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Full Description
Two scripts were created in 2017 from the same source materials: preserved song lyrics from a performance created in 1943 in the Terezin Ghetto called Prince Bettliegend (the Bedridden Prince), the popular 1930s jazz melodies to which those lyrics were set, and fragments of testimony by survivors who performed in or witnessed that production.
The development processes took place under the auspices of the £1.8 million AHRC-funded project Performing the Jewish Archive. PtJA co-investigator Lisa Peschel has spent the past two decades researching theatrical performance in Terezin, and the project's planned performance festivals in Australia and South African in the summer of 2017 afforded a unique opportunity to allow Prince Bettliegend to speak to our present. Peschel synthesized the existing materials into a rough plot outline, then collaborated with local production teams at the University of Sydney (produced by Joseph Toltz, directed by Ian Maxwell) and Stellenbosch University (directed by Amelda Brand) to reconstruct/recreate/re-imagine the play.
Both teams were extraordinarily sensitive to questions of trauma and pleasure in the original performance, and those questions manifested themselves in different underlying themes that emerged with each production. During the first, month-long development process at the University of Sydney (July 2017), Peschel, Maxwell and Toltz worked together to refine the plot outline, Toltz and musical director Kevin Hunt explored the 1930s music with the entire production team, then the actors, recruited from Sydney's alternative theatre scene, developed the performance through improvisation. Due to fortuitous accidents of casting, a theme soon emerged that dovetailed with the historical reality of the ghetto: the desire of the older prisoners to protect the youth.
While the Australian production was still in development, the South African team at Stellenbosch University, led by Amelda Brand, began creating their own version. Their performance was based on the same plot outline and, to some extent, the same text developed by the Sydney performers, but their production diverged radically due to their interest in addressing issues of more immediate interest to the multi-racial student case: race and power. Their musical approach also diverged: music director Leonore Bredekamp created a hybrid of 1930s jazz and klezmer music.
Part I of the book is composed of a series of essays about the original material and about each production. The essays, written by Peschel and key collaborators on each development team, explore the Terezin production and both reconstructions. Part II comprises the scripts. Although the texts themselves are similar, detailed stage directions and illustrations make clear how each manifested its own themes.
Part of Intellect's Playtext series.
Contents
List of Figures
Preface
Prologue
Joseph Toltz and Petrus du Preez
Part I
Introduction to A Holocaust Cabaret: Remaking Theatre from a Jewish Ghetto
Lisa Peschel
'There must be some way to protect this young man': Remaking Prince Bettliegend
Ian Maxwell
Student Ethnographers in the Rehearsal Room: Witnessing Prinz Bettliegend
Laura Ginters
Singing Up the Past and Stompin' with the Prinz: Jaroslav Ježek and the Music of Prinz Bettliegend
Joseph Toltz and Kevin Hunt
Conversation I: Prinz Bettliegend in Australia and Bearing the Gift Forward
Amelda Brand, Ian Maxwell and Lisa Peschel (Edited by Lisa Peschel)
Prinz Bettliegend in the Western Cape, South Africa: Permission to Play
Amelda Brand
Out of the Shadows: Notions of Memory and Remembrance
Leonore Bredekamp
Race, Power ... and Clowning: The Stellenbosch Cast Reflects
Amelda Brand and the Stellenbosch cast (Edited by Lisa Peschel)
Conversation II: The Prinz and Pedagogy, Identity and Cultural Appropriation
Amelda Brand, Ian Maxwell and Lisa Peschel (Edited by Lisa Peschel)
Part II
Prince Bettliegend Performance Script: Australia, August 2017
Prinz Bettliegend Performance Script: Western Cape, South Africa, March 2018
Conclusion
Lisa Peschel
Appendix 1: Plot outline and songs
Notes on Contributors
Index
