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Dancing Diasporas: Tracing Migration Through Movement with Dr. Hannah Kosstrin
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This month's guest is Hannah Kosstrin. Dr. Kosstrin is a dance historian and movement analyst. Her scholarship focuses on Jewish dance in global contexts including dance histories of the United States, Israel and the Jewish diaspora, Latin America, Europe, South Asia, and the African diaspora; gender and queer theory; nationalism, migration, and diaspora studies; Laban movement notation and analysis; and digital humanities. She is Director of Ohio State's Melton Center for Jewish Studies, Associate Professor in the Department of Dance, and has appointments in the Department of Near Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures, and is affiliate faculty with the Center for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies and the Mershon Center for International Security Studies.
Her new book Kinesthetic Peoplehood: Jewish Diasporic Dance Migrations (Oxford University Press) examines Jewish diasporic dance practices of choreographers who migrated between Israel and the United States between the Cold War and Covid. Her article “Whose Jewishness? Inbal Dance Theater and Cold War American Spectatorship” (American Jewish History, 2020) was awarded a Gertrude Lippincott Award Honorable Mention from the Dance Studies Association. Dr. Kosstrin’s work also appears in Dance Research Journal, Dance Chronicle, The International Journal of Screendance, Journal of Jewish Identities, Dance on Its Own Terms: Histories and Methodologies, Queer Dance: Meanings and Makings The Futures of Dance Studies and the Oxford Handbook of Jewishness and Dance She is project director for KineScribe, a Labanotation app supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Reed College, and Ohio State, and Faculty Lead for LabanLens, a Laban-based HoloLens application supported by Ohio State.
Links:
Kinescribe
Kinesthetic Peoplehood: Jewish Diasporic Dance Migrations - Discount code for 30% off: AUFLY30
Honest Bodies: Revolutionary Modernism in the Dances of Anna Sokolow - Discount code for 30% off: AAFLYG6
OhioDance: A State of Dance is a six-part series coming out the fourth Friday of each month through November 2026. This podcast is driven by the OhioDance mission to secure the foothold of dance in Ohio through increasing visibility, firming viability, and elevating the position of dance in Ohio.
In 2016, a five-person team set out on a mission to capture the achievements of persons and institutions who have shaped the intricate diversity of dance history and practice within the state of Ohio and weave them together in an easily accessible digital format. This we call this the OhioDance Virtual Dance Collection. As of 2026 we have highlighted 46 individuals and institutions. The team has traveled over 5000 miles and interviewed hundreds of individuals in all five regions of Ohio. vdc.ohiodance.org
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Transcript
Introduction and Welcome
00:00:07
Speaker
Welcome to A State of Dance, sponsored by OhioDance and hosted by independent choreographer and interdisciplinary artist, Rodney Veal.
00:00:22
Speaker
Welcome to A State of Dance, sponsored by OhioDance and hosted by myself, Rodney Veal. This podcast is partially based on the OhioDance Virtual Dance Collection, an interactive website that documents and preserves the achievements of individuals and institutions who have shaped the diversity of dance history and practice in Ohio.
Meet Dr. Hannah Kostron
00:00:41
Speaker
Today, I would like to welcome our guest, Dr. Hannah Kostron. Dr. Hannah Kostron is Associate Professor of Ohio State University, Department of Dance, and Director of Ohio State's Melton Center for Jewish Studies.
00:00:52
Speaker
She is a dance historian and movement analyst. Her scholarship focuses on Jewish dance and global context. Her research and teaching interests include the dance histories of the United States, Israel, and the Jewish diaspora, Latin America, Europe, South Asia, and the African diaspora.
00:01:10
Speaker
Gender and Queer Theory, Nationalism, Migration, and Diaspora Studies, Le Bon Movement Notation and Analysis, and Digital Humanities. Hannah is an all-around into the intellect and genius of what dance is all about. She's just fun to be around, so it's nice to be able to talk to friend. So welcome to
Excitement about Dance Conversations
00:01:30
Speaker
Dr. Hannah Kostrin.
00:01:31
Speaker
Thank you so much, Rodney, and thank you to Ohio Dance for having me today. i could say the same about you. I'm so excited to be in conversation with you to talk with folks about the amazing art of dance and in all of its manifestations. So it's so nice to be with you today.
