Singer's Warsaw, photo: www.festiwalsingera.pl
Singer's Warsaw, the annual festival of music, theatre, film, literature and visual arts, comes to Warsaw's Grzybowski Square and Próżna Street, to cafés on the Vistula River and Warsaw's Praga district, presenting facets of Yiddish culture
Connecting tradition and modernity, presenting culture of the pre-war Jewish shtetl and the contemporary art inspired by Jewish themes, Singer's Warsaw Festival channels the world so vividly described by the writer Isaak Beshevis Singer. The festival comes to Warsaw for the tenth time and presents cantors' songs, klezmer sounds, outdoor concerts, Jewish paper-cutting workshops, Hebrew calligraphy and much more.
Music
The All Saints' Church hosts jazz-trumpet virtuoso Tomasz Stanko, featuring the Kroke band and U.S. musicians, and the cantor Yaacov Lemmer will sing in the nearby Nozyk Synagogue. Other musical accents include Israeli cantor Dudu Fisher, known from his creation in Les Miserables staged on Broadway, the Canadian jazz pianist and composer Ron Davis and Joshua Nelson, the so-called prince of gospel music, who agreed to return to Warsaw. The festival's grand finale concert, held on Grzybowski Square, will be performed by the Other Europeans and stars of this year's festival. The Other Europeans is a world-famous group of 14 distinguished musicians connected with Yiddish and Lautari cultures.
Theatre
"Also, theatre geeks will find a few interesting proposals" the festival website says. The Jewish Theatre from Bucharest will stage Yentl based on An-Ski's The Dybbuk Between Two Worlds adapted by Szmuel Shohat for Habima, the National Theatre from Israel. Several small theatre productions will be presented by Karolina Kirsz (with her adaptation of Touch the Water, Touch the Wind by Amos Oz), Pawel Paszta and others.
Apart form music and theatre, Singer's Warsaw is about photography, workshops for children, cooking shows, family picnics and dance workshops. The honorary guest of the 2013 festival will be I.B. Singer's son, the Israeli journalist Izrael Zamir.
For more information see festival programme: Singer's Warsaw
Editor: MJ 24.07.2013
Sources: Singer's Warsaw, press release