• Duration: approx. 2 hours 50 minutes including intermission
• Language: English
• November 29, followed by a discussion
• Mousonturm co-production
• World premiere    

Accessibility of Location

Künstlerische Leitung, Komposition und Performance: Elischa Kaminer
Performance und Improvisation (Geige): Mayah Kadish
Performance und Improvisation (Perkussion): Mikołaj Rytowski
Performance und Improvisation (Perkussion): Angela Wai Nok Hui
Choreografische Mitarbeit: Jungyun Bae
Dramaturgische Mitarbeit und Outside Eye: Janna Pinsker
Outside Eye: Gil Hoz-Klemme
Produktionsleitung: Pamina Rottok
Produktions- und Ausstattungsassistenz: Niki Stäudte
Licht: Matthias Rieker
Ton: Jan Laekemaeker

Dank an: Rebecca Ajnwojner, Marcus Dross, Aviva Kaminer, Isidor Kaminer, Ilona Kaminer, Anne Kleiner, Alex Paxton, Leander Ripchinsky, Carsten Schrauff, Maximilian Zahn, im Cape, Paula und Eva von Convivio Vegetariano Collevecchio, das gesamte Bühnenteam des Mousonturms, Arthur Romanowski

Koproduziert von Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm Frankfurt am Main, gefördert durch die Stadt Frankfurt und das Hessische Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Forschung, Kunst und Kultur.

Elischa Kaminer works as a composer, performer, and theater maker at the intersection of experimental music, music theater, queer pop, electronic, and Yiddish music. Kaminer’s works have been performed in Europe, the US, Canada, and Korea, and have been invited to the Berlin Performing Arts Festival, Favoritenfestival, and Impulsefestival, among others. Performances have included appearances at the Muziekgebouw Amsterdam, the Music Gallery Toronto, Roy O. Disney Hall Los Angeles, and St. John’s Smith Square London. From 2021 to 2023, Elischa Kaminer was Associate Composer at the British record label NONCLASSICAL, and in 2024 he was invited to be Artist in Residence at the Britten Pears Arts Centre and the Glasshouse International Centre for Music. In 2025, he founded his own record label, JONAH RECORDS. He studied composition at the Royal Academy of Music, followed by a master’s degree at the Institute for Applied Theater Studies in Giessen. www.elischakaminer.com 

Angela Wai Nok Hui, a percussionist and sound artist based in London and Hong Kong.  She uses sounds that are not meant to be, childhood-like sugarcoating to frame and tell the true story of the living, uses sonic elements to bring attention to the phenomena of activism and self-love with a bitter aftertaste. angelahuiwainok.com

Violinist and music maker Mayah Kadish is at home in many musics - early baroque to experimental music theatre, contemporary classical to pop. She is a keen collaborator in creating new music, and her own creations live in a creaky contemporary space that sometimes calls on these disparate worlds. As performer and composer she often works closely with dance. Mayah performs internationally as soloist in halls such as London’s Barbican (UK), Amsterdam Muziekgebouw (NL), Lucerne Opera (CH), Volksbuehne Berlin (DE), Sadler’s Wells (UK), TSB Arena Wellington (NZ), Haarlem Philharmonie (NL) and Wiesbaden State Theatre (DE) amongst many others. She has performed extensively with her groups La Vaghezza,  s t a r g a z e, and the members of Ensemble x.y. Born in Rome, Mayah grew up in London where she studied philosophy at King’s College and the violin at the Royal Academy of Music. She studied the baroque violin with Enrico Onofri in Palermo.

Mikołaj Rytowski is a versatile instrumentalist rooted in percussion, diverging from conventional norms to explore sound and creativity in an organic way. His practice includes improvisation, composition, and performance, moving beyond interpretation to active participation in the creative process. As a creator and improviser, he continuously expands the boundaries of percussion and electronic instruments, experimenting with new combinations and sonic innovations. His artistic approach goes beyond traditional perceptions of percussion, emphasizing exploration and expression over convention. His projects often take hybrid forms, combining instrumental practice with electronics, visual arts, and performance. He creates immersive experiences that challenge the boundaries between performer, instrument, and space. His works have been presented in a variety of contexts – from intimate improvised concerts to large interdisciplinary projects – always with a focus on the relationship between sound, space, and audience. www.mikolajrytowski.com

• There will be two scenes with screaming on stage.
• There will be a scene with descriptions of violence.
• There will be loud moments.
• There will be rapid, strobe-like light changes in places.

Elischa Kaminer in conversation with dramaturgs Janna Pinsker, Yossi Herzka, and Leander Ripchinsky.

In our preliminary conversation, you mentioned that the Jewish principle of Tikkun Olam plays an important role in your work. Could you explain that?

