MEMENTO: Memory, Held on Pointe

How the Jerusalem Ballet transforms historical trauma into a choreography of survival

Well then—there comes a moment when all you can do is reach for a pen and let it spill.
If ballet criticism has its own black square, Nadya Timofeyeva has drawn it here with the bodies of her dancers, inscribing it onto a tiny patch of studio space where the distance between the spectator and the abyss collapses to the length of an outstretched arm.

You find yourself in tears—out of wonder, out of a stunned disbelief that survival was possible at all, out of a near-paralysis before the choreographer’s mastery, as she pushes ballet beyond the perimeter of theatricality and leads it inward, into the depths of the body, where the fine grain of every feeling remains intact. It turns out that even the Catastrophe can be told with tenderness, with fragility; that it can make you gasp, even smile, provoking a silent, many-voiced “wow”—especially when a beautiful man in an SS uniform hurls you first into ecstasy and then into a suspended stillness with a dizzying Bolero, danced on a chair and across the floor, charged with eros. And yet, beneath it all, you unmistakably hear the clatter of train wheels, while the choreography of the hands stubbornly resurrects the rigid silhouettes of Teutonic knights.

                   Photo by @morgansophiaphotography

On Holocaust Remembrance Day, when time in Jerusalem thickens and any words feel either excessive or false, the Jerusalem Ballet chose the only register that seems possible within this silence: in its studio, it presented MEMENTO by Nadya Timofeyeva.

At the center of this choreographic reflection stands Franceska (Franciszka) Mann—a Jewish ballerina murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1943. A young dancer, a celebrated beauty, a laureate of international competitions, a star of the Warsaw stage; a ghetto inmate, a nightclub performer, a prisoner in a death camp. And her act, which entered history as one of the most astonishing gestures of Jewish resistance: in the undressing room before the gas chamber, Franceska, moving with calculated seduction, seized a pistol from the holster of a guard spellbound by her grace and fired three shots—wounding two and killing an officer. According to one account, she then took her own life with the same weapon; according to another, she and the others were shot by soldiers who rushed in at the sound. “It makes a certain sense that it was a ballerina who found the strength—and the audacity—to resist, who refused to dissolve into anonymous death,” Nadya once told me. “A true ballerina never yields; she fights to the end.”

Nadya Timofeyeva captivates not only by everything she is (one could go on about her indefinitely), but by the fact that every pas in her ballets is inherently musical, and therefore always gestures beyond the merely earthly. For her, music is a kind of religion, and each time she assembles a remarkable soundtrack out of disparate sources that cohere into a single, indisputable score. In MEMENTO, this becomes something like the cultural anamnesis of a fractured Europe—a handful of notes and their grief. Chopin and Beethoven stand alongside Isaac Schwartz and Lord Berners, yet the greatest shock comes from the already mentioned Bolero by Ravel, laid over the barking cadence of Hitler’s speech. The music’s monotonous pulse, together with the movements of the striking Mikhail Botsok in Nazi uniform, becomes a mechanism of entrainment, of mounting hypnotic pressure—a metaphor for collective trance. There is also the finale of the Ninth Symphony, heard here as a bitter epitaph to a humanism shattered against the watchtower of the camp.

Timofeyeva structures her ballet around a clash of bodily logics. On one side, the world of the Jewish shtetl, woven into a neoclassical fabric through the organic language of folk dance: movement that is warm, communal, alive. On the other, the cold, calibrated geometry of Nazi physicality—nearly impersonal, drilled to automatism, with an almost exaggerated discipline of form (the SS dances, male and female alike, send a chill through the body each time). A distinct professional feat, and at the same time a dramatic apex, is the pointe-tap sequence in the “Melody Palace” nightclub scene: a half-forgotten genre of prewar entertainment stripped of any trace of diversion, the hammering of taps against the parquet sounding like the ticking of a mechanism. Here, pointe shoes cease to be instruments of elevation and become instruments of survival.

                      Photo by @morgansophiaphotography

If I were to devise a slogan for this ballet, I might say that MEMENTO is a mirror in which both the fragility of a ballet slipper and the inhuman cold of barbed wire are reflected. The chain of scenes traces Franceska Mann’s life from 1939 to 1943: late-1930s Warsaw—a solo dance, applause, flowers, an officer in civilian dress through whom the SS uniform begins to show. A family interior filled with warmth, habits, holidays. The ghetto, with its precarious balance between the illusion of normalcy and constant threat. The “Melody Palace” nightclub, where dance becomes a currency of survival. And finally, the camp, where every movement reads as an act of resistance. Look closely, too, at the scenography and costumes by Inna Polonskaya: everything is calibrated to the smallest detail, where the variations in the cut of SS uniforms across the years or the nuances of fabric texture do not serve as mere illustration, but as a way of fixing time within movement.

In a company of twelve, each dancer carries the trace of a personal history, yet the appearance of Adam Greenfeld in the role of Franceska’s father is something singular. A wheelchair dancer, an IDF veteran, the son of parents who survived the inferno of the camps, he brings into the performance a measure of authenticity that no acting technique can simulate. His very biography is itself a manifesto of overcoming, and he dances about what remains when everything has been taken from a person except the capacity to love and to feel another’s rhythm. Especially moving is the duet between Franceska’s father and his second daughter—a dialogue of wheels and pointe shoes in which there is not the slightest hint of speculation on physical limitation; on the contrary, it contains more dignity, more verticality, than many academic pas de deux. The wheelchair here is neither a prop nor a symbol of frailty, but an extension of the body, an instrument of a new plastic language unfamiliar to the classical eye. Ariel Meiron (as Franceska’s sister) does not simply dance alongside him; she interweaves herself into the motion of the wheels, turning their rotation into an unending series of pirouettes.

And, of course, at the center of this field of tension is Franceska herself—Anael Zateikin, endlessly captivating, demonstrating the full range of classical virtues, from buoyant jumps to impeccable fouettés. This crystalline precision of form is the result of the meticulous work of Martin Schonberg, the company’s associate director, who shaped the rehearsals and translated the choreographer’s vision into the dancers’ muscle memory. Yet these fouettés are not for applause: within the space of the ghetto and the camp, each turn reads as a desperate attempt to restart a stalled engine of reality, to hold equilibrium in a world coming apart. Her tap, too, becomes a nervous tattoo—a dance as transaction, a dance as burn, where the ballerina’s professionalism turns into her final weapon.

                        Photo by @morgansophiaphotography

MEMENTO is not only an extraordinarily beautiful, compelling, narratively gripping ballet. It is a necessary one. Every battement tendu feels like an attempt to pierce the wall of oblivion; every pause, a frozen echo of cries that, decades later, suddenly regain a physical audibility. And yet, in our part of the world, those cries sound every day—the ballet of Nadya Timofeyeva simply gives them articulation, transforming historical trauma into a choreography of flawless precision.