Dreams

Photo: Ger van Leeuwen
On this photo: Anne Hyde

Choreographer: Anna Sokolow

For some time prior to the creation of this piece, Anna Sokolow had been having troubled dreams. She decided to explore them through dance, and the resulting composition was a wrenching exploration of the demons that can haunt our minds as we sleep. Only after she finished the ballet however, did Sokolow realize what the piece was truly about. Finding herself staring at the concentration camp numbers on a man's arm, she realized that when her dreams began, she had been reading André Schwartz-Bart's ‘The Last of the Just’, a groundbreaking novel about the death camps. The novel had prompted her dreams, which had in turn prompted the dance. Therefore, 'Dreams' isn't just an allegory of hopelessness and despair, an abstract sketch of the internal horrors of nightmares, but also a literal complaint against everything that happened to the Jewish people during the Holocaust.