00:01:47
Speaker
Absolute pleasure. This is going to great. This is good fun. And we always have great conversations. And so folks, that's what's just one of the lucky perks of being in the dance world is you get to have these great conversations off camera with folks like
Dance History and Movement Analysis
00:02:00
Speaker
with Hannah. So Hannah, here we go. We're going to dive in. The first question is about dance history and movement analysis are two quite different disciplines.
00:02:09
Speaker
How do you hold both of those together inside of your work? Thank you. It is such a good question. And one of the ways that I'm going to start to talk about it is that I don't necessarily hold them as two different disciplines. Certainly, they each have different um histories. They have very different legacies and heritages and inheritances.
00:02:31
Speaker
But for me, they've always been together because analyzing dance is very much a part of how I understand dance history. So one of the things for me that is so exciting about dance history and one of the main reasons that I do it, and I always tell my students this at the beginning of every semester, is that I am really invested in understanding what it felt like to be inside bodies, be inside people's bodies in different periods of history.
00:03:01
Speaker
And there certainly is a limit to that. There's absolutely a limit to how we can understand, you know, other people's experiences, particularly when we don't necessarily share historical, cultural, socioeconomic class or caste.
Understanding Laban Notation
00:03:14
Speaker
experiences so that, you know, there is a limit to that and i and I do want to just recognize that. But one of the things that thinking about dance analysis or engaging with it does for me is it really gives me a kind of idea for how to bring physicality into my understanding of the past. And of course, again, everything has its limitations. But for me, the analysis comes in when I'm thinking about what's going on in this dance practice. How do we understand what that physicality meant in its time? So for me, movement analysis itself is a term that links to a very specific lineage in the Laban movement notation and forms of
Dance Notation Systems and Context
00:03:59
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analysis. Those systems also have their capacities and their limitations in a lot of ways.
00:04:05
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But one of the things, and I started studying those systems when I was in college at Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland, and then continued at Ohio State, where you and I had some past crossing experiences together. yes yes. Especially in that realm, because it was new to me. Yes. I just, I was so fascinated by it. and and And also to just placing it in context, but yeah, keep going. So I use the different parts of those systems a little bit differently. Laban notation is a movement notation system. It notates where the body goes in space and time. And there are a bunch, and when I say a bunch, I mean hundreds and hundreds of scores of dances that have been notated throughout the 20th century and into the 21st century. And for me, that's a real direct connection to history. So for dances that do have Laban notation scores, so for dances that either there was a dancer in in the cast of any particular work, this was the case with a lot of the Anna Sokola work that I did with my first book. Ray Cook was a a notator who worked in her company. And then in this book, Zaeva Cohen had some of her dances notated by the Dance Notation Bureau. And
00:05:13
Speaker
One of the things that's so exciting to me about a Laban notation score is that it really gives you the experience of being inside of the dance. And so in a work like Rainwood, which is a piece by Zeeva Cohen that I write about in the book, I was really able to read the score and understand what the dancers' experienced experiences were of performing it.
00:05:35
Speaker
in addition to giving me the sense of the dancers' experiences performing it, it also gave me a sense for what the movement was in a different way than watching the video. And so for me, bringing together the movement notation and movement analysis with other kinds of research sources, video, different kinds of archival sources like photographs and reviews and programs.
Cultural Narratives in Dance History
00:06:00
Speaker
The relationship between a video and a notation score of a work is very similar to hearing a piece of music and then being able to read the musical score. So you get a sense for the outside and the inside at the same time. And particularly for reading a Laban notation score of Zeva Cohen's work,
00:06:18
Speaker
I was able to understand the feminism in her work in an embodied way, in a way that I hadn't quite completely understood it when I was you know reading reviews of the work or talking to her about the work or watching it, that by embodying it, I really felt in my viscera what was going on in terms of the way that in that piece she was very specifically connecting women's bodies to some larger themes.
00:06:46
Speaker
And so for me, even though when we look at professional organizations, you know, dance history and movement analysis, we can go to LIMS and we can go to ICLE, International Council of Kinetography Laban, we can go to Dance Studies Association, that all of these parts of the field have their gatherings.
