Come enjoy this night of Klezmer & Yiddish folk songs to dance to played by Western Massachusetts' Ta-Ra-Ram Klezmer and Yiddish band.
Sliding scale donations accepted at the door: $0 to $18
Hope to see you there!
Read their Bios:
Weaver (vocals, banjo) is a director, writer, performer, translator, and Yiddish dance leader. They are a puppet and mask designer, and co-founder/co-artistic director of The People’s Puppet Parade, a radical community parade based around the Jewish calendar which facilitates youth leadership and cultural literacy. They co-founded Theater Between Addresses, an all-queer theater collective which produces new work and supports new play development. They are the storyteller of the performance collective Magid Ensemble.
Rachel Leader (violin) is passionate about cultivating vibrant community-led spaces, and is a klezmer violinist, cultural organizer, and educator based in Northampton, MA. She is a founding member of the critically acclaimed klezmer quartet Mamaliga, performing and teaching internationally at Yiddish Summer Weimar, KlezKanada, and Yiddish New York. Rachel is also a founder, violinist, and producer of the Magid Ensemble’s "Shterna & The Lost Voice," an immersive musical storytelling production that transports audiences into the rich world of Yiddish folklore. Rachel received the 2021 Klezmer New Leaders Fellowship from the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music, and is a founding member of in-demand klezmer bands Burikes, A Glezele Tey, among other projects. She also regularly performs with Chaia (Kleztronica), blending house and techno grooves with electric fiddle and archival samples to create innovative soundscapes of Jewish diasporic identity. Rachel is the co-founder and director of KlezCummington, an annual klezmer and Yiddish cultural festival on her family’s land in Cummington, MA.
Ariel Shapiro (accordion, vocals) is a klezmer accordionist, cultural organizer, and multi-disciplinary artist based on Nipmuc and Pocumtuc land in so-called Northampton, Massachusetts. Ariel believes deeply in the transformative power of music and art that is centered around community and intergenerational relationship-building, rooted in culturally-informed history and artistic practices, and committed to justice and collective care work. Ariel is a core organizer of KlezCummington, an annual Jewish cultural festival dedicated to the creation and deepening of Yiddish diasporic music and cultures, as well the People's Puppet Parade, a community-based, devised spectacle theater processional exploring radical histories and communal expressions of grief and joy. Ariel is a founding member of klezmer bands Burikes, A Glezele Tey, and Khaloymes, performing fresh takes on traditional klezmer tunes and Yiddish songs, leading community jams and zingerays (Yiddish sing-alongs), and accompanying Yiddish dancing and theatrical productions, including Jenny Romaine/Great Small Work’s “Three Cookbooks in the Garden: A stage illusion”, The Un-nameable Children's Project “Across the Ninefold River”, and Weaver’s “Inhabiting the Tsadik of the Woods”. Ariel also collaborates with Der Tkhines Proyekt, setting old Yiddish prayers (written for and by women and gender non-conforming folks) to new melodies, and composing new works to be sung in the streets, around kitchen tables, and anywhere they can be used to help tear down systems of injustice to build a frayer velt (a freer world).
Ozzy Irving Gold-Shapiro is a curious historian, Yiddishist/Jewish cultural organizer, performing artist, educator, translator, and raconteur living on Nipmuc, Pocumtuc, and Nonotuck land in so-called western Massachusetts. As one of the co-organizers of The People’s Puppet Parade, they orchestrate multigenerational, community-led spectacle theater parades based on Jewish folk art, music, culture, and radical histories. They sing and play ukulele in the klezmer band Burikes and co-organize Klezcummington, a yearly festival dedicated to the creation and deepening of Yiddish diasporic cultures. They have been involved as a researcher, translator, and performer in a number of archival Yiddish-based performance projects that seek to destabilize traditional historical narratives, including Jenny Romaine’s “The Revival of the Gravediggers of Uzda,” Weaver's "Plague Wedding," and “Vu bistu geven?/Where Have You Been?. They are also a Jewish educator, teaching lesser-known histories through food and pickling workshops, as well as a bilingual field fellow for the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project. They have witnessed the power of music and theater in struggles for liberation, and love forging connections, building community on and off the stage, and creating joyous and raucous occasions to support local mutual aid work!