Purim
Photos By Erik McGregor
Great Small Works has been at the heart of the Aftselakhis Spectacle Committee’s diasporist, queer, abolitionist, feminist, antifascist, trans, & very very maximalist Purimshpil since it’s inception. A Purim Shpil is a traditional folk play put on by Jews all over the world for the late winter holiday of Purim. The Aftselakhis Spectacle Committee (TASC), in cahoots with Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ), hosts a public process that lasts 3 months. TASC invites people into all aspects of work from political education, to dancing, singing, puppet building, costume making, writing the show and performing in it. The Purim crew feeds participants, provides metros and childcare to help folk join in. They use the prep period (at Great Small Works Studio) to bring people together who are usually segregated from each other. They carve out time and space to hang out, move together, and summon ancestral stories. The carnival force at the heart of Purim summons the team and crowd to cultivate inspiring confusion. The community finds new formations of thought, and activism by way of the artistic process. The art has to be excellent, and the analysis too. Both joyfully infuse the other to bring NYC to a new “place.” 1,500 costumed People attend the performances. The Great Small Studio is the space in which the process takes root.
Art and Tradition in a Time of Uprisings
By Gabriel Levine
Examining radical reinventions of traditional practices, ranging from a queer reclamation of the Jewish festival of Purim to an Indigenous remixing of musical traditions.