As contemporary genocides and atrocities continue to ravage civilization, theater artists voices will not and do not remain silent.
Example:
Interview with Andi Potamkin
Feb 12, 2014
Survivors Still Active in Creating Witness Theater
Jan 12, 2014
The following links/articles describe projects taking place in 2014 that involve the participation of living survivors in the ongoing creation of Holocaust related theater. Survivor memories of events that they witnessed and lived are transformed by passionate artists supported by committed students into a unique type of drama.
Holocaust Stories Proves Therapeutic for Witness Theater >>
News From Beit Theresienstadt >>
(Please refer to pages 4-5)
Comments from an Israeli Director
Jan 10, 2014
My name is Avivit Shaked and I am an Israeli Theatre Director and group facilitator.
I’m working with groups of young pupils (in the 8th grade) and Holocaust Survivors. The name of the program is “Documentary Theatre for the Commemoration of the Holocaust in Israel”. In this program we are interacting young pupils with Holocaust survivors, so they can hear a firsthand testimony, as long as there are Holocaust Survivors left. These meetings are very touching. They enable a different kind of communication between generations. The meetings give the survivors—some for the first time in their lives—the opportunity to talk about what they have been through. For the pupils it is an experience that enables them to take responsibility and mature.
I got into this project as a 3rd generation of the Holocaust. I find it fascinating to work with older people, to hear testimony from a person that experienced an insane reality and one so difficult to understand or to accept. read more…
The Theatrical Representation of the Holocaust
Nov 18, 2013
by Juan Mayorga, Playwright
The image that many of us have of the Shoah is nurtured less from historians’ books than from artistic representations, some of which are offered by the theatre. This is not a new phenomenon. Many Athenians probably adopted the image of the Greeks’ victory against Xerxes presented by Aeschylus in “The Persians,” and many Spaniards of the 17th century likely accepted the image of the victory of the modern centralist state on the residual feudalist order offered by Lope de Vega in “Fuente Ovejuna.” Because its nature of bringing people together and, having therefore, a political character, theatre has been an especially apt medium to feed collective memories.
The theatre was more than likely the first medium used to record history. Before there was scripture or even speech, people used theatrics to share their experiences. Perhaps, the first man who saw fire mimicked his encounter with it to illustrate it to another man and he, in turn, to a third man, thus, at the same time, inventing theatre and history. In any case, no other medium presents the past in the present with the intensity of the theatre, such that individuals of another time are revived – reincarnated – by people here and now. If, in general, to use the terminology of Ortega y Gasset in his “The Idea of Theatre,” the actor disappears – he becomes transparent – so that the character can gain reality – visibility – such a transformation is basic to historical theatre in that the character created is not a product of the imagination but rather a real character from another time. The actor disappears in order to reveal a man who was and will be again during the play. read more…
“I am Bondi’s Brother” – Irving Roth
Nov 16, 2013
Holocaust Theater: Representation or Misrepresentation
Sep 16, 2013
(This is a transcript of a speech given by Arnold Mittelman to Association of Holocaust Organizations on 1/10/12.)
I wish to thank Bill Shulman, President of the Association of Holocaust Organizations, and member of the National Jewish Theater Foundation/Holocaust Theater Archive Advisory Board, for inviting me to make this presentation to you, his constituents, at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Facts are not the enemy of art, and art is not the enemy of facts. However, humankind often sees everything subjectively, even as we aspire to see the world objectively. Everything we see, touch, and feel is subject to individual interpretation. The late great Italian author Luigi Pirandello’s plays often examine how it is impossible to look at something truly objectively, since we are always looking at things subjectively through our own experience and understanding. And to a great extent, that is the power of theater: it has the ability to be seen individually and understood personally, defying all our collective attempts to view it objectively.
The aesthetic experience of the theatrical audience is to relate, not just to the live performance onstage, but to the reality and sense of each other’s presence. And therefore, although we are seeing the same performance together, we are never actually seeing the same collective performance because we all see the world differently. No wonder one person’s sense that a play is an accurate representation can be thought by another person to be a total misrepresentation. Such is Theater.
read more…
What the Survivor and Historian Know: Detente Between Those Who Lived the Shoah and Study It
Aug 20, 2013
by Dr. Michael Berenbaum, Director American Jewish University
Jeff Cohen’s The Soap Myth, as produced by the National Jewish Theater Foundation and directed by Arnold Mittleman, has brought to life on the New York stage the inherent tensions between Holocaust historians and Holocaust survivors over facts and interpretation of facts. Time and again, survivors speak of the Nazis’ making human fat into soap, while Holocaust historians say that, at best, there is insufficient evidence to support that claim.
