Downtown Bryan Performances
On November 2-5 and December 6-9, 2020 But Where There’s Hope, There’s Life presented 8 days of performances in downtown Bryan. Each night consists of nine performances for a total of 72 performances over eight days. To keep the audience and performers safe, audience members of 10 traveled through various performance locations downtown. As audiences checked in outside of the Stafford they put on a colored circle, wrote the name of a loved one on a rock, picked up a booklet of a survivor’s story, and waited for their tour guide to begin the performance. As their journey began, they dialed a number on their phone to first listen to actors talk about Hitler’s beginning, then they entered the Stafford to watch a dancer perform to some of Hitler’s famous speeches with visualizations created by our Viz team. Then audiences moved in the space to watch two dance films about a family in hiding and two sisters deciding if staying together or traveling apart is the safest path for them. As the tour guide moves the audience to their next location, they redial the audio number and listen to stories of the persecution of the Jews. At the Cotton Exchange, the audience watched a dancer perform Unseen Solitude, a story about one of our collaborator’s aunt who lived in a closet for two years during the Holocaust. Then the audience moved to another area to watch a dance film about the ghettos and the rounding up of Jews for their transport to the concentration camps. As the audience moves to the Palace, they listen to accounts of liberators and what they saw at the camps. As the audience watched a performance about the camps and the Death Marches, they laid their rocks at the front of the stage to remember their loved ones who have perished. The audience then moved to the loading dock to watch a soloist perform work in the sand about the senseless loss of over 11 million people. The final work, Liberation, was presented in a film at the Frame Gallery. After the final work, the audience was guided to the Village for a Q&A with the choreographers. Here they asked questions, read about the history of the holocaust, and participated in the butterfly project shaping their circles into a butterfly, a symbol of hope in the Holocaust.
For future performances and other activities from the HopeLife project please visit our Performance and Ticketing page.
