Playing Against Time

Pete Rushefsky For keeping the old ethnic songs and dances alive.

Pete Rushefsky For keeping the old ethnic songs and dances alive.

by George Robinson
Special To The Jewish Week

There is a kind of amiable clutter common to nonprofit arts organizations, a mix of posters for old and new events, stacks of CDs or DVDs or T-shirts, files that haven’t made it into the right filing cabinet yet and that sediment of old phone messages, take-out menus and opened but unanswered mail. The Center for Traditional Music and Dance has enough of that clutter in its cozy offices in the financial district to be instantly recognizable as such an organization, and its executive director, Pete Rushefsky, clearly feels at home.
Most Jewish Week readers, if they recognize his name, think of the 38-year-old Rushefsky as a gifted tsimblist, the latest in a line of excellent young musicians who are keeping the klezmer flame lit. And he certainly fits that description, but in his “day job,” Rushefsky is even more active in the struggle to keep Yiddish culture and many of its counterparts, both Jewish and non-Jewish, alive and thriving. Thus, the two sides of Rushefsky’s work identity fit together quite nicely.
A quick glance at the Center’s recent programs gives some small idea of its astonishingly global reach, a tribute to the demographic riches New York City has to offer. The Center’s roster of traveling artists includes such diverse performers as Thunderbird American Indian Dancers, the Afro-Peruvian music and dance troupe Caracumbe, African troubadour Abdoulaye Diabate, Bulgarian Gypsy sax player Yuri Yunakov and his ensemble, Japanese dancer Sachiyo Ito, and klezmer stars Alicia Svigals and Andy Statman. Given its start 40 years ago as the Balkan Arts Center, the CTMD has come a long way, and not only in geography.
“Immigration patterns change, so [the Center] started expanding into different communities,” Rushefsky explains. “They added the Italian and Jewish communities to the Balkans — in 1978, they began the Dave Tarras project [documenting and recording the great klezmer clarinetist] — and then they added Irish and Latino cultures.”
It expanded, in part, by taking on other ethnicities. Just like the city itself.
The most important part of the Center’s mandate is that it works with the communities whose music and dance it is documenting, preserving and passing along to future generations.
Steven Zeitlin, the executive director of City Lore, another organization dedicated to preserving and presenting the city’s rich cultural heritage, encapsulates the mission of CTMD (and his own group) succinctly.
“Their work comes out of the concept we call ‘cultural equity,’ that is, the right of each community to have forums and venues for their artistic expression and not to be marginalized,” he says. “The role that they fill most crucially is that they work with many individual ethnic communities to ensure that those communities have a way to have their music and dance heard and to have venues and forums for their music in New York City.”
Although that goal unites all of the ethnic communities that CTMD partners with, in practice the path to the finish line differs from group to group.
“It’s different in every community and we try to work with each community on its own terms,” Rushefsky says. “When we start we consult cultural specialists, artists within the community. We look for intergenerational transmission, community contacts, who [the music or dance] is used by within the community. How does it function to bind the community together?”
The result in any given cultural community is a five-year process that Rushefsky says includes “field research, getting to know the artists, educators and other institutions in the community in the first year. They’re really the ones driving the goals of the project, how we implement those goals, what programs we put on, what artistic forms we work in.”
Frequently the programs that result will encompass far more than just music and dance, creating a larger cultural context that may include photography, moviemaking and culinary traditions. The central focus, though, is always the same, to serve the three groups that Rushefsky calls the Center’s constituencies.
“First, there are the individual artists who are, by and large, immigrants facing a lot of challenges in making a living,” he says. “We are helping them to present their work in both their own communities and for a wider audience.”
The second constituency is the community itself.
“Our task there is to make it possible for them to carry their traditions on, pass traditions on to new generations and share them with a wider public,” Rushefsky continues.
Not surprisingly, the third constituency is that wider public.
Rushefsky says, “These diverse traditions of music and dance are part of the riches we all share in New York, part of what makes the city such a cultural capital of the world.”
Almost from the very beginning, CTMD has had a particular affinity for the music and dance traditions of the Jewish diaspora.
“We’ve done Jewish programming for 35 years,” Rushefsky notes. “What we are doing now is packaging our experience in klezmer, in Yiddish song, in Yiddish dance, everything from the fiddler Leon Schwartz, to preserving the tradition of badkhones [the witty, improvised rhyming that was performed at old-world wedding parties]. And we’re trying to step it up a notch. We created the An-Sky Institute for Jewish Culture, which we want to be a year-round home for documentation, presentation, transmission of Jewish cultures of the diaspora, with a big emphasis on Yiddish culture.”
This is, Rushefsky says, a pivotal moment in the history of Yiddish culture, hence CTMD’s stepped-up efforts.
“Over the next 10 years, you will be seeing the passage from the scene of the last remnants of the population who grew up before the Holocaust, people who could still remember how to dance a sher [a Yiddish scissors dance] in their village,” he says. “This is the last generation of native speakers of Yiddish, other than the very Orthodox. They are the last carriers of a whole civilization that had its own forms. So this is an important time to be doing documentation and collection of songs, dances and a whole array of traditions. I see us in a 10-year window where we really have to do a lot of work to do that documentation. This is the last time that we’ll be able to learn from native speakers and people who grew up in that world.”
Rushefsky understands the problem in a personal way. Growing up in Rochester, N.Y., he eagerly listened to his grandparents, who were originally from Brisk, Belarus, and Yiddish speakers.
“I loved learning about how they came here, and through the songs they sang we had this culture flowing through our ears,” he says.
And here, he readily acknowledges, is where his two jobs meet and merge.
“One of the things the Center wants to do is to see the traditions continue to evolve and grow,” Rushefsky says. “I’m trying to do that personally with klezmer.”
Even his choice of instrument underlines that commitment.
“I play tsimbl because it’s a tradition that had died out,” he says. “Then Stuart Brotman and Zev Feldman and Josh Horowitz and Kurt Bjorling were able to reconstruct it. They interviewed older musicians who had played with tsimblists, they studied other hammered dulcimer musical traditions, they listened to recordings.
“They’ve been able to reconstruct those traditions, and I’m trying to develop that. I’m not interested in creating hybrid forms. How can we grow this tradition in a way that’s idiomatic to itself? I’m interested in growing the roots.”
City Lore’s Steven Zeitlin recalls an event that seems a perfect metaphor for the place where Rushefsky’s two roles combine.
“[City Lore] did a multicultural program involving different endangered languages, including South African and Native American languages and Yiddish, Pete was in a group with Michael Alpert playing a variety of Yiddish tunes, and I was amazed to see that after each group had [finished] their numbers, Pete and Michael started to jam with the other groups and managed to find a common musical ground with all of them. To my mind, that is a perfect metaphor for what the CTMD is doing.”
For more information on the Center for Traditional Music and Dance, visit their Web site: www.ctmd.org.

Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization