Teryl Dobbs
During the Nazi invasion, this building in Prague was appropriated from its Jewish owners to become Gestapo headquarters.
Scholars and artists in Madison have played a special role in an international effort to preserve Jewish artwork.
On Sunday, Aug. 30, Madison hosts “Out of the Shadows: Rediscovering Jewish Music, Literature and Theater,” a performance festival that melds past with present. It is part of “Performing the Jewish Archive,” an international research project led by the University of Leeds in England. It also includes the University of York, Sydney Conservatorium of Music and the UW.
The project’s goal is to bring rediscovered music and theatrical works by Jewish artists to public attention. With the help of a $2.5 million grant from the United Kingdom’s Arts and Humanities Research Council, festivals of dormant, forgotten or lost art works will be performed around the world. Madison, where two festivals take place (the next is May 1-5, 2016), is the only city in the U.S. to be chosen.
Local partners for the festival include UW-Madison School of Music, Mosse-Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies, Mayrent Institute for Yiddish Culture, professor Rachel Brenner of the Center for Jewish Studies, Bach Dancing & Dynamite Society and more.
Teryl Dobbs, chair of music education at UW-Madison, is one of 12 international co-investigators and leads the Madison project. “The goal of the project is to bring Jewish art works out of suitcases, attics and storage units where some have been found and put them in a modern context,” says Dobbs.
The conference launches with a 10 a.m. brunch with the scholars and musicians called “Nosh, Kibitz, and Schmooze” ($12, preregistration required). All remaining events are free, but do require advance registration. For detailed schedule and registration, see Performing the Jewish Archive at music.wisc.edu/events.
Out of the Shadows:
Rediscovering Jewish Music, Literature and Theater
Sound Salon: An Audio Tour of the Mayrent Collection
- Mills Hall, School of Music, 12:20-1:40 pm
- (all events Sunday, Aug. 30)
The Mayrent Collection of Yiddish Recordings contains over 9,000 78 rpm recordings from the first half of the 20th century. Sherry Mayrent, the collection’s founder, donated the recordings to UW-Madison’s Mills Music Library in 2010. Mills is one of the few libraries in the country to have significant collections of pre-1955 music recordings. Mayrent and Henry Sapoznik, founding director of the Mayrent Institute for Yiddish Culture, will give an overview of this remarkable collection and perform a few works from it — with Mayrent on clarinet and Sapoznik on tenor guitar.
Concert: Bach Dancing & Dynamite Society
- First Unitarian Meeting House,
- Atrium Auditorium, 2:30-4:30 pm
The concert features Jewish composers Erwin Schulhoff, Robert Kahn, Dick Kattenburg and Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Schulhoff’s Flute Sonata and Kattenburg’s Quartet for Flute, Violin, Cello and Piano were at the forefront of the chamber music genre of their time. Had these young men survived the Holocaust, classical music might be different today.
Cabaret Evening: “Laugh With Us” and “I’m a Stranger Here Myself”
- Overture Center, Promenade Hall, 7-10 pm
The final performance will be a two-act cabaret featuring Laugh With Us, authored by four Czech Jews during their time in the Terezin Ghetto, located north of Prague. The show takes place in the future and assumes that the actors survived the Holocaust and are back in Prague performing this cabaret in venues throughout the city. Lisa Peschel, project co-investigator from the University of York, will provide commentaries on the history of the ghetto, the lives of the performers, and how the cabaret has been adapted to make it understandable in performance.
The off-Broadway hit I’m a Stranger Here Myself, by New York-based cabaret performer Mark Nadler, is a collection of bittersweet songs that highlight French, German Jewish and gay songwriters who composed during the days of the Weimar Republic. These social outsiders give us a glimpse of artistic freedom and vivid nightlife in pre-Hitler Germany. The songs, about 12 in all, include many by composer Kurt Weill, like “My Ship” and “Bilbao Song.” Other songs include “The Lavender Song,” a gay liberation anthem, and the feisty tune “I May Never Go Home Anymore.”
