Performing at the Jerusalem Theatre… with the Beginners

Last week, B"H, I had the thrill once again of performing on stage at the Jerusalem Theatre. Bright lights. Applause. Adrenaline.

And yet, I wasn't dancing in a dazzling sequence costume with my steel-shuffling troupe. I was performing with the beginner tap group.

No… I did not accidentally wander into the wrong dance number or forget where I was supposed to be!

FINDING A NEW ROLE

I have been tap dancing for twenty years.

Twenty years.

At this point in life, I should probably be teaching the beginners. Instead, I joined them.

Not because I stopped “real” dancing or lost the place I had earned in our kick line. And definitely not because I stopped loving it. But because my ankle and knee recently decided they were no longer interested in jumping high or f-lapping faster than a speeding bullet. Apparently, my joints have been holding meetings without me, and decided: “Effective immediately: reduce high-impact commitments.”

So I adapted.

That's how I found myself in beginners’ tap, relearning steps I once knew in my sleep.

At first, it felt strange. Who willingly goes backwards? But you know what? Beginners don’t agonize about what they used to be able to do. They simply try to do it now. And that’s surprisingly peaceful.

TWO TAP LIVES

Now, I haven’t left my veteran tap class. I’m still there too. Every week. Standing beside dancers who sometimes perform steps that my arthritic ankle and knee look at with deep suspicion.

So I’ve become something of a choreographer for one. When a routine asks for a step my joints politely refuse, I don’t leave the line, I adjust. I simplify. I substitute. I improvise. And you know what, everyone still smiles and loves me.

It’s not always easy, and occasionally I suspect my body and I are performing two slightly different dances to the same music. But I stay in the room. And that matters more to me than anything else, because I love my troupe and I want to dance with them as long as I can.

So my week now has two tap lives:

In the veteran class, I stretch myself, adapt my steps, and try to stay part of something bigger and more complex than what I can comfortably do alone. In the beginner class, I relearn, rebuild, and remind myself that joy doesn’t require expertise. Between the two, I keep dancing.

ON STAGE

And then something unexpected happened. We performed at the Jerusalem Theatre. Yes. The beginners’ troupe. There I stood under stage lights, feeling exactly the same thrill I have felt for years at every stage of dance.

The stage, it turns out, doesn’t care what your level is. It only cares that you give your all and shine out   your personal aura. And the audience doesn’t come to measure technical perfection. It comes to feel your love and enthusiasm, your willingness to share your gift across the footlights.

LIFE IS MULTI-DIRECTIONAL

Many of us believe that life moves in one direction only: Forward ..to.. better ..to.. more advanced ..to.. more capable.

But then, one day life quietly introduces a different curriculum: Oy vey, so... adapt ..and.. simplify ..and.. begin again.

At seventy, I’m learning that “beginner” is not a downgrade. It’s a skill. A state of mind. Really... a privilege.

There is something deeply honest about the beginners’ class. No pretending. No hiding. No comparison to who you used to be. Just: Can I do this step today? And if not, can I do a version of it that still lets me dance?

So, here I am tapping in two worlds, and I’ve discovered something important: I am still a dancer.

Not because I move the way I used to. But because I still move. And I still say yes to the stage.

Maybe that’s the real secret of this stage of life. You don’t stop performing when things change. You learn new ways to stay in the dance.

And if that means being a beginner at seventy … then I’ll take it. And tap on.

She Hung Up Her Tap Shoes. I’m Still Lacing Mine.

Last year, at 71, my friend Fayge hung up her tap shoes. 

Not dramatically. Not with a final Broadway bow.

Just quietly. After eighteen years of shuffle-ball-change, costume mishaps, and late-night laughter.

When we began dancing at 50 (me) and 52 (Fayge), we were on top of our game. (Yes, really.)

As the years went by, tap became more challenging, but we did our best with a determined smile. And there is a moment we often shared that I treasure most.

After a particularly difficult step - the kind that requires fierce concentration and silent prayer - when we somehow managed to execute it without collapsing into each other, Fayge and I would reach out and squeeze hands. No words. Just that squeeze.

We did it.

That squeeze said: We’re still here.
Still moving.
Still brave enough to try.

WOMEN OF STEEL

But tap is not simple at any age. It demands speed, precision, strong knees, cooperative ankles.

Now Fayge and I have none of those things.

