LABAlive is BROKEN
ART. MUSIC. THEATER. PERFORMANCE. ANCIENT TEXTS.
Join LABA East Bay: A Laboratory for Jewish Culture at the JCC East Bay for a two-part series of art, performance, ancient Jewish text teachings, wine and schmoozing. The works featured in LABAlive come from the 2022 LABA East Bay artist fellows, and are inspired by their study of the theme of “BROKEN” in our open-minded, non-dogmatic beit midrash. Come to one–or both!
PART ONE: October 22, 2022. 7:30-9:30 pm. JCC East Bay
Director and circus performer Jeff Raz presents “Circus/Borders,” a community-based circus/theater exploration of borders. (Co-created by theater director Rebecca Novick)
Writer Michael David Lukas reads from his new novel manuscript, a post-apocalyptic retelling of the biblical Book of Esther.
Artist Lauren Ari presents new painting and sculpture, and “Moving Red Earth,” a collective ritual.
Harpist Jennifer Ellis plays new, original music that embraces the joyfully rich sounds of a “broken” harp.
Writer, teacher and Illustrator Meg Adler explores midrash (creative interpretation) as the filling in of the Torah’s narrative cracks with “story spackle.”
LABA scholar Deena Aranoff talks about that time when Moses broke the tablets.
PART TWO: December 3, 2022. 7:30-9:30 pm. JCC East Bay
Filmmaker Sari Gilman shares a sample of her film-in-progress, which explores the benefits and costs of belonging and her sometimes painfully, other times beautifully, fractured nature of her Jewish identity through an examination of her family’s divergent views on Israel.
Choreographer/dancer Risa Jaroslow and two dancers will be performing “shards” of movement that Risa collected during the pandemic, which, together, they have built into new choreography.
Artist Leah Koransky presents a series of two-dimensional artworks which will incorporate light, shadows, and glass to explore “brokenness” as a visual language.
Multidisciplinary artist David Israel Katz presents an installation based on the Aleinu, underlining the elements of befuddlement and breakdown found in this notorious prayer text.
Filmmaker Ken Paul Rosenthal presents “The Calling of Jerusalem,” a graphic video portrait of poet Julia Vinograd that is constructed from the individual letters of a poem she recites about God and Jerusalem’s broken romance.
LABA scholar Sam Shonkoff will talk about that time the vessels of light containing the universe shattered into a million pieces.
Ticket info coming soon.