Dance Artist Tweaks Old World Tradition

Naomi Goldberg has a terribly contagious case of dance.

A few weeks back, for example, she walked into the new offices of the Music Center’s Education Division. She was just taking a tour of their digs and saying hello to the people who arrange in-school programs.

“Within 2 1/2 minutes, she had them all, essentially, in class,” recalled Lindsey Nelson, the office’s managing director. The three staffers were standing up, leaning into file cabinets, door frames, desks. That’s what happens when you get up to stretch in front of Naomi Goldberg, he said.

“She just is dance,” Nelson added. “She is a woman of such deep conviction of her discipline and such open enthusiasm for it, and with such a remarkable generosity of spirit, that you cannot help but get caught up in her journey.”

The latest leg of her journey as a dancer and artistic director of Los Angeles Modern Dance & Ballet (LAMD & B) is choreographed to klezmer, the music that emerged from the Jewish ghettos of eastern Europe at the end of the 1800s. Part polka, part folk song, some klezmer is mournful, but much of it is the celebratory music of weddings and bar mitzvahs.

For “Klez-o-Rama,” tonight and Sunday at the Cal State Northridge Performing Arts Center, Goldberg choreographed 13 songs by the Klezmatics, a contemporary Jewish roots band. They take traditional klezmer melodies--performed with horns, accordion, violin, drums, bass and clarinet--and add elements of jazz, funk and world beat music.

What the Klezmatics do for music, LAMD & B does for dance. The members of Goldberg’s company have studied ballet, Chinese classical dance, flamenco, tap, jazz and other modern styles. They hail from North Carolina to Beijing. To combine ballet, modern and folk dancing--with klezmer, no less--doesn’t strike Goldberg as the least bit unnatural. After all, she said, what is ballet but one culture’s folk dancing?

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It’s an approach informed by Goldberg’s own varied training. Now 35, she split her teen years between Teaneck, N.J.--where anyone could study dance--and the School of American Ballet in New York--where only people of a certain body type could. Later, she spent time with a troupe of street performers and then studied modern dance at Barnard College.

When she landed in Los Angeles in 1985, she danced wherever she could. She would give impromptu recitals at Venice Beach and teach basic movement to passersby. She would do one-minute routines during open-mike nights at comedy clubs and bring people from the audience on stage to dance with her. In 1989, she founded LAMB & D with the same dance-where-you-can attitude. The company spent a lot of time in recreation centers and high school gymnasiums, including the 1992 Spring Gym Tour.

LAMB & D is, in fact, never far from those roots: Rehearsals and dance classes are in a studio at the Hollywood-Los Feliz Jewish Community Center. Here, the 10 dancers--including Goldberg--create beautiful chaos. They walk on their hands, pirouette, swing their hips in ways that would make the Bolshoi blush.

The way LAMB & D dances to klezmer songs such as “Fun Tashlikh,” with sensual movements and smoldering glances, is far removed from the Hasidic traditional dances. A book Goldberg read on traditional Jewish dance indicated that there was never any sexual suggestiveness. Hasidic men and women don’t even dance together.

But Goldberg’s goal isn’t to replicate existing dance. It’s to make dance accessible and entertaining. That’s why five members of the company perform in schools as part of the Music Center on Tour program. That’s also why they got a $7,250 Los Angeles City Department of Cultural Affairs grant this year for workshops at Angel’s Gate Community Center in San Pedro.

The last few years have provided some more upscale venues. They’ve sold out shows at the 1,200-seat John Anson Ford Amphitheatre the last two summers, including an earlier version of “Klez-o-Rama” performed with live music from the Klezmatics. A recent show at the Luckman Fine Arts Complex at Cal State L.A. sold an unusually high 200 walk-up tickets beyond advance sales, according to managing director Clif Harper.

The success at bigger theaters, though, hasn’t translated into stability for Goldberg or her troupe. She still works as a substitute teacher, and all her dancers have outside jobs. Los Angeles also has limited opportunities for dancers, so some LAMD & B members have left to go to New York or Europe.

“It’s a struggle,” said Goldberg as she ran her hands through her short, dark hair and rubbed her eyes. She’s up nights thinking about how to financially sustain her troupe, she said. Other questions also trouble her: How to keep the education programs going? How to tour outside of Los Angeles? How to remind people about their inner dancer?

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Everyone is a dancer to Goldberg. “If you go to or are drawn to a dance performance,” she said, “and when you leave if your heart feels light and your body feels different--you are a dancer.”

Her company reflects that openness. While they have a classical ballet discipline, the dancers themselves are a multi-culti mix of body types and ages. At 48, Nicholas Gunn, who danced with the Paul Taylor Dance Company in New York, might be considered too old by some dance groups. He was teaching at Loyola Marymount when he encountered Goldberg. He’s now a guest performer with LAMB & D.

“She’s given me a real shot in the arm in terms of performing,” he said. “She sort of epitomizes what the whole modern dance tradition is, in that you take your past and you build upon it and create something contemporary.”

“Klez-o-Rama” has been an education for Gunn, who, like most members of the company, is not Jewish. He read about the ghettos in the Ukraine and Poland, and how despite harsh repression the Hasid believed God was in everything around them. That joyful faith, he said, is reflected in music like “Nign”--a song with voice but no words--to which he dances a solo.

“It’s filled with passion and sensuality,” he said. “I think it’s uplifting. It takes you through the flesh to the spirit.”

There is a similar feeling to “Fisherlid,” which has four women dancing without rising off their knees. They begin with plaintive movements, as if cleaning and serving, and evolve into a rapturous upward reach. “Man in a Hat” is more whimsical, with six dancers moving in almost vaudevillian style. In total, “Klez-o-Rama” comprises 13 dances, some solos, some duets, some with the entire company.

And then, the finale. At Northridge, it features performances by the CSUN Hillel and the Filipino American Student Assn. In the past, Goldberg has invited Brazilian samba dancers, Chinese folk dancers and high school drill teams to take their turn at interpreting klezmer.

“I see the evening as a string of pearls,” she said, “all held together by this idea of: What is klezmer?”

DETAILS

* WHAT: “Klez-o-Rama.”

* WHERE: Performing Arts Center in the CSUN Student Union.

* WHEN: 8 p.m. tonight and 2 p.m. Sunday.

* HOW MUCH: $22, $15 for seniors, $12 for CSUN students.

* CALL: Ticketmaster at (213) 480-3232.