workshops

Find the funny in you

In Irwin Levin’s upcoming Jewish Humour Playshop, participants will discover and/or build upon their own creativity and sense of humour through improv games, written and spoken exercises.

With a background in stand-up comedy and improvisation, Levin is a man with a message: “Everyone is funny!” He encourages community members (18+) to join in his three-hour “playshop” at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver on Oct. 19, starting at 10:15 a.m.

“Come as you are, ready to play and have some laughs!” he told the Independent, adding, “I’m looking forward to teaching fellow members of the tribe at this unique event, where we can let loose and be the funny people we know we are.”

Featured exercises will include Wisdom from Chelm, Mensch on the Bench, and Jokes from Jewish Entertainers.

photo - Irwin Levin encourages community members to join his Oct. 19 improv playshop at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver — Irwin Levin encourages community members to join his Oct. 19 improv playshop at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver. “Come as you are, ready to play and have some laughs!” he said. (photo from Irwin Levin)

Levin has had what he calls “a wicked sense of humour” since childhood.

“Being funny is very important to me,” he said. ”I hated school because of problems with focus, and I didn’t bond well with other kids. My solace was making kids, teachers and others laugh, but, most importantly, I made myself laugh – like when I was 17 and accidentally reversed my dad’s car instead of going forwards, thus making a hole in the side of the garage and then crashing through the back onto our back lawn. After being very upset, I had the thought that we have the only three-door garage on the block – that made me laugh and helped me a lot.

“The point is, sometimes it helps to look at the funny side of life. Laughter is very healthy and sometimes necessary, especially in a stressful world. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take life seriously, but it’s always nice to find someone to laugh with or on your own.”

Over the last five years, Levin has taken improv classes from David C. Jones, stand-up comedy classes with David Granirer and sketch comedy classes at Blind Tiger Comedy. He has performed at China Cloud Studios in Vancouver and is currently teaching a three-month improv series at Carousel Theatre with his wife, Cass Freeman.

“I started taking stand-up courses before improv, to see if that was something I wanted to do for a living. Around that time, I started dating Cass and she was into improv and got me interested. This was in the mid-’90s,” Levin said.

“Improv can relieve stress, reduce stage fright and improve self-esteem,” Freeman told the Independent in an interview a few years ago about the theatrical form. (See jewishindependent.ca/many-reasons-to-learn-improv.) “Improv games encourage creativity, quick thinking and communication skills, and are a great tool for breaking the ice, having fun and building team spirit,” she said.

“When taking classes, improv is mostly playing games and doing short scenes,” Levin explained about what people can expect at his upcoming playshop. “There are no mistakes in improv! In improv, you aren’t trying to say funny things – you say things funny. The comedy just comes organically in a scene.

“The games in my playshop will be low pressure, because a lot of the exercises will be written, so that participants can take their time with coming up with answers and read out in a circle. Also, they don’t have to participate in any game that they won’t be comfortable playing.”

The cost to attend Levin’s Jewish Humour Playshop is $30 or pay what you can. People can register by texting Levin at 778-862-4638.

Klezcadia set to return

Bay Area klezmer trio Veretski Pass returns to Klezcadia, which runs in-person and online June 10-15. (photo from Klezcadia)

Klezcadia, a festival of klezmer music and Yiddish culture, is back for a second year. The June 10-15 event can be experienced in-person in Victoria or virtually from around the world.

The 2025 festival, free for all who register, features author and playwright Michael Wex, who will be offering a two-part webinar titled Jews, Germans and Jive: Yiddish as a Language of Resistance.

Wex, the author of the bestseller Born to Kvetch and Just Say Nu, will be delivering the talks from his home in Toronto. No stranger to Vancouver audiences, his play, The Last Night at the Cabaret Yitesh (Di Letste Nakht Baym Yitesh), in which he also performed, closed the 2024 Chutzpah! Festival.

Laura Rosenberg, the director and driving force behind Klezcadia, said Wex “is arguably the most famous person to interpret the public impact of the Yiddish language on the English language.”

She told the Independent that the festival’s mission, operating principles and format will be the same as they were in its inaugural season. “The performance and workshop content, on the other hand, will be completely new for 2025, though obviously within the same klezmer music and Yiddish culture arena as last year, and involving many of the same artists and faculty members,” she said.

