Theater Performance

Bobe Mayses
Yiddish Knights and Other Impossibilities
Aug 1  Mon  7 p.m. @OMA   Premiere
Admission: 14.50 € / 8.50 €
following Premiere After-party: Free admission
>> Tickets online

Aug 2  Tue  5 p.m. @OMA
Admission: 14.50 € / 8.50 €
>> Tickets online

Reservations: support@othermusic.eu

– in cooperation with Kunstfest Weimar –

What do you get when you mix a 500-year old Yiddish bestselling story about knights and fair ladies, ottava rima, a Renaissance Jewish scholar’s life of constant flight and refuge across the Alps, the 500th anniversary of Europe’s first ghetto in Venice, with New York anarchist-Jewish puppet theater, Italian Renaissance music, New Jewish Music, street theater, circus, a haunted house, a New York Times Best-Selling author (Michael Wex), an OBIE-award winning director (Jenny Romaine), the director of Yiddish Summer Weimar (Alan Bern), a dozen or more performers from all over Europe, and… the OMA (Other Music Academy)? You get “Bobe Mayses – Yiddish Knights and Other Impossibilities,” a wild, theatrical indoor-outdoor romp through the centuries and the legends that we cling to in order to survive the flotsam-littered tsunami of history.

Funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation, “Bobe Mayses – Yiddish Knights and Other Impossibilities” is a first-time cooperation between Yiddish Summer Weimar (YSW) and the Kunstfest Weimar. The work will be created by a resident, international ensemble during Yiddish Summer Weimar. Its premiere will take place during YSW 2016 with performances at other European venues to follow. An experimental mixture of puppet-, street- and traditional theater, each performance begins in the Other Music Academy (OMA), from there traveling by outdoor parade to the mon ami cultural center, where it concludes indoors. In case of rain, umbrellas or rainwear are recommended.

Dance Performance

GILGUL – Transformation
Aug 4  Thu  5 p.m. @mon ami   Premiere
Admission: 14.50 € / 8.50 €
>> Tickets online

Aug 5  Fri  5 p.m. @mon ami
Admission: 14.50 € / 8.50 €
>> Tickets online

Reservations: support@othermusic.eu

One of the highlights of this year’s Yiddish Summer Weimar is the creation and premiere of “GILGUL – Transformation,” a new, contemporary dance piece based on traditional Yiddish traditional dance. In Eastern European urban centers like Warsaw, Lodz, Odessa and Moscow before World War II, an avant-garde, modernist Yiddish choreography was flowering, only to be brutally cut short by the Holocaust. With the creation of GILGUL, we reach back to this extraordinarily rich cultural and artistic heritage, bring it into the present and move forward.

GILGUL is a Yiddish/Hebrew word that can mean “rolling” or “transformation”, and in Jewish mysticism refers to the transmigration of souls into different bodies (metempsychosis).

The dance piece was choreographed by Steve Weintraub, whom the Jewish Daily Forward called “hipster dance luminary,” with original music composed by two of the most creative, young voices in New Jewish Music, Zilien Biret and Ilya Shneyveys. GILGUL also invited dancers from all over Europe trained in ballet, modern and other schools of contemporary dance to be part of the process of creating the work while also learning about Yiddish traditional dance.

With GILGUL, contemporary dance finally contributes to the wave of creativity that has carried New Yiddish Music for more than 10 years. We are very proud to present it in Weimar!