00:07:03
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But for me, in thinking about what movement analysis does in terms of when we are specific to the needs of the dance, and the allowances and even exclusions and limitations of any given theoretical or an analytical system, that when we find the moments where those things come together in synergy, that there's a lot that we can do. So for me, movement analysis has always been one of my research methods that I use in thinking about dance history and animating it with corporeality and kinesthesia and getting at the fleshiness of people's bodies. I just love that because in essence, the life in this really telling that energy and sort of the embodiment that leaves a trail. It's almost forensic in many ways. That's why i love our conversations about it because there's a lot more information. i always tell people, oh, no, no, no, no. no no no It's not just a dance. you need to dig a little deeper and kind of go to that place. And, you know, you're providing that sort of access to it in such a cool way. Thank
'Kinesthetic Peoplehood' Book Discussion
00:08:08
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you. Yeah, I love what you're saying, like forensic, the forensics of dance history. I love that idea because it's right there. You know, you're in it You're looking at the evidence and the kinesthetic data. You're like right in the body there. Yeah.
00:08:22
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And that forensics is like kind of leading to larger themes because you're studying it within the context of diasporas and regions and cultures and genders and queerness. And and there's so many aspects to it. And I always go, it's never that simple.
00:08:37
Speaker
If a dance were that simple, if only dance were that simple, I love that you do that. And it's just really pretty cool. So it leads me to my question, because the thing is you're compiling all this. Your new book, Kinesthetic Peoplehood, but Jewish Diasporic Dance Migrations, came out in May of 2026. Tell us about this book, because I think what you were talking about really is the underpinning of how you got to put this all on the printed page.
00:09:01
Speaker
Yes, it absolutely is. And so what we were just talking about, the forensics of dance and the the kinesthetic evidence and how we understand histories through the body, is very much at the heart of this book, Kinaesthetic Peoplehood, Jewish Diasporic Dance Migrations. So it's about a couple of different things. The book, on the one hand, is about how people feel part of a diasporic community or estranged from it through dance practices. And that's kinesthetic peoplehood. So kinesthetic peoplehood, in and of itself, is a portmanteau that I put together of words that already exist. Kinesthetic being embodied knowledge. and peoplehood being a concept that is very popular and common in talking about Jewish history, particularly American Jewish history, for how Jewish folks feel connected to each other within a national context, but also across national contexts. And so this word does not only relate to Jewish people, but it's very common in Jewish studies is to think about sort of senses of peoplehood in this way. So kinesthetic peoplehood is that feeling of being connected to a diasporic community through dance practices, through taking dance classes, through making dances, and through seeing dance in a theater. And the way that that kinesthetic peoplehood lives is in those three aspects. I should say that the book covers from the Cold War to COVID. So I'm really looking at about 1948, 49, 50 until 2022. So I'm looking at different kinds of historical sources throughout the book. I look at how audiences reacted to work that they saw on stage. And I do that through various kinds of reception history, through reading reviews at different points in time. But I'm thinking about how audiences are
00:10:50
Speaker
not reacting to the dances that they're seeing, and then also the ways that people who come to take dance classes are also feeling part of a Jewish diasporic space and how choreographers who identify or are part of Jewish histories are engaging this in their work. So that's where the kinesthetic peoplehood part comes in. And there's also another part of that. You know, I said how people feel part of or estranged from a diaspora, that there are a lot of things that I engage in the book in terms of multi-ethnic Jewish histories, in terms of understanding the Jewish diaspora certainly as one big entity, but also understanding the micro diasporas that are part of the Jewish diaspora. So Jewish culture that comes from Europe Jewish culture that comes from the Middle East, Jewish culture that comes from around the Mediterranean, Jewish culture that comes from Africa, Jewish culture that comes from South Asia. And these dance practices that are affiliated with these different parts of the Jewish diaspora all have regional movement markers that show the diversity of the Jewish diaspora through the body. And so again, we get to that forensics moment of, you know, how do we use our kinesthetic evidence when I see this kind of gestural practice? And I'm like, wait, that looks like a South Asian gestural practice. How is it in quote unquote Jewish dance? We actually learn about Jewish migration from India through a Yemen and that South Asian sphere, how those migrations exist. And so the Jewish dance migration part of the title is how we understand the breadth and diversity of the Jewish diaspora through the body. You know, how we see in choreographers' movement choices the different kinds of Jewish dance practices from different parts of the diaspora and how they appear on stage.
Diasporic Knowledge in Dance
00:12:35
Speaker
One of the metaphors that I make to make this feel a little bit more concrete, because on the one hand it's like, yes, diaspora through the body, absolutely.
00:12:43
Speaker
What does that actually mean? Right, exactly. place Because the title of the book, it's fantastic, but it's also a little esoteric, as any good academic book is, right? Which doesn't make it any less compelling, people. I just let you know. it's like we always Thank you. That's right. The cover is gorgeous, and so is the inside. So, um you know, please pick it up and read it. But one of the comparisons that I make to understanding how we can see Jewish migration through the body is to think about food ways and flavors so that If you've ever eaten food that maybe is fusion or maybe it's not, but you can taste it and say, oh, like this flavor note comes from this particular region or this flavor note, you know, comes out of this cultural context. Movement works the same way.
