E-MAIL PRINT MOST E-MAILED

XL Cover Story: 'Light: The Holocaust & Humanity Project'

Stephen Mills' new ballet is more than a dance about the Holocaust; it's a journey toward tolerance.

By Jeanne Claire Van Ryzin | Portrait by Sung Park
March 31, 2005


Stephen Mills

Where to start?

How to create a ballet -- a thing of extraordinary human beauty -- about a chapter of human history so horrific, so vast and so violent as to be almost incomprehensible?

How to evoke the Holocaust in traditional stage movement -- something virtually no dance artists have tried to accomplish?

That was the challenge Ballet Austin artistic director Stephen Mills set for himself almost two years ago. Or the way he explains it, it was the challenge others set out for him.

"I never in a million years set out to do a ballet on the Holocaust," he says. "But this is one of those inexplicable instances where you didn't know you need to do something, but then the forces of the universe put you in a place to learn an important lesson and be a conduit of what you've learned."

Mills has spent much of the past year learning things. Last spring he spent a week studying in a special program at the Holocaust Museum Houston. He traveled to Eastern Europe and visited more than a half dozen Holocaust sites including concentration camps. He traveled to Israel and talked to his peers in the Israeli dance community. And he talked to about a dozen Holocaust survivors in Austin, Houston, New York, Europe and Israel.

The result is "Light: The Holocaust & Humanity Project," which opens Friday and runs through Sunday at Bass Concert Hall. The 75-minute one-act ballet, set to the music of contemporary composers Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Arvo P�rt and others, loosely follows the story of one Holocaust survivor.

"Looking back on the past few years, I can now see how this project fits," he says. "I'm a real fatalist. The intolerance and hatred that cropped up after 9/11 horrified me. And it's still a reality, and it's still something nobody wants to talk about. So I began to ask myself, what are the ethical responsibilities of an artist?"

But could a ballet, a delicate art of the body, portray the horrors of the Holocaust?

"You could never sum up the experience of the Holocaust," Mills explains. "But everyone has a body. Everyone knows what it is to be afraid, to be hungry, to be in pain and to be humiliated. Certainly not to the degree that the Holocaust victims and survivors did, but everyone knows what those feelings feel like. It seems logical to use the body as a means of expressing this story."

Mills stresses that his production will be metaphoric, not realistic. It follows the story of one Holocaust survivor, but will concentrate on states of mind, not historical locations or actions. Award-winning designer Christopher McCollum has conceived screens as the primary scenery, with associative images -- including filmed dance -- projected on the screens. Costumes will evoke the period of the 1930s and '40s, without attempting historical accuracy.

"You won't see Nazis or emblems from that period," Mills says. "We are trying to make it an experience that did happen then, but could happen -- is happening -- today."

The ever-modest Mills is quick to point out that he didn't arrive at the initial idea on his own. It was during a conversation about two years ago with Mary Lee Webeck, an education professor at the University of Texas who oversees the Warren Fellowships, a weeklong program for teachers-to-be at the Holocaust Museum Houston. Webeck strongly advised the choreographer that yes, he needed to create a ballet, he needed to use the body as a means to tell people about the Holocaust.

'LIGHT: THE HOLOCAUST & HUMANITY PROJECT'
When: 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday.
Where: Bass Concert Hall, University of Texas campus, 23rd Street and Robert Dedman Drive
How much: $17-$61
Info: 469-SHOW, www.balletaustin.org.
Pre-performance lectures: 6:45 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 12:45 p.m. Sunday.
Post-performance discussions moderated by representatives of the Austin Anti-Defamation League: 9:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 3:30 p.m. Sunday.
Lectures and discussions are free with a ticket to the performance.

ELIE WIESEL
When: 8 p.m. Thursday night
Where: Bass Concert Hall, University of Texas campus, 23rd Street and Robert Dedman Drive
How much: free, but tickets must be obtained in advance
Info: 476-2163

'THE CREATIVE PROCESS: LIGHT'
When: 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. Mondays-Thursdays, 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. Fridays, 12:30 to 6 p.m. Saturdays, 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sundays
Where: Dell Jewish Community Campus, 7300 Hart Lane
How much: free
Info: 735-8076

"Whatever creative danger of making a dance about this topic was not nearly as great as the danger of not doing it," Webeck says.

Mills, however, felt he needed to ask permission before he could start. But from whom?

Principally one group: Holocaust survivors. "I felt like as long as the survivor community felt it was right, then it was all right for me to do it," he says. "My gravest concern is that I would hurt a survivor."

The answer he received? Of course, he must do it, he must continue to tell the story. And one of the Holocaust survivors who gave Mills the encouragement to do so, was Naomi Warren of Houston.

