A sher or sherele is a dance and musical form in

Eastern European Eastern Europe is a subregion of the European continent. As a largely ambiguous term, it has a wide range of geopolitical, geographical, ethnic, cultural, and socio-economic connotations. The vast majority of the region is covered by Russia, whi ...

Jewish

folk music Folk music is a music genre that includes traditional folk music and the contemporary genre that evolved from the former during the 20th-century folk revival. Some types of folk music may be called world music. Traditional folk music has b ...

, notably

Klezmer Klezmer ( yi, קלעזמער or ) is an instrumental musical tradition of the Ashkenazi Jews of Central and Eastern Europe. The essential elements of the tradition include dance tunes, ritual melodies, and virtuosic improvisations played for l ...

music. The words mean "scissors" / "little scissors" respectively. Therefore sometimes it is called the scissors dance or little scissors dance. The sher is a

set dance A country dance is any of a very large number of social dances of a type that originated in the British Isles; it is the repeated execution of a predefined sequence of figures, carefully designed to fit a fixed length of music, performed by a g ...

in 4/4 march-like tempo. The set is made up of four couples in a square formation, similar to a

quadrille The quadrille is a dance that was fashionable in late 18th- and 19th-century Europe and its colonies. The quadrille consists of a chain of four to six '' contredanses''. Latterly the quadrille was frequently danced to a medley of opera melodie ...

square dance A square dance is a dance for four couples, or eight dancers in total, arranged in a square, with one couple on each side, facing the middle of the square. Square dances contain elements from numerous traditional dances and were first documente ...

formation. There are many figures used, such as couples advancing, retiring, changing places, couples visiting, circling, threading the needle, etc. The "sher" figure involves two opposite men advancing towards each other and then crossing past each other turning as they pass. The name of the dance may come from the sher figure that is thought to imitate the cutting action of scissors.

Michael Alpert Michael Alpert (born 1954, Los Angeles, California) is a klezmer musician and Yiddish singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, scholar and educator who has been called a key figure in the klezmer revitalization, beginning in the 1970s. He has ...

of the klezmer band

Brave Old World Brave Old World is an American and German klezmer band. It formed in 1989. Members hail from the US and Germany. ''The Washington Post'' called Brave Old World "the revival's first supergroup. Every player is a virtuoso.” In 1992, the group ...

has written the following description of the dance: "The sher (also called sherele) is one of the most popular and widespread East European Jewish figure dances. Dating from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it is similar to the American square dance, the Russian ''kadril'' uadrilleand other urban and rural figure dances originating in northern and central Europe of the past 150 years. Calling for individual, couple and group participation, the sher functions as one of the richest venues for both social interaction and individual expression in the East European Jewish dance repertoire." (from "Sher #1 (Pessl's Sher)," Unpublished article provided in support of a presentation made by Michael Alpert in Kradow, 1994.)

References

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External links

video: Yiddish Klezmer Dancing: Sher
Yiddish culture Klezmer Jewish dance