90 dances, many of which are considered Israeli classics. In 1944, Gurit Kadman organized a First Fruits dance pageant to celebrate the Jewish holiday of Shavuot at kibbutz Dalia. That same year, she organized the first folk dance festival at the kibbutz, which became a regular event. First held in 1988, the Karmiel Dance Festival is the largest celebration of dance in Israel, featuring three or four days and nights of dancing. The festival features 5,000 or more dancers and a quarter of a million spectators in the capital of Galilee. Begun as an Israeli folk dance event, the festivities now include performances, workshops, and open dance sessions for a variety of dance forms and nationalities. Like many types of European folk dance and country-western line dancing in the U.S., each Israeli folk dance has a fixed choreography (sequence of steps) and is danced to a specific piece of music. The yotzer, or choreographer, selects a piece of music, usually from one of the genres of Israeli music, and arranges a set of steps to fit with that music. The formation of the dance might be a circle, couples, trios, or short lines, as well as a group/line formation as in country-western line dancing. The movements themselves are varied, in many cases drawing on older Jewish and non-Jewish folk dance traditions. Major folk influences include the Hora (a dance form common to many Eastern and Southeastern European cultures), the Tza’ad Temani, Atari, the dance tradition of the Chasidim (adherents of the Eastern European Jewish religious movement), and other Eastern European folk dance traditions. There are many dabke-type Israeli folk dances; the dabke is originally an Arabic folk dance form of the Middle East. Some dances show primarily a single influence. For example, the dances Hora Chadera (1972) and Eretz, Eretz (1974) hearken back to the Hasidic dance tradition. Some dances combine elements from multiple folk dance traditions, or from folk and non-folk sources. The dance Ma Navu (1956) combines folk dance influences (e.g., the Yemenite step) with movements from ballet. Some Israeli dances—this is more common in the newer dances—have few if any folk elements. Prime examples are Yo Ya and Zodiak, which are done in disco format (i.e., with all dancers facing in the same direction) and have movements almost entirely from jazz dance; purists might consider such dances stylistically outside the limits of folk dance. In spite of