“Holocaust on ice” dance by wife of Putin official causes uproar

Source: Alec Luhn, The Guardian, November 28, 2016

The wife of Vladimir Putin’s spokesman has caused controversy by dressing in a concentration camp uniform for a televised ice dance routine that some have called the “Holocaust on ice”.

Tatiana Navka, a former Olympic ice dancer and the wife of presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov, and her dancing partner, actor Andrei Burkovsky, appeared in striped uniforms bearing yellow six-pointed stars on the popular celebrity skating TV show Ice Age.

Their routine for the song Beautiful That Way – by Israeli singer Achinoam “Noa” Nini – was based on the Academy-Award-winning Italian film Life Is Beautiful.

In the film, a Jewish father pretends for the sake of his young son that the family’s internment by the Nazis is part of an elaborate game.

In their performance, Navka and Burkovsky smiled and pantomimed shooting at each other in front of an imaginary child, before Burkovsky exited to the sound of machine gun fire.

“Definitely watch this! One of my favourite numbers!” Navka wrote under photographs from the performance on her Instagram account, adding that: “Our children should know and remember that terrible time.”

The judges gave the pair perfect scores for both technique and artistry, but the performance divided news outlets and social media users.

One suggested Navka and Burkovsky be sent to a place “where they give out those kind of pyjamas for free,” while another said they should have “starved for a few months, worked in the freezing cold to get into character”.

A popular tweet said the producers at state-owned Channel One, which broadcast the show, were “f**ked in the head”.

Dozens of others tweeted angry comments at the Twitter account of the Russian embassy in London.

A similar scandal unfolded in April when actor Alexander Petrov dressed as a Nazi soldier for a routine on the TV show Dancing With the Stars. Internet users at the time sarcastically suggested he do a number about the concentration camps.

Holocaust Museum to visitors: Please stop catching Pokémon here

Source: The Washington Post, June 12, 2016

Almost everywhere you turn, it seems, people have their eyes glued to smartphone screens playing Pokémon Go. Since its launch last week, the app has quickly become a cultural phenomenon that has fans of all ages hunting around their neighborhoods for collectible digital creatures that appear on players’ screens as they explore real-world locations.

But there’s at least one place that would really like to keep Pokémon out: the Holocaust Museum.

The museum, along with many other landmarks, is a “PokéStop” within the game — a place where players can get free in-game items. There are three PokéStops associated with various parts of the museum.

“Playing the game is not appropriate in the museum, which is a memorial to the victims of Nazism,” Andrew Hollinger, the museum’s communications director, told The Post. “We are trying to find out if we can get the museum excluded from the game.”

The Holocaust Museum’s plight highlights how apps that layer a digital world on top of the real one can create awkward situations, especially since the owners of the physical locations often cannot weigh in on how their spaces are being used.

One image circulating online appears to show a player encountering an unsettling digital critter inside the museum: a Pokémon called Koffing that emits poisonous gas floating by a sign for the museum’s Helena Rubinstein Auditorium. The auditorium shows the testimonials of Jews who survived the gas chambers.

The image, which appears to have originated from a now deleted post on the photo-sharing site imgur, might be a hoax: That particular Pokémon didn’t appear nearby when this Post reporter visited the museum Monday afternoon, although the specific Pokémon that appears in each location does vary from time to time. Hollinger said that the museum is concerned about the potential Koffing appearance.

Niantic did not immediately respond to inquiries about the alleged Koffing sighting or if there was any way to honor the Holocaust Museum’s request to stop Pokémon from popping up inside its building.

Hollinger stressed that the museum is generally pro-technology and encourages visitors to use social media to share how their experiences with the exhibits moved them. “But this game falls very much outside that,” he said.

On Monday afternoon, there were plenty of people inside the museum who seemed to be distracted from its haunting exhibits as they tried to “catch ’em all,” as the Pokémon slogan goes. A player even used a lure module, a beacon that attracts Pokémon to a specific PokéStop, on the museum’s marker — making double-headed bird-like creatures dubbed Doduos and rodent-like Rattatas practically swarm on users’ screens.

The player behind the lure, a 30-year-old visiting from North Carolina named Dustin who declined to share his last name with The Post for privacy reasons, was excited to catch a crustacean-like Krabby while waiting in the museum’s lobby with a group of friends to pick up tickets for a scheduled tour.

