Chutzpah! 2005 – a gem of a festival

JANOS MATÉ

"I started meditating. I like to have an espresso first, just to make it more challenging," quips Betsy Salkind, the San Francisco-based comedian who will be the featured act at the opening night of Chutzpah! The Lisa Nemetz Showcase of Jewish Performing Arts.

The program for the fifth annual Chutzpah! festival is punctuated with world-class comedy, music, drama and dance. The festival will bring to the stage local performers as well as artists from across North America and Israel. Some are emerging artists, and some are internationally renown. All are highly accomplished.

The Israeli humorist Dan Ben-Amotz's wry comment "They'll eat if they want; if they don't, they won't" aptly encapsulates the approach Chutzpah! brings to programming.

"Some audiences prefer traditional performances. Others seek 'on the edge' entertainment. Many prefer a touch of both," said Mary Louise Albert, the new artistic director of Chutzpah! "Chutzpah! does not seek to pander to audience tastes. We aim to educate our audiences to trust us. We demonstrate year after year that we provide the best entertainment value in town. Stellar performances at affordable prices."

In the humor category, Salkind is a regular in America's top comedy clubs, including New York's Comic Strip and Los Angeles's Comedy Store. She has appeared on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and has been a staff writer for Saturday Night Special and Roseanne.

Salkind's deadpan delivery and timing is reminiscent of the great Jack Benny. Her humor is topical and without reserve.

"I see doing comedy as an incredible opportunity to talk about things you don't normally talk about. If you're not offending anyone, you are not doing it right," she said.

Salkind is also a physical humorist. Her Squirrel Lady rendition of a squirrel munching on a piece of matzah is something not to be missed. The opening night of Chutzpah! with Salkind is sponsored by VanCity.

Supergroup of klezmer

Undoubtedly, Chutzpah's most ambitious undertaking to date is its co-production with the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts of Brave Old World's Canadian première of Songs of the Lodz Ghetto.

Hailed worldwide as the "supergroup" of the klezmer revival, Brave Old World is regarded as the pre-eminent interpreter and creator of klezmer, Yiddish and new Jewish music.

Songs of the Lodz Ghetto features Brave Old World's arrangements and theatrical presentation of rare Jewish street and cabaret songs created in Lodz ghetto in Poland from 1940 to 1944, at which point all the Jews of the ghetto were transported to Auschwitz. Of the 250,000 people transported, only 877 survived.

Allen Bern of Brave Old World emphasizes that Songs from the Lodz Ghetto, presented as a one-act opera, celebrates both the survival and the memory of the Jews of Lodz. Bern explained that the songs are not historic recreations, as instruments were banned in the ghetto, but rather Brave Old World's interpretations.

He offered the metaphor, "Imagine a painter painting the ghetto and his own hand is in the painting. That is Brave Old World's interpretation of these songs. We were not in the ghetto so whatever we do is in our imagination."

Bern also discouraged the notion that the program is steeped in sadness. "When we think about the ghetto, we think about darkness and pain. But in fact the energy and the vitality of the people was incredible," he said.

Hence Songs from the Lodz Ghetto has many lively, sarcastic and ironic moments. One song by Yankelle Herczkowicz, a survivor whose songs comprise the main body of the program, is satirically entitled "There Goes a German Jew." The reference is to German Jews who, upon arriving in Lodz, naively asked for directions to the hotel they were supposed to stay in.

The performance is entirely in Yiddish. But the libretto will be handed out and the audience will be able to follow along or read the translated text beforehand.

Brave Old World will perform at the Chan Centre on March 2. The performance is made possible though the sponsorship of the Phyliss and Irving Snider Foundation and Judy and Isaac Thau.

Pirates and pirouettes

Last year, the Minneapolis-based husband-and-wife team of Brian Sostek and Megan

McClellan performed Trick Boxing, their fanciful comedy about a young immigrant apple-seller-turned-boxer, to sold-out audiences at Chutzpah!

They are back again this year with Pieces of Eight, a whimsical tale about a dancing pirate queen whose story is brought to life by a reluctant writer and the studio boss's can-do secretary. The show is peppered with physical comedy, sword fighting, rapier-sharp repartee, puppets and flowing ballroom dance numbers. One critic refers to their light-hearted dancing as "Fred and Ginger at their most playful."

McClellan and Sostek make a dynamic duo and they have garnered international acclaim for their delightful storytelling. They weave "magic out of just about nothing."

For a dance show that will get you hopping in your seat, Dance Allstars, Chutzpah's flagship dance performance, showcases collaborations between Jewish and non-Jewish international dance artists. Emily Molnar (former dancer with the Frankfurt Ballet and Ballet B.C.) will dance a virtuosi solo of her own creation. Award-winning filmmaker Daniel Conrad, who has worked with both Molnar and Aszure Barton (New York-based former dancer with the National Ballet and Les Ballets Jazz) on his last two dance films, will present his latest dance film, 7 Universal Solvents. Barton will also dance live solos as well as in duets with Banning Roberts, who is a lead dancer with her New York-based company AszURe and Artists.

Completing this lineup is Ballet B.C.'s lead dancer, Simone Orlando. Orlando will dance a new work of her own choreography. She will be accompanied by Vancouver-based Israeli composer Itamar Erez.

In a separate dance performance, the gifted dancer and choreographer Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg will return to Chutzpah! to première a theatre-based dance solo choreographed for her by the well-known Canadian choreographer Denise Clarke. Friedenberg, who spent a couple of years living in South America, will perform one of her two shows in Spanish.

Connections with Israel

In October 2003, Chutzpah! established a direct link with the Acco Festival of Alternative Theatre in Israel, when, at the invitation of the Israeli embassy in Canada and Israel's foreign ministry, Albert attended the annual Acco festival.
This trip resulted in the Chutzpah! engagement of the internationally acclaimed Israeli performer and playwright Robbie Gringas. Gringras's solo play About Oranges is about a man who was somehow involved in a suicide bombing and, consequently, arrives for a job interview 35 days late.

The show, which was described by the London Sunday Times as "bleakly, blackly funny," is hard hitting and controversial. It had a month-long run at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and has been performed around the world, from Israel to San Francisco to Washington, D.C., to Melbourne, Australia.

"Gringras has stripped the Middle East conflict down to its basic elements: pain and comedy," writes the Guardian.

In five short years, the Chutzpah! festival has come into its own. It now has an international reputation. The festival receives submissions from Jewish artists from across North America, as well as overseas.

Chutzpah! kicks off at the Norman Rothstein Theatre in the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver on Feb. 26. Program and ticket information is available at 604-257-5145 and at www.chutzpahfestival.com.

Janos Maté is a Chutzpah! festival co-chair.

^TOP