San Diego, CA (special)--Someday, if the producers of the San Diego Jewish Arts Festival realize their dreams, the Lyceum Theatre at Horton Plaza will be described in San Diego guidebooks as the place where world-famous plays, musicals, and other kinds of performance art were created and premiered.

Now in its sixth year, the Jewish Arts Festival is transforming itself from what was once a single-day smorgasbord of offerings from talented Jewish performers and fine artists to a week-long showcase for new works capable of taking Jewish messages to worldwide audiences. The centerpiece of the sixth annual Jewish Arts Festival, June 22-29, is the premiere of Customs of the House, a collaboration between musician/ composer Yale Strom and dancer and choreographer John Malashock. The work was commissioned by the Los Angeles-based Center for Jewish Culture and Creativity which helps to produce the festival  in cooperation with the San Diego Repertory Theatre.

Todd Salovey outside Lyceum

The Rep makes its home at the Lyceum Theatre.

John Rauch, president of the center, said Malashock and Strom had collaborated successfully in 1996 on another center-commissioned work, Tribes, which after premiering at the San Diego Jewish Arts Festival was danced by Malashock and Company on a tour throughout Eastern Europe.

"They wanted to work again together, so we asked Yale to do something on a Jewish theme, but left everything else up to John and to him to work out," Rauch said. 

"What they have come up with is a Jewish perspective on issues of homelessness and dispossession and so forth.They are focusing on the Kosovo refugee crisis."

Strom said he calls the piece he composed Shperngulje Masive which in the Albanian language means "Mass Exodus." 

"With the problems in Kosovo and having been in Kosovo before, I was very moved," Strom said. "I know Albanians personally. To me, being a Jewish person, and a Jewish American, it reflected so much what happened to the Jews and to the Rom (Gypsies) as well 60 years ago--in 1939."

The 24-minute piece is in three not quite equal movements. The first movement evokes the "ebb and flow of ten years between 1989 and 1999, before the Kosovars were physically expelled from their land," according to the composer. Amid growing tension, there is a sweetness.

In the second movement, the mood changes. "It has a very interesting feel -- a more militaristic feel," Strom said."The sound is getting a little more dissonant, on purpose, and what it is reflecting is more chaos: lives (in Kosovo) are being disrupted by more laws, more restrictions and this carries into the third movement. But intertwined with this are moments of reprieve when there is a beautiful melodic line that is colorful, so to speak, that is not purposely atonal. 

"When tension levels were down, there was levity in life, whether it be a wedding or a celebration," Strom said, drawing on his experiences photographing and collecting the music of Eastern Europeans. 

"These people were able to go on with life, because if one only dwells in the negative, it is very stressful, it can be damaging psychologically or even kill you. If you lived there, you still tried to make a life. So if your daughter had a school play you would go to it, or if your daughter had a birthday, you would celebrate it. That feeling I wanted to portray in the Kosovo Albanian way."

In the third movement, "the military feeling builds and builds and we have a major chord, and then the clouds have risen, the storm has gone, and the lone violin is playing a little excerpt from the Jewish folk melody Ani Ma'amin, and here we juxtapose this Kosovar situation bluntly with the Holocaust. Look how it parallels what happened 60 years ago. Then over that we play a bazouki, which is a very Greek, Balkan instrument. ... I wanted to end on a positive note, and now, here it is! We apparently have a NATO-supervised peace in Kosovo. It isn't the end, these people still hate each other, but at least it is a step in the right direction."

Ani Ma'amin , meaning "I Believe" is a prayer set to music, based on an inscription found on a cellar wall in Cologne, Germany, where Jews hid from the nazis. Its Hebrew lyrics means: "I believe in the sun even when it is not shining; I believe in love even when not feeling it; I believe in God even when He is silent."

Malashock decided to interpret Strom's composition metaphorically rather than literally. Instead of having his dancers illustrate life in Kosovo, he decided instead to work from an alternative story line: "the idea of things that are customary in different cultures, in different families, in different places--how they can be so misunderstood by someone who is not familiar with that custom."

The troupe created some of its own customs to illustrate separate peoples. "We use a lot of gestures and things that look like they are saying something but who knows what they really are saying," Malashock said. "And that is kind of fun. There is also in the piece a strong sense of trying to hold onto what is customary when you are in an unfamiliar place, when you are uprooted."

Malashock said his work reconciles with Strom's in the sense that, "when you think about it, what is causing the problem at Kosovo is that they (Serbs and ethnic Albanians) really have different customs, culture and outlooks that they can't find a way to make compatible."

While there is not a lot of conflict in the dance, "there definitely is that sense of people doing things in different ways and seeing where they can meet and can't meet," Malashock said. "That is intertwined with a lot of joyous dancing."

