs for dance are gendered, i.e., either used for men or used for women. The root for females dancing is hwl while for males it is rqd. This suggests that the activity of dancing was separated; men danced with men, women with women. However, this does not inform us as to whether men or women were watching each other. In the female dances at Shiloh, the precursor for the holiday Tu B’Av, women danced for men for courtship purposes, and in the water-drawing ceremony in the Temple, men danced as women watched. Ilan finds that the differently gendered verbs for dance also reveal different kinds of dancing. Based on other interpretations of hwl and rqd, she surmises that hwl refers to circle dancing, or forming a circle, while rqd refers to leaping, or bouncing, up and down.
This becomes a little complicated when looking at what King David was doing, and who he was doing it for, in 2 Samuel 6. (From now on in this paper I will mostly focus on the 2 Samuel rather than the 1 Chronicle telling of this story, as there is more text to the story and Michal plays a larger role.) Music and dancing were part of both processions of the Ark to Jerusalem, the first being before Uzzah’s demise, the second after when David processes again, this time with more ritual and intention. In the first procession, the instruments cited, according to David Wright, are the voice, lyres, hand-drums, rattles and cymbals. Throughout the Hebrew Bible, according to Carol Meyers, the hand-drum is the instrument that women play. She finds evidence for this in Exodus 15:20-21, 1 Samuel 18:6-7, Judges 5:1, and Judges 11:34, among others. In the second procession, Wright explains that while the only horns and ritual shouting are mentioned as musical elements, the implicit evidence of other instruments in the second procession is the presence of joyous dancing. And, dancing was often accompanied, as mentioned, with hand-drums, played by women. Therefore, in both processions, we can assume the presence of both men and women. (And of course Michal’s words about David’s dancing in front of other women confirm this.) What we are not able to completely pinpoint is whether the men and women were dancing together. However, given that it was a procession, and the instruments and song go hand in hand with the dancing, we can safely assume that the dancing, if separated by gender, was not hidden from either gender, and could have been mixed. One could wonder whether women were dancing in circles while men were jumping, or due to the joyousness of the occasion, this type of step differentiation might have been forgotten, and the usual boundaries transgressed. This possible transgression, whether it was through David dancing with women or perhaps at times like a woman, could have aided the disgust Michal voiced, as well as signaled a highly transformative moment – one in which transgression can create new meaning for the surrounding community as well as popularizing the transgressor.
There were other differences between the first and second procession, differences which I feel created a transformative effect on David and served as a greater transformation for the people he ruled. Wright discusses how the horns could not be alone in the second procession due to the dancing, but the addition of horns may signal a difference in intention. Horns “are mainly used to summon people together, signal an announcement, mark the beginning of cultic events and times…” and in war. David wanted to clearly mark the difference between the first, failed attempt at bringing the ark to Jerusalem, and the second, in which he set out more clearly ritualistic and cultic parameters for all to follow.
David sees that the Ark has blessed Obed-edom and his family, with whom the Ark was housed for three months between processions. David seeks the same blessings, and thus creates an atmosphere immersed in ritual. Wright speaks of a more “intensified form of dance” in the second procession as a result of a “greater volume of music and community excitement.” And the appearance of the horns in the second procession over the first “conveys the impression that David and the people are now more deeply committed to transferring the ark to Jerusalem. They reveal a greater emotional involvement in the ceremony and, implicitly, a greater reverence for the deity.” This complements other changes in the second procession: carrying the Ark on the shoulders instead of on the cart that David had devised, offering sacrifices at the beginning of the procession, and David leading the procession. Also, David started the procession but had all involved in it halt after six steps (2 Samuel 6:13). Any time a procession starts, and then stops, especially after a set number of steps, signifies an important moment, a reckoning, a “pregnant pause”, if you will. The sacrifice followed this pause. David also wears a special piece of clothing, a linen ephod, which is associated with priestly clothes (2 Samuel 6:14). It is sometimes questioned whether there was dancing at all in the first procession, as the verbs can also be translated as “to play” as in play an instrument. However, using various connections with other uses of the verb and how it is used in the later Chronicles story, Wright argues that indeed dancing existed in the first procession, but the dancing in the second procession was clearly more vigorous and therefore, I feel, possibly more transformational, than in the first.
