Through Ariel Ashbel’s characteristic aesthetic that exposes the mechanics of the theatrical apparatus, Fiddler! A Musical unites the tender beauty and complexities of different storytellings, traditions, and approaches to faith.
Premiering at HAU1 on 14–17 December 2023, the work weaves together contributions from a vast cast of closely knit, longtime collaborators in an expansive production that explores joy and sorrow through time past and present. Celebrating ten years of Ariel Efraim Ashbel and friends, Ashbel takes the 1964 Broadway musical Fiddler on the Roof—a journey through 20th-century Jewish tradition—as the blueprint for an epic new creation. Six months after the premiere, I talked to contemporary dancer Leah Katz, who performs in the work, about the development of the choreographic material and its evolution on tour. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Alice: In the first Act, a nod to the musical’s original structure composed in a series of short songs and dances, you beautifully reconstructed Jerome Robbins’ choreography Afternoon of a Faun[1] from 1953. Was video documentation your primary resource for recreating this solo?
Leah: I used a text from Robbins and images of an Israeli choreographer, Baruch Agadati. Agadati was a Russian Jew who immigrated to Palestine in the early 1900s. He was known for performing Jewish folk dances in an expressionist style in solo performances he called ‘concerts’ in which he would portray different shtetl (small towns with predominantly Ashkenazi Jews that existed in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust) characters. He had a ballet background and wanted to use imagery from Jewish culture and life and put it on stage to elevate this kind of folk dance into more high art or stage dance. In the images (I didn’t find any videos), he used a lot of two-dimensional, almost hieroglyphic imagery, which evokes Afternoon of a Faun. Marquet Lee, the costume designer, bridged this gap after seeing an early version of what I was working on and said, “Oh, this reminds me a lot of Jerome Robbins’s Afternoon of a Faun.”
Alice: To my mind, the distinction of your solo in Fiddler! A Musical is that it represents a professional ‘modern’ dancer, appearing alongside folk dance or Broadway-style ‘variety’ numbers by your collaborators. Your dancing evokes devotion. It was such an apparent reference to Afternoon of a Faun for me (this is the first time I’ve heard of Baruch Agadati and his fascinating legacy); it led me down lines of dance history: Robbins’s experience with Balanchine and notable others, and how he influenced new waves of dance by combining ballet, jazz, and pedestrian movements.
Leah Katz performing a solo inspired by still images of Russian Empire-born Israeli classical ballet dancer, choreographer, painter, film producer, and director Baruch Agadati and Jerome Robbins’ personal story and dance history, and his Afternoon of a Faun (1953). Robbins was the choreographer of the original production of Fiddler on the Roof (1964). © Mayra Wallraff
Leah: I was oscillating between a ballet body/vocabulary, and as Robbins says in this text, something about a monstrous body, a little more grotesque. It was about his journey from embodying a classical ballet body to one that taps into “his inner Jew.” He was trying to stray from a Christian, Church-centred way of moving his body to something more true to himself as a Jewish person.
Alice: Your musculature was exploding monstrously through your ballet tights! Your dancing and costume playfully touched on control and discipline from a dance training perspective, which can also veer, through honing refinement, into the grotesque when pushed far enough, like religious practice. The ‘flatness’ in Afternoon of a Faun is the same aspirational idea for me in ballet and modern dance: our bodies are curved, asymmetrical, and cannot geometrically fit into planes and lines, yet we strive to move as if we are somehow immune to gravity or pain.
Is your solo material changing as you go on tour with the work?
Leah: We’ve toured it once since the Berlin premiere. I stayed accurate to its structure, yet it evolved even during the season in Berlin at HAU. That always happens with performance. Once it becomes alive in space, with eyes on it, and I feel it being witnessed by more people, it energetically evolves. Maybe if you watched it again, it would look the same, but I don’t think it feels the same.
Alice: You have the freedom to change it and adapt it within the process and lifecycle of the whole work.
Leah: It’s funny because, at first, I didn’t feel like I related to the material’s content. And the more I do it, the more I feel like this is my dance and its references.
