Repertoire

A Shibboleth performance by Julia Romanowska, drawing freely on texts by Elfriede Jelinek and passages from the Song of Songs.

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The performance brings together Elfriede Jelinek's novel Lust and passages from the Song of Songs. The Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2004 "for her musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society's clichés and their subjugating power." Her social criticism is biting: "Pathetic accusations get you nowhere. The best remedy is to exaggerate reality until it becomes grotesque," she has said.

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The Song of Songs, one of the treasures of ancient literature and a book of the Old Testament, portrays a love that seeks and finds, that encounters resistance and surprise, and that breaks through everything standing in its way: "Love is strong as death."

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But what do those words mean when placed beside Jelinek's unsparing view of the human being?

The Song of Songs, one of the gems of ancient literature and a book in the Old Testament, depicts a love that seeks and finds, that encounters resistance and surprises, that breaks through everything that stands in its way: "Love is as strong as death."

But what do those words really mean, placed next to Jelinek's merciless gaze on humanity?

A Shibboleth performance by Julia Romanowska, drawing freely on texts by Etty Hillesum.

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The performance draws on Etty Hillesum's diaries and letters, collected in An Interrupted Life: The Diaries, 1941–43. Hillesum was a Dutch Jewish woman who was murdered in Auschwitz at the age of twenty-nine. The book was first published in the 1980s and attracted great international attention. Her writing reveals an unconventional, politically aware and passionate human being, with rare intellectual clarity and artistic gifts.

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In the midst of the Holocaust, she wrote with crystalline insight into her situation: "Our complete destruction is the goal" (3 July 1942). And yet she retained her faith in human compassion until the last day of her life.

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What enables a human being to preserve their moral compass and dignity under the most inhuman circumstances?

A Shibboleth performance by Julia Romanowska, drawing freely on texts by Georges Perec and Emil Cioran.

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The performance takes as its point of departure Georges Perec's work The Raise — a book-length set of instructions on how, regardless of sanitary, psychological, climatic, economic or other circumstances, to maximise one's chances when asking one's head of department for an increase in salary.

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Perec was a member of the literary movement Oulipo, in which writers and mathematicians explored "existing mathematical methods for writing fiction, while developing new ones." Among his best-known works are A Void, written entirely without the letter "e," and Life: A User's Manual — works marked by an unmistakable sense of humour.

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The Romanian-French philosopher Emil Cioran is also woven into the performance, through passages from his first book, On the Heights of Despair (1934). Cioran has been called "a thinker of despair and twilight":

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"At this moment I feel an irrepressible need to scream, to give voice to a howl that would fill the universe with dread. I feel an extraordinary roar rising within me, and I ask myself why it does not annihilate this world."