Douglas Rosenberg, artist, screendance pioneer and professor at the University of Madison, Wisconsin, toured Europe during the autumn of 2021 with his film “Song of Songs”. In addition to producing the film, Rosenberg himself performs in front of the camera. In a discussion at The Jewish Salon in Gothenburg’s House of Literature on October 10, 2021, Rosenberg explained that the film is his first since 2012, and that it could not have been produced earlier. His meeting with dancer Sally Gross and their co-production in 2012 in the Gates of Heaven Synagogue were essential for him finding the desired artistic form (within the limitations of a twenty-minute film) where he could express his passion for the history of Judaism. “Song of Songs” was filmed in and around the artist’s studio in Wisconsin late in the winter of 2020.
THE FILM OPENS WITH THE MAN’S FACE. Or rather: it opens with the movements of his hands. The two hands circle the air just like the hands of Jewish mothers have circled around the Sabbath candles for thousands of years. These hands bring energy back to the soul, leaving the world outside, they focus the individual, freed from duties, and demands.
The man moves out into the empty room.
Alone – and not alone – he dances with a bundle of dried sunflowers from his own garden, tied to his back with two strings. The stalks reach upwards, maybe towards God, but the petals fall downwards: fragile as paper blossoms they keep watch over the man’s head. And the camera now lets us see him from behind, the stalks following his back, his thighs, his calves down towards the open surface of the floor.
The man wears black trousers and a black coat, like an old Chassid. He sweeps a length of cloth with HaShirim (Song of Songs) in Hebrew printed on it around himself, as if it were a tallit. He then pulls the cloth over his furrowed face: disappears into the ancient language. The man breathes through a harmonica, the drawn-out tones like orchestrated sorrow. And suddenly the room is a snow-covered field and the man dances under a white sky. This could be anywhere in old Europe, before the war.
Again the camera sees him from behind: he carries winter branches in his hands. The dark and dead branches become extensions of his own living body. A merging takes place.
Suddenly, we see only his hands and a large, rectangular stone. The hands perform a precise activity. Perhaps they open a book and pull out a page. Again, and again. They seem to play a piano. They move. Dance. Converse. We still do not see the man’s face. He disappears from the frame and the credits begin to roll. Afterwards a young man with a clarinet walks across the floor. He plays so slowly that one can scarcely recognize the old klezmer melody.
He is the man’s son.
Photo: Michael Eckblad
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The first version of Song of Songs includes brief, written reflections in which Rosenberg explains, among other things, that the project arose from the idea of ritual as a principle of liberation. The idea here is that we find our freedom through ritual, that in ritual we manage to leave the dictates of achievement and all superficial demands and instead meet that which is meaningful – artistically and spiritually. This is so closely related to the Jewish shabbat that, since viewing the film a couple of days ago, I’ve thought it could just as well be entitled Shabbat.
The passing of tradition portrayed in the film are in turn associated with the well-known Jewish expression: L’dorVador – from generation to generation. However, the work is entitled neither Shabbat nor L’dorVador but rather Song of Songs, in kinship with the most prominent poem in the Hebrew bible. This title is most certainly motivated when considering how deeply the film is steeped in text and poetic expression. Perhaps though, the fact that I instinctively feel drawn into the film and want to interact with it, indicates that Song of Songs forces its viewers to inscribe themselves into the dance: to interpret and re-interpret. A kind of L’dor Vador – again.
Song of Songs is most often read as a sensuous love poem written by a passionate King Salomon. But in fact, if Rabbi Akiva hadn’t succeeded in spreading his allegorical interpretation, in which the passionate love depicted refers to God and the Jewish people, the poem would perhaps never have been included in the Tanakh. Rabbi Akiva, like Maimonides, meant that the message of Song of Songs is to love God in the same way that one loves a person: with longing, with passion, on the edge of obsession. There is a certain resonance between this interpretation and the long stalks tied to Rosenberg’s back in the film. These tall, hard stalks strive upward, towards a heavenly connection, while still reaching downwards: to keep the man rooted in the real world, where the Jewish people live their lives. After all the Torah was given to us here on earth and is ever after ours to interpret. For that reason, it is easy for me to translate the concept “God” with “Jewish history” in this case. This, not the least since the personal, archeological work embodied in the film always demands, in Jewish contexts, that the individual seek his or her place in the history of the Jewish people, in the Jewish historical landscape. Such work is often triggered either by infatuation or by close proximity to death.