When, during its creation, I was project director at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, I rejected the display of a cake of soap. So, too, did my colleagues at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and at Auschwitz and Majdanek in Poland. Rather than go into the minutiae of detail regarding the soap, however, it is worthwhile to consider the relationship between survivor testimony and historical fact.
Elie Wiesel, the preeminent survivor, set the bar impossibly high: “Only those who were there will ever know, and those who were there can never tell.” Survivors’ testimony was privileged. They alone could know. Nothing could be said by my generation, born after the war; what could we know?
Yet, over time, we have come to understand each other better and perhaps to listen to one another more respectfully.
read more…
All About Jewish Theatre
May 24, 2013
The NJTF Holocaust Theater International Initiative wishes to recognize the Israel based website ALL ABOUT JEWISH THEATRE, Moti Sandak editor, for the development of their Holocaust Theatre On Line Collection. This publicly accessible compilation of articles, reviews and theatre works can be found at: All About Jewish Theatre
The Aftermath of War: Second Generation Performance Art
Dec 16, 2012
Dr. Susan Jacobowitz
Queensborough Community College
The City University of New York
A rock drops into the center of a pond. Ripples spread. Make that a flaming comet crashing into a boiling tar pit. A tidal wave ensues. Consider the Holocaust as that first event. Call the pit “Europe.” (“In the Beginning Was Auschwitz” B7)
– Melvyn Julies Bukiet
Performance art is a particular subset of second generation creative work that is still emerging from the tidal wave. It combines or fuses the project of depicting and understanding the Holocaust experience with bringing second generation experience into perspective. Like other second generation work, it involves research, imagination, re-creation and often an actual pilgrimage back to sites of memory or significance in Europe. For performance artists such as Deb Filler, Naava Piatka and Lisa Kron, it means depicting or actually embodying the parent whose story is being told. The work can be revealing and confrontational. Since Kron and Filler are comediennes, their pieces are often quite humorous as well. These are works that utilize multiple media: text, song, photography, comedy, performance. There is a strong experiential component for both the creator and the audience. These one-person plays and shows advance our understanding of the consequences and complexities of genocide.
Sonia Pilcer, whose The Holocaust Kid has been adapted into a one-woman show, writes of her parents, “I was their first seed of life after so much death. A living monument to their survival, a shrine to their murdered mothers. But I am not a Holocaust survivor. All that I survived was my childhood and my parents’ fierce, anxious love” (4). Melvyn Jules Bukiet uses his father’s concentration camp tattoo as identification for his bank account and as his signature—he inscribes a copy of his book for Helmut Kohl using the number 108016. Bukiet writes:
It would be disingenuous for me to claim that those six digits were the first I knew. Presumably I could count, but the artless aniline blue of 108016 tattooed on my father’s forearm was an abiding sign of the past in our present. It was his alone and then, as much as such a thing can ever be, it became mine, and now it’s yours; we can share (B10).
Second generation performance art participates in this project of sharing. read more…
HTC Insights
Views, reference and research of interest.
Honoring Elie and Marion Wiesel for Their Plays
Elie Wiesel’s Plays as Kaddish: The Sacred Duty to Remember and Resist By Prof. Lori R. Weintrob Director, Wagner College Holocaust Center This article is an expanded version of remarks presented by author in conjunction with the National Jewish Theater Foundation...
NJTF HTII becomes part of UM MILLER CENTER
CLICK HERE to Download Press Release HOLOCAUST THEATER INTERNATIONAL INITIATIVE BECOMES PART OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI’S SUE AND LEONARD MILLER CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY JUDAIC STUDIES. Through research and educational programs, the Holocaust Theater International...
Theatrical Depictions of Survivor Stories
USC Shoah Foundation and National Jewish Theater Foundation Collaborate to Launch ‘This is What I’ve Scene,’ First Ever Theater-Related Activity To Be Provided to Students Worldwide Via IWitness Website Click Here to Download Press Release Los Angeles, Dec. 8,...