By Bella Levavi
NORTHAMPTON – Audiences at the Parlor Room were held rapt last weekend as intricate paper shadow puppets mounted on a massive scroll crept across a hand-cranked ark, with musical accompaniment from a three-piece Klezmer band and narration by Northampton performance artist A.C. Weaver.
With their week-long tour culminating in two sold-out shows at the Parlor Room on Sunday, April 21, the Magid Ensemble’s performances of its original work “Shterna and the Lost Voice” provided audiences with a glimpse of how today’s Yiddish diasporic artists use their knowledge of Jewish pre-Holocaust Eastern-European folklore and tradition to create new works of Jewish art.
“There is something really cool about people who are younger and queer making art in traditional ways that is often at odds because it is changing traditions,” violinist Rachel Leader told The Shoestring.
Weaver noted that they come from a thriving, living diasporic Yiddish culture and that they are a product of many generations of work from cultural organizers before them. “Our source material can generate projects like this increasingly with every generation,” they said.
Inspired by mythical tales of Elyahu Hanovi (Elijah the Prophet), the 45-minute show narrates a woman’s journey through ‘the three worlds’ — the underworld, the physical world, and the heavens — to restore her friend’s lost voice.
The narrative engages the audience throughout the entire performance, with the performers, each prolific in their respective fields, taking turns in the spotlight to showcase their talents and provide moments of storytelling, crankie paper-cut art, and original klezmer scores — even breaking out into a Horah dance in one scene, with audience participation encouraged.
While the group of five artists used to live and create art together in Northampton, they now live across the country in New York; Portland, Oregon; Boston; and some still in the queer Yiddish diasporic hub of Northampton.
The development of “Shterna and the Lost Voice” took the performers a year and a half, beginning with Weaver writing a story and sharing it with their four friends. Weaver explained that the original script allowed ample space for the music and visual art to shine, creating a true multidisciplinary experience.
Mattias Kaufmann, the ensemble’s accordionist, explained that the group practiced and developed the performance together, mostly over Zoom with one week-long, in-person residency they all attended, “feeding off each other’s inspiration.”
Weaver said that the strength of the piece lies not only in the performers’ relationships with each other, but also in their connection to a living culture rooted in interpersonal mentorship and teaching relationships with older practitioners of Yiddish culture, visual arts, and storytelling.
The story draws inspiration from Jewish ethnographic materials by S. Ansky, as well as scholarly writings by Nathaniel Deutsch and Gabriella Safran, and the book “Tales of Elijah the Prophet” by Peninnah Schram. It combines documented folklore with elements of the story crafted by Weaver according to the rules of Jewish folklore and mysticism.
In one scene, Raymond’s crankie shows dead people in Jewish cemeteries rolling through the earth to go to the Jerusalem of the underworld to dance – practicing for when the Messiah comes. Weaver explained that this was based off research from Ansky’s expedition.
“I used writings from musicologists and ethnographers that reported the beliefs of shtetl Jews. That is where we get a lot of the folk lore we have from those people,” Weaver said.
The score features all-original music drawing on traditional klezmer influences. Kauffmann explained that the group came into the process with ideas and melodies, developing the piece together through learning by ear and incorporating improvisation. Throughout the performance, suspenseful moments in the story are accentuated with accompanying actions and sound effects from the musicians, such as the cello mimicking the noises of a worm chomping on stones.
“It was an honor to get to work in a multidisciplinary space,” Leader said. “We are all so deep in our craft in different aspects — even the specificity of the violin and harmonies —there are endless layers of depth of expression. We all had to rely on each other to create something so immersive.”
The visuals of Shterna, crafted by Raymond, were made using an X-Acto knife and tracing paper on butcher paper, drawing influence from traditional Jewish paper cuts. Many motifs from Jewish papercut art can be seen in the borders of the piece.
“I love printmaking and storytelling, the crankie is a beautiful way of tying those together with visual art,” Raymond said.
One scene, featuring minimal narration, presents a display of the Garden of Eden filled with floral drawings, bringing the garden to life in the story — an evident focal point for Raymond as the visual artist of the show.
“We have spent so much of our lives dedicated to learning the endless specificities of the genre and this culture — where it comes from, how we want it to evolve, how it became what it is — that brings us love and joy to our lives,” Leader said. “I felt there was a synergy we were able to bring together that is different from the mainstream culture we are a part of.”
While the performance itself mostly steered clear of overt politics, the Magid Ensemble acknowledged in their interview the inherent politics of bringing these traditions into the present day. Weaver said an argument can be made that their work as diasporic tradition practitioners can be seen as inherently anti-Zionist. One line in the show made reference to the Jerusalem of the physical world never having what people hope for, eliciting giggles from the audience in a moment of thin metaphor in an otherwise deeply symbolic piece.
The group explained to The Shoestring that they are anti-Zionist performers, and they used the show as a fundraiser for a family evacuating from Gaza.
More than thinking of the piece as inherently political, they said they saw Shterna take on new meanings as the story evolved in the development stages and again when they brought the work to audiences.
“We live in such a fast-paced, reactionary, divisive, explosive, digitized world that has lost a lot of the depth. We are trying to create and hold with so much sincerity and love in this piece,” Leader said, emphasizing the value of analog art forms for speaking to new audiences
“We are deeply rooted in klezmer music but this is something new. And I see that as powerful.”
Members of the Magid Ensemble will next appear at the Yiddish cultural festival KlezCummington on July 6.
Bella Levavi is a mutli-disciplinary performance artist with a community engaged practice that uses the absurd as a tool for social commentary. She is also a Greenfield-based writer.
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