Meme

Lizarded from shirei_shibolim. If you want me to ask you 5 questions, comment with that request.

1. Why IFD? (As opposed to ballroom or country line dancing, for example.)
It was sort of a matter of the right thing at the right time. ARoudn the end of 7th grade, Mom had a night off from choir, and one of her friends used to do Israeli Dance pretty regularly, but hadn't gone in a while, and invited Mom to join her. Mom brought me too, and I got the music for Eretz Eretz stuck in my head- except only the beginning of each part, not what linked the two together. So I had to go back so I could at least let the whole song run through my head, rather than just the first fragment or the second fragment. A few times later we brought my sister, and the rest is history.
If you want to know why I like ISraeli best- well, it's sort of a first love thing: Swing is fun too, and I'm liking the little bits of ballroom I've done, and Contra's alright, ditto international. But I like the set choreography and the variety of material, and the music, and, for all I sometimes complain about it or make fun of it, the community. I also really enjoy having a mix of levels of dances: from the very easy that give me a chance to socialize to the hard ones that are a real challenge. I guess a lot of that applies for International too, but I've only done that once- but if I could get to it, I'd probably like that too. The community seemed a bit more laid back. The advantage and disadvantage to Israeli (yes, I mean both) are that there's so much new material all the time. Learning and remembering it when there's a lot of good new material is a good challenge and a lot of fun and thrills. When there's a lot of junk coming out (as of late) it's mostly just "oh, another 15 minutes of fame dance- let's watch it waltz in, and when we're done with that, we can watch it waltz out". But over all- at this point Israeli dance is my home base, both for dancing and in general.

2. Have you ever done / do you ever plan to do any choreography in said genre?
I've done and probably will be doing some more performance choreography. I choreographed 2/3 of HaMakor's piece for the Boston Festival last year. I'll be choreographing some of it this year. As for recreational stuff? Probably not. The whole choreographers' scene gets Very competitive and rather nasty, and unless you have a real inspiration or a calling, I don't see how it's worth it, especially outside of Israel. It's also, at this point, a very male-heavy field, and very Sephardi influenced. I started writing an essay/article on this for the New Zealand IFD magazine, and never finished it. Maybe I'll touch it up and post it sometime soon.

3. Why "Steve"?
THere isn't much of a good reason. I was hanging around with my friend Steve at the Rochester Dance Marathon a few years ago, and we somehow chanced onto the idea that everyone should have the same name, really. We ran through a few names before we found one that fit correctly: I think we tried Bob and maybe Frank. Clearly, we wanted something 1 syllable: ALberta just wouldn't have cut it. He said Steve, I agreed, and it's been Steve ever since. It's a running joke expanded all out of proportion.

4. Our most recent information indicates that you would like to pursue a career in Jewish academia. Anything more specific?
Oh, there are several more specific ideas, I'm just not sure how they're eventually going to fall into place. I'm particularly interested in both the intersection of Judaic Studies and Women's Studies and in Jewish usage of ritual: I'd like to look into how traditional versus more innovative ritual is used, and how those usages have changed over time. Yes, I realize that this means I'll probably end up writing books that work out to being "The History of Customs Surrounding Jewish Weddings/Jewish Mourning/Bar Mitzvah/Naming Ceremonies" etc. So that'll probably end up being the intersection of textual study, history and sociology.

5. Write an interesting sentence in Arabic, and describe any odd grammatical points contained therein.
I don't know how to write in Arabic on here, and I don't have a good transliteration scheme worked out. Add to that that my Arabic usage is Lousy with a capital Lousy. So this is unlikely to actually be all that interesting.
"Maa Andi alkutub al'arabiyah fi haqiqat waalidiy."
"I don't have the Arabic books in my father's garden."
Interesting grammatical feature:
1. One creates the construction for "I have" with a preposition, and it's one that is vaguely equivalent, literally to "chez" in French. This isn't so different from Hebrew, or, I'm told, Russian, but it's still sort of interesting. It's negated not with the word for no/not ("laa"), but with the negator for the past tense and prepositions.
2. Alkutub al'arabiyah: non-human plurals are treated as feminine singular both for appropriately declining adjectives and conjugating verbs. A socioliguist could, and I'm sure a number of them already have, had all sorts of intellectual fun with that one- that one is a really lousily non-feminist language rule.
3. haqiqat waalidy: construct state, called iDaafa. It's equivalent to Smikhut in Hebrew, except without any spelling changes, just pronunciational changes. The letter found at the end of most feminine nouns is usually silent but is pronounced as a 't' in construct states. The second word/last word in a construct may be definite, either by article (al) or posessive (in this case, the 'y' at the end), but the first word is definite by definition if the last word is definite- you can't say "the toy of a sailor" even if you knew the words for toy and sailor: the closest you could get would be "the toy of the sailor" or "a toy of a sailor". But then in Arabic, things are always definite unless they're specifically Not definite. Things we'd leave without any article in English are all prefixed with 'al' in Arabic.
4. Plurals. Arabic plurals are often irregular, and the irregulars are almost always weird and amusing. hence: kutub which is the plural of kitaab. The plural of haqiqah is haqaaik.

