Der Dybbuk (1937-2017) | Film Performance, Jerusalem Film Festival

Der Dybbuk (1937-2017)

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50 minutes | Film and Live Performance

Directed by Michael Waszynski (Poland, 1937) with a new edition by Adi Kaplan, Shachar Carmel & Sala-manca (2017)

Live dubbing by Lea Mauas and Diego Rotman (Sala-manca group), Live Follies by Adi Kaplan, Shachar Carmel and Ayu Rotman Mauas & Live Music by The Jerusalem Street Orchestra, conducted by Ido Shpitalnik

״The dead were returned to life, and a culture long vanished, wiped out by the Holocaust, was resurrected on the screen” (Ira Konigsberg)

A new, re-edited version of the Yiddish film will be screened with live music and dubbing performance in the courtyard of the former Jerusalem Leprosarium (Hansen House), a venue no less gothic than the film’s aesthetics.

The new, film-performance version is based on the film directed by Michael Waszynsky (1937), based upon S. Ansky’s play Der Dybbuk. Ansky wrote the play after completing the ethnographic expedition he organized between 1912-1914. The play (and film) tells the story of the ill-fated love between Hanan and Lea, the possession of Lea’s body by Hanan’s soul, the exorcism ceremony, and death as resolution – a re-encounter of the lovers in the next world.

Adi Kaplan, Shahar Carmel, and Sala-manca not only re-edited the film, they also replaced the original music composed by Henekh Kohn and the cantorial songs performed by Gershon Sirotta, with a new score. Performed live by the Jerusalem Street Orchestra, conducted by Ido Shpitalnik, the score is an adapted version of the Vltva (The Moldau), the second symphonic poem of Má vlast (My Homeland), by Czech composer Bedřich Smetana. The use of Smetana’s Moldau as a clear reference to Israel’s national anthem – resonating it, but different – creates a liminal sonic soundscape incapable of defining an accurate sense of place or ideology.

Lea Mauas and Diego Rotman of the Sala-manca group are professional and real life partners, possessing the voices of the “dead but eternal” characters, originally performed by another real-life couple, Lili Liliana (Leah) and Leon Liebgold (Hannan)

In the spirit of The Dybbuk, the artists visit the archive instead of the cemetery, and invite the dead to dance with the living once again.

With the support of Ostrovsky Family Fund, Artis Grant Program, Polish Institute – Tel Aviv, P.A.T. (Performance Art and Technology), Hazira, Jerusalem Municipality, The National Authority for Yiddish Culture, Bet Shalom Aleichem.

The Ethnographic Department, 2015

Mamuta at Hansen | Artists: Yeshaiau Raboinowitz, Itamar Mendes-Flohr, Sala-manca, Ktura Manor, Ester Bires, Amitai Arnon, Nir Yaalom, Adi Kaplan, Shahar Carmel, Hanan Abu-Hussein, Samuel Rotman | Curators: Sala-manca

Opening Hours: Monday and Thursday 10-15, Wednesday 17-21 and Fridays 9-12

The Ethnographic Department addresses the link between an art museum and an ethnographic museum, between “fine” art and “folk” art, and the tension that exists between original, restoration, copy and adaptation. All of these are aspects central to the curatorial thinking that has guided the Museum of the Contemporary since its onset.
The Museum was founded in December 2009 at the Mamuta Center in Ein Kerem, in the home of Daniela Passal, formerly the home of Palestinian researcher Issa Manun and in the interim “absentee property”. The first exhibition dealt with the museum as an institution, with the topography of Israeli memory, with the local historiography of the village Ein Karem and and with the home of the museum – the home of Daniela Passal. The Museum also developed a digital storage room of exhibitions which are not viewable on the net but are offered for downloading – each exhibition as a “package” for printing, exhibiting or re-installing – according to the physical and economic possibilities of the downloading body.

The Ethnographic Department also deals in part with the history of the structure in which it dwells. This is the Leprosarium Jesus Hilfe , founded as an isolatedrefuge for leprosy patients.

It was created by the German-Protestant Moravian community in 1867 and operated for twenty years in a building on today’s Agron Street, Jerusalem. In 1887 the institute moved to a new building in the Talbiya neighborhood of Jerusalem, planned by Konrad Shick.

