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FRANÇAIS app de traduction à gauche
We enter the exhibition gallery of the MAI to experience an unusual composition of dance, storytelling, performance created by Roger White and Helen Simard. The story is constructed from conversations between Roger White and his grandmother Marianna Clark (née Goldmann). She was one of the lucky people whose family left Germany before the worst of Hitler's nazi nightmare and slaughter of Jews.
A fascinating revelation from the conversation between the author and his grandmother is that in the beginning of naziism she was a young child and hoped to get her own swastika like the other children she saw in her neighborhood.
Four dancer actors fill the space as we listen to the audio recollections of a woman who saw Hitler and Jessy Owens at the 1936 Summer Olympics. I am sharing all the details below.
LENA GHIO
Because You Never Asked is a dreamlike realm where historical fact meets auto-fictional storytelling in a multilayered, intergenerational experience. Based on discussions between composer Roger White and his grandmother, Marianna Clark (née Goldmann), about her experiences fleeing Nazi Germany and arriving in the UK as a refugee, the piece combines texts mined from diaries and letters that Marianna wrote in her late teens and early 20s with the recordings of her speaking in her 90s. The story unfolds simultaneously on two different timelines, merging past and present, to explore how memories are constructed and reconstructed over time. Because You Never Asked is an archive of complex family history: one that is innocently painful, naïvely complex, and beautifully tragic.
Woven into haunting soundscapes, recordings of White's grandmother's stories are at the heart of the Because You Never Asked—hearing her life experience in her own words creates a raw, natural experience that can provide personal insight into the complexity of living through times of war and displacement. The show's choreographic language is based on events from Marianna's life. Helen Simard’s choreographic process involved generating movement sourced from images drawn from Marianna’s family stories, memories, and archive. Because You Never Asked explores ancestral memory and how it is stored and expressed through the body, creating a world where movement embodies the kinds of memories that are so nuanced they cannot be reduced to words. Performed by David Albert-Toth, Marie Lévêque, Brianna Lombardo, and Maxine Segalowitz. |
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MARIANNA CLARK'S ESCAPE FROM NAZI GERMANY
Marianna Clark (née Goldmann) grew up near Hamburg, Germany, with a Jewish father and a Christian mother. After the passing of the Nuremberg laws in 1935, her parents’ marriage was deemed illegal and their citizenship revoked; the family left Germany in 1939, fleeing to the UK as refugees. In recent years, Marianna started sharing stories with her grandson Roger White of what it was like to live under the Nazi regime and the life that she left behind. White recorded her telling these stories, and also discovered her diaries and hundreds of letters written between her and her family, which shine a light on what day-to-day life was like before and during WW2. It is these stories of a young woman’s experience of leaving her homeland and forging a new identity that provide the basis of the show.
HISTORICAL ARTIFACTS |
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Because You Never Asked is born of a family archive, one that was kept hidden for almost 80 years. To illustrate this, historical artifacts from Marianna Clark's archives, such as passports, photos, diary entries, Nazi documents, and letters between family members and friends, will be displayed in the MAI café-bar. This will further immerse audiences in the fragments of her memories. Among these artifacts will be never-before-seen historical photos of Hans Liepelt, a member of the White Rose Movement and childhood best friend of Marianna. |
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Marianna Clark, childhood portrait © Roger White These historical artifacts will be available for viewing in the MAI café-bar before each performance. |
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Presented in the MAI gallery, the performance has been cleverly crafted to incorporate the space's four pillars, intentionally obstructing selected views at precise moments. The aim is to accentuate the permeable and fleeting nature of memory. By deliberately denying viewers a full and constant perspective, Roger White offers the audience a glimpse into his process of reconstructing his family's stories. With the audience seated on both sides of the gallery, each seat offers a different sound and visual perspective. In this manner, the audience is fully immersed in the way memory operates, where some aspects are heightened and others forgotten.
BRINGING MEMORIES & ARCHIVES BACK TO LIFE
“I want to obscure the audience's viewpoint, so that people are not able to see everything and so that the viewing experience is different depending on where you are seated. When you start looking into your family’s history, you’re never going to see everything. I spent ten years trying to learn everything and what I did learn is that it is impossible. Two people could read the same letter, and come away with completely different meanings from it, different interpretations. So as a spectator, no matter where you sit in the room, you’ll see the show differently than your fellow spectator.” – Roger White
A talkback with the artists will follow the performance on April 20, 2023 |
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Artistic Director and Composer: Roger White
Choreographer: Helen Simard
Performers: David Albert-Toth, Brianna Lombardo, Maxine Segalowitz, Marie Lévêque
Technical Director and Lighting Designer: Tiffanie Boffa
Rehearsal Director: Nindy Banks
Outside Eyes: Alexandra Landé, Sébastien Provencher, Emily Gualtieri
Costume Designer: Tricia Crivellaro
Costume Assistant: Jade Simard
Production Manager: Kaia Mienna
Administration: Guylaine Savoie (Diagramme, gestion culturelle)
Residencies: Circuit-Est, Cas Public, Segal Centre for Performing Arts, MAI (Montréal, arts interculturels)
A We All Fall Down production, presented by MAI (Montréal, arts interculturels) |
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Roger White is an autodidact composer and sound-based artist. He began his career as an active musician and DJ in Tiohtiá:ke/Montréal’s underground music scene (Kops Crew, Rhythm Mercenaries, Dead Messenger). Today, White primarily composes music for dance, using audio synthesis, hypnotic sound loops and binaural recording techniques to create immersive sonic landscapes that invite spectators to sink into altered levels of consciousness. He is also currently developing a podcast that explores the creative processes of neurodiverse artists. White was an artist in residency at the Segal Centre for Performing Arts for their 2019-2020 season, through the Jewish Arts Mentorship program.
Helen Simard is a choreographer, rehearsal director and dance dramaturge. Originally from Kingston, Ontario, she relocated to Tiohtiá:ke/Montréal in 1996 to pursue a career in the arts. Simard collaborates with musicians and dancers to create visceral interdisciplinary shows. Her work uses repetition, complex spatial patterns and techniques of sensory overwhelm to create hypnotic, dreamlike performances that blur the boundaries between conscious and subconscious spaces. Past works such as NO FUN (2014), IDIOT (2017), Dance Side of the Moon (2018), REQUIEM POP (2019), and PAPILLON (2020) are joyfully chaotic and complex in their simplicity, walking a fine line between the real and the imaginary. Simard holds a BFA (Concordia University, 2000) and MA in Dance (Université du Québec à Montréal, 2014). Her current research explores themes relating to loss, memory, nostalgia, and intergenerational exchange. |
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WHAT?
Because You Never Asked
by Roger White & Helen Simard
WHEN?
PERFORMANCE
APR 19–22
7:30 PM
WEBCAST
JUNE 12-16
DURATION?
70 minutes
WHERE?
MAI (Montréal, arts interculturels)
3680 Jeanne-Mance
BOX OFFICE
Regular → $28 • Reduced → $22 • Junior & Groups → $16 • Accompanying person → $0 • Passport 4/4 → $68
www.m-a-i.qc.ca/en/boxoffice
514-982-3386 |
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Founded in 1999, MAI (Montréal, arts interculturels) is a non-profit organization that supports the development, creation, presentation and promotion of intercultural arts for a variety of audiences. MAI's programming promotes hybrid and innovative practices in dance, theatre, visual arts, speech arts, performance, music and interdisciplinary arts, while building bridges between artists and local communities through its Public + program. |
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MAI acknowledges that the land on which we live and work is part of the unceded territories of the Kanien’keha:ka nation. |
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