Wright focuses on transformation in that he speaks to this type of vigorous dancing as similar to various forms of “self-affliction, that is, fasting or more strenuous forms of self-abuse, such as cutting or scarring the skin.” Although vigorous dancing in theological situations can indeed have self-afflicting qualities, such as Sufi dancers who use knives against themselves while whirling into a frenzy, this is not the only outcome of that kind of vigor. Bradford Keeney, an anthropologist, speaks about the cross-cultural dance of shaking, a convulsing, jumping, whirling of the body that is used to create religious fervor and connection, transformational states of being, and shamanistic healing. This shaking “medicine” as he refers to it has been a part of cultures from Africa, Asia, to our own Shakers and Quakers in North America. David completed his ritualistic transfer of the Ark to Jerusalem through the vessel of his own body, physically transferring the power of the deity from the Philistines, to a neutral other space, to the city where his reign will continue through his son, Solomon.
This transfer of power, especially from the Saul royal family rule to what becomes the dynastic Davidic rule, is further enhanced by the ending of 2 Samuel 6 and the beginning of 2 Samuel 7. Here in the conversation between Michal and David, many scholars and creative writers have found rich material. And, after this influential conversation, the last line of 2 Samuel 6 (where we learn that Michal will be barren for the remainder of her days) seems almost literally like a punch line. Directly after this, in 2 Samuel 7, David’s continued rule and his relationship to the creation of his dynasty are discussed. It seems clear that the ending of 2 Samuel 6 must be directly related to the enhancement of David’s power.
Bruce Rosenstock argues that David’s wild dancing is akin to Bakhtin’s “carnivalizing” and is connected to pan-Mediterranean rituals which involved “dance, genital display, and mocking speech designed to elicit laughter.” He also contends that Michal rejects David’s behavior as unworthy of a King, and that according to her ideology, based in her family’s rule, royal glory mirrors divine glory and is supposed to be invisible, or at least contained. Rosenstock goes into great detail about the wording of their dialogue, and how they play off of each other’s words and meanings. Since they are doing this, Rosenstock surmises, it is possible that they are participating in a ritual of mocking that goes horribly wrong. He likens the mocking words of Michal – “What glory the king of Israel got for himself today when he was revealed today before the eyes of the servant girls of his subjects just like the way one of those worthless men reveal themselves,” (6:20) and the self-deprecating response of David – “I will be lowly in my own eyes and with the servant girls you spoke of, with them I will get myself glory” (6:21-22) as the give and take of ritual mockery. And part of the ritual Rosenstock references is about enhancing fertility. This he sees evidenced in the fertile blessings bestowed upon Obed-edom upon housing the Ark, and later upon David’s blessing the crowd and all of corporate Israel with a cake that is identified by Hosea with the worship of foreign fertility divinities. David carries the blessings back to his home, where the ritual language takes place. Michal engages in ritual language, which connects to fertility rituals in Greece where women engage in abusive language, deriding their husbands, eliciting laughter, although, this language is usually not to their husband’s faces. The mocking language is reminiscent of the mocking language of the dancing women earlier when greeting Saul with “Saul has slain his thousands, and David his tens of thousands.” (1 Samuel 18:6) The question is if both Michal and David were engaged in a ritual of mocking and derision, what went wrong? Rosenstock suggests that the ritual “misfired”; Michal expected David to play the more serious role and she the mocking, and David expected the opposite. This “misfiring of the ritual reverses the normal expectations, bringing childlessness rather than reproductive blessing to Michal and David.”
Rosenstock and other writers talk about jealousy as a motivation for Michal to be disapproving. Michal was brought back to David after marrying another man, and after he acquired other wives. They hadn’t yet seen each other after her return. Rosenstock writes that Michal “also resents the fact that the king’s glory, which had only been hers to see, is now shared with the servant girls.” This however, seems a bit of a stretch, as Michal is aware of David’s other wives, and therefore his glory is not her sole property anymore.
