Rebecca Rossen – författare

How does dance represent the Holocaust? How can it archive, memorialize, and activate the past, while coalescing artists, performers, and audiences in collective acts of witnessing? How might performances at memorial sites unearth suppressed histories or engage viewers in ways that traditional monument and memorials do not? Moving Memories looks to answer these questions by exploring Holocaust representation in dance. Drawing upon the concept of moving memories, author Rebecca Rossen demonstrates how dance sets Holocaust remembrance into motion; generates embodied acts of commemoration and transmission that counter forgetting and erasure; involves makers, performers, viewers (and even survivors) in affective, shared experiences; and nudges memorials out of stasis to disrupt entrenched ideologies and nationalisms. Transnational in scope, Moving Memories considers dance and performance produced in Argentina, Austria, Canada, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Poland, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Rossen richly illustrates kinesthetic, sonic, and visual iconography in over two dozen works created by Jewish and non-Jewish choreographers between 1960 and the present that span a variety of genres including concert dance, dance theatre, dance on film, opera, site-specific performance, and competition dance. Demonstrating a distinct ability to vivify dance on the page, she shows how choreographers have, across decades and formats, consistently grappled with the Holocaust and its continuing resonance through choreographic and bodily expression.

How does dance represent the Holocaust? How can it archive, memorialize, and activate the past, while coalescing artists, performers, and audiences in collective acts of witnessing? How might performances at memorial sites unearth suppressed histories or engage viewers in ways that traditional monument and memorials do not? Moving Memories looks to answer these questions by exploring Holocaust representation in dance. Drawing upon the concept of moving memories, author Rebecca Rossen demonstrates how dance sets Holocaust remembrance into motion; generates embodied acts of commemoration and transmission that counter forgetting and erasure; involves makers, performers, viewers (and even survivors) in affective, shared experiences; and nudges memorials out of stasis to disrupt entrenched ideologies and nationalisms. Transnational in scope, Moving Memories considers dance and performance produced in Argentina, Austria, Canada, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Poland, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Rossen richly illustrates kinesthetic, sonic, and visual iconography in over two dozen works created by Jewish and non-Jewish choreographers between 1960 and the present that span a variety of genres including concert dance, dance theatre, dance on film, opera, site-specific performance, and competition dance. Demonstrating a distinct ability to vivify dance on the page, she shows how choreographers have, across decades and formats, consistently grappled with the Holocaust and its continuing resonance through choreographic and bodily expression.

While Jews are commonly referred to as the "people of the book," American Jewish choreographers have consistently turned to dance as a means to articulate personal and collective identities; tangle with stereotypes; advance social and political agendas; and imagine new possibilities for themselves as individuals, artists, and Jews. Dancing Jewish delineates this rich history, demonstrating that Jewish choreographers have not only been vital contributors to American modern and postmodern dance, but that they have also played a critical and unacknowledged role in the history of Jews in the United States. By examining the role dance has played in the struggle between Jewish identification and integration into American life, the book moves across disciplinary boundaries to show how cultural identity, nationality, ethnicity, and gender are formed and performed through the body and its motions. A dancer and choreographer, as well as an historian, Rebecca Rossen offers evocative analyses of dances while asserting the importance of embodied methodologies to academic research. Featuring over fifty images, a companion website, and key works from 1930 to 2005 by a wide range of artists-including David Dorfman, Dan Froot, David Gordon, Hadassah, Margaret Jenkins, Pauline Koner, Dvora Lapson, Liz Lerman, Sophie Maslow, Anna Sokolow, and Benjamin Zemach-Dancing Jewish offers a comprehensive framework for interpreting performance and establishes dance as a crucial site in which American Jews have grappled with cultural belonging, personal and collective histories, and the values that bind and pull them apart.

While Jews are commonly referred to as the "people of the book," American Jewish choreographers have consistently turned to dance as a means to articulate personal and collective identities; tangle with stereotypes; advance social and political agendas; and imagine new possibilities for themselves as individuals, artists, and Jews. Dancing Jewish delineates this rich history, demonstrating that Jewish choreographers have not only been vital contributors to American modern and postmodern dance, but that they have also played a critical and unacknowledged role in the history of Jews in the United States. By examining the role dance has played in the struggle between Jewish identification and integration into American life, the book moves across disciplinary boundaries to show how cultural identity, nationality, ethnicity, and gender are formed and performed through the body and its motions. A dancer and choreographer, as well as an historian, Rebecca Rossen offers evocative analyses of dances while asserting the importance of embodied methodologies to academic research. Featuring over fifty images, a companion website, and key works from 1930 to 2005 by a wide range of artists-including David Dorfman, Dan Froot, David Gordon, Hadassah, Margaret Jenkins, Pauline Koner, Dvora Lapson, Liz Lerman, Sophie Maslow, Anna Sokolow, and Benjamin Zemach-Dancing Jewish offers a comprehensive framework for interpreting performance and establishes dance as a crucial site in which American Jews have grappled with cultural belonging, personal and collective histories, and the values that bind and pull them apart.