Dance Performance in 5 Acts

Intergenerational Trauma Dance Performance in 5 Acts

Performance Vision Statement

Our goal is to create a performance that invites audiences into the emotional and transformative journey of intergenerational trauma—a legacy carried not just through memory, but through the body, gesture, and silence.

Inspired by Gabrielle Roth’s 5Rhythms—Flowing, Staccato, Chaos, Lyrical, and Stillness—this work moves through five energetic landscapes, tracing how trauma shapes, distorts, and ultimately transforms us.

This is not just a story of inherited sorrow. It is also a journey toward integration—a passage from fragmentation to wholeness, from silence to voice, from isolation to connection.

Through dance, narration, music, and image, we offer a living ritual—one that invites not only remembrance, but the possibility of renewal.

The Performance

Each segment of the performance begins with an immersive visual experience: a projected video unfolding across the walls, evoking the sensation of a continuous journey. This recurring motif—movement through space and time—acts as both literal and symbolic terrain. Whether evoking migration, exile, or return, it gestures toward the thresholds we cross between what was, what is, and what might yet become.

Each video will be crafted using raw, unprocessed footage, curated music, and rhythm-specific language—woven together with the aid of AI tools—to evoke the emotional and energetic landscape of each rhythm.

Our musical selections draw from a deep well of global movement communities—a mosaic of soundscapes that carry wide emotional range and cultural nuance. The music sets the tone, pulse, and tempo of each rhythm, laying the ground for what follows.

As the music and imagery evolve, a third layer enters: the voice. A narrated reflection or short story—approximately 400–500 words—guides the audience into the inner terrain of the segment. These texts are aligned with the rhythm they accompany and are inspired by Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey. Like Campbell’s archetypal protagonist, each storyteller traverses an inner odyssey—one of rupture, exile, transformation, and return.

Once the narration fades, the dance begins.

Each rhythm—Flowing, Staccato, Chaos, Lyrical, and Stillness—acts as a somatic map, revealing the energetic and emotional cycles that shape our lives and histories:

• Flowing connects us to our yin nature—grounded, receptive, circular.
• Staccato embodies yang—clear, defined, directional.
• Chaos dissolves boundaries, inviting surrender, release, and reorganization.
• Lyrical emerges from freedom—expansive, playful, where individuality is reawakened.
• Stillness arrives as a place of integration—a return, bearing the wisdom of the journey.

Our ensemble features dancers from diverse movement communities, bringing a richness of lived experiences, cultural inheritances, and embodied vocabularies. Choreography will balance structured form with intuitive improvisation—allowing each dancer to inhabit their own edge between containment and release. The result will be a performance of layered texture and emotional resonance—a convergence of bodies, breath, memory, and meaning.

This is not just dance.
It is remembrance.
It is ritual.
It is transformation made visible.

Part 1:

The Narration – Flow

My name is Asha.

I was born in Georgia, on land my grandmother never left, though she never really felt free upon it. My people were once enslaved here. My lineage holds stories of shackles, cotton fields, auction blocks—stories that were passed down without words. The silence was the first inheritance.

In my family, we didn’t talk much about history. The past lived in the rhythms of our lives—in how we walked, how we watched our backs, how we carried both strength and sorrow in our bones. It was in my mother’s eyes when a siren wailed. In my uncle’s quiet when he spoke of his youth. In the way my grandmother hummed spirituals while shelling peas on the porch—like prayer wrapped in melody.

They called it resilience. But underneath, I felt something heavy. Something sticky. Like grief that had no name.

As a child, I didn’t know why I cried when I saw the black-and-white photos of lynchings in history books. I didn’t understand why my body tensed in certain neighborhoods, or why my mother taught me to say “yes, ma’am” to any stranger in uniform. The fear didn’t begin with me. It traveled, cell to cell, story to silence, down into my bloodstream.

And yet—I danced.

Even when the sorrow lived in my marrow, I danced. My body always knew what my voice could not yet say. Through movement, I could feel the flow of something ancient. Not just pain, but presence. Not just survival, but grace.

Experts call it epigenetic trauma. I call it remembering with the body. It takes a lifetime to feel it fully, and even longer to begin to transform it. But I believe we can.

Because in the movement, I begin to breathe again—not just for myself, but for the ones who could not.

The Dance – Flowing Rhythm

As the narration fades, the rhythm of Flowing begins to rise.