Meme

Lizarded from shirei_shibolim. If you want me to ask you 5 questions, comment with that request.

1. Why IFD? (As opposed to ballroom or country line dancing, for example.)
It was sort of a matter of the right thing at the right time. ARoudn the end of 7th grade, Mom had a night off from choir, and one of her friends used to do Israeli Dance pretty regularly, but hadn't gone in a while, and invited Mom to join her. Mom brought me too, and I got the music for Eretz Eretz stuck in my head- except only the beginning of each part, not what linked the two together. So I had to go back so I could at least let the whole song run through my head, rather than just the first fragment or the second fragment. A few times later we brought my sister, and the rest is history.
If you want to know why I like ISraeli best- well, it's sort of a first love thing: Swing is fun too, and I'm liking the little bits of ballroom I've done, and Contra's alright, ditto international. But I like the set choreography and the variety of material, and the music, and, for all I sometimes complain about it or make fun of it, the community. I also really enjoy having a mix of levels of dances: from the very easy that give me a chance to socialize to the hard ones that are a real challenge. I guess a lot of that applies for International too, but I've only done that once- but if I could get to it, I'd probably like that too. The community seemed a bit more laid back. The advantage and disadvantage to Israeli (yes, I mean both) are that there's so much new material all the time. Learning and remembering it when there's a lot of good new material is a good challenge and a lot of fun and thrills. When there's a lot of junk coming out (as of late) it's mostly just "oh, another 15 minutes of fame dance- let's watch it waltz in, and when we're done with that, we can watch it waltz out". But over all- at this point Israeli dance is my home base, both for dancing and in general.

2. Have you ever done / do you ever plan to do any choreography in said genre?
I've done and probably will be doing some more performance choreography. I choreographed 2/3 of HaMakor's piece for the Boston Festival last year. I'll be choreographing some of it this year. As for recreational stuff? Probably not. The whole choreographers' scene gets Very competitive and rather nasty, and unless you have a real inspiration or a calling, I don't see how it's worth it, especially outside of Israel. It's also, at this point, a very male-heavy field, and very Sephardi influenced. I started writing an essay/article on this for the New Zealand IFD magazine, and never finished it. Maybe I'll touch it up and post it sometime soon.

3. Why "Steve"?
THere isn't much of a good reason. I was hanging around with my friend Steve at the Rochester Dance Marathon a few years ago, and we somehow chanced onto the idea that everyone should have the same name, really. We ran through a few names before we found one that fit correctly: I think we tried Bob and maybe Frank. Clearly, we wanted something 1 syllable: ALberta just wouldn't have cut it. He said Steve, I agreed, and it's been Steve ever since. It's a running joke expanded all out of proportion.

4. Our most recent information indicates that you would like to pursue a career in Jewish academia. Anything more specific?
Oh, there are several more specific ideas, I'm just not sure how they're eventually going to fall into place. I'm particularly interested in both the intersection of Judaic Studies and Women's Studies and in Jewish usage of ritual: I'd like to look into how traditional versus more innovative ritual is used, and how those usages have changed over time. Yes, I realize that this means I'll probably end up writing books that work out to being "The History of Customs Surrounding Jewish Weddings/Jewish Mourning/Bar Mitzvah/Naming Ceremonies" etc. So that'll probably end up being the intersection of textual study, history and sociology.

5. Write an interesting sentence in Arabic, and describe any odd grammatical points contained therein.
I don't know how to write in Arabic on here, and I don't have a good transliteration scheme worked out. Add to that that my Arabic usage is Lousy with a capital Lousy. So this is unlikely to actually be all that interesting.
"Maa Andi alkutub al'arabiyah fi haqiqat waalidiy."
"I don't have the Arabic books in my father's garden."
Interesting grammatical feature:
1. One creates the construction for "I have" with a preposition, and it's one that is vaguely equivalent, literally to "chez" in French. This isn't so different from Hebrew, or, I'm told, Russian, but it's still sort of interesting. It's negated not with the word for no/not ("laa"), but with the negator for the past tense and prepositions.
2. Alkutub al'arabiyah: non-human plurals are treated as feminine singular both for appropriately declining adjectives and conjugating verbs. A socioliguist could, and I'm sure a number of them already have, had all sorts of intellectual fun with that one- that one is a really lousily non-feminist language rule.
3. haqiqat waalidy: construct state, called iDaafa. It's equivalent to Smikhut in Hebrew, except without any spelling changes, just pronunciational changes. The letter found at the end of most feminine nouns is usually silent but is pronounced as a 't' in construct states. The second word/last word in a construct may be definite, either by article (al) or posessive (in this case, the 'y' at the end), but the first word is definite by definition if the last word is definite- you can't say "the toy of a sailor" even if you knew the words for toy and sailor: the closest you could get would be "the toy of the sailor" or "a toy of a sailor". But then in Arabic, things are always definite unless they're specifically Not definite. Things we'd leave without any article in English are all prefixed with 'al' in Arabic.
4. Plurals. Arabic plurals are often irregular, and the irregulars are almost always weird and amusing. hence: kutub which is the plural of kitaab. The plural of haqiqah is haqaaik.