‘SCHOLARLY RIGOR’ VS. ‘CATHARSIS’ AT UCLA

Not so long ago, Margalit Oved thought of UCLA as a secure place to work out the supposed dichotomy between doing and teaching in the dance world. But recently the womb of academia turned into what Oved calls “a personal battlefield.”

Oved, born in South Yemen in the late ‘30s and a member of the Inbal Dance Company of Israel, was invited to teach “Dance of Israel” in 1966 at UCLA, where she made a name for herself as a teacher and as the leader of her Margalit Dance Theater company.

During her 21-year UCLA career and 15 years as a company director, Oved discovered that for her “teaching was the highest form of art making,” since it effected change on a daily basis. Indeed, instead of worrying over an audience’s response to her choreography, her deepest interest became focusing “on the catharsis possible for the individual student,” watching for when the “soul came alive like a moving animal deep in the body.”

That all changed in January. A newly formed, three-member faculty appointment committee evaluated Oved and other non-tenured lecturers on the basis of UCLA’s changing academic requirements.

According to Allegra Fuller Snyder and Judy Mitoma, committee members who are both on the faculty of the dance department, Oved “lacked scholarly rigor when compared to the credentials of new applicants” and thus was not rehired.

After 20 years of automatic rehiring, said Oved, “I was shocked when I was first asked to submit a rehiring application (and) horrified when I got the letter saying I could never teach again at UCLA.

“It’s not the money teaching offers me, but the food for my spirit that keeps me alive,” Oved said, her oval face contorted in anguish. “If I don’t teach, I will die. . . .”

“I could feel the crisis coming,” said Holly Small, a former Oved student who went on to become artistic director of a small dance company in her native Toronto before resuming her graduate studies in the UCLA dance department three years ago.

“Margalit swept thousands of students by storm,” Small said, “professional movers and pre-meds, too. Kids raised on a Westwood mentality were thirsty for the catharsis she felt and could make students feel. It was almost as if the dance department couldn’t bear what she offered us.”

Oved said she believes that not fitting into a “neat job description” lost her the job. “I stood with one foot on the globe of ethnology and one foot on the globe of contemporary dance issues, and these so-called scholars failed to see the value of the civilizations I brought together.

“How could those in charge be so single-minded as to punish me for trying to open student’s minds so as to see links between ancient Israel and our technological world? How could I leave out Auschwitz, AIDS, Martin Luther King, when teaching movement?”

Fuller Snyder said that “Margalit was supposed to teach Dance of Israel, not performance skills and not contemporary dance issues.

“You could say that Margalit was almost too creative for us, too much a performer for the students, not enough of a scholar for us.

“We deeply regret losing Margalit. She has always been one of our most popular instructors; we love her. But she’s relied too much on her instinctive powers--she’s never published, she has no degree--and I find that we just can no longer shelter her from the realities of a world in flux at UCLA.”

Fuller Snyder said major changes in university guidelines are transforming the way all fine arts are viewed. “Perhaps Margalit is a casualty of the pressures we at the dance department feel,” Fuller Snyder said. “But the truth is that we can use someone who can interface our art needs with our rigorous academic ones, a lecturer versed in all forms of ethnology who can limit the teaching solely to non-Western dance.”

In the light of such criticism, Oved wondered why, in all her years as a teacher, not a single faculty member ventured into her classes to observe her approach.

“I would have loved fighting with the faculty,” Oved said, “showing them how students must be able to view themselves as ethnic in order to dance ethnic--seeing the potential to become (something) ‘other,’ ” out of the Western mainstream.

Oved pointed to her “Symphony of Tin Cans,” recently seen as part of the annual UCLA Dance Company performance in Royce Hall, as an indication of the way opposing forces in dance must be merged, “because you can only understand one form” when you see it in “relation to its supposed opposite.”

Sitting downstage while beating a tin can rhythmically, Oved chanted Yemenite versions of the Biblical “Song of Songs” as 16 dancers fused balletic and modern disciplines with Middle-Eastern movement phraseology.

She also mentioned another piece, “Yemenite Women Waiting” (performed in Detroit May 17), as acquiring new expressive values because of the UCLA termination. “Being cut off from the possibility of teaching again makes this work about freedom seem timely,” she said.

“I come from Aden,” she whispered in the piece, her voice then breaking into an ear-piercing chant. “The hottest place in the world. . . . Not far from where Miriam picked up her tambourine, leapt over Egypt, led her people out of slavery, and pushed Isadora Duncan aside with her strength. . . .”

The term pushing aside is very much on her mind. “I don’t want to push UCLA aside, just on the chance that I might teach there again,” she said, her voice cracking with emotion as she leafs through pages of petitions on her behalf from hundreds of students.

“But I will push away my anger and my fear to face this challenge. I won’t be a teacher without a class for long, but until then, what?”

Oved has dreams of opening her own school or of trying to publish a book she’s written about her youth in South Yemen but most of all of returning to UCLA.

“Of course I’m scared about the future. But so what? I ask my students to go to hell and back with me, so why shouldn’t I? What kind of a teacher would I be if I didn’t sweat this one out? If I didn’t learn?”