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LISTEN TO A RADIO INTERVIEW
March 14, 2009; Workmen's Circle/Arbeter Ring
How many long-time residents can you fit in a house of cards? Does Mordechai clean behind his ears? Will Esther take a stand? Are all alien nations against gentrification? Will CAAV get back from the Bronx in time? Just how DO you take over a building, anyways? And which one’s Mordechai, and which one’s Haman?
Dancing! Merriment! Food and Drinks! Hop, meine homentashen, and see the show! Workmen’s Circle and JFREJ present in partnership with the Good Old Lower East Side (GOLES) and CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities, and thanks to Great Small Works and the New Yiddish Repertory Theater.
Spectacle house band led by Avi Fox-Rosen with Judith Berkson, Lee Free, Mary Feaster. Special appearances by pianist Ray Santiago and master congero and singer Abran Rodriguez, Adrienne Cooper, the Rude Mechanical Orchestra, Crosmopolitan, Gary Z, Xavier, and more. Star studded performing devising ensemble: Ariel Federow, Katy Rubin, Killer Sideburns, Abigail Miller, Michelle Malka Miller, Seltzer and Salt, Tamar Elster, Ora Fruchter, Abigail Levine, Aleza Summitt, Avi Rose, Rachel Yucht, Sam Wilson, Tine Kindermann, CAAAV Youth Group, WCKinder Shula, Copper Henningfield (the world’s greatest Magician)
WHAT IS PURIM? Purim is the Jewish festival of spring fever, of masks and costumes and parodies of all sacred things. It centers on the Scroll of Esther, a farcical story that wears the mask of being a factual history. It is a tale of overreach, a parody of officialdom in which the powerful turn abysmally stupid and bring about their own destruction. YAY!
The L.E.S. SHUSHAN Purim Shpiel of Vacant Lots is offered as a balm to the spirit. A Heavy Metal banana peel to the political soul.
Ritual expert Rebbetsin Hadassah Gross has said...There are many paths to holy disorder, many routes to the place of perfect misunderstanding... The more we move towards what scares us most, explore and embody it., The more we are entering into the practice of Purim..the more deeply we will be rearranged, supercharged and renewed.
This party is all about gentrification on the Lower East Side, and finding solutions to it through brilliant strategy by long-term residents, newcomers, allies, and gentrifiers together
Made by an impossible coalition of kids and elders, long term L.E.S. activists, artists, anthropologists, queers, religious n' secular folk together.
THE MUSIC WILL ROCK YOU!