I was informed that Grant would be away on Nov 13th, 2016 when I returned to dancing at Germantown on Oct 23rd. Normally I try to keep up with the new dances being introduced on Sunday mornings in addition to trying to analyze what is the favorites of the session around the times I am called to substitute. However, this time to substitute was somewhat different and more difficult. Most of the local dancers were aware that I had been having a medical problem during the late August through early October period of 2016 with several visits to Paoli hospital. This would present a bit of a problem in the preparation for my stint as DJ three weeks hence. Like many patients, I find that my memory is affected by anaesthesia and I had had several applications of this during the aforementioned period. To me it meant more prep work than usual. So, with my cell phone, I made sure to take some pictures of Grant's easel - what is used to indicate the dances played during the session - during Oct 30th and Nov 6th. These pictures show the easel as it filled up on October 30th.
Nov 6 - the Sunday before my assignment as leader - the easel again was the subject of cell phone pictures as you can see. With this, I now had a two week listing of the recent dances played. This would be the basis of my study. Several montages below you will see a listing of these dances with youtube references where available and the underlying artist rendition because I believe Israeli dance is propelled more so by the music and less so by the steps. Dances with catchy music tend to survive whereas there's little that can be done for a dance with great steps but limited music.
In the meantime I had to make sure that I had the music to play on my equipment. In terms of equipment I think a substitute should try to integrate with the normal equipment used at the venue. Sometimes it's not possible but in Grant and Germantown's case, for several years I have had this substitute position and this has allowed me to accumulate Apple sound equipment of various types. Grant led in this as for many years he used an ipod to run the session. I followed on this by also purchasing an Ipod (somewhat more advanced than Grant's) and periodically I will upgrade my ipod with new music that Grant is using in these sessions. However, last year it became clear that Grant's ipod was having a bit of difficulty and Grant has graduated to an Apple Mac Book. He has also begun to use the Marcus Auditorium sound system since the facility bought an adapter allowing access from PC equipment through the audio jack. In fact, included with the aforementioned adapter is an audio cable to make this very easy to use. This montage focuses on this! Leftmost is Gant's Macbook in operation. Next we see the adapter and the third shows the lip of the auditorium stage where equipment can be assembled. At the halfway point of the stage (top of the rightmost picture) is where the adapter and audio cable is situated.
For those not familiar with the Marcus auditorium let's add some pictures. The first of these shows the easel and a gathering of dancers after a session. The other pictures show dancers in motion. The Marcus is not the only venue where dancing occurs at Germantown although it is the most frequent. A week after the event detailed here, I was involved in another event at Germantown: the annual Homage to Scorpios affair which took place in the Tenin canteen room. Dancers are kept informed of the location used each week through Grant's weekly Email which normally arrives on Saturday although the facility also lists the location of Israeli dancing on their activity list seen as you enter the building.
So, as mentioned above, at the same time that I am keeping track of what's played, I have to make sure that I have the music to any new additional music that Grant has been dealing with. In this case, in essence, what I need to do is catch any new music since summer 2015. At that time Grant was not available to DJ the Germantown summer session and, acting as substitute DJ, I had access - and explored - his ipod to determine new music to move over to my equipment. For those of you that are not familiar with this system, Apple controls what computers can access your ipod's information. My ipod is set for my desktop at my home whereas Grant's is set for his apple macboook that he also uses at his home. Nevertheless, I could determine what was on his device and try to obtain this music elsewhere. In the end, the file structure of my ipod differs from Grant's and I have become used to moving between both ipods when needed. These pictures show a closeup on my ipod. I have my main repertoire of Israeli dance music in the Songs directory but I also have two directoryies of specific Grant Music designated (not remarkably) as Grant's Music and Latest from Grant. One of these pictures also shows my ipod connected to one of my desktops by way of a USB cable and, rightmost, is a screen shot of Itunes on my desktop which is the way that you can add, edit and delete music on the little device once it is connected through a usb port.
This takes us to the week of Nov 7th through 12th. By this time I am trying to outline what I should be concentrating on as far as the dances to be played on Nov 13th. Readers may already have an idea of the time flow of the session. But, if you've never been to the Sunday morning Germantown session, here's the breakdown. The session starts at 10AM where for at least half and hour beginner and easy dances are played. Starting as early as 10:30 or as late as 10:45 (depending on attendees) the emphasis switches to the beginner intermediate dances. 11AM or thereabouts are announcements and this is done by Tamar if she is in attendance or by the leader if Tamar is absent. After the announcements one or more new dances may be taught or otherwise reviewed although as a sub I am not expected to teach anything new. About 11:45 more advanced dances become a part of the mix and generally 12 to the end of the session features the hardest dances intermixed perhaps with reprises of prior music. Given my absence from the session for a few weeks, I needed a crib sheet - in this case an excel spreadsheet - to make sure of the music and steps. So below, you can see that I have tried to get myself ready by looking at youtube videos of the dances and the choreographers and the underlying artists. Note:choreograph and artist info relies on Aura Lipski's Israelidances.com site and you can click any underlined designation to watch the youtube video.