Press:

Yaad Biran, From Ansky to Kanaan (in hebrew)

In his/her Voice | The Voice of the Word Performance Festival, 2014

Participating Artists: Adi Kaplan, Shachar Carmel, Tom Soloveichik, Alex Drool, Josef Sprinzak, Carmel Bar, Li Lorian, Adam Yodfat, Victoria Hanna, Noam Inbar, Shira Borer, Jerusalem Conservatory Chamber Orchestra with Conductor Michael Klinghoffer, Ilan Volkov, Zohar Shafir, Tomer Damsky, Eran Sachs, Maya Dunitz

Curators: The Sala-Manca Group and Guy Biran

The 14 Kola Shel Ha’Mila Festival Named after Mario Kotliar Bekola Shelo Dybbuk The Hazira Performance Art Arena’s flagship festival, now in its 14th year, examines the relationship between word/text and performance art. This year, the festival is being held in participation with the ‘Mamuta’ Center for Art and Media at Hansen House. in the photo: Joseph Shprinzak The dybbuk (an evil spirit in Jewish folklore) phenomenon, through Ansky’s play, is the basis and inspiration for this year’s Kola Shel Ha’Mila festival (The Voice of the Word). The Mamuta spaces at Hansen House, formerly a leper colony, are transformed into an area for challenging one’s spiritual transformation, as a metaphor for the ancient building’s newly designated mission. In Kola Shelo, Hansen House is granted the suppressed forces of experience, which connect past and present, art and ritualism, healing and performance. The dybbuk is an external force that penetrates the human body and causes it to behave erratically. According to tradition, the dybbuk is the spirit of a deceased person, which takes over a live body and speaks through it in another voice. The dybbuk is a way of coping with harsh social situations, voice dissent, for which the afflicted have no words, and reveal dark occurrences from a community’s past.

Maybe it’s because the Leper Hospital was previously known as “Jesus Hilfe”, or,”Jesus Help Asylum”, and it reminds us of two of Jesus’ qualities – healing and banishing demons; maybe it’s because in 1950 a different, political and ideological spirit possessed the building, and it was decided to change the hospital’s persona and rename it after Dr. Hansen, who discovered Leprosy’s origin and seemed, to the building’s new owners (Israel’s Health Ministry) , like the right spirit for the public body they now represented; maybe it’s because the Leper Hospital lost its function, became an arts and technology center, and was named “Hansen House”, as if it is the home of the spirit that replaced Jesus; maybe it’s because today, instead of the lepers, artists and students are the ones who live in the building, and sometimes challenge the local cultural hegemony; maybe it’s because one hundred years have passed since S. An-sky’s ethnographic expedition, where he collected a part of the stories that functioned as the play’s basis, and a hundred years since the play’s first drafts were written in Russian and Yiddish; maybe it’s because of all these things, separately or together, that we decided, as a part of the “The Voice of the Word 14” festival, to return to one of the most profound traditions in Jewish culture, to dwell on an external spirit which possesses the body of a flesh and blood human being: the Dybbuk.

“Into the body of a living human being, with an individual, distinct soul, enters at a certain point in his life another soul – the soul of a person who died prematurely and was seen as a sinner so terrible, even entering hell was deprived from him, and he remains between two worlds, haunted and tortured by angels of destruction […] the Dybbuk seeks a refuge from its persecutors and enters the living body against its will, seizing it, sticking to it, possessing it and speaking from the mouth of the person possessed as a distinct personality” (Rachel Elior). Yoram Bilu writes that the urges and aspirations that stand at the base of this disorder were challenges that threatened the traditional Jewish lifestyle. The play was written during the years 1912-1917 in Russian and Yiddish, and was inspired by the traditions and stories of the Dybbuk that An-sky collected when he was the head of an ethnographical expedition to Volhynia and Podolia. The play was performed many times by different groups, and through the years became a canonical play in Jewish theater’s history, in Yiddish and in Hebrew.

“The Voice of the Word” festival deals with the connection between the text and its performative aspects. In “His Voice in Her: Dybbuk” we suggested a refraction of the play using its motives, texts, or characters. Each of the parts the artists chose takes place in the historical building the architect Conrad Schick designed. The play, whose acts develop on a timeline, develops in the festival with its dispersal throughout the different spaces: Time becomes territory.

