It seems fitting that with the 80th anniversary this month of the liberation of Auschwitz, observed as part of International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Jan. 27, Los Angeles Ballet is reprising Memoryhouse, Artistic Director Melissa Barak’s 2023 piece commemorating World War II and the Holocaust in particular. The abstract evening-length work, which unfolds as a series of vignettes, will be presented Jan. 30 – Feb. 1 at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts.
“I’ve always been fascinated by Holocaust history,” said Barak, 45, a former professional dancer with New York City Ballet who founded the erstwhile Barak Ballet in 2013 and has been with LAB since 2023. She mentioned visits in her 20s and 30s to concentration camps including Dachau, Sachsenhausen, and Auschwitz, as well as to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam.
The notion of a ballet about one of history’s darkest times may seem daunting, if not depressing. But Barak, a native Angeleno, said she was guided in crafting Memoryhouse by composer Max Richter’s 2002 album of the same name, which is heard in its entirety during the ballet. Assembling the stories she’d spent years collecting, the choreographer created 18 movement sections representing Holocaust history.
“When the album came out, it wasn’t on my radar,” recalled Barak. “But about 10 years ago, I began listening to it and loved the music. It created a dramatic, almost cinematic vision in my head. Given the different [tracks], it really told a story. At some point as I was listening, in my head I saw this image of a pitiful-looking girl sitting onstage during the rain sound in [the piece] ‘November.’ It occurred to me, ‘This is a good backdrop for a Holocaust-related story.’
“As soon as I had that thought,” continued Barak, “I carried that with me to other [tracks I was listening to] and other stories that are well known: people being stuffed into train cars, the hard labor in camps. Those stories matched the music and made sense to me, and I felt that the storytelling [could be] done in an abstract way.
“Nothing is literal [in the ballet], and it jumps back and forth in time, creating fragmented pieces of a broken part of history. There is no text, but there is some spoken word because on the album there’s spoken word. The title is the text.”
For the 2023 premiere, Barak commissioned architect Hagy Belzberg — founding partner of BA Collective and designer of the current home of Los Angeles’ Holocaust Museum (he’s also designing its expansion) — for a movable set design and art director Sebastian Peschiera for projections that include birds, sleeting rain, and a forest. Longtime collaborator Holly Hynes designed loose-fitting cream-colored costumes for Act 1 but went with dramatic colors in Act 2. It’s the same production at The Wallis.
Barak said that everything in her career “has led up to this moment.” Memoryhouse uses all 24 LAB company dancers, and the choreography “got fleshed out with the dancers in the studio step-by-step. I may know I want certain configurations — certainly for pas de deux and groupings — but you can only figure it out with bodies.”
Barak said she wanted the work to “feel like lost stories floating in the ether.” She noted that there are “so many [Holocaust] stories we know, but what about stories we never knew, the families that all died? We don’t know their histories, their relationships. There are so many stories lost, and they won’t be known to any of us. Remembering people that once existed but never had the opportunity to share what they did, to think about the obliteration of a people lost forever, is soul-crushing but also poetic.”
“There’s also a curiosity about [this history] from younger generations who seem to know very little to nothing — not just about the Holocaust,” she stressed, “but what led up to it. We’re seeing [similar events] today. It’s terrifying, and you wonder, ‘How did such a civilized, flourishing society get wrapped up in that kind of hate?’”
Barak said she wants this history to stay alive and hopes that her work triggers “an emotional response in people that should hit [them] in a raw, moving way. With Richter’s powerful music, dance, the projections, and Nathan Scheuer’s lighting [design] — all that creates certain scenes and imagery that transport people. And they can feel the heaviness, that it was a dark, terrible time.
“But it’s a time we can’t forget,” Barak emphasized. “If it hits you emotionally and forces you to reckon with it, that [helps] make sure that history stays alive.”
