View related articles View Crossmark data 1 This moment is traced in 'Ancestors' (3:30), a short edited video by Ben Spatz with Nazlıhan Eda Erçin and Agnieszka Mendel, http://bit.ly/2HQKjtB (fig. 1). 2 This moment is traced in the final section of 'Diaspora' (Spatz et al. 2018); also available at http://bit.ly/2V2FOyK (fig. 2). 3 This moment is traced in 'Działoszyce', a video essay by Nazlıhan Eda Erçin with Agnieszka Mendel and Ben Spatz. 'Działoszyce' is a work in progress, which has been shown at several public events but is not yet available online. The book is Hage (2017) (fig. 3). 4 The Judaica project was supported by a Leadership Fellow award from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (2016-18). This article is indebted to Nazlıhan Eda Erçin and Agnieszka Mendel, who were full-time researchers on the project from May to October 2017; as well as to anthropologist and performer Caroline Gatt and other collaborators. The question 'Who owns a song?' was proposed by Erçin; she has also written about the project (Erçin 2018). Open access for this article is provided by University of Huddersfield. Thanks to Santiago Slabodsky for comments on an earlier draft. 5 My decision to lowercase 'jewish' throughout this article is explained below.
This article analyses a performance of Judaica 1 at The British Library in London, part of an ongoing research project to investigate the embodied technique of contemporary (Jewish) identity using a ‘laboratory’ methodology of post-Grotowskian songaction. Through a close analysis of this event, the article seeks to articulate some of the main concepts and questions that underpin the Judaica Project, such as the relevance of social epistemology to fields of embodied knowledge; the ethics and politics of embodied research in culturally defined areas of technique; and the relationship between referential meaning and non-lexical vocal form. Although the Judaica Project focuses specifically on Jewish songs, the proposed synthesis of scholarly epistemology and contemporary performance could have relevance for other projects in which embodied performance materials function both as markers of identity and as unfolding epistemic objects.
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