Project description:

A performance adaptation of David Roskie’s English translation of Lejb Goldin’s Yiddish-language text “Chronicle of a Single Day”, an autofiction account of starvation which presaged the author’s eventual cause of death (murder). Composed in August 1941 in the Warsaw Ghetto, then subsequently buried in tins beneath a basement, with the rest of a massive archive, before and during deportations to Treblinka, the type-written text was exhumed water-damaged postwar. We intentionally performed “Internal” during the #NODAPL occupation at Standing Rock, a fight for water and against genocide, on the night before Thanksgiving, a national US holiday that celebrates and obfuscates settler-colonial genocide, and three weeks after the election of President Donald Trump within the whipping up of more virulant white supremacist mob violence. We projected a scan of Goldin’s original manuscript, sent to us from the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw (PL), on one of three walls that enclosed the set and audience. I intentionally held the script I had adapted, typed on my typewriter, and redacted from the translation of Goldin’s text, over my face with one hand, reading from it at a rehearsed pace, gesturing full-bodied nevertheless ,nearly wearing it like a mask. We sought the particularly damaged materiality of Goldin’s manuscript by way of the mask, meeting its visual and narrative effect in periods of silence, in the water of a horse trough I stood in, stretched out in, and constrained myself not to leave. Perin was constrained to be touching the walls or the floor at all times. And she circled us, the audience and I, appearing primarily through the sound of her body against these surfaces and peripheral apparitions of her limbs and their shadows. I did not memorize the text, but memorized what it is like to read it. This was and was not a staged reading. We were between acting. In my free hand, I held a dried-up root, from a wild squash plant a goat-herder friend had ripped up out of the desert months before and handed to me. Mathias Svalina served a dense borscht soup with lentils in the middle of the play. The soup was passed, bowl by bowl to each audience member. Before the play started, the soup on my lap, in the car, I told my partner Yanara, “This is going to be terrible, terrible, terrible. I just want to get it over with.” In fact, the experience was ecstatic. Some audience members, the next day, claimed they felt they were inside the stomach. Another thought that the dried up root in my hand was my body. Another (initially) thought the soup was blood. Another said she had wanted to see my face. Another asked what the water meant. What I remember is that a solidarity emanated between my speaking, my feet moving the water, and the sound of Perin moving over the walls and the floor. I remember this as a durational episode that collapses our many rehearsals into the witnessed performance. This texture of solidarity, Goldin, a Bundist, speaks in the very end of his utterly magnificent, roaring text—a highly vulnerable and struggling solidarity with intrinsic, universal human worth even within the assault of deprivation. By way of the manuscript’s damage, we showered in the specter of this solidarity, if isolated from it in language, time, conditions, and catastrophe.