|
JEWISH JOURNAL
April 27, 2007
Outreach get kids in tune with Sephardic
melodies
By Roberto Loiederman, Contributing Writer
Dozens of elementary school children, Jews and non-Jews, a
great many of them Latinos, danced in the sanctuary aisles
in wild abandon. Accompanied by a live symphony orchestra, a
tall, balding Argentine cantor with an operatic voice and
arms waving straight out at his sides like a stork about to
fly, belted out the "Mexican Hat Dance" while overjoyed
10-year-olds whirled and hundreds of their classmates jumped
and clapped.
This was the high-energy moment, the "money shot" of an
outreach program run by the Los Angeles Jewish Symphony (LAJS).
Attended by about 700 fourth- and fifth-graders from Jewish
day schools and their counterparts from several largely
Latino mid-Valley elementary schools, the concert on April
16 was the culminating event after a series of classroom
workshops focusing on connections between Latino and
Sephardic music.
Subsidized in part by a grant from the National
Endowment for the Arts, LAJS members -- in lively
preparatory sessions held at participating schools during
the run-up to the concert -- had shown the students what an
orchestra and its instruments do, and they had also
encouraged the children to create artwork drawn from their
own family experiences.
"The children drew pictures from their own culture,"
said Wendy Prober, LAJS member. "Every culture has folk
tales from which it draws its morality and its lessons.
Those folk tales are passed on to the children, whether
Jewish or Mexican. And children are also exposed to family
stories.... We wanted them to express their own stories,
their own humanity, using different textures and fabrics and
colors.... We wanted them to see that stories can be
expressed through visual arts as well as by music."
When the children arrived at Adat Ari El in Valey
Village for the much-anticipated concert, they passed by
some of their own artwork hanging in the foyer. They were
then shepherded into a hall that had been converted into an
"Instrument Petting Zoo": volunteers encouraged the children
to touch and play violins, trombones, tympani and other
orchestral instruments.
The students got their hands (and lips) on different
instruments, trying to coax noises out of them, learning how
difficult it is to make sweet sounds, even with the help of
professional guides.
Once the children were seated in the sanctuary, Lana
Marcus, head of Adat Ari El's day school, asked: "How many
are in a synagogue for the first time?" More than half of
the group waved their arms. She pointed out the eternal
light, the ark, the handmade tapestry and the Torah scrolls.
She started to explain what the Torah is, but when she
sensed that the crowd was becoming restless, she stopped: "I
think you guys came to hear music, not me."
She turned the stage over to Noreen Green, artistic director
of LAJS.
The students were already familiar with Green, from
visits to their schools during the workshops, so they
responded enthusiastically to her educational comments. She
told the crowd about numerous links between Sephardic and
Latino traditions.
The students were ready when Green asked, "What's the
language spoken by Sephardic Jews?"
"Ladino!" they shouted.
Laughing, Green pointed out that one letter separates
Ladino and Latino.
Interacting easily with the large crowd, she got them
to say what they had learned in the workshops: that Sepharad
means Spain in Hebrew, that Ladino is a form of Spanish as
it was spoken by Jews in Spain hundreds of years ago, and
that it was the language those Jews took into exile.
Accompanied by the LAJS, Marcelo Gindlin, an
accomplished Argentine-born cantor based at the Malibu
Jewish Center and Synagogue, sang traditional Sephardic
melodies. This was followed by a guitar concerto written by
a Sephardic composer.
Green drew parallels between what happened to Sephardic
Jews in 1492 and events of the 20th century, telling the
audience that the day before the concert was Yom HaShoah,
Holocaust Remembrance Day, and that among the 6 million Jews
whose deaths are remembered, there were a million and a half
children.
To honor those children, Green's 9-year-old daughter,
Hannah Drew, sang a touching rendition of "The Last
Butterfly," with lyrics by Pavel Friedman, a young man who
perished at Auschwitz.
Then came the part of the concert many had been waiting
for: the "Mexican Hat Dance," or "Jarabe Tapatio," as it's
called in Spanish. Just as the students from the public
schools had learned about Sephardic Jewish culture, so too
the students from the Jewish day schools had learned about
this song, a symbol of Mexican pride, a dance intended to
draw together the disparate Mexican cultures into a single
national identity.
And that's when Adat Ari El's sanctuary became host to
a Mexican dance celebration.
In short order the concert had veered from a solemn dirge
commemorating unimaginably tragic events to a lively stomp
celebrating national pride. What was odd about this was that
it didn't feel odd at all, as if pain and pride were parts
of the same collective experience shared by both Latinos and
Sephardic Jews.
Once the crowd settled down, Gindlin sang "Cielito
Lindo," a love song, and "Granada," a nostalgic song about
at an Andalusian city remembered for its beautiful women,
fragrant roses and bloody bullfights. The song's brooding
melancholy underlined a feeling shared by Latinos and
Sephardic Jews when it comes to Spain: a sense of loss and
dispossession.
As they respectfully filed out of the sanctuary, the
students seemed genuinely excited at having been at a
symphony concert.
Clearly the program had had several important aims
besides connecting the dots between Sephardic and Latino
music.
One of the project's underlying objectives was to have
these students become aware of the sources of pain and pride
in a group from a different background, and that may well
have occurred.
But it was also clear that the students -- by listening
to their own folk music played by a symphony orchestra --
had also gained a deeper admiration for their own
backgrounds.
And not just because of the music. There was the
artwork as well.
Prober said that when she looked at some of the artwork
the children had made, it was "heart-wrenching. One child
made a map of the family's difficult travels from India to
Guyana to California. Another, of Armenian background, did a
drawing of the devastating earthquake in Armenia a few years
back. Some drawings showed violent acts: people being shot.
There was a lot of pride in their families as well. One did
a drawing about his grandfather who had fought against
Hitler."
The students had been asked to depict their family
story. This seems to have instilled in many the notion that
their own story, however painful, was a worthwhile subject
for art.
These students had understood, perhaps instinctively,
one of the things that this program was clearly intended to
convey: that artistic creation is a way of turning pain into
pride. |
