Tatyana Tenenbaum & Hadar Ahuvia: Long tones in the days of omer

Thu 02 Jun, 2022, 8pm
Free ($10 suggested donation)

Thursday, June 2nd at 8pm ET, choreographer and composer Tatyana Tenenbaum continues her 2022 ISSUE residency with Long tones in the days of omer, a collaboration with independent dancer, choreographer, Jewish educator, and service leader Hadar Ahuvia. The performance will take place at Congregation Beth Elohim in Park Slope, Brooklyn, in partnership with the New Jewish Culture Fellowship.

Hadar Ahuvia and Tatyana Tenenbaum are New York City/Lenapehoking-based interdisciplinary performance makers who have been supporting each other’s work since 2014. The duo notes, “We have taken different pathways toward “examining jewish histories, deconstructing Zionist folk song and dance, and American musical theater respectively.

Long tones in the days of omer takes place during the 49 days of the Omer, a symbolic accounting between the spring and the summer harvests. A concert of original music inspired by our embodied vocal research and Ashkenazi jewish modes and melodies, reverberating in harmony and dissonance.

Together we are re-casting our cultural pageantries and embodied rituals, composing new prosody for this moment. We have often relied on journaling back and forth to one another. It helps fill in the gaps of time. It helps us find new tones in our conversation--and sometimes it results as literal text or song in our work. This concert is a live dialogue.”

Choreographer/composer Tatyana Tenenbaum employs breath, voice, fascia and musculature to excavate spaces of memory, power and transformation. Her work sits at the juncture of experimental music and dance and has been described as “rich polyphony” (The New Yorker) and “transcending the fraught history between utterance and stance through an exacting inquiry” (Critical Correspondence). She has been commissioned and presented by The Chocolate Factory Theater, Temple University, Movement Research, School for Contemporary Dance & Thought, and Danspace Project, and Pliegues y Despliegues festival in Bogotá, Colombia. In collaboration with curator Lydia Bell and artist Jasmine Hearn she co-organized the collective terrain/s platform on voice and body at Danspace Project. She has performed with and learned from Yoshiko Chuma & the School of Hard Knocks, Daria Faïn and Robert Kocik, Jennifer Monson/iLAND, Emily Johnson/CATALYST, Okwui Okpokwasili & Peter Born, and Hadar Ahuvia, among others. Tatyana and Hadar received a 2021 New Jewish Culture Fellowship for their collaborative work. Tatyana sees her multidisciplinary work within a lineage of musical theater; a cultural site of assimilation, invention, violence, and resiliency for her Jewish ancestors who settled in New York City/Lenapehoking.

Hadar Ahuvia is an independent dancer, choreographer, Jewish educator and service leader weaving her love of movement, song, and jewish community in NYC/Lenapehoking for the past ten years. She is a performer with Reggie Wilson/ Fist & Heel Performance Group and works at synagogues across the Jewish denominations. Her choreographic work has been supported by Baryshnikov Arts Center, the 14th St. Y, Danspace Project, Yaddo, Movement Research, and Gibney Dance among others. Ahuvia is a recipient of a Bessie nomination for Outstanding Breakout Choreographer, was one of Dance Magazine’s ‘25 to Watch in 2019’, and a 2020 New Brooklyn Culture Fellow with Tatyana Tenebaum. Her essay on choreographing a diasporic Israeli identity beyond Zionism is featured in the Oxford Handbook of Jewishness and Dance. She will be starting rabbinical school this fall.

Congregation Beth Elohim, fondly known as CBE, offers authentic, meaningful and outside the box Jewish experiences for those in our Brooklyn community and beyond. The congregation is deeply committed to education for all ages, community-building, spiritual life, and social justice and is inspired to learn about tradition while engaging with the present and positively impact our future. Our Reform congregation welcomes seekers from all Jewish movements, from other faiths, and at all levels of Jewish experience, including those who are new to our traditions and those who are questioning.

This performance is supported by the New Jewish Culture Fellowship. NJCF advances the work of groundbreaking artists through material support, mentorship, peer feedback, and shared cultural investigation.

ISSUE Project Room programs are supported, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the New York State Legislature, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council