A Performance-Lecture on Messianic Themes
For eight 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 works to move back and forth between these varying talmudic registers and modes of address in the hopes of inching 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?
After first studying these Talmud pages in Berlin in 2015, I began the first phase of their performance-based investigation during a residency at the 14th Street Y in 2018. At that time, what emerged was a loose assemblage of fragments of performance-based Talmudic commentary – heavily supplemented by music, movement, and filmic image. I continued reading and re-reading these same Talmud pages as they became even more eerily relevant during the COVID-19 pandemic, and beginning in 2021 had the fortunate occasion to transform the material into an intermedial performance-lecture. The piece constellates rather disparate voices and perspectives: from Paul Celan to Marisa Tomei, Ella Fitzgerald to Gershom Scholem, Maimonides to Juan Valdez. This was a new kind of writing for me, one which tried to perform talmudic exegesis – with the help of many coffees, hints of autofiction, and original music – in order to get at some very muddy questions of exile, of redemption, and of messianic time? A textual version of the performance-lecture was published in Performance Research in 2023 and included lyrics and sheet music for two original songs – by Stew and Daniel Kluger. The videos that accompanied these songs in the live iterations of the performance-lecture are below.
Conceived and Performed by: Brandon Woolf
New Music by: Daniel Kluger, Stew, and Alberto di Gennaro & The Big Passport
Special Thanks to:
Lauren Mancia, Elad Lapidot, Tina Petereit, Jenny Seastone, Ben Gassman, Isa Spector, Jade Manns, Iliana Penichet-Ramirez, Ronit Muszkatblit, LABA: A Laboratory for Jewish Culture, and Target Margin Theater.
Performed live 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