In the short texts included in the first version of the project, Rosenberg describes how he, during the working process, thought about Chassidic dances: exuberant – but also reverent and always performed in the collective. He thought of being enfolded in the embrace of the text. He asks himself: “How does it open my heart and/ and what does that look like?
Well, what does it look like?
The text and the person in Song of Songs meet in tenderness – and, perhaps, in sorrow. As I noted, this work could also be entitled “Kaddish”. One could contend that the Hebrew text printed on the cloth that envelops the dancing man is also an integral part of a Jewish male body – not leastwise since the cloth resembles and functions like a tallit, the prayer shawl Jewish men are commanded to wear during all the light hours of the day. In certain sequences the man disappears completely in the text. Thus, the answer to the question as to what it looks like when the text opens the man’s heart is that he disappears into the heart of the text, into Jewish history.
When he then lets the tallit fall and dances again, he offers a new interpretation of the text and of what it is to search for one’s own place in a larger Jewish context. This chain of events reminds me of a remark in the fascinating book Jews and Words (Amos Oz, Fania Salzberger-Oz) where the authors explore the intimate connection between Jewish identity and text. They suggest that when we talk about what the Jewish people ‘are’, the text holds a surprisingly prominent position, it is even more important than flesh and blood: “Ours is not a bloodline, it is a textline.”
I often assert that Jewish tradition demands a constant reclamation of Jewish history and Jewish identity. In that process it is of importance to explore and understand one’s own personal narrative. It is obvious that the traditional way – within Jewish culture – to reach such understanding is attained by repetitive and active remembrance, this is inscribed in the Jewish year and in the religious traditions. However, the individual can practice a similar insisting and ritual work outside the religious boundaries, for example within artistic practice, and reach a similarly true connection to the past. I believe all sorts of embodied reclamation and reinterpretation of Jewish history/identity, however, partly centers around the question of how do we become active co-authors of the central narrative while also carving out our personal story? How do we emerge as unique human beings while also a part of a people with such a long, rich, and traumatic history? One thing is for sure and that is that without being firmly rooted in the past it is difficult to see one’s future and we will be at risk of getting lost.
Art, as said above, is an excellent and enriching practice where exploring the relationship between the personal narrative and its greater Jewish narrative can be embodied. In his essay It was there all along – an essay that can favorably be read in connection with Song of Songs – Rosenberg quotes Terry Thredgold, who writes that “Performance always involves a labor of making the self, a muscular, emotional labor, a labor of constructing memories for the body, which ‘brands’ the materiality of the body and leaves its corporeal traces in the text of performance.”
In Song of Songs several objects, movements, landscapes and tones afford us glimpses of the greater narrative. The ability to interpret it as a Jewish narrative perhaps depends partly on the viewer’s previous knowledge and proficiency in conducting readings and counter readings. Personally, I submit that Rosenberg’s view of Judaism is closer to Chassidism than to the current common discourse which approaches identity by defining one as inside or outside, by affirming or rejecting. What occurs in Song of Songs is instead both mystical and mythical. It is simultaneously open to the world and closed within an individual. And it is therefore very vulnerable. The objects Rosenberg chooses to foreground are associated with Jewish life and also, with death: the dried sunflowers he bears on his back like a mighty, twisted tefillin, are dead, or about to die. The winter branches in his hands, that act as extensions of the living flesh, are dead. When the film ends, as mentioned above, we do not see Rosenberg on the empty floor, but a young man who walks over the open surface and plays a melody that could break any heart. I would say that Rosenberg’s Song of Songs thus embodies the famous words of Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk: “There is nothing as whole as a broken heart.”
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- Email: karinbrygger@gmail.com
- Photos: Michael Eckblad (courtesy of Douglas Rosenberg).
- Translation from Swedish: Robert Lyons
- This essay was first published in Swedish in Dixikon 18/10/2021, where it still is available in Swedish: https://www.dixikon.se/song-of-songs/