by Liat Benhabib

In a situation where words are inadequate and events are hard to convey, the human body and the language of dance may be employed to communicate emotions and narratives. A screening of two videodance works, Zummel (from the Yiddish: “Gathering,” 7 minutes, 1999 and Sarah (pictured below, 6 minutes, 1999), by the Toronto-based Kaeja d’Dance dance company, was the starting-point for an investigation of the videodance medium as a tool for perpetuating the memory of the Holocaust. Film scholar Maya Deren has referred to such efforts as “choreography for the camera.”

The artists, director and choreographer Allen Kaeja and his partner, dancer Karen Kaeja, were guests of Vdance—Israel’s first videodance festival, held at the Tel Aviv Cinemateque and the Yad Vashem Visual Center in May. Together with director Mark Adam they created seven videodance films that deal with the personal history of Allen Kaeja’s father, Morton Norris (Nossal), a Holocaust survivor from Kutno, Poland. Only in adulthood did Allen come to learn the story of his father, a butcher by trade who survived Auschwitz thanks to his placement in the camp kitchen. “The combination of stage and film works illustrates the need to highlight emotionally-charged imagery with music in order to awaken the interest of the viewer,” Karen Kaeja explains. “The dances captured on film can preserve the integrity of these two art forms and imbue them with an historical significance.” Allen adds: “There is an enormous responsibility and challenge in expressing Holocaust remembrance: to represent images of loss, betrayal, uncertainty, desperation, determination and necessity without becoming melodramatic or falling into recognized patterns of expression or clichés.”

The works screened at Yad Vashem initiate a discussion about the Holocaust through the use of images embedded in the collective memory, but re-processed in a new language: the language of dance and film. Art historian and cultural scholar Dr. Gideon Ofrat discussed the films and their importance for the work of Yad Vashem: “What is Yad Vashem’s mission? To document, to remember, to educate of course, but also to mourn through symbols. A monument is a metaphor. But the greatness of a metaphor lies in its openness to the viewer’s interpretation. Kaeja d’Dance’s Zummel can be taken as a reflection of the human condition. Zummel’s context is the Holocaust, but at the same time it bears great metaphorical power, as art that transcends its context, thereby moving into the existential domain.”

Yad Vashem Directorate Chairman Avner Shalev reviewed the change that took place at the end of the 20th century in Holocaust representation, historical research and video/visual documentation: “Documentation of the atrocities at Bergen-Belsen began immediately after the camp’s liberation; the American miniseries Holocaust, Spielberg’s Schindler’s List—these all exemplify the great influence the visual medium has had on efforts to document the Holocaust and perpetuate its memory. Today we are at a crossroads, from which nothing appears certain: how will the Holocaust be remembered in another 20 to 50 years? Will it continue to live within us, as part of the raw material out of which our personal and collective identity is formed? Monumental historical narratives and visual clichés cannot, by themselves, shape consciousness. In the postmodern era, it is art that has the power to connect people to meaningful personal experiences that enable us to cope with the Holocaust and its memory.”

The author is Director of Yad Vashem’s Visual Center.

The program was prepared with the assistance of Vdance Festival Director Avi Feldman, and Visual Center employee Mimi Ash.
 

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