Muntergang and Other Cheerful Downfalls

This bilingual Yiddish/English puppet show with original music based on the lives of Zuni Maud and Yosl Cutler, two modernist hand-puppeteers from the early 20th century. The show revisits their work together with Great Small Works’ own puppets, projections, and scrolls with a score performed live by Jessica Lurie and Ira Temple. Muntergang is a meditation on historical models for changing power relationships.

“….When YIVO reached out to Great Small Works to animate the work of the Yiddish puppet troupe MODICUT we were delighted. Zuni Maud and Yosl Cutler are undoubtedly our artistic ancestors as puppeteers, modernist folk artists, and Yiddish storytellers drawn to making work about shifting systemic social relationships.

Their early 20th-century methodology, knocking about and hitting each other with expressionist dolls they had built themselves, was part of a larger broad-visioned movement to transform human behavior, and achieve dignity and safety for a huge number of people. How inspiring! Not only were they prismatic artists working in Yiddish and fascinated with puppets, but they felt they could win! The movements they were connected to, with all of their faults, seemed able to effect paradigm shifts in culture, to change the nature of “what is ok” in the treatment of veterans, workers, farmers, poor people, black people, women, elders, immigrants, and children.

This piece is about Zuni Maud and Yosl Cutler, but it is also a meditation on how to embody values that change power relations.. As descendents of Yiddishland, we inherit what Haym Soloveitchik calls “the dual tradition of the intellectual and the mimetic, the law as taught and the law as practiced…” “Words,” he adds, “are good for description but pathetically inadequate for teaching how to do something. Try learning how to tie shoelaces from written instructions. One learns best by being shown; that is to say, mimetically.”

How do we use ancestral mimesis and communal behavior to disturb the peace? To crack through our own participation in what is subtly articulated in the Black Lives Matter movement, but I’ll call white supremacy? How can our languages and traditions give us the courage to question Possession by Whiteness?

Many of the words in the script are not mine. They are insights and questions by inclusive, empathetic and brilliant scholars/friends. These wise people include: Zuni Maud, Yosl Kotler, Moyshe Nadir, Sh. Ansky, Aurora Levins Morales, Andrea Smith, Agi Legutko, anonymous cartoonists from the Yiddish Press 1905-1936, Yehoyesh, Haym Soloveitchik, Adrienne Marie Brown, Gabriella Safran, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Richard Pryor, Lily Tomlin, Mae West, David G. Roskies, Donella Meadows, James Baldwin, Rosza Daniel Lang/Levitsky, Anna Jacobs, Michael Wex, Itzik Gottesman, Arian Nekhaie, David Schneer, Joachim Neugroschel, Anna Elena Torres, Je Exodus Hooper, Naomi Seidman, Jared Sexton, Robby Pekarar and Peretz Markish.
– Jenny Romaine for GSW, 2016