Shifting Grounds: Performance Night 2

Sunday, November 15, 2026

5:00 PM

Arts & Culture

Shifting Grounds: Performance Night 2

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 second evening of Shifting Grounds brings together vocal improvisation, poetry, theater, and video to explore the relationships between language, memory, ritual, and belonging. Drawing on Jewish musical traditions, histories, and cultural practices, the performances question how borders, collective memory, and inherited narratives shape our understanding of identity and place.

Sunday, November 15’s performance features:

Paul Amitai’s Trope Variations: an improvisational vocal performance based on the musical notation system of trope. Used for centuries as a guide to chanting the Torah, the system consists of graphic symbols that convey meaning and melody to the performer. For Trope Variations, the symbols act as visual prompts for vocal improvisation, with the original melodies used as source material that's reconfigured into new arrangements. The melodic patterns are processed with audio effects to create a lush, meditative soundscape. Every performance is unique.

Talia Bloch’s Words Are Belongings: a reading of poems at the intersection of language, place, and identity.

Noah Crandell’s This Is (Not) a Holocaust Memorial: a theatrical performance examining how Holocaust memory has been shaped by nationalism, ideology, tourism, and shifting political interests, tracing memorial culture from postwar Europe to the present. The piece, directed by Rachel Gita Karp, questions whether memorials keep history alive or allow us to outsource the work of remembering, ultimately asking what it might mean to stop building memorials and even to forget.

Aviv Keshet’s Wail: a performance exploring the wail as a ritual, image, and symbol.

Nessa Norich’s A Grenets-Mayse (A Border-Story): a video installation that mines imagery and rituals from Yiddish healing practices traditionally performed by women, folktales, and song to present Jewish diasporic reflections on the concept of ‘borders.’ This site-specific work was created in collaboration with the Hereland Collective in Białowieza, a dense forest straddling the Poland-Belarus border, a region facing increased militarization and a current migrant crisis.

Featured Artists

Paul Amitai

Paul Amitai is an artist, musician, and curator who has exhibited and performed internationally. He’s been an artist-in-residence at the Frankfurter Kunstverein, Banff Centre, and Harvestworks. Paul was formerly Senior Curator at Eyebeam Art & Technology Center and currently leads the sound design agency, Listen, in New York.

Amitai's treats sound like paint or sculpture — an additive and reductive process shaped in real-time, blending studio-based experimentation, live improvisation, and site-specific installations. Since 2021, he's released three albums that reflect this painterly approach, using voice as the sole instrument. With guitar effects pedals as colors and textures, Amitai has explored turning voice into something elastic and uncanny, yet grounded in physical, human presence. These improvisations aim to create immersive sonic paintings and environments that evoke a sacred experience.

In 2025, he received a Ruth Arts Mary L. Nohl Alumni Award to develop the vocal performance project, Trope Variations, which uses Torah cantillation as the basis for live improvisation. A set of thirty graphic marks, each representing a different melody, provide the creative prompts for performance. Inspired by Brian Eno’s “Oblique Strategies” and John Cage’s use of the I Ching to introduce chance operations into music, Trope Variations are never performed the same way twice. The melodic motifs are the building blocks of a performance, rearranged, sequenced, and reinterpreted in new ways every time it’s performed.

Extracting the graphics and melodies from their original function brings the vocabulary into a new context, eliciting the past but through a personal, contemporary reinterpretation. The result is a distinctive approach to structured improvisation, where both vocal samples and live vocalizations are layered and processed to create lush, ambient soundscapes. Situated between extended-duration sound performances, loop-based minimalism, and immersive sound baths, Trope Variations is an exploration in redefining how the sacred or sublime might sound.

Talia Bloch

Talia Bloch is the author of the poetry collection Inheritance (Gold Wake Press). Her second manuscript was a finalist for the National Poetry Series Competition as well as several other prizes. Her poems have appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Copper Nickel, Denver Quarterly, North American Review, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, River Styx, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. Her work has been selected for Best Small Fictions 2020, a Pleiades Editor’s Prize for Emerging Poets, and for Reading the Body: Poetry & Dance on Recovery, a film coproduced by Bellevue Literary Review and The Paige Fraser Foundation that has won awards internationally. Talia’s work has received support from the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska, Monson Arts in Maine, and Yetzirah. Much of her work looks for the line between being a passive observer and an active participant both in one’s private life and in the public arena. Her journalism covering culture and religion, as well as genetics and health, has appeared in outlets such as Aufbau, The Brooklyn Rail, JTA, and The Forward, and she participated in a project with The City newspaper, honoring the lives of those lost to the Covid-19 pandemic. Born and raised in the Bronx, NY, Talia currently lives in Brooklyn. She holds an MA from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and a BA in comparative literature from Yale University. She has worked as a reporter, editor, translator, teacher, fellowship administrator, and immigrant-petition-advocacy writer. She has also spent time in a community lab and currently teaches poetry classes in the community.

