“Light/The Holocaust and Humanity Project” has produced a flurry of artistic activity that will have involved no less than 15 events over its month-long time span when comes to an end next week. But “Light” will be heating up over the next few days, culminating in Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre’s production of Stephen Mills’ ballet, which has served as the inspiration for the local community.
In coordination with the Pittsburgh Holocaust Museum, the PBT dancers saw a Holocaust film, “Genocide,” listened to survivors and went to the national museum in Washington D.C. during August in preparation for “Light,” but have only had four weeks to learn the intense fabric of Mills’ choreography. In contrast, Mills’ dancers at Ballet Austin spent six months acquainting themselves with the historical material before ever attempting a step. He sometimes had to move from his director role into that of “friend and confidant.”
The Austin director himself was equally committed to “Light,” because the ballet was born out of Mills’ reaction to the Sept. 11 bombing of New York’s World Trade Center in 2001. His 18-month journey went on to include visits to seven concentration camps, talks with 25 survivors and tours of three Holocaust museums.
Mills ultimately learned that the Holocaust, in all of its immensity, was an unwieldy topic to cover. “When you have history, you understand that war is hell,” he explains. “When you have someone you know, it becomes a very personal work.” So he built the focus of “Light” around a real survivor that he met named Naomi Warren.
“Light” is not a specific retelling of her story. Instead it is a general illustration of the Jewish experience filtered through her. The ballet is divided into seven sections: Adam and Eve, Family, Targets Behind Doors, Isolation and Degradation, Boxcar, Ashes and Hush. Assorted screens and props (like the Tree of Life above) enhance what is primarily abstract, but highly-charged emotional movement.
PBT is the first company that has been granted permission to restage the ballet. “I’ve known Terry [Orr] and Harris [Ferris] for a long time,” Mills says. “They convinced me that they were going to take care of it.” He also specified community and personal involvement, something that PBT fulfilled in partnering with the local organizations.
As Mills revisits the ballet, he realizes that what Warren and the other survivors “gave me in my quest was very profound.” He also learned that “the emotional content that I was imbued with originally hasn’t diminished at all.”
He credits the PBT dancers. “The second I stepped into the studio, we were already on a level playing field,” Mills acknowledges. “They were already approaching the subject with the kind of reverence that we required. They’ve been full of questions. They listened to every story that I wanted to tell with interest, even thought they were sometimes hard and I think it will imbue their performances with the kind of emotion that is going to be necessary.”
That being said, it wasn’t easy during rehearsal. Mills quietly used phrases to get beyond the technique in a ballet that doesn’t concern itself with piques and pirouettes, but a deep emotional center. “You’re out of your mind with fear.” “You see people being shot because they didn’t understand the language.” “You’re just a specimen.”
But Christopher Budzynski says that Mills doesn’t want the audience to pity the dancers. “The survivors were forced to do extraordinary things to survive this treatment,” he says. “Yes, the dancers are undergoing a rollercoaster of emotion. But everybody is a part of life; they just can’t look the other way.”
Mills would ask for a certain porte bras that was wispy and above the head. “He was referring to the trees that they planted at one of the concentration camps,” notes Budzynski. Or the dancers were asked to huddle and look up, trying to shelter their faces with their hands. “We were looking at the nozzles in a gas chamber.”
Even as the emotions and the choreography tumble over and around each other, Mills wants the dancers to focus on the power of the human spirit. “He doesn’t want the audience to pity us,” echoes Julia Erickson, who will try to submerge herself in the role of Warren during the production. “He wants them to see our strength.”
Erickson explains the “Ashes” section, where eight dancers walk around in a circle, with breakaway solos where “people fall off as they perish…and eventually, I’m the only person left.”
Despite that heavy responsibility, she’s willing to make the journey through “Light.” “It’s about the power of the human spirit,” Erickson says. “Just the concept that life is precious, that humans are resilient, just to have kindness in the world – everyone can do their part.”
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