What Becomes Treasure

Came back yesterday from London after a much needed break. It was wonderful to see that part of my family again. They are very dear to me and I am grateful to my mother for making sure that we knew who our relatives were! Everywhere I went I met people who had stories of immigrant parents, even at the Lido swimming pool!... Today we had the chance to talk with Michaela Maria Mueller, the author of several books. One of them is about a Somali family that she has followed from their journey out of Somalia ending up in Germany. Unfortunately the book is in German so I can't read it just yet. We had a very thoughtful conversation about what it means to be a refugee and why there is so much resistance in some parts of society. What is the cause? We also talked about How different generations have dealt with the Holocauset here in Germany. We discussed the differences in the way the Ukranians have been looked after vs. the way refugees from Muslim or African nations have been treated. ...

August 24th. Today we returned to Berlin from Schwedt and tomorrow I will leave for London to see my cousins - all 2nd generation survivors like me. I will take a break from the blog for the next 5 days. So let me fill in some of what's been going on the last couple of days. On Monday the 22nd, Elizabeth and I worked hard in the morning in the dance studio on movement ideas. Afterwards we spent some time with Thomas talking more about ideas for the project. By this time I was missing both my jacket and my dance pants. It took a couple of days for me to work out where the pants had disappeared (I had used them to keep my pants dry when we had dinner on the veranda overlooking the canal). The pants are never to be seen again. We tried going back to find them but the staff thought we were looking for black funeral flowers instead of Schwartz hosen... We traced my jacket back to Thomas's van through a photo that EB took. On Tuesday morning I set out after breakfast on my own to ...

August 21, 1922 A day off? not really. No meetings or rehearsals but lots of walking. I took a walk in the morning and found my way directly to the house that Jake and I think was the Oltersdorf home where my Aunt Lisa lived through the war with her kids until they escaped the Russian bombing of Schwedt. I walked about 45 minutes scouting for possible stations if there's going to be an outdoor performance in July '23 which is Thomas's idea. Then Elizabeth and I set out in the afternoon to visit the Stadtmuseum - I was thinking that the Tobacco exhibit would still be there (it isn't). Since we were early, we walked on along the canal for quite a way looking in on people's gardens and talking about our own gardens at home. There are a lot of high rise buildings here in the center of town - block apartments with balconies. There's loads of green space too and lots of beautiful sculptures but not a lot of flowers so it was nice to get far enough out of the center to...

8/20/22 It's Saturday. Thought it would be a non-working day. We were invited to the countryside again, this time to the village of Lunow for the adult celebration of Thomas' niece. We were picked up a little before 11 am in the great old yellow Mercedes van that has toured most of this hemisphere - been to India and back, for instance. Before we could leave, Thomas wanted to share his latest ideas about the project: a large suitcase with items that must fit like a puzzle but there's never enough room, for instance. Since he had started the day with adding yeast to flour, he thought about unleavened bread - not even enough time to let the bread rise before you leave. Then we headed out of town with a stop at a little farmers market where he was hoping to pick up some rye and wheat for his bread making. This was in Stolzenhagen where the art community Ponderosa is. The rye & wheat were not there unfortunately for T. but we had a really nice drive. Sometimes it gets reall...

August 19. A short post. We had the morning free and since I felt under the weather I slept again after we returned from the little open market and the post office. At 3 pm I met Thomas at the Kunstshcule (Art school) and met some of his collegues from the pottery studio. He is shifting from teaching dance and has taken up pottery as something he will also teach. We reviewed our plans and some of the challenges we still have. At 5 pm we worked again with the three women from Francesca's class: Regina, Edith and Christiana. Finally got some stuff on video - good stuff I think. These women are so fun and open to trying our ideas. We started this time with introductions and after sharing a little about where this project began (back in 2015 when I brought some of my Mom's things to the town museum), Christiana shared that her grandparents were refugees from Sudentenland at the end of the war. Tomorrow we are invited to the birthday celebration of a 7 year old niece of Thomas. Back...