00:13:27
Speaker
And so we can see that in the choreography. And so one of the other things that the book does in that sense is that it starts to break down some assumptions about Jewish dance more broadly, because so often people hear Jewish dance and they're like, ah, yes, fiddle around the roof or they think, ah, you know, folk dance. And those are absolutely part of the Jewish diaspora, but they're not the entirety of Jewish dance. Yes, there is a scope that is wider than our own understanding of the Jewish diaspora, of any diaspora, and it's a voyage of discovery. And I love that you said, oh, there's that movement in South Asian. ah Let's trace a migratory route to it. And so that's what I love about the work that you do, and especially inside the book, that it's
00:14:10
Speaker
it's getting us to go on kind of these journeys that we may not have associated and hopefully dig a little deeper and earn awareness and understanding, if I got this correct. That is absolutely what I'm hoping will happen here. And the other thing that I'll just say too, like the last part of this is about people feeling part of a diaspora through watching dance. The dance that people are watching in the book are the choreographies on the theatrical stage. There are all different kinds of places where Jewish dance happens. um The stuff I'm focusing on is on the theatrical stage and mostly in the modern contemporary genre.
00:14:48
Speaker
And I'm focusing on Israeli choreographers and companies who either toured through or migrated to the United States between the Cold War and COVID. And so through their work, we're seeing multiple parts of the Jewish diaspora, thinking about Israel as a diasporic space, not necessarily as a static space, but as a diasporic space, and also understanding a lot of the different nuances and layers and struggles even within the Jewish community in Israel. Israel has been in the news a lot lately. So one of the things too that this book is doing is it's giving kind of a sense for a lot of different ways of understanding the Middle East. When we think about Jewish migrations through it, But the kinds of ways that I'm tracing a very particular kind of 20th and 21st century peoplehood is in relationship to how audiences understand their relationship, not just all audiences, Jewish audiences in particular, and then audiences who are not Jewish, how they understand
00:15:43
Speaker
Judaism and the Jewish diaspora through dance. And the choreographers who I'm writing about have a connection with Israel. Either they were born there or they worked there or something to really kind of think about what are we talking about when we're talking about Jewish diaspora? How does it live in the body?
00:15:59
Speaker
And as part of that, introduced this term corporeal diasporism, It's kind of a question of how we understand diaspora through the body. So corporeal diasporism, corporeal means of the body. The word corporeality, which is a word that we throw around in our dance studies classrooms, corporeality means the materiality of the body. So, you know, how we understand the way the body feels, exists in space and time. And then diasporism is another word that is not only specific to the Jewish diaspora, but is often used when talking about the Jewish diaspora. And it's this idea that a home couldn't be anywhere, that a Jewish home can be anywhere. And it doesn't necessarily have to be in one location, in one region, in one landmass, but that it really can be anywhere. And so I was thinking, well, you know, in this time of continued migration and displacement, what does it mean to understand diaspora, not just through the body, which is one part of it, right, that we were just talking about with looking at different movements and gestures and postures and being able to understand how they trace to different regions, but also to think, what if we literally put diaspora in the body? What if people could say, all right, my diasporic understanding relates to how I am living in the body?
Impact of International Choreographers
00:17:20
Speaker
And so this is one of the things that is, I hope, transferable across diasporic contexts in thinking about how we can make a sense of home in the body. And then the idea of corporeal diasporism is that, but it's also when you look at movement and when you can trace, ah, I see that that movement traces to this region, to this cultural context, that it's the it's the bodily manifestation of Jewish dance migrations. So that's kind of the whole thing in a nutshell. This is one of those books where we always say, oh, like, what's the book about? What's your elevator pitch? And I'm like, my elevator needs to go up 45 floors because there's a couple of different parts of it. But yeah, in maybe a can of nuts instead of one nutshell is the book.
00:18:02
Speaker
I love it. I love it. And so piggybacking on that, this next question is about some of the choreographers you feature in the book. They brought their work to the American Jewish audiences through touring and teaching, including stops in Ohio.
