They Were Dancing

This is a column about rites of passage and about the little girls who dance in and out of our lives.

I saw them over the weekend in celebrations as old as the wind and as new as each day’s sunrise.

I watched them spin in the blurred speed and color of a Degas painting to music as varied as Tchaikovsky, the hora and “Jailhouse Rock.”

I heard them laugh, I saw them cry and I joined them in remembering pain beyond belief suffered by those whose anguish weighs heavily upon the world’s conscience.

It was a weekend of reflection and revelation, combined in both the ritual of a bat mitzvah and in the seasonal tradition of “The Nutcracker” ballet.

The bat mitzvah honored the coming of age of Shavonne Wieder, the 13-year-old daughter of Les and Tyree Wieder, in a rite of passage that dates to the 2nd Century.

Here, in ceremonial custom, one says farewell to infancy, and turns in the direction that leads to adulthood. Every culture acknowledges that moment in the process of growing up, but Shavonne’s was special because it paid homage to both religion and race. Her mother is black, her father white.

Beneath the roof of Northridge’s Temple Ahavat Shalom, the history of two peoples, Jews and African Americans, was blended in serenity and tradition in the first steps of a dark-eyed girl’s journey into adolescence.

She began the trip by remembering family losses both to Nazism and to slavery, and by embracing the truths of Moses and Martin Luther King Jr.

And then she danced.

*

I saw “The Nutcracker” ballet the next day.

It was presented for the 14th consecutive year in a cavernous Topanga Community House that has echoed with both acrimony and high spirits.

Weddings have been held there, and carnivals, and debates over land use that have clanged with the resonance of clashing swords.

On Sunday, the old building rang with the music of Peter Tchaikovsky and dazzled a packed house with dances choreographed by Sherry Jason.

Among the dancers was a glowing little mouse named Nicole.

There were others onstage too, of course, in a cast of children and adults that transformed a tradition into magic.

Their costumes of brilliant reds and pastel pinks shimmered in the spotlights as they soared like butterflies and pranced like gazelles in a mosaic of dance reminiscent of a study by Edgar Degas.

He painted ballerinas in rich oils, and caught them in motion, capturing life, as he once said, in its essential gestures.

I mention 8-year-old Nicole because of her style, because of her smile, because of her ebullience . . . and because, well, she’s my granddaughter.

She was a mouse, a little cousin and a naughty child in this year’s “Nutcracker,” her fourth year of participation in the production.

I have watched girls become young ladies in the progress of their performances, and the mice become snowflakes. Nicole grows as she dances, in a rite of passage enhanced by music.

*

Dancing is a fundamental element of celebration. It always has been, keyed first to the rhythms of nature and then to the nuances of culture.

When the ceremony for Shavonne was over, the music began. Even here there was tradition. The first dance of the bat mitzvah party was the hora, a circular dance which, through hand-holding, joined its participants together.

The hora was never intended as a metaphor for linking races, but that it did on this night of passage. Blacks joined with whites to lift a daughter of both races on a chair above the crowd, in a celebration of unity that someday may be more than a dance.

Into a circle created by a young girl coming of age was drawn many dancers, each as similar as the costumed little mice of “Nutcracker,” but as different as the music that followed the hora.

We went from “Fiddler on the Roof” to the chicken dance, and the proper young participants of an ancient ritual were suddenly flinging off ceremonial constraints and letting it all hang out.

As I watched the bat mitzvah on Saturday and the “Nutcracker” on Sunday, I realized how quickly our little girls become big girls, and how easily they dance out of our lives.

But I realized too how much hope they represent for a world whose history is littered with pain.

I’ll remember this weekend vividly as I grow old in the business of writing. I’ll see the little girls as clearly as if it were yesterday, costumed and vivacious, as bright as morning.

They’ll be dancing.