Divorce ceremonies, interpretations using auditory activities and works, mechanical theater, mixes of sounds and images, archived material and live happenings, edits of old movies mixed with live performances of a youth orchestra – all these give one of the Jewish theater’s classic plays in Hebrew and in Yiddish a modern take. The artists once again bring up questions on ownership, on national and gender identity, on possession, on sound and spirit and on the spirit of time and convey a feeling that must be similar to the one created during the play’s performances in the 1920’s: The feeling that one world of values is disappearing, and a new one is taking its place.

Borderline, 2013

Borderline – Two performance events in the frame of Rashamim (drawing biennale) and with the collaboration of Daat HaMakom

Participating artists: adi kaplan and shahar carmel together with Dudu Carmel and invited musicians, shira legmann together with musica nova consort, hadas ophrat, lezli rubin-kunda, josef sprinzak.
Invited artists: Guy Yitzhaki and Dafi Sapunar, Yonatan Amir and Ronen Eidelman

Curators: Sala-manca.

“Borderline” is the title of two performance events featuring new works that address the space of the former Hansen leper house, and engage with cartography, mapping, and drawing in space.

Cartography, as a field of knowledge that encodes the space and delineates the connections between space and identity, employs the language of drawing in order to express political, economic, and social worldviews, all the while preserving and founding perceptions of identity. The works in “Borderline” will offer a different mapping of the space, whether through a revised reading of existing maps or the creation of alternative poetic maps.

The wall of Hansen House – which marked the separation between normal life and abnormal life – serves as the borderline, the initial point of departure for some of the works. The Hansen wall, residue of the outside self-defense against the inside, marks the space of a ghetto, of exile within the city, and serves as an architectural metaphor that echoes other walls. The works in the series of performances engage with the conceptual and concrete notion of the borderline: its delineation, erasure, or blurring. The borderline appears in the works as a formal or metaphorical line that separates and unifies its two sides, produces situations of passage, blockage, schism, or destination, and materializes in the encounter with agents that indicate its existence: customs, police, border crossing, conflict between different interests.

The aspiration towards a utopian borderless space, a plan for a space without lines, was the dream of architect Rodriguez (the pseudonym of João Delgado), who had signed his business card “Arch. Rodriguez – Plans without Lines: an architect on a tightrope”.

http://traces.art.org.il/5/venues/mamuta?en

Mame Moderne at Tate Modern, 2010

MAME Moderne at No Soul For Sale, Tate Modern
Highlights from our non-collection
Curators: Sala-Manca Collective

Mame Moderne (“Modern Mother” in Yiddish) is the name of the TATE Modern translated literaly and genderly to the Yiddish language (Tate means “Father” in Yiddish). In this salon we show a series of works which don’t belong to us—non-collectors of this non-collection. Maybe a reflection on art habits and rituals, maybe a negative of Museum, maybe a gallery in the local barber shop (or maybe not).

In our 25m2 of Tate Modern we present the Mame Moderne Salon, with its waiting room composed of works presented in different projects curated by Sala-Manca since 2000, dealing (or not) with the topic of Identity Change.

While awaiting the hairdresser to hairdress you watching the process you are passing through in someone else (performance by Shira Borer), you can watch a TV film of a “patriotic” recreation of the myths of the Golem (video by Adi Kaplan, Shahar Carmel, Yonatan Vinitsky, Noam Kaplan, and Etai Onik), hear the story of a Palestinian refugee from Ein Kerem told in the voice of a Jewish-Israeli artist (sound work and performance by Hadas Ofrat), watch a live streaming of barber shops and transformed urban areas in the conflicted Hebron (Heb2-live steaming), see a futuristic film about a post-IKEA society (Pil&Galia Kollectiv) and a still-video work about a sound researcher (Asaf Setty), observe a reflection on cultural treasures and ownership in a video of a film as a metaphor for cultural re-appropriation (Iris Pshedezki) and a woman and a tree that became one and stand alone (Tamar Shipony), hear classical English poetry translated from English into English through Babylon software (Sala-Manca) and foreign workers in Tel Aviv speaking the “holy language” (Eran Sachs) , or buy MAME Moderne t-shirts designed by Einat Amir (einat amir)
On Sunday May 16 at 11:30, a live performance of a love story between an orthodox Jew and a secret agent of the Mossad (Sala-Manca’s live performance at the main stage 2010).

Link to Brochure