00:18:17
Speaker
How do local communities shape or get shaped by global cultural migrations? Because I think Ohio got really un impacted by it. This is the question that I just think is so important and so interesting and one of the ones that I'm really invested in. And the way that we think about how local communities, not just shape, but specifically get shaped by these global cultural migrations, you know, how people are affected by the dance that they see and then how that lives in their bodies. And there's a couple of different ways that I think about this. So Margalito Vedza, Eva Cohen, Degay Fetter, Also, Alon Carneal, these Ohio connections are really exciting for us to think about. And it was over about 40 years. So Margalito Ved was born in what was then the British Protectorate of Aden in southern Yemen and 1949 migrated with a very big Jewish migration from South Yemen to Tel Aviv and made her early career there with the company. At the time it was called Inbal Yemenite Dance Group, but now is known as Inbal Dance Theater. And it showcases different kinds of practices from Yemen and Aden and now more generalized Mizrahi sensibility. Mizrahi is an Israeli word, it's a Hebrew word that refers to Jews from the Middle East. And there's a much longer history of that word that started out as an othering and now has been reclaimed. But in any event, so Oved moved to the United States in 1967 and had a huge performing career for about 30, 40 years in the U.S., went back and forth to Tel Aviv a couple of times. But in the 1970s, she had this dance company, Margalito Oved Dance Theater, and had an NEA tour.
00:19:56
Speaker
touring grant that included some of the college tours. And she had that for a couple of years. And so she went through 11 cities in Ohio over the course of two years. She taught at Ohio University. She taught at Ohio State University. She taught at Miami University. She spent a lot of time in going around Cleveland, both in ah university classrooms, but also to like Jewish community centers. And so one of the things about her classes that I've read about in the archival materials is that Students just loved taking her classes. She would do these things where she would draw the students around and kind of give them different kinds of ideas of where the movement came from and, you know, how she wanted them to think about it. And she would bring them through different kinds of using sound with their voices and drawing together. And the newspaper coverage from local papers, which I think are also so, so important to how we understand history, particularly in a time when local papers are either being bought up by huge conglomerates or are just being eliminated completely.
00:20:57
Speaker
And so we're actually losing this really important part of history of understanding really down to the neighborhood level how people are engaging with the world around them. And particularly the arts. Particularly the arts. yeah yeah Huge, shoot che huge, huge, huge.
00:21:12
Speaker
And so in the 70s, local papers were all the rage. you know This is how people like got their news. And so it was been it was so exciting to read the local receptions to Oved's work.
Local Influences: Ved and Cohen
00:21:25
Speaker
And there are a lot from Ohio University and Miami University about the students' experiences in her classes, um how they really just were deeply affected and transformed by it.
00:21:35
Speaker
And then there is this one review from the Columbus Dispatch about Oved's performance at the Old Thurber Theater at Ohio State. May we remember that building forever and ever because it is no longer with us. But there was this comment that the critic made about how the theater was overflowing with students.
00:21:54
Speaker
And i thought about my own experiences in that theater, you know, Thurber Theater in the Drake Union, right on the river there. And I could only imagine, of course, it was filled with students, because at that time, certainly students were required to go as part of their coursework to see the visiting artist, because she was a visiting artist at Ohio State.
00:22:13
Speaker
But also, based on the other newspaper sources that I had read about the students' relationships with Oved in classes, It's entirely possible that even if they were not required to go, that they were so excited about what they experienced in class that then they went to choose to go see her in the theater. In that sense, we can see through the archival materials the kinds of folks who were engaging and the way that it lived with them.
00:22:38
Speaker
And sometimes also what I need to do is use stuff from the contemporary moment and kind of not imagine, but infer how it may have also happened in the past. So Oved toured through in the 70s.
00:22:54
Speaker
and came through Ohio a couple of times between 1974 and 1976 on one of those National Endowment for the Arts College tours. And then at the same time, Ze'eva Cohen was also touring through Ohio. She also was briefly at Ohio State. But there was this really interesting interaction that she didn't have directly. But someone who saw a performance of hers at Bowling Green wrote her a letter.
00:23:20
Speaker
that I found in an archival folder. Ze'eva had performed a work called Mothers of Israel. In the 1970s, Ze'eva Cohen had the solo show that she toured all across the United States, and Margolita Oved had made the solo for her called Mothers of Israel, which was about the biblical mothers of the Jewish people, Sarah, Rebecca, Leah, and Rachel.
00:23:46
Speaker
And so she performed one of these solos at Bowling Green. And someone who was an MFA poetry student was in the audience and was so deeply moved that he wrote her a letter. Basically, you know, I am so inspired. And so he also wanted to connect with her through a sense of shared Jewish experience. And he wrote a little greeting in Hebrew script at the top of this English typed letter. He wrote, L'zeeva shalom, which means like, Tuzza eva, hello.
