Baruch Agadati

Baruch Agadati (ברוך אגדתי, also Baruch Kaushansky-Agadati; January 8, 1895 – January 18, 1976) was a Russian Empire-born Israeli classical ballet dancer, choreographer, painter, and film producer and director.

Biography
Baruch Kaushansky (later Agadati) was born to a Jewish family in Bessarabia, and grew up in Odessa. He immigrated to the region of Palestine in the early 1900s. In Palestine, he was known for performing Jewish folk dances in an expressionist style, often in solo performances he called "concerts" in which he would portray different Shtetl characters. His bohemian stylings—one performance featured him openly urinating on the back wall of the stage—scandalized the middle class.

Agadati attended the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem from 1910 to 1914. When World War I started in 1914, he was in Russia visiting his parents and was unable to return to Palestine. He remained there and studied classical ballet, joining the dance troupe of the Odessa Opera and Ballet Theater. In 1919, he returned to Palestine. In 1920, he moved to the Neve Tzedek neighborhood in Tel Aviv. Until his death is 1976, he worked in theatre, painted, danced and choreographed Israeli folkdance, produced the famous Purim "Ad DeLo Yada" Carnival balls. He is buried in Trumpeldor Cemetery in Tel Aviv.

Dance and film career
Kaushansky returned to Russia during the First World War and took the name Agadati. After Agadati's return to Palestine in 1919, he began to give solo dance recitals and became one of the pioneers of cinema in Israel. Agadati purchased cinematographer Yaakov Ben Dov's film archives in 1934, when Ben Dov retired from filmmaking. He and his brother Yitzhak used it to start the AGA Newsreel. He directed the early Zionist film entitled This is the Land (1935), the first Hebrew speaking film, and a new version in 1963, called "Tomorrow's Yesterday.".

In the 1920s and 1930s, he was known for organizing Adloyada Tel Aviv Purim balls.

Agadati's costume for "Yihie" ("Yemenite Ecstasy"), a solo show that also toured Europe and South America, was designed by Natalia Goncharova of Ballets Russes.

In 1924, Agadati choreographed a dance based on the Romanian Hora that became known as "Hora Agadati". It was performed by the Ohel Workers' Theatre, which toured pioneer settlements in the Jezreel Valley. The dancers form a circle, holding hands and move counterclockwise following a six-beat step in a walk-walk-step-kick-step-kick pattern.

Education

 * 1910 Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem, with Boris Schatz
 * 1914-19 Dance and painting, Odessa
 * 1930 Painting, Florence

Teaching

 * Odessa, classical ballet, painting and music

Awards and recognition

 * 1976 Worthy Citizen of Tel Aviv Award, Municipality of Tel Aviv-Yafo

Gallery
Archival photographs of Baruch Agadati in costume, taken during the late 1920s. Photographer: Atelier Willinger, Vienna Collection of the Bat Sheva and Yitzhak Katz Archive, Information Center for Israeli Art, Israel Museum, Jerusalem