The Art of Benjamin Zemach Produced by Miriam Rochlin

 (1969)
The Art of Benjamin Zemach

Produced in Los Angeles, the film won the Kodak Shoestring award in 1971. It was shown on Public Television and screened only several times in the last half century. It is a testament to the first decades of early 20th century Jewish cultural production by one of its earliest and most prominent dance theatre artists.

Narrated by Zemach, this rarely seen film is a work of art and an important historical document for several reasons. It is the only record of Zemach dancing. We see the essence of his style of integrating the authentic gestures and themes of Eastern European Jewry that he had in his bones with the flow, expansiveness and formal concerns of modern dance and the attention to detail of his Russian theater training with Stanislavsky, Vakhtangov and Meyerhold. We also see the span of time and place the choreography represents. It takes us from early 1920’s Moscow (“Beggar”), 1931 New York (“Farewell to Queen Sabbath”), to mid-century New York and Los Angeles in “The Travels of Benjamin the Third” based on the Mendele Mocher Sforim novella, and “Joyous” in which he dances and speaks Chaim Nachman Bialik’s “Dance of Death,” written both in Yiddish and Hebrew.

Produced in Los Angeles, the film won the Kodak Shoestring award in 1971. It was shown on Public Television and screened only several times in the last half century. It is a testament to the first decades of early 20th century Jewish cultural production by one of its earliest and most prominent dance theatre artists.

Narrated by Zemach, this rarely seen film is a work of art and an important historical document for several reasons. It is the only record of Zemach dancing. We see the essence of his style of integrating the authentic gestures and themes of Eastern European Jewry that he had in his bones with the flow, expansiveness and formal concerns of modern dance and the attention to detail of his Russian theater training with Stanislavsky, Vakhtangov and Meyerhold. We also see the span of time and place the choreography represents. It takes us from early 1920’s Moscow (“Beggar”), 1931 New York (“Farewell to Queen Sabbath”), to mid-century New York and Los Angeles in “The Travels of Benjamin the Third” based on the Mendele Mocher Sforim novella, and “Joyous” in which he dances and speaks Chaim Nachman Bialik’s “Dance of Death,” written both in Yiddish and Hebrew.

Zemach’s work covered not only decades and continents, but various aspects of human experience and emotion. As a child he experienced the pogroms of the 1905 revolution in Russia, as a teen he experienced the cultural activities of Jewish Bialystok and the founding of his older brother’s Habima theater company and it’s move to Moscow. There he experienced Habima’s close contact with Konstantin Stanislavsky in his master classes when Zemach was approaching 20, and trained in early modern dance and ballet.

His clear gift for interpretation and the flexibility to bring his training to whatever medium appeared, allowed him to function not only in the Expressionistic theater and dance of the 1920s but to continue into choreographing the first Jewish dance work at the Hollywood Bowl, the lost-world Hollywood film “She,” for which he was nominated for an Oscar and the Jewish pageant “The Eternal Road” on Broadway directed by Max Reinhardt with music by Kurt Weill.

He is fully as great an actor as a dancer…
-L.A. Times, c. 1933

His every line, every movement sublime, perfect…
-Max Reinhardt, director, c. 1937

Zemach,Ito 1928