Ashkenaz Festival 2010 in Toronto (2): Ashkenaz Parade and 4 Other Performances of Music and Dance

This is the second part of 2 of the Ashkenaz Festival 2010 in Toronto, but I repeat the introduction of the first part:


¿In which part of the World you can experiment Jewish culture without feeling you are not part of it? Aside of New York and (maybe) Israel itself, almost everywhere in the world Jewish communities are closed to other eyes, and that's it, yes, well not in Toronto. 

Jews are a very strong community here and also a very active one. Just months ago there was an impressive Jewish film festival with a huge quantity of Jewish-subject and Jewish-made films, and every September the whole city celebrates Jewish Culture with a festival called Ashkenaz Festival or Festival of New Yiddish Culture (as it was called in Yiddish). During more or less an entire week there are theatre performances, music concerts, dance performances and lessons, parades, a market fair, painting exhibitions, lectures, and religious ceremonies with a relevant openness to non-Jews that most of us have never experimented before.

Jewish artists and celebrities from all over the world come here for the festival and party and talk with everyone who wants to listen to or dance with or learn from, and that is simply amazing. 

So I tried a little bit of everything and I had many surprises. I'm sharing some photographs of every spectacle and there is a video or audio when I could record something.


Now, the other five events I listened to and watched, including the parade with giant puppets, musicians and actors.

Sephardic and Mizrachi Cabaret

A concert with 10 of the best of the best in Sephardi and Mizrachi Music (from Israel and Morocco to Washington, from Sarajevo and Seattle to New York). It was the first time I experienced as spectator Ladino Songs.

Slideshow: Sephardic and Mizrachi Cabaret. Ashkenaz Festival 2010.

Morrocan sephardic chant by Aaron Bensoussan

 

You can find and buy music by Aaron Bensoussan here: http://www.amazon.com/Aaron-Bensoussan/e/B000APN688/digital/ref=ep_artist_tab_digi





Moldavian and Roma dances with Steve Weintraub & The Other Europeans

A concert of Roma musicians, and a Moldavian dance lesson for a multitude in an open stage.

Slideshow: Moldavian and Roma Dances. Ashkenaz Festival 2010.

Video: Moldavian and Roma dances. Ashkenaz Festival 2010.

Moldavian and Roma Dance at Ashkenaz Festival 2010 from Gustavo Thomas on Vimeo.

Divahn concert

A concert with an amazing music band of young Newyorker women, Divahn, with songs with far middle Eastern influence.

Slideshow: Divahn Concert. Ashkenaz Festival 2010.

Audio: Yonkipur Song. Divahn Concert. Ashkenaz Festival 2010.

 

(You can find and buy cd and mp3 by Divahn here: http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/divahn)

Balkan Beat Box concert

A concert of one of the most crazy Jewish band I have ever listened to, Balkan Beat Box, from Israel.

Slideshow: Balkan Beat Box Concert. Ashkenaz Festival 2010.

You can look for Balkan beat Box music on internet, it is a very famous band.

Ashkenaz Parade and Performance

Slideshow: Ashkenaz Parade. Ashkenaz Festival 2010.

Finally a very live performance and parade with hundreds of people lead by Shadowland Theatre Group with their big puppets and music bands.

Seeing a street theatre performance in Toronto is almost a miracle, there are some acrobatic groups performing here and there (Orange Circus and others), but street theatre groups I only know Shadowland Theatre Group. It seems they are working in Toronto since many years ago, and some of their first performances had political connotation for the city during the eighties, so it has been a long way on an almost deserted land. Good for them.

Video: Askenaz Parade and Performance. Ashkenaz Festival 2010.

Ashkenaz Parade and Performance at Toronto Ashkenaz Festival 2010 from Gustavo Thomas on Vimeo.

*

Ashkenaz Festival 2010 in Toronto (1): 3 Dance and Music Performances

¿In which part of the World you can experiment Jewish culture without feeling you are not part of it? Aside of New York and (maybe) Israel itself, almost everywhere in the world Jewish communities are closed to other eyes, and that's it. Well, not in Toronto. 

