Prometheus Dance’s Apokalypsis

Features Survivor Stella Penzer

 

By Susie Davidson

Advocate Correspondent

 

BOSTON - The dark universal face of human displacement is portrayed in Apokalypsis, which will be performed by the Prometheus Dance company on Feb. 14-16 and Feb. 20-23 at the Boston Center for the Arts Cyclorama, 539 Tremont St.

 

Created and choreographed by artistic directors Diane Arvanites-Noya and Tommy Neblett of Prometheus, a 15-year-old dance/theater group based in Cambridge, Apokalypsis is a stark examination of forced exile and the will to survive.

 

“Passages include images of surreal dreamlike quality, amid the stark immediacy of violence and fear,” explained publicist Juan Martinez of Brookline’s Darkhorse Media Inc. “Integral to the narrative is a massive, stage-length set reminiscent of the Berlin Wall that the dancers climb and hurl themselves against in desperation,” he continued. “In addition, numerous black umbrellas, rocks and trees are used as symbols of fragility, safety and uncertain fate.”

 

Founded by Arvanites-Noya with an aim to create performance, in collaboration with composers and designers, with social themes, the company, through adult performances at venues and schools, outreach and media coverage, has reached nearly 500,000 audience members.

 

The 90-minute performance, named one of the Ten Best Dance Performances of the year by the Boston Globe and featured on WGBH’s Greater Boston Arts program, was originally staged in February, 2000. With an original score by John Kusiak and environment design by Beth Galston, it features Prometheus dancers, 20 community dancers and Boston Conservatory dance majors, as well as six mature, retired dancers aged 50-80.

 

One of the six is 80-year-old Stella (Slawin) Penzer of Newton, who knows firsthand the plight that she personifies. A survivor of World War II Poland, she miraculously escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto as a teenager, while learning of her family’s annihilation shortly thereafter.

 

Her parents ran a Bundist-influenced library in Otwock, Poland. “We heard about Kristallnacht, but couldn’t do anything,” she said. “Librarians aren’t rich – we had no arms, no nothing. We just listened.” As the war clouds thickened, her mother urged her to become a nurse, as she could take that occupation anywhere. “In Poland, if someone said to you,  ‘you are Jewish?  You don’t look like a Jew!’, that was the greatest compliment,” Penzer recalled. “I had dark hair and eyes and did not look like a Pole. Yet, my command of the Polish language may have saved my life.” She wound up working in the Jewish hospital inside the Warsaw Ghetto, from which she graduated in 1940 and still has the pin. Her boyfriend Urek was able to procure falsified papers for them by purchasing birth certificates of deceased children from a priest.

 

In the summer of 1942, as Jews were rounded into cattle cars from the ghetto, Penzer was smuggled into Lvov, where she worked, as Sabina Gasiorowska, as a servant for a German secretary. “I felt that by working in the lion’s throat, I would be much safer than working for the Poles,” she explained. “The Germans did not have a nose for Jews mascarading as Poles.”

 

She learned that her parents and brother had perished, along with her aunt and an uncle, Abram Wilendorf, who as a policeman, did not have to go. “But when my aunt and cousin were put into the cattle car, he threw his police cap at the oppressors and went in with them,” she tearfully recounted. Urek was caught as a Pole as a part of the resistance movement, and went to Auschwitz and Mauthausen.

 

Still masquerading as a Pole, Penzer ended up working at a felt factory in Bodenbach for the Germans until liberation. At the displaced persons’ camp, while trying to prove she was a Jew, she was fortunate to encounter an official who knew a schoolmate of hers. “At the DP there were notes plastered all over the walls,” she said, again through tears. “Though it was futile, people were searching for their relatives.” She was able to locate one aunt in Brussels, and at the camp, met her future husband, Victor Penzer, a medical student who eventually graduated from Tufts and practiced dentistry. They had three children; he died in 1999 at the age of 80.

 

“Stella adds the truth and experience to the piece that we need,” said dancer Jason Dionne. “Genocide and refugees have no specificity, no time, no place,” added dancer Bryan Steele. “They occur through history. She brings reality here.”

 

Penzer has been a folk dancer for 25 years. “My aunt Gutka had friends who would dance at my parents’ house,” she recalled. “I’d sneak in the room and watch them. From them on I was craving to dance, but I didn’t until I heard about the Folk Arts Center in Cambridge, run by Marianne Taylor. She is 73 now and still dancing.” Taylor’s daughter Andy, a member of Prometheus, ran into Penzer recently, and told her that they were looking for a senior dancer.

 

So two days per week, Penzer, who also dances every Sunday evening with MIT’s three hours-long dance session, walks a half mile to the Newton Center T station, takes the T into Central Square, goes up 5 flights of stairs at the Dance Complex (no big deal, she says), and dances at least two hours, to rehearse what, for her, is the story of her life.

 

The performance, funded in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, will run Friday and Saturday, Feb. 14 and 15, at 8 p.m.; Sunday, Feb. 16 at 6 p.m.; Thursday-Saturday, Feb. 20-22, at 8 p.m.; and Sunday, Feb. 23, at 6 p.m. Tickets are on sale at the BCA Cyclorama box office at 617-426-ARTS (2787). Prices are $25 for general admission and $15 for students and seniors. For information, email jmartinez@darkhorsemediainc.com.