In Boston, dancers perform moving homage to families of hostages in Gaza
Israeli folk dance festival at MIT features unique piece by Dalia Davis, as black and gray-clad performers — including a state senator — honor those in Hamas captivity
Reporter at The Times of Israel
CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts — Wearing somber black and gray outfits, the dancers made flowing movements across the stage to the piano music of Idan Raichel’s “Tachzor” (“Come Back”). They were debuting a unique piece, a performance honoring the families of the hostages taken in the October 7 Hamas onslaught on Israel.
Created by dancer and choreographer Dalia Davis, the performance took place during the annual Israel Folkdance Festival of Boston at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on March 17. The piece concluded with a Jewish prayer for the redemption of hostages, accompanied by an empty chair covered in yellow, the symbolic color of captivity.
“We were all crying at the end as we came offstage,” Davis told The Times of Israel. “I hope that we conveyed what we were looking to convey.”
The performance was one of 16 at this year’s festival, which featured 300 total dancers ages five to 60. Other selections ranged from the traditional Israeli hora to modern pop music.
There was one notable difference from previous years — this time, the festival took place in the shadow of the October 7 massacre and the ensuing Israeli war against Hamas. The surprise terror offensive saw thousands of Hamas-led terrorists butcher 1,200 people in southern Israel, most of them civilians, and abduct 253 more to the Gaza Strip amid unspeakable acts of brutality.
With related tensions rippling across the world, including at college campuses such as MIT, it wasn’t taken for granted that Sunday’s program at Kresge Auditorium would go off smoothly.
“We work really closely with MIT Police and other security,” said festival board member Alexis Maharam, who danced in Davis’s performance. “They have always had our back for 40-some years.”
“I think it went well,” said festival president Susan Gruber. “I think it went very well. There’s always an enthusiastic audience. The groups were exceedingly well prepared, which is true as always. But it felt like a really good show. It felt like it had flow and rhythm.”
“We had Dalia’s piece, which was truly poignant,” Gruber added. “There wasn’t a dry eye for that. We had some very classic Israeli pieces, which reminded us of better times, and hopefully, better times to come.”
Davis’s piece featured 20 dancers, all female, ages seven to 55. It opened with “Tachzor” before segueing to a niggun, or wordless Jewish religious song. The adults wore yellow ribbons and represented families of hostages, while the younger kids represented the hostages themselves. Both children and grownups lay on the stage at times to convey separate elements of captivity and grief, respectively.
“The movements were a mix of expressing sorrow and expressing love, and also conviction to do something,” Davis said. “A lot of the movements get sharper as the families do anything they can.”
She felt compelled to do something after learning about the Oct. 7 attacks, during which around 253 hostages were taken amid violence that claimed about 1,200 lives.
“I had been trying to think, ‘What can I do, how can I process this?’” Davis said in a previous interview with The Times of Israel in early February.
Her lifelong interest in dance and choreography seemed a natural way to do this. Born in New Jersey, she grew up in an Israeli folk-dancing family and is named after Kibbutz Dalia, which she said is the former site of an Israeli folk dance festival. As a toddler, she got an on-stage cameo at a separate festival, at Rutgers University in her home state.
“As I grew older, I started to understand the history of Israeli folk dance, the songs and messages, what it means for the Jewish people,” Davis said. “Jews from all over the world have infused Israeli folk dance with their particular countries.”
Now, as a mother of four children, she empathized with the plight of the mothers of hostages and sought to incorporate this into the piece.
“As a mom, I was constantly thinking, ‘How are these moms going through this, [finding] strength to do so many different actions, statements, expressions of love?’” Davis recalled.
She read interviews with parents of hostages — some whose children had come back and some still waiting for that to happen.
“I was trying to really connect a little bit of a voice to these mothers, to these family members,” Davis said.
She reached out to the many other dancers she has worked with over the years, and others within one degree of separation in what she described as the tightly-knit world of Israeli folk dance. The resulting group represented multiple sections of the United States, from New England to the Midwest — including Minnesota, where Davis is currently based — to the West Coast.
With such diverse representation, the dancers had to rehearse remotely instead of in person — a first for Davis.
“In the moment, it felt so critical,” she said. “We had tons and tons of videos. Everyone was learning together on their own.”
There was one in-person rehearsal — a six-hour marathon on the Friday before the event.
One of the dancers, Massachusetts State Sen. Becca Rausch, had to balance practice with her job as a state legislator.
“The nice part is that a lot of rehearsals were asynchronous,” Rausch said. “Most of them were on Zoom.”
“It was an honor to do it,” the politician reflected. “It was really humbling.”
Rausch is a longtime Israeli folk dancer who participated in her first show at age 14, and a former board member of the Boston festival. She noted the changed situation this year.
“It’s a difficult time for a lot of people,” she said. “There’s a lot of hurt, a lot of worry, a lot of fear… just awful death and destruction and hate. That makes everything harder, certainly including politics. I will say I have been very grateful to colleagues of mine who have reached out to me.”
Dancers in the piece cited particularly poignant moments. Rausch mentioned one in which some families were reunited and some were not. For Maharam, it was the “amen” by the audience to the closing prayer.
“I hope we gave voice to the people who need it,” Maharam said.
“We’re thinking about them,” Davis said. “We carry them in our heart, waiting for their loved ones to come home, which so many people in Israel want.”