Although the museum is uncomfortable with its Pokémon infestation, most of the players building up their digital critter collection inside the building at least didn’t seem to mean any disrespect.-Andrew Peterson

“It’s not like we came here to play,” said Angie, a 37-year-old member of Dustin’s group who also declined to share her last name for privacy reasons, “But gotta catch ’em all.”

“Sighet, Sighet” (Harold Becker, 1964). In memory of Elie Wiesel

 

A haunting film about Elie Wiesel’s hometown and roots, produced in 1964. I share this video just to promote awareness of the Holocaust and a deeper knowledge of one of its most important witnesses, recently disappeared. If I am infringing any copyright laws, I will remove it immediately.

Iran’s Holocaust Cartoon Competition

Source: Rafael Medoff, The Daily Beast, January 26, 2016

Just in time for International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the Iranian government has announced that it will be holding another “Holocaust Cartoons Contest,” in which the cartoonist who most viciously mocks the Nazi genocide will be awarded $50,000. It may be tempting to dismiss such Iranian mischief as harmless foolishness, but Tehran’s hateful contest reminds us that political cartoons increasingly are recognized as powerful instruments of influence.

A cartoon in the New York World played a crucial role in the outcome of the 1884 U.S. presidential race: The Democrats plastered Walt McDougall’s send-up of Republican candidate James Blaine on thousands of billboards across the state, helping to deliver hotly contested New York to Democrat Grover Cleveland (he won the state by just 1,100 votes). In the early 1900s, politicians in several states were so stung by cartoonists’ barbs that they introduced legislation to limit what cartoonists were allowed to draw; in Pennsylvania, for example, the governor initiated a bill to stop cartoonists from portraying elected officials as birds or other animals.

In the 1930s, the Hitler regime used cartoons to incite hatred of Germany’s Jews. The leading Nazi propaganda organ, the weekly newspaper Der Sturmer, was filled with vicious caricatures of Jews as vampires, insects, and especially as sexual defilers of German women. A typical cartoon would feature a huge, leering spider with a Jewish face attempting to ensnare an innocent German maiden, or a swarthy Jewish doctor hovering over a sedated, half-dressed female German patient.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry recently released a brief YouTube video comparing the anti-Jewish stereotypes in some contemporary Palestinian cartoons to the images used by Hitler. While one should always be cautious about making comparisons to the Nazis, it certainly was disturbing to see a recent cartoon on a Palestinian Authority website showing a leering, hook-nosed Israeli soldier, beginning to disrobe while pinning down a weeping Muslim woman wearing a headdress representing Jerusalem’s most famous mosque. The caption read: “Al Aqsa is Being Raped.”

Israeli officials contend that the recent wave of Palestinian stabbings and car-ramming attacks has been inspired in part by Palestinian political cartoons portraying such violence as heroic and encouraging young Palestinians to use knives and automobiles as weapons.

The best-known examples of the link between cartoons and violence are not the cartoons urging readers to take up arms, but rather the cartoons that were met by violent Muslim protests. These include the riots following the 2006 publication by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten of cartoons depicting Muhammad; the 2015 massacre of the staff of the French weekly Charlie Hebdo, which had published Muhammad cartoons; and last year’s terrorist attack on a Texas event that was showcasing caricatures of Muhammad.

Such violence has had a chilling effect in some quarters. The editors at Yale University Press in 2009 removed all the Muhammad cartoon images from a book they published about the cartoon controversy. Several prominent cartoonists, including Garry Trudeau (“Doonesbury”) have asserted that Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons about Muhammad were the equivalent of “hate speech.”

But even if that characterization were accurate, the fact is that in America, hate speech is legal. The possibility that someone’s words may offend is no reason to muzzle the speaker. The right to offend is part of the right to free speech. And frankly, offending people is practically the raison d’être of political cartoonists.

That does not mean that every political cartoon deserves the Housekeeping Seal of Approval. It means that it is up to editors to decide if a cartoon is so tasteless that it should not be published. And it is up to readers to decide if they dislike a particular cartoonist so much that they do not want to purchase that newspaper.

Of course there are different reasons people may take offense at a cartoon. Many people were troubled recently when a cartoon in The Washington Post depicted the young children of U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz as trained monkeys; there is a general consensus in the political world that candidates’ children should be off-limits. The Post apologized and pulled the cartoon.