Six to eight dancers move in unison, lifting a single figure draped in a white cloth—soft, flowing, ancestral. This figure is carried as if through the currents of time—tenderly, reverently—then gently released into a structure resembling an open circle of bent branches, evoking both the cotton fields and a protective nest. It is a place of memory and reawakening.

The dancers move through the space with grounded grace, each step beginning in the sole and spiraling upward. They circle, spiral, yield and receive—breathing through their feet. The lifted figure rises, slowly, to join them.

In Flowing, we root into our yin nature. This rhythm invites us to listen to what moves beneath the surface, to trust the body’s wisdom, to let breath lead. It is the beginning of the journey—a returning to the earth, to the self, to what was always there.

Here, we honor the silence not by filling it, but by moving with it. We begin to speak—not in words, but in presence

Part 2:

The Narration – Staccato

My name is Kenji.

I was born in California, decades after my family was forced into the internment camps during World War II. My grandmother never called it a camp. She said, “We were relocated. For our protection.” Even as a child, I could hear the strain in those words—the way they bent under their own weight.

Trauma didn’t show up in our house like yelling or violence. It showed up in order. Politeness. Good grades. Smiling when you didn’t feel like it. We didn’t talk about what happened—not really. But it was always there, like a quiet metronome ticking beneath the surface of everything.

I remember the photographs: black-and-white faces behind barbed wire, children with tags around their necks like luggage. I remember the day I learned that my father was born in one of those camps—Manzanar. He was just a baby. I asked him about it once. He shrugged and said, “It was what it was.”

That phrase followed me like a shadow.
It was what it was.
As if it didn’t matter.
As if it couldn’t be changed.

But it did matter.
It shaped him. And it shaped me.

He taught me how to walk straight, how to speak clearly, how not to draw attention. “Don’t give them a reason,” he’d say. I didn’t know who they were. Just that they were always watching. That we had to prove ourselves—over and over, no matter how many generations had passed.

And yet, beneath the neatness, the control, the carefulness—I felt something else.
Something unspoken.
Shame.

Not for what we had done, but for having been made to disappear. For being labeled suspect. For not fighting back. I felt it in my bones—the way my body stiffened when someone said, “You speak English so well.” The way my fists clenched when classmates made jokes about chopsticks and kamikaze pilots.

I didn’t have the language for it then. But I do now.
It was intergenerational trauma.
Passed down not just in stories, but in posture. In silence. In the way we braced for judgment before it even came.

They say Staccato is the rhythm of definition. Of the heart and hips.
That makes sense to me.
Because it took movement—sharp, intentional, unapologetic—for me to feel what I was never allowed to say.
I am not your stereotype.
I am not your shadow.
I carry a history of erasure, yes.
But I am here.
And I speak.

The Dance – Staccato Rhythm

The rhythm of Staccato enters like a sudden breath held too long.

A group of dancers moves in sync, dressed in variations of uniform—tight, angular, deliberate. Their bodies strike through space with rhythmic precision, sharp and repeated. Movements mimic the mechanical—like robots cleverly disguised as humans. Amid them, krumping or street-style dancers may erupt—explosive, raw, expressive—pushing the rhythm to its emotional edge.

Staccato is the rhythm of the heart and hips. It belongs to the yang—defined, structured, directional. It gives shape to emotion, allowing us to speak through motion what words often cannot contain. It’s the rhythm where truth takes form, where shame finds edges, where silence cracks.

Through this rhythm, we tap into drive and purpose. We set boundaries. We speak. We confront.
And in doing so, we begin to reclaim the story—not just of what was inherited, but of how it can be redefined.

Part 3:

The Narration – Chaos

My name is Nour.

I was born in Gaza City. The first sound I remember wasn’t my mother’s voice—it was the buzz of drones overhead.
They say babies recognize lullabies.
Mine was sirens.
Airstrikes.
Shouts in the night.

My father once told me, “You were born between two ceasefires. That’s the closest thing to peace we’ve known.” He tried to make it a joke. But the silence afterward said everything.

I come from a family of displaced people. My grandparents fled their village in 1948. They thought they’d return in a week. That week became forever.
Our home in Gaza isn’t where we’re from. But it’s the only place I’ve ever known. And even here, the ground keeps shifting.

I’ve seen buildings collapse like lungs exhaling. I’ve seen my school turned into rubble. I’ve seen my friend’s backpack lying in the street—intact, except for the blood.
There are days when I feel like my body isn’t mine.
It flinches without permission.
It forgets how to rest.

