Collaboration 2.0: Preparing `Jephta's Daughter` for the Stage, a Humanities Day Presentation

 Oct 18, 2014, 8:00 PM – 9:00 PM
 Logan Center for the Arts, Room 501, Chicago, IL 60637


 

Professor and Director of the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry David Levin and Israeli director and choreographer Saar Magal will present on their collaborative work preparing a new piece, “Jephta’s Daughter,” for its July 2015 premiere at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich. The piece will explore the figure of Jephta’s daughter, the only human sacrificed in the Old Testament. Levin and Magal’s discussion will combine scenic work with considerations of literary, cultural, and theological theory. Using improvisational, physical, and text-based work, this presentation will be particular interest to anyone curious about the adaptation and the conjunction of textual analysis and performance practice.

The presentation is free but please visit humanitiesday.uchicago.edu to register.  Learn more at humanitiesday2014.uchicago.edu.

 

David Levin is the Addie Clark Harding Professor in the Departments of Germanic Studies, Cinema and Media Studies, and Theater and Performance Studies and Director of the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry. His research is organized around questions of performance and spectatorship, especially in the institutional and ideological histories of absorption. He is the author of Unsettling Opera: Staging Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, and Zemlinsky (University of Chicago Press, 2007) and Richard Wagner, Fritz Lang, and the Nibelungen: The Dramaturgy of Disavowal (Princeton University Press, 1998), and the editor of Opera Through Other Eyes (Stanford University Press, 2004).
 
Saar Magal is an internationally renowned choreographer who has taught dance and choreography at the American Repertory Theater Institute at Harvard University, the Peridance Scholarship Program in New York, Yoram Loewenstein’s Performing Art Studio, the Bat Dor Dance School in Tel Aviv, and the School of Visual Theatre in Jerusalem, among others. Her video dance Cell Fish premiered at Lincoln Center, and was also featured at the Video Dance Festival at Tel Aviv Cinematheque. One of her latest creations, Hacking Wagner, was commissioned by the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich and premiered in July 2012.