Performing the Jewish Archive

About

During the long 20th century, displacement has affected the musical, theatrical and literary output of Jewish artists in myriad ways. Many works are thought to have been lost or have, until recently, languished in obscurity.

‘Performing the Jewish Archive’ is motivated by a desire to recover and engage anew with these creative artefacts, and to stimulate the creation of new works to re-animate existing archival repositories. We aim to theorise and reconceptualise the Jewish archive as ‘co-textual’: all artefacts are components of a non-hierarchical, non-linear system that destabilises the relationship between past, present and future, origin and diaspora.

Project Partners

The Performing the Jewish Archive team are proud to be associated with the following partner organisations. More information on our collaborations and joint activities will become available soon.

• The National Archives
• British Library
• Anne Frank Trust
• Australian National Film & Sound Archive (Australia)
• Theatre Company ‘Blah Blah Blah’
• English Heritage
• Goldner String Quartet
• Hans Gál Society
• Holocaust Survivors Friendship Association
• Jewish Museum in Prague
• Bach Dancing & Dynamite Society, Madison
• Madison Youth Choirs
• Makor Jewish Culture/JFest International
• The Nash Ensemble of London
• National Library of Australia
• Opera North
• Royal Northern College of Music
• South African Holocaust Foundation
• Sinai Synagogue, Leeds
• Stellenbosch University
• Sydney Jewish Museum
• Terezín Memorial
• University of Cape Town
• US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington DC
• Wisconsin Youth Symphony Orchestra
• Czech Philharmonic Orchestra
• Seattle Symphony
• Mayrent Institute

Mission Statement

Performing the Jewish Archive’s mission is to deliver an outstanding project that:

1. Plays a prominent role in the ongoing debates surrounding archives, performance, memory and Jewish culture
2. Engages with archives in new, creative and innovative ways
3. Challenges the hierarchical relationships between archives, artworks and performance
4. Creates a new and sustainable archive for the future

Aims and Objectives

1. To explore archives that have recently come to light (in South Africa, Prague, Australia, USA and Finland) and seek out archives that have yet to be located.  Already-established networks will be crucial in helping the team to follow existing leads in search of further archives.
2. To disseminate the results of our research through scholarly outputs for academic beneficiaries and performances and community education projects for a wider-public audience.
3. To theorise and reconceptualize Jewish archives.  This will be achieved through engagement with several types of archives such as creative works, traditional archival documentation and ethnographic archive. The focus will be on ensuing that no one archive is privileged over another, thereby creating a non-hierarchical and non-linear system.
4. To develop methods of audience response testing which will help to determine how successful our performances are in generating audience engagement.
5. To create a new, sustainable archive for the future and pathways for the perpetuation of our scholarly and performance related outcomes.  This will be done through the creation of an interactive public web resource featuring an online database of our project performances with links to supporting archival artefacts, associated conference/symposium presentations, publications and audience response data.