People say trauma lives in the mind.
No. It lives in the nervous system.
In the way your shoulders rise before you even hear the explosion.
In the way you forget to breathe.

For a long time, I didn’t dance. It felt wrong—indulgent.
But one day, after a raid, I went out into the courtyard alone. And I moved. I didn’t think. I didn’t plan. My feet hit the earth like it was the only thing holding me together. My arms flailed. My head spun. My body wept in rhythm.

And something shifted.

Because chaos is not just destruction.
It is the release of what has been held too long.

In that storm of movement, I wasn’t weak.
I wasn’t broken.
I was alive. Fierce. Free—even if just for a moment.

In Gaza, we learn to live inside contradiction.
Grief and tenderness. Rage and love.
We hold joy like a fragile glass—precious because it’s rare.

And when the world burns around us, we keep dancing.
Because in the dance, we remember who we are.
Not victims. Not ghosts.
But people with breath, with blood, with stories that refuse to be erased.

The Dance – Chaos Rhythm

The dancers flood the stage like a storm breaking open.
Exuberant, reckless, alive.
Bodies whirl and shudder, caught in a trance-ecstatic pulse. The line between choreography and surrender blurs, slips away.

Chaos is not an absence of meaning—it is the wild language beneath meaning, the primal undercurrent we rarely allow ourselves to hear. This rhythm is an invitation to unravel. To let go of form, of control, of the small voice that says: “Stay safe.”

Here, in Chaos, the dancers move as if shaken by memory—spines twisting, arms flung wide, feet pounding in patterns that never quite repeat. Bursts of movement erupt from deep within the gut. One dancer may collapse, only to rise again, swept by the current of the group.

Chaos is where everything unspoken gets a voice.
Grief wails. Rage spirals. Joy flickers like a flame refusing to be extinguished.

In the Chaos rhythm, I am called to tap into something raw, untamed, and holy.
Here, in the letting go, I find the edge of transformation.
Here, in the spinning center of disorder, I discover the possibility of becoming new.

Chaos demands we release the grip. And in that release, something unexpected cracks open—hidden joy, buried grief, wild knowing.

We lose ourselves.
And sometimes, that’s the only way to come home.

Part 4:

The Narration – Lyrical

The year is 2004.
Ten years after the Rwandan genocide.

We’re in Kigali, on the outskirts of the city. The hills are green, deceptively peaceful. Children are kicking a soccer ball in a dusty lot, laughter echoing across the valley. Life is returning, but the air still carries the echo of something unspeakable. You feel it in the silence between conversations. In the way people look away too quickly. In the names that are never spoken.

One of those children—barefoot, fast, joyful—is my brother. And the girl watching from the edge of the field, sketching the scene with a piece of charcoal on torn paper—that’s me.

My name is Imara. It means “strong” in Kinyarwanda.

My parents survived the genocide. Barely. They lost nearly everyone—siblings, cousins, entire villages vanished in a matter of weeks. They never told me much. Just fragments. A story here, a photo there. They thought they were protecting me. Maybe they were.

But even silence carries a weight.
And eventually, I began to feel it.

Not as a burden—but as a calling.

One day I discovered movement. A local group had started offering traditional Rwandan dance classes to kids in the neighborhood. I had never seen anything like it. Graceful, expressive, grounded in the earth and reaching toward the sky. It was like watching grief dissolve into rhythm.

I joined without telling anyone.

In that dance studio, I found my inheritance—not only of pain, but of resilience. I began to understand that my body could carry joy as well as sorrow. That I could belong to both history and hope. That rhythm could be a form of remembering.

We danced to the beat of cowhide drums and soaring voices. We danced to remember the ones who were lost—and to honor the ones who survived.

I used to think survival meant silence. Now I know it means creation.

And like the artist who takes ash and turns it into color, I want to make something beautiful out of what was broken.

Because even after genocide, something tender still grows. Even after fire, something luminous can rise.

The Dance – Lyrical Rhythm

Across the stage stretches a long, undulating line—a fiery ribbon of fabric, shimmering red, rippling like a living wave. It rises and falls, bending and swaying as if it has its own breath.

The dancers leap and spin around it, using the line as both anchor and invitation. Their movements mirror a river’s fluidity, or molten glass, twisting into unpredictable patterns, capturing the spirit of creation in real time.