Fayge was diagnosed with Parkinson’s years ago. Yet, she kept dancing. She kept showing up every Tuesday night with lipstick on and her tap shoes laced tight. But last season she decided that the turns and the quick movements – um, tap is mostly turns and quick movements - were asking more than her body could give.

So she chose to stop.

ALONE ON THE DANCE FLOOR

So, here I am. Seventy years old.
In a class of women ranging from 33 to 50 … and then… me.

I have arthritis in my ankle, which makes my shuffles occasionally slur in ways I’d rather not discuss, and hops live only in my mind. My knee, injured two years ago, still negotiates every fast combination. When the choreography calls for “quick and light,” I do my best to remember what that once felt like.

Still, Tuesday night tap is my happy place.

KEEPING MOVING

Fayge may have hung up her tap shoes, but she didn’t hang up her dance costumes. She still performs in “The Walker Dance,” a joyful piece filled with women over sixty who march and sway with more energy than orthopedists would advise. (We dance with walkers, but B"H, they're still props.) Fayge does yoga. She exercises. She shows up for life.

And she still belongs to our tap family.

She keeps in touch. She cheers us on. She lives in our inside jokes. Even without the shoes, she is part of the rhythm.

And me?

Fayge has officially made me the oldest tap dancer in Gush Etzion.

For now, I am choosing to stay. To shuffle imperfectly. To ice my ankle. To stand in a room full of younger women and claim my place anyway.

One day, I too may hang up my shoes.

But not yet.

For now, when the music starts and the floor answers back, I am still reaching for that invisible hand squeeze.

Still here.
Still moving.
Still dancing.

(Photos by our dear friends - Rebecca Kowalsky and Beth Lanin)

 

On Stage after 70

Just about every little girl prances in front of the mirror and imagines herself a star, enjoying the applause from her adoring audience. Razzle dazzle, thank you and you and you! Yet, I wonder how many little girls imagined themselves still on stage at 70 years old?

Forget 70. What about 90?

Sylvia Dombey is a feisty 91-year-old who made Aliya from Hendon, England, five years ago, because she didn’t want to paint her house and pull up her rugs. Really. Sylvia had performed for 20 years in England with her late husband for all kinds of organizations. They raised nearly 20,000 pounds for charity doing shows about the lives of famous performers, like Judy Garland, Rogers and Hammerstein, and the greatest of all Sophie Tucker.

“Sophie Tucker!” Sylvia declared, “People don’t even know who I’m talking about.”

Actually, I know exactly who she was talking about, because my grandfather, o’h, raised us on Sophie’s classic, “Some of these daysssssss. Ya gonna miss me, honey.”

Sylvia developed a love of performing at a young age. On Sunday visits to her grandparents, her grandfather used to ask her to “put on the alta kreckers”, the old record albums. “They used to crackle, you know!”

Upon Aliya, Sylvia performed her shows in Jerusalem’s AACI - Americans and Canadians in Israel. Then at 89, she retired from the stage, and today is busy with weekly programs at AACI, Hadassah book club and her grandchildren who live in Greater Jerusalem.

Sylvia proved that she’s still got it when she sang some of her classics over the phone to me. I couldn’t help but sing along.

Ruth as Nimrod on his throne.
Photo by www.imagesthroughtime.com.

Ruth Sager, 71.5, began on stage as a three-and-a-half-year-old ballerina. Toe dancing (ouch) at eight years old pushed her to other performing pursuits. “I didn’t realize as a young person, how much [performing] was part of my identity.”

Over the years she's done radio, cable TV, voice-overs, plus music and dance therapy workshops. There always seemed to be a performing opportunity – in Melbourne, Australia, Papua, New Guinea, Boston, Mass., and here in Israel where Ruth and her husband Mike moved in 1993.

She launched her Israeli acting career with a 48-hour-combustion play project with Rafi Poch, and her theater engine has been running ever since. Ruth’s speaking voice is simply unique. Last year in addition to her other on-stage characters, Ruth narrated the title song in Jerusalem's re-imagined  COUNT THE STARS – The Journey of Avraham and Sara (which I co-created and co-produced with the amazing Avital Macales for The Women’s Performance Community of Jerusalem 2016 production with OU Israel). Nothing slows this girl down. Following on STARS’ heels, she started learning Improv with Debbie Hirsch, appeared in AACI’s Chana Senesh and in a recent Torah Live film.

Always expanding her horizons and ready to perform, Ruth said, “I think since 70, life has been really interesting for my husband and myself. We have a creative life. I feel in some ways that I’m only beginning.”

