Bobe Mayses?

For the past 15 years, the Yiddish Summer Weimar Festival has brought Yiddish culture to this historic site of German Classicism. Every year, artists, scholars and participants from two dozen countries meet at festival events and workshops over a period of several weeks. Some of the featured ensembles, like “The Other Europeans” and “Dan Kahn and the Painted Bird” were actually established thanks to contacts forged at the Weimar festival. The 2016 festival programme included a conference, figure theatre performance and a dance piece. “Gilgul” played on the tradition of modern stage dances based on a Yiddish vocabulary of movement – a tradition which hasn’t been cultivated since the Holocaust. The interdisciplinary theatre installation “Bobe Mayses” highlighted the life and works of the poet Elia Levita Bachur. The conference invited internationally renowned musicologists and artists to present and analyse the available sources of Yiddish performance practice. Along with various venues around town, the Other Music Academy served as a central location at which the festival artists were living, rehearsing and performing. In 2009, the town of Weimar allowed the “Other Music” Association to move into a former school building where it could conduct interdisciplinary research and offer activities to the public all year round.

Artistic director: Alan Bern
Artists: Alan Bern, Gregory Corbino (US), Abigail Miller (US), Andrea Pancur, Jenny Romaine (US), Andreas Schmitges, Ilya Shneyveys (LV), Lorin Sklamberg (US), Steven Lee Weintraub (US), Michael Wex (CDN)