A conversation: Guest teacher Rabbi Diane Elliot, and Artistic Director Jennifer Mascall
with Susan McKenzie
Rabbi Diane Elliot
Susan Would you introduce yourself?
Diane My name is Diane Elliot. I started my professional life as a modern dancer and choreographer in New York City, straight from completing an undergraduate degree at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), where I did dance, theatre, and academics. I’m from the Midwest originally. I was 22, finished school, had proved what I could do academically, and I just wanted to dance. So I went to New York.
I danced there for ten years. I studied with a number of people, Nancy Meehan (rooted in Hawkins technique), ballet with Finas Jung and Zena Rommett, and contact improvisation-wise did a lot with Mangrove, first in NYC and later in San Francisco. Cut my hair short. Did my own work. Toured and taught. But my primary training influence was the work of Alwin Nikolais, Murray Lewis, Phyllis Lamhut, and their school.
What attracted me as a young student was that the Nikolais work was based on principles rather than a movement vocabulary that came out of one person’s body. As an undergrad at the University of Michigan, I had the chance to experience many dance companies and master classes, and Nikolais drew me because it’s archetypal and mythological. You didn’t focus on the bodies of the dancers – they were components of an entire environment. Largely without narrative (though some works - like Tent - had an emotional narrative). It was architecturally focussed, and the absence of feeling, emotion, and story wasn’t exactly where I lived, but the richness of the imagery, the way you’re stimulating the students through verbal imagery, to find the spatial architecture, or the concepts we worked with – energy, motion - were so valuable. And it gave me a lot of skills as a teacher – including learning how to speak and drum at the same time!
Susan Here in Vancouver around the same time, Anna Wyman’s work was compared to Nikolais’ works. “Motion, not emotion”. Nikolais dances had a really high visual/design component and placed you in an unusual sensory state.
Jennifer As somebody who watched Nikolais’ performances, I feel like what I saw was an experience for the audience. That doesn’t feel far from an individual working on the experience of themselves and the audience.
I was invited to teach in Angers, France with Nikolais, and made French connections that led to working in France. Feeling that I needed to move on from NYC, I took a job I was offered at the University of Minnesota in their new major program. Minneapolis had a very enlightened arts community I really enjoyed, and bitter cold winters (think Winnipeg). That was kind of a wonderful time. During my many years there, in addition to teaching, I worked with two different collectives of dancers. We had consistent relationships, were able to deepen our work, and we did a lot of improvisation, and contact improvisation.
I’d met Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, the originator of Body Mind Centering ®, and studied with her a little bit at Naropa. Then I did the full training program, integrated that into my work as a choreographer and developed a private practice, working one on one with people. When studying BMC I really felt pulled to develop a more regular spiritual practice grounded in some ancient lineage, because the Body Mind Centering work took us to the very edge of our awareness, into very deep, unstructured space, and I felt I needed some structured kinds of contemplation. I found my way to a Vipassana Buddhist meditating community.
As I developed a deeper practice and got very quiet ( as a dancer, I’d always kept moving) I found much more internal movement - and my early childhood training in Judaism began to surface. I found myself reaching out into the Jewish community and beginning to bring my Jewish lineage work into my performance work. I did pieces where I drew in other Jewish artists, in which we all told parts of our family history in dance, song, theatre, scenes. We supported one another in playing out each others’ histories and lineages. And then people started inviting me to do bits of spiritual leadership in the Jewish community.
One thing led to another. I found some teachers and eventually left behind my life in Minnesota as if drawn along a path. An astrologer guided me to San Diego, where I knew almost no one - but the weather was a lot better. And within a year, I found myself in rabbinical school in Los Angeles. I did have a Jewish background growing up, which I’d kind of left behind, as I became a dancer, with not many opportunities at all, for leadership for women, at that time. By the time I came back into the Jewish world, there were lots of women leaders.
That’s the full trajectory. For about 20 years now I’ve been doing rabbinical work, and integrating movement and somatic work with spiritual work, teaching embodied Judaism in various venues.
Rabbi Diane Elliot
Susan Did you two study with Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen at the same time?
Jennifer No, I was there in the mid-nineties. Diane came in as an assistant or teacher.
Diane I’d first encountered Bonnie’s work in 1983 and did the practitioner training from 87-90. When you were there, I was finishing my teacher assisting requirements, and because Bonnie fell very ill at that time, we teachers and assistants had to really hold the program.