Commenting on the fact that he and Strom were collaborating -- yet at the same time working with different story lines in their heads -- Malashock said: "I remember one time I had been at a dance festival and these two artists had been commissioned to create a dance together and I remember the festival director asking 'well how is the piece coming along?' and these two said, 'well it is done now, but now we just have to figure out what it is all about.' And the festival director was visibly shocked.

"Yet on some level it is really true," Malashock said. "You make work and you learn a lot of things after it is done that you didn't know before it was done. So there is a certain amount of trust and no worry about there being interconnection between Yale's approach and my approach. It may start out in very separate worlds and slowly it intertwines."

Todd Salovey, a director for the San Diego Repertory Theatre and an associate producer of the Jewish Festival, commented "what John is striving to do is to find ways in which the body can be shaped and moved in relation to other people which is evocative of a gesture or an expression and will really tell a story through movement.

"People tend to think of modern dance as sort of abstract and remote and it is actually not," Salovey added. "What it is, is taking everyday movements and everyday relationships and making them bigger through a more physicalized expression of them."

On the same evening that his troupe performs Customs of the House , Malashock will reprise Tribes, the work on which he and Strom collaborated for a previous festival.

"That was choreographed with a piece that I called Romanian Suite in Three Movements, Strom said. "Tribes was a sextet of my regular klezmer band Klazzj, and it had elements of klezmer, Sephardic, Arabic and a little jazz Balkan-flavored," Strom said. 

"I based Tribes on different musical motifs that came from Romania. ...So what I did was to divide the music into three different areas. One is called 'City of Iasi (Yash),' which is the largest city in the province of Moldavia in northeastern Romania, so I mixed the different folk styles and Jewish styles there. 

"And I have a movement called 'Sighet-Maramures' and that is in the northwest portion of Romania, and you have influences of Hungarian, Slovakian, Ukrainian there. There are Chasidim who lived there, the Satmar being the best known. Elie Wiesel comes from there. 

"And the other movement is called Cluj, and that is a city in Transylvania, which is associated with the legend of Dracula, but which is also the region which has the largest group of Hungarians outside of Hungary -- about 1.2 million."

Strom said when Malashock choreographed the work, he created that depicted "customs and ethnicities, where we are each individuals but also part of a larger mass."

He remembers being pleased with Malashock's interpretation of Tribes. "Dance is movement. Here they were jumping around, holding each other, crawling, the various things, and having specific meanings," he said. "It was wonderful." At one point, he said, "there were times when I thought 'Oh my God! That is exactly what I would have done!' it is funny but good artists are often-like minded." 

Other parts of the choreography for Tribes were completely unexpected, he said.

Between presentations of the two Strom-Malashock collaborations, Malashock also will present Swallow in a Word Cage, a duet he dances with his wife Nina that is evocative of life in the Krakow Ghetto. Additionally, he will premiere a new dance, The Story of Isaac, with his son Duncan.

Strom and his band Klazzj will warm up the crowd prior to each presentation of Customs of the House. The composer's many other artistic faces -- as photographer, documentary maker, film producer, and world traveler -- will be the subject of a special retrospective Sunday, June 27, to be narrated by KPBS radio personality Dan Erwine, host of  "These Days." A highlight of this presentation will be the showing of clips from his soon-to-be-released feature film, On the QT, starring James Earl Jones. 

A number of other performers will be showcased as well during the week long festival--with opening night honors going to actor Ron Campbell who will reprise his one-man play The Thousandth Night which San Diego audiences recently had the opportunity to witness at the North County Rep.

Although its development was independent of the Center for Jewish Culture and Creativity, the play is of the type that Rauch wants to foster because it both reflects a Jewish viewpoint and has the potential to impact a great diversity of audiences.

The play was written as a vehicle for Campbell by Carol Wolf after she saw the actor perform 26 parts in a one-man version of A Tale of Two Cities at the San Diego Rep .

The playwright came up to Campbell on closing night and announced she would like to write for him. Not recognizing her, Campbell replied flippantly, "yeah, sure, knock yourself out." Undeterred, she asked what subject he liked. He replied that he always had been fascinated by The Arabian Nights, the story in which Sheherezade, to avoid being put to death, tells the Sultan a cliff-hanging tale each night for 1,001 nights.

Wolf, who like Campbell is Jewish, had developed an expertise as a schoolteacher in Holocaust subjects. "In our research, we found out that there really was a Cafe Sheherezade in Occupied Paris in 1943," Campbell said. 

"We came across this book about Occupied Paris and on side of the page was a sequined can-can dancer kicking her leg up in the air, and on the other page was the cloakroom of the Cafe Sheherezade which was just German officers' caps neatly filed with tags. Rather than suffering during the occupation, the actors and the cabaret owners were doing quite well because the officers had disposable income."

