“Ani Ma’amin,” meaning “I Believe” in Hebrew, is a folk song from Maimonides’ Thirteen Articles of Faith. It is the title of Shira Greenberg’s exploratory choreography on the impact of the Holocaust on American Jews, combining video testimony from three generations of Jews with choreography, music and text. The theme expanded from the war on the European Jewish community to the on-going war against intolerance and racism. Keshet’s five company members revealed an intense dramatic energy as they moved through this tightly designed dance with clean, strong technical skill. Savanna Brissey-Cohen, Erin Crawley-Woods, Marie Gorence, Lisa Nevada and Amber Peterson have become true professionals in this work.

The choreography progressed through seven sections, from Pre-war, The Holocaust, Post-war, three generations of testimonials, to a final testimony by writer Felicia Weingarten that expressed her search and belief in the human capacity for good. Each video text formed the basis for movement as the dancers developed and created variations on the original motifs based on gestures from religious life. Preparations for the Friday Sabbath meal included the fluttering hands of women in prayer at the lighting of the candle.

Sarah Elizabeth Bennett choreographed the opening Pre-war section to a smooth fusion of music by Antonio Vivaldi, Tommaso Albinoni, Salvatore Licitra and the Kronos Quartet. The dancers were young girls here, heads rolling from side to side as they moved into light, joyful arabesques, leaps over each others’ curved backs, and strong twists of torso, opening their arms in Egyptian stylized designs before rolling into quick somersaults. The motifs developed neatly into canon and fugue forms.

Movement became faster, more frantic, as the dance evolved into the Holocaust section. Wilfred Joseph’s Requiem used text of the Mourners’ Kaddish; the dancers moved down into the floor, falling or leaning backwards. Moments of silence emerged as the dancers struck a series of frozen poses, like snapshots of a conflict, with bodies forming strong, connected sculptures with each other. The Holocaust ended with a dark and somber, almost subterranean section. A black, stage-covering cloth quickly was drawn across dancers lying prone on the floor. The covering gradually grew into moving mountains of dark shapes, as though the buried strove once again toward the surface.

A dance section choreographed to Mozart’s Requiem, by Donna Jewell, followed the bitter testimony of a first generation survivor. Dancers lifted two figures above their heads in funerary processions, and moved into side-leaning attitudes and lunges.

As the testimonies spoke of experiences and escapes from extermination camps, the dancers lifted stones from upstage that represented the deaths of six million Jews. The Jewish custom of placing pebbles on graves as a remembrance became the dominant symbol for the remainder of this work. The stones were manipulated in small mounds, lines connecting the dancers, or cradled in their arms like lost children. This was one of the most moving and beautifully designed symbolic uses of props this viewer has experienced.

In The Third Generation section, dancers return to Poland, as did young Rena Bernstein and Mila Bachner in their testimonies. They symbolically “try on” found objects, placing new stones as they go.

Greenberg says it took about a year to research and create this choreography, which was totally absorbing, yet never morbid.

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