by Leigh Witchel
“The Final Veil” was an elegant evening about an ugly topic. A “movement opera,” the creative team behind it included JL Marlor, who composed the music and wrote the libretto, and choreography by former Graham principal Katherine Crockett and Cassandra Rosebeetle, who also played the main character, Franceska Mann.
Mann was a Polish dancer who had gained some fame outside of Poland. Photos showed a long-legged young woman, aerial and vivacious. Born in 1917, she died at Auschwitz at the age of 26. Her story, like most stories of the Holocaust, is of what someone had to do to survive. But Mann’s story is compelling because at the point of no return, she decided she had nothing to lose.
The performance took place in “the cell theater,” which had set up risers on the ground floor of a Chelsea townhouse for a tight but intimate evening that began with the high, keening notes of a violin. Smoke curled from the ground at the side of the stage, was it from a train? Or something worse . . .
We first saw Mann lying on a table, completely naked, as a recorded male voice recited the results of an imaginary autopsy. The lights went out, and the cast rolled her down the aisle past us, still naked but with darkness as a cloak.
The personnel seemed to be grouped in quartets. Four singers came first, in long black dresses that recalled choir robes, singing words from accounts of the Holocaust. Three dancers (Rosebeetle made the fourth) were also in black, short sleeve dresses with long skirts. The costumes had a similar utilitarian quality as from Martha Graham’s dances from the same time. And up a flight of stairs, hidden from our view, a string quartet played.
The next scene took place in the nightclub where Mann performed in Warsaw, the Melody Palace, with Rosebeetle doing a solo. The choreography had to take into account the size and limitations of the performing space. It was a simple waltz in soft slippers, what you’d be able to do on a crowded living room floor.
“And the Jewish quarter became a ghetto,” the women sang. Despite the creators’ classification, “The Final Veil” felt more like a cantata than an opera, because of its heavy use of voices in chorus, and especially the feeling of an evening of exposition, stories recounted more than action.
“Today I am not sure if what I wrote is true.” Charlotte Delbo wrote in “Auschwitz and After,” another source for the libretto. Even though it acted out the story, “The Final Veil” dealt more with the memory of the story than the story itself. The telling of the narrative, often in voiceover, was as vivid as the live singing and dancing.
“Today I am not sure if what I wrote is true, but I am sure it is truthful.” Rosebeetle danced a second solo representing a performance after the closing of the ghetto, and made a similar dance feel more mournful and yearning. The dancers and singers linked arms to dance a Jewish line dance, a hora, and the narration explained the rumors of how to buy your way out of the country.
From there, transit. The cast rearranged their chairs, not in lines, but a triangle, for a feeling more like a congregation rather than a train. “Palestine, Paraguay, Honduras, Ecuador,” the women sang the names of four possible destinations where they thought they might be headed after they were exchanged in Switzerland, until they realized the train was not headed in the direction it should have been.
A line sung from Dan Pagis’ poem, “Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway Car”: “If you see my older son Cain, son of man . . .” Rosebeetle stood on a chair to worry and lament amid the growing panic. Again, the dancing, the choreography, and even the look had the feel of early Graham. The cast sat and clapped for a simple, but effective chair dance.
Arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau was signified by singing the words above the gate every Jewish child learned about in Hebrew School: “Arbeit Macht Frei.” Their oppressors were invisible, a voice stating the dull and quotidian as if what happened next would be dull and quotidian. “Please remember what hook you have put your clothing on.” Men were only heard here, not seen.
The singers sang a list:
43,000 pairs of shoes
38,000 suitcases
15,000 pounds of human hair
This was what was left behind when Auschwitz was liberated, as well as
Four crematoria
One state of the art hospital
Two mass graves
and the desperate need, both of the victims and victimizers, to document and enumerate.
Each dancer walked with to the corner and opened the suitcase she was carrying, taking out shoes and putting them on a pile. Here they were ballet slippers and pointe shoes. And one child’s slipper.
More numbers:
15,000 Roma
50,000 prisoners of war
1.1 million Jews
“It did not take me long to figure out what I was doing.” Mann’s imagined thoughts, sung. Rosebeetle brought her suitcase, but instead of slippers took out a pair of red high heels. The dancers embraced in fear and farewell.
The accounts of what happened next vary in details, though not in outcome. Filip Müller’s in “Eyewitness Auschwitz: three years in the gas chambers,” published in 1979, is what he heard when he arrived shortly after it happened. Realizing the guards were watching her, Mann turned her disrobing into a striptease, lifting her skirt, taking off her stocking. Finally down to her brassiere and having the two guards focused on her, she seized the moment, jammed her high heel into one of their foreheads and as he screamed in pain, grabbed his pistol and started shooting, killing one guard and permanently injuring another.
As well as being a trained dancer and a skater, Rosebeetle also is a burlesque artist, which should have come in handy. But in a contrary interpretation, Rosebeetle did a slow, sullen disrobing. No smile, not even pretending to enjoy it. It’s the pretending that would have made sense. If Müller’s account is accurate, Mann was trying to fool two lecherous guards.
Moving trance-like, Rosebeetle first removed her skirt, then her blouse, and finally her panties until she was completely nude. Here, at the point of Mann’s story that had the most action, the show went mute, instead having a curtain drop in front of Rosebeetle with the rest of the narrative told in words painted on the curtain. In all accounts, guards arrived with machine guns and all the women were killed.
“It is just so difficult to recollect.” Another quote sung, this time from Susan Warsinger, born in 1929 who fled as a child to France and then to the United States, and who wrote those words at age 89. And for all of us, not just to recollect, but to document.
Mann was a survivor; she got transferred out of the Warsaw ghetto before it was liquidated and purchased citizenship documents from South America, hoping to escape there. What she did to achieve this is open to debate. Sources in Polish say that Mann was a German collaborator; a choice to survive the Nazis forced on many others. One source placed her as being killed by the underground before these events could have happened.
Warsinger’s words, sung like a Greek chorus, remind us of the importance of recording history . Even in the present, and with the amount of recorded material on the Internet seemingly there forever, things disappear in a matter of years, not decades. Or they get buried in the crush of new ephemera.
The Holocaust is the most poignant example of in our time of history being gaslit. Even without deniers, memories shift and fade. Even with the heroic efforts of people risking their lives to keep diaries, details got lost, or were inevitably in conflict. We live in an age when no one agrees on facts. Simply knowing what happened matters. The facts disappear, but the interpretation lingers.
More than anything, it seemed “The Final Veil” aimed to be a beautiful elegy. The polish and fullness of the show, using singers, dancers and musicians, must not be ignored, nor the effort and hard work of independent production. Because of the setting, the dancers were more constrained than the singers, who, especially Katie Lipow, sang impressively and were moving. The choreography and dancing was more basic, but virtuosity wasn’t essential.
If anything can be discussed about the choices in “The Final Veil,” it was to gravitate to the inaction of the story, not the action. An elegant, dignified cantata, but there might have been less elegance and more theater. Maybe, as with Mann, this was a moment for action, as much as dignity.
copyright © 2022 by Leigh Witchel
“The Final Veil”
the cell theatre, New York, NY
July 15, 2022
Cover: Cassandra Rosebeetle in “The Final Veil.” Photo © Frank Padrone.
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