Video excerpts from April 21, 2006 performance at the Duderstadt Center Video Studio, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor:

Performers: Suzanne Klock (soprano), Megan Remaly (harp), Megan Fergusson (viola), Maggie Hasspacher (double bass),  Jacob Richman (video controller), Shauna Steele (choreography)

Three Yiddish Lullabies is a mixed-media setting of fragmented texts in Yiddish.   In three separate music and moving image settings, we are presented with a mysterious young mother.  She reaches out to us through the materials, sounds, and images that surround her, yet she is always obscured or constrained.  Through the broken and jumbled songs that she sings to us, we try to piece together the history of this ghostly young woman.  The audience sees the piece from the point of view of the child.  However, this point of view is disorganized and dream-like: obscured views of the singer are mixed with the simple imagery (birds, stars) about which she is singing.  The texts are mixed as well, at times dealing with the personal feelings of love, loss, and imminent tragedy that the mother is experiencing, yet which the child cannot understand (perhaps is too young to understand), and he merely focuses on the soothing tone of the mother’s voice.  Images, words and sounds are continuously mixed and obscured, and my aim is to express how even a powerful memory, personal or collective, fades and distorts over time.

This piece utilizes the Jitter/Max/MSP programming language to live-process the video images.  Long hanging strips of chiffon used as malleable projection surfaces, old junkyard televisions scattered in the audience, as well as other various materials are also used in this performance.