The music we are playing today was created during a time of personal as well as collective crises—a time of genocides, ecocides, the rise of the far right, racism, antisemitism, and queerphobia. The world into which we were born screaming is already a broken world, lying in shards. Tikkun Olam describes the attempt to gather these shards, to rearrange them—or, as the French rabbi Delphine Horvilleur writes, “to weave with the void.” My practice understands itself in this tradition of Tikkun Olam. In it, pain and joy, the sacred and the profane, sex and liturgy intertwine. It is an attempt to somehow deal with this broken world—while we humans are often actively responsible for this heap of shards ourselves.

During rehearsals, we repeatedly had the impression that your stage design and props represent more than what they are used for. Or at least you play with the idea that your stage elements can be read symbolically. How do you see it?

Perhaps I can explain your impression through a recurring motif of the evening—for example the ladder: at first, it is simply that—a ladder for practical work, allowing the musicians to play their instruments. In Jewish tradition, the ladder connects worlds. In Jacob’s dream, angels ascend and descend the ladder—a back and forth between heaven and earth, between a here-and-now and an elsewhere. The ladder here is not an escape route upward but a passage—a constant up and down that reminds us that Tikkun Olam is not a straight path but a rhythmic pendulum: drawing near and pulling away, rising and falling back.
This pendulum also resonates in the invitation to a pleasurable, sensual non-understanding. Some objects and props are charged with meaning, yet many things—sounds, gestures, images, costumes, objects—resist immediate, unambiguous interpretation. I believe that precisely in this state of suspension, in this back-and-forth where the mind briefly stumbles, a space of playfulness can open: a groping, a drifting, as in a dream or an image whose meaning refuses full clarity and yet still touches us. In this play with ambiguity, I want to invite the loosening of one’s gaze, the shedding of expectations, and the immersion into a world in which meaning is not fixed but collectively sought, invented, condensed—and allowed to be discarded again and again.
Non-understanding becomes a place of freedom, where new connections can emerge, new sensations, perhaps even new forms of “living with the broken” (Delphine Horvilleur). This is the artistic search at the heart of this work.

Even before the audience enters, we hear a striking sound from the shofar—an instrument otherwise played in religious services on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. You also mentioned angels earlier. What does it mean for you to bring these elements of liturgy and ritual into the evening?

The angels—malachim—conjured in strings of love and rage, climbing up and down the ladders, are not floating, transcendental beings for me. In Hebrew, the word simply means “messengers.” They are people, moments, performers* and connections that care for us and sometimes even save us when we least expect it: a friend bringing us pizza, a song that carries us through difficult times, improvising together at the piano. In this understanding, angels are radically earthly. Our concert asks which people or encounters have carried or changed us at decisive moments—and which angels we may have met without knowing it.
The sound of the shofar, the ram’s horn, also plays a role in this world of earthly angels. It is not a gentle sound but a rupture. In some interpretations, the cry of the shofar is linked to the trembling voice of an angel; in others, to the cry of a heart that wants to be awakened. The sound calls out: Wake up. It pulls us out of numbness and forgetting, reminding us of the unfinished and of the work of tending to what is broken.

Throughout the concert we encounter moments of repetition and also a play with duration—long and short. What does working with and thinking about temporality mean in your practice?

My work is inspired by Hasidic musical traditions, in which short melodic fragments are often repeated over long stretches of time. Therefore, the experience of time and the play with repetition and transformation play a central role in this concert as well. Some passages expand, linger, transform; others are fleeting and appear only briefly. These moments of differing duration open a perception of time that invites a recalibration of one’s attention. In my compositions I repeatedly explore what happens when we commit to repetition, delay, elongation and transformation. In these varying durations, listening itself becomes a form of devotion—a surrender to both the fleeting and that which does not rush past, but remains.

At the beginning of the evening we hear two songs—first solo from you, then together with the entire ensemble. What does the practice of playing together mean to you?

Yes, starting from two traditional zemirot—Shalom Aleichem and Hine Ma Tov—we open the evening. In doing so, the question arises of how personal and collective trauma inscribe themselves into our bodies and our playing. For me, playing—and especially making music together—is a place where we can approach the unspeakable. Playing together counters the violence that runs through individual and collective biographies with a moment of permeability, gentleness, radical openness.
I see my artistic practice as a constant balancing act between this radical vulnerability and ecstasy, and I search for spaces where the fragmentary is not hidden but allowed to shine. In our concert, personal and collective stories of trauma intertwine with Jewish song, avant-pop and noise music, condensing into a dreamlike sonic landscape—a playground where anything can happen at any moment. In my work, ritual and performance meet, as do irony and seriousness, queer aesthetics and liturgical forms. I understand art and making music together as places where cracks can be revealed, memories reordered, and something new can come into being: a practice of listening, witnessing, transformation.

All texts from the piece can be read here:
www.elischakaminer.com/strings