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Samantha Ellis (London,
UK) is a playwright on attachment
to the Birmingham Repertory Theatre. She is also a freelance journalist
writing about theatre and dance for the Guardian,
Observer, the Jewish Quarterly
and the Jewish Chronicle. Her
plays staged in London include
Patching Havoc
(Theatre 503), Use
Me as Your Cardigan (Jackson's
Lane Theatre), Feel the Plastic
(Camden People's Theatre), Martin's Wedding (BAC)
and a short play for The Miniaturists
at Southwark Playhouse. Play about Hair will explore the controversies
surrounding women, faith and hair-covering by telling the story of a
friendship between a Hindu and a Jewish woman. Both have given up their hair for
religious reasons and both are affected by the controversies, differing
opinions and misinformation that
surround the issues of a woman’s hair. The play will be staged at the
Birmingham Repertory Theatre.
Yulia Ginis (Novi Sad, Serbia)
is an artist
and theatre director. In her work she links visual theatre with movement
and dance with costumes and masks. Her recent works explore the
opportunities of creating modern visual theatre based on traditional Jewish
texts. She received the Mayor’s of Jerusalem grant
for her play ‘Mystorin’ in 2005. Synagoga is a multidisciplinary theatrical performance based on texts from the
Talmud. The project was launched as the initiative of Serbian and Israeli
artists; it will be performed in former synagogues in Eastern
Europe which have been transformed into cultural centres.
Bente
Kahan (Oslo,
Norway) is a Norwegian actor and
performing artist who trained in Tel-Aviv and New York. She began her career in the
classical theatres of Habima, Israel's national theatre, and
Nationaltheatret in Norway.
She wrote her first monodrama Bessie
in 1986. In 1990 she founded Teater Dybbuk in Oslo, which has put on amongst others, Yiddishkayt, Farewell Cracow and Voices
from Theresienstadt. In 2005, Bente Kahan was appointed the director of
the White Stork Synagogue, Wroclaw
Center for Jewish
Culture and Education. Wallstrasse 13 is a play using authentic film,
photos and archival material portraying Jewish women who lived on
Wallstrasse in Wroclaw/Breslau in different eras, pre-war German Breslau
and post-war Polish Wroclaw. The
play will be staged by Teater Dybbuk in Wroclaw.
Ofri Luz
(Brussels, Belgium) An Israeli choreographer and modern dancer now living
in Brussels, she lived for several years in the Israeli desert which
inspired her greatly, and where she founded and organised regular dance
programmes and festivals. She also initiated several artistic projects with
students and the local community there, which resulted in theatre
productions. The project Diversity
concentrates on diversity as a ‘collection of differences’ through three
female dancers: one Jewish, one Canadian and one Austrian. The space, which
is divided into three, symbolises the space within each dancer. The show
translates into gestures the possibility of constructing bridges between each
dancer’s space. The music was composed specially by Zvi Ravitz, a musician
from Mitzpe Ramon.
Tracy-Ann Oberman (London, UK)
is a television
and radio
actress,
best known for her role in the soap
opera EastEnders. In addition to her many
television credits, Tracy-Ann has acted in radio
drama and comedy, appearing regularly on BBC Radio
4, including the leading role in The Attractive Young Rabbi.
She has also written comedy sketches and an award-winning sitcom for BBC
Three, The Harrington Harker. When studying at the Moscow Arts
Theatre School,
she was particularly inspired by the comedy in Chekhov. His play ‘Three Sisters’ provides the inspiration for Oberman’s new play
to be written in collaboration with Diane Samuels.
Diane
Samuels (London, UK)
is a Liverpool-born playwright living in London. She is also a radio, novel and children's writer. She worked as a drama teacher
in inner London
secondary schools and then as an education officer at the Unicorn Theatre
for children before becoming a
full-time writer. Her work for the theatre includes: Frankie's Monster, Chalk Circle, Salt of the Earth, The
Bonekeeper, short-listed for the W. H. Smith Awards for plays for
children, and Kindertransport, co-winner of the 1992 Verity Bargate
Award and winner of 1993 Meyer Whitworth Award. Diane was awarded a Science on Stage and Screen
Award by the Wellcome Trust in 2001 to undertake an experimental
collaboration with medical specialists to make an innovative piece of
documentary theatre about the nature of pain. Three Sisters on Hope Street
will be set in Liverpool and is a collaboration with Tracy-Ann Oberman
which will be staged at the Hampstead Theatre, London.
Stéphane
Valensi (Paris, France) He recently acted in plays by
Patrick Haggiag, The Wild Duck by
Ibsen, and Stalingrad’s Last
Letters by Laurent Terzieff. He also acted in Comedy by Beckett, The
High Territories by René Zahnd, which was directed by Henri Ronse with
whom he participated from 2000 to 2004 in the Poets’ Caravan in Central France.
In 2003 he toured 40 schools with a presentation of an anthology of
contemporary poetry. He has
collaborated with Jean Gilibert on The
Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky, Athalie
by Racine and with Fabienne Ankaoua on
Kafka’s Metamorphosis at the
French Institute in Prague.