Between in-person and virtual attendees, Klezcadia had more than 500 participants from 21 countries in 2024 and the 2025 registration looks to be at least on par with those data, according to Rosenberg.

“Everything from concerts to workshops to open rehearsals is designed to equalize as much as possible the experience of in-person and virtual participants,” she said. “And, thanks to our generous donors, registration is once again free.”

Other notable appearances this year include returning Bay Area klezmer trio Veretski Pass, who will appear on both the concert and workshop rosters. Members Cookie Segelstein (violin), Joshua Horowitz (19th-century button accordion) and Stuart Brotman (bass) play a wide variety of East European numbers. This year, they will offer “band-to-band master classes” with two Victoria-based klezmer ensembles.

Vancouver singer/songwriter Geoff Berner, joined by Segelstein, will perform songs from his upcoming album – Berner’s first to be completely in Yiddish. Over the past 25 years, Berner has toured in 17 countries, opened for rock stars in stadiums and, the Klezcadia notes state, “played nearly every dirty little café bar in Western Europe.”

Klezcadia 2025 will see the Victoria debut of Jordan Wax, a rising star on the Yiddish singer/songwriter scene, who will share music from his newly released album, The Heart Deciphers, on the Borscht Beat label. The New Mexico musician blends many influences, from the Missouri Ozarks to the Indo-Hispanic world and the entire Ashkenazic diaspora.

Christina Crowder, director of the Klezmer Institute, based in Yonkers, NY, will be on hand to perform century-old music rediscovered in Ukraine’s Vernadsky Library, which recently was published for global use via the Kiselgof-Makonovetsky Digital Manuscript Project.

As it did in 2024, this year’s festival will conclude with the entire Klezcadia cohort performing a finale concert at the Stage in the Park (Cameron Bandshell) in Victoria’s Beacon Hill Park.

Billing itself as “A Safer Shtetl,” Klezcadia’s hybrid environment prioritizes the safe experience of immunocompromised and high-risk participants, for the performers, crew and volunteers, and for attendees. Indoor activities feature the use of protective protocols such as supplemental air purification, required masking and daily onsite COVID testing.

“We learned from our inaugural-season experience that our fully hybrid format was extremely valuable, both to our immunocompromised and high-risk participants, but also to a vast number of people who, for geographic or financial reasons, were unable to attend in person,” Rosenberg said.

Rosenberg gives credit to other members of the Klezcadia team for helping with the various technical tools needed to put together a hybrid festival. She said some of the evolving challenges faced in viral safety and communal safety, and the current cross-border political situation, have provided added appreciation to how much a hybrid design can be adapted at short notice, if needed.

People who were not able to attend a live event in 2024 have expressed their thanks to Rosenberg in the lead-up to this year’s festival.

“One of my greatest delights in the intervening year since our inaugural season has been hearing what a difference Klezcadia made to our immunocompromised and high-risk attendees,” she said. “Whether local or halfway across the world, many of these people have felt shut out of their communities, including their Jewish cultural communities, and they expressed in heartfelt terms how life-changing it was for them to be able to participate in a cultural festival that prioritized their safety but was open to everyone.”

All Klezcadia events will take place within a 10-minute drive from downtown Victoria. Specific venue information will be provided only after registration, and only to in-person participants. For more information, visit klezcadia.org.

Sam Margolis has written for the Globe and Mail, the National Post, UPI and MSNBC.

Tell your own “crankie” stories

Where Do Stories Come From? (fun vanen nemen zikh di mayses) on Nov. 9 highlights a poem from each of three Yiddish women writers: Ida Maze, Esther Shumiatcher-Hirschbein and Yudika. (Illustration by Cesario Lavery)

This year’s Chutzpah! Festival includes several opportunities for people to participate in the arts being performed. A prime example is Where Do Stories Come From? (fun vanen nemen zikh di mayses), wherein attendees of the Nov. 9 event at the Rothstein Theatre will be able to learn new music inspired by Yiddish poetry and, in the Zack Gallery, on Nov. 7 and/or Nov. 12, participate in a “crankie” workshop.

Where Do Stories Come From?, which is presented by the Chutzpah! Festival and KlezKanada – co-curated by the organizations’ respective artistic directors, Jessica Mann Gutteridge and Avia Moore – includes “new musical and visual settings for three Yiddish poems by celebrated Canadian women writers, selected and translated by Faith Jones, with accompanying visual artwork in the form of ‘crankies’ – a centuries-old art form in which an illustrated scroll, evocative of the Torah, is wound across spools set in a viewing window.”

