Germany: Watch the film of “Ritual Echoes,” a sound installation performance piece by Avery Gosfield centered on the monumental medieval mikvah in Speyer

As we noted at the time, the Italy-based American musician Avery Gosfield, a specialist in early music, was awarded one of the three first-time artist-in-residence fellowships presented by the ShUM cities project. 

Her work, titled “Ritual Echoes,” entailed creation of a sound installation piece centered on the monumental medieval mikvah in Speyer. Its architectural and tonal structure inspired the composition, which was based on Jewish text and music traditions, but also contains new compositions and improvisation. The mikvah also served as a performance space.  

Watch a film of the work here. The performance was filmed from May 9-11 2022, and has now been posted on YouTube. (Directed and filmed by Matthias Barthel, Sound by Benjamin Dresßler, artistic and scientific consultation by Dr. Neta Bodner, text transcriptions, translations and original inspiration by Dr. Peter Sh. Lenhardt):

 

Gosfield, a native of Philadelphia and graduate of Oberlin College, plays the recorder and other historical instruments. She is the project manager of the Jewish Music and Theater Week in Dresden and part of the ancient music group  “Ensemble Lucidarium.” 

Her project 

features artistic reconstructions of 12th and 13th century piyyutim describing the Rhineland massacres; a French-Jewish lament about the burning of Jews in 1288 Troyes; as well as songs dedicated to joyous occasions. Performed by Avery Gosfield, Svetlana Kundish, Carla Nahadi Babelegoto and Élodie Poirier, it was filmed in the almost perfectly preserved 13th century ritual bath (Mikve) and the ruins of the Women’s Synagogue of the Jewish Court of Speyer.

The description of the piece states that the name “Ritual Echoes” refers, first of all, to the unique and powerful acoustic of the Speyer Mikvah, “an exceptional and almost perfectly preserved piece of 13th century architecture.”

But it also refers to the sensations that overtake one upon entering the space – the echoes of the rituals, and of the presences, that inhabited the space many centuries before. The very nature of the space: the narrow entryway, the steep steps which lead down to a first landing, the gathering space below, with Gothic and Romanic windows that look out over the bathing pool and finally, the descent, via low, narrow, curving steps to the bath itself, force one onto the same path that would have been taken by the Jewish inhabitants of medieval Speyer. Details – the benches along the steps and around the gathering space, a round, almost gym-like changing room on the left, the niches for lanterns carved into the wall – are all concrete reminders that the space was a well-used, practical, community gathering place.

Each of the four women who perform in the video also perform, symbolically, roles associated with the Mikve: the old woman, who would have also acted as a midwife, in charge of supervising the bathing, making sure that every woman who bathed there comes out meticulously clean. The religious leader, responsible for leading the women’s services, acting as a spiritual leader of the females in the congregation and for the religious education of girls and their mothers. The menstruant: wife, mother, businesswoman; and the bride, enjoying her last ritual bath, accompanied by friends, before her marriage.

The ShUM Cities project  linking the important medieval Jewish heritage of the German cities of Worms, Speyer, and Mainz , was recently included on UNESCO’s roster of World Heritage.

In April 2021, the project launched its first-time international artist-in-residence program, supported by the state and the three cities. In a competition open to all artistic fields, it offered up to three grants for the realization of an artistic project dealing with the history of the ShUM communities and their religious, cultural and architectural heritage. Projects needed to present an artistic approach to the ShUM heritage, “taking into account the history and present of Judaism and its views.”

Besides Gosfield, the other two grantees were the Argentinian architect German Morales, and the New York-based visual artist Katya Oicherman.

Morales’s project entailed a documentation of the Jewish architectural heritage in the three ShUM cities, via drawings, photographs, and archival sources that will result in a digital publication.

Oicherman, born in the USSR but now based in New York, planned to make “a series of hand embroidery in Worms that refers to the ‘Minhagbuch,’ a collection of Jewish customs and rites that Juspa Schammes, chronicler of the Worms Jewish community, made in the 17th century.”