What a nice week – the birthday party was great and so was Roberto’s workshop – thanks for coming out!!
Now, for the video and a little story. Every year when we celebrate my birthday at the session, I pick a dance that I love that I wish we did more often, and I teach that instead of a brand-new one. This year’s pick was Shmulik Gov-Ari’s “Agiley Damar”, originally from 1995. Isn’t it beautiful?
I hope you enjoyed (re-)learning it on Monday, and if you missed it, Liatt will be reviewing it this week, so come for that! And if it really was a re-learn for you, you may have noticed that a step in part three is not what you remember – after the side-cross-yemenite, Shmulik originally taught the next part as turning on your own side first and then changing sides, before the “kapow kapow 🙂 “. When he brought the dance back when Shoshana Dimari died, he taught it (and started dancing it) the way I did it on Monday, in which you change sides first and then back yemenite, so I thought it was the better way to go. Here’s the video from Machol Europa 2006, when he re-taught it. Enjoy!!
Erica Goldman began Israeli dancing in New York as a child alongside her father, another folk dance fanatic. After many years performing with several New England area Israeli dance troupes, she branched out into other kinds of folk dance as a member of the Mandala Folkdance Ensemble and then the Collage Dance Ensemble, with whom she competed at the Golden Karagöz Folk Dance Competition in Turkey in 2003. In 2004, Erica spent the summer as the Dance Director of Camp Alonim (at the then Brandeis-Bardin Institute), a Jewish overnight camp where Israeli dancing is truly an obsession among the campers. She was hooked; after working for nearly eight years for a software company in Boston, she quit her job and moved to L.A. and has been teaching Israeli dance nearly full-time ever since, both in the US and abroad. Erica was the Israeli dance teacher at New Community Jewish High School in Los Angeles and also coordinated their Israel exchange programs with three high schools in Tel Aviv until 2014 when she returned to the East Coast for grad school. A grateful Wexner Fellow, Erica earned her MBA from the Heller School and her MA in the Hornstein Program for Jewish Professional Leadership at Brandeis University, and now is Director of Program and Operations at JPRO Network. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.
I called Shmulik Gov-Ari yesterday and he told me that the last part of Agiley Damar on the above posted video is incorrect. There was no change from the original dance, just a mistake that he made when he made the video at Machol Europa 2006. According to him, he made the video late at night and he just made a mistake. Shmulik told me I should use older videos of this dance and not the video from Machol Europa 2006. I suggest that we correct it so that we will not be embarrassed when we do it outside of LA.
Ellen & Ilan “Pazim”
Every year, Erica teaches Israeli dances at events and workshops for audiences young and old, both in the Jewish world and beyond. In addition to Israeli dance leader, Erica has been an engineering linguist, a high school English teacher, and a nonprofit Chief Program Officer. Erica was the Director of Dance at Camp Alonim, the Jewish sleepaway camp where Israeli dancing is a shared obsession, for twelve summers, and has been an Educator for the Cornerstone Fellowship, a program of the Foundation for Jewish Camp, for over a decade.
After earning her MBA and an MA in Jewish Professional Leadership from the Hornstein Program at Brandeis University, Erica launched Ma’agal, an initiative to improve Israeli dance education at schools and camps across the nation. She is a grateful Wexner Fellow/Davidson Scholar and a proud alumna of the Ruskay Institute for Jewish Professional Leadership, a program of UJA-Federation of New York that she now directs (when she’s not dancing). In 2023, she taught Israeli dance on her fifth continent (so far!).
Dance With Erica 
I called Shmulik Gov-Ari yesterday and he told me that the last part of Agiley Damar on the above posted video is incorrect. There was no change from the original dance, just a mistake that he made when he made the video at Machol Europa 2006. According to him, he made the video late at night and he just made a mistake. Shmulik told me I should use older videos of this dance and not the video from Machol Europa 2006. I suggest that we correct it so that we will not be embarrassed when we do it outside of LA.
Ellen & Ilan “Pazim”