About
What is Klezmer Aerobics?
Klezmer Aerobics is a touring cultural performance that is best described as
a family-friendly interactive dance/storytelling workout where “the 1880s meets the 1980s.”
The show’s creator, Rabbi Daniel Brenner, plays an aerobics instructor and leads an audience participation workout as he tells the original story SHVITZ! about Levi and the Old Badchen – a coming-of-age tale about a dancer and his apprentice in a Polish shtetl. The audience learns the traditional dances of the Old Badchen and the dances that Levi learns and creates when he runs off to Warsaw. The show – which has toured to JCCs, synagogues, schools, libraries, retirement communities, conferences, and art festivals – is a one-hour joyride packed with Jewish cultural history and delightful klezmer music.
Klezmer Aerobics has been featured in the New York Times, NYC – The Official Guide, Art Nerd NY, Tablet Magazine, Heeb Magazine, and The Yiddish Daily Forward.
About Daniel
Daniel Brenner started performing in 1987 with the late comic legend Chris Farley (at the Ark Improvisational Theater) and has been involved in the arts ever since. In rabbinical school, he created the one-man-show Faster, Rabbi, Drill! Drill!, won an All Out Arts New York playwriting award (2000), and wrote a series of chassidic folktale/plays for Philadelphia’s Theatre Ariel. Since then, he had a play produced by New York’s Vital Theater and spawned a handful of purim shpiels. He performs regularly with the band Midnight Nosh. Daniel lives with his beloved, Lisa, and their three children – Noam, Jonah, and Adira – in Montclair, New Jersey.
DANCE STYLE
Klezmer Aerobics brings both a vivid gestural vocabulary of hand, arm and shoulder movements together with bouncing, skipping, and hopping. The style incorporates elements of Ashkenazi dance and culture, including movements that relate to clothwork, study, prayer, argument, grief, celebration, and resilience. To create the “klezmer aerobics” style, Brenner studied with master dance instructor Steven Lee Weintraub, who himself was a student of the legendary dancer Felix Fibich. Fibich grew up in Poland in the cradle of both chasidic dance and of klezmer dance – and he miraculously survived the war, fleeing Poland and joining an entertainiment group that performed for the soldiers of the advancing Russian army. Many of the moves taught by Fibich are used in the choreography of the Old Badchen. Brenner adds an “aerobics” twist on the klezmer and chasidic dances that is informed by his ongoing study of traditional afro-haitian dance, with Julio Jean. In addition to blending these two dance styles, Brenner’s dance pedagogy is informed by neuroscientists who study dance, like Dr. Tal Shaffir, who explore the energizing, calming, empowering, and healing powers of movement.
PRESS
NYC GO: The Official Guide to New York
THE YIDDISH DAILY FORWARD (IN YIDDISH)
ON WISCONSIN (The University of Wisconsin Alumni Magazine)
(Photo: Daniel dancing with Judith, one of Felix Fibich’s students)