What is important in Rosenstock’s analysis is that David is clearly aware of his important role in the heightening of his power through this ritual. Through other Biblical passages where the heroic warrior is received with dancing and singing, to C.L. Seow’s collection of evidence from mythic narratives celebrating the return of the divine warrior through dance, and then the warrior’s enthronement, David is ritually enacting his own enthronement and perhaps finalizing his takeover of Saul’s family rule. This is further emphasized by the final sentence in 2 Samuel 6; Michal’s barrenness completes the takeover with no heirs to fight for Saul’s lineage. It is also worth noting that throughout the narrative, (2 Samuel 6:16, 6:20, and 6:23) Michal is referred to as the “daughter of Saul” rather than the wife of David. This shows that the narrator of 2 Samuel 6 was interested in creating a rift between the house of Saul and David’s future reign.
Robert Alter emphasizes the gap between the end of verse 22 and the beginning of verse 23 (when Michal is pronounced barren) as a strategic one. Michal’s silence to David’s retort, and the breaking off of the dialogue at this point is “implicit commentary. David has the last word because, after all, he has the power, as he has just taken pains to point out to Michal. The daughter of a rejected royal house and by now a consort of only marginal political utility to the popularly acclaimed king…Michal can do nothing…” David’s word is final. The Biblical narrator marks the space that changes the history of the Jewish nation with silence.
Walter Brueggemann also sees this exchange as a final step in the transformation of the house of Israel. “David uses Michal’s words to dismiss her. Michal as no future, no claim on Israel, no prospect for life. In David’s utter abandonment to dance and in his liturgic, social, royal extravagance, a new order is authorized, wrought out of unrestrained yielding and worship.”
The most powerful textual sign that a new rule is announced is the fact that the next chapter, 2 Samuel 7, David’s rule is firmly established. It is worth quoting Nathan, the prophet with whom David consults, and his vision from YHWH, since it mentions this transfer of power, the taking away of God’s love from Saul, and the continued rule of David through his heirs in 2 Samuel 7:8-16. “Now then, tell my servant David, ‘This is what the LORD Almighty says: I took you from the pasture and from following the flock to be ruler over my people Israel. I have been with you wherever you have gone, and I have cut off all your enemies from before you. Now I will make your name great, like the names of the greatest men of the earth. And I will provide a place for my people Israel and will plant them so that they can have a home of their own and no longer be disturbed. Wicked people will not oppress them anymore, as they did at the beginning and have done ever since the time I appointed leaders over my people Israel. I will also give you rest from all your enemies. The LORD declares to you that the LORD himself will establish a house for you: When your days are over and you rest with your fathers, I will raise up your offspring to succeed you, who will come from your own body, and I will establish his kingdom. He is the one who will build a house for my Name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. I will be his father, and he will be my son. When he does wrong, I will punish him with the rod of men, with floggings inflicted by men. But my love will never be taken away from him, as I took it away from Saul, whom I removed from before you. Your house and your kingdom will endure forever before me; your throne will be established forever.”
As I asked in the beginning of this essay: who was David dancing for - his God, as he states (2 Samuel 6:21), for the crowd and specifically for the women in the crowd, as Michal suggests (2 Samuel 6:20), or for the sake of celebration? David’s dancing was the catalyst for the transformation of the nation of Israel from Saul’s royal family to his own kingdom. David was dancing for the power change on which the narrator in 2 Samuel 6 is focused. The nature of the dancing itself, the rituals that surrounded it and enlivened it, and the reaction of Michal and the inferred consequences all contribute to creating and then finalizing this historic shift of power and fate for the Israelites.
ENDNOTES
F. Berk and D. Rosenblatt, “Dance,” The Second Jewish Catalogue, ed. Sharon Strassfield and Michael Strassfield (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1976) 337.
Schwartz, Regina, “Adultery in the House of David: The Metanarrative of Biblical Scholarship and the Narratives of the Bible,” Semeia, 1991, 35-55. In this text the author proposes that the past two centuries of Biblical scholarship has created a reading of the Bible as a consistent, uninterrupted narrative rather than focusing on the text itself, which is more inconsistent and interrupted, and even somewhat, if defined loosely, “post-modern.”
