Recurring Dreams: Restaging Holocaust Performance as Commemoration

• In Event: Embodied Acts: Dance and its Impact on Jewish Memories, Peoplehood, and Institutions

Abstract

This presentation focuses on the role of memory in stagings and restagings of three Holocaust performances over time—Anna Sokolow’s DREAMS (1961), Meredith Monk’s QUARRY (1976), and Kristen Smiarowski’s THE KEY GAME PROJECT (2008–14). Despite generational differences, all three artists are Jewish American women who engaged the Holocaust from a distance, interweaving dreamlike imagery and blurring time and space to explore memory and signify the impossibility of assimilating traumatic histories. Throughout, I ask how do different historical contexts impact the meanings and reception of Holocaust performance over time? How do the embodied and archival processes of restaging dance and performance engage participants in deep enactments of personal and collective memory? For example, meanings for Sokolow’s DREAMS, an abstract series of disturbing vignettes, shifted over the course of the 1960s depending on when or where it was presented; but over the next thirty years, it became a paradigmatic meditation on the Holocaust passed down from body to body as legacy. Monk’s QUARRY, which centers on a young American girl who experiences the war and totalitarianism as a waking nightmare, was performed frequently its first couple of years, and then not again until 1985, when it opened the day before Reagan’s controversial visit to Bitburg. In 2008, Smiarowski premiered a solo inspired by Holocaust survivor Ida Fink’s 1983 story “The Key Game.” While the solo is powerful on its own, Smiarowski developed the work into a multimedia trilogy through which she and her collaborators utilized their memories of the previous iteration to generate new choreographies that served, in Smiarowski’s words, as a “memorial to the one that preceded it.” Drawing upon theories from Holocaust studies and methods and theories from dance and performance studies, as well as an abundance of archival materials and interviews, I argue that these works set archives and memories into motion, serving as vital acts of commemoration that demonstrate the continued resonance of the Holocaust and its aftereffects.

Author

• Rebecca Rossen, University of Texas at Austin