Dance with the Dead II: Possession and Nationalism in the Old-New Film Der Dybbuk (1937-2017)

In November 2015, a 20-minute re-edited version of the Yiddish film: Der Dybbuk (1937), directed by Michał Waszyński and based on the homonymous play by Sh. An-ski was screened in the attic of the

former Jerusalem leprosarium. Adi Kaplan and Shahar Carmel not only re-edited the film but also replaced the original music composed by Henekh Kohn and the cantorial songs performed by Gershon Sirotta. The new score, performed live by the

Jerusalem Young Symphonic Orchestra, was an adapted version of

the Vltva (The Moldau), the second symphonic poem of Má vlast (My Homeland), composed by the

Czech composer Bedřich Smetana.

In April 2017, hundred years after the writing of the play, a new version of the film, based on Kaplan and

Carmel is going to be presented with live performance by the Sala-manca group (Lea Mauas and myself)

in the frame of the Israel Festival. The new version involved a new form of possession.

Kaplan and Carmel and Sala-manca`s work, who, in the spirit of The Dybbuk, visit the archive instead of

the cemetery and invite the dead to dance again with the living. They turn the fallen “stars” of the Yiddish

theater into active agents in the co-creation of new content and meaning, having a new role in life and in

death with an extraordinary “reactionary political and poetical force”, where the sublime idea of sacrifice

for the nation and for love has been put aside.