The Man Without a World Plays in Poland!

… AND ELSEWHERE!
(Lubljana, and upcoming Sweden, Austria, England…)

AN INTERVIEW WITH DONALD SOSIN & ALICIA SVIGALS
(by Pier Marton/Zevi – the title character)
following their playing with
The Man Without a World
In Lublin and in Krakow in 2023
(what is often called a cine-concert).

FOR MORE INFORMATION TO BOOK THIS EVENT,
Please Contact the Sunrise Foundation.
You can ALSO reach out directly to both
ALICIA SVIGALS/ & DONALD SOSIN

WE WERE LOOKING FOR ULTIMATE CONTEXT — Donald Sosin

The Man Without a World (in Polish)

[In 2022, Eleanor Antin’s 1991 (silent Yiddish) feature film,
“THE MAN WITHOUT A WORLD”
WAS GIVEN A NEW LIFE
– thanks to Dennis Doros and Milestone Films –
by being RENOVATED to 4K quality & receiving a NEW SCORE by virtuoso composer-musicians,
Alicia Svigals and Donald Sosin.

RECORDED FRIDAY JUNE 7, 2024

MAIN PART

Pier Marton (PM) : I’m gonna let you speak about what it was like to be in Poland with the film and… whatever comes up. Let’s hear what you want to say.

Donald Sosin (DS) : – What would you like? Would you like to set a framework for this so that people know what we’re talking about?

PM: – We’re speaking about the fact that you were in Poland in Lublin and in Krakow, and you played with The Man Without a World, a film made in 1991 by Eleanor Antin and that film was renovated in 4K by Dennis Doros of Milestone Films, and the two of you have created a new score (which I’d be quite interested to hear about later): the main thing is that I am amazed by, and I’m sure a lot of people are, and maybe you are too, that you played in Poland, of all places!
So tell us everything: getting ready… doing it… coming out of Poland… going “what happened?!”
That’s the framework.

DS: To backtrack: how we got to this film in the first place, is through two other films that Alicia and I had scored: one for Deutsche Kinemathek: Ancient Law/Das Alte Gesetz (Dupont) in 2017, and the other one, The City Without Jews/Die Stadt Ohne Juden (Breslauer) for the Film Archive of Austria in 2020.. and two years later, in 2022, we were asked to score The Man Without a World which I knew nothing about, and I knew nothing about Eleanor Antin, not being really into the art world.
So it was during the pandemic that Alicia and I had to be in two separate spaces, writing music with each other and sending it back-and-forth to the Internet… not an ideal way to work, but it came out satisfactorily, we think.
We made some adjustments when we finally got together and were able to work together. I’ll let Alicia say more about her processes in writing…
For me when I’m working on silent films as I’ve done for over 50 years now, I’m watching the film and ideas just occur to me, and I write them down or I record them in my computer and then look at them and edit them and play with them…
And so in this case, I had Alicia‘s melodies as a jumping off place for many of the scenes, and then I would take those and work them into the scenes and arrange them, and manipulate them in various ways so that we finally ended up with a complete score for the film… which we did in the fall of 2022 at the Princeton Garden Theater and at a local theater here in Northwest Connecticut, before we took it around the country and to Europe.

RESURRECTING PEOPLE AND ART FROM A LOST PLACE IN TIME

Alicia Svigals (AS) : In terms of your question about what it was like to do this film in, of all places, Poland… it was kind of amazing because, you know, I come out of the American Klezmer revival, and the ethos around that has always been “resurrecting people and art from a lost place in time,” and we studied old recordings and internalized the style, the musical language, and then started writing new music and in that language – so that language wouldn’t die and it would live on…
So for this film, you know there were these images of a shtetl in Poland, and those melodies that Donnie is referring to popped into my head as I watched, as I walked… took walks in nature… and closed my eyes and saw the characters in the film again, and I would sing them into my iPhone, and then work them more… and I sent a bunch of them to Donnie…

