THE CLASH OF HOW WE BEGIN TO REMEMBER

As the events in Paris and Bogo, Nigeria unfold there are images of horror that are screaming. We can only imagine what it must have been like for the satirical cartoon artists that were massacred by Islamic jihadists in Charlie Hebdo and the Jewish shoppers in the kosher market shopping for the Sabbath who were greeted by a man who wanted to kill them because they were Jews. 

I am also appalled about what I am learning about the massacre of possibly 2,000 people slaughtered by the Boko Haram in Nigeria, basically obliterating an entire town. 

We are shocked at the evil and we are also amazed. There was heroism reported. A French-Muslim man, Lassana Bathily led the Jewish

Lassana Bathily

shoppers down to the walk-in freezer in order to hide. Then he escaped and at first though briefly held by the police as possibly connected to the jihadist, he then was released and continued to help the police so they could save the people in the market.

These attacks are attacks on the freedom of ideas, the power of the arts, the transmission of culture, and the ability to be transformed. Yes, Charlie Hebdo was a playful, satirical magazine, provocative and sometimes brutally irreverent. In this way it was performative, getting us to sit up and take notice, but also getting us to really think and see the world through our darker sides and then to examine them to decide how we feel about immigrants, races, gender issues and sexuality, politicians, religions, and more.

These attacks are also against the Jewish people. They can be seen as an accumulation of attacks, not necessarily linked, that have occurred relatively recently - from the Hyper Cacher Jewish market

to an attack on a Jewish school in Toulouse in 2012 where children and their teacher were killed. They echo the attack on the Jewish museum in Belgium in May 2014 where a shooter burst in and killed four and the attack on the Chabad Jewish Center in Mumbai in 2008 that killed six including the rabbi and his wife. Their two year old son was saved by his Indian nanny; and the very recent November 2014 attack in an Israeli synagogue where five men were killed who were praying. Even in the Charlie Hebdo office the only woman killed was a Jewish woman, Elsa Cayat,

Elsa Cayat

who worked there and was specifically sought and killed by the jihadists, as other women were left alone. Her cousin reported that she had been receiving anti-Semitic threats. 

These attacks are also specifically against ideas and the transmission of knowledge. The Boko Haram kidnapped 276 girls from their school seeking to eradicate any form of education that is against their values and desire for power. They have specifically targetted schools. They are also against freedom for women, since they believe in a caliphate of Islamic beliefs that are repressive. The recent massacre is showing an upsurge in their quest for a fundamentalist caliphate.

In other words these attacks are an assault on a new world. It is a world that is closer than ever before due to the digital world we live in. This world lives in close proximity to different religions, different belief systems, different cultures and most of all different identities - both individual and collective. This also means that we are in an age of transculturalism - a vital way of seeing the world as "collected identities." We no longer live in the age of the melting pot seeking to merge all heritages and cultures into one big identity, which basically means the identity of the majority culture. 

One of my prophets is Paul Simon and his album "Graceland" is for me one of the great works of art

Miriam Makeba and Paul Simon

On it he has many pieces that depict this transcultural journey and the song that says it best for me is Under African Skies. If there is anything redeeming in all of this, perhaps we can hear it in his voice.: 

Joseph’s face was black as night

The pale yellow moon shown in his eyes
His path was marked
By the stars in the Southern Hemisphere
And he walked his days
Under African Skies

This is the story of how we begin to remember
This is the powerful pulsing of love in the vein
After the dream of falling and calling your name out
These are the roots of rhythm
And the roots of rhythm remain

AT LAST: A Tribute to Etta James

Review of AT LAST: A Tribute to Etta James
Written and directed by Jackie Taylor 
Co-director Daryl D. Brooks, Musical Director Robert Reddrick
Through December 28, 2014
At the Black Ensemble Theater in Chicago www.blackensemble.org

"Etta James. Etta James, Etta James, I gotta have my Etta James." This refrain is repeated over and over again in an almost ritualized fashion evoking the great singer of blues, jazz, country blues, soul, rock and roll, and just about anything else that was thrown at her in Jackie Taylor's dramatized revue AT LAST: A TRIBUTE TO ETTA JAMES at the Black Ensemble Theater in Chicago.

The show posits the many Etta James' and has five wonderful singers portraying each of her multi-dimensions played by Candace Edwards, Arzula Gardner Melanie McCullogh, Alanna Taylor, and Yahdina Udeen. Each has a different aspect of her personality and each has her own incredible singing voice. One who is more soulful, to one who is more gutsy, to one who is more childlike, to one who is more bluesy, and to one who is a more straight-ahead composite of all them. And the women explore the many personalities behind the songs at the prodding and demanding of one Ms. Real. She insists that they are all brought together to understand and pay tribute to the great person that they all represent.

Taylor's dramatic revue is about how Ms. Real, played by Rueben Echoles, who is conducting the "tribute" to Etta, insists that they must explore the different facets of Etta's psychology: her bouts with depression and drugs, her self hating, her problems with men and her inability to love herself. And the show has the many Etta James' argue with themselves and sing their hearts out from one hit song to another (with much support from the audience who do shout outs as though at church).  

In Etta James' memoir "Rage to Survive" she has to go through such therapeutic experiences, when she is given the choice by a judge to go to rehab or go to jail for her drug habits as well as other crimes she has committed. She chose rehab and just as in Taylor's show, Etta resisted learning about her psychological disorders with all her might. 

Throughout, each singer taunts the other in opposition, counterpoint and in exploration of the true Etta James. This is enacted in the second act by a singing competition and each Etta James tries to outdo the other in singing prowess reaching and raising the rafters on each song and finally coming to the realization that each is an important aspect of who Etta is. Imagine James Brown, Phoebe Snow, Diana Ross, Roberta Flack and Mahalia Jackson all combined into one and maybe you'll understand the power and emotion of Etta James. Clearly Jackie Taylor milks the most out of these singing voices (and Etta's voice did change over the course of her career).

The weaknesses in the piece are in the scriptwriting, especially in the first act as it sets up the confrontations in the second act, and in how it doesn't really tell us much about Etta James' life story. According to her memoir it is fascinating, dramatic, heartbreaking, and poignant. 

But the singing and the performances of each of the Etta James' is truly amazing. They go from one iconic song to the next and finally end on what we have all been waiting for "At Last." And even though we know that this is where they are heading from the very beginning -- as we hear from each actor singing from the depths of Etta's soul, we must join in and say "Etta James, Etta James, Etta James, I gotta have my Etta James."

