My Date at the Holocaust Ballet

Dorie Chevlen attends “Memoryhouse,” an abstract, cinematic performance that still managed to dance around comparisons to contemporary injustices.

By Dorie ChevlenFebruary 12, 2025

MEMORYHOUSE, The Wallis, Beverly Hills, February 1, 2025.

As a critic, but probably more so as a Jew, I am immediately skeptical of any dance “inspired” by the Holocaust. In the myriad stories that escaped that great tragedy exists the most generous and cruelest of our human capacity—which is precisely why it can feel so cheap to bring it to the stage. Lazy, almost. It’s the Holocaust; of course we’re going to feel something.

My atheist (née Catholic) boyfriend does not share in this skepticism, thankfully, which made him the ideal date for Los Angeles Ballet’s Memoryhouse at the Wallis’s Bram Goldsmith Theater this past Saturday afternoon. Choreographed by the company’s still new-car-fresh artistic director Melissa Barak, and first staged last year, the show used Max Richter’s same-name album as both score and guide. Though deliberately nonnarrative, with no specific characters or events portrayed, a sort of piecework story came together across the show’s 18 abstract vignettes, aided by Barak’s clever use of costumes, movement, scrim, and set pieces. Under the quintessentially Richteresque sound (cue the lonely violins and haunting codas), it took on downright cinematic urgency.

In the first act, dancers in gauzy gray pants and shirts wove across the stage, lifting and dragging each other under a scrim that looked like a dark forest. There was a distinct and disturbing lack of eye contact between them that made even the most luscious pas de deux feel coerced, not a partnered turn but a forced disorientation. Male dancers usually place their hands on the thighs of female dancers for above-shoulder lifts, but in this context, that familiar pose felt nefarious, almost assault-like.

Because of my familiarity with the stories of the Holocaust—I hope our collective familiarity—it was easy to apply more specific events to each vignette. As the scrim changed from forest to window to fence, the dancers likewise seemed to embody different characters—people fleeing, people hiding, people trying to celebrate what was left to them. At one point, the dancers grouped together into a huddle, knees bent in plié, doing small, timid bourrée steps in parallel, the gesture somehow defensive at that height, self-protective, like skittish animals torn on which direction to run. It was hard for me to watch without remembering where else I’d seen the posture in the news lately.

In the Q and A after the performance, questions were more laudatory than probing. The moderator asked the Holocaust survivors in the room to stand up, and we applauded them heartily. I was lone among the audience in asking how Barak saw her ballet fitting into today’s cultural moment—one that sees Israel at war with Palestine, our own country expelling the peoples it deems unwanted, and antisemitism rising all around us, seemingly unchecked and unbothered. I had been linking everything together while sitting there, applying meaning to the abstractions; I had assumed what I later said, into the mic, introducing my question, that “all art is political.” But whether for the sake of avoiding controversy or from a place of genuine sincerity, Barak politely rejected my premise. She repeated the description from the program. This ballet was inspired by the Holocaust. There was nothing political about it.

I blushed, standing there, mic back in its holster, feeling a fool to have even asked. But the truth is, it’s not up to her. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, sure. But this was not just a ballet to me.

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Photo by Cheryl Mann, courtesy of Memoryhouse.