A Performance-Lecture on Messianic Themes
For a few years now, I’ve been reading and re-reading six particular pages of the Babylonian Talmud, which confront some confounding questions of messianism. I’m not a scholar of Talmud; I really have no business digging around in this foundational tome of rabbinic Judaism. And yet, these six pages persist in their invitation – again and again – to consider catastrophe, caesura, mourning, and morning joe via dialogue, debate, parable, mathematical calculation, geopolitical commentary, conspiracy theory, and seemingly dadaist non-sequitur.
T.MUDD is a performance-lecture with new music that moves back and forth between these varying Talmudic registers and modes of address in the hopes of moving us just a little bit closer to (or perhaps way further away from) answering the persistent questions: Just what are we waiting for? And what should we do while we wait – for the end without end?
Conceived and Performed by: Brandon Woolf
New Music by: Daniel Kluger, Stew (aka Baba Bibi), and Alberto di Gennaro & The Big Passport
Special Thanks to:
Lauren Mancia, Elad Lapidot, Tina Petereit, Jenny Seastone, Ben Gassman, Isaac Spector, Jade Manns, Iliana Penichet-Ramirez, Ronit Muszkatblit, LABA: A Laboratory for Jewish Culture, and Target Margin Theater.
Performed at:
Ethyle R. Wolfe Institute for the Humanities, Brooklyn College, New York, April 2021
The Berlin Center for Intellectual Diaspora, Berlin, Germany, December 2021
QUORUM, Queen Mary, University of London, UK, February 2022