Tag: Holocaust

Burning Desire to Choreograph – A Dance of Resistance

JoAnne Tucker / / Current Events, Holocaust Repertory, Personal Life

For the past few months, I have found myself missing working with dancers the way I did for over 30 years with The Avodah Dance Ensemble.  At first my recent focus was on creating a work inspired by the labyrinth in my garden.  I haven’t abandoned the idea and still envision a piece that can be performed on the labyrinth and filmed.  It will also be developed into a performance piece for the stage.  But in the past few days another idea has been driving me, and that is what I want to focus on in this blog.

I am very glad to be living in Costa Rica rather than the United States right now. However, that doesn’t mean I am not VERY concerned with what is happening in the United States, and I do want to take some kind of action to support the growing call for change.  Surprisingly I am inspired by the writing of David Brooks in The New York Times.  Brooks was one of my husband’s favorite columnists.  Brooks is a moderate, centrist, and conservative unlike me.  I consider myself a liberal and strong Democrat.   Yet the past two articles that he wrote resonated with me.   For example, in an April 17th column he stated:

Trump’s behavior has aroused great moral indignation. It has aroused in people’s hearts a sense that something sacred is being trampled here — democracy, rule of law, intellectual freedom, compassion, pluralism and global exchange. These things are worth fighting for.  https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/17/opinion/trump-harvard-law-firms.html

Then in an April 24th column he wrote:

[W]e are the beneficiaries of a precious inheritance. Our ancestors bequeathed to us a judicial system, great universities, compassionate aid organizations, great companies and scientific genius. My mission statement would be: America is great, and we will fight for what has made America great. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/24/opinion/trump-administration-energy-strength-weakness.html

After reading the second column, the urge to use my talents to respond was triggered.  A dance of resistance.  And I have a clear vision of how it will begin.  There is a moment in the piece I created in 1976 called I Never Saw Another Butterfly, based on poems written by children in the Terezin concentration camp, where the dancers link arms and lunge forward moving strongly on the diagonal. That is how my new piece will begin.

Kezia Gleckman Hayman and Beth Millstein demonstrating linking the arms together in a rehearsal.
The Avodah Dance Ensemble performing I Never Saw Another Butterfly at a high school: the lunge with arms linked.

I Never Saw Another Butterfly was the first piece I choreographed for a Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony. It was soon joined by Kaddish, which is set to the opening eight minutes of Leonard Bernstein’s Kaddish Symphony.  Primo Levi’s poetry inspired a third piece, Shema, several years later.  These three pieces were an important part of Avodah’s repertory using dance to bring awareness to the Holocaust and were performed in settings such as a Catholic Boys School in Jersey City, an Interfaith Conference, and a Community College in Philadelphia, in addition to many schools, universities, synagogues and Jewish community centers.

My new piece would see dancers (maybe 20 or 30) coming from different directions of the stage and slowly linking arms in several lines building a strong force of energy to become a unison statement to lunge forward and continue to progress in unison with choreography yet to be designed.

In the past when I decided on a theme, one of my first steps was to research all I could find on the subject. A few days ago, I googled dances of resistance.  Wow did I get a lot of information.  I encourage interested readers to do the same and see how dance has for centuries been a tool to bring a community together and to make strong statements of resistance.

I was also curious to see if there were examples of linking arms together for resistance and change, and indeed there are.

One is an event that created a human chain connecting Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt to the Tennessee State Capitol, which took place April 18, 2023. The purpose was to support changes in gun laws to make public spaces safer.  https://news.vumc.org/2023/04/19/linking-arms-for-change-images-from-the-event/

A title of a book that was published in 2001 called Linked Arms: A Rural Community Resists Nuclear piqued my curiosity. The book describes how a rural group used civil disobedience to defy the nuclear industry and governmental authority, preventing the building of a nuclear dump in western New York.  While I don’t know if the group linked arms as part of the demonstrations, my hunch is they did, hence the title of the book.

On May 1, 2025, The New York Times reported that after a speech in Philadelphia by Bernie Sanders, “dozens of demonstrators locked arms and sat down at an intersection near a highway entrance for about 30 minutes before police began to make arrests.”