HERE WE ARE

AS (continued): So then, taking those to Poland, taking the whole project – the film, its imagery of a shtetl in Poland, the music which is in part informed by that tradition – and here we are – and it’s no longer a far away place in time: we are in that place, and the whole gestalt of “farawayness” is gone… and it’s no longer part of the meaning of what we’re doing.
“Farawayness” was always so intrinsic to the art form, and here we are, and it’s here!
It’s far away in time, but also not so much anymore because it wasn’t really so long ago.
I think the interest in Yiddish culture that my generation has had, and the people that followed us afterwards, part of it is that it has the halo of a fairy tale around it, so there is no time in a way and it’s timeless, but it’s not our time.
That’s part of the beauty of it, but once you’re in the place, time also collapses, and it’s no longer a fairy tale – and it was never a fairy tale. It was often a nightmare and the film shows that.
The film takes the whole mythology of nostalgia, some place far away and in the past, where it can be whatever we wanted to be, like a Rorschach blot, and problematizes and deconstructs that so that, now it’s something that happened to real people, real people who were in fact our great grandparents.
And they had the beauty of their culture and tradition and they had the ugliness of violence around them.
The movie is also a fairy tale. So it is complicated because it has its own fairy tale layer!
There was that rupture in the rules of the game for me that was very interesting, and a little disconcerting, and certainly found its way into my playing, and looking at the audience, and looking at the space and looking at the movie again, and then what?
So I guess “then what” is the question you’re exploring here.

THIS IS HERE, THIS IS NOW

DS: There is another layer to this also which is the fact that it’s not a movie made in Poland in the 20s, it’s a movie made in San Diego in 1991, as an homage to that period and to that place, that time, and of course to the mother of the director, (the former writer?), Eleanor Antin, who was part of the Yiddish Theater in those days.
So there are these many layers, and as Alicia said, it wasn’t really brought home to us how immediate those feelings were, until we walked into the space in Krakow, where we were going to perform, and we said: this is here, this is now.
Films always take place now in our consciousness anyway, regardless of where they are set, when they are set, We experience them now in wherever we are in our journeys, as emotional and spiritual beings.
Having had grandparents that grew up in Ukraine, and great grandparents that came from Belarus and Germany, it was very significant for me to be able to bring what we had done with this film, which by that time had already taken on a quality of our own mythical connection, and the audiences that we had played for, their connections, and the stories that we heard about their past and their ancestors, all of that.
If we have done this in Poland for the first time, it would’ve been one thing, but we had already done this for just under a year by the time we got to Poland last summer; so there was a lot of baggage, in the best sense of the word, that we were taking with us and bringing to the experience of performing in Lublin and Krakow.

PM: Was it any kind of accident that it was Lublin and Krakow that ended up inviting you? Two Jewish cities in terms of Jewish history.

AS: We were invited by a particular event, which was called “The Reunion of Lublin Jews,” which means people and their descendants – Jews from Lublin all gather from all over the world (I think they do this every year), and connect and explore Lublin, pre-war Polish culture and also obviously what happened to that community.
There was something very interesting going on there, which was that there was a city-wide installation art project where somebody, and I apologize, I don’t know the artist’s name or might have been a group, but there was a photographer, I think a Jewish photographer, who before the war lived in the Jewish neighborhood and took hundreds and hundreds of photos of the inhabitants. So the project was: they blew up these photos to larger than life-size, and through archival research, they figured out who these people were, when they could, and where they lived, what their address was. And again, it was a project about place and time, re-anchoring the generic and distancing idea of the mythical victims of the past. It was like “No! Real people, a real address.”
And they put these photos in the windows of those houses, with the permission of the current residents and owners. It was quite powerful to roam those streets, between the soundcheck and the show, and also the day before, and have these people looking at us and looking back, and that was certainly in my mind. They were b&w photos like the b&w movie, so Lublin was a very significant character in the movie of our trip to Lublin!

PM: It was not Roman Vishniac’s pictures?

AS: No, an unknown photographer, I think even an amateur. He did portraits or something, and it was specifically his neighbors among the Jews of Lublin.
When I got there, I got there before Donnie, I needed a cup of coffee and I turned into a random coffee shop, and there was a recording of a 1920’s Yiddish singer.
What?! Is that the algorithm?! Did they read my retina?
Certainly a Yiddish song… So I “Shazammed” it, and it was this very celebrated singer from the 20’s in Poland who was famous generally, but also recorded Yiddish songs. It was a little eerie, I have to say, and wonderful.
They are really good-hearted people who are trying… They are trying to make cultural reparations, they’re trying to educate themselves, and everybody around them, about Jewish culture. They’re trying to reclaim something of what was lost.
When I first got to Poland, it was in the 1990’s with my band at the time, The Klezmatics. We drove over the border in a van, and it was like “Wow, this is kind of a vast Jewish graveyard.” And then we met people, and there were a lot of people who were sort of organizing their lives around that fact – non-Jews who were struggling with it, and trying to do something about it now.
We had been invited for the first year of what’s become a decades long event in Krakow, the Annual Jewish Cultural Festival that’s run by somebody who’s really devoted his life and career to kind of making amends and bringing Jewish culture back to Krakow where it was so vibrant and rich.
It was Polish culture to a large extent! It was an amputation of the limbs of Polish culture to destroy that. And a lot of people understand that.

