Gathering Sparks: Jewish Arts and Somatics
- Edited by Nicole Bindler, Kristen Smiarowski, Ben Spatz
Forthcoming 2027
- Languages
- English
- BISAC subject codes
- BISAC: ART060000, REL040000
- Thema subject codes
- THEMA: AT, QRJP, VXH
Contemporary renewals of judaism and jewishness return again and again to the kabbalistic image of gathering sparks, an approach to tikkun olam or healing the world that recognizes fragmentation and incompleteness as central to our attempts at doing good. This volume arises out of a shared sense of the sparks that we gather as jewish movers, creators, and activists in the 2020s. The glimmers of hope that we steward are too often limited by logocentric assumptions about what is real, what is meaningful, and what is political. Yet we know that some of the most important knowledge is carried in our bodies: as dance technique, as somatic awareness, as ways of thinking and researching through practice.
The essays collected in Gathering Sparks: Jewish Arts and Somatics reveal a variety of ways to be jewish and a diversity of creative, spiritual, and political practices that are informed by a wide variety of contemporary jewish experiences. They are rooted in a commitment to decolonization, while at the same time holding space for different ideas about what that means. Even within non-zionist and anti-zionist circles, individuals in this volume do not always think or feel the same about how to move forward with ideas and practices of jewishness in the present. For some, explicit solidarity with the movement for a free Palestine must be central to any legitimate actions taken under the banner of jewishness or judaism. Others emphasize relations of solidarity and connection with indigenous and/or Black diasporic communities, with a difficult yet necessary untangling from whiteness, and with allied investigations of trans, queer, feminist, and nonbinary identities.
Although this is not a handbook or manual, we hope that the essays and images gathered here will serve as sparks to light the imaginations and activations of others—not as a single approach, but as a kaleidoscope of methods and pathways, traced by others that may resonate with your own life and work. Despite and because of their differences, we find that they work together to offer a breath of something new: a way of articulating with, through, and even sometimes against jewishness that is neither nostalgic nor solely critical but fresh, artistic, politically committed, historically informed, creative, and embodied.
Biographies
Nicole Bindler is a dance-maker, Body-Mind Centering® practitioner, ISMETA registered Master Somatic Movement Therapist, writer, and curator whose artistic work has been presented on four continents. She has practiced contact improvisation since 1997 and has organized in the Palestine solidarity movement since 2002. Notable projects include touring with Bethlehem-based Diyar Theatre; curating the Deborah Hay Solo Festival; somatic research on the embryology of the genitalia from a non-binary perspective; co-producing the Consent Culture in Contact Improvisation Symposium; and a solo dance, The Case for Invagination, in which her scars speak candidly about trauma and desire. Her work has been supported by the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, Leeway Foundation, Puffin Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Philadelphia Office of Arts, Culture and the Creative Economy, Ellen Forman Memorial Award, and the Dance Studies Association Conference fellowship. She has been on faculty at University of the Arts, Temple University, and University of Pennsylvania. Her writing has been published in *Critical Correspondence, Contact Quarterly, Emergency Index, Jewish Currents, BMC® Currents, Curate This, Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices, Somatics Toolkit, American Jewish Studies Perspectives, *and thINKingDANCE.
Kristen Smiarowski is a choreographer, dancer, and educator. She has taught choreography, dance theater, improvisation, creative dance, and folk dance to children and adults throughout Southern California and has been creating original dance works since 1996. Her theater-based and site-specific choreography has been presented in various theaters and unique natural and architectural locations, including REDCAT, Automata, and the Ballona Freshwater Marsh, among others. She was a recipient of the Six Points Fellowship for Emerging Jewish Artists (2011–2013) as well as awards and commissions from multiple institutions and foundations, including Culture Lab, The University of California Institute for Research in the Arts, The Wooden Floor (formerly St. Joseph Ballet), and Puffin Foundation West.
Ben Spatz is an interdisciplinary scholar-practitioner working at the intersections of artistic research and critical theories of embodiment and identity. They are the author of several books, including *What a Body Can Do *(2015) and Race and the Forms of Knowledge (2024), as well as founding editor of the videographic Journal of Embodied Research. Ben has been affiliated with the Universities of Huddersfield, Leeds, Oxford, and CUNY, and is now an Assistant Professor in Creative Practice at University of Birmingham. Their ongoing Judaica project explores diasporic and decolonial jewishness through performance, writing, and video.
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Genres
- Art+Aesthetics
Keywords
- dance
- embodied practice
- identity politics
- Judaism
- performance
- religion
- solidarity