Artists have long been responding to injustice, political upheaval, and social causes with their talents.  This is an important time for all of us to be active.  I close with some recent words from Mikhail Baryshnikov’s International Dance Day Message (April 29, 2025):

It’s often said that dance can express the unspeakable. Joy, grief, and despair become visible; embodied expressions of our shared fragility. In this, dance can awaken empathy, inspire kindness, and spark a desire to heal rather than harm. Especially now—as hundreds of thousands endure war, navigate political upheaval, and rise in protest against injustice—honest reflection is vital. It’s a heavy burden to place on the body, on dance, on art. Yet art is still the best way to give form to the unspoken, and we can begin by asking ourselves: Where is my truth? How do I honor myself and my community? Whom do I answer to? Link to article.  

Dr. Edith Eva Eger’s The Choice: Embrace the Possible

JoAnne Tucker / / Book Review, Holocaust Repertory

While Facebook gets lots of criticism and has its drawbacks, one of its very positive things for me is connecting to the many dancers I’ve worked with from the time Avodah began in the early 70’s to the women who were part of the recent Healing Voices – Personal Stories  film Through the Door.  Lisa Watson, a member of Avodah in the 90’s, is a friend on Facebook and this past May 19th she posted about Dr. Edith Eva Eger (now 92) who wrote a book at age 90 about surviving the Holocaust.  The book is called The Choice: Embrace the Possible, and I thank you, Lisa, for bringing the book to my attention.

Recently I have tended to stay away from reading accounts of Holocaust survivors but this book held special interest for me because prior to her deportation to Auschwitz in 1944 at the age of 16, Eger had been training as a dancer and gymnast.  The post that Lisa shared on Facebook related to the fact that Dr. Eger was in the Netherlands to meet with the director, the actor and the ballerina who would be portraying her in a performance about the time that Dr. Mengele in Auschwitz asked her to dance for him.  There is a wonderful interview of her trip to the Netherlands which includes her watching a rehearsal and hugging the dancer who is portraying her.  The interview is a good account of her life and philosophy and I highly recommend it whether or not you plan on reading the book. https://dreditheger.com/2019/05/04/interview-with-eenvandaag-dutch-national-television/

I wonder, if I were still running Avodah, if I would choose to build a piece about Eger and the moment that she danced for Mengele, who had come into the barracks looking for a ballerina.  She found that the way she was able to dance for him was to close her eyes and pretend that she was at the Budapest opera house dancing Romeo and Juliet.  But it is not only that moment that I find gripping and would want to convey.  It is her overall philosophy and spirit, even in her 90’s, that I would want to capture (demonstrated by the fact that she ends her lectures with a high kick).

Among the many gems in the book is her recalling and giving examples over and over again of the inspirational words from her mother, spoken in the cattle car as they were being transported to Auschwitz. Her mother said to her that no one can take away from you what you think and feel inside.  The day they arrived her mother and father died but she and her sister survived.  Toward the end of the war, prisoners were marched to Austria.  She and her sister were found by a soldier on May 4, 1945. She was barely alive, sick and with a broken back.

We learn how she recovered, married and moved to the United States where she eventually studied Psychology, earning her Ph.D. and becoming an expert particularly with war trauma victims. 

She shares stories of some of her patients and how they help her work through her own challenges.  While physically free she shares the struggle to mentally free herself.  She relates this to her patients that are living in their own prisons, and so much of what she shares has relevancy to all of us about how we can live in a prison of our own making, choosing to be our own jailers.  A comment by her I noted, most likely when she was recently interviewed by Oprah, is to choose expression rather than depression.  It is what we keep secret and do not work through that causes our depression.  Here’s the link where you can watch the interview.

http://www.oprah.com/own-super-soul-sunday/dr-edith-eva-eger-the-choice

One of her mentors is Victor Frankel, another Holocaust survivor who wrote Man’s Search for Meaning.  She describes their friendship.

To conclude I want to share quotes from two sources. First, a review in The New York Times written in October 2017 ends with the reviewer’s comment, “I can’t imagine a more important message for modern times.  Eger’s book is a triumph and should be read by all who care about their inner freedom and the future of humanity.”  Second, the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Desmond Tutu said:  “The Choice is a gift to humanity. One of those rare and eternal stories that you don’t want to end and that leave you forever changed. Dr. Eger’s life reveals our capacity to transcend even the greatest of horrors and to use that suffering for the benefit of others. She has found true freedom and forgiveness and shows us how we can as well.”

