Because You Never Asked - A Review
An archive of memories and artifacts, a beautiful assemblage of a difficult history. Every object, sound, and written word was representative of intergenerational storytelling. With the opening show being sold out, I was lucky to have gotten there an hour early. I had just enough time to look through the glass enclosures filled with passports, letters, pictures, and a well loved doll before the room was too crowded. Seeing all of these things left me with a mixture of tender nostalgia and hurt.
When the crowd moved a bit, I was able to squeeze past to listen in at one of the audio exhibits. When I covered my ears with one of the two pairs of headphones, I was lulled by letters read through the voice of a family member that was still here. A youthful voice for a letter that dated, a beautiful thing I thought. On a television nearby, I watched a series of old clips. A child dressed in a frilly costume holds up a sign that reads “Evil” in black, while the other boy holds one that reads “Good”. A stranger soon joined me when they put on headphones too. We greeted each other with a tight smile before turning back towards the film. We watched as the children laughed deviously in the way kids do, posed in front of the camera, and ran away. Colorful, kind, nostalgic.
As choreographer Helen Simard pointed out to me, these moments were chosen to be filmed with intention. With the cost of the film itself at the time, it was just what people had to do. Film was a luxury. I thought about how there was something so delicate about needing to choose what to remember and what to document, it felt attentive and loving. Choosing to share those videos lived in that space as well. Paraphrasing from Helen: the world is burning and everything’s on fire. Might as well go about it with care. Considering everything they had gone through, this felt like a manifestation of just that.
I tried to picture someone from the photographs writing a letter or filming another. I wondered- what made those moments so important? How did they choose what was worth documenting at that moment? I stood, listened and watched until the film was set back to where it had started. I could barely pull away. Roger White spoke of how building this was a difficult, but informing process, one that led to a lot of change and letting go. He had mentioned to me that in this search of understanding his family’s history, he realized that their experience in fleeing Nazi Germany was only a small fraction of their long life, something that was easy to get lost in. The more he spoke with his grandmother, Marianna Clark’s (born Goldmann), the more he discovered other parts of other stories that were just as important; even one as simple as the fond memory of a childhood friend who happened to be Hans Liepelt, a member of The White Rose Resistance who stood in “opposition to the National Socialist (NS) dictatorship and an end to the war all over Munich” (Weiße Rose Stiftung E.V.)
I was told that in watching this piece, in listening to the letters, and in reading the program, everyone would be captured by different parts. I found that I was drawn most to the confrontational nature of the venue. The space dared to rearrange the audience with the bifrontal placement of the seats. Choosing where to sit carried weight, as every eyeline was partially blocked by four gigantic cement columns. I decided that I would sit between them to not miss any part of the show, which was a false perception on my part. As it went on, I realized that they didn’t hinder the experience at all. They were part of the show too. Striking, resistant, impenetrable. The dancers hid behind the cement columns, suddenly disappearing from my line of vision. They explored shapes and movement with the shadows cast from both the columns and their bodies. Those parts of the show visually inaccessible to me were like the memories of the events themselves. We didn’t get to know it fully in fact and feeling because we weren’t there when it happened.
The space itself forced me to choose where to look and how to listen. When I couldn’t see the performers, I instead listened harder to the silence, the audio recordings of conversations between Roger White and his grandmother, or I listened to the music that played in the space. When I did so, I discovered that the show itself, the use of sound and voice, was a hybrid sort of verbatim theatre. It was alive in the reading of letters, yet it also lived in a multidisciplinary space of contemporary dance.
When the source material was initially directed to being a performance of some kind, Roger White had originally pieced it together as a traditional play. As he put it bluntly, it didn’t work. It didn’t capture everything that it should have. It then shifted in a different form, allowing the exploration a broader narration of experience while keeping the source material as its focus. The result allowed the dancers to work closely with the source material, which was mostly text, daring them to reshape narration and the nature of their verbatim.
The form it took on was so much more tangible to me and informed the work deeply. Rather than understanding it like I would have a traditional script with actors, I felt it all in my gut. I felt it like I felt for the doll in the glass enclosure, like when I watched the clips. The interpretive movement allowed for layered comprehension of both fact, feeling, and memory.
This beautiful experience as a whole was a multilayered playback documentary; one that bravely captured the feeling of seeking safety, as well as existing as an homage to Marianna Clark’s life. Hearing their voices speak to each other was remarkable and incredibly touching. I felt that Roger White’s explorations of his own family’s history was attentive, experimental and brave; A well grounded experience that left me with misty eyes and a full heart.
Photography by Kristina Hillard
Because You Never Asked is based on discussions between musician, composer, and record producer Roger White and his grandmother, Marianna Clark (née Goldmann), about her experiences fleeing Nazi Germany and arriving in the UK as a refugee.
Choreography by Helen Simard.
Lighting Design by Tiffanie Boffa and Costume Design by Tricia Crivellaro.
Performed by David Albert-Toth, Marie Lévêque, Brianna Lombardo, and Maxine Segalowitz.
For more information, visit We All Fall Down Interdisciplinary Creations.