🎉 November 25, 7:00 PM 📍 Yiddish Culture Center, Andersa 15 🆓 Free admission I Come from a Pineapple is a multilingual radio play that takes as its starting point the work of Else Lasker-Schüler, a Jewish German-language poet associated with Berlin, and her experience of being at home and not at home in language. We follow the trail of the artist's performative explorations, her attempts to transcend binary oppositions in language and body, as well as the less obvious affiliations of her artistic actions with futurism and dadaism. We ask about the connection between language and declarations of belonging—national or gender—while simultaneously introducing them into an experimental movement that rejects essentialism. Although Lasker-Schüler operated in her work with categories of origin and primacy, she also multiplied stories of her own beginnings in successive texts, proliferated proper names, signatures, invented new proto-languages, thus denying the idea of origin. Or at least, we feel inclined to deny it. Entering into dialogue with these gestures of proliferation, we incorporate Yiddish and Yiddish texts into the radio play. Yiddish, rejected by German Jews and constructed in acculturation discourses as an anti-language, became for part of the Jewish-German intelligentsia at the beginning of the 20th century an important point of reference or even a measure of authenticity, and at the same time, as with Kafka, a phantasmatic language. Although Else Lasker-Schüler herself did not know Yiddish, she was strongly present in the Yiddish sphere—through contacts with the Yiddish avant-garde, translations, and by becoming an imagined interlocutor for creators such as Anna Margolin—a Yiddish poet who, like Lasker-Schüler, blurred identity trails, wore masks, and tested the boundaries of language. The idea of text as performance, practiced by Else Lasker-Schüler, also includes the rejection of the belief in the stability of language, the concept of transforming it each time together with the audience. The sound game of languages and identities—both historical and invented—to which we invite you, refers to this idea, not as a reconstruction or reproduction, but rather as a new version. Into the cracks and fissures of the poet's language, we introduce new contexts—texts and sounds—opening ourselves to the unknown. We are curious where they will lead us, and you. One thing is certain: a pineapple is a pineapple, is a pineapple, is a pineapple. Creators: - Concept and script: Karolina Szymaniak - Development: Natalia Chmielarz - Music: Szymon Wildstein - Voices: Natalia Chmielarz and Karolina Szymaniak - Production: Hubert Osmólski - Graphic design: Anna Rabczuk The event accompanies the exhibition "The Power of Words" at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews _____________________________________________ Funded by the Ministry of Interior and Administration