But sometimes cartoons that at first glance appear to be tasteless, may not actually be. Charlie Hebdo last week published a cartoon that many interpreted as suggesting that the drowned Syrian refugee boy, had he lived, would have grown up to sexually harass women. Some pundits, however, understood that cartoon to be mocking opponents of Muslim refugee immigration—similar in spirit to the famous 2008 New Yorker cover depicting Barack Obama as a Muslim and Michelle Obama as an armed revolutionary. That cartoon was intended as a comment on how some of the Obamas’ opponents perceived them.

The vigorous reaction and debate over such cartoons is precisely what one would expect in a free society. In Iran, by contrast, the only kind of political cartoons that can be published without the cartoonist being imprisoned are those which the regime approves—for example, cartoons denying the Holocaust or comparing Israel to Nazi Germany. Here in America, we ensure cartoonists’ freedom to skewer hypocritical politicians or antagonize interest groups by guaranteeing their right to irritate or offend. And if they cross the line into the realm of tastelessness, then the natural forces of reason and taste usually serve as a counter.

This informal system of checks and balances has served cartoonists, editors, and the public well since our country’s earliest days. No doubt totalitarian regimes will continue to use cartoons to advance their aims, because they know that cartoons are powerful instruments of persuasion. But for that same reason, free societies must continue protecting the right of cartoonists to compete, unrestrained, in the marketplace of ideas.

Details Emerge About Jerry Lewis’ Unreleased Holocaust Film

Source: Sara Ivry, Tablet, January 6, 2016

There’s a sort of louche, menacing quality about Jerry Lewis—I’ve always thought so, anyway. Maybe it’s the tan or the bada-bing pinkie ring, or the warmth he seemed unwilling to summon even while hosting a telethon for muscular dystrophy. I found Lewis’ nasal parodic voice irksome and repellent. And his appeal—here in the U.S., or in France—has always perplexed me. I could never stand The Nutty Professor; the only film of his I’ve ever enjoyed is The King of Comedy and that’s partly because he plays a balls-out asshole, or perhaps he’s not “playing at all,” which is part of what makes that film so riveting.

Why speak of Jerry Lewis now, you ask? Because the BBC has just released a short documentary about Lewis’ never-seen 1970 Holocaust film The Day the Clown Cried. Lewis flew to Sweden to shoot the feature, and when he was finished he took the reels with him back to the United States but never released the film. When asked about it, Lewis has asserted he would never screen it because it’s “bad, bad, bad.”

The BBC mini-documentary, The Story of the Day the Clown Cried, features stills from the film and show Lewis with a red nose and painted clown make-up in front of would-be barracks where he is directing would-be Nazis played by Swedish actors. Various Swedes are interviewed about the shoot and production. We learn that Lewis worked on this project for a decade before filming commenced. We find out that some actors never got paid. We’re told that Lewis gave reels of all his films, includingThe Day the Clown Died, to the Library of Congress with the caveat the institution is forbidden to screen the film until 2025 at the earliest.

And we’re treated to a single tidbit of fascinating trivia: While in Sweden, Lewis never laundered his drawers or socks—he simply threw them away after a single wear. One—by which I mean, me—wonders if that is a lifelong habit and where that kind of behavior came from.

Against the improbable background music of Massive Attack, the documentary’s host, British comedian David Schneider (himself the son of a Holocaust survivor) ruminates on the question of whether one can make comedy out of such tragedy, and if that’s what Lewis was trying to do. There’s no way to know, really, if the film was supposed to be comedy, or have comedic elements, so it’s a bit of goose-chase speculation.

Nevertheless, the query reminded me of a gutting joke the British writer Howard Jacobson included in his fantastic novel Kalooki Nights, which I read years ago: What’s the difference between a Jew and a pizza? A pizza doesn’t scream when you stick it in the oven. That’s the kind of joke (you) never forget. Which begs Schneider’s question: Is it appropriate to make entertainment out of this genocide? Beyond appropriate, is it possible? Fans of The Producers might say yes. That Lewis has refused to make the film public suggests a different answer.

