Purim Ball this Saturday night!

Your Homentaschen Are Killing Me! A Purim Masquerade Ball for the body, its resilience, its fragility, and its bounce! March 3rd, 2012
220 36th St, Industry City, Sunset Park, Brooklyn
D/N/R to 36th St or B35 to 39th St/2nd Ave
8pm–late
$12-$20 sliding scale
No one turned away for lack of cash or costume
Performance and food by Domestic Workers United

Performances start at 8pm sharp with Daddy, followed by
Purim Shpiel Act I
The Rude Mechanical Orchestra
Purim Shpiel Act II
Shelley Nicole's blaKbüshe
Purim Shpiel Act III
DJ Ripley

pre-show guest performances by Glenn Marla, Hana Malia, Shomi Noise and Kaitlin Prest

The event is wheelchair accessible.
Public Transportation directions to our venue at 220 W 36th St between 2nd and 3rd Avenues:
Take the D/N/R to the 36th street stop in Brooklyn. The venue is a block and a half down 36th street. This stop is not wheelchair accessible.
OR
The B35 bus stops at 39th Street and 2nd Ave, 3 short blocks from the venue. MTA buses are wheelchair accessible.

More about Purim and this year’s Shpiel

Purim is the Jewish festival of spring fever, of masquerade and parodies of all sacred things. It centers on the Scroll of Esther, the Megillah, a burlesque of a story that wears the mask of being a factual history. For centuries Jews have made homemade pageants like ours to tell this story and to talk about overreach—about how the powerful turn abysmally stupid and bring about their own destruction. But Purim also has a mystical side, and we learn from the Purim rabbis that this holiday is a campy stare at what scares us the most, in ourselves and in the world. It must be taken seriously.

(Your Homentaschen are Killing Me!) is an original work of art grounded in the traditional pan-Jewish practice of staging transgressive folk plays re-enacting the scroll of Esther, and delivering a fanciful, somewhat drunken but always profound, critique of power. At the heart of the event is a glittering original handmade Purim Shpiel. Expect oversize costumes and puppets, dazzling sets, the drag will be high, low and medium, and the age and gender spectrum will runneth over.

The theme of this year’s Purim Shpiel is the body, its fragility, strength, and resilience “Your Homentaschen are Killing Me” draws on themes of current campaign work and the long time work of artists and activists around issue/crisis of care in the US. We are using the bodies of the heroes of the megillah to tell stories from and related to the campaign work of Caring Across Generations (http://caringacrossgenerations.org/), dedicated to deepening and strengthening our understanding of care through the knowledge that we all give and receive care throughout our lives. This campaign’s innovative strategy brings together members of disability justice movement, home health care workers from Domestic Workers United (http://www.domesticworkersunited.org/) and domestic employers.

The Organizers

The party is created by a collaborative group of artists, activists and civilians
(including Julie Davids, Avi Fox-Rosen, Anna Jacobs, Daniel Roza Lang-Levitsky,
Dr. Rachel Mattson, Abigail Miller, LJ Roberts, Jenny Romaine, Zach Scholl, Hannah
Temple, Josh Waletzky, Cassandra Burrows, and the Occupy Wall Street Puppetry
Guild) in the style of a carnival mas camp. The crew, originally gathered under the
tutelage of visionary Yiddish scholar and beloved Diva Adrienne Cooper (to whom
this year’s Purim shpiel is dedicated), has been working together for a decade, in
collaboration with Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (http://www.jfrej.org),
Workmen’s Circle (http://www.circle.org), and Great Small Works (http://
www.greatsmallworks.org).