Netta, right in the center of the fun.

Netta deVriend, 71, was not a star struck youth yearning for the footlights. That didn’t keep her from joining the choir of JOSEPH and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat in 2001 for the Raise Your Spirits theater company (which I founded because of the terror around us). “I saw the energy, the achdut (unity) and the beauty of it [despite the terror] going on. With the little ones and the big ones, everyone gave chizuk (strength) to each other, during that stage of our lives, having suffered quite a few losses [due to the terror] on the road, and it made me feel part of the community.”

Once Netta took her place on stage, she never left. She is one of the few performers who has appeared in every Raise Your Spirits production since JOSEPH.

Netta, who lived in Holland and Australia before her Aliya, said that not only does she not feel like 71 - 71 was her old elementary school teacher who wore grey dresses and kept her hair in a bun - she thinks she’s a better performer today than 16 years ago. “I don’t perform for money. I do it to make others happy, and because of the energy of the group. It’s something you don’t see anywhere else.”

Bakol, left, in a scene from THE LOST LIGHT.

Bakol Gellar. Bakol. With a name that congers up smoky-throated Lauren Bacall, of course, she’s got to be an actress. The performing bug bit Bakol at age five. She went to arts camp, and wanted to go to theatre school. She started a Jewish theater in Bloomington, Indiana (who would believe there were Jews in Indiana) and performed in America in Chaim’s Lovesong, playing the part of a Holocaust survivor who visited Israel and convinced her husband to make Aliya.

After Bakol made Aliya in 2009, the first thing she did was get a job doing dramatic readings of Shai Agnon stories in the Agnon House on holidays…then a play for Eli Kaplan Wildman at the Agnon House and Beit Avichai, several things for JEST (Jerusalem English Speaking Theater, which is no longer around), an historical re-enactment in honor of Hadassah’s 100^th Anniversary, living museum characters at the Israel Museum, plus shows at the AACI, like A Little Night Music, the Yom HaShoa production Remember My Name, Avenue Q, an indie film, plus several episodes of Torah Live productions (on which I serve as production manager). She even filmed a TV pilot recently.

In her 70th year, Bakol’s still got the bug. She said, “If someone woke me up at 2 AM and said, ‘I have a part for you’, I would jump out of bed and do it. An actor acts and I hope I’ll be doing it until I literally can’t.”

Cheryl in DAMES. Photo by www.imagesthroughtime.com.

Cheryl Mandel is a go-go dancer. Okay, she’s not still a go-go- dancer, but her teenage go-go dance personality has never left her, even now as she turns 70. If you watched the weekly teen dance shows in Canada more than 50 years ago, you’d find Cheryl monkeying around. She’s still at it every Saturday night, as she ponies, twists and shimmies with women half her age. In fact, she leads the women across the dance floor half the time.

While she didn’t dance as a young mother, she returned to the stage in her 50s, when she cracked up audiences as a hairy Ishmaelite in Raise Your Spirits’ JOSEPH. She continued dancing while she croaked her way into her audiences’ hearts as a raven in the RYS productions NOAH! Ride the Wave! and then as a cackling slave in RUTH & NAOMI in the Fields of Bethlehem. It was during ESTHER and the Secrets in the King’s Court that Cheryl showed everyone what a powerful figure she was off stage, as well. Toward the end of the show's run, Cheryl's son, Daniel, HY”D, was killed in an IDF military operation. Since then she has devoted her life to doing good works to honor her son’s memory.

Cheryl took on a new challenge at age 60, when she created a dance-autobiography for DAMES of the DANCE (which I founded in 2007), and then expanded it to a movie autobiography. For the past 10 years, Cheryl has lit up the DAMES stage with her fantastically popular dance-theater numbers and kept her fellow dancers energized with her fun personality and wacky laugh. Cheryl said, “I love working with others in developing the idea, the choreography, the costumes and music, and then putting it together.  It’s a very big creative challenge.”

Cheryl has taken on three more challenges this year. She’s teaching a dance class for bereaved women through the One Family organization and feels “it’s one of the most significant things I’ve ever done.” She’s organizing a group of women for the adventure of a lifetime to India. And she’s now giving workshops called, THE DANCE OF COPING. For a fun time, call Cheryl, mandelcheryl@gmail.com. 😜, or you can contact her for an inspirational speaker, a wise woman and a role model.