Moving Home: Finding Comfort in the Evolving Practice of Israeli Folk Dance

This work seeks to understand the history of Israeli folk dance, its modern practice, and the way historical and modern context and the interactions between the two create something meaningful and important in the world and in cultural tradition. I will first delve into the origins of Israeli folk dance to create an understanding of the form's history and then will work through a modern contextualization of the form and describe its contemporary practice. From there, I use my own studio-based embodied research to identify the concepts of comfort and home which I use to organize, describe, and understand the import of Israeli folk dance, historically and now. From my research, I find that the concepts of home and comfort describe and create an important aspect of the way Israeli folk dance acts as a community-building, social dance practice.