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October, 2007 - Australian Jewish News Australian Jewish News online
Arts (OCTOBER 15 2007)
It’s a war zone, baby
Dancer Aviva Sheb’a.
Melbourne-born vocal-dance artist Aviva Sheb’a performed for troops in Vietnam, suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and later a spinal injury. She takes off her dancing shoes and talks to LEXI LANDSMAN about her strength to turn tragedy into personal triumph.
AVIVA Sheb’a will never forget arriving in Siagon, Vietnam, nearly four decades ago. She recalls seeing the rows of military planes painted camouflage, the swarms of men wearing green and carrying guns.
She remembers the smell of the aviation fumes, and seeing malnourished children with no legs holding chooks upside down, while the Vietnamese “white mice” watched her studiously.
This was the welcome Sheb’a, then 17, received in 1970, when she arrived in Vietnam as a dancer to perform for the troops.
It was the atmosphere that would characterise her three-month stay and would leave her with indelible memories that still make her voice quiver 37 years later.
It would be the place where her nightmares played out and would continue to traumatise her for 26 years in the form of undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
“From the time I arrived, everything was unsettling. I was in very real danger, often,” Sheb’a, 55, recalls. “My agent there turned out to be a gunrunner and, far from providing any form of protection, he was a very great danger to me.”
And Sheb’a, who had never been away from her family before, was unsettled further when she met her dancing and musical companions, who turned out to be a rhythm and blues band – a style of music completely unsuited to her training as a flamenco and jazz dancer.
But Sheb’a explains that it was the soldiers chanting, “Get your gear off” during performances that had the worst affect on her. “As a 17-year-old from a Yiddishe home with over-protective parents, going into a war zone filled with men, who didn’t get to see women and certainly didn’t get handed the gentleman handbook, was tough. I think that had an even worse affect on me.”
But, apart from the derogatory taunts of the soldiers, Sheb’a can recall vividly the many confronting experiences she endured: seeing babies and children born with deformities having her agent make advances on the night of her arrival in Saigon witnessing the self-immolation of a Buddhist monk putting on false eyelashes while perched on amplifiers on the back of a truck with battle action at the side of the road and facing a machine-gun brandished by a Viet Cong in the jungle.
But one experience stands out. On the eve of her 18th birthday, Sheb’a and the dancers were based in Da Nang, a town on the central coast of Vietnam.
“My bedroom villa faced an interrogation centre,” she explains. “Having someone shoving a gun in my face on my 18th birthday – there is no comfort zone with that.”
At this point, Sheb’a pauses – her voice a thin string – and asks if she can return to the story later. She never does.
Instead Sheb’a explains that she was quickly instilled with a line that has long echoed at the back of her mind, “It’s a war zone, baby – improvise.”
It’s the one phrase that has stuck in her mind, and has now formed the backbone of her upcoming performance that will see her tell her story on the stage as part of the inaugural season of Short, Sweet & Dance festival in Newtown, Sydney.
Her work Shebada was selected as one of 20 from hundreds of entries to feature in the two-week dance festival. For Sheb’a, the performance will provide an opportunity to finally quash the silence and share her story.
Sheb’a was born in Melbourne in 1952, one year after her parents had moved to Australia from England. From a young age, Sheb’a began to suffer from asthma attacks.
When physiotherapy and swimming lessons failed, Sheb’a became sicker and had to increase her medication. As a last resort, her mother took her to dance training as an alternative therapy to assist with her breathing and she quickly found her passion for dance.
“I was a darling of the Melbourne dance scene from the age of 15”, she explains, which is why her return to Australia in 1970 from Vietnam proved to be a whole new challenge.
Sheb’a was eager to leave her traumatic memories behind and go back to her old life – as the fast-rising star of the Melbourne arts scene. But instead of being warmly welcomed and comforted, Sheb’a was hit with a “smouldering silence”.
Nobody believed her stories, she explains – no-one wanted to.
“That had a more detrimental affect on me, which magnified the effects of everything else that had happened,” Sheb’a explains. “As with any trauma, you need to be able to talk about it and you need to be believed. I’d start to talk about seeing the children’s deformities and no-one believed me. Disbelief became a way of shutting me up, which did me a lot of damage.”
And, to add to that, Sheb’a says that people looked at her with the misconception that all dancers were prostitutes and so she began to feel further and further isolated.
But her struggle wasn’t to end there. Shortly after Sheb’a returned to Melbourne, she began to wake at night in sweats, having nightmares she’d jump when a door slammed and was perpetually nervous.
It was then that Sheb’a began venting her frustration and fear in the only way she could – through dance.
“Because of the forced silence, I had to find another way of expressing what was going on inside me. Being a flamenco dancer and a trained singer, I had an outlet, but it wasn’t enough, so I started combining all aspects of dance and song.”
And so Sheb’a set out to reach the vocal range of a Jewish singer that had inspired her.
“I heard the record by Yma Sumac – which is Amy Camus backwards. I immediately thought she was amazing, so I started using dance techniques I knew, and singing techniques to explore how far I could go with my voice.”
Sheb’a began using dance as a springboard to push her voice further, but in 1974, Sheb’a suffered a back injury and was forced to make the choice to either spend the rest of her life in bed or have the lumber region of her body pinned with a steel rod to enable her to sit in a wheelchair.
Instead, Sheb’a went to see a naturopath and osteopath and, within four months, was back on her feet. She re-entered the studio as a guest teacher for the Australian Dance Theatre and became even more determined to dance. The injury also led her to develop a system of teaching dance injury-free through incorporating healing work into the dance movement.
In 1977, she moved to Amsterdam and was paid by the Dutch Government to do street performances.
“I was one of the ‘crazy artists’ who went around Amsterdam doing spontaneous performances. I used to go to all to the jazz festivals. I had fantastic experiences.”
It was there that Sheb’a first coined the term “vocal dance”, a dance tradition that has been followed worldwide.
“All that came about because I went through all these horrible experiences and had no way of expressing them. At the time, people just thought I was weird. I knew I wasn’t mad – eccentric, yes.”
But it was only in 1996 that Sheb’a discovered she suffered from PTSD. It was the diagnosis that put an end to 26 years of suffering in silence.
“Things started to come back, things I’d been repressing for years. I realised I was perfectly normal, I had just been through abnormal experiences and dealt with them in a perfectly normal way,” she explains. “When you’re traumatised, you deal in whatever form is available to you. Even now, 37 years later, when a door bangs, my heart races.”
Her years of silence, repression, and confusion have led Sheb’a to now proudly tell her story in the way she knows best – through dance, song and storytelling.
“Shebada,” she explains, “is a combination of Sheb’a, my story, and dance.”
Her son Leslie Marsh will direct the performance and will perform on percussion, while Sheb’a will use castanets.
Sheb’a, who went back to Vietnam a few months ago for the first time after 37 years, says the performance is almost “like coming full circle”.
Sheb’a says she loves the rush of being on stage and is looking forward to her performance next week.
“It’s the only place, and the only way, I can truly be myself, express myself and not get locked up for it, and bring people pleasure and, with a bit of luck now and then I even get a quid,” she jokes.
But it is Sheb’a’s optimism and her contagious laugh, despite the trauma she experienced, that continues to inspire.
“I want the audience to take away the message that whatever you go through in life doesn’t have to break you. You can emerge from those experiences in triumph, with a complete and utter lust for life, which is what I have. I’ve never wanted to be on the planet more than I do now.” |
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