Balancing Act: Fiddler’s Bottle Dance and the Transformation of “Tradition”

The Bottle Dance in Fiddler on the Roof was inspired by what the director/choreographer Jerome Robbins called “field research” at Orthodox Jewish weddings. Reshaped and expanded by Robbins’s masterful showbiz sensibility, it became a show-stopping number — and, thus transformed, filtered back out of the musical into Jewish celebrations to confer “tradition.”