Introducing Hatikvah Dance Academy in South Africa! The first Dance Academy in the history of South Africa giving training in Israeli Folk Dance!
From the earliest moments of known human history,
people danced for recreation, for the pleasure of it, to arouse joy and to celebrate. Dance was an expression of culture. They danced at social gatherings and functions and experienced a sense of community.
Hatikvah Dance Academy’s aspiration is to give high calibre education and training in Israeli Folk Dance. This folk dance genre originated in the first half of the 20th century during the secular Kibbutz movement in Pre-State Israel. Owing to almost 2000 years’ diaspora, as a nation the Jewish people had lost their cultural and national dance traditions. Going against the “laws” of folk culture, upon returning to their land, Jewish immigrants set out to invent a folk dance tradition for the Jewish community as a means of national identification. They created folk dances by taking elements of different dance cultures originating in their various native countries of origin. Some examples of the dance cultures from the countries from which they borrowed, are the “Krakowiak” from Poland, the “Hora” from Romania, the “Polka” from the Czech Republic, to all the way from the Levantine and Middle Eastern Countries the “Dabke and Yemenite step”. They changed the Hora into a more simplified form and it became the Jewish-Palestinian national dance. The intent behind the incorporation of such diverse cultures in the folk dances, was to unify culturally the emerging Israeli nation and to create a sense of national community.
In the early pre-Israel days these dances were performed on the kibbutzim at festive events which were based on the Jewish religious and agricultural calendar. They were performance and stage dances which only later became accessible to the general dance enthusiast in simplified forms.
To describe the newly invented folk dances, terms such as “Palestinian dance”, “Jewish dance” and “Hebrew dance” were used. Only after the State of Israel was founded in 1948, the term “Israeli folk dancing”, in Hebrew riqudei-am, literally “folk dances”, came into use and is still used up until today.
About the logo of Hatikvah Dance Academy
The name of the Dance Academy
The name of the Dance Academy is written above in big Hebrew letters. Underneath the Hebrew name is the Hebrew name in English. (Hebrew is the national language of the state of Israel.)
Hatikvah in Hebrew means “The Hope”. Hatikvah is also the name of a romantic Jewish poem and national anthem of the state of Israel. The anthem is about the yearning in the Jewish heart and a 2000-year-old hope of returning to the land of Israel, restoring it, and reclaiming it as a sovereign nation.
The rose
Some of the symbolism which the rose conveys:
Beauty
Elegance
Passion
Devotion
Love
Honour
Intrigue
Wisdom
Timelessness
The colour of the rose
The rose is associated with the colour pink in a variety of languages such as the Romance languages, Greek and Polish.
Christel Kamffer
Director and Dance Teacher
© Copyright Christel Kamffer 2018 ®