Jews are a very strong community here and also a very active one. Just months ago there was an impressive Jewish film festival with a large quantity of Jewish-subject and Jewish-made films, and every September the whole city celebrates Jewish Culture with a festival called Ashkenaz Festival or Festival of New Yiddish Culture (as it was called in Yiddish). During more or less an entire week there are theatre performances, music concerts, dance performances and lessons, parades, a market fair, painting exhibitions, lectures, and religious ceremonies with a relevant openness to non-Jews that most of us have never experimented before.

Jewish artists and celebrities from all over the world come here for the festival and party and talk with everyone who wants to listen to or dance with or learn from, and that is simply amazing. 

So I tried a little bit of everything and I had many surprises. I'm sharing some photographs of every spectacle and there is a video or audio when I could record something. Of course the final event, the parade, is what I wanted to show in this theatre Blog but it will be at the next post, for now the three first performances.

Yiddish dance lessons

Slideshow: Yiddish Dance Lesson at Azhkenaz Festival 2010

Very surprised how Avia Moore managed to teach a 20-minute Yiddish Dance to almost 60 people; the music by Mike Winograd Band was very enjoyable, funny and cheerful.

Video: Yiddish Dance Lesson at Ashkenaz Festival 2010

Yiddish Dance Lesson at Toronto Ashkenaz Festival 2010 from Gustavo Thomas on Vimeo.

Elaine Hoffman Watts and the Fabulous Shpielkes concert

Slideshow: Eliane Watts and The Fabulous Shpielkes at Ashkenaz Festival 2010

This was a concert of Blues-style Klezmer Music with an eighty years old drummer grandma and a fantastic band.

Video:  Eliane Watts and The Fabulous Shpielkes at Ashkenaz Festival 2010 (1)

Elaine Hoffman Watts & The Fabulous Shpielkes Concert at Ashkenaz Festival (video 2) from Gustavo Thomas on Vimeo.

Video:  Eliane Watts and The Fabulous Shpielkes at Ashkenaz Festival 2010 (2)

Elaine Hoffman Watts & The Fabulous Shpielkes Concert at Ashkenaz Festival (video 1) from Gustavo Thomas on Vimeo.



Havdallah Ceremony

Slideshow: Havdallah, during Ashkenaz Festival 2010

A celebration of the Havdallah, the final ceremony of every Shabbath when religiosity and seriousness mix with a klezmer night party. Here the whole ceremony recorded in 4 tracks, it is very enjoyable but long, if you are patient you'll find how surprising and amazing it is the change of music style through the religious chants of the first ceremony to the joyful music at the end when the Shabbath has finished. If you are in a hurry, then listen to the 3rd track where is recorded the moment of the change of music I am talking about.

Havdallah (first track)

Havdallah (second track)

 

Havdallah (third track)

 

Havdallah (fourth track)

 

"Film Socialisme" (Directed by Jean Luc Godard), at TIFF 2010

Godard reminds us that cinema is images and sound

that the history of cinema can be other

as well as the history of mankind can be seen from other perspectives

Godard reminds us of the words of the critical idealist

Godard is a revolutionary cynic

Godard makes a film that follows the defeat in struggle

only to continue its existence

Godard is a master

years of creation through images and sound

years of thinking in images and sound

Godard shows us images and sounds

Sounds that are murky for some

unintelligible to others, 

difficult for all

Words and phrases

simple images, 

textures of simple images, 

simple people in simple images 

weaving a structure based on sadness, 

disappointment at the ideals of socialism, 

the ideals of the words people and freedom,

the struggles of those who do not speak of patriotism or nationality

or democracy

the horrors of what happened on the chosen path

and what will not be forgotten

A set of fantasy, a set of stupidity and cheap jewelry;

a ship

containing a few disillusioned and outdated passengers

and bringing them to a journey through history.

