Immediately the dancers’ strong expressions and choreography motifs identified who was who: here was Elli’s mother, her father, and her brother. The music was bright, with an Eastern European influence, and the protagonist, Elli, entered, armed with notebook and pen: an aspiring poet. Bitton-Jackson herself.Ī single dancer entered the space with Bitton-Jackson’s memoir and read in the first person–a structural aspect that would carry through the entire piece–describing life as a twelve-year-old girl in 1943 in Somorja, Slovakia.The space soon filled with other characters, dressed in period-appropriate civilian clothing. Running my thumb over the book’s pages, I knew that the next day I would be back in LA at Studio A, attending Stretch Dance Company‘s premiere of a dance by the same name, based on the memoir and endorsed by Dr.
At the time, I was unable to believe that a girl my age had endured such horrors and still held onto hope, but in other ways I had found I could relate to her experience. Last Saturday, while there to teach and visit, I picked it up again, remembering the few times I had devoured its contents as a middle-schooler, perversely fascinated by that disgusting chapter in history. Livia Bitton-Jackson, sits on a bookshelf in my parent’s house in Michigan. A copy of “ I Have Lived a Thousand Years,” a Holocaust memoir by Dr.
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