DS: Coincidentally Joanna, my wife and I, are watching the 1983 miniseries The Winds of War from the Herman Wouk book. Having read the book, part of which is set in a little town in Southern Poland, where there’s a wedding going on and then people have to leave when war breaks out.
Again, having film as a way of referencing and connecting us is very powerful. I think it’s all credit to Eleanor for having taken a very multifaceted approach to this film: it’s partly documentary, it’s partly comedy, partly drama, satire.
It all comes together in her unique way of presenting art, and then putting herself in the middle of it as a character. People are very affected by this, whether they’re here in the States, whether they’re Jewish, whether they’re not Jewish… but I’ve never been as affected by it as I was in Poland.
It ramped everything up to a completely different level, as it did with the Ancient Law which we did in Germany for the first time last December, as part of a presentation by a synagogue, although it was in a theater.
Again to bring culture to the place where it originates, where the mise-en-scène is an extraordinary experience.

I WAS THERE WITH THE GHOSTS

PM: Can I ask you to go a little further when you say “ramped up?” Can you describe that ramped up state… meaning is it in the playing, is it in the afterglow, after the presentation… or is it in some kind of tension that you feel before you play, before the screening.
I’m just wondering whether you can qualify or describe some of the energy and the exchanges.
I think for me, art, film, music, all of these are a form of linking, and you link different things together, and then, just like poetry you see sparks, and you have no idea where they land.
That’s what I want to hear: whether there are words that you can say about this energy: these sparks, before/during/after.
Basically I am knocking on the door where you said “ramped up.”

DS: The score is all written down, so the notes are the notes, and we played it many times… but our consciousness affects how each note is played, and being in that space, being a car ride away from Auschwitz had just… it put me into a completely different emotional frame of mind.
Seeing some of the more violent scenes, and knowing that a few years after the events of this film, that those events were going to be carried out on a very, very large scale.
It was very overwhelming, and I’m gonna cry thinking about this now…

IT WAS NOT ABOUT US

AS: To me, it felt like it was less of a performance during performing, and more like a seance. Particularly, the ghosts scene in the graveyard: it felt like,,, we were playing the music that was making them rise up, and maybe not just there – I felt the presence, in the theater and outside the theater…
It wasn’t about us the way a performance can sometimes be… if you’re trying to play the right notes, and you’re trying to do your best!
Compared to that, it was like an out-of-body experience.
I always connect to the music, some parts more than others depending on whether I can be free or whether I have to think very hard about what’s going on technically. It’s all written so that it affects the audience either way, and they have no way of knowing, but in terms of my experience, it was from beginning to end, I was there with the ghosts.

“LISTEN TO THIS GREAT STUFF” – THAT’S NOT THE POINT

DS: Everything deepened for me.
We write this music, and we don’t know who is gonna listen to her and what the effect is.
The effect was probably more powerful for me and for Alicia than for anybody else in the room because our music was reaching an audience who lives this landscape, who lives this history everyday, and whatever connections – maybe some of them were tourists and don’t have that connection – but for the people that were there, and the woman who runs the JCC isn’t Jewish, but she’s very devoted to sustaining and preserving the culture, so it was also very powerful for her.
It’s an honor, a calling and a responsibility that we feel in bringing these films to people to say “look!” – not even so much to listen because most of the time when you’re watching a film, you’re not listening – but just to say: “look, look at this, and put yourself in the lives of those people, or go wherever you will go, wherever the film will take you,” and then our music is an aid to that, we try to make it an aid, so that the film, some people say that they they forget that there’s any music, they forget that we’re there playing because it seems so much that the two things are of one fabric.
That’s a great achievement for us, if we can do that because we don’t want to be putting ourselves out and saying “listen to this great stuff” – that’s not the point.

AS: We’re there in service to the film and to make a unified artistic emotional experience for people: and it’s true that’s the highest compliment when people say: “it was exactly with the film, it was like it was coming from the story and I forgot you were even there” – that’s pretty great. It’s so nice…
What I usually do stand in the middle of the stage and I’m the performer!
And this is like: I sit in the dark, and it’s just me and the film and Donnie, and in the end, it’s the experience and it’s not about me.
That’s a beautiful feeling for an artist!

