About
What is Klezmer Aerobics?
Klezmer Aerobics is a touring cultural performance that is best described as
a family-friendly interactive dance/storytelling workout where “the 1880s meets the 1980s.”
The show’s creator, Rabbi Daniel Brenner, plays an aerobics instructor and leads an audience participation workout as he tells the original story SHVITZ! about Levi and the Old Badchen – a coming-of-age tale about a dancer and his apprentice in a Polish shtetl. The audience learns the traditional dances of the Old Badchen and the dances that Levi learns and creates when he runs off to Warsaw. The show – which has toured to JCCs, synagogues, schools, retirement communities, conferences, and art festivals – is a one-hour joyride packed with Jewish cultural history and delightful klezmer music.
Klezmer Aerobics has been featured in the New York Times, NYC – The Official Guide, Art Nerd NY, Tablet Magazine, Heeb Magazine, and The Yiddish Daily Forward.
About Daniel
Daniel Brenner started performing in 1987 with the late comic legend Chris Farley (at the Ark Improvisational Theater) and has been involved in the arts ever since. In rabbinical school, he created the one-man-show Faster, Rabbi, Drill! Drill!, won an All Out Arts New York playwriting award (2000), and wrote a series of chassidic folktale/plays for Philadelphia’s Theatre Ariel. Since then, he had a play produced by New York’s Vital Theater and spawned a handful of purim shpiels. He performs regularly with the band Midnight Nosh. Daniel lives with his beloved, Lisa, and their three children – Noam, Jonah, and Adira – in Montclair, New Jersey.
Special thank you: Master dance instructor Steven Lee Weintraub taught Daniel many of the moves that he is using in the choreography of the Old Badchen.
PRESS
NYC GO: The Official Guide to New York
THE YIDDISH DAILY FORWARD (IN YIDDISH)
ON WISCONSIN (The University of Wisconsin Alumni Magazine)
Coming soon: 80s Klezmer Aerobics Workout Video– Available exclusively on VHS! Dust off the VCR and Shvitz! in the comfort of your own living room with the 80s Klezmer Aerobics workout video. For a preview of what the VHS will look like, click on the tape below…