Jennifer I’d first encountered Bonnie’s work in 1978 in San Francisco. Diane was in that same workshop at Mangrove - all three of us (Jennifer, Diane, and Susan) were there. I remember Mangrove people would talk about Bonnie, and in classes, they’d introduce yield and push. They talked about Bonnie like she was a rock star. Three years later in Montreal, I did a two-day workshop with her. It changed everything I was thinking about movement and understanding, and I knew from then on that I wanted to study with her. But at that time it was something like 3 years, full-time, in Amherst (Massachusetts). When I saw a sign saying “Last time Bonnie is teaching the Modular Program / West Coast” I thought OK, it’s now or never!
Susan Do you remember your first encounter with Bonnie?
Diane Absolutely. It was so powerful. In New York, around 1977, I’d actually begun studying with Gail Turner, one of Bonnie’s senior teachers. I’d go once a week to Brooklyn, and Gail would help me trace my pelvis and things like that. But it took six more years to meet Bonnie. At Naropa, I did a week with Steve Paxton, and Bonnie was the second week. She taught organs, and then she taught glands, and development, which was kinda way over my head, but it didn’t matter, you just enter where you enter. I’ll never forget the organ day (we did a little bit of it this week). She was teaching the lungs, and everyone was moving around with that buoyancy and lightness and supporting the arms. And then she said (And this was me coming out of my New York dance background where one day out of the entire semester at the Nikolais School was spent on inner space, and all the rest was “skin out” outer space - very architectural.)
“Now feel your lungs expanding into the sides of your heart on the inhale, and feel how your heart is supported and hugged by your lungs, and your heart doesn’t have to do all the work. Your heart is supported.”
And I had a moment of feeling that my heart could release, and soften – I burst into tears, and ran out of the studio, into the field, sobbing my guts out. Just the permission to feel what was inside, and to let that move me.
Jennifer Interesting! A similar thing happened during the two days in Montreal. We were doing the lungs, and everybody’s arms were up and out and Bonnie moved to the heart. She said “Close your eyes, and now think about your definition of compassion. Just let your arms go to where they want to go, just let your body go” etc. And we opened our eyes - everybody was within this realm with their arms. What that does for the sense of archetype - as opposed to a symbol you see somewhere! That we live our archetypes. In dance, we paid lip service to the idea that our choreography and our steps are what we believe. Here was an example. Suddenly, there was no longer any need to do choreography as I’d known it because the body would be able to speak what it believed. That shift was really big, and it is still what I work on now.
Susan Can you talk about how you’ve each taken this information and worked to apply it to performance?
Diane I came back from that 1983 workshop and having learned the developmental patterns, I began to choreograph using them. We did a whole project called Power Objects, taking on different animal forms, and worked with totems. Each performer found their own animal totem, and then we gave them voices. One scene in this piece turned out to be an interview of somebody’s childhood teddy bear – I mean, there was Ted, and Ted was very wise, you know...! Anyway, we did a lot of crawling and creeping. And I remember David White, the New York impresario who ran Dance Theatre Workshop - I’d worked with him some in New York - came to judge some grant competition in Minneapolis, and we were doing this crawling, you know? We got the grant, but I heard via the grapevine that David had said something like “well, every choreographer goes through this at some point.”
Jennifer For me, I felt it was a very complicated transition. There would be BMC conferences, and I would see people perform. Nothing I saw moved me as a choreographer, as an artist from the outside. So I felt that it wasn’t enough to simply “go to the cell”. There was a whole other territory, which was to embody something, and then to move into this terrain and find how to communicate that in a way that could be received. Because simply to be embodied, even though we were working on sensation, we were still objectifying ourselves. The audience had to Watch. You. I found the whole idea Bonnie brought up of “the mind of the room” revelatory, and I dream of being able to be somewhere in my body and expressing what it has to say, and having the mind of the room – of the whole theatre – being in the same place.
Diane I did have to move far away, to Minneapolis - to put some space around me, to search toward how you communicate the BMC work. How is it integrated in such a way that the presences are felt, but in a form that people can be interested by? During my BMC training, I gathered a group, a women’s collective who’d all done some form of embodied work, some with dance backgrounds, some from theatre. We started evolving a form that I called Active Witness. One person would move and tell some part of their story. Others would be witnesses, invited to witness in ways the mover felt she needed. So “I need somebody’s hand right here on the back of my neck… or “right here on my chest”..or “I need to hear your voice whispering or singing a lullaby to me.” And when we put these together into full, evening-length works, themes emerged. We did five full evenings over four and a half years.
