By Jenni Person, Artistic Director, The Open Tent

During last Passover 2009, Arts Inside The Open Tent presented an alternative, creative Passover Seder as Art, promoting alternative access to the Passover experience. In conjunction with its exhibition, Growing Up Comix: JT Waldman, in partnership with Art Center/South Florida, the Seder As Art tied-in the graphic novelist’s piece Four Children, originally commissioned by Nextbook, while engaging artists in a variety of media (performing, media and visual arts) with their own interpretations of parts of the Haggadah. Participating artists were Kevin Arrow Andrea Askowitz, Hannah Lasky, Zammy Migdal, Rhonda Mitrani, Carmel Ophir & Howard Davis, and JT Waldman.

Seder As Art stood out as a successful interdisciplinary art experience not only because it relied on the intermix of a variety of disciplines, but also because of its play between art and audience – an experiential reinterpretation of tradition. The project served as a virtual aesthetic Seder which took guests (otherwise known as on Second Saturday gallery night art enthusiasts prowling the Design District’s offerings) through aspects of the traditional Passover Seder from the memory and nostalgia referenced in a mixed-media installation, My Matzo by Zammy Migdal to through a literal figurative print of a halo-ed Elijah by Hannah Lasky. Like an actual Seder, the project prodded and struck deep to provoke questions and stirred guests to examine contemporary issues in the face of the historical story of the journey from the narrow place of oppression to redemption.

In addition to Waldman’s piece, the project included Four Questions, a video installation by Rhonda Mitrani that juxtaposed text, sound, and video footage to question if the contemporary condition of media image bombardment numbs us to the fact that the same issues of oppression still exist.

Kevin Arrow’s Untitled (Recipe Box) was to the naked eye purely nostalgia as an installation of a wooden recipe box out of which he pulled and arranged mostly handwritten recipes for standard Ashkenazi Jewish recipes such as stuffed cabbage, matzah brei and brisket. His artist statement connected it to memories of his grandmother’s cooking and stories of another life in an Odessa shtetl surviving Cossack rampages. The very image of the balabusta, a Yiddish term of endearment and praise for a skilled Jewish homemaker (the literal translation is “master of the house”), in the kitchen of Arrow’s more upwardly mobile American childhood ably and abundantly providing for two generations of family served as a strong symbol of redemption. As the producer of this project I was fortunate to also hear another story of redemption. Arrow spoke of his acquisition of the box, discovered amongst a gutter full of discards. As he perused the refuse he came across hand-notated books and such treasures that it seemed someone else perceived of as trash. Thankfully Arrow redeemed some books, including cookbooks and the recipe box from annihilation giving it a new life amongst his own palette and in our installation.

By Jenni Person, Artistic Director, The Open Tent

On Saturday, November 7 I had one of those extraordinary days that reminds me why I do what I do.

In preparation for Oy-Le!, our first Sleepless Night presentation (we did two), I spent the afternoon at the rehearsal/jam session of Heavy Shteltl Klezmer and Siempre Flamenco – five musicians who came together to fuse their unique, culturally-specific sounds. It was inspiring to see this small group of strangers walk into a room together, set up their instruments and equipment and proceed to connect through music. Like small talk at a cocktail party, pitch and rhythm mingled, musicians smiling at each other and laughing at points when musical phrases landed in mutually favorable places in the audio-sphere of our make-shift rehearsal room at Temple Emanu-el on Miami Beach.

Two hours later we were on our way to the Lummus Park Mainstage at 8th Street and the ocean where our juxtaposed jam was to take the stage at 6:30. It was a total thrill to be amongst the Sleepless Night hullabaloo right there on Ocean Drive, surrounded by arts enthusiasts and the anticipation of all the wondrous things that were to come throughout the night. With the first downbeat of Oy-Le! the small crowd that had been waiting swelled to double and triple its size as people were drawn to the unique sound resulting from the layering of Klezmer and Flamenco. Young and old, Jewish and non, Miamian and tourist, danced along to the rich rhythms which proved doubly familiar and accessible. The audience had a blast – but at the center of this joy was that of the musicians who shared the stage and shared the music from within themselves.

After the show I raced with a volunteer and a mic stand up the beach to Lincoln Road for our 8pm presentation of Lip Schtick in partnership with Lip Service hosted by Books & Books and Design Within Reach. What a buzz awaited us as audience streamed in for our show. Again, we welcomed an incredibly diverse audience – this time all having come out for compelling stories of contemporary Jewish experience. And compelling it was as voices soared into hearts – despite a sound system glitch that rendered my mic-stand-schlepping useless. The solid line-up of writers sharing their words about their names, their families, their stomachs, and all by way of connecting to their Jewish identity was as gloriously diverse as the enthusiastic audience. They were young and old, gay and straight, kosher and treyf.

The words that got put out there – tightly woven text relaying this broad variety of Jewish identity and experience – provided access points for everyone. And it was again the resulting incredibly joyful energy of artists and audience that was so dense you could practically see it. If you missed it, all the pieces can be viewed online via YouTube at the Lip Service site (not yet posted).

By Jenni Person, Artistic Director, The Open Tent

Welcome to the first installment of my Jewish arts blog. So, what’s Jewish about Jewish art? And what constitutes a Jewish story? I sit here, surrounded by cats, a sleeping kid, and my beloved tapping away at his own keyboard as he puts his finishing touches on one of the pieces he is submitting for our November 7 performance of Lip Schtick: Jewish Stories from some of Miami’s most loud-mouthed Jews (and their friends!). When I first approached Andrea Askowitz of Lip Service, an organization that produces the secular version regularly at Books & Books in Coral Gables, about partnering up to create Lip Schtick, I did so with the goal of celebrating fresh voices and alternative perspectives on Jewish identity. From the get-go this project was about throwing open the doors so widely as to embrace a supreme spectrum of definitions of identity and story. And such is the place from which we work at The Open Tent with our Arts mission of: The Open Tent presents performance, visual, literary, and media arts programs rooted in Jewish identity, tradition, practice, culture and/or text.

Last year I was fortunate to be invited by the Foundation for Jewish Culture to participate in a think-tank for New Jewish Music as they embark on building a music program at the Foundation. Surrounded by some of our generation’s most significant Jewish musicians at a retreat center in upstate New York, I was intrigued by the bold words of conductor and academic Leon Botstein claiming that “there is no such thing as Jewish music, only music made by Jews.” And while I humbly disagree with this statement from such a leader, I did agree with his urging that not any one thing is Jewish music – mainly because I think Jewish music, just as Jewish culture in general, can and needs to be many things – just as diverse as Jews ourselves.

To me, Jewish culture is broad and sweeping, defined by association just as in our mission. It is culture that in some way touches on or is influenced by any or all elements of what Jewish is. So, whether it’s Lip Schtick or Seder As Art or Klezmer revivalist Frank London jamming with a salsa band in Flamingo Park where generations earlier my grandparents kibitzed in Yiddish with other snow-bird socialists, it’s Jewish art to me. But ultimately, it’s perhaps a fluid and amorphous experience that touches different people in different ways. Because there’s more than one way to be Jewish, there’s more than one way to be Jewish art. And there’s way more than one Jewish story.