Canaanite and Ancestral Roots in the Dance of Yardena Cohen
Keywords:
Yardena Cohen, Modern dance in Israel, Modern dance, Choreography, Relations between art and ideology, Canaanite artAbstract
Yardena Cohen was a leading pioneer in Israeli modern dance. During the 1930s and 1940s she developed original choreography and performance by creating a locally-rooted dance form that integrated body and land as an expression of the emerging national identity. The article traces Cohen’s personal narrative as reflected in her writing and the interrelationship between her artistic endeavors and national ideology.
In Cohen’s search for a local dance expression, she took the East as her model and turned to the Bible as a source of ancestral traditions in the spirit of the country’s youth. Artistically, the younger generation identified with Canaanite art, co-opting it through the lens of their national ethos and embodied practices of realizing the natural bond with land. Cohen sprang from this generation, and while her work aimed to create new forms of locally-rooted bodily practices, the author claims that she designed her dances in a Canaanite style.
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