Images and Rich Fragments for a New Jewish Theatre - Detroit Conference

by Leslie Marko

Now back from the meeting with directors, producers, actors and playwrights associated with to the AJT (Association for Jewish Theatre), I go through the images which remind me of the intense schedule we all had.

The 45 participants, most of whom were from the United States and Canada, some from Israel and I from Latin America (last year, in Vienna, we were also joined by participants from Europe – Austria, Norway and France – Russia and Australia) gathered every break to exchange ideas, to get to know each other, to interact.

At the crack of dawn of every day of the intense schedule, we would read and reflect, under the orientation of Michael Posnick from New York, about philosophical texts of Martin Buber, The Living Theatre and the Talmud, which provided us with a bridge to the issues to be dealt with in the congress.

Afterwards, we would head to the Jewish Community Centre of Detroit where we kept on working until midnight. The Centre is also home base of JET (Jewish Ensemble Theatre) that now presents Oy! (which is selling out for all performances) and where we watched and were impacted by a scene from the polemic play Women’s Minyan about fanaticism at the heart of a family in Mea Shearim.

At JET we had numerous round-table discussions, group work sessions, solo presentations (monologues), scenes and workshops (ranging from Yoga and Jewish Mysticism to Physical Theatre practices with Prof. Malcolm Tulip from the Department of Theatre & Drama of the University of Michigan)

In the dramatic readings, which were directed and interpreted by the participants themselves, 15 scenes of plays written by dramatists taking part in the Conference were performed. I joyfully directed a scene of Children of Night by Gabriel Emanuel, about the respected doctor and professor Janucz Korczak in Warsaw during the Holocaust, with the participation of two actors: Michael Posnick and Henrick Eger of Philadelphia.

We visited, at the centre of Detroit (a city with a Jewish community of 75,000 members) the oldest theatre, in the Fisher Building, where the owner of the theatre, Joey Nederlander, aged 90, told us with a great sense of humor about the good times he had with actors such as Cary Grant.

The conversations and presentations tackled aspects of Israeli society, the conflict in the Middle East, social theatre, educational theatre, the Holocaust, orthodoxy and radicalism, orthodoxy and spirituality, identity, assimilation, music and Yiddish theatre, IsraDrama (The Israeli Theatre Festival that took place until June 22nd presented by Richard Stein from LA), relationships inside the Jewish family, among other issues.

A recurrent issue in the Congress was the difficulty of getting Images and Rich Fragments for a New resources in order to support the establishment and continuity of companies and Jewish theatre projects, which therefore limits the capacity of expression, creation and development of these companies, forcing these theatrical professionals to migrate to other realms of culture and education outside the Jewish context.

In one session, we learned more about the Jewish Theatre website (www.jewish-theatre.com). First created and developed by Moti Sandak, the website has more than 150,000 visits a week, great richness of information and a section in Spanish under development.

One of the last text-based sessions of work featured material which will ultimately become a book written by the new president of AJT - David Chack, from Chicago - (our former president was the great Mira Hirsch from Atlanta). The session, presented by David, was entitled, “From Fiddler on the Roof to Rent”, analyzing the journey of
American theatre and its implications re arts and culture in Jewish communities, as a means of innovation in these communities.

The amount of significant dramaturgical Jewish texts, the background that each person brought from their companies to the event, the discussions regarding our role in our communities, as well as the consonances and dissonances which emerged during our conversations - all contributed to our ultimate goal of experiencing and reflecting upon Jewish Theatre in the world.

The theatre movement in Brazil is incredibly rich and strong and Brazilian productions can be easily found in several international festivals as well as in the numerous festivals organized in the country.

The level of experimentation based on systematic serious research is high. Academic courses of high quality are preparing actors, directors, masters and doctoral students to create an entire generation of professionals engaged in the development of new theatre languages and theatrical interventions in our society.

São Paulo, where I live, together with Rio de Janeiro constitute the most important centres of theatre production in the country. Hundreds of companies and school theatre programs fill our seasons with challenging and innovative performances.

The production of Jewish theatre, which is more conventional, mainly resides in two great centres, where I currently work: the club A Hebraica, linked to Maccabi Mundial which maintains and supports 10 amateur groups of children, young people, adults and elder people, a street theatre group and a performance group for events, under the supervision of Gaby Milevsky and the Centro de Cultura Judaica (CCJ). Run by Yael Steiner, the CCJ produces and brings in both theatre and music performances of high quality, free of charge and open to the entire population.

It is extremely important to mention the enormous contribution of the intellectual Jacó Guinsburg, considered the most important authority on Russian and Yiddish theatre in Brazil. Semiologist and theatre theory professor, Jacó Guinsburg is also the editor of several book collections about theatre for Editora Perspectiva, of which he is the director.

Even so, there are just a few directors of Jewish theatre today working in a systematic way in both research and production.

Participation in conferences of this kind is very important for us, who long to be the leaders of a creative and critical Jewish theatre that, as part of the Brazilian theatre movement, contributes to the humanization of our society.

At LEER (Laboratory of Studies about Intolerance, Discrimination and Ethnography) from the History department of Universidade de São Paulo (directed by Professor Maria Luisa Tucci Carneiro) theatre is used as the medium for short presentations about events linked to atrocities such as the Holocaust, the atomic bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, political persecution, etc.

I consider the creation of a Jewish theatre movement in Latin America (for which I am AJT’s representative) to be of extreme importance, as this represents a way of engagement in particular issues that, when treated universally, would interest not only the
Jewish community but also other cultures. Researching and producing Jewish drama could enrich the sense of coexistence and diversity in our society and preserve values, traditions and memories of our culture without losing critical reflection on universal identity, on being human.

An upcoming conference, which will happen alongside the Jewish Theatre Festival in June 2010, in Israel, with the expected presence of more than 200 groups from all over the world supported by the Ministry of Culture, our AJT, the Habima Theatre, Nephesh Company, the Jewish Theatre Web and other foundations, has started to gain our attention and involvement. After all, meeting in Israel means the possibility of gathering in a familiar universe of great stimulation for us all - a meeting which represents a significant opportunity for those who are both on stage and in the audience.

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