Zoom link https://us06web.zoom.us/j/85056193266

Vu Bistu Geven?/Where Have You Been? is an adventure parable that asks urgent and timely questions about diasporic Jewish Montrealers’ relationships to land and colonialism.

Earlier iterations of the project include a film premiered at Klezkanada’s 2020 online summer retreat for which the team conducted interviews with Indigenous cultural leaders and historians, a local Québécois farmer, and staff from the beloved summer utopia, Camp B’Nai Brith. They pursued historical and archival research, and built relationships with Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) collaborators. Vu Bistu Geven? weaves together original music and songs in Yiddish, English, French, and Kanien’kehá:ka; characters penned by Yiddish Montreal writers; colourful, original narrative film sequences; and a collage of documentary and pop-culture material. With humour and loving curiosity, we walk the audience through realms of Jewish and Kanien’kehá:ka storytelling. Our playful aesthetic opens up to self-reflexive inquiry about Jewish participation in Canadian settler-colonialism and leaves us with the refrain: “Ikh hob nisht gevist, nor ze ikh itst! I didn’t know, but now I see”!.

In her online performance Jenny Romaine will present an excitingly abridged one person version of the group project with clips and live commentary.

Jenny Romaine is a NYC based director, designer, puppeteer, and educator who co-founded the Obie winning Great Small Works visual theater collective to keep theater at the heart of social life. She is music director of Circus Amok and has directed/ designed puppet pageants, street spectacles, operas, toy theater shows, acts for clubs, black box productions, and works for puppets on film including “Muntergang and other Cheerful Downfalls,” The Sukkes Mob featured in Punk Jews, The Spectacle of the Rising Tide for the River to River Festival, NYC and Bobe Mayses: Yiddish Knights and other impossibilities with Yiddish Summer Weimar and more. Romaine anchors puppet theater workshops co-led by formerly incarcerated individuals for youth in NYC jails with Inside Change, and for two decades has directed/co-created the JFREJ/Aftselakhis Spectacle Committee's pan Jewish diasporist, queer, abolitionist, feminist, antifascist, trans, & very very maximalist Purimshpil extravaganzas serving thousands. Romaine has worked as a puppeteer with GSW, Amy Trompetter, Bread and Puppet Theater, Viva DiConcini, Chinese Theatre Works, and Janie Geiser. She is featured in "Dazzle Camouflage: Spectacular Theatrical Strategies for Resistance and Resilience" a monograph by Ezra Berkley Nepon and is a founding member of Naming The Lost /Memorials.

Jenny's online talk is a part of the online program of Yiddishland Pavilion that takes place from May to November 2022 and brings together artists and scholars who focus on Yiddish contemporary culture.

Yiddishland Pavilion is an alternative pavilion that premiered at 59th Venice Biennale in dialogue with some of the national pavilions. It is the first independent transnational pavilion bringing together artists and scholars who activate Yiddish and the diasporic Jewish discourse in contemporary artistic practice. The Pavilion’s activities — performances, discussions, presentations of new artworks, physical and digital interventions — unfold at the 5in Venice and online between April and November 2022. Yiddishland Pavilion represents Yiddishland ( ייִדישלאַנד or אידישלאַנד)—an imaginary country/land/space/territory and a stateless network connected through the Yiddish language and culture.

Yiddishland Pavilion is curated by Maria Veits and Yevgeniy Fiks.

yiddishlandpavilion.art

The event is held in zoom. The zoom link will be sent to you before the event.