Photos: Longwood, Florida 1996 (top) and Brooklyn College 1949 (bottom); courtesy of artists
You and I (working title) is an equal collaboration between Hadar Ahuvia and Tatyana Tenenbaum that makes space for repairing our Jewishness within the ongoing wreckage of colonialism. It is a prying open of our Jewish diasporic histories and ‘folklore’. For Hadar it is the collectivist Zionist project and its culture, song and dance; for Tatyana, her grandparents work as Broadway producers, sewing seeds of the American dream through musical theater. We are examining how our Ashkenazi families participated in projects that, though seemingly disparate, share an ideological root—the acceptance of the supremacy of the West and its advance. You and I searches for imagined evolutions without rupture, for poetry with weight, for a future grounded in past insight, for foresight.
Music, Text, Choreography and Performance by Hadar Ahuvia and Tatyana Tenenbaum
Hadar Ahuvia reshapes Israeli folk and traditional liturgy, proposing embodied repair through pedagogical, choreographic and vocal practice. She brings this radical, diasporist Israeli culture to her teaching Jewish youth, organizing with JFREJ, JVP, and liberation work through community based counseling. Hadar also calls in the lineage of work with artists Sara Rudner, Jill Sigman, Donna Uchizono, Molly Poerstel, and Kathy Westwater. She is grateful to perform with Reggie Wilson/ Fist and Heel Performance Group. Her work has been presented at 14th St. Y, The James Gallery, Whitman College, and Danspace Project, and a collaboration with Shira Eviatar premiered at Gibney Dance in November 2019.
Choreographer/composer Tatyana Tenenbaum’s work employs breath, voice, fascia and musculature to excavates spaces of memory, power and transformation. Her ancestors wove their voices into the tuneful stories of the Broadway stage. She draws from this lineage as well as work with Yoshiko Chuma, Daria Faïn, Jennifer Monson, Levi Gonzalez, Emily Johnson/CATALYST, Andy Luo and lily bo shapiro, and the UNDOING AND DOING collective. Her work has been presented at venues including The Chocolate Factory, Brooklyn Studios for Dance, and Danspace Project where she co-curated the 2019 collective terrain/s platform on voice and choreography with Lydia Bell and Jasmine Hearn in conversation with Samita Sinha and Tendayi Kuumba.