His film is the eternal sadness of what has been lost

and the illusion lost in the waters of the Mediterranean,

in its wars and its diasporas that have crossed it

Godard reminds us that cinema has changed

and now is part of something that not all of us fought for it.

His film, this film, is a film that doesn't recognize,

denigrating to some and not praising anyone. 

His film bothers anyone who speaks the language of those who have won 

The heirs of the victorious don't want to stay longer watching it and tend to go away 

not because of being against it but because they are unable to understand it 

Because they do not understand!

because it is not possible to understand a world that does not have the codes to understand others

In the beginning this world we now call Cinema was one of the Cinemas

and today it is all ... it seems everything.

It is already in our mind, we edit our thoughts with the way it is edited.

This is a closure only read for who lives outside.

Godard makes this evident to a few ones

most are lost when watching

irritated

they don't enjoy neither the words

nor poetry

nor the images, beautiful images of our time

They can not see the thought of the other,

nor their life reflecting in a mirror that have never before seen.

No one enjoys the last will of an old man

disappointed

continuing to work in his Art

satirizing with ironies that no one can understand.

Godard is a language about to die!

As that Socialism he intends to speak of in his film,

as the pure ideals of some living,

beyond the mistakes of social ideologies in the past.

Godard is one of those last speakers of that endangered language

who speaks it only not to forget it

and it is no longer understood;

with a mythology of gods that no one worships anymore;

and is proud, excessively proud.

Because that language,

he won't teach to speak

to anyone.

*

"Film Socialisme"

Directed by Jean Luc Godard

Screening at Toronto International Film Festival 2010 (TIFF 2010)
Bell Lightbox 2

September 19th, 2010

Trigger Festival 2010: The Honesty Of Cruelty.

On June 9th, 2010, I was invited to a Performance-Party at Raging Spoon, an alternative venue in Toronto. This party was part of the Trigger Festival, an independent art festival focused on alternative ways of living and doing art.

Even though Toronto has a very large alternative community, it is hard for anyone from that community to get a place in this city, a city which dreams of being part of the success of the American way of life (Canadian-style). So, an event like the Trigger Festival was almost unknown to most Torontonians, with almost no publicity anywhere and without any special place in those "what-to-do" magazines. Even then, that night Raging Spoon was almost full of people (around 100, maybe more) looking for some crazy and different performance acts, and they were not disappointed.

Some 10 performance acts were scheduled for that night and two of them deserve my special mention because they were surprising and shocking from my point of view. I wasn't prepared to see anything interesting (I was going to a party), so I didn't bring my cameras and I only could take video and photographs with my iphone, I apologize for the bad quality of the images.

Transvestite, AIDS and a bottle of wine.

First, it was a foreign homosexual man, a transvestite who lives in Toronto, exposing his impotence and his suffering with his AIDS treatment, through a very shocking performance. (See video "first performance")
Here, the act with the actions as I can remember them.

He...

- appears dressed like a woman with a big handbag, with a juice extractor, a bottle of wine , beets and medical pills.

- cuts and prepares some slices of beet for a juice, and puts the pills on the floor.

- extracts the juice while singing,

- opens a bottle of wine.

- takes off his underwear and lies down with his back on the floor.

- introduces the mouth of the bottle into his anus and empties the contents of the bottle while singing.

- shows, in silence, the empty bottle and drinks the last drops.

- puts the glass with beet juice on the floor and, seating close to it, fills the glass with the liquid coming out from his anus.

- shows to the spectators the glasses filled with beet juice and wine from his anus.

- drinks the liquid and swallows the pills.

- cleans perfectly, using his clothes, all the area of the performing space.

A queer girl beaten

Second, a lesbian girl, from Québec, expressing her impotence before the world, the sexism and the incomprehension of society, repeating scenes of her real life when she was humiliated and beaten, inviting the public to shout and to cry if they shared her hate. (See video "second performance")
It is a little more difficult to remember exactly the order of actions but I will try to do it:

She...