In the play, Guy de Bonheur is "the last surviving member of this company of actors--they have all been deported for some reason or another," Campbell said. "He is now on the death train to Buchenwald and there has been sabotage on the train tracks ahead. The theatre becomes the train station where French gendarmes are charged with guarding the prisoners until the train can move. This actor comes in and tries to save his life with his acting abilities." Like Sheherezade, he tells one story after another, requiring Campbell to portray 38 characters in all.

Noting that a reviewer for the Los Angeles Times had described the Holocaust-era play as "a comedy with a gun to its head," Campbell noted that he and Wolf began developing it before the movie Life is Beautiful presented humor in the context of the Shoah.

Since the play's debut, "it became more and more important for me to perform before audiences because of the triumph that comes with the insurmountable odds that the character is up against," Campbell said. He has performed the play in England and in Israel.

Campbell acts in many kinds of plays, not just one-man productions. Currently he portrays Albert Einstein in an imaginary meeting with Pablo Picasso in the San Diego Rep production of Steve Martin's Picasso at the Lapin Agile.

Compared to multiple cast member plays, where actors can cover for each other, "there is a real quality of self-reliance" in one-man plays, Campbell said. "Once you step out there, you are kind of on the razor's edge. No one is going to bail you out. So really my relationship on stage is with the audience. They become my acting partner."

"Like working without a net?" I asked

"Annette didn't want to work with me either," he quipped in reply. "I tell you the cast parties can be kind of lonely. You go out with the stage manager and that is it."

The Tifereth Israel Youth Chorale, conducted by Cantor Alisa Pomerantz Boro, will open the evening for Campbell. Between 30 and 35 chorale members will perform six songs, including three by Pomerantz-Boro's sister, Raquel Pomerantz Gershon, a resident of Dallas.

At least two of her songs, B'tzelem Elohim and Oseh Shalom have lyrics 
that evoke some of the other themes that will be struck during the festival. In B'tzelem Elohim, we hear themes reminiscent of Malashock's Customs of the House, but expressed specifically for children:

We all are children of G-d
We are all images of G-d.

Like a work of art, never twice the same
Each a different face, each one has a name
Each with special gifts, each with special dreams
Each of us is made B'tzelem Elohim.

You don't look like me, I don't talk like you
We like different games, different music too!
You like to sit and paint, I'm on a soccer team
You and I were made B'tzelem Elohim.

Pomerantz Gershon voiced similar sentiments as those Strom articulates in Kosovo with this updated Oseh Shalom:

Please God, look at this world You have created
We need Your help, 'cause we are out of control
You gave us the freedom to choose wrong or right
but too many of us have chosen to fight
Please show us Your light, show us the way
Oseh Shalom Bimromav, Hu Ya'aseh Shalom Aleynu
V'al Kol Yisrael, Yisrael.

Yet another play expressing a Jewish viewpoint which may someday tour other nations is El Ultimo (The Last One) , a comedy created by the Spanish-language Teatro Punta y Coma, whose writers, actors and producers in the main are Jews who have immigrated to this country from Mexico. The group is part of the Ken Jewish Community, the Spanish language affiliate of the Lawrence Family Jewish Community Center.

Pepe Stepensky, founder of the troupe, said the play is a humorous look at the way his father died last November. At a 50th reunion, he made a funny speech, received an ovation, sat down in his chair, and suddenly slumped over dead. 

"He was so happy and they were applauding and two minutes later he is dead," Stepensky said. "We took this sad moment and turned it into something very funny but very, very sentimental. It is like we are shouting out 'guys, you have one life to live and any day it can happen, so don't spend your time doing stupid things or fighting lost causes or things like that, but just go out and do what you need to do. Spend time with your family and your kids, and be a good parent."

Stepensky created the play after asking his father's many friends to write their reflections about him and to describe everything they remember about the day of his father's death.

"They all gave me their thoughts and I put them all on a floppy disk in a program and compared it, and I separated everything, and I did the play. It took us three or four months just to write the play and it came out a very interesting project."

Because his father was well-known to the actors of Teatro Punta Y Coma - he had attended many performances -- the actors were able to be as involved in shaping the story as Stepensky was.

The troupe generally group-writes the scripts. "I tell them the story--the beginning and how it ends and what are some of the main points in the story--and from there everyone starts writing," Stepensky said. 

"I put it all together and make the connections between the dialogues. I write some of the parts and correct some of the parts and I work with them. It is a very interesting process because while they are writing they are learning the roles so they don't have to go home and then learn their parts. In the middle of their writing, they are learning. It is a good process. I spend most of my time making them understand the role, making them have the tone I want to have."

