Akron Beacon Journal – Stage notes: Piece of Violins of Hope comes to Akron

By Kerry Clawson, Akron Beacon Journal

GroundWorks DanceTheater will bring a piece of the Violins of Hope Cleveland project to Akron this weekend with its performance of the dance Shadowbox at the Akron-Summit County Public Library.

The Cleveland dance company was commissioned by the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage and the Jewish Federation’s Cleveland Israel Arts Connection to create the dance, choreographed by artistic director David Shimotakahara to an original score by Israeli composer Oded Zehavi. Zehavi is a visiting artist at the Cleveland Institute of Music.

Violins of Hope Cleveland is a partnership among Northeast Ohio’s cultural, educational and media organizations highlighting violins that survived the Holocaust and represent the never-ending hope of the Jewish people. The project was started by Amnon Weinstein in 1996 to locate and restore violins that were played by Jews in camps and ghettos during World War II so they could be brought to life again on the concert stage.

Shimotakahara’s Shadowbox dance made its world premiere in October at the Allen Theatre and will make its Akron premiere this weekend.

“We’re very, very honored to be involved with the Violins of Hope project,” Shimotakahara said.

He talked about Shadowbox containing metaphors for the persecution and terror of the Holocaust. The dance starts out with interactions based on children’s games. Made up of five vignettes, each dance is a remembrance of parts of somebody’s life.

The dance creates a sense of community and intimacy that is torn apart.

“The loss of things that were part of their lives before — that, I think, is very much a part of the piece,” Shimotakahara said. “The stage itself and what’s onstage becomes a metaphor for the experience … of unprecedented suffering and violence.”

Shadowbox’s score for solo violin will be performed live, along with a recorded track, by Mirabai Weismehl Rosenfeld, first violinist of the Orquestra de la Comunitat de Valencia in Spain. She is currently participating in the Concertmaster Academy at the Cleveland Institute of Music, studying with Cleveland Orchestra Concertmaster William Preucil.

Also on this weekend’s program is the reprise of Lynn Taylor Corbett’sUnpublished Dialogues, based on the life of Virginia Woolf. Annika Sheaff will portray Woolf, dancing with Damien Highfield, Felise Bagley and new company members Lauren Garson and Michael Marquez.

Another Akron premiere will be Kate Weare’s Far and Near, the second dance GroundWorks has commissioned from the 2014 Guggenheim fellow. Her abstract dance is set to Caroline Shaw’s 2013 Pulitzer Prize-winning Partita for 8 Voices, recorded by the a cappella group Roomful of Teeth.

“She [Weare] was really intent on creating movement to this music and her ideas came out of that,” Shimotakahara said. He described that a cappella choral music as “very rambunctious, very energetic, very spikey.”