Margalit Oved, the lead artistic choreographer of Israel’s Inbal Dance Theatre and one of the most prominent figures in the establishment of Israeli dance, has died aged 92.
Oved’s story is a perfect reflection of the Inbal experience, whose dancers draw inspiration from their Yemenite backgrounds using biblical imagery. Once described as the epitome of a performance artist, she fused her talents as a musician and actress to bring her imagination to life through dance.
She grew up with Jewish parents in southern Yemen in 1934, the seventh of nine children; her father was a pearl merchant, her mother a midwife. She remembers happily dancing barefoot in the sand in her childhood. Later she would bring the waves of the desert sand, or riding a camel, to her dance techniques.
“When you step on hot desert sand, you jump. That became part of our dancing,” she said.
Her mother insisted on a good education, so the young Margalit attended a Catholic school, where she added English to her native Aramaic, Hebrew and Arabic. She told The Jerusalem Post in 1995 that her mother’s concept of God was “sincerity, compassion and honesty”.
During the Yemeni unrest she was airlifted to Israel in 1949 with her family under the Operation Magic Carpet scheme and founded Beit Lenoar, a cultural heritage organisation for children. The family settled in Kerem HaTeimanim, Tel Aviv.
In 1950, Oved joined Sara Levi-Tanai’s newly formed Inbal Dance Company, working over the next 15 years as its principal dancer and choreographer.
She created dances using the rhythms of traditional Yemen, Arabia, Africa, India and Spain. In 1955, she played a nurse looking after an American war-wounded tourist in the first Israeli-produced film, Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer. It was her second film. The previous year Oved, who studied with Jerome Robbins and Anna Sokolow, had made Every Mile a Stone. In 1957 the company went on a world tour.
Oved branched out on her own in 1965, moving to the US. She taught at the University of California’s dance department in Los Angeles and formed her own Margalit Dance Theatre. While there she also began to develop her solo repertoire, creating such magically named dances as Yemenite Wedding, The Dybbuk of Aden, the Birth of a Drum and Kingdom of Spirit. Others, such as A Donkey Stepped on a Flower, had more down-to-earth connotations.
Her inspirational Gestures of Sand was performed at the LA Dance Festival in 1972, a production that became the subject of a documentary film. The following year came Through the Gates of Aden, which was based on her early life.
In LA she met her future husband, Melvin Marshall, whom she would later describe as her “prince of the Bronx”. They had a son, Barak, and a daughter, Dikla. But the Inbal remained in her blood and her soul. She returned to Israel in 1994 but resigned from the group after a year, in protest at managerial failure in the band. She supported her son’s company Barak Marshall Dance Theatre and appeared as lead singer in his first choreographed works, including the award-winning Aunt Leah (1995) and Emma Goldman’s Wedding (1997). Last year Marshall became artistic director of Inbal, drawing on his mother’s movement language while introducing his own more philosophical, often Brechtian ideas.
Meanwhile, Oved’s work continued to explore biblical and mystical themes while embodying her values of honesty, simplicity, family life and human relationships. The Beginning evoked the burgeoning self-knowledge of Adam and Eve, while in David and Goliath she danced both roles, morphing traits of innocence with incipient triumphalism.
She used different parts of her body to build a diverse vocabulary, and described traditional Yemeni dance as “very straight, like the gazelle, influenced by Africa, Arabia, India and Spain.
“The expressions of the different cultures were so magnificent, the drumming, the ululations, the use of masks to transform into different animals, the way to use the hands and spine and face and feet.”
The hands, she said, were all about dimensions.
“You beg and eat with the hands. In the dance, how can you just leave them doing nothing? You stretch and work the hands, then you can see the beautiful lines of the arms.” Much as she was drawn to the Yemen of her childhood, her later work also absorbed her experiences as a mother of an American-born family. In her role as a choreographic teacher, she would seek out an exceptional dance student by picking up on their rhythm, their face, their sensitivity, their emotion.
“A dancer has to be prepared for everything,” she said. “In order to talk with your body there has to be precision, but not in a way that is dogmatic… it’s about extending the whole body so nothing stays lazy. Have you seen how an eagle’s legs shift when he goes to fly? If the legs don’t extend back, it won’t fly.”
But she insisted that she also learnt from her students. “I see their eyes and their faces as they are thinking and trying to know the movement… Their attention gives me so much confidence. Education is part of the human experience. It makes me a better person.”
Often photographed in brilliantly colourful Yemenite national dress, and adorned with dangling coins and jewellery, she stunned her audiences with the way she fused together her Yemenite childhood, her adolescent experience in Israel and the Los Angeles she grew up with.
In 1972, Dance Magazine praised the originality of her choreography and described her as a “radiant performer who moves with calculated economy yet conveys an impression of dancing with extravagant panache”.
Oved also wrote her own music, which was intensely percussive in character and redolent of the music she had grown up with in Aden. She has been described as thinking and moving in metaphors. She would refer to how a foot must reach the ground, or an arm lengthen across the body to envision the desert. She once held a masterclass at the Harvard Westlake School where she spoke-sang to resonate with a drum she kept playing.
Oved was described by Inbal’s former CEO, Eldad Gruppi, as the muse, voice and face of the company in its formative years. “She created an image of a dancer unlike any other. A rare combination of Yemenite nobility, tradition, strength and bold modernism.” According to Jane Calem Rosen, writing in The Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women, she left an indelible mark on 20th-century Jewish culture.
Oved received choreography awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Myrtle Wreath Award from Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organisation in 1973. She is survived by her family in America and Israel. Her husband, Melvin, predeceased her.
Margalit Oved: born 1934. Died February 5, 2026
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