Performing the Jewish Archive

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The manifold catastrophes of the 20th century have torn holes in the cultural fabric of Europe. This project's overarching objective is to re-knit certain threads across those gaps by bringing recently rediscovered musical, theatrical and literary works by Jewish artists back to the attention of scholars and the public. Scholarly outputs will include monographs, journal articles and critical editions, and the project will have wider impact through an interactive web resource, educational projects, and performances at five international cultural festivals.Our scholarly work and artistic practice will engage with three types of 'Jewish archives': a) the works themselves, often providing information on the complexities of the context in which they were created; b) traditional archival documentation; c) ethnographic archives (oral history and testimony) providing historical information and illuminating the meaning of events for past and present generations. Rather than privileging any type of archive as 'text' and others as 'context,' we consider all three as co-texts mutually illuminating each other. All are equally valuable aspects of our investigation.Some of these archives are at risk, giving our work special urgency. While new archives open or are discovered in some parts of the world, the fragile memories of elderly survivors are fast disappearing, and family archives are disposed of or deteriorate. Working alongside partner organisations (performers, educators, museums, libraries, archives and policy-makers) in the UK, US, Central Europe, South Africa and Australia, we will follow existing leads to seek out new archives, and help preserve those that have recently come to light. Our multi-disciplinary team brings research expertise allowing us to focus on the period c.1880-c.1950, the most intense period of Jewish displacement in the modern era. Our case studies include recently recovered theatrical manuscripts from the Terezin Ghetto near Prague, musical works from Eastern Europe uncovered in private collections in Australia, South Africa and England, and literary accounts of survivor experiences written immediately after the Holocaust. Via these case studies of Jewish artistic creation in diverse situations of internment, exile or migration, we will illuminate more broadly the role of art in one of the paradigmatic experiences of the modern age: displacement. When do artists use creative works to represent the rupture of displacement, and when do music, theatre and literature create continuity with their former lives, or a bridge between the old life and the new? Our co-textual performances create a relationship between past and present, not only by drawing upon on all three types of archives (for example, by interspersing scenes from a rediscovered play with narrated survivor testimony against a backdrop of projected archival images), but by engaging explicitly with the multiple possible meanings of these artefacts from the past, both for their original audiences and ourselves. The performances foreground ways in which that past may live on in our present and future - in a very real sense, 'thinking forward through the past'. Audience response testing, developed during the project, will help us determine how successful we are in generating audience engagement in the present. We will attract audiences from widely diverse constituencies by featuring world-leading practitioners such as the Nash Ensemble alongside amateur and student performers, and by staging performances in historically significant venues such as the Terezin Memorial (the site of the former WWII Jewish Ghetto) and Clifford's Tower in York (the site of a 12th-century pogrom). We will perpetuate engagement with these archives by encouraging arts practitioners, policy-makers and cultural event programmers to engage with them, and through educational projects in which participants create their own performances based on archival co-texts.