Her Roots Are Tangled in Folk Dance and Israel

“You will be teaching and correcting people, and it is important not to hurt their feelings, if it can be avoided,” he wrote. But when Ahuvia talked about not hurting feelings, the statement carried more weight. She was about to enter thornier terrain in a work dealing with themes of cultural appropriation, nationalism, displacement and relationships between Israeli and Palestinian cultures.

In “Everything,” which is to have its premiere on Thursday at the Theater at the 14th Street Y, Ahuvia, 32, examines the complex origins of Israeli folk dances, which played a vital role not only in the formation of Israeli identity but also in her own. As the daughter of Israeli parents, she grew up performing the dances recreationally, alongside more formal ballet and jazz training. Her grandparents were Eastern European Jews who, in the 1930s, helped to found Beit HaShita, a kibbutz in northern Israel, where her parents were born. Ahuvia, who was born in Argentina, lived in Israel from ages 5 to 10 between periods of living in Florida. (Her father traveled for work.) As a teenager she moved to Hawaii, then San Francisco, where she studied at Alonzo King LINES Ballet, and finally to New York to attend Sarah Lawrence College.

In a recent interview at her Brooklyn apartment, Ahuvia, who has danced for choreographers including Sara Rudner and Reggie Wilson, said that “Everything” grew out of a longer process that began over a decade ago, “of questioning my Zionism and feeling responsible to do that through the mediums that are mine.”

A spirited lecture-demonstration, “Everything” layers buoyant, grapevining, heel-toeing steps — from some of the more than 8,000 Israeli folk dances created since the 1930s — with instructional videos, archival images and commentary delivered, often in tandem with movement, by Ahuvia, Mor Mendel and Lily Bo Shapiro.

A couple of weeks before the premiere, Ahuvia spoke about the work’s evolution. Below are edited excerpts from that conversation.

Q: Was folk dancing a big part of your life growing up?

A: It became a bigger part of my life when we moved back to Florida. It was one way of staying connected to Israel. My mom had been a folk dancer, semiprofessionally. We went to weekly gatherings at the JCC [Jewish Community Center], and when we moved to Hawaii, joined another gathering there.

Q: What inspired this piece?

A: Before this piece, I made a solo that was returning to the dances in a more emotional way; it was more about my relationship to them. I talked at the time about making these dances and songs face the Nakba, which is what Palestinians call the founding of the state of Israel. [Nakba is the Arabic word for “catastrophe."] How could I hold onto my heritage and also this other reality? I wasn’t really looking at how the dances were constructed. This piece came out of wanting to investigate that more deeply.

I knew the dances were an integral part of this Zionist enterprise, and you could see that in a liberatory way or see some of the colonial mechanisms in it. I was looking for a way to communicate that.

Q: One issue you explore is cultural appropriation, how the pioneers of Israeli folk dance, mostly Eastern European women, drew from social dance forms like Palestinian dabke.

A: It’s well-documented that these women went to Palestinian villages and watched them dancing and felt they held the steps for what new Israeli dances could be. And so they borrowed steps and wrote new music and created dances that were directly synchronous to the new music, and in this way it becomes a new Israeli dance.

This was their way of participating in the nation-building and what for them was this revolutionary moment. I don’t think that cultural exchange is bad, but I think it’s about the context of whose narratives get told and seen.

Q: You also look at the popularity of Israeli folk dance among Christian Zionists. Did you know about this phenomenon before starting your research?

A: Our family friends are Christian Zionists, so it wasn’t a surprise. But I figured out it was much larger in scope than I realized. I was looking for videos of basic steps being taught, and the first websites to pop up were almost always Christian.

Q: Where does the title come from?

A: I went to the Israeli Embassy in New York to renew my passport, and the security guard asked me, in Hebrew, “Everything you have is yours?” Because I was working on this piece, it really stuck with me.

Q: Is it risky showing this work at a Jewish-affiliated organization like the 14th Street Y?

A: It’s a little risky. I don’t know who’s going to come, and last year when I did a work-in-progress showing [at the Y], there was some tension about the content of the work. But they pride themselves on being a place that’s politically open, where artists can say what they want to say.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.