Dartmouth Events

Tantzn Tanakh: A Workshop of New Jewish Music & Movement Experiments

Eli Berman GR '23, Aani Kisslinger, and Stuart Meyers invite the public to experience the workshop of a work-in-process for voices, trumpet, electronics, and dance.

Thursday, May 18, 2023
4:30pm – 5:30pm
Roth Center for Jewish Life
Intended Audience(s): Public
Categories: Arts, Arts and Sciences, Performances, Spiritual & Worship

Eli Berman (she/they/זי/זיי) is a vocalist, improviser, composer-producer, and new instrument builder from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She creates electroacoustic music using experimental vocal techniques across a variety of her ancestral vocal technologies, including khazones (Ashkenazi Jewish cantorial music), Yiddish and Appalachian folk songs, Slovak travnice (traditional women's haymaking songs), and western classical repertoire. For the past three years, Eli has been developing feedback instruments that extend the human voice using PVC pipes, metal sheets, and frame drums amplified by transducers and modulated by delay pedals. In the past year she has begun to create beats from digital samples of her voice. Eli has premiered her music at the Watermill Center, (R)evolution: Resonant Bodies at the Banff Centre, New Music On the Point, Yiddish Summer Weimar, New Explorative Oratorio Voice Festival, Atlantic Music Festival, and Gender Unbound. Eli performed in and contributed to Anna Lublina's 2023 Undying in Yidderland: Jargon Rituals at Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm (Frankfurt, Germany), and in 2022 she performed in the live premiere of Sanni Est's album PHOTOPHOBIA for the Pop-Kultur Festival at Kulturbrauerei (Berlin, Germany).

Aaron "Aani" Kisslinger (they/them) is a multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, composer, producer, and writer born and raised in NYC. Their solo ElectraBrassPop project AANI aims to build a sonic sanctuary for vulnerability, joy, healing, and liberation. Additionally, drawing on their upbringing in the lineages of Klezmer and Balkan Brass, they explore the connections between Jewish, Romani, Ottoman, and Arabic musics. They are the bandleader of Novi Hitovi Brass Band and Dancing Divas Brass Band, member of Zlatne Uste Balkan Brass, Stoop Kidz Brass Band, Git Azoy Klezmer Collective, and Las Mariquitas, NY's premier queer/trans salsa band, and a regular horn player with Slavic Soul Party!, EMEFE, Brooklyn Nomads, and more. They have performed at venues such as Bowery Ballroom, Music Hall of Williamsburg, Blue Note, Mercury Lounge, Preservation Hall, and Webster Hall. Their new single Shells is out now on all platforms with a music video.

Stuart B Meyers is a multidisciplinary artist working with dance, theatre, ritual, and parties. Inspired by the overlap in their queer and Jewish identities, Stuart creates transformative performances and gatherings. As a performer, Stuart has worked internationally alongside Colette Sadler, Julian Webber, Nick Cave, Ann Liv Young, Robert Wilson, Christopher Williams, Thomas Bo Nilsson, A.R.M., Tino Sehgal & Mina Nishimura. As a creator, Stuart’s work includes the ritual dinner party “*The Shabbos Queen*, a Queer & Dreamy Jewish Shabbat Dinner Delight & Extravaganza,” which has toured internationally since 2017, several choreographic works including KOPFINO and WITCH DANCE, and installations such as PRIDE INSIIIDE (an uplifting queer-gogo dance ritual in a West-Village storefront window) and TAP DANCING IN THE OUTFIELD (video installation). Stuart received funding from the Berlin Cultural Senate, the BK Arts Council, and the NEA, is a 2019-2021 NYLA Fresh Tracks Artist & CPR AIR and was a 2018 danceWeb Scholar. Stuart organizes Brooklyn's new queer Jewish dance party FLAMINGGG, is an educator for Ping Chong + Co, a certified Hypnotist (IHF), and reads Tarot + Dreams through a Kabbalistic tradition (trained by Bonnie Buckner & Catherine Shainberg of the School of Images). Stuart also spins regularly as DJ Party Girl.

 

For more information, contact:
Grant Cook

Events are free and open to the public unless otherwise noted.