DS: I must say that since we met you in October, Pier, it ramped up another level because we have a personal connection to you as such a great actor in the film…and then having met Eleanor two weeks ago at her home, again another level, and that was extraordinarily emotional… and then having the chance to call you and have you speak to Eleanor…
These layers upon layers and layers that are this unique blessing that has just dropped into our lives that I never expected.
I’m ashamed to say I didn’t know anything about Alicia and her work until I met her in 2017.

AS: You can’t know everybody!

DS: These past six, seven years, my life has been transformed in so many ways: the opportunities that we’ve been given as a duo to take our work, to meet other people, to work together, to learn how to work together as musicians.
All of these things are part of what happens when the lights go down and we start playing.
I can only just repeat that I didn’t know much about the history of Lublin and Krakow until we actually got there: they were names, they were places on the map – you know how it is.
And then you’re there, and then you see the buildings, and you see the bullet holes in the walls, and the pavement stones, the synagogue and the cemetery…
And it all takes on such an immediacy and such a clarity: looking at life through very clear glasses, with a very bright light.

AS: It has been really amazing: we watched you so many times and Eleanor, and then to actually meet in person, it was like when you have friends from decades ago and then you don’t see them for decades, then you see them, that’s why I felt: we had been friends in the 1990s, you didn’t know it!
You guys really exist… it was really something!
It was interesting to go to Poland in 2023, after having done that 30 years earlier, so when I went there for the first Jewish culture festival in Krakow, and played Klezmer… there was a very intense consciousness of the history and the Holocaust among a self-selected group of people who were interested and came. There was a young woman who was studying Yiddish, not Jewish, who smoked a pipe, and she said “I smoke pipes because Jewish women in Krakow before the war smoked pipes.” So it was like it was almost a countercultural movement.
And it was interesting to go back in 2023 and do this, and things have changed: there was less consciousness and that’s true everywhere. A generation has passed, a generation has passed away, and the world‘s issues and victims have changed, and there are pogroms happening today.
There are always pogroms happening somewhere…

JUST LIKE A STORY THAT WAS TOLD IN A MOVIE

AS (continued): So it was for example, it was really surprising in Krakow: we got some feedback after the show that some people were upset to see the Poles depicted in an unflattering light, to see the pogrom scene, and the sexual violence that was implied.
Hearing this, I got the feeling that it was news, that to some people that that actually happened, and they maybe didn’t even know. That it was just like a story that was told in a movie. I never expected to go out and educate people about the Holocaust, but I think that that’s what’s happening as we bring this movie to various places.

PM: You actually ended up having to discuss the film with an audience member, or you just heard about these tensions?

AS: People were polite, people loved it, but we heard through the presenter about some of those reactions where people were offended on behalf of the Polish people. So I can only conjecture what they do or don’t know…. I don’t wanna make a leap of interpretation, but I did feel different generally, actually just talking to people.

WHAT WE WERE LOOKING FOR WAS ULTIMATE CONTEXT

PM: Donnie, this was your first time in Poland?

DS: Yes, my wife, daughter and I were in Warsaw for a couple of days before that, and took the tour of the Jewish area which was very, very powerful and sad.
We came to Lublin with that fresh in our minds, and then walking the streets, we had a wonderful guide who took us around, and said look at this, and showed us and took us through the museum with the exhibit that I sent you a link to.

PM: I am going to ask this directly, a key question: I’ve been there, “visited” so to speak, the place because my grandmother was gassed there: I went to Auschwitz, did you end up going to Auschwitz at all?

DS: No, for two reasons first of all because we didn’t want to take our 13 year old daughter. We went to the Schindler museum which was very powerful. Joanna and I have both been both and separately to Dachau, so we knew to some extent what we were going to see at Auschwitz, and it was only also question of time constraints.
My sister, I think, has performed at Auschwitz with the Zamir Chorale of Boston and at another camp also at Theresienstadt, and said it was an overwhelming experience for all of them.

PM: Alicia?

AS: No I didn’t go either. On this particular trip, there wasn’t time really, and I’m sensitive. I find these things a little overwhelming so…

PM: I just want to say that for me, there was a before Auschwitz and an after Auschwitz I cannot erase.
I was there in the middle of winter… it was freezing… It was still a Communist country… I asked for the keys to enter the Hungarian pavilion. It was even colder inside the building than outside: it was like an icebox.
One other thing that may be related to Auschwitz: did you notice the figures of Jews as good luck statues, and things like that?

