She lived for thirteen years after tests confirmed ovarian cancer, which she intuited long before that. She opened her sealed orders early, knew she was meant to dance, which she did until two days before she died on April 6, 2007.
Last night, two hundred members of Dorothy Hershkowitz's family celebrated her life. Sweet nibbles to welcome guests and then the curtain.
A forty-minute film that Dorothy narrates, a dance biography, with Dorothy looking to the filmmaker, Lynn Bikofsky, and talking to us. Dance has been her "best friend," she says (at her funeral last April, the cantor recalled her saying that dance was her "conversation with God"). When things have been difficult, which they often were (we remember), she goes to her studio or at least "the studio of my mind." Dance is where she works out life, realizes emotion, travels through space. We see clips of her as a very young dancer, and, remarkably, pieces of her major early works, Kaddish, which she choreographed and performed shortly after her father's death (I made seafood lasagna for the cast party), and Monday Morning Quarterback, inspired by an incident where she had to step over a drunk in a subway turnstile. She is still dancing at the end of the film: she had to repeat a take 30 times, 30, when she performs in the halls, not the auditorium, of Dana Farber Cancer Institute, because people keep walking into frame, the background narration a lab technician saying "some people enjoy this test, find it relaxing," as Dorothy throws her body, just a few months before her death, from wall to wall with the knocks of the MRI. And then her teaching one of her last classes, frail, close to the end, her arms floating like no others, and the camera rests on her smile, her very beautiful smile.
People speak, beginning with the cantor, Lorel Zar-Kessler, and then many others. Poems, anecdotes, quotes from letters, a cello concert, cards, and emails Dorothy wrote, Dorothy-aware of death coming soon, her son, Alexander Bohn, recalling that she danced when she put away groceries, her students, her best friend in junior high, her cousin, all recalling a Dorothy the others recognized, and the brave tall man who said Dorothy was his icon of hope after his wife's ovarian cancer diagnosis because D had already lived seven years, (and, as it turned out, did live four years more after his wife died). Surely, as her husband, Dave Evans, has said, her incredibly strong body, all those years of movement, extended her life.
And then they danced, 15 of her students, in a piece choreographed by Joanie Block to "Smile."
Dave said the last words. Gratitude to all, composed and dignified, and very lovingly he tells of two things Dorothy said, the first a few moments after they met: "She poured out her love, meaning Alexander and Jonathan, her sons;" and her last, to the effect of: "No one should go hungry - there is no reason for that."
And then we all sang "You gotta have heart," words on the jump page here.
Repeating what I wrote when she died: Dance on, Dorothy.
A nice article in the Newton, Mass, newspaper where Dorothy lived.
Heart (from Damn Yankees--no comment, ed.)
You've gotta have heart
All you really need is heart
When the odds are sayin' you'll never win
That's when the grin should start
You've gotta have hope
Mustn't sit around and mope
Nothin's half as bad as it may appear
Wait'll next year and hope
When your luck is battin' zero
Get your chin up off the floor
Mister you can be a hero
You can open any door, there's nothin' to it but to do it
You've gotta have heart
Miles 'n miles n' miles of heart
Oh, it's fine to be a genius of course
But keep that old horse
Before the cart
First you've gotta have
First you've gotta have
First you've gotta have heart