00:24:13
Speaker
And then he kind of signed off with a lehitreot, which means like, see you later, good to talk to you. But he he wrote in this letter just what deep impact it made on him in terms of seeing this work. And so in those ways, we can really see how these kinds of national and international travels affect the emotions of the people who are experiencing them.
00:24:36
Speaker
And then I'll fast forward about 40 years to Dege Fetter and Elone Carniel, who were guest artists in the Department of Dance at OSU over the last six or so years.
00:24:47
Speaker
Dege Fetter, in particular, ah first came to OSU in 2020. She was born in Gondar, Ethiopia, which is in the northwest part of Ethiopia. And she migrated to Israel in the mid nineteen eighty s She was part of a huge migration effort called Operation Moses of Ethiopian Jews from Ethiopia through Khartoum, Sudan, and then there was an airlift.
00:25:10
Speaker
And her movement practice is based in Eskesta dancing, which is an Amharic kind of Pan-Ethiopian, so not expressly Jewish, but Pan-Ethiopian dance practice that focuses on isolating and vibrating the shoulders and chest. And she uses that as her movement basis to do contemporary experimentation. And so she came in 2020 and I took her class there and then I Zoomed her in like the next year. We did some class during the pandemic on Zoom. And so both me as a researcher learning her movement practice and then also my students having the experience of doing the movement also was an important part of how not just like they understood her work as an artist, but also how they understood her worldview and, you know, the different ways that she made her work. And so they also started thinking about how they might engage their understanding of African diasporic practices from this East African context as opposed to the West African context, which is more prominent in their training. And then she was here in February of 2026 and taught class and gave a performance. And There are so many ways that we can understand not just how people respond to the work, but also this deeper understanding of global cultural migrations as they move, which seems to be using the word to continue to define itself. But we had this amazing conversation when she was here with my colleague, Momar Anjaye, who is from Senegal and also very similarly to Federer, uses different elements of Africanist practices to determine an African diasporic contemporaneity in his work. And to bring her and Momar into conversation in that way also gives us a different viewpoint on how we understand the idea of diaspora and intersecting diasporas. You know, what happens when the Jewish and African diasporas come together, not just in terms of a trans-diasporic relationship, that's two distinct diasporas coming together, but when we've got... a dual diaspora experience and a person like Fedor being both of the Jewish diasporic and African diasporic contexts. How do we then understand diasporic migration? And then in terms of local communities, when these choreographers come through,
00:27:24
Speaker
their movement comes into dancers' bodies. When I was in a rehearsal when Alon Carneal was here in 2022, I was just watching him. he He's like an improviser and he works with the Feldenkrais Method, which is a somatic practice that offers different ways of aligning the body and finding home in the body. And he was teaching them a dance that was a solo for him and he was making it into a group work for a handful of students in our department. And I just remember being in rehearsal and thinking, okay, you know, he made this dance in Tel Aviv and Haifa, and now it is in the bodies of these dancers in the Midwest. Barbara Browning, who's ah a dance scholar, has written about contagion, and and her context was a little bit different, but the ways that movement unfolds not contaminates in a negative sense, but the ways that movement really moves through people's bodies and we can see that transfer also really gives us a sense of, you know, when we're thinking about global cultural migrations through the body, people are learning these dance practices, taking it into their bodies, and then they're going out and having it as part of their localized practice. And so, in a sense, the world is a lot smaller than we sometimes realize, especially when we can see the way that movement moves through people's bodies.
00:28:40
Speaker
That is a great stopping point for a
Dr. Kostron's Contributions to Dance
00:28:42
Speaker
break on our podcast. but when we come back, where we're going to keep diving in because that's what the greatest thing about conversations with Hannah is that you just keep taking notes and there's more to come. So stay tuned.
00:29:00
Speaker
We want to remind you that if you like what you're listening to and are not a member of OhioDance, you can go ohiodance.org and click the membership button to join and receive the many benefits that come with your membership.
00:29:12
Speaker
You can also donate through our purple donate button.
00:29:26
Speaker
Okay, everyone, we're back and with a very, very, very rich conversation, information-laden conversation with Dr. Hannah Koster. I love the fact that there's such a multidimensionality to your practice and just It's deep dive investigation on all fronts, which I just find inspiring.