Alice: That’s cool when that happens; you keep learning about the relationship between you as a performer and the material you perform. You’ve performed so far in Berlin and Dusseldorf. Has this change of context, although still in Germany, impacted your interpretation and delivery of your solo and the whole work?
Leah: It’s a multi-part answer because we did a slightly different version in Dusseldorf. It was reduced. We were a smaller cast. The space was different, so performing the piece felt different. The theatre itself is much smaller and much more intimate. We were much closer to the audience. This changed how we embodied and projected the work. Even though the seasons were only a month apart (the premiere was in December, and Dusseldorf was in early February), we were also a month further into the current situation in Palestine. This was more in the show’s background, and there was more tension in the air. I am not so familiar with West German politics. I didn’t know if it’d be a more conservative audience than in Berlin, nor in which direction that would have them leaning. We didn’t spend much time discussing the politics in Dusseldorf. But there was tension in the air amongst us, performing a work dealing with Jewish culture. On my walk to the theatre to perform, there was a pro-Palestine rally and a pro-Israel rally. I want to do this work justice because I believe in it, think its message is true and important, and don’t want it to be misinterpreted. I don’t want words to be put in my mouth, and I don’t want my body to represent something that I don’t intend to.
I felt this a lot more in Dusseldorf than in Berlin. And I don’t know if that’s because it was 30 more days into the situation that’s still occurring. I don’t want to name it a ‘war’ because war implies it’s two-sided.
Alice: Language and its silencing is a powerful weapon right now.
Leah: Yes. Leading up to the Berlin premiere, we were all nervous, excited, and anxious. By Dusseldorf, things had more time to settle, and I had more time to reflect. My impression of West Germany was that it was more one-sided politically on this argument than Berlin. I think the situation globally had much to do with how the work felt different.
Alice: Touring a piece to a different place—learning about a performance on a body level in a context somewhere and then taking your body with this knowledge somewhere else—does so much, including audience reception and feedback. It influences the evolution of a work. And because you live in Berlin and have a community here, this also must have impacted how information settled in your body, to then ground in a different part of this country, where you probably received less personal feedback afterwards. When is the work next going to occur?
Leah: We will do it in September in Kampnagel in Hamburg.
Alice: Part of working with an archive is understanding how and why the material was made and perceived when it was first made. Liz Rosenfeld made a personal, queer adaptation of “If I Were a Rich Man”, very different, content and frame-wise, from the original. All the contributions became frames for each other. There was such a diversity of contemporary interpreters, reinterpreting material that originated in different times and places through different approaches. What challenges did you face while adapting the original material into this contemporary socio-political context today, as well as to yourself and your history?
Leah: We looked at still images and drew from them. There’s always something inherently challenging about translating a captured moment into a way of moving and being… Trying to understand what might have been happening in dance, the world, and that person’s trajectory. It feels like a big responsibility to take something that you Google image search, turn it into something that’s living and breathing, and comment on it. As I said, I didn’t feel I related so much to the material initially. It felt like I could perform it because that’s my job. I could represent it. But I’m not a man, and while ethnically Jewish, I don’t relate to the struggle that Robbins experienced, this push and pull between two worlds. I was self-conscious about portraying these two bodies, the ballet figure and the monstrous body. Maybe because I didn’t feel like a master of either of them, it felt a little disingenuous to propose that I could embody these things effectively. So it was just a representation at first, kind of superficial. I will make these shapes with my body. I will say these words. We each worked on our parts alone, removed from the group. It felt kind of isolated. It wasn’t until close to the premiere that I understood how it would fit into this bigger tapestry of the whole work. When I started to see what other people were working on, I saw more relevance in my proposal.
[1] Robbins’ Afternoon of a Faun was influenced by Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem “L’après-midi d’un faune”, the inspiration for Claude Debussy’s score Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, as well as Vaslav Nijinsky’s 1912 ballet to the same score.
Fiddler! A Musical (2023), by Ariel Efraim Ashbel and friends premiered at HAU1 on December 14–17, 2023. Further performances will be shown at Kampnagel, Hamburg in September 2024.