THE HEART THAT YEARNS: REVIEW OF MY NAME IS ASHER LEV AT STAGE 773

REVIEW: MY NAME IS ASHER LEV

By Aaron Posner

Adapted from the novel by Chaim Potok

Directed by Kimberly Senior

Produced by TimeLine Theatre in Chicago

At Stage 773 through October 18, 2014

Alex Weisman as Asher Lev, Lawrence Grimm as the Father, Danica Monroe as the Mother

When I was 12 years old I read a book that changed my life. It was The Chosen by Chaim Potok. I marveled at how Potok was able to capture the beauty of Judaism and at the same time depict a secular world with exciting baseball games, the joys of literature and the ideas of Western thought. Then The Promise and My Name Is Asher Lev came out and I was hooked.

Potok’s book My Name Is Asher Lev struck home for me personally, since Asher was an artist and I was in theatre and a singer. For me the creative impulses of being an artist and a Jew came from the same spiritual place. I found a Judaism which lived and breathed through storytelling, humor, song, dance, performance and textualities coming from Judaism’s ‘thousands of years’ dialectic with Torah and Talmud. Also the Judaism I followed had experiences in chavurot or small fervent communities with ecstatic prayer, meditative practices, and creative experiences. It is no wonder that Chaim Potok was one of the leading lights for the Chavurah Movement of young Jews, starting in the 60s and 70s.

The play of Asher Lev is set against the landscape of a world where it is dangerous to be a Jew, where the wonder of life cries out to be explored through creative expression, and about the intense passion from a Chasidic way of life that. Showing the pressures on Asher and his Chasidic family in a 1950s household in Brooklyn after the Holocaust and during the reign of Stalin in the Soviet Union, the play takes place when Jewish communities were rebuilding their lives. The parents, who are emissaries – shluchim – for the Rebbe the spiritual leader of their community, have to deal with an inquisitive and creative son who is passionate about “idolatrous” art, which is anathema to their world. While doing the Rebbe’s work, Asher’s mother suffers the loss of her brother and she goes into a deep depression.

Asher, in the play as our narrator, looks back in time and describes his predicament living with a depressed mother and his yearning to create art. As we the audience hear his tale, we long for him to leave his home and find himself. Eventually he goes on to study art (through a recommendation by the Rebbe) and he grows up to become the thing that his parents do not want, a famous artist.

But as Asher narrates, he speaks as though disembodied, without much connection to his parents, to Judaism or himself. It is telling that in the talkback discussion after the show, Alex Weisman the actor who played Asher, responded to a question by saying that he believed the play is more about the parents than it is about Asher Lev. This basic misconception of Potok’s intent was apparent from the performance and this production. 

Purposely, Potok uses Chasidism because it is a branch of Judaism known for emphasizing the awe in the universe that can be found in every human action, from the trivial to the portentous. It is a Judaism that leads the person in prayer to the celestial heights. It is filled with music, dance, storytelling and intellectual discourse, and even, at times, through drink and wild merriment. 

Alex Weisman as Asher Lev

Sadly, director Kimberly Senior  gives no emphasis to how Asher’s artistic passion is related to his Chasidic roots. A fine director (great work in Northlight’s The Whipping Man), I am sorry to say that this play gets away from her. Its deep themes of spiritual and Jewish content are not evident in her work with the actors or in the staging.

An example, Asher is supposed to have payos (side hair curls) that Chasidic boys and men grow out. They are continually referred to as a major part of his identity. Yet he doesn’t have them and looks quite “reformed Jewish” (Weisman words describing his own Jewish upbringing, in the talkback).

A missed historical detail is in the costume choice for the Rebbe. Astonishingly he comes out in a modern synagogue-style tallit (prayer shawl), rather than, either, a traditional Polish-style coat and shtreiml (fur hat) or a large fedora typically worn by the Lubavitcher Rebbe -- the sect Potok used as the inspiration for this fictionalized sect, as the Ladover.

A more important scene is when Asher, who is now taking classes in an artist’s studio, is going to paint a live nude model for the first time. This scene entirely loses its world shattering impact for Asher, because the female model partially disrobes for only a second and Asher barely registers it. Yet this moment should have been a telling one for him. Afterwards he tries to explain it to his parents, about why drawing nudes is so important for an artist. Clearly, in the script he is affected and brought to some sense of the mystery of the female body, as a transcendent and revelatory moment. But on stage it seemed rushed and embarrassed.

A bizarre production choice is the fact that Asher, who is constantly drawing, shows his pictures to his parents, yet nothing is on the page. He then posts them on a large wall and before us are a lot of blank pieces of paper looking like a lot of ‘post-its’. It is emblematic of this production, that where we look for the art from the page, we can’t find it conceptually on the stage.

Most importantly, a major theme of the play is the question of Jewish identity and the need for healing the world and the Jewish people after the trauma and losses of the Holocaust. Yet in this production the Jewish specificity is a mundane story of generational conflict, creating a blandness throughout.

Asher’s parents go to his gallery opening and see his painting “Brooklyn Crucifixion,” a painting of his mother on a cross at his gallery show. Potok’s point, and what makes his work so interesting, is that Asher appropriates and transforms this symbol into a Jewish one for a post-Holocaust era, bringing Chagall’s “White Crucifixion” to mind. Going back to his Chasidic roots to bring the Moshiach “now,” the Messiah who will redeem the Jewish people and the world, Asher paints what is deep in his soul and even within the soul of his people. Ironically, it is this painting that shakes his parents to their very core as Jews, yearning for their son to embody the values they believe in. Though we see shock in his parent’s faces when they see the piece, the lack of a performative Jewish concept in the production and the way the scene is played, leaves the moment colorless.

At the end the character looks into a mirror as he faces the audience. Looking at himself (and at us) he says, “My name is Asher Lev,” the translation of his Hebrew name meaning “heart of happiness.” But this production does not go to that heart. Potok is exploring the search for identity, out of deep Jewish historical roots of creativity, revelation, exile, trauma, and transformation. It is for a world today that is yearning for a spiritual and aesthetically truthful journey. Given TimeLine Theatre Company’s great past work and its mission of presenting works from history as they connect with us today, this production is disappointing.

THE ICEMAN COMETH -- A STORY OF EXILE

As someone who mostly writes about Jewish related theatre I saw many parallels to plays of Jewish content in Eugene O'Neill's play The Iceman Cometh which opened last night at the The Goodman in Chicago. Perhaps due to that, I saw a play that depicted the story of people in exile. 

