Melting Dance and Healing Arts in one Drastic Action

An ingenious way to raise funds and consciousness in New York City

                                                    by Adina Dabija

Last spring I was delighted to participate in a very special event blending healing arts with dance in an extremely original way. It was a health fair organized in Manhattan, New York, by dancer and massage therapist Aviva Geismar in order to raise funds for her Drastic Action dance company and also to help her friends from various healing arts fields advertise different types of bodywork, while giving the public the opportunity to learn about different healing modalities. In a huge open space, about 20 therapists were doing some sort of bodywork in the same time, which, along with the dance show excerpts, was giving a very dynamic flavor to the event. It was sure a very energetic place! The therapists generously donated the small compensations offered by the public for their bodywork sample to the organizers, to help the production of a new show.

This was not only a very creative way to raise funds, but also brought up the profound relationship between expression and healing. Dance, as well as the healing process of a disease, is all about expression. The disease is just the opposite of that. It is the suppression of  the expression, it is the inability to release the constrained emotions. "There is a lot of common territory between massage and improvisation: both need a basic structure, but once you have that, you can play with it and effect the other person's energy. Massage is a little like performing." - Geismar believes.

Geismar founded Drastic Action in 1996 and she is also teaching massage classes at The Swedish Institute College of Health Sciences in New York. Her choreographic work represents a cathartic release of  the inhibited emotions of violence victims, in an attempt to heal open wounds from the past. Apparently, the social trauma she was marked by lies deep in her Jewish blood. Her grandparents grew up in the Jewish community in Breisach, Germany. After their marriage, they moved to Mannheim where they raised three children, including Aviva's father, Ludwig Geismar. In 1939, at age 18, Ludwig immigrated to the United States, but his parents were unable to escape the Nazis and died in Auschwitz. As a first generation American, Aviva Geismar had no direct exposure to German culture nor the Holocaust, yet her dances gravitate toward tragic and un-resolvable situations and her movement quality remembers of German expressionist dance. In 2003 she and her group performed in Breisach, Germany, improvising on the streets and aiming to heal the space and the wounds of the Holocaust survivors. "We filled the space with color and energy", remembers Geismar. In March 2008 Drastic Action will perform "Line of Descent" at DANCE NEW AMSTERDAM in Lower Manhattan. The starting point for this work was Geismar's experience in Breisach. Given current political events in the U.S. and abroad, Geismar's work melds her personal legacy with issues relevant in many parts of the world.

Drastic Action works are remarkable by their purity and austerity, remembering somehow of German expressionism. This creates an interesting mélange of modern and classic and an intriguing mixture between warmth and cold.

I am not sure how much Aviva raised for Drastic Action at the Carnival, but I sure hope her projects will continue. As for the event, I thought it was a complete form of art in itself, reuniting the body and the soul. And, for sure, a very ingenious way to raise funds and consciousness altogether!