He has also acted in The Fragments by
Murray Schisgal by Philippe Ferran, Ruy
Blas and Victor Hugo’s Lucretia
Borgia by Jean Martinez. These three short plays, 74 Georgie Avenue, The Old Jew and The Peddlars by Murray Schisgal
are the first to be directed by Stéphane Valensi. Since 1963, Murray
Schisgal has written plays and scripts for cinema and television, until the
enormous success of Tootsie,
which he co-authored and which won several prizes. These plays tackle with
typical New York
Jewish humour the themes of continuity and discontinuity of cultural
heritage. They deal in a very touching manner with the problems linked with
awareness of identity, uprootedness and transmission. The play will be
performed between 19 March and 15 April 2007 at the Gerard Philippe Theatre
in Saint-Denis.
Performing
arts: music composition
Francis
Biggi (Bovisio Masciago, Italy) studied medieval history and music history in Milan and has a diploma in medieval lute from the
Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, Basle. He was
a founding member of two Italian medieval music ensembles of the 1980’s:
Alia Musica and Ars Italica. He has collaborated with early
music ensembles in Boston, Basel,
Paris, Geneva,
Barcelona and Assisi
as well as performing in most of the major European early music festivals
and in the United States
and Canada.
Since 1992, he has been co-director of Milan’s Ensemble Lucidarium alongside
Avery Gosfield. Their
collaborative project, La Istoria de Purim io ve lo racconto: Jewish
Life at the Crossroads in Renaissance Italy
was performed 35 times
across Europe by Ensemble Lucidarium.
Their new collaboration, When Yiddish was Young, will use a variety of Renaissance and other
traditional poetical and musical sources. This composition and recording
will attempt to recreate musical soundscape in European countries where
Yiddish was spoken. When
Yiddish was Young will
be performed at the Frankischer Festival, Germany, the Jewish Summer Festival, Hungary, the Jewish Museum of Bologna and Cantar di Pietre, Switzerland.
Daniel Biro (London,
UK) grew up in France but has been living in the UK since
1985. Inspired by visual performance and electronic instruments from a
young age, Biro founded the Sargasso label in the early 1990s to promote
contemporary experimental and avant-garde music. His long-term collaborators
include choreographer Jane Turner, singer-songwriter Orange, sound designer Mike Willox,
guitarist Rob Palmer and jazz musician BB Davis. Daniel is also President
of the CAMAC Art Centre in France.
A
Thin, Still Sound is an
electro-acoustic, computer-based composition using bass clarinet and
electronics proposing an imaginary representation of the kinds of sounds
the Jewish people might have heard at Sinai. It will be recorded by
Sargasso and performed at the Urdang
Academy in London.
Petr Bohac (Prague,
Czech Republic), Mirenka
Cechova (Prague, Czech Republic)
The Voice of Anne Frank is a multi-expressional theatre project depicting the Shoah and themes
of hiding oneself. Anne Frank, hope, death, intimacy, identity and the
suppression of identity as a human-being are all themes explored in this
production. It will be performed at the Transteatral in Prague.
Alexandre
Brussilevski (Paris, France) was born in the Ukraine and
is a graduate of the Moscow Conservatory of Music. He won a number of
international prizes early on in his career (the Grand
Prix at the International Prague Competition in 1969, and the Grand Prix at
the Jacques Thibaud Competition in 1975). After
having been prohibited from performing abroad for eight years, Brussilovsky
was able to leave the USSR
in 1985 and rebuilt his career in France, dividing his time
between concert halls and teaching. At the same time his dream of having his
own ensemble came true with the creation of Ricercata de Paris. Since 2000
he has been the principal conductor of Ensemble Del Arte in Neuburg (Germany).
As an international soloist, Brussilevsky has given masterclasses in Bloomington (Indiana
University) and the Summer
Academies in Geneva, Nice and New York. He is also
the founder and artistic director of the Suoni e Colori recording label, the international music academy
Masters de Pontlevoy, the chamber music festival Les MusiCimes in Courchevel (France) and the Pont Alexandre III Festival of French music in Moscow.
His new project which received an award by the EAJC is an anthology
of 20th Century Jewish Music for the
Violin. Volume 1 of this anthology will be devoted to previously
unrecorded works by the contemporary Russian Jewish composer Efrem
Podgaitz, who draws on popular Jewish musical themes. Volume 2 will be
devoted to Weinberg, Ben Haim and Kopytman.
Marian Grinberg (Bucharest, Romania) studied piano, violin and composition
and graduated from the Bucharest Conservatory. He also studied composition
under Professor Ivan Erod at the Vienna Musik Hochshule. His composition
‘Tatashka’ was performed by the national orchestra of Romania and
recorded by the national television. Grinberg devotes himself to studying
three traditional styles of music: Romanian, Gypsy and Jewish. His work
‘Gipsy-Jewish Rhapsody’ has been performed at the Vienna Konzerthaus, the
Wurzburg Theatre, the Salzburg Folk Festival and the Furth Summer Festival.