Though it has stars - Brian Dennehy and Nathan Lane who were excellent -- it was O'Neill, his epic play (4 hrs and 45 minutes incl. three intermissions) and the ensemble cast who were the stars. This group of ne'er do wells in Harry Hope's flophouse are rootless, stateless and living under the bottle -- longing for their next drink and waiting for Hickey, their saviour.


But when Hickey arrives, the salvation he offers is to come clean, to leave the world of pipe dreams, to come back to reality and see the world as it truly is -- not under the haze and anesthesia of drink. This seems reasonable and not unlike abolitionists of the day. Since Hickey is a charismatic figure that they look up to they do try to tear away the charades they play. They work to clean up and in amusing ways like a group of schlemiels, they try to drop their pretend lives that are dreams, but are so much a part of their identity. They try to live in a reality that has oppressed them in the past and to do the things that they say they really want to accomplish.

But this freedom that he offers has a price. And when they do join the world, they see why they lived in fantasy. Separated from their dreams they become like their oppressors -- petty, angry, greedy, misogynist, physical abusers, and racist. They become the things that they have been trying to escape from. Life fills them with terror. Before, they saw the world as in a dream and they were the storytellers of that dream, living for a tomorrow that may never come, but yearning for it just as an exile longs for the homeland.


Bolshevism and revolution are the backdrop. Radical leaders are being turned in and arrested by an intransigent (and corrupt) legal system, that upholds inequality and believes that cultural and racial differences are insidious and un-American. Similarly, Jewish-American were leaders in the unions and radical movements at that time, enduring jail to promote their ideals. Anti-Semitism was rampant in 1939 when the play was written and Germany was seen, even in America (witness leaders like Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh), as a bastion of progress with a false superman -- Hitler, to rid them of their radicals and their Jews.


The characters (and they are interesting and playful characters performed by a wonderful cast) in Harry Hope's Saloon come to reality and it stinks. They yearn to go back to their dreams and their lies. But Hickey has worked a miracle and changed the booze so it no longer creates an alcoholic stupor. Like a magician he has made the elixir of dreams into liquid impotence and all that is left to them is emptiness. 

The characters in Harry Hope's Saloon are from the heartland of America, they are Irish-Americans, Black, Jewish, immigrants (legals and not), people who are emotionally unstable, intellectuals, women selling their bodies -- all searching for a home and a society that accepts them and their difference. They yearn for a day of equality and change. They yearn for a future that brings hope. And unlike other times when Hickey visits, even if they didn't have that, they had their dreams.


But Hickey has changed. He takes their dreams away as he takes away their drink and gives them the harsh reality of an America that only cares about power and is self-serving. Similarly to Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, Hickey is a salesman who sells dreams. But both embody rootlessness and self-loathing that is both imposed from within and from outside. They live in a dream that becomes a nightmare of deep, deep existential loss.

Where does this loss come from? I believe it is from exile, the exile of people from their communities, their cultural roots, and their identities. The pipe dreams of Harry Hope's Saloon that they express through stories, jokes and song are their lifeblood, helping them to live with a taste of a better tomorrow, that they all long for, but can only realize through booze. 


And Hickey, their leader, is also the ultimate wanderer who can never settle down. Like Willy Loman he is always on the go. And as much as they chase the next sale, they are in both in exile. Both of them live in an world that values commercialism, capitalism and power. They are just cogs in the system -- the everyman, the "low-man," the "hick-man" -- and attention will definitely not be paid.


These plays speak so much to our times, where power and greed are what are given voice in America and the world today. Not only has the revolution not taken place but corporations are now  "people" under the law as the Supreme Court ruled in the Citizens United case. No longer are individual human rights respected, as the Arizona law against immigrants makes clear -- they need not apply, even though they add value economically and as cultural capitol. And as the NRA lobby continues to guide legislation, states like Florida allow people to legally use guns and kill when they feel threatened by people they deem to be "the other."


I could go on and on about the relevance of The Iceman Cometh and Death of a Salesman. Suffice it to say that the loss of everything we should hold dear is in this play. Come see it to dream, to laugh, to cry, to mourn and to feel the loss that comes from an exilic world. From this telling of the tale, maybe there is hope.

THEATRE OF THE REAL

The acts of violence against innocents and the shear hatred that it encompasses is not in the past, as we remember the Holocaust on Yom HaShoah this past Wednesday and Thursday. It is with us today. The trial of  Anders Behring Breivik for the massacre of 77 people in 2011, mostly teens at a summer camp, that he executed in Utoya, Norway, shows us how pure unadulterated hate leads to a violence that is unimaginable by civilized people. 


The recent killings done by a madman in Toulouse, France when Mohammed Merah went on a rampage in March 2012, killing three paratroopers and seriously injuring a third. Then four days later Merah went to a Jewish school and slaughtered a 30-year old rabbi Jonathan Sandler, his children aged four and five, and another child, the daughter of the school's principal. The 7-year-old girl, Miriam Monsonego, died in her father's arms as medics tried to resuscitate her. Merah was described as chasing her and then holding her by the hair as he shot her at point blank range.


As I teach my classes this quarter on representations of the Holocaust in theatre and film we think about why things like this happen. We try to get "inside" the events that are being depicted on stage or on the screen and we examine how they represent what the Holocaust was about. We discuss the ongoing history of anti-Semitism and acts of violence that come from racism and prejudice that humanity perpetrates against the other. And as theatre people, we try to imagine. 


Yet our imaginations fall short. We have no thoughts that can truly picture it. So, even as we realize the paucity of our understanding, acts of violence against children and other innocent people still happen. The theatre of the real takes over and erases the theatre of the stage. This is not the same as so-called "Reality TV", with its superficial nonsense that wears us down when we watch and anesthetizes us. The theatre of the real is the performances of every moment that make us feel and think and shock us to what is important in life.


Today Elie Wiesel and Barak Obama met at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. They went to the memorial and spoke about the continued need to ferret out atrocity and intervene before it is too late. Wiesel spoke about how the Holocaust could have been prevented if nations had moved to stop it. Obama spoke about the new commission on atrocity and the sanctions against Syria and Iran. 


Are these acts enough? When will the violence of hatred end? As Karl Ove Knausgaard wrote today in the NYTimes in reference to the trial of Breivik, "Our task is to witness it, to allow the weight of reality to break through the picture and correct it. And never, never the reverse." This is the theatre of the real.

