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The Bowls Project is an immersive music performance
that takes place in a dome. Based on inscriptions of sex and magic from
Babylonian amulets, it features new music composed by Jewlia Eisenberg,
performed by Charming Hostess. The Bowls Project conjures a visceral connection
to daily life past and present in the region known today as Iraq.
The Bowls Project is based on texts from incantation
bowls, common amulets 1500 years ago in Babylon. Simple clay bowls were
inscribed with a householder`s secrets and desires, then buried under
the house. Incantation bowls speak of mysticism and sex; angels and demons;
and the trials and joys of daily life. Especially (and unusually) audible
are the voices of the era`s women--their work, hopes, and dreams. These
spiraled Aramaic inscriptions from the same time and place as the Talmud
open up a larger discussion: of the connections between material and literary
culture, between canonized and marginalized voices, between ritual power
and popular practice, and of how music mediates these relationships.
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Musical context for The Bowls Project is drawn
from the female body, the rich traditions of the Babylonian Jews,
and other diaspora sources, both Jewish and African. The performance
dome echoes the sonic space of the bowls themselves and its warm interior
evokes the domestic concerns of the bowl texts. Shezad Dawood will
do video inscription on the dome walls, using source footage from
the Iraq Museum. |
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Cafe Salonika interprets songs of the
cafe aman with a focus on the intersection of rebetika and Salonikan Jewish
music.
Known as “the Jerusalem of the Balkans,”
Salonika (Thessaloniki) was for two millennia home to one of the largest
and most vibrant Jewish communities in the world. The folk music of Salonika
is spectacular—it sings of tragic history and bawdy drunks, gritty
sex and highbrow romance. Rebetika music originated in the cafes, prisons,
and hash dens of Constantinople and Smyrna. With the forced immigration
of two million Greek-speaking refugees from Asia Minor in 1922, cafes
aman in Greek port cities like Salonika became centers of rebetika.
The 1930s cafe aman was a meeting place for working
people and underworld types. The musicians performing there were Greeks,
Jews, Slavs, Turks, and, Vlachs. The culture of the cafe aman was anti-authoritarian
and non-conformist: the music that came out of it synthesized Turkish
scales, Balkan meters, Hebrew chant, and words in Greek, Turkish and Ladino.
Cafe Salonika is part of this hybrid tradition, drawing from
both the violent, sexy rebetika music sung by Jewish women like Roza Eskenazi
and Stella Haskil, and on the romantic and funny Sephardic folk music
with its roots in Spain, North Africa and the Balkans.
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