April 17 & 18, 8pm
THE WEIGHT OF THREAD: A JEWISH RITUAL FOR PALESTINE
April 17 & 18, 2026 - 8PM
At Dance Mission Theater
The Weight of Thread is an immersive dance ritual rooted in Jewish mourning, supplication, and resistance traditions, reckoning with grief, rupture, and solidarity in the shadow of genocide. Through dance, live music, poetry, and collective ritual, the work challenges dominant Zionist definitions of Jewishness while affirming Judaism's anti-genocidal, humanitarian values and expressing kinship with Palestinian liberation.
Created by Molly Levy and Stephanie Sherman in collaboration with Anna Greenberg-Gold, the piece emerges from a deeply personal and political process. The artists met through shared grief over the genocide in Gaza and a desire to remain in relationship to Jewish identity while confronting violence enacted in its name. Turning toward Jewish ritual, dance, and writing, they began building a practice that could hold complexity without flattening it.
Over the past year, this process expanded into intimate community gatherings with Jewish and Palestinian artists, activists, and educators. These dinners-grounded in vulnerability, listening, and care-are integral to the work. Elements of the performance draw directly from these lived relationships.
More than a performance, The Weight of Thread is an act of "family building" in the face of rupture. Audiences are invited into an intimate, intergenerational space of shared presence, where witnessing becomes collective and grief is held in community.
Blending choreography, live music inspired by Jewish prayer and Yiddish folk traditions, poetry, and installation, the work creates a space for complexity, discomfort, and connection-without offering easy resolution.
25-100.
Presented by Stephanie Sherman & Molly Levy.