FOOTNOTE-Joseph Cedar's wonderful new film

I am still pondering this one. Though the reviewers I've read have seen this as a film that shows the Jewish art of learning for learning's sake - Torah Lishma - I think it is more about the problems of learning that begin and end with a footnote. Having been in footnotes myself in books and articles and also being proud of them, I definitely, empathize with the father Eliezer. But I also relate to Uriel the son, who is able to go beyond the infinitesimally small and expand learning so that people today can relate.


This tension very much exists today. We want to know and learn quickly. We don't want to take the time for research. We want everything to relate to our times and we get frustrated or bored when the problems of the past aren't my problems. I also get frustrated with the phrase "make it relevant." I am a big believer in context and I think that learning must be as much as possible from a contextualized perspective. I think we settle for easy answers and basically we like knowledge when it affirms views that we already have.


But learning in order for it to truly be new knowledge must be unsettling and disturbing. It must jar our usual mental processes and bring us to new conclusions. And this is where the movie FOOTNOTE creates the tension. The learning of the father gets stuck in the infinitesimal and the learning of the son, which becomes wisdom is that just knowing the truth is not always what is right.


It says in the Talmud that two scholars studying together "sharpen each other's minds in the study of the law for the sake of truth." But that sharpening can be a dangerous weapon wielded against others. FOOTNOTE beautifully shows this tension and also shows the dire consequences of learning that are hurtful and create barriers which enslave rather than frees us.

Batsheva Dance Company Tells Story Through Revelation

The internationally famous Batsheva Dance Company from Israel is coming to Chicago to the Auditorium Theatre later this month (ticket information below) . I watch the performers as they exhibit flawless execution and I ask, "What story are they telling?"

I spoke with Matan David, one of the troupe’s dancers and who is currently in New York City with the company. I asked him about the meaning and stories of their dance compositions. “It is hard to say as theatre and story. We work with emotions and feelings but not to show a story. The information is purely physical. The way we work - stories are created on their own and it is abstract.”

This past week they performed "Hora" in New York City. “It is a dance about the alternative meanings,” David told me. “The word “hora” can mean many things. For many it is an Israeli dance, it can also mean “hour” in Latin" (the dance is one hour). And the work doesn’t have the Hora circle dance in it. Clearly for Batsheva and its Director Ohad Naharin, meanings are subjectively multiple and come from the viewer’s perspective, even as they emerge for the performer.

Naharin, the Director of Batsheva Dance since 1990, has said. “Texture is one of the most meaningful things to me, in dancing…And for me the meaning comes out of recognizing those elements…the composition, the tension between the elements, the dynamics… that’s the meaning of the work; it comes out of there. That’s why you cannot tell a dance. And if you can tell a dance, it’s maybe not a very good danc.” (Susan Yung 2007 interview). Anna Kisselgoff of the NYTimes wrote, “He seems deliberately to leave interpretation to the audience. A more dubious appraisal might suggest the choreography is needlessly obscure in some cases.”

I continued my discussion with Matan David about “Max“ which will be performed in Chicago.  I continued to probe about story, but in a new way. I asked David about the story of Naharin and how he composed the music for “Max” under the pseudonym Maxim Warrat. He laughed and said, “That is very funny. Max is the alter ego of Naharin. He came into the studio one day and became Maxim Warrat the composer. It seemed like a joke. And the music came in with him each day we worked on it.” I asked if Naharin became someone else or more himself as Maxim and how his dual identities reminded me of Purim this past week, with the masks we wear to hide in order to play and let out another side of ourselves. “Yes, that is true," he said, "so “Max” is very theatrical and it came from the music. I always have people see “Max” first if they have never seen Batsheva. For me it is dark…the movement creates a distance. I love it. It is very influenced by Japanese movement and dance.”

In “Max” I saw the performers manipulate their bodies flawlessly through movements that were exacting, totally in sync and physically impeccable. I heard Hebrew and other languages or pseudo-language; and the musical tones evoked Jewish kinot, or mourning laments, which are chanted to remember exile and the ancient Temple’s destruction. I also saw in the dance other destructions and atrocities like Hiroshima and Nagasaki and through the purity of Batsheva’s movement I was brought to the universalism of the suffering of all humanity. The New York Times wrote about “Max,” “(It) produces a formal structure full of breath, as if the air around the dancers and not just the movement, is responsible for shifting the dynamic from mischievous to ominous. At times it’s balmy; in other moments it’s ice cold. Succinctly and mysteriously, “Max” zeros in, just as its press notes say, on the pleasure and pain of being alive.”

Dance critic Debra Cash writes about how their technique coming from a process called "Gaga" is integral to their composition, “The Company sums it up by calling it simply “a tool for creative thinking." As it says on their website, "We are aware of the distance between our body parts, we are aware of the friction between flesh and bones, we sense the weight of our body parts…we learn to appreciate understatement and exaggeration…We discover both the animal we are and the power of our imagination.” 

In this way the body is more body-in-pure-movement rather than a body with a dramatic story arc and context. As a contrast, in the recent Wim Wenders film about Pina Bausch, Pina, (which beautifully encompasses her aesthetic of dance and the Wuppertal Tanztheater) one sees dancers working in a totally different way, with all kinds of relationships emerging -- men to women, sensual to powerful, repetitive and Sisyphusean, environment to body, music to feeling, and youth to aging.

Unlike Pina, Naharin goes to the other end of the spectrum. Meaning and story are stripped away to show the purity of body and energy. The music lends a feeling of ritual. Unseen and powerful forces are the source for the movement and the dancer is an actor who is not in control and caught up in movements without intellectual or emotional awareness.

Batsheva is understood through the viewer’s perspective, what the dancer discovers, and how the pure movement on stage is an unformed revelation of movement -- as texture and the text.

Batsheva Dance Company Auditorium Theatre March 17 and 18, 2012 one weekend only. Tickets are on sale now and range from $30 - $90, available by phone at (800) 982-2787, at http://www.ticketmaster.com/Auditorium-Theatre-tickets-Chicago/venue/57351 or in-person at ATRU’s box office. This engagement is made possible through the generous support of Seymour Persky.

THE ACADEMY AWARDS AND THE SURVIVAL OF THE WORLD!

Reflecting on the Academy Awards with Billy Crystal. There is clearly no problem with Billy being the emcee for the awards show and his comfortability addressing the audience in the theatre as well as the television audience – talking about African-American ethnicity and referencing Jewish ethnicity was not a problem. The fact that being Jewish is so accepted in this country is both amazing and also often overlooked by many Jews.

