Presented as part of the 2011 Jerusalem Season of Culture, the intimate multimedia performance at the Tower of David sits amid a rich festival schedule, which includes experimental, highbrow and guerrilla-esque productions at iconic Jerusalem locations such as the Tower of David, Mishkenot Sha’ananim, Machane Yehuda and the newly renovated Israel Museum. Sponsored by the municipality of Jerusalem in partnership with the Israel branch of the Schusterman Family Foundation, the Jerusalem Season of Culture, which runs through July 28, is a celebration of diverse art and ideas, aimed at raising Jerusalem’s cultural profile (for GoJerusalem.com’s full coverage of the initiative, click here).
A prime specimen of contemporary heady art, Different Trains is a musical and spoken-word exploration of personal memory, the potential for progress, mass transportation and the Holocaust. Trains are often used as symbols of journeys, even at the Tower of David – Reich composed the piece in the late 1980s, more than 40 years after he, as a child, criss-crossed the United States via train. In adulthood, he felt compelled to compare his innocent and positive travel adventures to the very different experience of Jews in Europe during the same period.
Different Trains is structured around three movements, covering two continents (Europe and North America), three time periods (before, during and after World War Two) and looped audio recordings of three Holocaust survivors, his childhood nanny and a Pullman porter. Reich also employs repeating samples of train sounds and alternating pitches to forge paradiddle rhythms. “The music is beautiful and high in energy,” Forsgren tells GoJerusalem.com. “It gives you the feeling that the political movement in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s was ‘on rails’ and couldn’t be stopped.”
Forsgren’s Different Trains may mean many things to the generations of ingathered exiles attending the performances in Jerusalem (“I want the project to grab hold of life, of the heart, of the pulse,” she says), but these will be new contexts and impressions after having been staged at the Jewish Theater of Stockholm’s home venue some 62 times since its premiere three years ago. “Sweden was the only country in Scandinavia that was not taken over in World War Two – they didn’t have the losses, suffering and starvation that people in other countries did,” Forsgren says of the show’s ripples. “The piece itself doesn’t age. It’s a modern classic. It asks, ‘What would you do?’ The musicians are like witnesses.”
Forsgren herself visits Israel on an annual basis, but this month represents the first visit for most of the members of Fleshquartet, who have been performing together for more than two decades and have collaborated with the likes of Elvis Costello and the Opera of Paris. The Fleshquartet’s original Tears After, a response to Different Trains, is performed as part of the program. “They are curious and excited to come,” says Forsgren, who has been working with the ensemble since 2008.
Photos of Different Trains courtesy of the Jewish Theater Stockholm. Photo of Pia Forsgren courtesy of Siri Isgren for the Jewish Theater Stockholm. Photo of the Fleshquartet courtesy of the Fleshquartet.
