Schindlers List Thesis

Activity One - Choreographic Intention
The dance ‘The Oppression of the Jewish Race’ was based on the stimulus ‘Schindlers List’ directed by Steven Spielberg. The dance is in narrative structure based on the journey of the Jewish race from freedom to oppression. The feelings within this dance vary. In the first section, the dance begins with a light playfulness where happiness and hope are portrayed by the dancers. This hopefulness gradually fade however, as the dance steadily progresses into bleakness and has a numbing quality to it. The dancers continue in this despair with outwards signs of pain being expressed. The feeling in the end section of the dance is one of utter hopelessness and anguish. The dance concludes with this feeling as it is how the Jews felt by the end of the Holocaust and as many of their lives ended when the Holocaust was taking place during World War II. This was the motivations that the choreographer used to choreograph this dance. The overall choreographic intention is to convey the oppression of the Jewish race. Through
Our black dresses are taken off and the dancers are ‘naked’. Each of the dancers begins by raising their heads in unison as if to look at the ‘shower heads’ that release the gas. The expression is a mixture of hope and utter despair. The music then drops and the dancer’s shoulders hunch over and it is if they had been punched in the stomach. All the dancers then interact with one another as they slowly die. The last person dies as the violin ends, with a single lifted hand that comes shakily down as the dance ends. This death symbolises how the Jews dies as one group, their dignity stripped away and their race slandered. I had to practise this is a lot with another dancer and working together to try and project the death of our characters. This help to show the intention of how they still helped each other even as they were