REVIEW: Seder by Adam Kammerling for the Living Roots Festival

The Living Record Festival was an eclectic mix of content available earlier this year which was interesting and intriguing, and I would say something for everyone in the offer. Some of those pieces like the excellent Finney’s Ghost are still available on the Living Record Productions website and later in May, they will be hosting content for the Brighton Fringe Festival. It is a lucky dip with a wide range of topics, production styles and performers. My latest dip into the offer was Adam Kammerling’s twenty-two-minute piece called Seder. He is promoted as a poet and artist examining intergenerational trauma and celebrating the rituals we make for connection. It asks how history connects us, and considers, through the annual Jewish custom of the Seder, how all of us can celebrate our survival.

I knew nothing about the Jewish Passover ritual feast marking the first and often second night of the Passover, which began on 27th March this year in which families gather around the table to retell stories of liberation of Israelites from slavery in Egypt as told in Exodus. Kommerling uses the event and the table setting in his home as the springboard for a series of short poems and recollections accompanied by Antosh Wojeck on the drums and Bellatrix on strings and vocals which are used to underscore his words or provide strange musical interludes.

Some of it resonates powerfully with everyone, other pieces are obscure and hard to relate to and the visuals used to accompany the words are puzzling and, in my mind, unexplained. It works best when he peers up into the camera from behind the microphone and we engage with him and listen to his words. The words about not seeing Grandparents for nearly a year and therefore them not yet meeting his newborn son capture the sense we all feel after lockdown. As does the poem about “same walls, same floor, same faces and same sounds” and the strange idea that “time has slowed down and sped up” at the same time. The idea that “linear time has collapsed, distinguished only by the weather, warped into one blur” is a powerful metaphor for the last year. When we see him, his voice is elevated, and we hear the emotion behind the words. In the voice-over pieces his voice is often gently monotonal, perhaps detached from the subject. 

Much of it may connect with his own community better than with me. I needed more information to understand and engage and generally, the visuals did not provide it. References to a large, monumental gate built by Hitler, delousing sheds, and mass graves I can understand but references to the “fear of what can come through the glass” or the snakes in the garden were unfathomable. The pictures of shoes and boots and close-ups of his face, hair and arm added confusion rather than insight. The references to goldfish completely lost me but sent me to Wikipedia for a clue. Was it a reference to Jewish families in Nazi Germany being forbidden to have pets or perhaps to the shock artist Marco Evaristti’s horrific sounding work in Denmark of goldfish in blenders in an art gallery? He says he is an educationalist so perhaps my response to enquiry was what he sought to create. I never got a sense of the Seder event itself and with isolation, I suppose it was impossible to see the intergenerational family together, but images of family could have been used to create this. However, I did learn about the custom and its importance as a result of watching and found the ideas thought-provoking and challenging and for me that is what makes the Living Record an interesting platform and one, I shall return to. 

Review by Nick Wayne

Rating: ★★★

Seat: Online | Price of Ticket: £5