Beauty and Terror, Seen Through the Kaleidoscope of Jewish Theatre: International Aspects of the AJT Conference in Vienna, Austria, March 2007

by Henrik Eger, Ph.D.

Prologue

"To Jews and non-Jews in the audience, we must show not just a rosy picture, glossing over blemishes, but a picture as close and sometimes as painful to the truth as we can come." Theodore Bikel's (Austria & USA) advice from his important keynote address represents one of the many powerful images in our constantly changing conference kaleidoscope where theatre people from around the globe contributed beautiful, thought-provoking, and sometimes even terrifying aspects of life, showing the strength and tremendous range of Jewish theatre worldwide.

Looking into our conference kaleidoscope from an international perspective, I vividly recall dramatic beads, pebbles, and shards of many different colors and emotions that terrified, challenged, but also nurtured me.

Terrifying Images

We were taken to the edge of human existence many times: Brenda Adelman's (USA) My Brooklyn Hamlet, relived her mother's murder by her father (who then married the victim's sister), a drama that created a classical Greek catharsis in a modern Brooklyn setting.

Dutch Puppeteer Coby Omvlee's (Norway) presented Fusentast Theatre's educational outreach to Scandinavian and Arab audiences, counterbalancing the often vicious and dangerous anti-Jewish diatribes in many madrasahs around the world. Their work evokes the Holocaust, or, in Coby's words:

Acting as a Nazi with an SS collar, I take one of the paper puppets, Willem--whom the audience has grown to know quite well-set him on fire, and throw him into an "oven." Later, without any expression of anger or hate, I take the remaining characters out of the family portrait and throw them away, except Hetty, the main character-the only one left. During those scenes, both children and adults tend to sit in complete silence.

Susan Salms-Moss (USA and Germany), an American opera singer who has performed in Germany for the past 25 years, at the end of the "Theater of Genocide" presentation by Robert Skloot (USA), sang Maurice Ravel's "Kaddisch" with a God-given voice that went under my skin as if it had been sung in a forgotten concentration camp--the last song of the last surviving Jewish woman on earth.

Having secured the Bishop's permission to perform in Vienna's spectacular old Cathedral, Warren Rosenzweig (USA & Austria) and his international cast then presented his dramatic epic Die Judenstadt -this extraordinary event that three generations ago would have led to most audience members being carted off to Theresienstadt, gnawed at my awareness, and colored and haunted my perception of the entire conference . . .

. . . especially during the performance of my docudrama Metronome Ticking (Germany & USA), where Mira Hirsch (USA) and I held up posters of Lily Spitz as a young Holocaust survivor and my father as a Third Reich propaganda officer, neither of us saying a word, while a metronome was ticking mercilessly until the audience broke the Third Reich spell and applauded, a cathartic moment in my life. I am deeply grateful to all those people who, some filled with tears, hugged me and said, "What a powerful play. Keep on writing more." I am, bearing in mind the advice from my father's final letter, written shortly after he had witnessed a mass execution in Russia in 1944 (and shortly before he got killed, too): "Read more than my letters, read, what I did not write, read that which could shatter my heart."

Challenging Ideas

A century ago, the Moscow Art Theatre developed revolutionary new acting methods under Constantin Stanislavsky and became the topic of heated discussions in Europe, ranging from actors and directors reviling to revering this new method, so much so that during a tour through Germany, one playwright called Stanislavsky and his troupe "artistic divinities." In Vienna in 2007, few groups sparked more discussion than young theatre artists Boris Yukhanonov and Gregog Zeltser and their "LaboraTORIA" ensemble from Moscow (Russia). From their study of traditional and mystical Jewish texts, they presented a radical concept of Jewish theatre. Their purist, if somewhat combative approach, seemed to exasperate some conference participants--especially those in the US facing the reality of unsubsidized theatre-while captivating, even mesmerizing others, including Daniel Kahn (USA & Germany), whom some considered "our young Jewish-American revolutionary." This multi-talented Michigan native, who left the United States for Berlin, charmed some Viennese and challenged others as he walked through the streets between conference events, playing Yiddish music on his accordion, even on a rainy day--an unforgettable experience.

Eva Brenner (Austria), the outspoken artistic co-director of the Fleischerei (the Butchery), one of the very few Austrian theatre people actively participating in the conference program, presented one of her company's action-oriented political theatre pieces. In a performance at the store-front sized Jewish Theatre of Vienna, the audience was taught some warm-up exercises which slowly transformed into a protest rally where we imperceptibly became part of a revolutionary scene. Marching along, singing a worker's song written by a Jewish Viennese activist, we became totally integrated into an old documentary of marching workers now flickering on a large screen in front of us. The performance forced even the most ardent capitalists (if they were in the audience) to join this historic workers' protest movement--probably the headiest and most physically involving theatre experience I had in Vienna, making me both conform and rebel at the same time.

Gaby Aldor (Israel) represented The Arab-Hebrew Theater of Jaffa, where two theatrical groups produce plays, together and apart, in both Hebrew and Arabic, and in which Israeli and Arab actors and directors work collectively, provoking controversy for many in the region as they challenge notions of the cultural and political divide. They often engage in heated debates and arguments, but out of the pain can come good theatre: Tikun Olam at its best, as "sharing and working together in the theater makes us forget our different origins. It makes us become and stay close friends."

Motti Lerner (Israel), just as Bikel before him, presented one of the most challenging ideas about the prospect of Jewish culture and identity:

It is still unclear whether [. . .] the globalization process will actually weaken nationalism in the world. If it does, then the centrality of the State of Israel in Jewish culture will become weakened, and Jewish culture will have to define a particular identity for itself that is not based on nationalism, and apparently not on religion either. On what, then, will our future particular identity focus? I hope that the focus will be on the same aspiration towards progress, depth, and universal justice - on the same "Tikun Olam."

