Ben-Gurion Research Institute Press, 2025, ISBN: 9789655101553, 263 pages.

A Studio of Their Own: The Women who Founded Israeli Concert Dance, 1920-1952 [Hebrew]

A Studio of their Own is a fascinating journey to the beginning of one of the most important artistic fields in Hebrew culture. This is the first book that systematically and extensively chronicles the development of concert dance in Israel and the inception of a living, vibrant institution.

https://bgri-press.bgu.ac.il/node/1123

Israeli concert dance, founded by Baruch Agadati, quickly became a prominently female arena: 16 women, most of them immigrants from Eastern Europe, established schools and dance groups, taught, created, and built dance communities. They brought with them European teaching methods and developed unique methods of their own, connected with the opera and theater institutions in the country, and mostly – created a local language of movement.

A Studio of their Own, echoing Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, illustrates how basic and vital women’s rights are to a creative space, to resources and artistic freedom. The women of Israeli dance who operated in Israel in the days its of early development have done so in limiting conditions, without any institutional backing and while the public sphere has been mostly dominated by men. They had to teach dance in their homes and rely on the scarce resources at their disposal, without any material infrastructure and prior to a local evolution of a dance tradition. Despite all this, they have created, taught and left behind a legacy, the majority of which was erased from the collective memory, yet was to become the foundation of Israeli dance.  

Yonat Rothman manages the Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company’s archive project.