DANCE

I started taking dance classes when I was 9 years old.  At the Park Dance Studio in Brownsville, Brooklyn.  I studied mostly ballet, and a little bit of tap.  When I was 10,  I was in the Studio's Recital, which was held at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. A very prestigious concert hall.  I was the star of the show, with two solos. One was a toe-tap routine, and one was a ballet solo which featured 8 fouete turns - those are the difficult turns with one foot always in the air, whipping around, while the other foot moves from en pointe (on the toe) and down. My dentist, who attended the concert, suggested I change my name to Hasia (my Yiddish name was Chasia Gila) Melandova and that I would be a star. 

My teacher at Park Dance told my mother to take me to a more advanced ballet school and suggested Fokine's Studio in Carnegie Hall.  I studied there from the age of 11 to 13.  When I was 13, Mr. Fokine told my mother my hips and thighs were getting too big for professional ballet. And he suggested I study modern dance.  So I started studying with  Alwin Nikolais at the Henry St. Settlement and with Irving Burton and Betty Osgood at the New Dance Group. Eventually I got a scholarship at Martha Graham's Studio, and started ballet classes with Karel Schook. 

In the meantime I was doing a lot of Israeli dance, performing at a variety of different occasions and venues, both with the dance group of Hashomer Hatzair, the Zionist organization in which I was a member, and with  my first dance partner, Mark Dranov. 

When I was 16 years old, Mark introduced me to Fred Berk, the pre-eminent Israeli Folk Dance teacher, choreographer and maven whose base was the 92nd St. "Y" in New York.  And Fred created the dance team of Gila & Dov.  Fred had changed the name of my friend Bernard Liebhaber to Dov Alton, for professional reasons. Needless to say Bernard, still my good friend, changed it back to his real name when he stopped dancing.  And Fred was and always will be remembered as my mentor.