Arts Correspondent

There's a moment in "Dreams," the 1961 dance piece by second-generation modern dance pioneer Anna Sokolow, that sears. Dancers stand, vibrating in stillness, each with a fist rigidly balled up, clasped in their other hand, tensely pulling away, but caught, unable to escape.

This emblematic gesture in "Dreams" grew from Sokolow's own subconscious memories, her night terrors. Ultimately, the piece became her evocation of the horrors of the Holocaust with dancers trapped, conjuring hollowed-eyed concentration camp victims, their opened mouths at one point soundless like an Edvard Munch scream.

"Dreams" returns to Washington Saturday and Sunday when the Dakshina/Daniel Phoenix Singh Dance Company brings a revival to Dance Place. Dakshina, a District-based company founded in 2004, lives in two worlds: modern dance and the South Indian classical temple dance form called bharata natyam.

"Dakshina has two meanings," Singh, 36, explains. "It means 'offering' and it also means 'from the south of India,' a cardinal direction. I wanted to find a way to bring those two dance worlds together in my company."

The daughter of Russian Jewish parents, Anna Sokolow grew up on New York's Lower East Side, where she was introduced to dance at a local community center and the famed Neighborhood Playhouse, coming under the tutelage of Martha Graham and becoming one of the dance master's first hired dancers.

Sokolow soon enough went off on her own, choreographing dances with a decidedly activist bent and frequently Jewish themes. She formed her first company in 1937 and throughout her career regularly visited Israel where she often taught and choreographed for Israel's premiere dance companies, Batsheva and Bat Dor.

Lorry May began working with Sokolow in 1967 as a member of her Players Project. She now directs the Sokolow Dance Foundation, which oversees and disseminates the dancemaker's choreographic body of works created between 1937 and her death in 2000 at the age of 90.

The solo "Kaddish," from 1945, created just as the Holocaust ended, resonates mourning by borrowing from traditional Jewish prayer rituals, including encircling the dancer's arm with a tefillin-like strap and the introspective and pained motion of beating the breast.

The intensity of this work captured Singh's imagination when he first saw it nearly a decade ago. "I didn't know the piece was a prayer of mourning. I didn't know anything about the piece except that it spoke to me on a powerful physical level," said Singh, who was born in a small village outside Mumbai and came to the Washington area at 17. After founding his company five years ago, he set out to add Sokolow works to his varied repertory, which includes both contemporary modern choreography, traditional Indian bharata natyam and his own dances that fuse both forms.

"So much of what is going on now in the world is relevant to this piece," Singh says about the group work "Dreams." "There's a quote by Eli Weisel, who said the biggest sin is not hate, it's indifference."

May, a demanding taskmaster, sighed audibly while Dakshina's dancers worked through the grueling choreography during a weekend rehearsal at the Maryland Youth Ballet studios in Silver Spring. "I don't walk into a rehearsal and say, 'Today, we're going to learn a dance about the Holocaust.' Nobody in that room has experienced that trauma on any level whatsoever. [The dancers] have to be in the action of panic or of running away, not in the action of feeling sorry for someone who is trapped.

"Anna never told us what her dances were all about. She made sure we got to where we had to be and once we knew, we'd figure it out. But she never laid it down intellectually."

And that's what May does with Dakshina's dancers. "It is about the Holocaust, but it's not a story," says May. "There are not bad guys who come in and round up the good guys. "Dreams" is about human beings.

"Anna has highlighted these human emotions of love, separation, panic, being trapped. They're very stark images of terror, fear, panic, indecision, loss, yet the themes are universal. They're about people, human feelings, human beings. It's not about the action of the tormentors, but the responses of the tormented."

"Dreams," the type of work that is so wrenching it often leaves audiences sitting in shocked silence, takes viewers on a painful psychological journey using pure expressive movement and gesture.

"Whenever I dance a Sokolow work, I find that it's all there in the movement," Singh says. "Sokolow doesn't need to have copious footnotes, text added and multimedia images flashing on a screen. The starkness of Sokolow's movement is what makes it universal. It still applies today."

Dreams and other works will be performed by Dakshina/Daniel Phoenix Singh Dance Company on May 9-10 at Dance Place in the District. Tickets, $14-$22, are available by calling 202-269-1600.