I am so glad to have read Dr. Eger’s book, which then led me to watch her various interviews. What a wonderful role model she is for those of us looking for people in their 80’s and 90’s leading rich meaningful lives.


Dr Eger holding her book. Photo from her website

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Another Holocaust Piece, Based on the Writings of Primo Levi

JoAnne Tucker / / Holocaust Repertory, New York Company, Uncategorized

Two blogs ago, I wrote about creating the 8-minute piece Kaddish.  It soon became a regular in our repertory, performed in concerts, Holocaust memorial programs, and on the bema before the Kaddish prayer.  Over the next fifteen years we were often invited to participate in Holocaust memorial programs, particularly in November around the time of Kristallnacht (“Night of Broken Glass”; see June 14, 2019 blog for explanation) and in late April or early May for Yom HaShoah (Holocaust memorial day, based on the Jewish calendar).  It wasn’t until 1996 that I choreographed the next piece that became a part of our Holocaust repertory. 

As long as I can remember, it was important to me that pieces related to the Holocaust be part of the Avodah Dance Ensemble’s repertory.  At the age of 12 or 13 I saw the original production of The Diary of Anne Frank on Broadway with Susan Strasberg as Anne Frank and Joseph Schildkraut as Otto Frank. It was during my first trip to New York City with my parents, when we saw several Broadway shows, The Diary of Anne Frank being the only drama.  I remember the evening well.  We had seats in the first row and I was mesmerized by the play and the performances.  I experienced the power of how theater can teach and emotionally engage one in learning.  After that I regularly read and learned more about the Holocaust and as I developed as a choreographer it was a natural next step to create pieces like I Never Saw Another Butterfly and Kaddish. 

The idea for the new piece, Shema, inspired by Primo Levi’s writing, came from Rabbi Oren Postrel.  I hunch that Rabbi Larry Raphael (of blessed memory) probably introduced us, knowing that Oren had a very strong background as a dancer who had seriously studied ballet and performed in the Oakland Ballet. Oren shared Primo Levi’s writing with me and soon we were developing a piece based on it.  Primo Levi (1919–1987)  was an Italian Jewish chemist, writer and Holocaust survivor. Much of what we used in our piece Shemacame from his best-known work, If This Is A Man, about his time as a prisoner at Auschwitz.

Primo Levi (1950’s) from Wikipedia

The choreography was not only inspired by Primo Levi’s poetry but also by the Broadway play Bent, written by Martin Sherman. The play, which I saw in 1980, revolves around the persecution of gays in Nazi Germany. I found the second act particularly powerful with its stillness and senseless repetition as the two main characters move a pile of stones from one side of the stage to the other. When it came time to choreograph Shema I wanted to use some kind of repetition to hold the piece together. So throughout the whole piece the four dancers walk in a straight line back and forth across the stage in the back part of the performing area.  Each dancer steps out of the line to share their poem in words and movement and when done goes back into the line.  Jack Anderson in a review in The New York Times, May 31, 1997,  describes it well:

Shema effectively contrasted relentless pacing, representing concentration camp regimentation with sudden outburst, symbolizing the prisoners’ turbulent personal feelings.

From a video of the piece, April 15, 1996, performed by the dancers who helped to create it, in a Yom HaShoah Service at 
Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion
Dancers from l. to r. Kezia Gleckman Hayman, Elizabeth McPherson, Beth Millstein, and Carla Armstrong
Here’s the link to the video

As in the earlier Holocaust piece I Never Saw Another Butterfly, the dance is done in silence and to the voices of the dancers. 

As I was writing this blog I came across an editorial in The New York Times published on May 26th (2019).  It was written by the Editorial Board, which “represents the opinions of the board, its editor and the publisher.  It is separate from the newsroom and the Op-Ed section.” The editorial clearly states that anti- Semitism is sharply on the rise and gives statistics for the increase in Germany and France in particular and also points out that it is not only coming from the far right, but also from the Islamists and far left.  The authors mention the increase here in the United States, and end by saying: 

Speak up, now, when you glimpse evidence of Anti Semitism, particularly within your own ranks, or risk enabling the spread of this deadly virus.

It is with a deep sadness and concern I read this and realize the truth in what they are saying. I fear we are on the edge of a cliff right now and I echo that we all have a responsibility to speak up and not allow discrimination in any form.

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