Shifting Grounds: Performance Night 1

Saturday, November 14, 2026

7:00 PM

Arts & Culture

Shifting Grounds: Performance Night 1

CPR - Center for Performance Research

361 Manhattan Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11211, USA

Shifting Grounds: New Jewish Art Festival is a two-day multidisciplinary arts festival exploring the range of art created by Jewish artists working in and around Brooklyn today. Presented by The Neighborhood: An Urban Center for Jewish Life on November 14 and 15, the weekend features a group exhibition, two evening performance programs and a Sunday morning workshop for families.

The first evening of Shifting Grounds brings together music, theater, poetry, dance, and puppetry to explore Jewish mythology, history, and contemporary life. Moving between the intimate and the collective, the performances engage with themes of transformation, power, love, and belonging through experimental approaches to storytelling, sound, and movement.

Saturday, November 14’s performance features:

Eli Berman’s Litanies of Lilith: an electro puppet opera work-in-progress depicting Lilith’s transformation from the first wife of Adam into the primordial mother of demons. Written, composed, and performed by Eli Berman, Litanies of Lilith features Yiddish translations by Moishe Dolman, and sounds generated through voice and wearable electronics as well as beats and drones made from vocal samples.

Catherine (C. Francis) Fisher’s Fresh Hell: a performance which brings together dance by Florence Nasar and music by Ira Gamerman featuring excerpts from Fisher’s forthcoming book-length poem.

Ira Gamerman’s Humorous Musings: a collection of short pieces on fame, surveillance, love, and isolation.

Ben Gassman’s The Board Minutes of Union Temple (1939-1947): a theatrical collaboration with Rachel Gita Karp and Lindsey Hope Pearlman depicting Louis Hamburger’s growing intolerance of fellow board member Charles Cohen.

Featured Artists

Eli Berman

Eli Berman is a Brooklyn-based vocalist, composer, producer, and sound artist originally from Pittsburgh, PA. Her music weaves together extended vocal techniques and experimental electronics with Ashkenanzi Jewish cantorial prayer, Yiddish and Appalachian ballads, and western classical repertoire for countertenor, baritone, and choir. She builds and performs with custom “vocal feedback pipes”—amplified PVC and steel tubes rigged with animal hides, transducers, and effects pedals that transform her voice and generate resonant acoustic feedback. As a member of Kleztronica, a collective mixing house, techno, klezmer, and Jewish liturgical music, Eli creates club, ambient, and noise music entirely from processed vocal samples. She has performed across North America and Europe at venues such as Ars Nova, National Sawdust, Morgan Library & Museum, Watermill Center, Centro Cultural Ollin Yoliztli (Mexico City, MX), Banff Centre (Alberta, CA), Neues Nationalgalerie (Berlin, DE), Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm (Frankfurt, DE), Yiddish Summer Weimar (Weimar, DE), and the Monastery of Saint Martin Pinario (Santiago de Compostela, ES). In 2025, Eli received the David C. and Thelma G. Driskell Award for Creative Excellence from the University of Maryland for her multimedia collaboration with artists Bonita Oliver and Armond Dorsey. In addition to composing and recording music for albums, film, and video games, Eli regularly performs as a countertenor soloist and chamber vocalist at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin in Times Square, St. Thomas Church Fifth Avenue, and other congregations throughout New York City.

Cathering (C.) Francis Fisher

C. Francis Fisher is a poet and translator. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Yale Review, the New England Review, and the Adroit Journal among others. Her first book of translations, In the Glittering Maw: Selected Poems of Joyce Mansour, appeared with World Poetry Books in 2024. She has been supported by residencies and fellowships from Yaddo and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. She is currently a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the City University of New York Graduate Center.

Her current project is a book-length poem that tries to reimagine the epic form. Written in a single sentence, this feminist project aims to rid the genre of hero and plot.

She also works as a curator for two event series in NYC: Colloquy, which invites translators for readings and conversations about literary translations, and RINSE: Works in Progress which brings together artists of all disciplines for short performances.