Poland Looks to Hollywood To Transform Wartime Image

Source: Justyna Pawlak, Forward, December 12, 2015

WARSAW — Poland’s new conservative rulers think their country faces an image problem abroad and they want Hollywood to produce a Polish equivalent of “Braveheart” or “Pearl Harbor” to promote their country’s positive place in history.

They also are looking to alter the narrative when it comes to Poland, where most of the Nazi death camps were located.

The right-wingers believe a major movie would make Poland feel proud of its achievements and win it more respect on the world stage at a time when many citizens are falling behind financially.

Critics say the government wants to exploit growing feelings of nationalism in order to boost its popularity and divert public attention from economic problems.

But, by putting an emphasis on patriotism, the government also risks stirring up more xenophobia at a time when Europe is grappling with a massive influx of refugees from the Middle East.

“There is no internationally recognized film about Polish history. I regret this,” Culture Minister Piotr Glinski told Reuters in an interview.

“Why is this important? Every community needs something that brings it together … in order to build its strength and to win, or rather, not to lose, on the world stage. Economically and politically,” he said.

Glinski’s eurosceptic Law and Justice party (PiS) won an election in October promising greater economic equality and a nationalist response to growing influence from Brussels.

PiS has since announced plans for a major public relations campaign at home and abroad, including the possible film venture, as well as a drive to make schools, theaters and public television promote more patriotic themes.

Glinski, who is the most senior member of the cabinet after the prime minister, said the film could for example tell the story of the 1683 battle of Vienna or the 1944 battle of Monte Cassino, the latter one of the toughest in World War Two.

In Vienna, Poles helped defeat the Turks in what marked the end of the Ottoman Empire’s expansion into Europe.

“Almost every wartime story of a Polish soldier is a ready-made script,” Glinski said. The film would “tell the world who has protected our civilisation.”

Asked if there were any movies that could serve as a model for the government’s plans, he said: “Yes, there are many, particularly American ones: Saving Private Ryan or Pearl Harbor. The well-known patriotic production about the heroic history of the Scots – Braveheart – can also be used as an example.”

Glinski said the goal was a “Hollywood-level” film and the government had been in touch with potential producers, although he did not say who they were.

COMPLICATED PAST

Another subject Glinski said should be addressed was Poland’s relations with its Jewish community during the Nazi Holocaust, potentially reopening a painful debate that has dominated the Polish media in recent years.

A series of books and films have revealed that Poles were not only the victims of the Nazis but, sometimes, also the perpetrators of crimes against the Jews.

This has raised questions of collective guilt and reconciliation in a nation taught to believe under communism that, with a few exceptions, it had conducted itself honorably during a war that killed a fifth of the population.

It has also contradicted the view of many Poles that their centuries-old cohabitation with Jews was one of the most harmonious in Europe. Of the six million Jews who died during the Holocaust, about half had been living in Poland.

“Poland’s image abroad suffers because, sometimes, Poland is said to be co-responsible for the Holocaust,” Glinski said. “It is disturbing that Poland is ascribed fault here.”

Last year, the Polish drama “Ida,” a story of a Polish-Jewish orphan searching for her identity and family history, won the Oscar for best foreign language film but attracted heavy criticism from Polish nationalist groups.

Its director says the film – in which the protagonist is told by her parents’ Polish neighbor that he killed them during the war – is a tale of human experience not history.

But some in Poland said it misrepresented reality.

Glinski said Poland could make a film about a Polish family that had hidden Jews from the Nazis during the war, in an effort to contradict revelations that some Poles had actively helped the Nazis in their genocidal campaign.

Critics say reopening the issue would damage Poland’s efforts to come to terms with its complicated past.

“Every nation is guilty of something,” said Konstanty Gebert, an expert with the European Council on Foreign Relations, a think-tank, in Warsaw.

“But that image improves when you discuss it and admit to it. This can earn you respect.”—Reuters

Read more: http://forward.com/culture/326635/polish-conservative-image-holocaust/#ixzz3uNQFdQa8

A Beauty Pageant for Holocaust Survivors

Source: Haaretz, November 25, 2015

Thirteen women who survived the Nazi effort to exterminate European Jews took part in the third annual “Miss Holocaust Survivor” beauty pageant in Haifa on Tuesday evening.

After facing some tough competition, including former “Miss Holocaust Survivor” beauty queen Hava Hershkovitz, 82, Rita Berkowitz, 83, took the crown.