Mayer I Gruber, “Ten Dance-Derived Expressions in the Hebrew Bible,” in Dance as Religious Studies, Doug Adams and Diane Apostolos-Cappadona, editors, OR: Crossroads Publishing Co., 1993
Curt Sachs, World History of the Dance, trans. Bessie Schonberg (New York: W.W. Norton, 1937) 30.
Gruber, 53.
Ibid., 54
Ibid.
Ibid., 58 – 59
Tal Ilan, “Dance and Gender in Ancient Jewish Sources,” Near Eastern Archaeology, 66 No. 3, (2003), 135
Ibid., 136
Ibid.
Carol Meyers, “Women with Hand-Drums, Dancing: Bible”, in Jewish Women’s Archive, jwa.org, retrieved 3/30 from http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/women-with-hand-drums-dancing-bible
David P Wright, “Music and Dance in 2 Samuel 6,” Journal of Biblical Literature, 121 no 2 Summer 2002, 209
Pendergast, Donna and Erica McWilliam, “Marginal Pleasures: Teachers, transgression and transformation.” Paper presented at The Australian Association of Research in Education annual conference, Melbourne, Nov-Dec 1999. This paper discusses the various ways in which transgression in the act of teaching, instead of subverting hegemonic teaching practice, can create new knowledge and popularize the teacher, thereby creating a stronger teacher/student relationship.
Wright., 210
Ibid., 215
Ibid.
Ibid., 223
Bradford Keeney, Shaking Medicine: The Healing Power of Ecstatic Movement. Destiny Books, 2007.
Bruce Rosenstock, “David’s Play: Fertility Rituals and the Glory of God in 2 Samuel 6,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, 31:1, (2006) p. 63
Ibid., 67-68
Ibid., 73
Ibid., 71
Ibid., 67
Robert Alter, “Characterization and the Art of Reticence,” in Telling Queen Michal’s Story: An Experiment in Comparative Interpretation, Clines, David J.A. and Eskenazi, Tamara C., editors, Sheffield: Sheffield Academy Press, 1991, 72-73
Walter Brueggemann, “2 Samuel 6” in Telling Queen Michal’s Story
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What is Embodied Prayer and Jewish Yoga?
By admin | December 3, 2009
Interview with 614 magazine (a new Jewish women’s magazine) from September, ‘09….
What is Jewish Yoga?
Class Description: We start with thank you. We say Modeh/Modah Ani upon waking, which is one big “thank you” for keeping me alive and waking me up, and go on to the morning prayers, which say thank you for opening eyes, mine and others, for straightening the bent, my body and others, for guiding my steps, etc. The prayers can be seen as an analogy for all humanity, but also for getting me out of bed and just, well, thanks. Then, after the grateful blessings, we say “wow.” All the Songs of Praise follow, the “wow” of the wonder of it all, and of God. We say “thanks” before we say “wow”! Isn’t that amazing? It’s an ancient “attitude of gratitude.” I use this map, which includes listening (shma) and studying/asking, this framework already handed down to Jews for thousands of years, to thematically and literally order the yoga movements of the class.
Why did you want to start your classes in Jewish yoga?
As a former professional dancer, and a yoga person and then teacher, I have always learned kinesthetically. I always felt like even my own spirituality was through my body, that somehow I felt a kind of God presence while focused on expanding, stretching, and playing with my own body’s boundaries. Taking care of and being aware of the body is a very Jewish attribute. (Even the Rambam said, and I paraphrase, “To know Torah you must care for the soul and the body; the soul is ranked first but the body comes first…”) It seemed natural to want to merge that way of learning with understanding Jewish concepts, beliefs, and prayers. It has been fascinating to uncover the rich history of movement within the tradition. From the present-day shuckling (swaying) in shul, to Torah processionals, to the time when David danced half naked in front of the Ark, and Miriam led the women into song and dance, movement and body consciousness have been a part of Judaism. Doing Jewish yoga is a way of reclaiming the body in connecting to God or your own personal version of Divinity. I also got tired of the headier textual study: Judaism is a lived religion, however orthodox a person wishes to embody it. The rituals include physically doing something to create spiritual connection. Doing Jewish yoga means physically understanding what it is to be thankful for girding Israel (us) with strength, or straightening our bent bodies—two prayers from the morning blessings. It means truly listening to our bodies’ responses to our own relationship to God and prayer (or as a friend says, “shma’ing the body”).