Noah Crandell

Noah Crandell is a Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary performance practitioner whose work explores memory, history, and their contemporary afterlives. He has presented work at Dixon Place, TheaterLab, Prelude Festival, and Creative Time HQ, and has been an artist in residence at Holyrad Studio and Otion Front Studio. He received a Tow International Research Grant to perform at the Riga Performance Festival in Latvia, where he conducted field research across Eastern Europe at sites of genocide and memorialization. Crandell is a member of the collective What Would an HIV Doula Do, contributing writing to their zines We Remind You, HIV and Palestine, and What Is an AIDS Worker? He has worked as a facilitator with Perfect City at Trenton HomeWorks and Bard College and is an upcoming resident at the Vashon Artist Residency. He received his BFA in Drama from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts and is an
MFA candidate in Performance and Interactive Media Arts at Brooklyn College.

Aviv Keshet

Aviv Keshet is a multidisciplinary artist and performer, born in Jerusalem (1995) and currently based in Princeton, NJ. Keshet is a 2022 graduate of the School of Visual Theater in Jerusalem.
Keshet's practice integrates bodies, objects, and spaces as components of equal agency, cultivating work that straddles the divide between performance and the plastic arts. Working across media predicated on supposedly clear divides—the moving subject of dance, the silent object of sculpture, and the inert, homogeneous space presumed to hold them—Keshet investigates the body's role as a knowing object and how objects act upon the body. Through embodied philosophies and social constructs, Keshets work channels the relationship between individual and society, seeking transformation through deep understanding.
Recent work includes One Thing (2025) HaMiffal, Jerusalem, Red Blanket and Flatland (2025) Kfar Saba City Gallery, A Man Walked… (2024) Givat Haviva Shared Art Center,
Keshet has completed residencies at HaMiffal (2025), Givat Haviva Shared Art Center (AIR 2024) and Nekudat Katze (2022-2023).

Nessa Norich

Nessa Norich is a filmmaker, theater artist, ritual facilitator, and somatic coach.

Nessa's award-winning original theatrical works have toured as far as New Delhi, and have shown at such notable venues as the Edinburgh Fringe, the British Film Institute, and the Getty Villa. In 2019, Nessa made their screen directing debut with the queer episodic fantasy series The Fae. Her first short film, Jelly Bean, which she wrote, directed, and starred in, was a 2022 NYC Women’s Fund recipient and the Official Selection of twenty-two International Film Festivals, including Academy Award-Qualifying Flicker’s Rhode Island, where Nessa received the award for Best Actress. As an actor, Nessa has starred in several feature and short films and guest-starred in HBO’s High Maintenance.

In her work, Nessa reimagines and reinterprets fairytales, myths, and rituals as documentation of ancestral wisdom, preserved to fortify our relationship to the spiritual aspects of our humanity and the natural world. Nessa composes colorful, stylized, satirical narratives for performance and film from found materials and sources, employing a devising methodology in which the performing ensemble collaboratively generates material through research, discussion, and embodied experimentation. Nessa's interest in adaptation is inspired by the traditional Jewish practice of studying biblical texts, which is characterized by linguistic analysis and interpretation - executed in a relational practice of knowledge-formation. Narrative is preserved through its ongoing revision. Nessa’s collaborators are invited to reflect on the themes of these classic stories through their own life experiences, pop culture references, and sensory-scapes. Sources are woven together with archetypal stories, revising them as mirrors for our current times and as maps for future generations.

Nessa trained in physical theater at the Lecoq School in Paris, with David Neumann and Diane Paulus at Barnard. In May, she will graduate from NYU Tisch with a Master’s in Arts Politics.

Sunday, November 15, 2026

5:00 PM

Shifting Grounds: Performance Night 2

CPR - Center for Performance Research

361 Manhattan Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11211, USA

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