Quite often the “official” line is that there is a lot of anti-Semitism and that we must be vigilant. No question, anti-Semitism exists. Synagogues are still being defaced and bombings are planned, just as happened recently outside the New York City area in New Jersey.

But the freedom that exists here is both unprecedented and wondrous. The Jewish community should be overjoyed at what we have achieved over the last 200+ years in America. While in Philadelphia this weekend we went to the incredible American Jewish History Museum on Independence Mall. What a great experience! The accomplishments by Jews in this country from science to business to politics and of course to arts and culture not only are great because of the achievements, they are great because they strongly contributed to what has made America into America. And the ways Jews joined with other ethnicities to be creative is only something that could have happened in this country.

Jews have a lot to be proud of, but America does too. The fabric of this nation is to offer freedom, not only to do as we please as long as it doesn’t hurt others. The genius of this country is to be an incubator nation that stimulates ingenuity, cross-cultural exchanges, creative solutions, and artistic explorations that come from a deep sense of breaking new ground for fresh perspectives on identity and invention.

That is the greatness of America – that identity and invention can come together and social strata, prejudices, class, and whether one has wealth or not are not going to be obstacles. Of course I acknowledge the racism that is a deep part of America, issues of women’s rights, and the ongoing homophobia that still is seeking a real just response. But as my teacher Elie Wiesel would always say -- and yet….

Much has been achieved and cultures are seeking each other out for cross-fertilization. The opportunities today are greater than ever. I am so optimistic for this world and we must insist on being optimistic, keeping in mind realities and obstacles. The world is closer together than ever before and the Jewish world as well as the world-at-large must embrace it or there will be no survival.

Holocaust, Israel and Jewish Performance

Just returning to Louisville from LA, I was looking at the films being shown at the Louisville Jewish Film Festival. At least four out of the thirteen (b-mitzvah theme here?) were based on the Holocaust or grappling with memories of Nazi cruelty. One was about Jews in America entitled Yankles - about a "Bad News Bears" style chasidic baseball team and the other eight were either from Israel or about Israel. On the face of it, the festival seems to say that Jewish film is mostly about the Holocaust and the rebirth of Judaism in the State of Israel. That means that the one film representing the approximately 5 million Jews in America relegates Jewish culture to kitschy schmaltz, which is putting it mildly.


So maybe these are the only films the festival leaders could find? But I know that isn't true. I have seen really good and interesting films with Jewish content from America and other countries with really interesting themes and cinematography over the last year. An example is "Crime After Crime" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Qw0-39e3dQ  I was pleased to meet the filmmaker Yoav Potash and Joshua Safran, a Jewish lawyer in the film who's Jewishness is very much a motif in the film. It documents how Safran, with his partner Nadia Costa, defends African-American woman Deborah Peagler seeking parole from an unjust sentence. The film had funding from the Foundation for Jewish Culture and has been a Sundance Selection.


Or what about a film about 20-somethings like "Four Weddings and a Felony." Though not an acclaimed film it still is a good film showing the trials and tribs of young Jews today. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6Sj7GcRl4U


Or if you really like Yiddish, the REAL Yiddish, what about "Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness" by Joseph Dorman, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfx5tOBbe6U
which puts to lie about how happy-go-lucky Tevye and his band of merry Jews were. As Hillel Halkin says in the film, "Sholem Aleichem never uses humor to escape what's terrible. He uses humor to enable you to understand that there is a perspective from which the most terrible thing is funny, too." It also features the 100 years old Bel Kaufman, author of Up the Down Staircase and the granddaughter of Sholem Aleichem.


There are many more but I guess the point I want to make is that Jewish films abound and the choices go  in many different directions, not just with the Holocaust and Israel. On another level I wonder about the choices and ask what are they saying about what the film fest selectors want to portray as Jewish culture and concerns. Why is there the focus on the Holocaust and Israel? Is this the primary way the presenters want Jews to be defined? Is this the way they define themselves? Is the implicit statement that being a Jew today in America is to primarily show how suffering and catastrophe resulted in the establishment of an Israel which now can boast a thriving film industry with talented filmmakers? 


I have seen many good Israeli films and bad ones, too. I was just at a private screening by the Tel Aviv University Film Department with films by students and graduates. But they aren't the sum total of the Jewish experience of America or in the world. We must go beyond the ghetto. We must see the Jewish-World experience in all of its colors, dimensions, and transculturalism. There are new definitions and cultural expressions of Jewishness today. Let's move into the 21st C.

Jewish theatre or what?

Lots of thoughts are going around my head since I got back from Los Angeles and the Jewish Theatre Conference we held there. So many good people came and showed their work and discussed topics like the ethics in a Jewish themed play or about "memory and identity" in plays with Holocaust content. We met with icons in American entertainment - Ed Asner and Carl Reiner and we saw performances that varied from "Yiddishy" style drama to personal wrestlings with what it means to be a Jew in a post-modern world. 


So what is the upshot? Jewish theatre, Jews in theatre, theatre impacted by Jewish thinking and Jewish experience and Jewish history -- where does it end? When Richard Montoya our keynote speaker on the "Shaping and Shifting of Jewish Theatre" came from Culture Clash, he spoke about the "taco meets pastrami" and I loved it because it said it all for me. It is about the taco and pastrami becoming friends and doing a dance. It is about the partnership that can come in a transcultural exchange. It is about what I have to gain from meeting you and what you have to gain from meeting me.


Martin Buber one of the greatest social-theologians in the 20th C, who also adored and believed in theatre and was a dramaturg in his early career, wrote that all of life is meeting. It is in the meeting that I respect where you come from and your journey, that enhances and excites me and the journey I can take with you. Theatre is the best way to enact that meeting, to communicate and be in the fully present moment. It brings me into the "awe" and transforms me, even for a short amount of time. Yet from this transformation I realize it is possible to be moved. It is in theatre that I become fully other and that I can best come to an understanding for the other who is in front of me. Buber felt that the I-Thou revelatory moment lived in theatre.


So Jewish theatre is that moment for me when all of this comes together. When I create or see theatrical creations before me I see the great tragedy of humanity and how heroic we all are in our desire to be more fully human -- to be just, to love, to endure our suffering and pains, to overcome grief, to laugh and make fun, to not take ourselves too seriously, to play and shpiel and to be meaningfully thoughtful when we are faced with memory and what the future holds. Jewish theatre brings all of this together for me and yet....


