In April-May of 2016, Debra McCall served as a humanitarian volunteer working with Syrian, Iraqi, Kurdish, Yezidi, Afghan and Pakistani refugees on the Greece-Macedonia border at the makeshift Idomeni and EKO camps with medical teams from the Salaam Cultural Museum (SCM) Medical Mission, Seattle, and the Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS). Despite the harsh conditions and EU political stalemate regarding refugees, there was a vibrant communal, entrepreneurial spirit. Debra will share stories and photos that capture the resourcefulness, hope, and generosity of the camp residents, as well as their compelling personal narratives. She will also speak to the work of volunteers and how one can support organizations aiding in the relief efforts for what has become the largest migration crisis in history, now having surpassed that of WW II.

Producer: Debra McCall

A choreographer and historian, Debra McCall has served on the graduate faculties of New York University, Adelphi University, Prescott College, and Pratt Institute, where she was Mellon Lecturer. A Certified Movement Analyst, she is a Senior Research Associate at the Institute of Movement Studies. A long-term collaboration with the author and psychoanalyst James Hillman coincided with a move to Italy where she founded a movement analysis/therapy program and functions as an Honorary Board Member for Art Therapy Italiana, Bologna.

Locally, she has worked in a variety of positions at the Ross School--from Head of School, to Dean of Cultural History, Director for Upper School Curriculum, Director of the Teacher Academy and teacher of World Dance. She also served on the Education Committee of the Watermill Center.

McCall is the recipient of two Choreography Fellowships plus an InterArts Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, along with a Research Fellowship and Summer Scholar Fellowship on the Arab Spring from the National Endowment for the Humanities. As Advanced Design Fellow at the American Academy in Rome, she conducted research in southern Italy, Sicily, Greece, and Egypt to choreograph Psyche's Last Task, based on the second century CE Metamorphoses of Apuleius.

In the 1980s she reconstructed the 1920s Bauhaus Dances of Oskar Schlemmer. As part of her research, she traveled to East Germany to the recently restored Bauhaus, rediscovered Schlemmer's original notes and sketches rumored to have been destroyed in WWII, and worked with the sole surviving performer of the pieces, Andreas Weininger, to reconstruct the dances. After premieres at The Kitchen and The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, they toured nationally and internationally, including a return to the original Bauhaus.

Her interest in working with refugees came about as a result of teaching medieval history of the region; travel throughout the Middle East; following the Arab uprisings real time on Twitter; study with Middle East experts at UC Davis on the roots of the Arab uprisings; and her mother's stories as a child refugee from Nazi occupied France.