Dance company We All Fall Down’s latest piece Because You Never Asked powerfully preserves a Holocaust survivor’s memories and relationship with her grandson through movement.
Capturing the stories of the last remaining Holocaust survivors is a challenge in and of itself. If I have learned anything from my experience trying to ask my own grandparents for more information (my family did not know they were Holocaust survivors until a few years ago), it is that there are some survivors who would reasonably prefer not to relive that trauma. In the case of Because You Never Asked – a multimedia live dance and recorded audio piece playing at Summerhall in this year’s Fringe – creator and sound designer Roger White’s grandmother was luckily willing to share her story of escaping Nazi Germany in 1938.
Dance, though, is not something I would have pegged to complement a survivor account. But when I sat down to watch Because You Never Asked, I quickly realized that I was in for something unique. In this hour of dreamlike documentary – a signature style of Canadian choreographer Helen Simard – this piece delicately unpacks the tender transmission of memories from grandmother to grandson. I was vaguely aware of history being preserved accessibly, in a way no other medium could achieve for this particular story.
I do wish we could have sat with just the audio a bit more at the beginning, getting to know our characters before the visual element of the production took over. The movement sometimes felt too abstracted from the audio, distracting from what was otherwise a cohesive piece. For the most part, though, the ensemble’s use of repetitive sequences, raw gesture work, and sensory overwhelm worked ingeniously to lift White’s grandmother’s harrowing account.
As I reflect on the piece and my own grandparents’ stories, I also realize that dance offers something that most Holocaust stories lack: embodiment. Put simply, the Nazis’ final solution was to erase certain types of bodies. So witnessing vibrant, moving bodies onstage while Clark shares her memories is not only a way to more palatably take in her horrific story; it also becomes a way of using art to reclaim what has been lost. Because You Never Asked made me aware of the miracle of my own body, especially when I consider my grandparents’ experience – something I sadly only discovered after they passed. While I may no longer be able to ask them the questions that might forever remain unanswered, the company behind Because You Never Asked has certainly given me hope that there may be other ways to turn back time, even if the memories can now only be my own.
Because You Never Asked is a part of the 2025 Edinburgh Fringe and plays until 25 August. Get tickets here: https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/because-you-never-asked