Shifting Grounds: New Jewish Art Festival is a two-day multidisciplinary arts festival exploring the range of art created by Jewish artists working in and around Brooklyn today. Presented by The Neighborhood: An Urban Center for Jewish Life on November 14 and 15, the weekend features a group exhibition, two evening performance programs and a Sunday morning workshop for families.
The first evening of Shifting Grounds brings together music, theater, poetry, dance, and puppetry to explore Jewish mythology, history, and contemporary life. Moving between the intimate and the collective, the performances engage with themes of transformation, power, love, and belonging through experimental approaches to storytelling, sound, and movement.
The second evening of Shifting Grounds brings together vocal improvisation, poetry, theater, and video to explore the relationships between language, memory, ritual, and belonging. Drawing on Jewish musical traditions, histories, and cultural practices, the performances question how borders, collective memory, and inherited narratives shape our understanding of identity and place.
Saturday, November 14’s performance features:
Eli Berman’s Litanies of Lilith: an electro puppet opera work-in-progress depicting Lilith’s transformation from the first wife of Adam into the primordial mother of demons. Written, composed, and performed by Eli Berman, Litanies of Lilith features Yiddish translations by Moishe Dolman, and sounds generated through voice and wearable electronics as well as beats and drones made from vocal samples.
Catherine (C. Francis) Fisher’s Fresh Hell: a performance which brings together dance by Florence Nasar and music by Ira Gamerman featuring excerpts from Fisher’s forthcoming book-length poem.
Ira Gamerman’s Humorous Musings: a collection of short pieces on fame, surveillance, love, and isolation.
Ben Gassman’s The Board Minutes of Union Temple (1939-1947): a theatrical collaboration with Rachel Gita Karp and Lindsey Hope Pearlman depicting Louis Hamburger’s growing intolerance of fellow board member Charles Cohen.
Florence Nasar’s Leaves: an intergenerational performance featuring family members retracing an ancestral path from Aleppo to Jerusalem to Brooklyn, exploring exile, bodily memory, and the ritual of rolling grape leaves.
Sunday, November 15’s performance features:
Paul Amitai’s Trope Variations: an improvisational vocal performance based on the musical notation system of trope. Used for centuries as a guide to chanting the Torah, the system consists of graphic symbols that convey meaning and melody to the performer. For Trope Variations, the symbols act as visual prompts for vocal improvisation, with the original melodies used as source material that's reconfigured into new arrangements. The melodic patterns are processed with audio effects to create a lush, meditative soundscape. Every performance is unique.
Talia Bloch’s Words Are Belongings: a reading of poems at the intersection of language, place, and identity.
Noah Crandell’s This Is (Not) a Holocaust Memorial: a theatrical performance examining how Holocaust memory has been shaped by nationalism, ideology, tourism, and shifting political interests, tracing memorial culture from postwar Europe to the present. The piece, directed by Rachel Gita Karp, questions whether memorials keep history alive or allow us to outsource the work of remembering, ultimately asking what it might mean to stop building memorials and even to forget.
Aviv Keshet’s Wail: a performance exploring the wail as a ritual, image, and symbol.
Nessa Norich’s A Grenets-Mayse (A Border-Story): a video installation that mines imagery and rituals from Yiddish healing practices traditionally performed by women, folktales, and song to present Jewish diasporic reflections on the concept of ‘borders.’ This site-specific work was created in collaboration with the Hereland Collective in Białowieza, a dense forest straddling the Poland-Belarus border, a region facing increased militarization and a current migrant crisis