What do you think women get out of the classes?
I hesitate to label what women, as opposed to men, get out of the classes. It would be easy to say that women are more open to new ways of learning in Judaism, especially if you’re talking about more traditional Jewish learners and learning methods, since they were traditionally left out, but many men in my class are the first to groan and moan and express their eagerness to work with their bodies as metaphors for their own truth. Often, women are the teachers, so they get role models. And, when I teach in Orthodox circles, such as at Orot College in Israel, it is only women who take the course.
What was one of your best teaching moments?
I’ve been lucky to have had quite a few high points recently. One was when I was leading an Embodied Shabbat ceremony, working with my rabbi and a musician. We were following what I consider to be the main parts of a morning service, especially Shabbat morning: gratitude, praise, listening, and study/asking. These parts correspond to the prayer and song sequences of the morning service. The group got so involved in the gratitude part—which includes yoga poses, chanting, getting warmed up, and saying what they’re grateful for—that, quite naturally, the songs of praise, specifically the Nishmat prayer, thanking and praising God for the Breath of Life, came out of the crowd and into their bodies. I barely had to lead—just had to facilitate the natural expansion of the group’s energy.
But I must say the most humbling and exciting moments are when I get those students who approach me saying that somehow, in some way, what they did in my class brought them closer to their Judaism, or their souls. Surprisingly enough, some of the more religious women I taught in Israel had this reaction. I was pretty blown away. Those women are so in love with Judaism that they make the gender differentiation look almost inviting. So, for them to say this to me, a Conservative-born feminist Jew who looked into Hindu yoga for my spirituality before returning to Judaism, is a pretty big honor.
What is the most challenging aspect about teaching your class?
The first five minutes. Always. Getting people to let go of their expectations… of whatever… a yoga class, a Jewish experience, what dance is, what it means to be Jewish, or what it is supposed to look like. Usually by minute six, but certainly by twenty, we’re all ok with where we are.
How does your class help women connect to Judaism?
I think, again, because of the traditional ways in which women were expected to behave or pray, this presents an egalitarian concrete connection to Judaism that bypasses those more male-dominated approaches.
What one lesson/message would you like to share with our readers?
Judaism rocks. And rolls. I mean it. I am in my mid-40s and I envy what is around now for younger women and men who are seeking a spiritual Judaism, not a rote, watered-down Judaism. There is a lot out there to get connected to—eco-Kosher, environmental awareness; the Torah is a pretty amazing guide if you’ve found smart, spiritually aware, and holistically oriented teachers to help lead you. And there’s more and more of those teachers, and some of them are in their 30s and early 40s. Find them; Judaism needs you to continue its mission of bringing Heaven and Earth together—making the material, spiritual and leading the earth into better times. If not now, when? (Ok, got a bit soap-boxy there… but Hillel had it right).
When do you personally feel most Jewish?
On Friday nights. The small stuff—lighting candles, saying the blessings, watching my partner’s (and soon my step-) children tear at the challah like they’re Siberian refugees. And then, kibbitzing in shul on Saturday, mixing small talk with prayer. It is the ease of the material and spiritual that makes Judaism interesting. In what other religion is it written that a man is supposed to please his woman, and yes I mean sexually, especially on Shabbos, as much as possible? Got to admit, girls, we got pretty lucky on that one.
What question do you wish I would ask, and what is your answer.
Question: where can I go for cool Judaism?
