Dancer Suzanne Miller of Suzanne Miller & Allan Paivio Productions, in collaboration with Mindy Yan Miller, will perform a dance of Holocaust Commemoration entitled “Needle and Thread” on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27, 2025. Accompanied by original sound and music, the performance creatively integrates contemporary dance and women’s traditional textile production to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust. 

“Needle and Thread" starts from a list of 600 given names of Holocaust victims collected by Yad Vashem in an extensive and ongoing project: ‘Pages of Testimony’. The work is a commemorative performance that develops from the dance and installation practices of Suzanne Miller and Mindy Yan Miller: Mindy sits and sews onto a large pieced skirt constructed from unwanted garments, adding her thoughts and labor, stitch by stitch. Suzanne wears the skirt and performs a series of embodied inscriptions, tracing each of the given names gathered from the "'Pages of Testimony.’” (artsandscience.usask.ca)  Allan Paivio’s sound design deploys whispers and song as the names punctuate and weave through an ambient industrial undertone, contrasted with the calls of songbirds.

A link to Suzanne Miller and Allan Paivio’s web site, with a video of “Needle and Thread”: millerpaivio.com

(Adjacent parking is available in the University Club parking lot.)