In 2001, Grinberg won for the second time the City of Bucharest Prize for his work on
traditional Romanian songs, which were performed by artists such as
Christina Barbulescu, Gary Bertini, Peter Stein and Alfred Bhosic. Since
2002 he has been working in the department of traditional music in Bucharest and teaching harmony and composition at the Arad Academy. Since 2004 Grinberg has
been the artistic director of the Arad Folk Music Festival. Di Naye
Hagode (The New Haggada) is
a musical homage to the heroism of the Jews who resisted in the Warsaw
Ghetto. Based on a Yiddish epic poem by poet Itsik Fefer, The New Haggada
is a dramatic oratory poem.
Ewa
Kornecka (Krakow, Poland)
grew up in Krakow and is a composer and pianist as well as co-founder
and music director of cabaret Loch
Camelot in Krakow. She is a
lecturer at the State
Theatrical Academy
and has written and recorded music for over 120 shows for TV and the stage.
She is a recipient of the Ministry of Culture and Art Award and since 1995 has
worked at the Atelier Theatre with Andre Ochodlo. Song Above Songs is a performance planned and inspired
by the poetry of eight Russian-Jewish authors who were sentenced for
treason and executed under Stalin. This composition attempts to bring their
poetry back to life. It will be performed at the International
Meetings with Jewish Culture - My Blue at the Atelier Theatre in Sopot.
Visual
arts: exhibitions of new work
David Breuer-Weil (London, UK) studied at Central St
Martin’s Art School
before he won a scholarship to Cambridge
where he studied literature. He
became director of Modern Art at Sotheby's and a consultant for modern and
contemporary art for de Pury & Luxembourg Art in Geneva.
Breuer-Weil has exhibited his work in London,
Cambridge, New York, Tel Aviv, and Düsseldorf. Project 3 is the third part of a
series of groundbreaking exhibitions. Project
1 was exhibited at the Roundhouse, Camden
in 2001 and Project 2 was
exhibited at the Oxo Tower Wharf,
London in
2003. Project 3 is the most ambitious
of the series, consisting of an installation of 50 monumentally sized
paintings exploring contemporary and historical Jewish experience, culture
and symbolism. Project 3 will be
exhibited in a disused urban site in the heart of central London under the auspices of the Ben Uri
Gallery.
Thomas Delohery
(Limerick, Ireland) became preoccupied with the
human figure in extreme situations of war and violence when he travelled to
Poland and visited the
concentration camps of Auschwitz, Birkenau
and Stutthof. This left a profound impact on him and since then, his work
has been solely concerned with the Holocaust. He has visited nearly all of
the main concentration camps in Europe and he has travelled to Israel to
interview survivors and do a Holocaust Educators course at Yad Vashem. He
has a Masters in Fine Art from the University
of Ulster and teaches art in Ceim
ar Ceim, Moyross’ Probation Project in Limerick.
His work has been exhibited all over Ireland,
Northern Ireland, Germany and Israel. Man-Made is an exhibition of watercolour
paintings which will be
shown at the Toradh Gallery, County Meath, Ireland. The opening of the
exhibition will be linked to the commemoration of the Holocaust Memorial
Day.
Marlis Glaser (Attenweiler, Germany)
trained as a
painter at the Hochschule fur Gestaltung in Bremen
under Professor Rolf Thiele. She taught at
the Hamburg Arts
Academy, and then at Bremen University.
Since 1984 she has been painting full-time. In
1984-5 she created ‘Portraits of Women of the Resistance’
in Bremen.
She has had many exhibitions in Germany,
Holland, France
and Sweden.
She carried out an art
project with schoolchildren on the theme of
remembering Janusz Korczak. For her latest project, And
Abraham planted
a tamarind tree,
Marlis Glaser painted and designed a series of portraits of residents of
the Shavei Zion Kibbutz in Israel.
These portraits are enhanced with paintings of plants. The project is the
outcome
of an exchange between the residents of Shavei Zion, a community
founded in 1938 by 40 German
Jewish refugees originally from Reixingen in
the Black Forest, who fled from the Nazi
regime.
Elliott Tucker (London, UK)
is a writer,
filmmaker and artist. After
training at Goldsmith’s Film
School and receiving
a Masters in Screenwriting, Elliott became a freelance educator,
specializing in the Visual Arts and Religious Studies. He has directed,
produced and edited The Children of
the Ghetto, a feature documentary film supported by Sir Alan Sugar,
Steven Berkoff and Arnold Schwartzman and Film for Humanity, Battle
of Cable Street
Film Project. He is currently developing new methods towards the
visualisation of Hebrew text and narrative imagery. The Metaphysics of Jewish
Life is a
multidimensional video installation dealing with Jewish ritual, Jewish time
and space, Jewish memory and life cycle. It will be performed and exhibited
at the London Jewish Cultural Centre, the Congregation of Jacob
Synagogue and St Hilda’s East Community Centre, London.
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