The Weight Of Thread: A Jewish Ritual for Palestine
trailer for The Weight of Thread
APRIL 17 & 18, 2026 - 8PM
DANCE MISSION THEATER
The Weight of Thread is a dance ritual rooted in Jewish mourning, supplication and resistance traditions, to reckon with grief, rupture, and solidarity in the shadow of genocide. Through dance, live music, poetry, and collective ritual, the work challenges Zionist definitions of Jewishness while affirming Judaism’s anti-genocidal, humanitarian values and expressing kinship with Palestinian liberation. Audiences are welcomed into an intimate, intergenerational community built through dance, music, food, and shared presence.
Choreography: Molly Levy & Stephanie Sherman in collaboration with Anna Greenberg-Gold
Dance: Anna Greenberg-Gold, Molly Levy & Stephanie Sherman
Music Selected, Created, Adapted and Performed by: Rowan Katz & Hannah Levy
Costumes: Eli Zépeda
Installation and Poetry: Stephanie Sherman & Molly Levy
Access Information:
Dance Mission Theater is located on the second floor of a building and is accessible by stairs and an elevator. If you need wheelchair or limited mobility seating reserved, please email [email protected]
ASL interpretation will be offered for the Saturday performance
If you need Live Audio Description please reach out to us at [email protected] ASAP
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Molly and Stephanie met two years ago at a friend’s art salon, connecting over shared Jewish identity, grief over the genocide in Gaza, and distress at seeing Jewishness weaponized to justify mass violence. We both felt called to be present with our Judaism as a responsibility to the current moment. We were craving a space for community, connection, and healing that could hold affirmation of Jewish humanitarian values, the interconnectedness of Jewish ancestral grief and Palestinian devastation – believing deeply that healing generational traumas in the Jewish community is a necessary part of ending cycles of violence. We were both turning towards dance and writing to navigate our feelings and our own healing. From this emerged the desire to create a dance that reconnected to our Jewish roots and values of humanism, empathy, liberation, and doykeit (“hereness,” a Yiddish principle of diaspora), grounded in practices that long predate Zionism and remain deeply embedded in Judaism.
Our process has been nonlinear, messy, and, at times, deeply challenging. How do you address something so vast and devastating through dance? How do you invite audiences with divergent beliefs into a shared space without flattening complexity or retreating into ambiguity? As Jews, we feel a responsibility to remain in dialogue within our Jewish communities—even when we deeply disagree about genocide or Palestine—because we believe that doing the painful work of internal healing is part of the process of ending cycles of violence. Our Jewish identities are wrapped up in the occupation of Palestine, and this is the uncomfortable, non-neutral place from which we dance, in solidarity with a people whose trauma is inextricably connected to ours.
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This project is more than a two-night dance performance. It is an act of family building in the face of forces that tear families apart. Zionism has caused deep ruptures within Jewish families and between Jews, Palestinians, and others.
In response, we began intentionally cultivating a Jewish and Jewish–Palestinian family that we hope will endure far beyond this performance. Over the past ten months, we have hosted a series of intimate community dinners with artists, activists, and educators seeking space for care, healing, and honest conversation around painful and complex questions. Some gatherings were exclusively Jewish; others brought Jews and Palestinians together. All were grounded in mutual support, vulnerability, and listening.
Elements of the performance draw directly from the lived experiences and relationships formed through these dinners. For us, it was essential to go beyond inviting people to watch a dance and instead build a sustainable community rooted in mutual care—one that existed before the performance and continues afterward.
These family dinners are not ancillary; they are integral to the work itself. In attending The Weight of Thread, you are not simply an audience member—you are being welcomed into our family.
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All elements of The Weight of Thread reflect deep attention to Jewish ancestral legacies and values of human dignity and collective responsibility.
Musicians Rowan Katz and Hannah Levy collaborated closely with the dancers to create a live original score that draws from Jewish prayers and tkhines, and Yiddish folk music and protest songs while reflecting each collaborator’s lineage and lived experience. As radical Jewish music scholars, Rowan and Hannah paid particular attention to the politics of language and sound.
Costume designer Eli Zépeda created garments inspired by the dancers’ Jewish women ancestors who embodied strength, care, and humanitarian values. Each costume evokes a different lineage and historical moment, honoring the past while animating it in the present.
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We are deeply grateful to the San Francisco Arts Commission for supporting this project. As many artists and arts supporters know, the care, labor, and time it takes to make community-rooted, culture-shifting work far exceeds the funding available. And yet, we continue to create because we believe in what this work makes possible.
If this work resonates with you, please donate. Your support directly helps sustain the artists, collaborators, and future life of this work. No amount is too small or too big. We are fiscally sponsored by Dancer’s Group so if you would like to make a tax-deductible donation, please visit the following link:
These performances are supported by San Francisco Arts Commission Individual Artist Grant Award
People
Stephanie Sherman, PhD, MFA (co-director) is a sparkly, queer, Jewish, feminist Ethnic Studies and Dance professor, choreographer, visual artist, and bilingual poet who has lived, taught, and collaborated with artist-activist communities in the United States, Mexico, and Ecuador for over two decades. Fluent in Spanish, her work is rooted in decolonial practice and centers solidarity, belonging, and mutual accountability across difference. She is a 2025–2026 San Francisco Individual Artist Award grantee for this project, which she co-directs with Molly Levy. In 2024, she published Tectonic Tongues / Lenguas Tectónicas (Black Lawrence Press).
