Remembrance Day: Francesco Spagnolo & Mara Cantoni January 27, 2011

While few remember that the origins of Yiddish literature can be traced to the Italian Renaissance, today's Italy has seen an unprecedented revival of all "things Yiddish," including literature, theater, and music. The success of this phenomenon began in the 1980's, when Milanese playwright/songwriter Mara Cantoni, herself the heir to a centuries-old Italian Jewish heritage, started staging Yiddish-inspired plays featuring Moni Ovadia. Their artistic collaboration eventually developed in a full-fledged Yiddish and Klezmer revival at the heart of a "virtually Jewish" European renaissance and the memorialization of the Holocaust.

Assisted by musicologist Francesco Spagnolo, Mara Cantoni will trace the history of the Yiddish revival in Italy, accompanied by music and videos from her work.

Mara Cantoni has passed gracefully, although with equal commitment and brilliancy, through different genres of music, theatre and writing, often changing her role but always keeping music as the pulsating heart of her work. With an interdisciplinary training (philosophy, music, dance), she has experimented with many of the possible interrelations between sound, word and movement, often also dealing with the world of the visual image. She has been a performer of folk music, a singer and songwriter, a dramaturgist and director of musical theatre, with some forays into the world of radio and video, without neglecting the critical and literary activity. In recent years she has concentrated on a refined form of minimalism, expressed through her writing of poems and aphorisms as well as in ironic and poetic performances.

Francesco Spagnolo, PhD, is the Curator of The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life at The Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley

http://www.magnes.org

RSVP to 415-788-7142 ext. 18

Official Website: http://www.iicsanfrancisco.esteri.it/IIC_SanFrancisco/webform/SchedaEvento.aspx?id=551