Frankfurt Lab

This interdisciplinary lecture-performance is based on the previous performance “the land speaks to me of something shared” about the tangled histories (and violent untanglings) of Jewish and Muslim rhythm. The lecture is a poetic response that considers the roles of Lublina and Al-Qaisi in this continuous history. It moves between short histories of Muslim-Jewish conviviality among women*, queers, and communists; poems about our grandmothers and the loss of our ancestral histories; rhythmic exposition through tap dance; and a chant for making garlic sauce.

The aim is to feel the holy impurity of our cultures, the ways we bleed into each other throughout history. Music and rhythm, like food or technology, cannot be contained by ethnic, religious, or national borders. It contaminates, evolves, mixes, assimilates, advances, resists. There is both freedom and violence in the inability to be contained. Rhythm is a Grandmother grows and evolves in that ambivalence. As we learn the rhythms of our ancestors (or at least the ones we can find in the archive), we learn about the shared worlds that they have evolved within. We speculate about what is not in the archive, what does not fit into our contemporary narratives about Jewish rhythm or Jewish music particularly from Jewish-Muslim worlds. We see how we, ourselves, change the rhythms, continuing the evolution away from the “original.” We ask them to speak through us. And so we sing about sharing dates and sentimental sediments, we lament, we celebrate, we smash garlic, we talk of forests, we pray. We don’t produce answers but instead a texture of ambivalence in a speculative shared life.