In these moments, I feel the dervish awaken within me—spinning, head tilted, one palm turned upward, the other downward. A vessel, a bridge, a conduit between heaven and earth. Boundaries dissolve. The ordinary yields to the extraordinary.

Lyrical is the rhythm of grace, of breath, of rediscovery. It’s the rhythm where we shed the armor of identity and become weightless again—guided not by choreography, but by trust.

Here, dance becomes a language of uplift. We are no longer tethered to what hurt us, but released into what moves us.

In Lyrical, we dance not just to express, but to be expressed—by life, by memory, by the unseen forces that shape us.

Part 5:

The Narration – Stillness

Trauma is painful.
It drove me inward—into solitude, into the refuge of my own mind. It made trust difficult. It made it hard to ask for help. So I learned to rely on myself.

But as the years pass, something inside softens. Slowly, I begin to see it differently—not as a curse, but as a teacher. Trauma has given me the gift of introspection, the power of creativity, the deep pull toward meaning.

It gently, persistently invites me to set down the weapons I turn on myself—and to reach instead for forgiveness, compassion, connection, love.

Healing is not a destination.
It’s a practice. A rhythm.
It begins again and again—as many times as it takes.

I remember one moment vividly.

My friend Giora and I were standing atop a crematorium in Birkenau, just above the flat green grasslands. The forest stretched far beyond. There was no one else there—just us, the land, the past. It was late autumn. The sky hung heavy with gray clouds, but at the edge, a thin silver lining glowed. The green fields gave no clue to the ash buried beneath.

We were talking quietly, as children of survivors do. I had just made an odd reference to General MacArthur—“I shall return!”—when something stopped us mid-sentence.

A young girl was walking across the field, not far from where we stood. She wore a white skirt, a pale yellow sweater, a backpack. Probably on her way home from school.

We fell silent.

The scene unfolded like a black-and-white film—except for the girl, alive in color, luminous against the muted world.

“Surreal,” Giora murmured.

The strange thing was how ordinary it felt.
The same sky. The same earth.
Then, now, always.

And in that moment, I realized something:
I can choose how to see it.

I can meet it with anger, with grievance, with the weight of sacrilege—how dare this place be reduced to a shortcut?
Or I can see her as something else: young, pure, innocent.
A living thread of color woven through sorrow.

She is hope.
She is the future.

The Dance – Stillness Rhythm

The hall dims. The music softens.
A circle of dancers moves in deliberate, unhurried motion. Each shift, each breath, is measured in inches—quiet waves of attention. Bodies lean, brush, fold, creating a fragile tapestry of grace.

One by one, they slip away, fading like dusk into nightfall.
Until only two remain—my companion and I.

We continue, locked in a silent dialogue, an intimate contact dance where our bodies whisper what words cannot hold.

The stage becomes a sanctuary.
Here, we listen with skin and bone, with presence, with trust.

As the final crescendo approaches, the music ebbs—tapering into stillness.
But I remain.
I move slowly, almost imperceptibly—caught between sound and silence, between time and timelessness.

Seconds stretch, become moments, become something beyond measure.

And as the last notes dissolve, I linger—
a figure suspended between worlds,
cradled by the invisible music of what remains.

The Stillness rhythm is not absence—it is presence.

It is the quiet space where breath meets bone, where motion folds into reflection, where we return to ourselves.

Stillness is not about freezing the body,
but softening into deep listening.

It is where clarity and insight emerge—
not by force, but by surrender.

Stillness invites us to let go.
To be here.
To be.

Closing Reflection

In the end,
this performance is not about perfection…
or resolution…
or arriving at some fixed destination.

It is about movement—
the ongoing, imperfect,
and profoundly human dance
we all share
as we carry our histories forward.

Intergenerational trauma teaches us
that pain can echo across time…
across skin…
across silence.

But it also teaches us this:
healing moves in spirals—
not in straight lines.

There will be moments of falling apart.
Of chaos.
Of returning to old patterns.

And there will be moments of lightness…
of grace…
of surprising clarity.

The deeper truth is this:

Healing is not something we do alone.

It lives in relationship—
in community…
in witness…
in shared breath
and shared motion.

As we close,
may we remember
that every rhythm we have moved through tonight—
Flowing, Staccato, Chaos, Lyrical, and Stillness—
lives in each of us.

May we carry their wisdom forward…

Dancing our own lives
with a little more tenderness,
a little more courage,
and a little more light.