Berkowitz is the mother of one, grandmother of six and great-grandmother of five, according to Reuters.

In a message for “the entire people of Israel,” she said: “That all Jews from all across the world will come (to Israel), all of them. And we shall be stronger. We are not afraid of anyone. The Jew will never disappear from the world.”

The pageant was organized by the Helping Hand organization, which aids thousands of the some 200,000 Holocaust survivors living in Israel.

Hitler comedy “Look Who’s Back” becomes Germany’s No 1 movie

Source: The Guardian, October 27, 2015

Look Who’s Back, a comedy about the return of Hitler, has become an unlikely hit in Germany, heading to the top of the box office chart in its third week of release.

The Borat-style film, based on the bestselling novel by Timur Vermes, puts Adolf Hitler back into German society and utilises the reactions of real people for humour. Over the weekend, it knocked Pixar’s hit adventure Inside Out off the top spot and became the country’s No 1 release. It has already made around £8.5m.

“Germans should be able to laugh at Hitler, rather than viewing him as a monster, because that relieves him of responsibility for his deeds and diverts attention from his guilt for the Holocaust,” director David Wnendt told the Guardian. “But it should be the type of laugh that catches in your throat and you’re almost ashamed when you realise what you’re doing.”

The plot imagines that Hitler has woken up in modern day Berlin, with no memory of any event post-1945 and ends up getting his own TV show. The book was a huge hit in Germany, selling 14m copies.

The film also highlights the increasing influence of the far right in Europe. “We’re highlighting that the danger of a resurgence is very much alive,” said Wnendt.

Look Who’s Back is the second homegrown hit this year for Germany’s Constantin Film, which also released Suck Me Shakespeer 2, a comedy that has made over £42m.

Huge Nazi banner for film causes outcry in France

Source: Jerusalem Post, October 1, 2015

A large Nazi banner unfurled in Nice, France, caused an outcry among locals and tourists.

The red banner with a swastika hung from the Palais de la Prefecture on Monday and Tuesday, during the filming of an adaptation of Joseph Joffo’s Holocaust memoir A Bag of Marbles.

“People started screaming,” tourist Andrew Gentry told BBC News. “They were really agitated.”

According to BBC News, the prefecture insisted it made efforts prior to Monday to alert people and even warned the city’s Jewish community. Nevertheless, many onlookers were puzzled.

“There was nothing to explain what was going on,” Gentry said. “The scene was just surreal.”

Some people started taking selfies in front of the banner.

During the war, German Waffen SS chief Alois Brunner stayed in the Hotel Excelsior in Nice to plan round-ups of Jews. The Palais de la Prefecture, which is being filmed to represent the Hotel Excelsior, said in a statement that it was an “honor” to play a part in remembering history.

A Bag of Marbles describes Joffo’s journey from Nazi-occupied Paris to a safer city in the southeast of France.

A French film adaptation was released in 1975. The remake is being directed by Canadian director Christian Duguay.

“No Longer Silent”. Alvin Ailey’s Holocaust Piece

Source: Simi Horwitz, When Alvin Ailey Choreographs the Holocaust, Forward, June 15, 2015

With the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater presenting a Holocaust inspired piece, “No Longer Silent,” at the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center, the iconic African American company has branched into new territory. In fact, it’s unprecedented, explained its artistic director Robert Battle, who choreographed the piece. Its musical score was composed by Erwin Schulhoff, a Czech-born Jew, and one of many musical artists who were killed or otherwise silenced by the Nazis.

“No Longer Silent” was conceived by Battle in 2007 as part of a Juilliard project — and the brainchild of conductor James Conlon — to commemorate three such composers, who include Franz Schreker and Alexander Zemlinsky.

“I was immediately drawn to Schuloff’s music for its urgency, rhythms, grandness, and ritualistic sounds,” said Battle as he sat in his corner office in the company’s West 55th Street complex. “It has tension and friction and reminded me of Stravinsky whom I love. It also reminded me of Martha Graham‘s early modern dance motifs. And then I got cold feet. Everything I loved about the music also terrified me.”

What finally anchored it for Battle was discovering just how much he and Schulhoff had in common. They both studied the piano, shared an interest in the avant-garde and jazz, and explored non-traditional artistic expressions in their own work. But there was also the human connection.