Take a look at this list like I did. The red designations are duplicates from week to week. As I'm preparing for my role on Sunday, I'm interested in the preferences of the Sunday morning dancers over the last few weeks. I pose a question to myself: Who are the most popular choreographers on this list? Surprisingly to me we have 6 dances attributed to Yankale Levy and 5 attributed to Shmulik Gov Ari. I don't have much information on Levy and perhaps some day I will do some research on him, but I do have some information on Gov Ari. In a previous script on this web site, my travels to New York and Vermont during summer 2016 were reported. Part of the plan was to dance at a session led by Gov Ari but this attempt came to nought. But in researching his background at that time I can tell you that he is of Yemenite heritage. When young he was active with a dance group associated with the Beit Hagefen Arab Jewish Center which, no doubt, also gave him an even greater familiarity with Arabian music beyond his heritage. Even today he is interested in being a bridge, through dance, between cultures. When older he joined the Karmon dance group where he performed during the late 1970's. At various times, as I have been told, Gov Ari has served as a cultural ambassador for the Israeli government. Supposedly in the early 1990's he was based out of Cherry Hill and active as an Israeli dance leader in several sessions in our area. While he was doing this, he was still busy with choreography and one local dancer says that she remembers doing an early version of his choreography of Eilat - before it was finalized - during that time. Today he is based out of Connecticut where he continues his choreographic duties while travelling world wide to give dance seminars. You can see such a trip to Melbourne, Australia in 2013 by clicking here.. At minimum considering this information I conclude that the dance Eilat should definitely be performed when I play leader the next Sunday. Perhaps I can also sneak in Boker, choreographed by Gov Ari in 1997, which used to be a staple of the group in years past and is one of my favorites.
Of course, I have my own biases in terms of music to dance to regardless of chroreographer. As someone who does anywhere between 1 and 4 classes of yoga a week, I have an affinity for Shanti which is Hindi for peace. It's not unusual for a yoga class to end with a chant of Shanti, Shanti, Shanti and the music does conjure up a kind of yoga feel. Also, ill or not, I'm partial to all dances that are fast, possibly disco-like. This would include Mimi (played on 11/6), Al Salsalim, Yalla, Salamati, Hanasich Halavan, etc. No doubt some of these would filter down into my play selection (if it was only dependent on me) but the Germantown dancers are encouraged to make requests and this would be a factor in the ultimate dance selections. Nevertheless by Saturday, Nov 12th, I had made some notes as to what I would theoretically do and you can see these notes in this montage. In my assumption, I have broken down the class into the beginner time period (10-10:30), the beginner/intermediate portion from 10:30 to 11, the intermediate time period of 11 to 12 and the advanced portion that lasts the last half hour of the session. Also included in my thinking - because of my competitive nature - is to play more dances than the previous two weeks (27 on 10/30 and 32 on 11/6) and we'll have a good shot at that given that I do not plan to teach any new dances. Of course, the Sunday dancers can request reviews and leaders must be flexible to the needs of participants.
It is now Sunday morning, Nov 13, 2016. Generally I sleep in on Sunday when Grant has the helm and will arrive at Germantown about 10:30AM. But as the leader for this Sunday, I must make the 10AM start. Furthermore there is the question of setup and prep so I am aiming to be at Germantown sometime around 9:30 although it would turn out that my actual arrival was at 9:38. But what equipment should I bring? I have the availability to run these sessions using either Apple (ipod) or IBM (Lenovo laptop) equipment but I will defer to the ipod given Germantown's historical usage. I also know that if it is working - and this has become iffy over the last year and a half - that I have access to Grant's Ipod when leading the session. Another question is the use of speakers. You already know of Germantowns recent acquisition of an adapter and I plan to use it but there is always the question of whether it will work. So, as I am about to leave my house slightly before 9AM this Sunday, I decide to take an extra pair of speakers just in case. I have a choice of several: you can see one possibility highlighted in another script on this web site but this works best in a blue tooth environment and my ipod does not have this capability. Other possibilities include my larger Bose speakers specifically set up for the ipod as the speakers themselves provide a base for connection and for powering. But, I've just been at Costco and bought a new toy and in this I am no different than any other male dealing wth equipment - the more the merrier - and this is the miniature Bose speaker, incidentally a cat magnet as you can see, which is the basis of this montage of pictures. Although I hope it will not be needed, this new addition of equipment, sans the inquisitive cat nicknamed Rhythm, accompanies my ipod as I set out for Germantown.
When I get to Germantown it is all business. I don't have time for pictures. Shortly after setting up the equipment I turned both ipods on - thankfully Grant's was working - and used both to keep pace with the music and dance hungry Sunday morning session patrons. As I expected, things changed while playing DJ. Since we had a preponderance of beginner dancers for the first hour or so, I accomodated the group by playing beginner music for the first 45 minutes. At 10:45 I switched into my notes but after Tamar made her announcements (approx at 11:20) I was swamped with requests which I tried to fill. I am very amenable to fulfilling these dancing requests but, then again, I don't need to provide for the time that Grant needs for his type of teaching. Our roles in running this session are very different. That is not to say that demonstrations were not done that morning, but only after the dance had been tried and there was concensus that a review would be in order. Given my problems with shyness in larger crowds, my tendency is to ask other dancer(s) to show the steps as many of our Sunday dancers know the steps to specific dances better than I do. It was only around 11:45, as things settled down, that I decided to take some cell phone pictures as you see here. Given that the attendance was much smaller that Sunday, these pictures show the natural arc of these circle dances.
Anyway, brace yourself: Here comes the statistics that derive out of the picture in this montage. You can see that we had performed 41 dances (2 dances were repeated when we analyzed this later)which beat the previous two weeks total of 27 and 32 respectively. You can also see where additional help and practice was provided per a dance by following the red painted arrows. You can see a gap after Melach Yam (at 11:00) which was filled only partly by Tamar's announcements at 11:20. This was where I asked Wendy to demonstrate the steps - this is a favorite dance of hers - and the dance was replayed. A similar situation occurred around 11:10 when Hayeled Sheli also was replayed. I also mentioned that the crowd was a bit smaller than in the previous two weeks. On Nov 6th Germantown had 35 dancers simultaneously in the circle. Our crowd this morning of Nov 13th, looking at those dancing simultaneously, was 21 dancers. Note:Click here to see a computerized playlist