Yet we must join with others. Our theatre must be transcultural today. It must include and be exposed to other identities and heritages. It must include and be affected by others and it must not be triumphal - only trumpeting ourselves. When Richard Montoya said that he wanted to include Jewish culture into his work and he wanted to be proud of his Jewishness from his crypto-Spanish Jewish roots, I said "Jews should be proud of the Spanish inflections in our roots and how some of the greatest collection of writings and experiences of all time came from those roots - the Kabbalah. The magical realism of Spanish culture is a strong element in our joint roots and it is no accident that the crucible of our search for the transcendent was in the history we lived together." So Richard said to me, "let's make a new play about this and I'll write it with you." So Richard, I will take you up on that offer. I'm there!

Getting Started

This is a new blog to move forward with an ongoing contemplation about Jewish theatre, film, arts and culture and their intersection with other arts and culture.

Using Malick's "The Tree of Life"

Several years ago, Roberta Morris (a wonderful scholar in religion and aesthetics) and I wrote an article about films that we saw at the 2001 Toronto Intl. Film Festival called "Does Film Have a Religion?" In preparation for the article and a television show we were "pitching" to a religion and culture network in Toronto, we viewed the films through a religious lens and we consciously chose films that we thought lent themselves to that perspectivist approach. Certainly Terence Malick's recent film The Tree of Life would have been one of those films.

The point of the article as well as the proposed tv series wasn't to belabor scholarly points on religion or on film, but to have an intelligent discussion from our different perspectives, hers as a scholar and writer on religion and film coming from a Christian background and mine as a writer/critic on Jewish theatre and the arts; and to put these views up and against each other, in opposition and opposing.

Yet our differences didn't limit our views. Rather it enhanced and deepened our thinking because we not only didn't judge each other - to the best of our ability - but we put ourselves in the shoes of the "other" to see what they saw and tried that on for size. We exercised a perspectivist approach that didn't close us off to each other and in that way the experience was quite refreshing and sacred.

So in that spirit I write about Malick's film.

I came to this movie with some positive expectations. What I had read about it seemed interesting to me, as it had religious ideas (and we can discuss what that means), it used the Book of Job as a textual referent, and it used film as a conscious aesthetic choice for this expression.

I was disappointed.

Mostly my disappointment came from a lack of questioning and complexity that permeated the film. The movie begins with a statement from the mother's voice, that we are brought into the world with two choices about how to live our lives. One choice is to live by grace and the other is to live by nature. She says "the way of nature and the way of grace. You have to choose which one to follow." If we choose to live by grace then all things are accepted. If we live by nature then we are never satisfied. The mother goes on to say, "No one who loves the way of grace comes to a bad end."

Then the tension of nature vs. grace is filmically depicted. The mother and father have to deal with the death of their son who dies in war, presumably the Vietnam War since the scenes are in the 50s and 60s, though this isn't made explicit.

Questions that could be addressed are hinted at but also left untouched. Why is there death? Why is there suffering? Is this embedded in the creation of the universe? Is this the product of nature? Is this part of the struggle and the aggression needed in order to survive? Do our core mythical, religious, and Biblical stories teach us how to deal with these existential and also with psychological crises - like in the story of the Garden of Eden, the story of Cain and Abel, the stories of Oedipus wanting to kill his father and have sex with his mother, the sacrificial offering of Isaac that nearly results in death by his father Abraham, and the stories of the unconditional love of Mary for Jesus.

Clearly, as I have been reminded, Malick is using his own background and perspective, his Christian reading of core Western myths to deal with these questions. That is what drew me to go see the film because these questions also fascinate me and move me deeply. I also think film is unique in its ability to deeply deal with existential and mythic subjects. Film is incisional that way, cutting deeply into our mental processes.

The visuals in fact are of intercutting, snatches of the past both cosmic and human, depictions of creation and the primeval soup juxtaposed with the birth of a child and the make-up of the family; the rivalry of dinosaurs with the rivalry of brothers -- all are interesting yet they started to take on a comic tone for me that I don't think was intended. I wondered when Malick was going to take on the hard stuff. When was he going to really deal with the tension of grace and nature? And when was he going to deal with sin, as St. Augustine writes about and its relation to grace and nature?

This isn't my tradition, but the belief of sin and desires as "original" is central to why evil exists, in Western beliefs. Yet Malick leaves this and focusses on the family dynamic of rivalry between brothers, between father and older son, and between father, mother and son. Once again this points symbolically at the trinity. The mother is the forgiving one and the one who shows love. The father (the Old Testament God?) is judgmental to the point of punishing his children for no real reason except that he is the authority who can't show mercy. He even threatens his wife when she challenges the way he is treating his son. Yet eventually all is forgiven and they move on.

But they are faced with injustices, like the way blacks are treated at best as second class citizens in Texas. The movie hints at class and racial prejudice but does nothing to point out its societal evil. It shows people who are suffering from poverty, alcoholism, hunger and other cruelties in the world yet leaves them behind in the narrative and the only evil we see afflict the central characters, is that their son dies in war - an unnecessary war, but that also is never dealt with. Also the location is Waco, Texas the location of the Branch Davidians, who broke away from the Seventh Day Adventists in 1955 and lived an existence believing in an imminent apocalypse until they were disbanded by FBI agents in 1993. Yet this is never mentioned in all of the films time travels. Why?

The ending of the film is a mix of beings that I assume are the souls of all humanity at the edge of a vast ocean walking aimlessly on the beach, all dressed in white. Perhaps this is heaven or the rapture after the apocalypse, but this too is left unexplained.

I find that the film is so deeply caught up in a mythic, mostly Christian symbolism, that it misses the issues of evil, cruelty and suffering in the world and ultimately sees these issues as being soothed over by grace -- accept and all will be forgiven. Christian music dominates, underscoring this and many requiems are played to invoke the final reckoning and God's grace.

But where is the moral outrage when the defenseless are killed in holocausts? Where is the anger at the universe for sending a mad man into a school and shooting indiscriminately and the need for a system of justice that demands gun control? Where is the belief that racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, misogyny and hatred of the outsider are wrong? And finally where is a God that created a universe or at the very least a human race that can be so violent and perpetrate so much bloodshed for whatever reason - religious fanaticism, totalitarianism, etc. I know that Malick wants to deal with the existential subject of life and death but the horrors of the 20th century don't give him that luxury if he is invoking the entire universe and God.