Sherman’s interdisciplinary, culturally grounded practice bridges cultures and identities to foster dialogue, healing, and collective understanding among communities often positioned in opposition. Her 25-year relationship with Ecuador and Mexico—where she lived and choreographed in Spanish—deeply informs her work, which explores queerness, disability, nationality, solidarity, and social justice through movement, performance, and ritual. She holds a PhD in Performance Studies from UC Berkeley, an MFA in Dance from NYU, and a BA in Hispanic Studies from Vassar College, and is a two-time Fulbright recipient in choreography (Mexico and Ecuador). Her residencies include Teatro Ciego, a blind theater company in Mexico City, and Colectivo Zeta in Ecuador. She is currently a professor at California College of the Arts and San José State University.
Recent works include Passing Over (QDF, 2025). Sisters (2025), created in collaboration with Palestinian artist Asma Ghanem and presented at Gallery Habibi. Her ongoing collaborations as resident choreographer with Teatro Ciego inspired a sustained commitment to accessibility in performance. Additional honors include the National Performance Network Red Latinoamericana Performance Residency (Ecuador, 2007), a residency with Colectivo Zeta (Ecuador), and an artist-in-residence with Hemispheric Encounters at Concordia University.
Molly Levy (co-director) is a performer, educator, and dancemaker who is drawn to the heart and humanity of dance. She combines meditation, writing, improvisation, and choreographed movement as mediums for healing and is particularly interested in researching the way dance asks and allows us to attend to ourselves both physically and emotionally.
Born and raised in the Bay Area and currently based in Oakland, Ca, Molly has performed throughout the country in devised original works, immersive theater, site-specific dance, and full evening burlesque shows. Her current and past collaborations include working with Sharp & Fine, Paufve Dance, Melecio Estrella, Katie Scherman+Artists, The Equus Projects, Dacha Theatre, Verlaine & McCann Present, House of Verlaine, and LROD as a performer; and Dacha Theatre as a movement director creating fluid movement languages and character specific movement studies to explore with actors and directors how movement serves as a second language beyond scripted lines for adaptations of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Hamlet, devised site-specific theater, and The Light Princess (a musical).
Anna Greenberg Gold (performer) is a dancer and personal chef. She received her formative dance training at Pasadena Dance Theater, the Ailey School, the Merce Cunningham Studio, and at the SF Conservatory of Dance. She graduated from the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts and earned her B.A. in Dance and Children's Book Illustration from Hampshire College. She has performed with the San Francisco Ballet, Megan Lowe Dances, Paufve Dance, Lenora Lee Dance, Liss Fain Dance and Nancy Karp+Dancers. Anna learned to fly as part of the Bandaloop Training Group in 2023. She is a current company member with the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company, Kristin Damrow & Company, Risa Jaroslow and Dancers and Deborah Slater Dance Theater.
Hannah Levy (composer and performer) is a jazz singer, music educator, composer, and Grammy-credited session vocalist based in Nashville, TN. Her creative work is guided by a pursuit of honest connection through joy, nuance and play. She is passionate about reminding audiences, students, and participants of all ages of the power that we hold individually and collectively to positively impact our world, and each other. It’s been an honor to co-create “The Weight of Thread.”
Folk music is a core component of Hannah’s musical makeup, having toured and studied traditional singing styles under the leadership of a wide range of tradition-bearers in the Republic of Georgia, South Africa, Colombia, Italy, and throughout the United States and Canada. She sang as a core member of Kitka Women’s Vocal Ensemble from 2016 - 2021, as well as directing Khidebi Georgian Community Choir through the Kitka Institute. For the past several summers she has led singing camps for both adults and teens at SongRoots (Vancouver, CA) and Village Harmony (Vermont). In her work as a studio vocalist she appears on Fantastic Negrito’s Grammy award-winning 2018 album, “Please Don’t Be Dead,” and is also featured heavily on his albums “Black Jesus White Problems” and “Grandfather Courage.” A graduate of the California Jazz Conservatory, Hannah is studied in the Kodaly and Somatic Voicework™ methods. More information can be found at www.hannahlevymusic.com
Rowan Katz (composer and performer) is a vocalist, songwriter, composer, poet, folklorist, and movement artist born and raised in Los Angeles proper. Their work moves fluidly between performance, composition, and communal practice, centering on themes of trauma healing, queerness, Jewish diasporism, recovery, abolition, rematriation, grief, ritual, and mysticism.
Drawing from polyphonic traditions, folk and diasporic music, cabaret and musical theater, experimental vocal practice, and contemporary popular genres, Rowan’s work resists clean categorization. Their musical language is shaped as much by DIY performance culture and popular music as it is by research, lineage study, and interdisciplinary collaboration.
Rowan approaches the voice as a ritual tool that invokes spirits, incites revolution, and fosters collective attunement. Their compositions and performances create liminal spaces where grief, pleasure, dissonance, devotion, humor, and survival coexist.
Rowan lives and works in Berkeley, California, where they regularly perform original music and Jewish cabaret, collaborate with dancers and musicians, and explore polyphony with Ardea Ensemble. Follow them on Instagram at @rowankatz.
Recent credits include: JetLag Festival; Songs of Truth: Holocaust Awareness Concert and Conversations with Golden Gate Symphony and Chorus; Free Key Choir; HBO’s Scavengers Reign; THEYFRIEND Festival; As Above / So Below at Marin Museum of Contemporary Art; SFJAZZ at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Glenview Classical Series.