Yiddish theater is a phenomenon of global Yiddish culture that largely contributed to development and preservation of the Yiddish world and enhanced its connections and dialogue with other cultures. Having originated in the Middle ages in the form of street musical performances and masquerades, later Yiddish performances started to include more elaborated forms of entertainment and education like plays performed during the religious holiday of Purim (known as Purimshpils). Urbanization and secularization as well as exposure to the theatre traditions of various European countries, and growth of the Jewish literary culture in the wake of the Haskalah led to professionalisation of Yiddish theater and broadening of the spectrum of the themes it had addressed including immigration, poverty, and integration. Modern Yiddish theater was founded by Abraham Goldfaden in 1876 in Romania, who started a theatrical tradition of Eastern European theater in Yiddish – this gave boost to appearance of multiple troupes, multiple playwrights, and Yiddish theatre critics and theoreticians in Russia, Poland, the UK and the Americas. Like the rest of Yiddish-language culture, Yiddish theatre was devastated by the Holocaust. Most of the world's Yiddish-speakers were killed and many theatres were destroyed. Yiddish-speaking performers and theater directors who managed to emigrate to the US and Canada, continued the traditions of Yiddish theater there, which allowed them to preserve both the language and the performing canon. Today Yiddish troupes also exist in Europe, Australia and Israel.
Invited speakers, that are both Yiddish theater researchers and practitioners, will look into different eras and aspects of Yiddish theater - from the sociopolitical and cultural contexts shaping theater productions in the 1920-s Romania to strategies of studying less known voices behind Yiddish dramaturgy and to multidisciplinary and multidimensional performances blending traditional Yiddish plays with contemporary artistic practices and new technologies.
Alexandra Chiriac focuses on Yiddish theatre in Romania in the first decades of the 20th century. In the 1920s and early 1930s, Bucharest was a thriving space of experimentation in Yiddish theatre. It was home not only to the world-famous Vilna Troupe (an international and mostly Yiddish-speaking theatrical ensemble formed in and named after the city of Vilnius/Vilna, and one of the prominent in the history of Yiddish theatre), but also to the avant-garde theatre director Iacob Sternberg (a native of Bessarabia and creator of the Bucharest Yiddish Theatre Studio). The productions they created were extremely popular, yet also boundary-pushing, relying on an expert blend of tradition and innovation. Chiriac has pieced together some of these experimental productions and the effects they created on stage and amongst the audience. In this talk, she discusses her search for the remnants of Yiddish theatre in Romania and reveals some of her most interesting research finds.
Sonia Gollance discusses how her work editing an online database of Yiddish play synopses for the
Digital Yiddish Theatre Project inspired her to research women who wrote plays in Yiddish. This topic has not received much scholarly attention but has generated increased interest among translators and dramaturges in recent years. She will also speak about her current project translating Tea Arciszewska's "Miryeml", a play about the trauma experienced by children during the Holocaust that contains both modernist and folkloric elements.
Artist group
Sala-manca (Lea Mauas and Diego Rotman) reviews and discuss some of the Yiddish performances we created during the last 20 years: "Albatros 2003", "Elephants in the nights of Metula" (2005), "West and East" (2008), "The Dybbuk 1937-2022"(2017, 2022), and "Yiddish Silence" (2021), "Escape" (2022) and "Between Two Worlds" (2022). Many oif these projects deal with poetics of translation (cultural, mediatic and social), with textual, urban and net contexts and with the tensions between low tech and high tech aesthetics, as well as social and political issues.