Teaching, Bible, and Tap Dance
“Like learning a language and learning an instrument” is how Dr. Amy Kalmanofsky describes the challenge of taking tap dance lessons. Through her own learning, she has gained an understanding of how movement can deepen her experience as a teacher and scholar.
Dr. Amy Kalmanofsky, Blanche and Romie Shapiro Professor of Bible and dean of both Albert A. List College of Jewish Studies and the Gershon Kekst Graduate School, has always been someone on the move. Since age 16 she has run six days a week, first thing in the morning, and she sees that daily run as a key contributor to her mental health. “My brain is just wired to appreciate movement,” she said.
Kalmanofsky has always shared a love of the arts, especially musical theatre, so it was not completely out of the blue about three years ago when she decided to explore moving her body in a whole new way: through tap-dancing.
Signing up for a class at the prominent Upper West Side dance studio Steps on Broadway, she jumped in not knowing what to expect (she even initially registered accidentally for a beginning class that was too advanced) but felt compelled to learn. “I’ve always enjoyed teaching, especially in a live classroom,” she said, “but I really love to learn.”
“Learning tap is the hardest thing I have ever done,” Kalmanofsky said. “Part of what is beautiful about tap is that it is non-verbal—it is speaking with sounds but without words.” Kalmanofsky’s academic career has been built on analyzing the language of the Bible, spoken and otherwise, which makes the wordless language of dance particularly attractive to her.
Kalmanofsky’s connection to movement and the body pervades her research. She is author of “Body Language: A Postmodern Interpretation of the Body in the Biblical Prophets” in The Oxford Handbook of the Prophets as well as “Bare Naked: A Gender Analysis of the Naked Body in Jeremiah 13” in Jeremiah Invented.
While movement in the Bible is often a narrative component and not a spiritual or esoteric aspect of text, Kalmanofsky appreciates the role of the body and movement in her own religious life.
“I’m not a meditator, but the rhythms of tap and the concentration needed to sustain them is meditative. In many ways, tap feels like a spiritual practice,” she said. “You have a deep connection to the other people dancing with you, a sense of community.” For Kalmanofsky, dance is what she called her “language of spirit.”
In communal prayer, her favorite liturgical moment is on Yom Kippur when the whole congregation bows to the floor during the aleinu prayer. “We need more physicality in our davening,” she said, understanding these movements as a means of “connecting to an abstract ideal filtered through an imperfect body.”
Becoming a student of tap dance has ignited Kalmanofsky’s curiosity in unexpected ways. Having lived in New York City for decades, she now finds herself going to jazz at Lincoln Center and reading about choreographers and dance theory. She appreciates the art of movement as a practitioner, not only an observer.
Kalmanofsky has also learned more about teaching. In her tap classes, she has observed how intuitively dance teachers adjust their teaching to the needs of their students. “For some students, tap is all about learning to count the rhythm; for others it is the mechanics of the step itself. I am in awe of what the teachers are actually doing for their students,” she said, emphasizing the “doing.”
“Tap is both learning a language and learning an instrument. It’s about skill and about expression,” said Kalmanofsky, and she has come to recognize the differences in these two modes of instruction. “On one hand dance teachers are teaching a skill, like teachers of a foreign language. And they are also teaching an appreciation for and expression of an artform.” Being able to do both at the same time takes considerable talent and considerable commitment to their students. “Dance teachers are amazing and unique educators.”
In higher education, especially with the pressures of tenure and subjective student evaluations, some professors have been made to feel that they need to perform. “We’ve lost our way a bit,” said Kalmanofsky.
Dance teachers at Steps—many of whom are or have been professional performers–are not performing in the classroom, they are student-focused, adapting their approach individually to the students in their classrooms, said Kalmanofsky. One thing that distinguishes Steps from other studios is that students do not perform at recitals. “It is all about what happens in class, learning to move your body in a deliberate way, with the process and product inextricably linked.” This is a mode of teaching that Kalmanofsky would like more educators to practice.
Kalmanofsky recalled one specific instructor who understood how to push and support students where they felt literally off-balance and physically vulnerable. “It can be deeply unsettling to not be able to control one’s body, to feel behind the rest of the class,” she said. Starting as a novice and working hard to learn tap, Kalmanofsky has gained great empathy for those who struggle to learn something like a foreign language or text.
“All learning, but especially learning that situates you outside your comfort zone, is an act of vulnerability,” she said. “Physically during tap, you are listening and moving and creating sound in ways that require enormous concentration, and that does not all happen right away at the same time,” she said.
At JTS, Kalmanofsky tries to channel her beloved dance teacher into her own teaching. Knowing when to push and when to support, creating a physical space for learners to allow themselves to be vulnerable are lessons she both practices and works to impart to the students in her classroom, many of whom will become Jewish educators.
While we might not catch Kalmanofsky tapping in Times Square, up on Broadway at 122nd Street, she is bringing rhythm and movement into her work, step by step.
