Aviva Geismar knows firsthand about the healing power of movement. A dancer, choreographer, and founder of the company Drastic Action – which uses dance to create connection across lines of difference – she works in a way that deliberately invites generational trauma to pass through her body, and through those of her dancers – losing its power as it goes. In fact, back in 2006, she travelled to the hometown, in Germany, of her paternal grandparents, who were killed in Auschwitz. She had travelled there on a mission to understand this place, to experience her own history as the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, to create a work at the site of the town’s destroyed synagogue, and to teach movement and choreography workshops to local schoolchildren.
“Prior to that, I hadn’t been consciously aware how big an influence my father’s history had on my creative voice,” she says, “but looking back I can see that it did. I was often portraying people who were struggling against insurmountable obstacles, making dances about social systems that were falling apart. Also, looking at the movement vocabulary in the dances, there was a strong resemblance to German expressionist dance, which was happening around the beginning of the 20th century. It was just this unconscious thing: you breathe the same air, you tend to make up the same kind of dances. Very strong gestural language, a lot of bound flow, very grounded and darkly dramatic.”
Awakening through movement
Why live and work right on the dividing lines, in this way? A kind of awakening from prejudice seems to happen when people create movement together, says Geismar. She remembers one student in Berlin, a girl from Palestine, who when she learned that Geismar was Jewish wanted to leave the class. “She got really upset,” says Geismar. “She didn’t want to work with me. I can understand. People in her family had been killed by Israelis. But to get her to understand: it wasn’t me. I’m not an Israeli soldier. I would never endorse killing people. The days went on, and we got past it, and at the end she gave me a big hug. That was pretty amazing to me.”
In that same class, an entire social group underwent a similar transformation. “There was a girl who was kind of ostracized,” says Geismar. “The other kids were saying they didn’t want to dance with her, that she was a lesbian, that when they were changing she was looking at them. We went through a huge conversation about accepting everyone for who they are. Eventually that girl’s classmates apologized, and they all danced together.”
To really dance, you’ve got to get real
So what exactly is it about creating dance that makes room for this kind of transformation? “We’re asking people to use movement to express something real about themselves,” explains Geismar, “as opposed to showing off with movement. So I think it’s being together and being vulnerable in that way with each other – the teachers doing it as much as the students. People connect with each other out of empathy.” Talk about letting fear, insecurity, anger, and prejudice fall away. And what could be a more drastic action than that?
It’s not easy though, this work. Early in the process of working with new students, Geismar often sees them resist the vulnerability that comes with creating authentic dance. “At some point around the first or second day,” she says of her students in Germany, “they would realize that we were asking them to dig inside themselves, and to express something, and there would sometimes be a bit of a crisis there, where some people would sort of panic and say they didn’t want to do it, they wanted to drop out. Day three, day four, they’d warm up more to the process, and by the end they’d be really excited and proud about what they had done.”
Drastic Action in Fort Tryon Park
Want to help Geismar and her company continue creating new work, teaching new students, and joining people across lines of difference? This spring and summer, Drastic Action comes to Fort Tryon Park, in Washington Heights, to set and perform a site-specific work that’s been in the works for more than two years. The dance is called Dis/Location (Fort Tryon), and explores the immigrant experience. Geismar and Drastic Action are currently raising money via ioby, to cover expenses related to NYC Parks Department permits for rehearsals and performances, dancers’ fees, teaching artists’ fees, and costume design and construction. Performances are slated for June 16th and 17th at 7pm, and June 18th at 5pm, on the Fort Tryon Park Billings Lawn.
In conjunction with the creation of Dis/Location (Fort Tryon), Drastic Action dancers and teaching artists are offering free dance classes to two groups of City College Academy of the Arts middle schoolers. It’s important to Geismar to bring the work into the Washington Heights community, and to give others the opportunity to reflect, through movement and conversation, on their own immigrant experiences, as she’s been able to do herself. Each student will, as part of their choreographic process, either write about their own immigrant experience or interview a family member. They’ll perform their works alongside Drastic Actions, on the Billings Lawn. If you believe in the healing power of dance, you won’t want to miss it.
For more information and to donate, check out their ioby campaign page here. See you in June!
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