“His music was stifled, not allowed to be played because of who he was ethnically,” said Battle. “I thought, ‘Wow.’ Of course that had resonance for me as an African-American.”

Battle was further troubled and fascinated by Schulhoff because he was a man doomed by a lousy twist of fate. Schulhoff was finally accepted into Russia, but just before his papers arrived in 1941, he was captured and deported to the Wülzburg concentration camp in Bavaria, where he died of tuberculosis one year later.

“The tragedy is that he almost made it out and then boom, the door slammed,” Battle said. “It’s a whole other thing if there was never any light at the end of the tunnel. But here he was so close.” Turning on a cassette recorder, Battle held up his hand in a “listen to this” gesture.

A moment later the music — a pounding, percussive sound — poured out, suggesting marching or militaristic maneuvers of some kind. Although “Ogelala” was the name of an Indian chief in the original ballet and Schulhoff was influenced by Native American music, Battle said the music made him think about war, the Nazi regime and, by extension, the Holocaust.

But instead of choreographing a piece literally about the Holocaust, an undertaking which Battle dubbed “presumptuous,” he incorporated its powerful imagery — the scene and costumes metaphorically evoking a concentration camp — to forge an impressionistic narrative as if seen through the eyes of Schulhoff, who is a character in the piece, serving as witness and ghost.

Like every Holocaust victim or survivor, each character has his own story and reveals it through solos, duets and group pieces. The black costumes are deliberately baggy and ill-fitting, and each bears a clearly defined white strip encircling the leg. “It’s a marking,” said Battle. “They’ve all been marked.”

Battle removed photos from a folder, spreading them across his desk. These grainy black and white shots featured naked and emaciated corpses lying alongside each other in mass concentration camp graves. Other shocking photos showed half starved inmates listlessly sitting on a bench.

“There is a long bench at the back of the stage that stretches into the wings, like this one,” Battle pointed at one image. “Look at the people sitting there. It’s death before death. The bench becomes a metaphor. It’s so masculine, staid and Nazi.”

The power of the shots was not lost on the dancers. “Some gasped,” he recalled. “Others just stared silently.”

Before rehearsals began, Battle talked to the dancers about Schulhoff’s biography, the history of the era and the Holocaust, and parallels with the African-American experience.

“Look at this picture,” he said, showing me a photo of Jewish inmates with arms in the air, an image that has inspired one significant segment in the dance and clearly brings to mind recent demonstrations across the country as protestors, arms aloft, shouted, “Hands up, don’t shoot.”

“I choreographed that piece years before the current demonstrations, but unless audiences read the program, they’re not going to realize that,” Battle said. “It’s going to be very interesting to see how audiences interpret the piece. Jews and African-Americans in the audience may see something very different. They may view the piece either though the eyes of survivors or as a reflection of the current climate of anti-Semitism or racism. The unifying theme is injustice and history repeating itself.”

Battle said that throughout his life he has been deeply affected by learning about the Holocaust, first in a high school history class, and later as an audience member at Whoopi Goldberg’s eponymous 1984 one-woman Broadway show. In it, she tackled a range of characters, including a hard-bitten male junkie who visits the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam, reads the diary, and is transformed in some way by Anne’s innocence and optimism.

“There’s no way that character should feel a connection with Anne and yet he does,” Battle recalled. “My own visit to the Anne Frank house brought back the power of Whoopi’s performance. It also confirmed my own personal connection.”

While “No Longer Silent” is an abstract piece, it’s far less so than Battle’s other works. Similarly, though he’s employed orchestral music in the past, it’s rarely been as eclectic and complex as the Schulhoff piece and, most significantly, historic events have not served as the basis for the company’s choreography, with one notable exception, “Odetta,” a piece Battle recently commissioned about civil rights activist, singer and songwriter Odetta Holmes.

Both “Odetta” and now “No Longer Silent” represent the company’s new and intensified interest in outreach and education. “In an era of social unrest these pieces are especially timely,” Battle said. “Also, they go back to the roots of modern dance, which has always been very concerned with social justice issues.”

Asked what he’d like audiences to think or feel after viewing “No Longer Silent,” Battle says, “When someone comes up to me after a performance and says it made him feel or see something totally unexpected, something I never even thought about, that’s a great response. That’s what I like to hear.”