[ Modiya > Art > Re-Mediating Jewish Rituals & Holidays ]
Artist Project: Avant-Garde Jewish Wedding by Melissa Shiff
On October 12th, 2003 artist Melissa Shiff and Professor Louis Kaplan married.
Their wedding ceremony played between contemporary performance art and the customs of the traditional Jewish wedding.was a multi-media event that combined music, video, text and performance. One of the ways that Shiff introduced media into the ceremony was to reinvent the physical structure and function of the Chuppah. Shiff tilted the Chuppah at a 45 degree angle so that it became a large movie screen under which the couple stood and upon which a rich array of images was projected at fitting moments throughout the ceremony.
Embodied Projections:
Bride’s Procession
Screenshot from Melissa Shiff's Avant-Garde Jewish Wedding
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As part of the ceremony, Shiff and Kaplan projected portions of the sacred text onto their bodies for their respective processionals. They explained their rationale for doing this as follows: “We felt that it was important and crucial to integrate the Torah into our processionals both as a marker of our Jewish inheritance and our interpellation as Jewish subjects.” Here the sacred text is transformed from a static book form to an animated embodied form with the moving image.
Questions:
What does having the Torah written on the body mean to you?
For further analysis we recommend Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s recent essay on the corporeal turn in Judaism.
http://www.nyu.edu/classes/bkg/web/corporeal.pdf
After reading this, do you have further thoughts on Kaplan and Shiff’s embodied wedding projections?
As Shiff walked down the aisle, the Hebrew text from the Torah where Rebecca veils herself in front of Isaac was projected onto her veil. At the end of the aisle, Shiff turned around to face her guests and unveiled herself.
Question:
What do Shiff’s gestures of turning to face the audience and unveiling herself signify?
Groom’s Procession
Screenshot from Melissa Shiff's Avant-Garde Jewish Wedding
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The groom’s processional was a fast forward montage of random Biblical passages. Meanwhile, text from Edmond Jabes’ Book of Questions was projected onto the Chuppah as the groom turned to face the guests. The text read: “The book is my home. It is the home of my words. Being Jewish is being at the heart of an essential interrogation.”
Questions:
How does the groom’s procession think about Jewish textual practices in a new way? How does this relate to issues of Jewish diaspora and home?
For further background reading, see the Modiya section on “Textual Practices.”
Rewriting Deuteronomy: Indexing the Past to Create the Future
Screenshot from Melissa Shiff's Avant-Garde Jewish Wedding
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Please watch this video clip and read the commentary that follows:
The following text was read by Shiff during the wedding ceremony:
“We feel that it is very important to mark and transform those aspects of our Jewish inheritance that are based on patriarchal rule and the oppression of women. Unlike the harsh verdict of Deuteronomy, we decided cast off the words of patriarchy and injustice with the aid of the software program Aftereffects to be left with free-floating signs from which to create poetry. This transformative process disposed of certain words and recombined others into poetry of our own making.” In the end, the new text is figuratively incorporated into the Torah thereby indexing the sacred text as permeable and permutable. The motivation here is to confront the injustices of the past in Jewish tradition and those that are still perpetuated today in order to build a better future.
Exercise with Questions:
Please find a passage in the Torah that you find unjust and that you would like to change and transform. Can you create a ritual/performance action where you redress this biblical wrong?
Do lay people have the authority to rewrite the Torah if they find it to be unjust or outmoded? If so, at what point does such a transformation cease to be Jewish?
Ancestors Projections
In some Jewish wedding ceremonies, there is a prayer to welcome of the souls of the dead. Shiff and Kaplan thought that this idea would work wonderfully in terms of a visual translation. Instead of a prayer, they meditated upon their ancestor’s photographic images. Instead of merely conjuring up the memory of those that have left them in the mind’s eye, they decided to create a visual representation of their respective family members who had passed away by using photos of them and projecting these ancestors onto the Chuppah so that their larger than life images hovered above watching over their celebration if only for a moment and then receded back into the void.
Screenshot from Melissa Shiff's Avant-Garde Jewish Wedding
Watch this video
This ritual tapped into some of the basic tenets of Judaism in new ways. After all, Judaism stresses the importance of honoring elders and ancestors. The Hebrew word (Zahkor) remember is crucial to Jewish ritual. It projects the past into the present and the future. The power of this projection resided not only in the fact that Shiff and Kaplan visually represented and honored our ancestors but that they were standing under them. The choreography of standing beneath them was at once an acknowledgement of their genealogical lineage, and a performance of connection of the past with the present.
Questions:
What do you think of this ancestor ritual instituted by Shiff and Kaplan at their wedding? Would you consider incorporating animated photography in this way at your own wedding ceremony? What about at a funeral or a shiva? Is this an appropriate use of photographic media for a Jewish ritual?
http://hdl.handle.net/1964/799
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