Gido's coming home! Performing Music and Theatre from the Terezin/Theresienstadt Ghetto for Commemoration, Education and Inspiration

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'Gido's coming home!' is a six-month series of commemorative, pedagogical and performance events that builds on the AHRC-funded Performing the Jewish Archive (PtJA) project to reach new audiences in the Czech Republic. Gido - the extraordinary young Czech-Jewish composer Gideon Klein - would have been 100 years old on 6th December 2019, had he not perished in the Holocaust at the age of 25. With a series of commemorative events, pedagogical workshops and public performances celebrating his life, and the lives and work of other individual artists who were also imprisoned in the Terezin Ghetto near Prague, we will disseminate the PtJA outputs and methods that our Czech partners find most useful for commemoration, education and inspiration. The PtJA project aimed to recover and restage musical and theatrical works created by displaced Jewish artists during the long 20th century. PtJA's objectives were to reconceptualise the notion of 'the archive' by treating traditional archival materials, survivor testimony and artistic creations by Jewish artists as sources of equal value, to seek such works in newly discovered archives, to disseminate the results both to academic and public beneficiaries, especially through public performances, and to create a new, sustainable archive, in particular through an interactive web resource that makes recordings of our work available to educators and the public. Because the Terezin Ghetto in the Czech Republic, with its unusually active cultural life, was one of our key sites of investigation for PtJA, we held one of our international performance festivals in the Czech Republic in September 2016. Due to the success of that festival and the collaborative relationships developed in the process, new pathways have opened up for us to reach Czech communities in small towns outside of the capital, to hold events in unusual venues to attract new audiences, and to influence Czech pedagogy about the Holocaust thanks to unexpected levels of access granted by Czech organizations (for example, to their own teacher training programmes). The events will take place from July to December 2019: July 2019. During a five-day Jewish cultural festival held in the small town of Holesov we will present a cabaret based on original material by Terezin artists and a play based on Klein's life. September 2019. Cultural and pedagogical events in the provinces and in the capital include: a commemoration in Klein's hometown of Prerov, including a jazz concert hosted by the city and featuring a new composition inspired by Gideon Klein, a concert of Klein's work in a recently renovated historic home in the provincial city of Brno, a lecture at the Jewish Museum in Prague on creating new plays from scripts written in the Terezin ghetto, and a workshop in Prague for 31 newly arrived Fulbright teachers on using the Terezin artists' legacy in English-language education. December 2019. The events for the anniversary of Klein's birth will take place in Prague and include: a commemorative concert at the Prague Conservatory where Klein completed his musical studies and the unveiling of a permanent exhibition there in his honour, a celebration at the Maisel Synagogue featuring Klein's music, a new composition inspired by him, and the launch of Dr Fligg's new biography of Klein, and a finale concert celebrating Klein's life in a recently renovated historic home, with spectators invited to attend in 1930s dress. By aiming to reach new audiences of spectators and educators we strive for an outcome that, although virtually impossible to measure, is of inestimable value: that as people's awareness of the incredible individuals who were lost in the Holocaust grows, they will become increasingly willing to oppose the types of discrimination that could lead to similar catastrophes.