Community Funded Artists Explore the Boundaries of the Permissible Through the Six Points Fellowship
Between the monologue by the sinister Jewish philanthropist obsessed with Jewish continuity and the depiction (by adult actors) of kindergarteners engaging in oral sex, it's clear that playwright Dan Fishback’s new work-in-progress, “The Last Chanukah,” isn’t your average Jewish community-funded piece of art.
The Six Points Fellowship, Fishback’s benefactor, isn’t your average Jewish funder. Supported by a grant from the UJA-Federation of New York (which has also has made grants to this magazine), the Fellowship represents a new kind of support for the arts from the Jewish establishment. Their first cohort of twelve emerging artists is halfway through its two-year tenure.
Prior to receiving the Fellowship, Fishback had long seen himself as too radical for the Jewish community. “[In] college,… I wrote a weekly column for my campus newspaper,” Fishback says. “I was very critical of the Israeli government and the Israeli occupation of Palestine in general. As a result, I was once heckled while passing an ‘Israel Day’ rally. People were literally screaming, ‘Fishback, you suck.’ After going through stuff like that, I never assume I will be embraced by an organized group of Jews.” And yet embraced he was, to the tune of $45,000 over two years.
"We think of our name, Six Points, as a midrash, with one of the explanations being that we want our projects to live as points, pushing the edges a bit, and therefore helping us to define and understand them,” says Rebecca Guber, program director of the Fellowship.
Through the Fellowship, artists receive a stipend and project funding, and attend monthly seminars aimed at helping them learn to navigate the life of the professional artist. Their projects are varied, ranging from new interpretations of Ashkenazic cantorial melodies to a puppet show.
This type of support for young artists is groundbreaking in the Jewish world, according to Guber. “Six Points is the beginning of a recognition of the importance of Jewish culture and the need to support the artists who create that work,” she says. “There have been opportunities [for Jewish artist to receive] commissions from cultural institutions, which are primarily for established artists. What has been harder to find is any type of hands-on support for artists to learn the essential skills of how to ply their trade.”
For Andrea Dezsö, another of the fellows, the greatest benefit of the Fellowship has been the community of Jewish artists that has developed among the fellows. “I really appreciate the network of friends and access to different circles and ideas that the Fellowship has brought me,” Dezsö says. “[The Fellowship] has just started to really generate some new energy that was not there before, or that I was not aware of before.”
Dezsö’s project involves stop-motion animation and the Jewish folklore of her native Transylvania. Before applying to Six Points, Dezsö had no experience in stop-motion. “I had a vision of how I wanted it to look,” she says. “I also have a history of learning new techniques [for different projects]. I’ve wanted for a long time to see my images move and to see what it would be like to think, not only in terms of composition, but in terms of time.”
“This project seemed like a huge challenge. It would be time-consuming, and expensive. There would be lots of equipment involved. I didn’t think it would be possible because of all the expenses until I heard about the Fellowship,” says Dezsö.
With funding from the Fellowship, Dezsö took nearly 25 credit hours at The New School and the School of Visual Arts in stop motion animation. Slices of her work, “The Demon Bridegroom,” were shown in early December and are available on the Six Points website (www.sixpointsfellowship.org). The images are gorgeous – eerie, perplexing, haunting, and rich.
Dezsö has modeled her story upon a story from the Jewish mystical tradition that says that human beings are particularly susceptible to demonic activity in periods of liminal time before weddings, bar mitzvot and brit milot. In the traditional version, a bridegroom falls in love with a seductive woman on the eve of his marriage. He abandons his bride and spends what feels like hundreds of years chasing after this mysterious woman. When the woman reveals herself to be a demon-in-disguise, he flees, returning to his pre-demonic life, where he discovers that he has been standing under the chuppah all along, having not yet taken his vows.
Dezsö will be viewing this story through the lens of the bride, yet the themes she will take up in her project – the mutability of time, the dangers associated with momentous occasions, the demon world – will be the same as those handled in the original story.
Differing greatly in medium, tone, and content from Dezsö’s work is Fishback’s potentially controversial “The Last Chanukah.” The play had its first reading in Manhattan on December 9th. Fishback has intended to create a script that is cutting-edge, both in its artistry and its open critique of the Jewish establishment’s monolithic support of Israel and its preoccupation with Jewish continuity. Fishback argues that these obsessions deprive Jews of their spiritual and cultural agency, opting instead to place a crude emphasis on their bodies as vessels for ethnic perpetuation.
At the December 9th reading, Fishback’s preoccupation with form overwhelmed the play’s political content, and a potentially sharp critique of the Jewish community threatened to settle for simply being shocking. It would be difficult to discuss the plot of “The Last Chanukah,” as it lacks a cohesive narrative drive. The script incorporates a vignette about a radical Jewish kindergarten into a play-within-a-play about an angst-ridden, pot-smoking, pontificating young Jewish woman. This character's stoned musings take the audience through a tour of her prized possessions, including notes passed in high school and remnants of a particularly disappointing birthright Israel trip. The young woman rails on about a recent abortion and an affair with an Arab man. Uttering one of the play's several tortured theses, she cries, "There is no Jew smart enough to be Jewish!"
Eventually, these musings interact with the appearance of an eager middle-aged Jewish philanthropist who asks a young Jewish man to impregnate the single Jewish women of New York between the ages of 30 and 40, one of whom turns out to be the stoned female protagonist. This exchange yields several heavy-handed epiphanies, one of which is voiced by the eerily single-minded philanthropist, who claims that while he has no interest in Jewish religion, Jewish bodies must be preserved. Finally, a Chanukah pageant about the Lost Gay Maccabee – which includes simulated fellatio by actors portraying kindergarteners – is thrown into the theatrical mix.
Guber is not concerned that the political content of the piece will upset the traditionally staid UJA-Federation. “Our selection process was a transparent, independent jury review. They chose artists who demonstrated significant artistic merit, which was not dependent of the political content of their work,” she says. “Artists work on the boundaries, and we anticipate that some of the work may push on those, but we believe, and [the UJA-Federation of New York] agrees, that the dialogue created by this work is essential to the larger conversation about Jewish identity in our time.”
For Fishback, this acceptance from the mainstream Jewish community has been heartening. “Getting this fellowship was proof that my career is, indeed, real,” he says. “It was like I got the word ‘ADULT’ stamped on my forehead.”
