This is one of an occasional series intended to paint a cumulative portrait of our Jewish community. Today we focus on dancer Sofi Askenazi.
Sofi Askenazi is totally “immersed in the creative process” — and that is exactly how she prefers it.
The 34-year old dancer, artist and educator from Mexico City will be entering her seventh season as a dancer for Wild Space Dance Company in Milwaukee, while she works on her master’s degree in choreography and performance from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and teaches dance to elementary and middle school children.
But her busy schedule doesn’t faze her because she believes “the more you combine the arts, the richer the experience becomes.”
Askenazi, who lives in Shorewood with her husband Abe and their two-year-old son, said she grew up dancing in the Mexican Jewish community.
The community there is “very targeted towards arts and festivals,” Askenazi said, where “dancing is so much a part of our lives.
As a result, her training began at an early age, in Israeli folk, ballet, jazz and modern dance, and during high school, Askenazi toured her native country with the Ananju Ve Atem Dance Company.
For Askenazi, dance has always brought “dimension to the world,” she said, and a “different kind of observation” of it.
“It opens the spectrum,” Askenazi said, in that it makes you “notice things you wouldn’t notice” and “changes the way we perceive.”
But when it came time for college, for which Askenazi moved to the United States in 1993, she chose not to study dance. Instead, she earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from the Massachusetts College of Art, because she “loved dance so much I didn’t want it to become a burden.”
Therefore, she was surprised when she moved to Wisconsin with her husband in 1996 and took a teaching job at a dance studio and realized how much she enjoyed it.
“I never thought I wanted to teach,” Askenazi said, but once she began, she found “teaching as a whole to be very rewarding” and now says “it is what I love.”
Askenazi teaches outreach classes for Wild Space, through a program called “Dance Enhance,” where she combines art and dance through workshops in Milwaukee Public Schools. She also teaches bilingual dance classes in other schools around the community, showing students how to “make creative movements” and “be creative with their bodies.”
Dance is “sculpture in motion,” Askenazi said, so her classes focus not only on dance itself, but also on the vocabulary and choreography surrounding it. This gives her students options that aren’t limited to only performing on stage, she said.
She enjoys the classes because “teaching dance is different than English, math or writing,” she said. “It is so much freer.”
In addition, it “teaches health” and “how you can move effectively,” Askenazi said, calling it a “form of artistic exercise.”
Askenazi brings in her Jewish heritage through her dancing and classes, and she plans to make it the central theme for the show she will produce as her final project for her master’s degree next year.
The production will look at “how we all take a different view of what Judaism can give us,” Askenazi said, a theme that was inspired by the fact that while her grandparents were “liberal” Jews who immigrated to Mexico from Russia and Poland, she was raised in a traditional Conservative household.
“We went the other way,” Askenazi said, noting that her sister is an Orthodox Jew and her brother is a rabbi in Miami.
While she works on her production, Askenazi will continue to practice with Wild Space for 12-15 hours a week.
Though all of the other dancers in the company have a day job as well, Askenazi said, they remain involved simply “for the love of dancing.”
Their most recent production, “Physical Evidence,” took place early this month, and recreated a historical dance marathon that took place in Milwaukee in 1931, starting from the end with slow dancing and building with intensity as the show continued.
Askenazi considers the 10-person modern dance company her “second family,” and plans to stay and grow with Wild Space. “Every project brings a new dimension.”
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