News from PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
Office of Communications
Stanhope Hall
Princeton, New Jersey 08544-5264
Telephone 609-258-3601; Fax 609-258-1301For immediate release: April 1, 2001
Contact: Marilyn Marks (609) 258-5748, mmarks@princeton.edu
Dance by Princeton choreographer opens Holocaust conference
Princeton, N.J. -- An internationally known children's dance troupe will open a conference on the Holocaust April 1 with a powerful dance created by Ze'eva Cohen, the acclaimed choreographer and director of Princeton University's dance program.
The dance, "I Never Saw Another Butterfly," will be performed by the Tennessee Children's Dance Ensemble to open the three-day Holocaust Conference 2001 at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. Cohen noted that she struggled to make the piece strong enough to portray the horrors of the Holocaust yet appropriate for young dancers to perform.
"My challenge was, what can children do that is not devastating for them?" Cohen said. "How can you explain to children that one group of people decided to take another group of people and make them extinct?'"
Cohen choreographed the dance to Swiss composer Ernest Bloch's "Concerto Grosso No. 1" and a clarinet and piano piece by Frank London of the Klezmatics. In three parts, the dance portrays first resistance, then devastation, then renewed resistance.
The name of the dance, "I Never Saw Another Butterfly," is the title of a poem by a child prisoner of the Terezin concentration camp. (The poem appears in a book of the same name that brings together writings and drawings created by young camp prisoners. Fifteen thousand children under 15 passed through the Terezin camp, and fewer than 100 survived.)
Cohen recently returned from Johannesburg, South Africa, where she and Aleta Hayes, a lecturer in Princeton's Program in Theater and Dance and the African-American Studies Program, performed in the FNB Vita Dance Umbrella, a contemporary dance festival. Together, they performed Cohen's 1996 duet "Negotiations," which interprets the Biblical story of Sarah, Abraham's wife; and Hagar, Sarah's maid. Unable to bear a child, Sarah gives Hagar to Abraham as a mistress. When Sarah later has a son in her old age, she convinces Abraham to drive Hagar and Hagar's son into the desert.
"That (story) is where it all starts," Cohen, who was born in Israel, said of the divide between the conflict between Jews and Arabs in the Middle East. "One boy goes one way. One boy goes another." Cohen noted that the dance also had special resonance in post-apartheid South Africa.
Cohen first gained notice as a dancer with Anna Sokolow's New York-based modern-dance troupe in the 1960s. She went on to found her own dance company and has been teaching at Princeton University since 1969.
/pr/news/01/q2/0401-dance.htm