Through dance, story, performance, and song, three presenters elaborated the uses of art to educate against hate during the multimedia performance “Art of Survival: Confronting Hate.” The performance took place in the Memorial Chapel on Tuesday, March 2, before an audience of about twenty-five students and professors.
Six departments– African American Studies, religion, dance, theater, history, and the University Chaplains– co-sponsored the event, which was conceived and orchestrated by Vera Schwarcz, Professor of East Asian Studies and history.
The presentation began with two dance solos performed by Ellen Gerdes ’05. Gerdes initially choreographed the pieces as part of a research project for History and Poetry, a seminar taught by Schwarcz last semester. In the class, students studied “poetry that deals with the unsayable,” according to Schwarcz.
Schwarcz invited Gerdes, a dance and psychology double major, to perform at the presentation.
“I knew that [Gerdes’ choreography] was stunning and needed to be seen in a broader context,” she said.
Gerdes’ first solo was accompanied by sparse wind-chime music, and she ended the piece by sustaining a disquieting, contorted body position that inspired discomfort in the audience. In her second piece, as Gerdes danced she recited a poem by Edith Brück, a Holocaust survivor, poet, and author. The poem, “Pretty Soon,” treated the subject of forgetfulness of the Holocaust in modern-day Germany.
Through her solos, Gerdes hoped to provide “a representation of the trauma [of hate],” she said.
Gerdes said she sees a strong relationship between dance as an art form and the subject matter she addressed.
“[W]ith dance, there’s often an effort to control dancers and to suppress different dance forms during times of trauma because the body represents things… that people don’t want to be represented,” she said
Schwarcz said she felt that Gerdes’ choreography provided a stark, and therefore important, perspective on the world today.
“We are living in harder times… [and] need to deal with it frontally and in a very direct way,” she said. Schwarcz said that Gerdes’ choreography did so with aplomb.
Others in attendance said that they agreed with Schwarcz.
“Ellen’s dance is what stuck out most to me [in the presentation],” said Sara Covey ’05. “It was really beautiful… a great way to start the presentation and to get us to think about hate crimes. Watching her movement brought a physical aspect to the stories and history.”
Gerdes’ performance was followed by presentations by Eve Nussbaum Soumerai, a Hartford-area diversity educator, and Rochelle Holder, a musician and music teacher in Hartford.
Soumerai spoke at length about her personal experience with hate and hate crimes. A survivor of the Holocaust and the attacks that took place on Kristallnacht, Soumerai was sent from her home city of Berlin to England on a Kindertransport at the age of thirteen.
Soumerai was told that she would be reunited with her family after a short while, but when she returned to Germany to work at a preschool for “bombed-out children” several years later, she found that her parents and siblings had all been killed.
Soumerai went on to describe the history of her involvement in hate-crimes education, and the development of her unique method of teaching. Her work at the German preschool, she said, allowed her to discover her passion for education and for children.
“I discovered within twenty-four hours what I loved to do,” Soumerai said. “I was happy.”
In the United States, Soumerai has devoted her life to preventing hate crime through the education of children. The most recent phase of her work has been the development of “tributes” based on the lives of “people of courage” such as Nelson Mandela, Golda Meir, Langston Hughes, and Roman Vishniac.
The tributes take the form of read-aloud scripts combining stories from the lives of the subjects with Soumerai’s own experiences. Stylistically, the tributes resemble a combination of Greek theater, with the presence of a chorus, and Passover Seder-style sequential readings.
Soumerai also described her work with college- and high school-aged students to develop these tributes, and to help younger children perform them. She sought to bring the same energy and good spirits that she employs to educate young people to her presentation in the Chapel.
“I don’t just want this to be a lecture, I want this to be an organic, living thing,” Soumerai said, as she recruited audience members to read aloud from her script about Mandela.
The scripts have been performed at schools all over the Hartford area and at Hebrew schools, among other places. Soumerai does not copyright her tributes, so that they may be available to as many people as possible.
“Eve’s gift is to take her experience in the Holocaust and to use it to open doors for… people of all backgrounds,” Schwarcz said. “[Soumerai] is very unique and much talked about in the Hartford area as a diversity educator.”
The third section of the event followed the reading from the Mandela tribute, and was performed by Rochelle Holder. Holder has collaborated with Soumerai for many years and brings a musical component to the tributes. Before speaking, she sang a slow, mournful a cappella rendition of the spiritual “Motherless Child.”
Holder, who is African-American, spoke of her own first experience of hate, describing the deep racism she encountered in a small Texas town as a teenager. She then discussed her involvement in Soumerai’s work, and the boundary-bridging nature of what Soumerai teaches.
“Eve has given her life to trying to make different people of all races, of all ages… come together,” Holder said.
Holder and Soumerai have organized performances of the tributes at the West Hartford elementary school where Holder teaches music. According to Holder, the students enjoyed learning about Martin Luther King, Jr. with Soumerai for a variety of reasons.
“Some of my kids said, ‘I’ve never talked to a white person before, Mrs. Holder!” she said. Working with Soumerai has allowed the students to learn important lessons about history, and has exposed them to new parts of the world around them, she added.
In closing the presentation, Holder addressed Wesleyan students directly.
“We have good people in this world of ours… it’s not all hate and indifference,” she said. “You have to believe that you can make a difference with your degree. In your community service, you might want to try Eve’s tributes.”
Soumerai and Holder have asked that any Wesleyan students interested in volunteering to help create or teach tributes contact Holder via e-mail, at shelleymusic925@aol.com (write “Wesleyan University” in the subject line).
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