Palestinian Ballet

And David danced before the Lord with all his might.--II Samuel 6:14.

And Miriam the prophetess . . . took a timbrel in her hand; and all the women went out after her with timbrels and with dances.--Exodus 15:20.

In the days before the Diaspora (the dispersal from Palestine), the Jews were a dancing people. As they wandered over the face of the earth they took up the dances of other nations, forgot their own. But one small group of about 3,000 Jews did not forget: the Yemenite Jews* who, driven from Jerusalem by the Roman conquerors in 132 A. D., settled in a corner of southwestern Arabia, where they have carried the traditions of Old Testament life down to the present day.

Modern Zionist dancers have long studied and imitated the traditional dances of the Yemenite Jews. Prominent among these Zionist dancers is Moscow-born Rina Nikova, former prima ballerina of Palestine's Tel Aviv Opera. While working in Palestine, Ballerina Nikova's interest in the Yemenite Jews became so absorbing that she spent months living in their villages learning their customs and dances at first hand. Upshot of her study was the formation in 1932 of a ballet troupe of seven dark-eyed, black-haired Yemenite girls. Because the girls sang as well as danced, she called her troupe the Palestine Singing Ballet. Eight months ago, Nikova's seven singing ballerinas started out on a tour of continental Europe. Last fortnight they opened a two-and-a-half-week engagement in London.

The off-season audience of Londoners who were present for the opening missed the virtuosity and sophistication of Russian ballet but liked the buoyancy and bounce with which the youthful Yemenites performed. Those dances which did not have Biblical subjects depicted such incidents in Yemenite life as breadmaking, gossip at the village well, work in the orange groves. In two numbers, Nikova's sturdy five-foot ballerinas gallantly revived the sword dances of their warrior ancestors.

* Not to be confused with the Yemenites, Arab inhabitants of Yemen, who like all Arabs are at present the Jews' bitter enemies.

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