The artistic directors decided early on to work with the poetry of Canadian women writers who wrote in Yiddish, said Gutteridge, “and there was no more perfect collaborator to work with on selecting the poetry than Vancouver’s own Faith Jones. For the musical work, we drew on the incredibly rich community of KlezKanada’s artists and were lucky that Sarah Larsson was interested in the project – she’s not only a gifted composer with a thorough knowledge of Yiddish music, but is herself a stunning vocalist and music director.

“We also spent a lot of time looking at incredible artworks by Jewish visual artists and ultimately selected Benny Ferdman, Ava Berkson and Cesario Lavery, all of whom bring an interest in Yiddish, diverse styles, and interest in visual storytelling to the project. As part of the project involves community participation, we also ensured that all the artists are skilled at and enjoy working with community of all abilities and ages.”

The idea for the event came after Gutteridge met Moore at a KlezKanada Summer Retreat in 2022.

“When the JCC Association announced they would be funding new community-based projects incorporating live music and storytelling with an emphasis on partnerships,” said Gutteridge, “we realized we had a wonderful opportunity to work together to share our assets – KlezKanada’s immersive creative residency environment and access to brilliant artists with knowledge of Yiddish culture, and the Chutzpah! Festival’s presentation opportunities.

“KlezKanada’s 2023 Summer Retreat theme was Yiddish film and, because it’s a very unplugged environment, had plans to explore the ‘pre-film’ illustrated story technique of crankies,” she continued. “We thought this art form would pair beautifully with the musical work being created, and would offer a very engaging opportunity to the community to participate in creating a multidimensional presentation together.”

Where Do Stories Come From? is supported by the JCC Association’s Making Music Happen program and Chutzpah! Festival’s music programming is supported by AmplifyBC’s Live Music Presentation Fund.

The event’s title comes from one of the three poems highlighted, one by Ida Maze. “It’s a poem that grabbed the entire group immediately and we knew we wanted to work with it,” said Gutteridge. “In the poem, Maze creates a strong visual image of a little house that appears to be abandoned, but as you approach you see that a fire is lit and, in the house, sit a grandfather and a grandmother sharing culture and stories with the children, and the stories are then carried away on the wind. For us, this poem really captured the idea of the project – that intergenerational cultural transmission is the key to how we survive and thrive and, in many ways, is a model for how we hope to see this project unfold. But I think the very notion that we pose this as a question invites everyone who experiences the work to ask themselves where they think stories come from.”

The other poems are by Esther Shumiatcher-Hirschbein and Yudika.

“Faith made a longer list of poems selected for their striking visual imagery and potential musicality and presented them to our full group of artists,” explained Gutteridge. “Right away, we all responded to the Ida Maze work and had to then narrow our choices to two more. We asked the artists to highlight which poems they found particularly inspiring and, as artistic directors, Avia and I also kept an eye on whether the selections were creating an interesting and balanced program in terms of style and theme. It was an enjoyable and smooth process and I think we all enjoyed kicking off the project together in this way.”

As for the workshops, Gutteridge said, “Ava and Cesario will be with us through the week to guide workshop participants through the process of making their own crankies, inspired by prompts from the poetry we will provide. While the crankies being made for the music event will be large scale, a wonderful characteristic of this art form is that it can be made any size using very humble materials like a shoebox or even a matchbox. With our partner the Zack Gallery, the work created in the workshops will be on display in a community exhibition, and our video director Flick Harrison will be on hand to help participants capture their crankies in action. Participants can opt to share their crankies and stories in an online video gallery. We hope we will see intergenerational groups making crankies together!”

During the week, Chutzpah! will also be hosting the return of the Flame, with their evening of storytelling on Nov. 6.

“The Flame’s artistic director, Deb Williams, will teach her remarkable day-long storytelling workshop on Sunday, Nov. 12, ending just before our final crankie workshop and the concert presentation,” said Gutteridge. “We hope that these projects together will inspire community participants to explore their own stories and find new and inspiring ways to tell and share them.”

For tickets to Where Do Stories Come From? and other Chutzpah! events, visit chutzpahfestival.com.