Looking at Lerner's theses and his many plays performed worldwide, I thought of Karl Marx's Theses on Feuerbach, who wrote 162 years ago that philosophers have only interpreted the world, but that others must change it. Lerner is one of those Jewish intellectuals and dramatists who, in his own way, may eventually do both--interpret and contribute toward a change of the world. His contributions support the work of those who want to give theatre its centrality in life, reflecting the Israeli saying that theatre is a secular synagogue (Shimon Levy, Israel) which Moti Sandak's (Israel) comprehensive "All About Jewish Theatre" website has created: an influential, secular synagogue on the Internet, an Open University to which everyone, Jews and non-Jews alike, has free access, both as writers and readers.

Beautiful and Nurturing Experiences

Rafael Goldwaser (France) presented electrifying Yiddish Theatre through sketches based on the stories of Sholem Aleichem with the kind of new energy and laughter only found in a few places on earth. Robin Hirsch (Germany, England, USA), in spite of his terrible experiences in the 1940's, kept the audience in stitches, showing us life as seen through the lens of the upper classes, first in Germany, then after escaping the Nazis, in England. Yossi Vassa (Ethiopia & Israel) took us on a present-day Jewish odyssey, reliving his painful experience of a 700 kilometer journey on foot from Ethiopia, and starting a new life as an immigrant of color in Israel.

Moisej Bazijan, former artistic director of the Jewish Theatre of Lemberg (Ukraine), now teaching and directing in Munich (Germany), created one of the most international experiences for me when I served as his German-English interpreter while he introduced his "Role Analysis through Action." Within a short period of time, he showed the American actors a kind of "Stanislavski plus" method, applied to a scene from Chekhov, teaching the actors to perform in honest and totally convincing ways. Their acting, head to head, rolling on the floor under a table, reading a surreal text, was so persuasive that during those moments I actually thought my American friends had permanently transformed into Beckett characters on speed.

Similarly provoking was the dispossessed spirit in Dybbuk, presented by Irina Andreeva of St. Petersburg (Russia) and Prague (Czech Republic), whose movements, expressions, and even absences crawled and crept into my mind--some of the most hauntingly beautiful "fleurs du mal" from Eastern Europe that I have ever seen.

Apparitions and spirits also followed us into the Piaristenkeller, a large wine cellar, where Deborah Baer Mozes (USA) presented actors from around the world in the "International Solo Program." Here, the past came back hauntingly, but also showed us a new spirit of hope, which surfaced again especially when Warren Rosenzweig introduced Ruth Schneider, a Viennese Holocaust Survivor (Austria and Britain), who spent some time incarcerated at Holloway Prison in London as an "enemy alien" during WWII, and later taught her son David how to speak and write in Yiddish. David then earned a Ph.D. in Yiddish Drama from Oxford, and told us that he now speaks the "Queen's Yiddish."

Witty New York dramatist Richard Orloff (USA) emceed the "International Playwrights' Forum" at the Jewish Museum where, thanks to Norman Fedder and Diane Gilboa (USA), the eleven most promising plays from around the world were presented through ten-minute sample scenes, including a piece by the visually stunning film and stage actor Eliran Caspi (Israel), whose well-built play showed Old Worlds and New Worlds clashing in modern Israel.

Turning the kaleidoscope by 180 degrees, we reach Tashmadada, the Jewish Theater Down Under, where Deborah Leiser-Moore (Australia) presented some of her physical theatre and managed to get the conference participants an invitation to the residence of the Australian Ambassador in Austria.

Concerns

In spite of all the beauty of the emerging images in our Jewish kaleidoscope, a few glass splinters did hurt when one of the active participants wrote, "The conference was very monopolized by American Jewish theater," and when another participant e-mailed, "Why were so few Europeans participating in Vienna . . . Is this a question of lack of communication?" One participant suggested more follow up and another suggested more personal, direct, and ongoing contacts with the Artistic Directors outside North America to enhance the mission of the AJT.

Michael Posnick (USA), writer, editor, academic, and Artistic Director of the Mosaic Theatre, a caring, modern Solomon who united everyone on the last day of the conference with his group meditation and singing, responded to these concerns by quoting the Haggadah which invites everyone: "let all who are hungry come and eat. Let all who are in need, come and share"-next year at the Jewish Theatre Conference, hosted by Evelyn Orbach and the Jewish Ensemble Theatre (JET) in Michigan, and the following year, we hope, in Israel. Everyone is invited.

Epilogue

Hardly a day goes by without images from the Vienna kaleidoscope flashing into my mind, each of them--whether terrifying, thought-provoking, or nurturing--has encouraged me to continue my writing. There are many others who seem to have been inspired by the conference, too. One of them, Marcia Isaacs (USA) of the West Coast Jewish Theatre in California, created a DVD with a beautiful musical and visual tribute to Tikun Olam and all its participants in the spirit of old Vienna, a digital "laterna magica."

Another participant, the Latin-American representative of the AJT, Leslie Marko Kirchhausen (Brazil), whose mother also escaped Vienna and the Holocaust like her contemporary Lily Spitz, chose a different route. Following the advice of our keynote speaker Theodore Bikel, "Like all theatre, Jewish theatre is not one thing alone," Marko Kirchhausen translated the AJT conference poster into Portuguese, inviting people in Sao Paulo to come to a session on the highlights of the conference, encouraging playwrights, actors, editors, and academics to contribute to Jewish theatre--continuing the work that that was shared in Vienna, in the spirit of Tikun Olam.

Let's celebrate theatre, let's celebrate life, let's interpret and change the world and with it, ourselves: L'Chaim, wherever you live, wherever you work.

<< Previous || Next >>