Monthly Archives: May 2014

[from The Guardian]

Medals pinned on chests suddenly resemble blood-splattered gunshot wounds in Dmitry Krymov’s vivid and visceral play.

There are times when Dmitry Krymov‘s production, which draws parallels between the fate of European Jewry with that of artists living under the oppressive Soviet regime, seems less like theatre and more like alchemy. Buckets of paint thrown against a white cardboard wall mysteriously come alive. Holes are cut in the cardboard and the shapeless blobs are transformed into human shapes: the lost Jews of Europe. The wall bursts open and the entire theatre is filled with a blizzard of newsprint, every tiny torn scrap fluttering in the wind an unbearably poignant reminder of all those lost in the Holocaust.

There is so much loss in this visually stunning two and a half hours. A procession of ghosts are raised – victims of fascism and communism. History always walks with a jackboot here: the sinister steps of an SS officer in the first half, Genealogy, are echoed in the second half, Shostakovich. The cardboard wall of Part One is glimpsed under a piano in Part Two as the composer tries desperately to escape his political collusion as the state turns on its artists. Medals pinned on chests suddenly resemble blood-splattered gunshot wounds; Shostakovich’s own medal pierces his back, turning him into a wind-up clockwork toy, dancing to the tune of Mother Russia, represented by a monstrous outsized puppet with hard eyes and trigger-ready fingers.

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[from Women News Network]

United Nations, New York, U.S., NORTH AMERICA: From Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 until the 1945 liberation, music played an integral role in daily life under Nazism, as illustrated at a United Nations event which used the medium of the arts to communicate fragments of the lives of victims of the Holocaust.

“It give us a deep, nuanced and complicated sense of who these human beings were who experienced these terrible things and how they responded,” said scholar Shirli Gilbert about music that survived the Holocaust.

“And helps us to see them not as a faceless mass of six million people but as individuals who came from different places, from different backgrounds, and understood what was happening in different ways.”

Working in partnership with Clive Marks, who spent most of his life studying European history and music, and who was awarded the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II in 2005 for his philanthropic efforts, Ms. Gilbert created an on-line resource for music associated with and played during the Holocaust. The website is part of the Organis  ation for Rehabilitation through Training (World ORT).

“In his second symphony, Arthur Honegger writes about the streets of Paris during the German occupation the streets on a wet Sunday afternoon, and you actually feel that you can see the greyness of it all,” Mr. Marks said in an interview alongside Ms. Gilbert ahead of the special event, Learning about the Holocaust through the Arts. Organized by the Holocaust and the UN Outreach Programme, the event was held in partnership with the Permanent Mission of Israel to the United Nations and the World Jewish Congress.

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