00:29:47
Speaker
I mean, I wonder how you sleep. if You're the project director of Kinescribe, an iPad app for labanotation. Why does dance notation matter and what problems does this app solve? Because when we were back in the day, we didn't have these kind of apps. And I just wondering, what does that do to kind of enrich an entryway point and problem solving with it?
00:30:09
Speaker
Thank you. Yes. And I will also say, Rodney, I also love our conversations and the ways that we both appreciate each other's texture of how we we think about dance and the ways that dance touches so many other things. And that curiosity that i that I share with you is a huge part of how there are so many touch points to my work. So so thank you for that.
00:30:31
Speaker
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, so Kinescribe, very exciting. So we've been doing this project. I work with David Raleigh, who some listeners might remember from Ohio State, years ago working with a Mac desktop program called Laban Writer. Both of these applications, Laban Writer and now Kinescribe, are like word processors for Laban notation. So it's a computerized program that writes and reads these scores. And he and I started working on the iPad app version of this in 2010 when I was on faculty at Reed College. Then when I came to Ohio State for the faculty position here, we brought it here and we're continuing to develop it. So one of the quote unquote problems now is that Laban Rider, the older program,
00:31:15
Speaker
was an amazing program and did so many things, but macOS moved on, the program wasn't updated, and now we need a way to use this program on current machines. And so Kinescribe has taken that up using a lot of the same code and expanding it for current devices. So it now runs both on the iPad and on the Mac desktop. So you can use it on both. If you don't have an iPad, you can use on the desktop, kinescribe.org. You can download it for free from the Apple App Store. But one of the things that's so exciting to me about the potentials for this app one is that it really is lovely to do notation in the studio on the ipad you can have it in your hand if you've got a pencil you can go with that transferring back and forth between the computers it's like in terms of problems that that the app solves they're so small it's just like the difference between a paper and a digital tablet but even that bringing the kinesthetic experience of writing and moving your finger across the tablet is really huge But we've been talking about what if in the future these applications could do some kind of, <unk> I'll say text recognition, but symbol recognition if you wanted to do certain kinds of digital analyses of the scores. This is where some of my digital humanities work ties in. And so on the one hand, it's really about how do we still have digital tools for and notation? But on the other hand, it's what can these digital tools do for us as we go forward? And I talked a little bit earlier about using Laban Notations scores in my research ah as a way of getting inside of the dance and understanding it. But there are other things that this app does that is a digital way of engaging. So there's a part of the Laban systems called motif description or motif notation. where you can notate something that's more proscriptive than descriptive. So you can say, oh, in this score, I'm going to do a movement that turns to the right, a movement that goes to the floor, a movement that jumps. And so you can create ideas for dances in a more creative way, or you can use it to analyze your own work. And when I have students do this in class, they say, oh, I didn't realize that I never turned to the left. And by analyzing their work with this very specific vocabulary, they start to see these differences. So those are the kinds of things, both in terms of what Laban Notations scores that are more descriptive, that are documents, you know, those things that contribute to dance history, but then also with the ways that we can do more generative scoring, how those contribute to general...
00:33:41
Speaker
kinesthetic knowledge, to the ways that we theorize from the body. And so Kinescribe supports that. We're hoping to have a release later this summer of an update, but you can absolutely go kinescribe.org. It's there. Download it, play with it, email me with problems that you find with it. Yeah. And we'll we'll continue on as we go forth. Yeah.
00:34:00
Speaker
I love the fact that you're bringing this because it's not a device. It's more than a device and a tool. you know what saying? It's a jumping off point for a different way of exploring from multiple aspects of what your practice is and what maybe you're not familiar with your practice. This is, I think it's something that folks in theater and those in visual arts can play with as well.
00:34:19
Speaker
I just love that concept with technology versus it being o tool. Absolutely. Yes, absolutely. So this question is about your first book, because I have my experiences with Anna Sokolow, which I count as a very special moment, working with Dr. Valerie Williams on Anna Sokolow's Steps of Silence. And your first book focuses on an Anna Sokolow, a choreographer working across, she worked across you the U.S., Mexico, and Israel in the mid-20th century.
