Dance Residency with Dege Feder
On Feb. 11–13, Ethiopian-Israeli multimedia artist Dege Feder came for a Jewish arts residency. Feder is the artistic director of Beta Dance Company in Haifa, Israel. Her work fuses traditional and contemporary Ethiopian and Western lyrics, instruments, musical scales, dancing, and visual aesthetics. Her awards include the Israeli Ministry of Culture Prize for Young Dance Creators and the Yitzhak Navon Prize. She teaches dance to empower women and girls in the Ethiopian-Israeli community. Feder’s visit was part of the Multi-ethnic Cultural Reproductions in the Middle East (MCRME) project, a collaboration between the Melton Center, Middle East Studies Center, and Center for Ethics and Human Values. Feder’s residency was additionally supported by the Department of Dance and School of Music, with artistic support from the Israeli Ministry of Culture and Sport.
Many people across campus experienced Feder’s work. In a lecture with her artistic partner and husband Tal Feder about their Ethio-fusion music group Lela, Feder discussed writing Mesnko, a song using Ethiopian scales and Amharic language transposed onto Western instruments. In a lecture about her choreography, Feder explained composing with eskesta dancing; she discussed her dance Mharene (Have Mercy, 2025), which engaged Ethiopian modes of grief for the Israel-Hamas War. Feder taught a mahol etiopi akhshavi (Ethiopian contemporary dance) class and dialogued with Assistant Professor of Dance Momar Ndiaye about dance in African diasporic circulation, moderated by Melton Center Director Hannah Kosstrin. Feder also discussed her work with the MCRME faculty research group.
Off campus at Columbus Jewish Day School (CJDS), Feder shared her migration story from Ethiopia to Israel, taught students her dance movements, and met with faculty.
The residency’s showcase was Feder’s solo B’Ima Sheli (In/With My Mother, 2022), an homage to her mother, who cared for Feder’s nine siblings after her father died. In the soundscore, Feder talks with her mother in Amharic and Hebrew while her mother reflects on her life. During the dance, Feder traverses a length of white muslin toward an armchair holding her mother’s mekenet (Ethiopian shawl), her movements punctuated by torso isolations from eskesta vocabulary. At the end, when Feder hoods herself with the mekenet, sinks into the chair, and sings an Ethiopian folk song about asking for care of one’s children, she becomes one with her mother’s experience. In the post-show question-and-answer session moderated by Professor Kosstrin, audience members learned about Feder’s work and about Feder and Kosstrin’s years-long artistic-research dialogue.