Even though it was absurdist I felt that A Serious Man was able to go further, through a sense of the particularity of one man's life, his family, and the moral situation he had to deal with as his life was falling apart. The Coen's also invoke The Book of Job and show how this one man loses everything, just like Job. They show in their quirky way that he is righteous and through the vacuousness of his suburban lifestyle -- devoid of a real sense of the deeply authentic -- show that in his own way Larry Gopnick is a good man seeking what is right. Yet no matter what, he is a schlemiel, a man who is always dumped on through no fault of his own. He is the little guy who shows the absurdity of life and yet he struggles to make meaning, which is where the humor comes from. And when the stakes are raised and he loses his wife to another man, he is close to losing his job, he takes a bribe, he has to help his brother leave the country because the brother is being accused of sodomy and solicitation, his son who is about to have a bar mitzvah is so nervous that he resorts to smoking pot, and then Larry is diagnosed with cancer -- all these things and more lead us to the moment when, like Gopnick, we want to scream at the universe and say "Enough."

The specificity of Gopnik's life, put up against profound questions about the meaning of life, give us a way in to really question meaning. As opposed to the seriousness of the themes of grace and nature that Malick references, the Coen's humorously bring up the problem of accident vs. fate and come out on the side of not knowing the answer. Ironically to me, the ponderous Tree of Life, is less deep than the humorously absurd Serious Man.

I am also wondering why the title The Tree of Life. There is little reference to this in the film and I invite comments on this. In Judaism the Tree of Life is two things. It is the Torah, which are the Five Books of Moses -- the core stories and practices of the Jewish people. The Tree of Life is also a mystical concept that the entire universe is built on. It is too much to write about here, but simply put it shows how the mythical primordial Tree (which originated in the Garden of Eden) is the channel for the Divine Flow from which emanates the source of all energy that permeates everything. Yet there has been a separation, according to the mystics and the Divine sparks of creation are spread in shards throughout the universe for us to redeem through prayer and deeds that heal the world or Tikkun Olam. Is this in Malick's film?

In A Serious Man at the movie's end, the tornado heads towards Larry Gopnick's son and his Jewish school. It is like the whirlwind in the Book of Job where God speaks to Job and says to him "Where were you when I laid the foundation of the universe? Tell me if you have knowledge." (Job 38) But in A Serious Man we are left to wonder if that knowledge exists. This whirlwind can destroy a school and children. Is there really meaning or are our lives an accident or are they ultimately beyond our comprehension and we don't know the final answer?

It reminds me of the story about the man who was given a job to stand on top of a tower outside of a small Jewish village (shtetl) in Europe. He was a watchman. But he wasn't there to warn about marauders or enemies. He was there to tell the town if the Messiah was coming. The town was afraid they were so remote, that they needed someone who could see a great distance and he would let them know that redemption was at hand.

So the watchman in the tower waited, days, weeks, months and even years. But the Messiah never came. One day a figure came into view and the watchman looked to see who he was. The figure turned out to be a peddler. The peddler saw the man on the watchtower and came over. He called up to him.

"You" he said, "What are you doing?"

The watchman looked down from the tower. "I'm waiting for the Messiah. My job is to stay here and wait, no matter how long. And when the Messiah comes, I'm to tell the people in the town way down the road." He pointed over down the road.

The peddler looked and thought about that for a minute and then he turned to the watchman and said,

"That's a funny thing. What kind of job is that? I'm sure it doesn't pay you much."

"That's true," answered the watchman, "But it sure is steady work."

We don't know the answers, though it would be comforting to know. But we do know that there is injustice, that there is inequality, that the rich take advantage of those have less power, and that there can be horrible cruelty. I don't think The Tree of Life got into that kind of complexity.

Sidney Lumet: An Appreciation and Jewish Perspective

The death of the great movie director Sidney Lumet reminds us that it isn't hard to distinguish a Lumet film. They are often filled with emotional grittiness. Challenging from the moment they start to the very end, they move quickly from scene to scene, barely giving audiences a chance to breath. He had "the touch" because his films were recognizable -- done with such an eye for detail, from the cinematography to the smallest object on a shelf. From each detail of the film, he utilized his creative imagination -- but it had to be authentic, in its service to the hard-hitting and (often) to a social conscience story.

The first Lumet film I remember is "The Pawnbroker." Tackling the subjects of the Holocaust and the poverty in Harlem, in one deeply etched, visual scream -- his scenes were layered with quick cuts of images and flashbacks. They brought the viewer into the mind of this Holocaust survivor even as it showed the inner city life of Harlem. By doing this, he constructed a landscape of suffering and the struggle to survive.

Yet Lumet didn't work in abstractions. He made it real. The details of every scene reflected the story Lumet wanted to portray. He even made this film very personal, by having his father Baruch Lumet in the role of a European Orthodox Jew. In one of the dream sequences, we see Lumet's father, Baruch, at a family picnic in Europe, and we know he will die in the Holocaust. Nevertheless Lumet doesn’t give in to pity and sentimentality. In this film, the force of the acting he extracts from Rod Steiger as the survivor Nazerman, transcends any sense of pity and breaks through the classical meaning of tragedy. All we do is fear.

Young Sidney acted on the Yiddish stage and in Yiddish film, starting at the age of four. His parents were in the Yiddish Art Theatre of Maurice Schwartz and the plays were by the great playwrights of the day, both Jewish and European. They performed Shakespeare, Russian plays, as well as Jewish content plays with a social message. Often the plays were about the “outsider” who was either an accused criminal seeking justice like Alfred Dreyfus or about other historic events when Jews were persecuted.

One of the Jewish roles (not Yiddish) Lumet most remembered was being in Kurt Weill’s 1937 pageant opera “The Eternal Road” directed by the great German director Max Reinhardt. He played “the estranged one’s son” and sang tenor. When interviewed he reflected on how it was this production that made him realize how great theatre and spectacle were and he realized this was the career for him.

Surely, the historic material must have affected him, as well. The opera, a six-hour extravaganza, is about the history of the suffering and persecution of the Jewish people over the millennia. It was specifically done as a protest to what was going on in Nazi Europe at the time and the world Kurt Weill had to leave.

Growing up in this milieu it is no wonder that Lumet as a young director after World War II, chose stories (starting out in early television) with lots of drama and a social message. Similarly to the filmmaker Jules Dassin (“The Naked City,” “Night and the City,” “Rififi”) who also came out of the Yiddish Theatre, he showed the city as a real character and would incorporate the action of the city and the personality of urban life (he mostly used New York City) as a counterpoint to the action in service to the story.