Ira Gamerman

Ira Lawrence Gamerman (He/We) is a writer, actor, and musician based in Brooklyn. (SAG-AFTRA) Screen: David Byrne’s “Everybody Laughs”, The Last OG (TBS) , East New York (CBS). Recent stage acting credits: The Edge Of Nature by Josh Fox (La MaMa), Doomers by Matthew Gasda (Brooklyn Center For Theater Research). Ira’s scriptwriting has been showcased by Kennedy Center, Mortified Live, Chashama, KGB Bar, Radiotopia’s The Truth, House Of Yes, The Flea, Collaboraction (@ Steppenwolf Garage), Australian Broadcast Corporation, Baltimore Playwright’s Festival, Samuel French OOB, Great Plains Theatre Conference, and Chicago New Media Summit as well as many other places around the globe. His play Moving The Eruv is a 2025 Script Competition Semifinalist at Austin Film Festival. Ira makes music with a haunted electric mandolin that was gifted by his estranged grandmother. Listen to AMBNT MNDLN, and Ira Lawrence’s Haunted Mandolin on all streaming services. Awards: New York Innovative Theater Award Nomination for Best Short Play, Best Playwright of Baltimore (City Paper), playwriting grants from Maryland State Arts Council and Chicago Union League. BILLY BITCHASS is published in BEST 10 MINUTE PLAYS OF 2016 by Smith & Kraus. Ira provided dramaturgy for David Finnigan’s Scenes From The Climate Era at The Cell in 2023. Ira’s Freelance Arts Journalism has been published by Antics, High Times, Pitchfork, Consequence of Sound, and Howlround. Ira taught playwriting and theater classes at Kingsborough Community College and Ohio University. Ira is cofounder of Misfits For Democracy a progressive political phone-banking group who partnered with PA Stands Up, Sunrise, DSA, Korean American Democratic Committee, NEXTGen, for many electoral victories.

Ben Gassman

Ben Gassman writes plays and texts for performance. His most recent works are the plays Adult Relationships (2025) and Botte di Ferro (2021), and the installation Between The Bread, which he conceived with Brandon Woolf under the banner of Culinary Theater (2023). Ben's work is interested in density and difference, and fueled by the rhythms of the spoken language of outer borough New York. He is interested in the way the global gets siphoned into the local.

Rachel Gita Karp

Rachel Gita Karp writes and directs performances to change US politics and policy. In particular she focuses on protecting reproductive freedom and bodily autonomy, supporting voting and voters, and increasing gender representation in government.

Trained in writing and directing, with backgrounds in theater, history, and activism, Rachel has created political performances in New York through Clubbed Thumb, Ars Nova, Mabou Mines, New Georges, The Drama League, Irondale, Judson Memorial Church, The Wild Project, The Brick, The Flea, LaGuardia Performing Arts Center, Brooklyn Arts Council, New York Foundation for the Arts, Re/Venue, IRT, Dixon Place, Incubator Arts Project, Anonymous Ensemble, Women Center Stage, and Network of Ensemble Theatres. Regionally, her work has been produced at La Jolla Playhouse, Actors Theatre of Louisville, the Pennsylvania Center for Women and Politics, and Philly Fringe, and she has written and directed productions at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Chatham University, Columbia University, and Carnegie Mellon University.

Rachel has held residencies across the US including at Marble House Project, SPACE on Ryder Farm, Tofte Lake Center, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Barn Arts, Monson Arts, Wildacres, and Stove Works. She was a Beatrice Terry Resident Director at The Drama League, a Directing Fellow at Clubbed Thumb, a Resident Artist at Mabou Mines, and a Resident Director at The Flea. She is a member of the Lincoln Center Theater’s Director Lab and an affiliated artist with New Georges. Rachel has associate and assistant directed productions on Broadway, Off-, and regional. Currently she works as a director at the Center for Artistic Activism, where she helps advocates bring more strategic creativity to their socially-engaged work – and gets endless inspiration to continue her own. BA: Columbia. MFA: Carnegie Mellon.

Lindsey Hope Pearlman

Lindsey Hope Pearlman is a director and playwright specializing in new plays and musicals. Original plays: Lucy (EST/Sloan Commission), Viv is for Vengeance (American Playwriting Foundation Relentless Award Honorable Mention), Cassandra Complex. Broadway: Bandstand (Assistant Director), Leap of Faith (SDC Observer). Selected Off-Broadway: The Art Tour (Theater Row), A Sign of the Times (Book writer, New World Stages), The Shoebox (SheNYC @ The Connelly), The Unrepentant Necrophile (HERE Arts Center), Zodiac Math (Mitu580). Selected Regional: MacGyver the Musical (Co-book writer, Stages, Houston TX), SuperYou (Associate Director, Skylight Music Theater, Milwaukee WI), The Rocky Horror Show Live! (The Strand Theater, Rockland ME). She received a NYSCA commission and a Venturous Theatre Fund grant for her new musical ROAR!, currently in development. Drama League NY Directing Fellow. Member, Bread Arts Collective. Graduate of London International School of Performing Arts, Hamilton College. Adjunct Professor, Pace University.

Saturday, November 14, 2026

7:00 PM

Shifting Grounds: Performance Night 1

CPR - Center for Performance Research

361 Manhattan Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11211, USA

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