Aaron Henne
We last spoke with Aaron Henne, artistic director of theatre dybbuk in Los Angeles, in late April of 2020 when performing arts organizations were just coming to terms with COVID and quarantine, and casting about for ways to keep afloat. Henne and theatre dybbuk were quick to pivot, postponing their summer show until October and taking script development to Zoom.
Then the summer did its thing. The show has now been postponed to summer 2021 and theatre dybbuk has found new ways to create relevant work, employ actors and continue a dialogue with audiences.
“We had to ask function questions as well as form questions,” Henne says when we catch up in November 2020. “We are a company that utilizes theatre as a way to have complex conversations about issues in our society and dynamics in our society about power, about dominance, about assimilation, about integration. And we had to ask some deep questions about — is theatre the only means by which we might do that?”
“We do high-risk, high-reward work. The challenge of the work … is purposeful, and I’m proud of that.”
Theatre dybbuk’s live performances are radically different from conventional stage plays. Written and directed by Henne and developed over the course of months by the cast, the pieces are highly choreographed, highly stylized, with dense, sometimes nearly impenetrable blocks of language. They dare the audience to lean forward and do the work of engagement. The topics are always relevant and current, but approached through the lens of Jewish mythology, folk tales and literature.
With no possibility of live performance, and with Zoom theatre not conducive to the theatre dybbuk experience, Henne realized that form needed to shift radically to continue to meet the company’s function.
“The biggest pivot that theatre dybbuk has engaged with over the last few months is that we’ve really moved from doing in-person, live theatrical works, which are now postponed for quite a while, to doing audio series work — podcasts — that also have online learning engagement opportunities. So we’ve created this podcast called the dybbukast.”
Just as a theatre dybbuk play is no ordinary play, the dybbukast is no ordinary podcast. The brand-new (episode two premieres December 11) podcast works with a different presenting partner and different scholar in each episode, focusing on a different text each time. Henne employs theatre dybbuk actors to voice the texts.
“We take a creative text from some point in Jewish history,” Henne explains. “This could be a play, a poem, song lyrics, a mythological narrative. And we hear selections from that creative text performed by theater dybbuk intersected with an interview with a scholar or an expert who can talk about what was going on in society at the time that this text was created, and the legacy of the text, and how it still speaks to things today … they create a kind of web of experience that you can process and take in and think about not only about history, but think about our world at this moment and what forces are still at play today.”
For anyone familiar with theatre dybbuk’s typical source material — the Lilith myth, 2nd century Jewish plays, the false antisemitic propaganda text The Protocols of the Elders of Zion — the text of their first podcast will be a surprise. Or, knowing Henne, maybe not…
“The first episode of the dybbukast is called I-Tell-You,” Henne says. “That is the name of a religious school journal from 1926 that Congregation Rodeph Shalom in Philadelphia published to share the essays of its students and a piece of writing from the rabbi, as well as this amazing … seven-page children's play called The Little Hasmoneans that is a Hanukkah play. It's this remarkable document that has not only a piece of theater in it, but also has all these perspectives of people at that time in history … And that is combined with an interview with Dr. Miriam Heller Stern, who illuminates what was going on in American Jewish history at that time … what does immigration look like in America, and about the tension between assimilation and isolation … this episode really uses this journal as an entry point to look at the complexities of community and belonging.”
The episode is compelling, funny and chilling, as Henne and Stern look at the ongoing difficulties of assimilation for jews in other societies — the need, as Stern says, “to be part and apart.”
This episode, presented in collaboration with Hebrew Union College, is already available, along with supplementary learning resources. The next issue, dropping December 11, takes on The Book of Enoch, an apocryphal text that didn’t make it into the Torah. Henne and Dr. Greg Salyer of the University of Philosophical Research discuss the text’s apocalyptic bent and the emotional value of end-times literature (full disclosure, I got to voice a juicy bit from The Book of Revelation for this episode).
As we discuss the current state of theatre in the world of pandemic, and its possible future, Henne encourages us to embrace new models for creation, performance and funding influenced by the many ways we as artists have coped globally.
“I got into theater because I believe in the power of the live engagement in person, where anything can happen in that space we are sharing together,” he says. “At the same time, I recognize the opportunities that this moment affords. And I wonder, on the back end, can we do both? Can we actually have both? Rather than thinking in binaries and having it be one or the other.”
“It all takes resources. And part of the reason why some of these things didn't occur to us before was because our resources were going into one thing. In order to do multiple things, more resources will be needed, not less … in order to make it sustainable, all of this is going to require more and more investment, because it is time. It is mental energy. It is of value. And how do we continue to shift the narrative so that people see whether it's in person or online or in your ear, that it is deserving of resources that allow people to live full and whole lives while also providing meaningful content to an audience and to participants?”
When it comes the question of funding, artists often feel helpless — especially when they’re trying to build new, equitable organization models and new types of work.
“Look, I can bemoan the fact that art is undervalued in our world, which is worth bemoaning, don't get me wrong. At the same time, I think I can also say that I can do better at talking about ‘why’ instead of ‘what.’ I think what happens is, as [an] artist I want to talk to you about the “what.” I want to talk to you about the cool show we made and how we’re making it. But what you may care about is the why. What function is it serving? How is it moving our world forward? How is it affecting your community and your way of thinking? I think that if we could really focus our storytelling about our work on the why, we might increase our chances of getting the meaningful support and buy in we need.”
He pauses and adds, “I get it. I'm an artist, I wish people just took for granted our world is filled with art, and why do we have to justify its value and the function it serves? But if I live in that resentment, I'm going to defeat my purpose. And so, I have to live in, ‘Okay. My job is to talk about the why. My job is to say what purpose it serves in our world. And I can't just take it for granted you know that.’ And I wonder how that could shift the conversation.”
