After suffering several family and professional losses within a 14-month period, as a way to deal with my grief, in 2018 I began an arts-based research project to search for my roots within the stories, photos, and genealogical tracings of my erased Jewish family lineage.  Using creative process to shine light on the dark immigrant shadows lurking within familial cracks – to transform pain and loss into movement – into choreographic form, thus began, The Shluva Project: My Grandmother’s Grandmother. As the first of two doctoral performances, The Shluva Project explores themes of excluded races, displaced and re-placed immigrants, desires to be ‘other’, and family lore that perpetuates a sense of loss and lost identity through the generations. This interactive interdisciplinary work will premier Spring 2020 at the University of Limerick’s Irish World Academy of Music and Dance in Ireland when I will be completing the second of a four-year PhD in Arts Practice.

Donations will go towards supporting research, development, performance production and dissemination. These include: one-year of non-EU university fees to develop and perform the first iteration of the project, travel to Ireland, research fees, professional choreography and dramaturgy coaching, music, costume, scenic/lighting design, and documentation. As well, travel to Lithuania in the summer to present this work at a dance conference and hopefully to find one of my ancestral villages.

It is through the research and art-making process that I hope to learn more about my family lineage, my own identity, and what life might have been like for my great great grandmother Shluva. How do I have some continuity of her within my personal makeup? I hope this project can shed light on how family histories and emotional palettes of our ancestors can be passed on and stored in the body. Then, how the body can hold research and metamorphose it into kinetic choreographic form, thus leading to a new sense of identity and integration, if not healing genealogical pain.

This project speaks to issues of identity – hiding it, losing it, having it be taken away, reclaiming it and rising up. It’s about transforming energy through movement, sound, ritual, and community. I figure, if you cannot find your family roots, you may as well create art. If you live with inter-generational trauma, you can dance it to healing. I am grateful for any and all support. I intend to support others to do this too.

“What haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others,” Nicolas Abraham, cited in Philippe Sands, 2016, p 7.