My current performance exploration, working title Strings Attached, involves a Jewish, Queer and Trans identity intervention via the mis/use and liberation of Jewish ritual practices. I am inspired by my experiences with the Chabad: the many times and cities in which I have been swept up in their “mitzvah campaign” to lay tefillin and talk about observance, and the fascinatingly conflicting emotions those experiences brought up in me. As a Transmasculine and secular Jewish person, laying tefillin feels both subversive and weirdly like home: a powerful tribal “calling in” that I am interested in exploring outside the confines of orthodoxy, with its discriminatory blind spots and -phobias around genders and sexualities. I am workshopping ideas for a new solo piece that will, among other things, wrestle with and explore the tensions and emotions behind millennia old Jewish rituals and their identificatory power.
