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Curator for Spark+Echo Arts and dancer Elizabeth Dishman responds to the theme of "Dancing" from Judges 21:16-24 with her company of dancers, Coriolis.

Judges 21:16-24​

dance in the dances

By 

Elizabeth Dishman

Credits: 

Collaboratively Choreographed by Elizabeth Dishman + the performers: Leah Ives, Kaitlin Morse, Niko Tsocanos and Caitlin Yuhas
Music by Giuseppe Sammartini and J. S. Bach

Curated by: 

Elizabeth Dishman

2013

Dance

Image by Giorgio Trovato

Primary Scripture

Then the elders of the congregation said, “How shall we provide wives for those who remain, since the women are destroyed out of Benjamin?”
They said, “There must be an inheritance for those who are escaped of Benjamin, that a tribe not be blotted out from Israel.
However we may not give them wives of our daughters, for the children of Israel had sworn, saying, ‘Cursed is he who gives a wife to Benjamin.’”
They said, “Behold, there is a feast of Yahweh from year to year in Shiloh, which is on the north of Bethel, on the east side of the highway that goes up from Bethel to Shechem, and on the south of Lebonah.”
They commanded the children of Benjamin, saying, “Go and lie in wait in the vineyards,
and see, and behold, if the daughters of Shiloh come out to dance in the dances, then come out of the vineyards, and each man catch his wife of the daughters of Shiloh, and go to the land of Benjamin.
It shall be, when their fathers or their brothers come to complain to us, that we will say to them, ‘Grant them graciously to us, because we didn’t take for each man his wife in battle, neither did you give them to them, otherwise you would now be guilty.’”
The children of Benjamin did so, and took wives for themselves, according to their number, of those who danced, whom they carried off. They went and returned to their inheritance, built the cities, and lived in them.
The children of Israel departed from there at that time, every man to his tribe and to his family, and they each went out from there to his own inheritance.

Judges 21:16-24

I initially found this passage really funny and bizarre: the Israelite tribesman make an oath not to give their daughters to the tribe of Benjamin for wives, but later feel sorry for their brothers, whose clan will die out. So they come up with this great idea to have the Benjamites SNATCH and marry the young women who go out to dance in the fields. That way no one breaks the oath, and Benjamin lives on. Such a good idea… It struck me as hilarious, so I imagined a light-hearted dance of joyous, unsuspecting young ladies being watched by a man with marriage on his mind.


However, the background story to this scene is horribly grim, involving gang rape, murder and a hideous call to justice from a man bereft of his concubine (Judges 19-21:15). Saving this darker content for a future dance, I decided to create the work based on my initial response to the dancing in the field scenario, but I also thought about what it would be like to try to build a real marriage out of this abrupt and non-mutual courtship. Hence the second section, which reflects the awkwardness and struggle that might have ensued (“so…now what do we do?”). In that culture the groom may not have tried as hard to become a good friend and lover, but I imagined a more present-day pair honestly searching for their footing in an intimate, stolen dance.



Spark Notes

The Artist's Reflection

Elizabeth Dishman is the Artistic Director of Dishman + Co. Choreography, a Brooklyn-based experimental dance company founded in 2001. Originally from Colorado, she studied Voice Performance at Emory University, and Choreography at The Ohio State University. In pursuit of ineffable junctures between the abstract and theatrical, the universal and deeply personal, Elizabeth and her collaborators devote themselves to scrupulous exploration and ardent play, probing the elusiveness of live performance in search of lasting things. Over 15 years and 40+ original works, Dishman + Co.’s choreography has been described by critics as “complex skeins and cerebral dreams”, “bodies in rigorous concentration”, and “playful and provocative…raw humanity seeps in”. www.DishmanAndCo.org




Elizabeth Dishman

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