NY Klezmer Series Proudly Presents:

Tantshoyz – Dance Party – with Steve Weintraub.

Music by the Zisl Slepovitch Trio with Avram Pengas (guitar) and Joanna Sternberg (bass), and Dmitri (Zisl) Slepovitch (clarinet)

Nov. 11, 2015 8pm

at Mehanata Bulgarian Bar –  113 Ludlow, just North of Delancey St.

Steve Weintraub is a specialist in contemporary and traditional Jewish dances. He travels regularly throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe to give workshops, including KlezKamp, KlezKanada, and the Jewish Festival in Krakow. Born on Governor’s Island and Bar Mitzvahed in the Bronx, Steven Lee Weintraub received his dance training in Manhattan with Alvin Ailey and Erick Hawkins, among others.

Dmitri Zisl Slepovitch (Zisl) is an ethnomusicologist, Yiddish and music educator, composer, clarinetist, pianist, singer, founder of Litvakus and Minsker Kapelye bands, Yiddish Language and Culture Instructor at The New School. Zisl has been continuously contributing to the National Yiddish Theatre – Folksbiene in various capacities, he has performed/ recorded with Michael Alpert, Paul Brody, Psoy Korolenko, Frank London, Yale Strom, Lev “Ljova” Zhurbin, and Inna Barmash, to name a few.

When he moved to the US in 2008, Slepovitch brought over his rich collection of Litvak/ Belarusian Jewish musical folklore, based on which he created a multimedia program Traveling the Yiddishland, presented by the NYT—Folksbiene. He scored and musically directed a number of different theater, TV and film productions; Taught internationally at seminars in Yiddish /klezmer music and Jewish studies, including BIMA at Brandeis University. Read autobiographical article by Dmitri Slepovitch in Jewish Forward.

For Weintraub, much of his career has been creating and performing Jewish dance; he has worked with choreographers Felix Fibich and Shula Kivel, and has performed the work of Fred Berk. He was a principal dancer and choreographer with the Israeli folkdance group Parparim and was assistant director of the annual Israeli Folk Dance Festival in NYC.

After a 20 year hiatus living in Atlanta and Chicago performing, choreographing and teaching, Steve is excited about having recently returned to the east coast to live and work.

Creating a Culture of Celebration

Since bible times Jews have celebrated with dance. In Eastern Europe, over hundreds of years, the style of music we call Klezmer evolved to serve the evolving way Jews danced and celebrated. Enfolded into these dances is the expression of a world of Jewish values: honour and respect, self-control, playfulness, love of community, balanced with individual expression, inclusiveness and virtuosity, humour, tenderness and great high spirits.

For Jews celebrating at a simcha, particularly a wedding, dancing is an important mitzvah (m’sameakh khusen v’kale). For this reason dancing is not only a pleasure, but fulfils your obligation as a guest to make the celebrants happy- it is a way of honouring the celebrants.

Steve will teach steps, figures and styles for many of the dances in the Klezmer repertoire: freylachs, bulgar, sher and zhok, to name a few. There will be a special focus on solo and couples improvisation. He will also tell you a lot about the history and evolution of Jewish dance.