August 18th. I can't believe this is only the 2nd full day in Schwedt. Each day feels like a week! Yesterday I had a really productive exchange with my collaborators Elizabeth Birmingham and Thomas Maucher with really great ideas being embodied. It's such a privilege to work with experienced performers who have choreography and teaching creds too. None of us are young, athletic dancers anymore but we can still capture the essence. One exercise: The childrens games we play that teach us to exclude and threaten others - very revealing. My favorite experiment was the work we did with Elizabeth's idea using crumpled paper. Unfortunately there is no internet yet at the Art school where we are working and I didn't have my camera. We worked from 11 to 2 or so and then, after grabbing my camera at the hotel, we were treated to a visit to Thomas' home - an old farm in a tiny village in the countryside. He and his wife have been working on restoring it for about 6 years. The ...

8/17/22 Elizabeth and I arrived in Schwedt yesterday around 3 pm. It was another hot day and it was a relief to be able to splash some water on our faces and lie down for a bit. At 4:30 or so we ventured out to find the Kitchen on the Run where we were to meet Thomas Maucher. The kitchen truck was set up in front of one of the old churches in a plaza. We passed by a man in a yellow shirt and straw hat on the opposite side of the large tree in the middle of the plaza. It turned out to be Thomas. A woman named Grit came to us and welcomed us. As she heard about why we were there she began to talk about why she was involved in the project. Everything was in German but I could see that she was very enthusiastic. She works in a bank but has become very involved in community projects. (I have emailed her the German version of the project announcement that describes what we are trying to do.) Since I'm not able to download to the blog yet, I'll post it, along with pictures, on the An...

August 15/16 Here I am, after a long day of travel, in Berlin. It's getting to be the wee hours of the morning but after crashing for a couple of hours I am now wide awake. What better time to write? I want to go back to the birth of this project - Schwedt in 2018. When I offered to lead a dance class/workshop while in town for the laying of Maria's Stolpersteine I knew almost nothing about the city or the people there. Thanks to Anke Grodon from the Stadtmuseum, I was put in touch with a couple of people working in the performing arts in Schwedt (Waltrud Bautsch and Thomas Maucher). I arrived with my husband in Schwedt in the afternoon after a long day traveling by train from Munich and nervously waited at our hotel to get instructions about where to go to meet Thomas and his group of dancers. Finally I went outside to do my pacing and after a while saw a small group of people approaching in the near dark - a man and some young girls. As they got closer I could see that they w...

August 13 Today I spent the day packing. Lots of things to sort and distribute between my carry on and my back pack. I'm bringing a variety of technical gadgets: my external cd player (cause that's how I do music); an external video camera that can be turned in different directions to capture more than what appears on the laptop monitor (I plan to record some stuff using zoom); an external video storage unit, etc etc. Took a break in the afternoon to have dinner at the county fair. That seems to have cleared my mind so that I can take care of a few more things on the to-do list. Where did I leave off in my last post? Not sure, so I'll write a little about what's been on my mind the last few days. I guess I'm still "scratching" (as Twyla Tharp calls it), my ears and eyes open for bits of information and inspiration to guide me. I very much feel like I've just set something in motion because I was curious to dig deeper. Some people think this is a family...

August 9, 2022 Today I am starting a blog to share notes about the project I am calling What Becomes Treasure. I leave in 5 days for Germany. I am flying to Berlin via Amsterdam and will take a train to my mother's home town of Schwedt (now a large city) which is NE of Berlin on the border with Poland, along the river Ode. I have wanted to return there ever since I spent three days there in 2018. My first visit was in 2015 when I traveled to a number of places in Europe, wanting to stand on the coordinates of the places my mother wrote about. I thought that if I went myseslf to Warsaw I could learn what had actually happened to her sister after her last postcard in 1942. I needed to visit Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia where my grandmother was a prisoner. It was the trip that allowed me to tackle the Holocaust and it's affect on me. The end result was the dance film "In the Shadow". The visit in 2018 was initiated by the wonderful women from the Stadt Museum of Schw...