Community, Archive, Lineage: Belonging to Yiddish folk music through rupture and repair

Workshop with Ira Khonen Temple

In this workshop we’ll talk about finding, selecting and performing repertoire in Yiddish, from the nuts and bolts to the whys and wherefore.  We’ll look at some of Ira’s translations and adaptations on their recent album Strange Tongue and discuss some of the differences between literary translation and translation for performance.  Also discussed: Why and how to queer a text? And how do the “non-performance” elements that surround a text (for example its author and composer, history, past usages, meaning) become part of the performance itself?

Ira Khonen Temple is a songwriter, accordionist and cultural organizer. A founder of the radical-traditional Yiddish music group Tsibele, Ira was also a longtime music director for the Aftselakhis Spectacle Committee Purimshpil and member of New York’s activist street band The Rude Mechanical Orchestra. Ira performs on and off Broadway, playing recently in Cabaret and Fiddler afn Dakh. Their first solo album Strange Tongue - Mistame-Loshn was released by Borscht Beat Records this October. The album is a collection of traditional Yiddish songs, reimagined and expanded in English - marrying queer, trans songwriting with the urgent, living breath of Yiddish culture as it is vibrantly practiced today in Brooklyn.

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