Keep looking for good, plugged-in resources, like Elat Chayyim—the Jewish renewal spiritual center based at Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center in Connecticut—with courses almost year-round. Romemu in New York—a place where there is yoga and meditation before the amazing chanting Shabbat service. Check out the Aleph Kallah—an every other year event, but an ongoing resource for teachers and ideas. If you’re an artist yourself, your local Jewish Federation probably wants to hear from you and how you can connect what you do with local day schools and Hebrew schools. Judaism needs young vital minds, bodies, and souls to keep falling in love with it, to find out about its desires for peace (yes, peace!), healing, and love; not just law, rules, and restrictions.
Jodi P Falk, MFA, CLMA
Jodi P Falk is an international educational consultant, choreographer, dancer, yogi, and teacher. Her work centers on the vehicle of movement and the arts to promote educational wellness, conflict resolution, proficiency, and personal and spiritual power. Visit www.dancingsoul.org to learn more about her program.
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Cool article about Jewish embodied prayer / dancingsoul online live!
By admin | October 6, 2009
www.brandeis.edu/hbi/614
Michelle Cove of Hadassah/Brandeis Institute, editor of 614, an online magazine for Jewish women, and men, found my articles and asked me for this interview.
Please visit their site. I talk about what a Jewish yoga/movement class looks like, from my perspective, and how it varies in Orthodox and in Renewal communities. Also, I tell you why women, from a traditional perspective, are lucky in Judaism!
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Moving Metaphors: Lesson in Poetry and Dance
By admin | March 30, 2009
Authors: Jenn Blackburn, English Teacher, and Jodi Falk, Dance Director, PVPACHS
Overview & Purpose: This series of activities was designed to allow students to explore poetry through movement. Many of these lessons can be done in one class period or spread out among several class periods. It is our intention to explore how dance can inform one’s understanding of poetry and conversely how poetry can inform one’s understanding of dance. In the spring of 2008, we applied these activities to a poetry unit with four ninth grade language arts classes. This fall we are applying these activities to four ninth grade language arts classes in their unit based upon John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me. We created this unit with these objectives in mind:
- To illustrate how both poetry and dance are forms of language.
- To demonstrate how movement can serve as a bridge between the abstract and the concrete.
- To provide multiple types of learners the benefit of varied approaches to teaching.
- To provide opportunities for immediate visual feedback regarding students’ understanding.
5) To provide multiple opportunities for all students to actively engage during activities.
MA Standards Addressed:
ELA Standards: 1 Discussion, 8 Understanding a Text, 11 Theme, 14 Poetry, 18 Dramatic Reading and Performance
Dance Standards: 1 Movement Elements and Dance Skills, 2 Choreography, 3 Dance as Expression, 4 Performance, 5 Critical Response, 10 Interdisciplinary Connections
Objectives:
Students will be able to:
- explain/ relate a connection between movement and language
- make discoveries and interpretations of the meaning of various poems using the elements of poetry (diction, sounds, rhythm, connotation, theme) and the form of dance (time, space, quality)
- show how rhythm, connotation, theme, action (verbs) and descriptive words (adverbs and adjectives) can be expressed through movement
- achieve a deeper understanding of poetry through physical exploration
Materials Needed:
- space for students to move freely
- handouts with guidelines, procedures and definitions
- index cards containing words with varied connotations
- pens or pencils
- copies of poems you will use and explore during exercises
We used: “i am accused of tending to the past” by Lucille Clifton for the connotation and denotation exercise, “Dream Deferred” by Langston Hughes for the action and descriptive words exercise, “Still I Rise” by Maya Angelou for the theme exercise, and finally “We Real Cool” by Gwendolyn Brooks and “We Wear the Mask” by Paul Laurence Dunbar for the rhythm exercise.
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Instruction:
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- Students will be introduced to the activities and objectives of the unit.
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- Elements of dance: space, time and quality, and choreographic principles
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- Connotation and Denotation Exercise- What are connotation and denotation? Why do poets make specific word choices? Can students find examples in the poem where a word with strong connotations is used? How does it affect the meaning of the line or poem? Can students demonstrate the connotations of words, phrases and lines using movement?