Stepensky works with choreographer David Chait, who once was a member of Mexico's famed Ballet Folklorico. "This guy is amazing," Stepensky says of Chait. "I do all the literary work but he does all the movements. It is like I do the drawings but he puts the color on the drawings."

This is the second play of Teatro Punta y Coma (Theater of Period and Comma -- a reference to writing their own works) incorporated in the San Diego Jewish Arts Festival. The previous one, ironically, was based on the death of Stepensky's mother after a long battle with cancer. 

Called La Visita, it told of a grieving son being visited by the spirit of his mother, as well as by those other dead relatives. . The mother tells the son "Let me go. Don't think about me. Pray and go to the synagogue every day because I need that to go to heaven and if you aren't doing that you aren't letting me go."

The final night of the festival features a New York City rock n' roll group, Inasense, which attracted Salovey's attention with their inclusion of material by Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach in programming for general audiences.

The group's co-leader, C Lanbaum, said he had met Carlebach in the 1980s, shortly after graduating from high school. Carlebach invited him to his home for a Passover seder attended by 40 other people. "He saw how into my Jewish roots I was, that I was very interested about them, and he invited me to Israel and actually paid my way."

Lanbaum said "We are not a Jewish band, we are just a regular rock band.But when we are playing in a general market, we occasionally will play a Carlebach tune instrumentally and it has
an effect on people."

Carlebach's music, he said, "are heavenly melodies. He had a real blessing that is coming from a source that is quite unique. ... It gives off some kind of a spirit that uplifts their spirits."

Lanbaum teams as guitarist and vocalist with the band's co-founder, Noah Solomon Chase. Other members are Jay Weissman and Mark Amrosino. Occasionally the band will use a fifth musician as well, but in San Diego plans to perform with the core four.

Yohanan Sebastian Winston, whose Dr. Weinstein's Jewish Orchestra has performed at Jewish events throughout San Diego, will open for Inasense. He also plans to devote the time to Carlebach, albeit a jazz version. 

"Rav Shlomo left his tunes, and then he split," Winston said. "What these tunes meant when he was alive was one thing; what they mean to a Jew in New York City is another thing. What they mean to a Jew in Israel is entirely a different thin than what they mean to me--I am a Jewish musician in Southern California. The musics that really matter to me are Jewish music, classical music and jazz and I am using this as a canvas to paint my own life experience. 

"Jazz has been a unifying factor in all of my music. His melodies are so strong that when you approach the harmony, which is really pretty simple in his music, when you approach the harmony from a jazz musician's perspective what it is like is a rethinking of a Chassidic niggun done within the context of jazz. That's where I am taking it from."

Winston said he will be joined on stage by Raquel and Howard Schraub who knew Carlebach in New York and who have been working on a documentary on his work. They will provide the vocals for one of his songs.

In addition to the performing arts programs, the San Diego Jewish Arts Festival will have works from a pair of exhibitions sent over by the Israeli Consulate in Los Angeles, according to Salovey. One is called "Israel at 50." Another is called "Women in Israel." 
* * *
Besides creating a new repertoire of Jewish work, Salovey and Rauch say a purpose of the Jewish Arts Festival is to help artists who are Jewish to get more deeply in touch with their heritage.

"I am very secular in my thinking because that is the qualification you need to be an actor," said Campbell of The Thousandth Night. "You have to be able to wear all the different hats and guises. I think it does add another dimenstion to be doing something that is ultimately about community. With the itinerant life style of an actor, you long for it, but you don't really get it."

Recently Rabbi Danny Landes of the Pardes Institute of Jerusalem taught a Talmud class at San Diego's Agency for Jewish Education. The lesson dealt with Rabbi Eliezer Ben Hyrcanus, who did not begin to study Torah until he was already an adult. When asked to lead a discussion, he protested that he was a well into which the water of Torah knowledge was to be poured. No, replied his teacher, Rabbi Yohanan Ben Zakkai, he was not a well, but a spring -- from which the water of Torah knowledge could be drawn.

Similarly, many of the artists of the San Diego Jewish Arts Festival originally may not have been schooled in Jewish thought, but through their creativity may add to the body of Jewish works.

"It is a challenge in a way to define what is Jewish art without it looking very traditional and familiar," Malashock said. "As a contemporary artist who is an artist separate from being a Jewish artist, the struggle to do work that is still connected to that Jewish culture, but continues to let me look forward and do things in a new way, is really the interesting part of the process."

Salovoy said to his knowledge no other theater in America has made the commitment made by the San Diego Rep to do "a full week of Jewish programming every year as part of their season.

"It makes me proud to be part of the Rep which has made such a commitment," Salovoy added. "We are saying that Jewish work is worth taking note of and that Jewish art is so broadly appealing that we want it to be part of what we do every year."