Light

As someone who spent every waking moment not devoted to school, eating, or sleeping at the dance studio while growing up, dance is a form of media that is incredibly personal and moving for me. Dancers are able to conjure grace beauty from just about anything. Even people unfamiliar with the art can be moved by certain performances. With dance there is often very little more than the human body and it's movement to music. There is no orated script, no editing, and it is always live. For this reason, though both forms of media involve movement, I think that dance can often times be more compelling than film or television. A prime example of this is the piece dubbed "The Holocaust Ballet." Choreographed and conceptualized by Stephen Mills of the Ballet Austin, Light/ The Holocaust and Humanity Project is a performance without parallels.

With an abstract, minimalist approach, this contemporary ballet has helped serve as a window into the haunting atrocities of the past and their lingering impact still in existence today. "I realized it would be impossible to do a ballet about Holocaust (itself) because it was such a monumentally horrific event that to assume you could distill it, or summarize it, would be offensive," Mills said in an interview with Trib Total Media. Instead he drew from the interviews he had with 20 Holocaust survivors, commonalities that they all shared - a life before, during, and after the horrific events they faced at the camps. He divided the 90 minute ballet into three sections with no intermission so as to not interrupt the flow and integration of each part. Mills used no swastikas. No military influence. No scenery. He wanted the story not to be about the events of Holocaust itself, but about its impact and influence. Naomi Warren, a Polish survivor whose life Mills based the piece on said that it was an emotional experience for her: “I could see my life. I don’t know how many people felt it was my life, but I knew it was my life. Every Holocaust survivor watching it could feel the drama and the happiness when they were liberated.”

The Reviews

"While art is said to mimic life, it is a bitter irony that often life’s greatest atrocities can inspire some of art’s greatest works. Such is the case with the Holocaust." - Dance Magazine

"There are countless novels... films... painting and sculptures... Words and pictures can easily tell the vile story. But can one depict a saga of degradation, brutality and murder through the art of ballet?" - The Jewish Chronicle

"A foray into a darker artistic territory led to the creation of Stephen Mills' Light/The Holocaust & Humanity Project, a timeless work about genocide. Performed by Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre this month, the ballet is augmented with educational events aimed at raising human-rights awareness." - Pittsburgh Magazine

While I have not been fortunate enough to see the 90 minute piece in it's entirety, the clips I have watched have left a lasting impression on me. It reminds me of the numbers performed by the members of one particular studio whom my studio competed against -- they would leave the stage and everyone would feel a bit uncomfortable. This was not because they were not good dancers, but because their dances always told a story... A story that was never very pretty and rarely had a happy ending. It was a really jarring experience - three minutes of gripping the arms of your auditorium chair, furrowing your eyebrows, and not knowing whether to laugh or to cry. These were not emotions that anyone in attendance was used to feeling in the midst of a large group senior division -- three minutes between the twenty-fifth jazz piece of the day to "Hot, Hot, Hot" and the debut performance of the new studio on the competition scene. I think it is great that such events are being brought to Light in such an innovative way on both a grandious scale though performance by laudible dance companies, as well as though the humbling pieces on competition stages across the country.