In 1983, a New York dancer named Larry Hyman was hired to teach the latest American disco moves in Germany. The trouble, according to the account behind Dancing Into Roses, was that no such new dances existed. He invented them.

Thirty-five years later, having changed his name to Yehuda, he returned to Germany for a different kind of performance. He danced in protest at the site of a synagogue destroyed during Kristallnacht and subsequently used as a recreation site. The two journeys form the backbone of his autobiographical solo show, at JACK in Brooklyn through November 1.

The contrast gives the production its disturbing charge. One trip finds a young American improvising entertainment for an audience; the other finds an older Jewish artist using movement to confront what happened at a particular place. The passage from frivolity to historical reckoning is the story’s engine, not an incidental surprise.

Hyman wrote and performs the piece, which Leo Egger directs. Mystical Feet Company presents the New York premiere. Promotional descriptions promise comedy alongside grief and anger, an unusual mixture for a work with such a stark historical destination.

Performance has its own ways of marking a place. Unlike a plaque, a dance is temporary; its force lies in the living body occupying the space, however briefly. Hyman’s story asks whether that fleeting act can make a past crime harder to overlook.

This is an advance, not a review: the claims about the show and its history come from the company and venue materials, not an independently observed performance.

Dancing Into Roses, through November 1, 2026, JACK, 20 Putnam Avenue, Brooklyn. Dates and venue information; production listing and tickets.

Yehuda Hyman at the former synagogue site in Freiburg in 2017. Photograph by Markus Wolter, cropped from the original; Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0. Archival documentary image, not a production photograph.