Making of Memoryhouse

Making of Memoryhouse is a documentary film following choreographer Melissa Barak as she dives in head first with her creative team in order to bring a ballet inspired by the Holocaust to emotional life. Through performance and rehearsal clips, as well as interviews and powerful survivor testimony, we are brought into the creative process where Barak works on building a theatrical dance experience like no other.

A conversation will take place after the film featuring:

• Melissa Barak

  • Barak is a choreographer and former professional dancer with New York City Ballet (NYCB) and Los Angeles Ballet. She has created new works for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Richmond Ballet, Dayton Ballet, American Repertory Ballet, Sacramento Ballet, Los Angeles Ballet, and Barak Ballet, a Los Angeles based contemporary ballet company she founded in 2013. Melissa has been awarded the Mae L. Wein and Choo San Goh awards for Outstanding Choreography and has been named a Dance Magazine “Top 25 to Watch”. She was also the inaugural recipient of the Virginia B. Toulmin Fellowship for Women Choreographers through Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU. Barak was appointed to be the new artistic director of Los Angeles Ballet in August 2022 where she looks forward to ushering in a new era of great dance for the company and the greater Los Angeles arts scene.

• Erika Fabian

  • Erika was born in Budapest, Hungary. In 1944, Erika's mother managed to secure false papers for her family, and they lived under Christian identities in Budapest for the rest of the war. Erika left Hungary in 1956, and she developed a career in theater, writing and photography. She has written and had produced several plays, published over 25 books including novels, travel and photography books, many magazine articles and is in the finishing stages of publishing a historical autobiography describing her experiences during the 1940s and 1950s in Hungary during WWII and living under Soviet Communism.

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 Conversation moderated by Holocaust Museum LA's Chief Impact Officer, Jordanna Gessler.

• The granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, Jordanna provides strategic leadership for the education and archive departments at Holocaust Museum LA. With over fifteen years of work in the Holocaust Studies field, Jordanna is a visionary leader with a proven track record in leading program, research, and educational initiatives. Jordanna studied Holocaust history as an undergraduate at the University of Vermont and as a graduate student at the University of Haifa. She conducted research in the Righteous Among the Nations Department at Yad Vashem and won the 2014 Yad Vashem Award for Research. Jordanna has written articles and presented internationally on topics including contemporary Antisemitism, fiction and the Holocaust, art and resistance, and teaching empathy.  Passionate about animal rights, civic engagement, advocacy, and education, she is an active member of several non-profit organizations and sits on the board of the Council of American Jewish Museums, which was named by the White House as part of the National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism.

  
  

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