Tobaron Waxmanhas spent several years of his life studying Jewish law and Philosophy as well as Jewish liturgical music while living in different ultra orthodox Jewish communities.
However parallel to this Tobaron has also maintained an art practice inside performance art with close links to feminist queer theory and the Jewish radical Left. And as he states elsewhere, most of his works are much influenced by this, living in two worlds at the same time on the one hand “engaging a feminist, post-queer, post-Zionist politic while revering the sacred and ancestral.”
The first two compositions we are going to play are Sheheckiyanu and Embraceable. It’s two short compositions for the human voice which incorporate “Jewish metatext and a ‘Queering’ of sung text. (the Sheheckiyanu is:) A prayer said at the recovery of an illness, the conclusion of a fast, or the end of a voyage… sung backwards, the inversion performed as a new supratext.”
Hereafter we play the 10.31 min. long composition “Still life: Israel eats itself”, part of a performance installation of the same name, from 2008. In this work we hear the voice of a 60 year old Israeli veteran off all of the wars waged by the state of Israel since 1948. “Incorporating an interview with a PTSD afflicted veteran of 5 wars, this tableau vivant uses the body as an analogue to landscape, land occupation, and ‘Holy Land’, to interrogate Jewish concepts of ‘purity’, nation state, and Middle East border conflict....The State creates a gender and then cannibalizes it.” It’s been composed by Yoni Niv and Elad De Lowe-Shniderman in 5.1 surround, under the direction of Tobaron Waxman.
Finally we play two other works, Anagramm 5:58 min and Psalm 23 4:19 min.
Psalm 23 was a live recording made at a community concert in the Jewish Community Centre of Vilnius, Lithuania. “Many Jewish survivors of the Second World war were in the audience, as well as contemporary students of the Yiddish language, both Jewish and Gentile. I became very emotional and restrained my voice lest I lose control of my instrument and start to cry. People in the audience were also crying, and suddenly everyone began to sing with me…. Yiddish is my parents’ first language. I am committed to developing my own contemporary relationship to this language, both in order to incorporate it into my art practice, and to have conversations with my mother, today.”
Anagramm was composed by Moritz Wettstein, incorporating vocal samples from Tobaron’s backwards vocal sketches. The collaboration was specifically to create a sound piece to accompany a mutli-channel video version of Tobaron’s javascript work ‘trans-genred.anagram’. http://www.tobaron.com/TW_SAIC1999-2002/anagram.html
We (at programmet for lydkunst) are very excited to make the presentation on radio of an artist, not working exclusively with sound, hoping that by using the sound material from Tobaron’s diverse works, that we are able to open a way into his performance and art praxis in general.
Tobaron Waxman has traveled extensively, giving lectures and showing his videos at places like SOAS, University of London, Mix Brasil Film Festival of Sexual Diversity, Videotage Hong Kong as well as at the Volksbühne Theatre Berlin. He has also received numerous grants and awards.
We of course recommend to visit the website which includes video and text material from many of his performances. Links are available at our webpage – www.programmetforlydkunst.dk
http://www.moritzwettstein.com/
