Mother Tongue by Ori Lenkinski
I recently received a rejection letter from a festival I deeply admire. The letter was written with care, and still, I felt myself slip into familiar rejection territory. If only my work were more like this person’s or that person’s, it would have stood a better chance, I chided myself.
Self-doubt arrives easily for me, in low moments and high ones alike. There have been many points in my creative life when I’ve looked around at colleagues making inspiring work and wished my own artistic efforts could produce something similar. It can feel like being in a foreign country where everyone else speaks a language I almost, but not quite, understand.
When I was pregnant with my first child, I attended a lecture about raising bilingual children. The speaker argued for communicating with children in one’s mother tongue. She spoke about moments when a quick command would be needed, to stop a child from running into traffic or from jumping off a high step, or moments when we would want to express something nearly beyond language. In those situations, she said, we wouldn’t have time to shuffle through vocabulary. The words would need to come fast, unimpeded. Love, she argued, needs to be communicated freely, and language can sometimes become a barrier rather than a bridge.
It was during that lecture that I decided that although I had chosen to live in Israel, I would speak to my child in English. We adopted the One Parent One Language model, in which I speak to our girls in English and my husband in Hebrew. It plays out in the most mundane moments, packing lunches, negotiating shoes, calling them in from the playground, each of us holding our linguistic line.
That decision often created tension, in our extended family and even with strangers in the park. People were worried that speaking a foreign language would alienate my daughter from Israeli society, causing her to be an ‘other’ and not like everyone else. A second language is an asset but it comes with a price. For the first five years of her life, she preferred English and it sometimes seemed those onlookers were right. But once she entered the school system, Hebrew took over, cordoning English off to our home. Thirteen years later, when people hear us speaking to one another in English, they assume that she doesn’t understand Hebrew, a fact that continually frustrates her. After all, between us, she is the native speaker, the local, the ‘sabra’, born and raised in Tel Aviv.
Looking at my creative work now, I recognize a similar mechanism at play. There is no room, in creation either, to search for the “right” language. Creation, as I understand it, is an act of love. And when we try to express love, we must use the channels that flow most freely. I may love the sound of Chinese or Italian, but I do not speak those languages with any fluency whatsoever. I can admire the work of a painter while recognizing that paint is not my medium.
This distinction becomes harder within one’s own field. And still, each choreographer speaks a distinct language. We often call this “movement language,” but it extends beyond steps to every choice a work contains: dancers, music, costumes, composition, props, design. Together, these elements form a syntax, a way of speaking.
And while in life I have only one mother, in dance I have had many mothers and fathers. These are the artists whose work shaped my understanding of what the stage is and what a performative act can hold. The ones who influenced how I “speak” today were those who allowed me to walk through their creative worlds, absorbing fragments of vocabulary along the way.
I see my girls doing the same thing with language. The One Parent One Language model, over time, evolved into a mutant third language. We have noticed that guests who do not speak both Hebrew and English are often lost in the jumble of words aloft in our home. “Where did you put the pincetta?”, “pass my kalmar”, “can you make shoko?” These sentences make perfect sense to us, even if they are a grammatical and linguistic mess.
Maybe this is what both parenting and making work require: trusting the language that comes most naturally, even when it isn’t the one being rewarded. Trusting it even when it meets silence, and choosing to speak anyway.
Originally published in Hebrew in the Parental Choreography column on Haaretz.com.
Ori Lenkinski is a Tel Aviv-based dancer, actress, choreographer and journalist. Her work, be it on stage, the Internet or on paper, is devoted to exploring the connection between words and movement.
As a dancer, Ori has worked with independent choreographers in the USA, Europe and Israel. Ori’s writing has been published in Dance Magazine, The Huffington Post, The Jerusalem Post, Haaretz and others. She is the founder and editor of www.creativewriting.me, an online platform to response to performance. Her choreographic works include The Painting, Portrait #2, The Suit, Meet Me in the Market, Help Desk, Birth Preparation Course, a dance piece, Jackie Pink and Black, Escape Room as well as the dance films Carriage and Expecting. Ori’s works have been presented throughout Israel, Asia, North America and Europe.