One of Simone Ferro’s reactions to immersing herself in the Holocaust and the other genocides has been a desire to alert people to a dangerous human potential.
A choreographer and University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee professor of dance, Ferro will be using dance to convey that concern in her upcoming debut performance of “Between yesterday and today … Remembrance is not enough.”
The dance will premiere June 24 in UWM’s Peck School of the Arts Dance Department’s summer dance concert, “Summerdances.”
Ferro was inspired to create this work by UW-Whitewater poet and professor DeWitt Clinton, Ph.D., an acquaintance she met through her husband, retired UWM professor Meredith Watts, Ph.D.
About two years ago, “DeWitt handed me his [original poem, an 18-part reflective meditation called “Reading the Tao at Auschwitz”] and said, ‘Do you think this could one day become a dance piece?’”
She was composing other dance works at the time, but the poetry touched her and she started researching the Holocaust.
A native of Sao Paolo, Brazil, who lived and performed with Switzerland’s Ballet du Grand Theatre de Geneve for 12 years, Ferro said that while living there she “was constantly outraged” by the growing French right wing. Her response to Clinton’s poem, she said, may have been connected with that rage.
Raised as a Catholic, Ferro said that her perspective on genocide is also influenced by her status as an ex-patriot Brazilian living as a foreigner for the past 20 years. She knows how it feels to be excluded — to be racially and culturally misunderstood, she said.
“What inspired me was that [Clinton] has a contemporary view [of the Holocaust]. He expresses the same sadness I read in [Holocaust survivor, author and Nobel Laureate Elie] Wiesel,” Ferro said.
That view is crucial in art, she believes. “Art needs to have a refreshing quality of timelessness” — “to take the moment of now and compare it to the past and the future.”
Racism, xenophobia and homophobia
As research for this project, Ferro read extensively, viewed Holocaust-themed plays and movies, listened to music of the era and studied other genocides. She and her husband also visited the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C.
“I thought that if I want to work with such a theme, I need to be imbedded with it. [At the Holocaust Museum] I acquired a lot of information I wasn’t acquainted with and also lots of images,” Ferro said.
She also required her dancers to read “Night,” Wiesel’s autobiographical account of his childhood imprisonment in concentration camps. They discussed and worked with the images in the book and some of those images have ended up in Ferro’s new work.
“This generation in its 20s doesn’t know Holocaust survivors and if they don’t read, they don’t know,” she said.
Ferro is also intrigued by “the duality” — the difference between us and those who commit genocide. “It is proved that we are not genetically different so we all carry this [potential] in us” to do what was done in the Holocaust and in other genocides.
“In my work, I raise the question: How much do we need to be alert to this potential?”
The work, which focuses on the Holocaust and other genocides, explores not only the persecution of Jews but also “invokes broader images of suffering and remembrance,” she said, including modern racism, xenophobia and homophobia.
“We like to believe that such a past will never occur again, but how different is our contemporary thinking really? In commemorating one great historical tragedy, we must also open our eyes to what is happening now before it is too late,” she said.
The production includes the work of 19 dancers as well as music, film and the recitation from Clinton’s poem.
“This is such a joint collaboration” among local musicians and artists, Ferro said. Ed Burgess, chair of the dance department, and Sarah Wilbur, artistic director of Danceworks Performance Company, will both be dancing in the piece.
Broaching such serious subjects suits Ferro perfectly. “I cannot do without any meaning underneath [my work]. I need to have a base of a concept.
“What is most important for me is to share my experience…. The beauty is not just in the movement but in the overall ideas — provoking emotions, taking people to other places, beyond their imaginations.”
“The audience needs to dream. Sometimes it not a good dream. It can be a nightmare — it can be about rage,” she said.
“Summerdances,” will be performed at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, June 24 and Saturday, June 25 and 3 p.m. on Sunday, June 26 at the Mainstage Theatre, 2400 E. Kenwood Blvd.
The Friday performance will be followed by an informal reception and the Sunday matinee by a talkback. Tickets are $16 general; $9 students and seniors.
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