Company members: teaching, writing, puppet design/construction, cultural advocacy, community organizing, performing, directing and more.
La Sublima Corte
La Sublima Corte – a bilingual Spanish/ English shadow puppet comedy by Rossi and Cuban musician Roberto Rodriguez.
The Revival of the Uzda Gravediggers
A parable written and directed by Jenny Romaine with Belarusian poet Maryjka Martysievič, Tatar historian Siarhej Chareuski, Canadian, songwriter Geoff Berner and translators Sadie Gold-Shapiro and Ben Kline, about a league of funeral professionals in the mostly ordinary Belarusian town of Uzda. With contributions by Stephen Kaplin and Jennifer Miller.
Near Minsk, Uzda was once a thriving center of religious thought, a stone’s throw away from the legendary Smargon Bear Training Academy. Now it’s a sleepy but psychedelically painted town. home to two adjacent cemeteries, one Jewish and one Muslim Tatar.
The show is an investigation of the situation peopled and crittered by a cast drawn from literature, botany, song, poetry, historical archives, and film. Also, new reality based fantasies by one of the most outstanding authors on Belarusian literary scene, Maryjka Martysievič and Tatar historian Siarhej Chareuski.
Uzda is a real place. Uzda people are real people. We’re making an account, a telling in which we lift up the central role of Jewish, Muslim, Christian and Pagan funeral professionals living together in the primeval forests for hundred and hundreds of years. Curiosity about the gravediggers, gardners, professional mourners, bears, inn keepers and mushrooms of UZDA, have inspired the team is devise across nation states, languages, wars and occupations, or, what Dr Anna Elena Torres calls “ liberated forms of kinship with a consciousness of deep time.” Their fantasy is built on humor and intrigue. Physical comedy, puppetry, fabulous costumes, and pleasant absurdity in many languages have the potential to destabilize the present moment, reminding us that there’s nothing truly inevitable about militarism, cruel austerity, Islamophobia, anti-semitism, and nationalism. Also, that we have, and have always had ingenious ways of resisting.
Soul Songs Inspiring Women of Klezmer: Composers Orchestra
Designed and costumed by Jenny Romaine/ Great Small Works for a woman and trans ensemble of virtuosic composers deeply connected to tradition. Our experience with experimental art has shown us that to create something new we need a relationship to ancestors. We pay attention to the integrity of traditional forms in service of evolution and the future. All of the work by the composers in Soul Songs is new, summoned into being by fourth-generation Philly klezmer legend trumpeter Susan Watts. Design Team: Trudi Cohen, Rosza Daniel Lang / Levitsky, Milo, Raphael Mischler.
“Bobe Mayses – Yiddish Knights and Other Impossibilities”
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 was created by New York Times best-selling author Michael Wex, directed by radical Yiddish theater visionary Jenny Romaine, with music composed by New Jewish Music pioneer, Alan Bern in collaboration with a resident, international ensemble. “Bobe Mayses: Yiddish Knights and Other Impossibilities” transforms the fantastic tales of Elia Levita’s Bovo Bukh(1507) into a wild mixture of street theater, installation, puppet theater, circus and more. Its premiere took place during YSW 2016, Jewish Museum Berlin, with performances at other European venues to follow. With Rosza Daniel Lang-Levitsky, Abigail Miller and Gregory Corbino.
The Sukkos Mob
The Sukkos Mob, holiday spectacle with music conducted in Yiddish, English, and Spanish in parks, communal spaces and streets, NYC. With new compositions by Jessica Lurie, Mind expanding sound beds by Wollesonic Labs, Spectacle design by Alessandra Nichols, Jennifer Harris, Abigail Miller, and Gaby Cryan, Celia Hart Caro, Yiddish translation by Itzik Gottesman, Choreography by Abigail Levine. Directed by Jenny Romaine. And a cavalcade of stars over the duration including Alicia Gerstein, Joe Dobkin, Gaby Cryan, Rosza Daniel Lang-Levitsky, Adrienne Cooper, Ahmad Azadi, Sam Wilson, Arielle Federow, Shane Baker, David Mandelbaum, Amy E. Alterman, Ezra Berkley Nepon, Rachel Mattson, JR Hankins, Avi-Fox Rosen, Tina Richerson, Jessica Lurie, Kenny Wolleson, Michelle Miller, Ben Meyers, Mor Erlich, Stephen Kaplin, Abigail Miller, Laura Fraugg, Sarah Bendix, Dan Blacksburg, Judith Berkson, Michael Winograd, Jake Schulman -Ment, and Jenny Romaine. The Haunted Suke (2014) Truth in Gay Clothes (2011), Don’t Let the Sheep Get in Your Eyes, immigration sci-fi inspired by Alex Rivera (2010), Awesome is Over, with architectural lighting designer Linnaea Tillet (2009), Postcards from Outer Space (2007), The Haunted House of Now, Funtastic! (2006) Featured in the film Punk Jews
El Proyecto de Teatro Mapuche, Southern Argentina
(2008)
Inspired by the episodic structure of The Sukkos Mob, members of the Mapuche Theater Project invited Jenny Romaine to facilitate a three-week street theater workshop at a local art school in Bariloche Argentina for members of a collective of Mapuche activist scholars and artists, and 60 additional community members. The Mapuche Theater Project (MTP) in Bariloche, Argentina, supports work that redefines Indian culture. Since its inception in 2001, MTP has used the performing arts as a means to participate in the social and political arena: to confront discrimination against the Mapuche People and to encourage awareness and discussion of Mapuche identity in Mapuche communities. “We use the cultural tools of theater to engage in this conversation throughout the rural and urban areas of Argentina’s historical Mapuche Territory. Argentina’s northern Patagonia, as well as southern Chile, comprise the full area of the Mapuche Historical Territory, known as the “Wajmapu”.