Part of 92Y’s special programming on the culture of Terezn, this performance presents works that resonate with the holocaust experience. Carolyn Dorfman shows Cat’s Cradle, which incorporates music and poetry written by Ilse Weber, a prisoner and nurse in the children’s ward at Terezn. The dance centers on three women knitting and working with yarn, spinning tales of their pasts and their family while also creating a closely-knit bond. Aviva Geismar shows excerpts from two dances, Yelena (2000) and The Unbidden and Unhinged (2001) whose style is similar to the expressionistic German dance of the 1920s and ‘30s. Geismar’s own father lost most of his family at Auschwitz. Laura Shapiro shows excerpts from her Letter from Poland, a dance she created after finding a letter, written in1937 and in Yiddish, to her grandmother, then living in Brooklyn. Shapiro’s dance addresses the layers of trauma and grace that we all carry in our bodies. Ze’eva Cohen presents a solo made for her by Anna Sokolow – Dreaming. The dance embraces both moods of tenderness and longing and moments of intense anger and pain. This revival is the first time the dance has been performed since 1975; Cohen is staging it and the dancer will be Mariah Steele. And the SOKOLOW DANCE THEATER performs the last section of Sokolow’s moving Scenes from the Music of Charles Ives (1971). The Ensemble’s director, Jim May, describes it as a “prayer in movement and one of the most deeply powerful choreographic works ever created in the expressionistic idiom.”
