Analogy/Dora: Tramontane

“Memory, often strikes me as a kind of dumbness. It makes one’s head heavy and giddy, as if one were not looking back down the receding perspectives of time but rather down on the earth from a great height, from one of those towers whose tops are lost to view in the clouds.” –W.G.Sebald

tra-mon-tane adjective \trə-ˈmän-ˌtān, ˌtra-mən-ˈ\ 1. traveling to, situated on, or living on the other side of a mountain; latin transmontanus “beyond the mountains”

Analogy/Dora: Tramontane is based on an oral history Jones conducted with 95-year old Dora Amelan, a French Jewish nurse & social worker. Amelan’s harrowing, touching and inspirational story is broken into approximately 25 episodes that become the basis for choreography and songs. These episodes chronicle her early life in Belgium, her mother’s death as the Germans were marching into Belgium and her experiences working at an underground Jewish organization in Vichy France’s internment camps, Gurs & Rivesaltes. Here is a portrait of the ability to persevere and survive.

This piece is part of Analogy: A Trilogy developed by Bill T. Jones with Associate Artistic Director, Janet Wong. Insipired by W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants, Jones continues his exploration of how text, storytelling and movement pull and push against each other and how another experience can be had through the combination and recombination of these elements. All three stories, while wildly different ruminate on the nature of service, duty and the question of what is a life well lived.

Composer Nick Hallett has created original music informed by the text as well as a soundscape that combines German Romantic Lieder and World War II-era French Chanson. Hallett and pianist Emily Manzo perform the music live.

– Décor by Creative Director, Bjorn Amelan with Video Design by Janet Wong.- Lighting design by long-time collaborator Robert Wierzel

– Costumes by Liz Prince