We’d orient the audience at the beginning by explaining the witness process and inviting them to witness. We’d provide art supplies, Kleenex, all kinds of things. We gave them permission: it’s fine to go out and come back, to stand up and move. We invited them to be an “outer ring” of witness – we were the active witness, they were the witness holding the periphery of the space. This was not some people’s cup of tea. Some people went out and never came back. But many stayed. We invited them to be a different kind of audience, not to sit arms crossed trying to evaluate, figure out, whatever, but to participate in holding the space for our stories. Then we always had time afterward for talkback/feedback – and often people would share their own stories, during that time.
This was my transitional moment – more and more of my Jewish self and material started coming out in those storytellings. Finally, I summoned a group of Jewish artists and we did that entire evening of telling family lineage stories with each other’s support. They were all professional artists, a composer, a couple of choreographers, a theatre director/writer. It was a turning point for me: the end of my professional performing work when I transitioned into more spiritual study and leadership.
Jennifer A thread that Diane mentioned this week, that I ran into when I was training and met Diane was that even when she began in New York City, she was a poet. Her language was a big part of her teaching this week.
Diane Yes - I’ve just published a book of poetry - Unbounded Heart: Poems and Prayers . It came out this week; It’s the second book I’ve done - I published the first book two years ago.
Susan Let’s talk a little about this workshop week you’ve just had together. You had a small group and an unusual combination of people. What was noteworthy? What was important?
Diane I present to many different kinds of groups, so I’m always adapting. I didn’t know who’d be with me, and the first day it was hard to focus the work, have a sense of where we’d go. Mostly I work with people who love to move but don’t have training in a professional way. This week, I taught a class focussed much more on learning the traditional forms: the niggunim, the traditional melodies of this particular stream of Jewish practice, which originated in the Hasidic revival of the 18th century. A tradition of either very joyous songs that would raise the energy level, or these deeply longing devotional songs that were one person’s reaching toward the infinite, to the mystery – often tinged with a lot of grief and longing that came from two thousand years of being in exile as a people, and praying to return.
So rather than teach a long devotional niggun (as I did in the course I taught last summer), we worked on one song the whole four days. They are very much like journeys, these long songs. We learned some shorter ones, to give the flavour, but the emphasis was on where do we source this kind of devotional singing in our own body, mind, spirit?
Rabbi Diane Elliot workshop MascallDance 2019
The song is like a bridge, between where we live in our everydayness and the expanded sense of self. We brought in a lot of the Body Mind Centering® systems work that supports the voice through the week. We talked about and worked with inside / outside, near and far, expanding/condensing, different polarities that our human lives stretch between. We worked with body systems that support the voice. In Body Mind Centering ® we don’t just talk about the diaphragm and pelvic floor, but also many layers of tissue that are horizontal to the body’s vertical access – that either transmit the flow of breath, movement, sound, or can modulate – or block it, depending on if there is a lot of tension or reasons to not have that flow.
We worked with the organs, shaping the vowel sounds with the soft tissue of the pharynx, and resonating - and then ended the week by going back to our own individual moment of conception, visualizing our egg, our sperm, and that vibratory tone that Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen says is born with each of us, that’s unique and supports us throughout our lives.
We found that place, or had an opportunity to look for that place, and let the sound come. It was really quite amazing, I was in tears by the end of it. People were on the floor, all with their heads toward the centre. And each one was making a different quality of vibratory sound that felt like a very holy moment – of being present at the inception of all these souls coming into embodiment.
Way Out West workshop with Rabbi Diane Elliot 2019
Jennifer Body Mind Centering ® and Grotowski are my main influences, and Grotowski also talks of this moment that Diane just mentioned – the moment of conception, the rhythm. The intersecting of many things that I know made studying with Diane rich. The sense of it being a lab, with a small node of people, allowed it to shed personality. We could feel Diane, and she didn't have to particularly use student/teacher, of a teaching personality as a means to work with us. We were just working and working. We covered so much, but with no sense of rush.
Susan: How did it come about that MascallDance invited Diane to teach at Way Out West?
Jennifer: Over several years, we (MascallDance) were working on the OW duet and one day composer Stefan Smulovitz, who is Jewish, looked at the work and said “You look like you are doing Niggun”. I googled it… realized the depth of what was written and where it went, a whole tradition I knew nothing of. It didn’t feel appropriate to do more than know it was there. The way Diane structured the week of studying Niggun, she has left me with tools and doorways. Because of the way she is always drawing Body Mind Centering ® understanding into these songs, and bringing in other ideas, has made other connections for me, so I feel that I can continue the research.
Susan Thank you for bringing Diane to Vancouver, Jennifer. In photos that Ash Mishra took of the workshop this week, there are places where people look stripped clean. There’s nothing there but them, and seeing this makes you aware of how unusual it is. Very beautiful. Each one is in themselves.