Post Memoriam: Dancing Narrative of World War II
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Date
2019-05
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The Ohio State University
Abstract
This project culminated in a 20 minute episodic, narrative work, with an overarching theme of the Second World War. This past summer I attended the World War II study tour through this history department. There, I gave myself onsite improvisation scores from which I source movement material for the work. I also made a dance film at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, which will be featured as the fourth section of the work and supported by Vergangenheitsbewältigung poetry for audio. The fifth and final section stands as a Holocaust memorial modeled after the aforementioned memorial in Germany. The rest of the episodes are sourced from both my, and my dancers’, family histories. I asked my dancers for their familial ties and cultural self-identifications with this historical time period. In this way, I am using my work as an alternative means of documenting and communicating historical education to my dancers and my audiences. The first section concerns the American experience in the war, using movement I created at Utah Beach, and being supported sonically by a primary source document written by my grandfather’s experiences at Utah Beach and narrated by my grandmother. The second section concerns the psychological implications of Nazism, exploring the many tactics of coercion both internally and externally. The movement is sourced from my score at the Topography of Terror in Berlin and is supported by a piece by Paul Hindemith, a music artist who strived for most of his career to find a successful place within the Third Reich. The third section is about the grey area that bystanders and rebels alike find themselves in, and how we as historians are to treat these people. Throughout this process I researched the many approaches to Holocaust and general historical memorialization through art, as well as tracing my own dance lineage back to the Ausdruckstanz tradition and its artists who largely complied with Nazism. I explored how the corporeal dance medium makes us both complicit and yet perfectly primed to analyze this complicated history.
Description
Third place for the 2019 Images of Research and Art Competition
Selected to present at the 2019 Research and Innovation Showcase
First place in "Redefining the Human Experience" at the Denman Research Forum
Selected to present at the 2019 Research and Innovation Showcase
First place in "Redefining the Human Experience" at the Denman Research Forum
Keywords
dance, gallery, international research, World War II