A long road to 'Light'

Born in Poland in 1920 to a prosperous, educated, close-knit Jewish family, Warren, by her own account, enjoyed a comfortable life until anti-Semitism proliferated after Hitler came to power in neighboring Germany in 1935. After the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, Jews were forced into ghettos and concentration camps. Miraculously, for a while Warren and her family managed to avoid the worst of the catastrophes. She even managed to go to college and get married. Then in January 1943, she and her family and her husband were rounded up and sent to Auschwitz. It was the first of three camps Warren endured.

She was her family's sole survivor.

A tall, striking woman who looks at least a decade younger than her 84 years, Warren shares her story readily these days. On the occasion of her 80th birthday, her children established the Warren Fellowship at the Holocaust Museum Houston, which each year funds a week of study for about 20 education undergraduate majors from around the state. Students talk with survivors and scholars and learn curricular tools for teaching, not just the history of the Holocaust, but also topics such as tolerance and coexistence.

Mills was a Warren Fellow last year, the first of what museum officials hope might be more artists participating in the program. Since meeting Warren in March 2004, Mills has spent considerable time talking with her. In January, Warren traveled to Austin to talk with Ballet Austin dancers and recalled a very specific moment during her time at the camps.

Forced into grueling labor outside, Warren faced inevitable sickness, exposure and death. Until, that is, she was directed to a sordid, but safer, task: sorting the belongings and clothes prisoners were forced to give up. It was grisly way to be reminded of the sheer volume of people subjected to so much cruelty and death, but at least Warren knew she would be inside and if she was, she knew had a better chance of surviving.

"When my name was called, I knew that I had to go outside and line up," she says in a lilting accent. "And all these guards were watching us, but my legs, they would not move, I just couldn't get them to move. And I thought 'I'll never make it,' and yet I had the feeling that now maybe I won't be cold all the time or in so much fear all the time if I could just get my legs to move.

"Suddenly, there were two friends on each side of me and they just lifted me up underneath my arms and then my legs were walking. And I knew then, at that moment, that I was going to get through this."

Warren's older sister and an uncle had already immigrated to the United States before the war, and when Warren was liberated from the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen she headed to Houston to join them. She met and married another Holocaust survivor, Martin Warren, raised three children and took over her husband's successful import business after he died.

For Warren, Mills' ballet is a necessity.

"The main reason for hate and evil is ignorance," she says. "If people would just learn about their differences ..."

More than a dance


Photo by Laura Skelding/AA-S Naomi Warren is one of the inspirations for 'Light.' Stephen Mills sought the approval of Holocaust survivors like Warren before embarking on this journey. Warren, who is watching a rehearsal of the ballet, is the only member of her immediate family to survive. She immigrated to Houston and set up a foundation to teach educators about the Holocaust.

Years ago, Mills himself danced in one of the few ballets about the Holocaust presented in the United States, "Ruins" by the late dance icon Anna Sokolov. He was 23 and he felt privileged just to be in a piece the elderly Sokolov directed. But he learned the choreography and danced without having any conversation about the events "Ruins" represented. "The historical context and origins of Sokolov's work completely bypassed me," he says.

That's why Mills and others at Ballet Austin were from the beginning adamant that whatever new ballet was created, it would be surrounded by multiple programs. "This project wouldn't be respectful -- it wouldn't be successful -- if we didn't try to create a communitywide discussion," he says.

Hence, "Light" officially launched in late January when a group of civic, religious and community leaders signed a pledge committing to work with area citizens to not remain bystanders to acts of bigotry and hate. A lecture series culminates tonight when Nobel Peace Prize-winner Elie Wiesel takes the stage at Bass Concert Hall for a free lecture. On April 19, Emmy Award-winner Linda Ellerbee will host a televised town hall meeting about understanding at KLRU.

In February, Webeck and her colleagues held a conference for high-school and middle-school teachers to learn skills in teaching the Holocaust. Until April 19, photographs from Mills and Webeck's trip to European Holocaust sites are on display at the Dell Jewish Community Center.

And through this weekend, "The Coexistence Exhibition" -- 45 large-scale posters, each a visual exploration of the art of getting along -- lines the path at Auditorium Shores. Ballet Austin officials raised $75,000 to bring the exhibit, which was created by the Museum on the Seam for Dialogue, Understanding and Coexistence in Jerusalem, to town for a month.

"I couldn't just create this ballet in a vacuum," says Mills. "It didn't make sense to do it if we weren't going to talk about hate and ignorance and intolerance. The issues are just too relevant today to be ignored."

As for the future of the ballet itself, Mills would of course love to see it taken up by other companies and performed elsewhere -- but not unless there could be a series of educational programs presented with it.

"I'm not going to change the world with this ballet," Mills says. "And art doesn't change the world. But art can change people -- it can give them an insight into something else. The most rewarding thing for me would be if this ballet would make people realize that political apathy -- or apathy of any kind -- is unacceptable. And then perhaps they would be inspired to be involved. Inspiring others to act would be the most important thing you could possibly hope for as an artist."

jvanryzin@statesman.com; 445-3699