Dances for the Blue House & Dancing to Connect/GERMANY

In 2006 Drastic Action partnered the Foundation to Support the Blue House in Breisach, Germany and Battery Dance to create Dances for the Blue House. The Blue House is the former Jewish Community Center in Breisach, the hometown of Geismar’s grandparents. For Dances for the Blue House, Geismar created a site-specific piece on the site of the town’s destroyed synagogue, and Drastic Action and Battery Dance performed additional works exploring the legacy of the Holocaust. Members of both companies implemented Geismar’s Dancing to Connect curriculum in week-long intensives at local high schools. The program culminated with performances which included the two NY dance companies and the German high school students performing the pieces they had created under the mentorship of the teaching artists. The impact of the project was far reaching, from an 82-year-old Breisach resident who remembered when her childhood Jewish friend inexplicably stopped coming to school, to three little Turkish boys, then living in Breisach, who watched the dancers rehearse outside and then came to every performance, to Geismar’s 85-year-old father who said the piece gave him goosebumps. This project served as a springboard for the Blue House’s increasingly ambitious programming in subsequent years and for Drastic Action and Battery Dance to return to numerous cities in Germany over the next 4 years with their program Dancing to Connect, centered on tolerance, and processing history through dance.

Press for Dances for the Blue House

• US Consulate, Frankfurt, Germany, Click here for more
• Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, english translation, Click here for more
• Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, original, Click here for more
• All About Jewish Theater, pdf, Click here to view 
• Hadassah Magazine, Dance Lessons, Click here to view pdf