Individual Submission Summary
Share...

Direct link:

Preliminary Steps toward Recreating PRINZ BETTLIEGEND (Prince Bedridden), a Musical Revue from the Terezín/Theresienstadt Ghetto

Tue, December 18, 2:30 to 4:00pm, Seaport Hotel & World Trade Center, Amphitheater

Abstract

Performing the Jewish Archive (PtJA) was a £1.8 million, 40-month project (Nov 2014-March 2018) funded by the UK Arts and Humanities research council. One of the research team's central aims was to bring unknown and neglected works by Jewish artists back to the public, in part through five international performance festivals. My personal goal, as one of the researchers on the grant, was to reconstruct works that had come to light during my research: plays written in the Terezín/Theresienstadt ghetto that had been preserved only in fragmentary form. For the final two PtJA festivals in the summer of 2017, held in Australia and in South Africa, local development teams based at University of Sydney (led by Ian Maxwell) and Stellenbosch University (led by Amelda Brand) created two different versions of one of these works: the musical play Prince Bettliegend.
In this paper I describe the preliminary work of creating a plot outline from preserved songs, survivor testimony, and knowledge of the events of the ghetto, and the origin and structure of each of the development teams. I also engage with some of the ethical questions raised by the comedic nature and optimistic tone of the original Terezín production. Drawing on theories of emotion by Sarah Ahmed, I focus on specific moments of pleasure that emerged during the development process: what do we learn from these moments about the prisoners’ experience that we may not come to understand in any other way?

Author