The glass pane almost ripples
Clara Kanter, Alastair White, and David Mazower's The Drowning Shore (2020) is a gorgeous act of ghosts and limits and liminal remembrance, a 14-minute cantata in Scots and Yiddish reaching through water and time to speak of marginalized languages and imperial borders and once again the love between two women that is the heart of Sholem Asch's God of Vengeance, the playwright's great-great-granddaughter now the performer in her bird-of-paradise brilliance, in ancestral tartan, in frum-black silk that made me think, intended or not, of Hanna Rovina's Leye in The Dybbuk, crumbling earth between her fingers, writing holy letters on the air. I managed to watch it this afternoon for its streaming premiere, no less haunted for being digital. I will have to check out the rest of Compass Presents' Oracles in Sepia if they are anything like as good as this one. In the meantime, I commend it highly to your attention.
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B) I don’t have art of that profundity in me (I sat in my work-couch-synagogue and yelled when that ending happened) but it helps renew my belief in the art I can make, or at least the dumb little books I can write about queers in love all over history.
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Okay. This is *Good*, and I will come back and watch it with my full attention.
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Magic is but words and bodies ... lips move in time with the wind
and
The spell is but silence /in the alien language / words that cover the earth with gold, gunships, articles, contract law, and theater
and
Those lungs filled with water and signs/ marking borders
Those last ones: the performer is holding the piece of glass so it just frames her face, and her face looks like one of these Fayum mummy portraits, and it's fitting.
Thanks so much for sharing this. I shared it with the healing angel's SO, whose many interests include choral work, Jewish history, and marginalized people.
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