Performing the Jewish Archive

20世纪的种种灾难撕裂了欧洲的文化结构。该项目的总体目标是通过将最近重新发现的犹太艺术家的音乐、戏剧和文学作品带回学者和公众的注意，重新编织这些差距的某些线索。学术成果将包括专著、期刊文章和评论版本，该项目将通过一个互动网络资源、教育项目和在五个国际文化节上的表演产生更广泛的影响。我们的学术工作和艺术实践将涉及三种类型的“犹太档案”：a)作品本身，往往提供关于其创作背景的复杂性的信息；b)传统档案文献；c)民族志档案(口述历史和证词)，提供历史信息，阐明事件对前代人和当代人的意义。我们认为这三种档案都是相互照亮的协同文本，而不是将任何类型的档案视为“文本”，而将其他类型的档案视为“上下文”。所有这些都是我们调查的同样有价值的方面。其中一些档案处于危险之中，使我们的工作特别紧迫。随着世界上一些地区新档案的开放或被发现，老年幸存者脆弱的记忆正在迅速消失，家庭档案被丢弃或变质。我们将与英国、美国、中欧、南非和澳大利亚的合作组织(表演者、教育工作者、博物馆、图书馆、档案馆和政策制定者)合作，根据现有线索寻找新的档案馆，并帮助保护那些最近曝光的档案馆。我们的多学科团队带来了研究专业知识，使我们能够专注于公元1880年至公元1950年，这是现代犹太人流离失所最严重的时期。我们的案例研究包括最近从布拉格附近的Terezin Ghetto找回的戏剧手稿，澳大利亚、南非和英国的私人收藏品中发现的东欧音乐作品，以及大屠杀后立即撰写的幸存者经历的文学描述。通过这些犹太人在各种拘留、流放或移民情况下的艺术创作的案例研究，我们将更广泛地阐明艺术在现代的一种典范经验中的作用：流离失所。艺术家什么时候用创作作品来表现置换的断裂，音乐、戏剧和文学什么时候创造与前世生活的延续，或者是旧生活和新生活之间的桥梁？我们的互文性表演在过去和现在之间创造了一种关系，不仅通过利用所有三种类型的档案(例如，通过在重新发现的戏剧中穿插讲述幸存者证词的场景，在投影的档案图像的背景下)，而且通过明确地接触这些来自过去的人工制品的多种可能的意义，无论是对它们的原始观众还是我们自己。这些表演展示了过去在我们现在和未来可能会继续存在的方式--在非常真实的意义上，“穿越过去的思考”。在项目期间开发的观众反应测试将帮助我们确定目前在产生观众参与度方面有多成功。我们将吸引来自广泛不同群体的观众，通过展示世界领先的从业者，如纳什乐团与业余和学生表演者，并通过在具有重要历史意义的场所，如Terezin纪念馆(前二战犹太人聚居区所在地)和约克克利福德塔(12世纪大屠杀所在地)上演表演。我们将通过鼓励艺术从业者、政策制定者和文化活动节目编制者与这些档案接触，以及通过教育项目，让参与者根据档案共同文本创作自己的表演，从而保持与这些档案的接触。

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.