00:34:48
Speaker
I know what makes her a compelling figure for understanding American modernism, but how would you say it? I'm kind of curious. Yes, I think she's an incredibly compelling figure for understanding American modernism because by understanding her work and her her travels, in the book I focus on her work in New York, Mexico City, and Tel Aviv. She also worked in Japan. She also toured all over, that we actually have an understanding of a global sense of modernism through her work. And specifically
00:35:21
Speaker
that her work, that American modernism, we come to learn, is not only American, but it's actually made up of movement influences from across her global travels. So in the same way that in kinesthetic peoplehood, I look at in that term, corporeal diasporism, how diasporic movement practices show up in the body, the seeds of that were planted in the way that I was understanding Sokolow's work. Because when I looked at photographs of her teaching in New York, and she taught gram technique, right? When I look at the photographs of her teaching in New York and I look at the photographs of her teaching in Mexico City and I look at the photographs of her teaching in Tel Aviv, they could be cut and pasted on top of each other. So we're seeing how she was disseminating American modernist practices like into the bodies of dancers abroad.
00:36:05
Speaker
And then the reverse was happening because she had small companies that she brought together through colleagues and local dance communities. She had small companies in Mexico City and in Tel Aviv at different times in Mexico City during the 1940s and in Tel Aviv during the nineteen sixty s but ah She was drawing from those dancers and their dance practices and their experiences and the cultural context of the places into her work and then recirculating it back through the United States. And so when we understand American modernism, it's actually made up of a composite of dance practices from the places that Sokolov traveled. And she was not the only one. So many American artists were traveling during the mid to late 20th century. And all of that was influencing what they were doing. And meanwhile, other companies were touring through and people were getting inspired. So a lot of the same ways that I think about dance traveling in the book, Kinesthetic Peoplehood,
00:37:00
Speaker
That was happening in Sokola's work. And so in the book, I show how her choreography was very much part of and contributing to discourse on the international left from a very specifically Jewish perspective. But the real story of that book is how we understand American modernism through its global influences.
00:37:20
Speaker
man And that was very telling to me about and embodying her work as an older practitioner of movement. And it's still within me. I still kind of reference it at key moments, not even in the space or the realms of movement.
00:37:35
Speaker
in my consideration of storytelling and capturing the media. So that's why I find these conversations within your book are so vital and necessary. I highly recommend everybody read kinesthetic peoplehood, Jewish diasporic, dance migrations, and all of your writing, because it's such rich material for jumping off to investigations into artistic curiosity, intellectual curiosity, humanist curiosity.
00:38:01
Speaker
curiosity because it matters. It's so matters now more than ever. I really believe that. And you're just such a, just an awesome practitioner of embodying it completely and fully.
00:38:15
Speaker
So it's a lot of love. I have a lot of love very handy. You know, yeah I feel, I just, I call it my fanboy phase. I get, I'm in my fanboy phase. oh Thank you so much. I'm also in my fangirl phase. And I know, I don't know if the listeners know this, but we are actually looking at each other while we're doing this. And we are, you know, emoting towards each other. It's like just so exciting. Thank you so much. ah Yes.
00:38:36
Speaker
Yeah. Just lots of love, lots of love. And I honestly say, you know, Hannah, it's been such a pleasure. I'm so glad that we get to share you through this medium. And I'm hoping that people take it to heart and share it with other people that really get engaged. with This is rich.
00:38:52
Speaker
material Thank you so much, Rodney. and And to Jess and to Jane, you know, to all of you for the invitation and for this amazing conversation today. Thank you so, so much. It means so much to me. When I was an independent choreographer, Ohio dance was such an important part of my work there and continues to be such an important entity for dance in Ohio. And it is really such a humbling honor to have my work highlighted by you in this way. So thank you so much.
00:39:22
Speaker
And so as I mentioned, if you want to play with Kinescribe, kinescribe.org, you can download from the Apple App Store. And both books, both Honest Bodies, my first book and Kinaesthetic Peoplehood, my second book, They're both with Oxford University Press. So you can go to Oxford University city Press's website and order it directly. All the places where you like to buy your books. Or order from your local bookstores. All of the places. i do have a local bookstore here in Columbus that I go and order all my books from. So you can get it in all of those outlets. Absolutely. Thank you all again so much for hosting me today.
00:39:59
Speaker
and it's totally our pleasure having you on the podcast. Thank you so much.
00:40:06
Speaker
A State of Dance is produced by OhioDance and hosted by Rodney Veal. Executive producer Jane D'Angelo, editor and audio technician Jessica Cavender. Musical composition by Matthew Peyton Dixon.
00:40:19
Speaker
OhioDance would like to thank our funders, the Ohio Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio State University Dance Preservation Fund, the Greater Columbus Arts Council, the Columbus Foundation, and the Akron Community Fund.