Moving Memories: Representations of the Holocaust in Contemporary Dance

FAIN: FEL-288943-23

Rebecca Leigh Rossen
University of Texas at Austin (Austin, TX 78712-0100)

Research and writing leading to a book about representations of the Holocaust in contemporary dance, from 1961 to the present, through consideration of works by Jewish and non-Jewish choreographers working in eight countries.

Moving Memories will examine dance as a critical site for Holocaust representation in over two dozen works created between 1961 and the present by Jewish and non-Jewish choreographers working in the US, as well as in Austria, Belarus, Canada, Germany, Hungary, Israel, and Poland. The Holocaust has been a major focus of film, theater, literature, and visual art; there have been numerous books that address Holocaust representation in these media. Moving Memories will be the first monograph on Holocaust representation in dance. I argue that dance has served as a fertile platform for making an embodied intervention into an immensely complex history of trauma and loss, intolerance and bigotry. The book illustrates how representations of the Holocaust in dance set history and testimony into motion; nudge memorials out of statis; activate individual and collective memories; and generate affective and effective responses in audiences.