moni ovadia - Dalla sabbia dal tempo

Dalla sabbia dal tempo - Author's notes

"Jewishness": words, music or silence?

First do, then you'll know. This is what one of the Hassidic Masters suggests, and it is a leit-motif of the whole Hassidic movement. And in a way, that's how it was for us. In the face of such a worrisome and imprecise subject - "Jewish culture" - our first consideration, Moni's and mine, was that we didn't really know that much about it, we certainly weren't erudite scholars, even though we are both intensely Jewish. So, instead of investigating history and religion, documents and information, we interrogated ourselves, in an attempt to identify the "Jewishness" we carry inside and of which we were obscurely aware; we followed the tracks of our own being before we ourselves knew what we wanted to get at.

By looking inwards, we were able to bring focus to a number of often contradictory fragments, amusing aspects and uncomfortable truths, memories of events we had never actually lived through, layerings of the imaginary; ghosts, perhaps, but compellingly present. We exchanged books and phrases which over the passage of time had most impressed us and in them we were reflected and recognized ourselves; we remembered stories and jokes, rediscovered forgotten languages. We drew out a long list of the Yiddish songs we had sung for years (thanks to Hana Roth, who initiated us to this traditional heritage more than twenty years ago) and we chose a few. We assumed all this as material for a theatrical creation and didn't bother to organize it according to some rational logic or assign it to a presumed identity search.

Born and developed in this way, by following the tracks of our own subjectivity, the performance we now propose is far from any didactic or filological intentions, it does not want to illustrate a specific culture or clarify this or that aspect of Judaism. On the contrary, the intention is to communicate directly some components of the restless Jewish soul, with a margin for the unfathomable. Fear and pride, a thousand impossible homelands, too many bastard languages. But also, naturally, humor, money, dialectics and theatricality, the waiting, the unease in extroversion, the vitality in melancholy, the feeling of ambivalence towards destiny. The enigma of the Jew, or rather the Jew's secret: diversity creates solitude and solitude creates a constant unanswered interrogation. And so, we present our "travel notes" with the intensity and involvement with which we collected them. Certain that this assylum or flowing of the soul – that is,"Jewishness" - is something which may not be explained but, for better or for worse, may only be lived.

Having been so conceived , this show could not find a structural correspondence in a concert-recital form or in a simple collage of songs and spoken pieces. It was necessary to make music and words co-inhabit a unitary emotional dimension, in which both could really pulsate. Our dramaturgical and scenic elaboration went in this direction, with two principal motivations . On the one hand, the weight music carries within the Jewish soul. Music which seems to have lived there ever since the beginning of time, an expression of moods which would otherwise be inexpressible; an interior rythm, an obbligato, the soul's own breath; melodies as unsaid phrases, words unable to become words; elemental harmonies which lay on formal simplicity as a nostalgia for the absolute. Music of the deep, in spite of its light robes, language entwined with being; a simple exposition cannot do it justice; a musicality in which one "is sung" rather than actively singing. On the other hand, the need to produce an original script and not to merely align quotations in a row. A multi-form text, an alchemy of words uprooted from their singular contexts – historical, narrative, scientific, poetic, of the cabaret – and restored through the filter of subjectivity, freely associated to and mixed with words of our own. Funny stories which have been dramatized, not an end in themselves; stories stolen from oral tradition and used to prompt other reflections; great modern thinkers considered alongside biblical prophets. Following this train of thought, brief excerpts from very different composers have been inserted here and there between the spoken words and the songs: they are not meant to be a sort of soundtrack but rather a series of cues, of emotional breaks. Music and words are given to the actors and musicians who, on stage, in the space of the desert – ancient reality or a place within – are called not so much to represent as to actually live the most elusive zone of Judaism. Perhaps, rather than in words spoken or sung, it is in the silences of the Jew, in those white spaces between one word and the next, in the empty spaces of a dream, that "Jewishness" resides.

Mara Cantoni
(from the opening performance playbill, 19 May, 1987)