- gives spectators a paper (see the photos) with a sentence in English and French inviting to shout or cry if we fell like it.
- listens to (as we do as well) several voice recordings with some men talking about her, about her appearance, her sexuality and in all cases humiliating her, as if everything were fuel for an emotional explosion.
- after several minutes of listening to the recordings she explodes into crying and shouting.
- Another girl enters and holds the first girl's arms while she's shouting loudly, it seems she is  being beaten by some people. Some spectators shout with her.

- falls on the floor, in silence.
- takes two banners with sentences in English and French: "I refuse to be a Victim" and "Thanks to the Queer community"

So, after that evening, I've being thinking a lot about what I saw there.

If we are as honest as those performers were, then those acts would change our perspective of watching spectacles.

Those were no spectacles for themselves, but they were theatrical acts, performing acts, half reality and half staging. Their performers gave a lesson of honesty, yes, but those weren't direct speeches during a real scene of crisis, those acts were also "theatre" and "performance"; we have to remember that they thought what to do on stage and what to show and say to the others; those performing acts walked on the line, on the border, of psychodrama and of personal theatre, they were in part an isolated hysterical impulse of an antisocial human being, and the summon of the creative saint-actor of "le Théâtre de la Cruauté". 

Yes, it was shocking and strange, not professional and not well staged, but unique. You won't see much of this in other parts... It was something terribly "unique".

Then some questions arise: What would happen if they were prepared actors, if they were great acrobats or very well prepared clowns? What would happen if they were educated singers? What kind of spectacle would we see? For sure something unbearable, because art and life together are Zeus' fulminating lightning.

If that combination doesn't happen, there is still the simple performance act they presented, and I think: I would rather see these honest performing acts than dozens of Off Broadways productions or those Toronto American-like plays on King street theatres, but tell me, please, who then will pay for it? who will pay for the honesty of "la cruauté" we saw that evening? Nobody will do it; well, yes, the performer himself, as it was.

It has to be an isolated act, behind the professional life, an alternative act, in a subterranean world, an underground act.

Certainly, it has to be a provocative act but outside the official and codified world of "art".

I love good theatre, good technique, the amazing way technical tradition is shown on Beijing Opera stage or Noh Theatre dramas, the way realist players can manage a character in a Tennessee Williams' play, but I'm also attracted by honesty, by cruelty, by that we can call a "trigger".

There is, undoubtedly, a dichotomy (not a contradiction) in my idea of art appreciation and creativity, but I enjoy that, it is like fuel in my creative life.

There is also a desire... and I won't say what this desire is.

Here, a slideshow of photographs of the whole event; you will recognize the acts I've been talking about.

First Performance

A Performance Act at Toronto Trigger Festival 2010 from Gustavo Thomas on Vimeo.

Second Performance

Trigger Festival 2010: Last Performance Act from Gustavo Thomas on Vimeo.

Antonio González Caballero Photographed in 1999

Antonio González Caballero, 1999

(By Alejandro Yustiaza)

Some days ago Alejandro Yustiaza, a former member of Esférica Ludens, sent to me a whole set of photographs of Antonio González Caballero at his home (and work place) in 1999.

There is something interesting in this set, aside of presenting more images of González Caballero the man, they show to us another González Caballero's home, the last one, in 20 de Noviembre Avenue, very close to the other one, both in México City Historic Downtown. We can see some of his paintings on the background of almost all the photographs of the set, and also we can get a glance of the last place he used to work at, giving lessons and transmitting his Acting Method. 

At that moment González Caballero's body was very weak after suffering several complicated surgeries, and we see him thin and tired; his hands, under the skin, are almost bones and veins, very impressive.

In this post I only share those photographs showing González Caballero alone, next week I will post more, he having a conversation with me and giving lessons.

You will notice that there are some images a little bit dirty or with some scratches, that's because of the time and problems with the digitalization. Be kind.

Slideshow of Photographs of González Caballero (1999)