AS: They were there for sale in Krakow in the 1990s, we were quite appalled.
There is so much talk about: there were all the people who were seriously committed to Jewish culture, not Jewish, and then, of course, there’s always a tourist industry that has grown up around it, but those good luck figures go back way before that, but once like the Jewish culture festival started in Krakow, there started to be a cottage industry of tourist souvenirs and stuff.
Even when we were there, we were taken aback when a taxi driver arrived at the hotel – that was actually a big tour with a lot of musicians – and they were like: “Tours of Auschwitz! Tours of Auschwitz! $10!” It was like “Ew…” – they were hawking it like it was a tour of anything. In fact, it was like “Tours of Auschwitz, Art Museum and Salt Mines!”

DS: When you listen to the news today: “In Gaza today five people were killed!” – it’s like (gesticulates in horror). There is no sense of propriety or context sometimes for these things.
And what we were looking for was ultimate context. And to put our performance in a place where people could really get it.
And I think they did, but I wouldn’t have wanted to have it as part of “and now they’re going to go off and watch cartoons, and watch something else.”
At least there was a time for Q&A (questions and answers) – time to reflect on this and then go out and be in the streets.
And think “oh, I am not that far away from all of this.” In time, yes, in space, and in Einsteinian terms, “I am right there!” (claps his hands)

AS: It’s all happening simultaneously!

END OF (MAIN) FIRST PART

FINAL COMMENTS

PM: To wrap it up: Q&As, surprises and things like that… what your hopes are in terms of playing again in Poland or anywhere else, and what other cities in Europe that you dream of playing?

DS: We’d like to take this everywhere! Whether they are Jewish audiences or not, students, film students at universities, people who are interested in performance-art, this is Eleanor Antin’s chef-d’œuvre by her own admission. This is the piece of hers that she feels the closest to, in all of the work that she’s done. ?So there’s an audience, and we are ready and willing to go wherever anybody will have us – we’d love to do this in Vienna. I’d love to do this at Konzerthaus Wien where I’ve played before. I will write to them again: they have four concerts a year with film music. To do this in Berlin, it’d be great.

AS: An in particular in Warsaw where you are walking off at the end, headed for Warsaw.

PM: I would like to do it in Budapest because I have family there, and would like to do it in Paris because I have my own history of being an “unconscious Jew” in Paris, if I can put it that way.

DS: We did it in Ljubljana and that was wonderful.

AS: Let’s do it in Paris and you’ll come with us.

DS: And in San Diego, we really want to do it where Eleanor is.

AS: Absolutely! Let’s go to San Diego… In closing, I would say: it’s been a pleasure to get to know you, and I feel like we’re forming a Man Without a World family, scattered to the four corners of the United States. There’s so many layers of this onion to peel and delight in, so I hope we can continue and collaborate!

PM: Thank you, thank you!

DS: One of the people who were visiting Eleanor the day we were there was (Diane), the wife of Jerome Rothenberg and she said “Oh, I was in the film too, I was in a little crowd scene!” So we’ve met three people, counting Eleanor, who were in the film. A couple have died unfortunately, Rothenberg and Allan Kaprow.

PM: And David unfortunately.

AS: We met four actually because Ron Robboy plays the violin!

DS: Four yes, so we have a couple of dozen left, to collect all of the baseball cards!

AS: Sooreleh is in Brazil… we got to bring her in.

DS: Why don’t we mention that we have funding from the Sunrise Foundation For Education in the Arts, so anybody who is watching this, if you’re interested in the film, and you would like to bring it to your venue, whatever it is: a synagogue, a JCC, a university, a film museum, any place in the world… our fees are paid by the Sunrise Foundation. We’re so grateful to them for that, and for the other two films that we have in our repertoire.
Alicia’s website do you want to mention that?

AS: AliciaSvigals.com and there’s a page there with our projects.

DS: I am at oldmoviemusic.com and you can find us both on Facebook as well.

PM: Thank you so much.

DS: Thank you Pier. It was a joy to see you and have a chance to talk about this with you same here.

PS: Thank you so much, a big embrace!

[FYI the automatic transcribing tools are there… but “Holocaust” becomes “Holidays,” “Shtetl” becomes “shuttle,” “pogroms” become “programs,” “the Poles” becomes “the polls,” “Krakow“ becomes “crack out,” “guide” becomes “guy,” “Auschwitz” becomes “Ashley,” etc… – and lots of other mistakes, it’s almost more work…]

The Lublin performance