Held on September 17, 2014
During this event, Dr. Barbara Milewski from Swarthmore College examines a selection of Krystyna Żywulska's camp songs and the various contexts in which they were created. She will also consider the extent to which the stylistic qualities of these works lent Żywulska 's post-war literary and artistic efforts their force in a Poland forever changed by the Holocaust and the insanity of a Soviet-imposed Communist regime. Next, Dr. Lisa Peschel from University of York, England shares some of her most recent findings from her book, Continuity in Diaspora: Theatrical Performance in the Terezín Ghetto. Dr. Peschel discusses how she began to investigate theatrical performance in the Terezín/Theresienstadt Ghetto, including her early research at the Kupferberg Holocaust Center at QCC. After a discussion of the history of the ghetto and of the scripts, Dr. Peschel divides students into small groups, providing each group with an excerpt of a script. Their task is to create a brief performance of the excerpt that uses framing devices (program notes, a brief spoken or performed introduction, running commentary on the script, etc.) to make the performance understandable to spectators who do not know the history of the ghetto. The colloquium ends with a presentation of the students' performances.
Dr. Barbara Milewski is the Daniel Underhill Professor of Music and former Chair of the Department of Music and Dance at Swarthmore College. A Polish music specialist, she has lectured extensively on questions of national identity and memory in the music of Chopin; songs created in the Nazi concentration camps; and the music of Poland's iconic postwar film, Zakazane piosenki (Forbidden Songs, 1947), for which she also created the complete English subtitles for the original uncensored version of the film. Her scholarship has appeared in various peer-reviewed journals, reference works and in recent scholarly volumes that examine postwar musical commemoration. With Bret Werb she produced an annotated compact disc of archival recordings, Aleksander Kulisiewicz: Ballads and Broadsides. Her translations of Polish songs for that recording, as well as for Thomas Pasatieri's song cycle Letter to Warsaw, and Paul Schoenfield's Camp Songs, have brought wider attention to the remarkable repertoire of topical songs created in the Nazi camps. She was a contributor to the BBC's The Documentary podcast, "Songs from the Depths of Hell" narrated by presenter Alan Dein, and the French public radio France Culture podcast, "Le barde des Enfers." She received her Ph.D. from the Music Department of Princeton University.
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Dr Lisa Peschel is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) of Theatre at the University of York, England. She has been researching theatrical performance in the Terezín/Theresienstadt ghetto since 1998. Her articles on survivor testimony and scripts written in the ghetto have appeared in major theatre- and Holocaust-related journals in the US and the UK and in Czech, German and Israeli publications. She has been invited to lecture and conduct performance workshops at institutions in the US, UK, Europe, South Africa, and Australia. Her anthology of rediscovered scripts, Performing Captivity, Performing Escape: Cabarets and Plays from the Terezin/Theresienstadt Ghetto, was published in 2014 (Czech- and German-language edition 2008). From 2014 to 2018 she was a co-investigator on the £1.8 million project 'Performing the Jewish Archive' funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council.
For more information about this play, visit Performing the Jewish Archive.
Art, Music and Education as Strategies for Survival by 
I Never Saw Another Butterfly: Children's Drawings and Poems from Terezín Concentration Camp, 1942-44 by 
Music in the Holocaust: Confronting Life in the Nazi Ghettos and Camps by 
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