He was a stickler for this level of realism even when faced with the Hollywood studio system. In his memoir “Making Movies,” he tells the story of when Herman Wouk’s book “Marjorie Morningstar,” about the Jewish nouveau riche, was about to be made into a film. Lumet actually sought out to be the director because he was afraid of how it would be done. His fears were not unfounded.

Brought to Hollywood for a meeting with Jack Warner, he was about to walk into Warner’s plush office suite when he noticed the designs for the Catskill Jewish resorts where some of the early parts of the story are set. He looked at them and saw that they were the latest in Los Angeles “spa chic” and didn’t look at all like the simple camp-style of bungalows that the Catskill resorts were made of. So in their conversation, Lumet mentioned that he had seen the design renderings and they didn’t seem very authentic. Warner shot back, “"I want to make it a universal picture, one that will appeal to audiences everywhere." Lumet replied, "So does that mean that you aren't going to hire any Jewish actors?" The interview ended quickly and Lumet was on the next plane back to New York. He didn’t get the job.

Ultimately, though, it is Sidney Lumet who is the protagonist in his films. Having this strong connection to a prophetic Jewish social consciousness, Lumet looked for stories that he could “feel” with his heart and his mind, as he writes in "Making Movies." They are about the little guy, one could even say the schlemiel or Jewish anti-hero, who battles the system. “12 Angry Men,” “Fail Safe,” “Serpico,” “Dog Day Afternoon,” “Prince of the City,” “Network,” “The Verdict,” -- they have become part of cinematic vocabulary as “one of the best” and are unique in the way they depict the outsider, seeking justice. And yet there is still a Yiddish style shrug, "sometimes you win and sometimes you lose."

Lumet’s strong sense of authenticity led him to portray the inner and outer forces around being the “outsider” seeking justice relentlessly, as in the Biblical tradition of Deuteronomy 16:20, “tzedek, tzedek tirdoff – justice, justice, you shall pursue, so that you may live.

Waiting

So much of what we do in the arts has to do with just surviving. We look for work, we keep peddling our goods, we join people for projects not knowing if they will pay off, and we do what we can to support ourselves while we keep going and going and WAITING.

What if we were supported without all the work that goes into getting the support...only to not get it? What if there was an appreciation for the arts in this country so that there was a process that made sense. And artists and those promoting the arts could just enter into that process and get funding to pursue their dreams, at least to the extent that gives it a real chance?

But somehow the arts are supposed to be underfunded. New forms of culture aren't valued by those with money, unless these forms bring in money of their own. So the way to reach success is money and the indicator that brings money is money. What is wrong with this picture?

And we wait and wait and wait...

Getting there

So this is the end of the week. I have heard from a lot of people who are looking forward to the Jewish theatre conference in Chicago and our team is getting ready http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=141437282539522&ref=ts

I just want to take a step back to think about the artistic side of it all. Jewish arts is really no different than any other arts in its execution.

All arts longs to reach the transcendent and all arts seeks to build community and a sense of exploration through the emotions, intellect, body, and spirit. Jewish arts, African-American, Irish, Latino, Gay, and more. But the problem is that we don't understand that in our difference we are all one. We think we act like we are one either by pretending that we accept each other when we really continue to conflate issues of difference and harbor hatred -- witness the horrible brouhaha over the Islamic Center in lower Manhattan. Or we try to merge all cultures into the "Why can't we just get along?" Rodney King mantra.

But the really cool thing, which is also a paradox, is that in our difference we are truly one. We were meant to be different and to come from different cultures and identities and that when we gather together and explore our differences and similarities together by looking at each other through the other's lens -- then we are one. The ultimate paradox best explored through art -- Being Many Through Being One; Being One Through Being Many.

Shabbat Shalom, Salaam Aleichem, Peace Be Unto You

How do we find the narrative when we don't even know it?

I just responded to a question by Ariel Beery from PresenTense about the Jewish narrative and the need to find one. He references an article by Seth Cohen in relation to philanthropy http://ejewishphilanthropy.com/incrementalism-and-the-need-for-a-new-jewish-philanthropic-narrative/

What does this mean? Cohen still is looking at the Jewish narrative as one that is needed to obtain wealth. He wants to inspire donors for causes. He is thinking about monetization as the goal of the narrative. This is wrongheaded thinking and leads to the already rigid thinking of our so-called Jewish leaders. That is why diaspora Jews are so turned off to the Judaism presented to them in their communities and that is why their view of Israel is only as a tribal nation that only cares about itself.

The Jewish narrative is already super compelling. The need is to extend it to include the world in positive interaction. We need to do two things that are counter-intuitive. We need to both include others in our story of liberation from Egypt/the Mitzrayim of slavery to authority/extremism and we need to maintain a security, pride, and celebration in living Judaism and Jewish culture through our historical experience. We need to both reach out and in and reject tribalism which is another way of creating a self-imposed ghetto. We have lived as outsiders to the world and that knowledge is very powerful. It is a paradox that we need to maintain and it is there that we find our creative dimension.

PERSPECTIVIST ARTS AND CULTURE

I have been changing over the last three years and as I have journeyed so has my work and my art. I am now working not only for Jewish theatre and arts but also for theatre from other identities and cultures. I am working on a show now from an LGBT point of view and I am working with artists and their narratives to construct a theatre that we call identity and heritage theatre.

What is the theory behind all of this? I recently read some works that are about how to best understand Kabbalah from historical contexts. The book by Moshe Idel, "Ascensions on High in Jewish Mysticism: Pillars, Lines and Ladders" posits that by adopting the point of view of the other in order to understand oneself is a way to not only understand the way others view you, but to find new ways to view oneself. It is like looking in a mirror with a mirror behind one. The reflection continues and multiple images appear. So it is in a perspectivist approach. there is more to this but I realize that I have already applied that to my art and my work.

So I call it Perspectivist Arts and Culture. There is more to say about my theories, about the wonderful theatre group that has been accepting my theories and practice and putting them into action in a very intense laboratory setting, but I will leave it there for now and try to continue this even more as the days go by.

Lively Jewish Arts and Culture

Lively Jewish Arts and Culture THE ARTS ARE MORE

What do I mean by that? they take us to places in our spirits that we wouldn't normally go to. they make us think and feel. They move us to action or they help us to meditate. They disturb and challenge. They make us feel good. They provide meaning and they uncover meaninglessness.

I am currently working to create an arts center for students interested in Jewish Culture. They can be Jewish or not. but they have to have a passion for the arts and they need to stay in the framework of Jewish-ness.

The idea is to extend the boundaries and possibilities of Jewish arts and culture and to extend the participants.

--David