Holy Names for Our Dybbuk
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The ninth and final artist featured in the Rotating Gallery is Julie Weitz, who, along with her team of collaborators, invites for a ritual performance of a dybbuk exorcism. In Yiddish folklore tradition, the “dybbuk” is a wandering spirit that clings to a living body to communicate messages from the dead. Traditionally, a group of healers would loosen the spirit’s grip on the host body through a combination of interviews, prayers and rhythmic chanting, culminating in a profound public demonstration of collective transmutation.
- 25 September (Wednesday), 8PM
- Free admission, limited places, book a free ticket →
“Holy Names for Our Dybbuk” reimagines a dybbuk exorcism for our times, as a movement-based score and site-specific ritual. Taking place at sites of Jewish commemoration in Poland, the performance brings audiences and performers into direct and embodied encounters with Jewish memory, as it is embedded in the land. The performance features Julie Weitz, Jewish-American visual artist with Polish roots, as the dybbuk who becomes a channel for ancestral grief. Through rhythmic Hebrew chanting and postmodern Hasidic-inspired choreography, an ensemble of Polish dancers engages the dybbuk as the healers, creating a somatic and symbolic ritual to exorcize ancestral trauma from the collective body and the land.
The performance takes inspiration from the Ashkenazi shamans, known as ba’alei shem (masters of the name), who commonly used the holy names for god to assist in healing rituals. The movement score is inspired by Polish Jewish choreographer Yudith Berg, renowned for her contributions to the Yiddish film “Der Dibuk” (1937, Poland), combining modern dance with traditional Yiddish folk movement. The performance also features a powerful audio recording of Paula Spigler, a Holocaust survivor from Lodz, whose voice adds a poignant depth to the experience. During the performance, the audience is invited to participate in the ritual.
In this harrowing moment of grief and violence in Israel and Palestine, Weitz’s project seeks the wisdom of ancestors, hoping they might guide us in healing the traumas of our past, present, and future.
After the performance, we invite you to join a discussion with the creators.
Julie Weitz – Working across performance, film, installation, and photography, artist Julie Weitz accounts for the wounds and resilience of diasporic culture by creating embodied and collective experiences for repair. Weitz probes the potential for embodied performance art to activate concepts of diasporism and “doikayt“. “Doikayt“, meaning “hereness,” is a Yiddish organizing principle—popular in prewar Eastern Europe, it has re-emerged in the 21st century as a cultural and political framework for radical Jewish diasporism, standing in solidarity with global liberation movements.
Weitz’s performance art practice animates figures from Yiddish folklore and uses the interactions between figures and sites—especially those where Yiddish culture was all but eradicated—to explore themes of loss and healing through a diasporic lens. She engages with caricature, folklorism, and emplacement to historicize her work in relation to past, present, and future developments in Jewish culture.
Weitz is a U.S. Fulbright Scholar (2023–24) and Wallis Annenberg Helix Fellow at Yiddishkayt (2020–23). Her artwork has been exhibited at the Contemporary Jewish Museum (San Francisco), Galicia Jewish Museum (Krakow), Jewish Museum of Vienna (Austria), LAND (Los Angeles), Lambert Center for the Arts (NYC), and Judisches Museum (Germany). She has been featured in "Artforum", "Art in America", "Los Angeles Times", "The New York Times", "BOMB", and "Hyperallergic". Weitz received her BFA from the University of Texas and MFA from the University of Wisconsin. She is currently based in Warsaw.
Holly Names for Our Dybbuk
- Creator: Julie Weitz
- Choreographer: Magdalena Przybysz
- Concept: Julie Weitz
- Dramaturgy: Magdalena Przybysz
- Performers and co-creators of choreography: Magda Niedzielska, Michał Przybyła, Katarzyna Żeglicka
- Costumes: Julie Weitz, Jill Spector i Donna Stack
The year 2024 marks POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews’ 10th anniversary. To celebrate this occasion, we want to make the voices of Jewish artists heard by creating a rotating, lively, polyphonic space in the last gallery of the Core Exhibition—a space for Jewish artists to express themselves.
Read more about Rotating Gallery →
Partners:
Co-financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage – project: "Rotating Gallery as part of POLIN Museum’s 10th birthday celebration (developing a network of Jewish artists)."