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- Action Words and Descriptive Words Exercise- Review the definitions of verbs, adjectives and adverbs before reading the poem(s). Identify examples of each from the poem. Select a group to explore the poem(s) with specific focus on the words in your assigned category. Can your group members perform the poem to a dramatic reading? How do group choices and performances compare or contrast when focus is shifted to different types of words?
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- Theme Exercise- What is theme? What is a theme statement? Can students identify a theme for a poem? How would they embody that theme using movement(s) or a montage?
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- Rhythm exercise- What is rhythm? Can students pick up on a rhythm and repeat it? Can they create their own rhythms? Can they identify rhythm in poetry?
Feedback: It is important for the teachers to provide feedback and assistance both to individuals and to groups throughout the course of each activity. Do not forget to allow students time to critique each other’s performances in a respectful and genuine manner. (You may need to model this.) Allow students the chance to explain their intentions for their choices and possibly consider what else they would have done following feedback or if given more time.
Reflection: At the end of each activity, as well as at the end of the unit, we provided time for discussion and summary of the activities that took place as well as the information covered. Students were asked to give feedback both through discussion and through a short survey.
Other Possible Applications: This year we created an integrated dance and language arts lesson using the characters of Harper Lee’s, To Kill a Mockingbird. Students explored the ways that characteristics can manifest themselves physically. Students explored movements such as rising, sinking, spreading, narrowing, advancing and retreating and applied these techniques to characters from the novel. Students established walks, movements and mannerisms for various characters and had the opportunity to create interactions with other characters.
We have also used movement to explore the shape and sounds of words in poetry.
For a detailed description of each exercise to use in your classroom, feel free to contact Jodi at jodi@dancingsoul.org
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MODES OF MOVEMENT INTO TEFILLAH: Mixing the modes! Sibling rivalry in Genesis and the human puzzle game
By admin | February 19, 2009
Recently I completed a residency at Heritage Academy, a Jewish day school in Longmeadow, Massachusetts. I came to work at first with the Judaic staff on bringing movement into their curriculum. I ended up not only working with the staff, but also with the middle school students finding ways to embody (and thereby enhance and re-member) their tefillah, or prayer.
MODES OF MOVEMENT INTO TEFILLAH
Three distinct modes of how movement and text, in this case the text of tefillah, were used with the middle school with varying levels of success. The three are: wordplay, the essence, and personalizing question. Full descriptions of these individual modes are in earlier blogs. In this lesson we mixed essence and personalizing.
MIXING THE MODES!
Lesson 4:
Modes: Personalizing and Essence
Text/prayer: The sibling rivalry stories in Genesis
Players: middle school day students
1. Talk about the sets of siblings that are mentioned in Genesis most often.
a. Cain and Abel, Yitzhak and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers
2. What do these sets of brothers have in common? What is different?
3. Personalizing: What kinds of relationship do the students have with their siblings? Are they alike? Are they opposite? Take Jacob and Esau – how are they alike? How opposite? Do they ever reconcile? When?
4. Essence: the metaphor of opposites needing each other to grow, or to move to their rightful place in the Torah, how opposites “attract”.
5. The human puzzle game is a favorite among children of all ages. Have one student make a shape that is interesting. Here, we asked one of them to make a shape like he/she was Jacob. What would be some of the characteristics of his stance, his arm/hand gestures, etc.
6. Then, ask another student to put him/herself in the empty spaces, the negative spaces (art term) of the student being Jacob. They are to try to fill in at least two negative spaces. This will look like interlocking puzzle pieces.
7. Then ask the Jacob person to leave, and let the second person stay still.
8. See what the not-Jacob space looks like, the opposite of Jacob…. Or is it? Is our not-self a reflection of our self and therefore part of us? Are we also our opposites? Sometimes, the second person will look a lot like what Esau might have looked – bigger, rounder, more “earthy”.
9. Continue to find opposites in the human puzzle. You can keep working with the actual Torah characters, and try to learn something about them, or just keep on doing the puzzle game, and learn something about what it means to embrace your opposite, or to know that you and your opposite are related.
10. Ask the students how doing this game relates to their own siblings at home?
11. Heritage student answers: My brother completes me, We have more in common than I thought, when we are together – we are one…
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