Episode 22: What if? What now?: Aaron Landsman on theater, cities, loneliness and communion
In episode 22, I speak with New York-based multidisciplinary artist Aaron Landsman about his 20-year project, Perfect City, a working group at the intersection of art, organizing, popular education and urban design. We discuss how our relationship to our Jewishness has been affected by the ongoing in violence Gaza, and we think together about the tension between utopian imagining—the “what if”—and the present-time demand to take care of one another within systemic challenges—the “what now.” We swirl around the topic of “communion,” both as a gathering together and as an imbibing of the holy through joyous embodied practice. We then turn to Aaron’s multi-platform theater piece, “Night Keeper,” which takes up loneliness and insomnia’s horrors. Finally, we talk about the suicides of friends and about embracing unruly faith practices: where is the way when there is no way?
Books, texts, and spaces mentioned or discussed
Aaron Landsman, “This is a Rehearsal”
Aaron Landsman, Norman Westberg, and Jehan Young, “Night Keeper” (album)
Emmanuel Lévinas, Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis
Emmanuel Lévinas, “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,” trans. Sean Hand
Music by Ben Roberts: Benjamin.Roberts447@gmail.com
Comments and ideas to Juliealicecarr@gmail.com
Aaron Landsman
Aaron Landsman is a multidisciplinary artist. Born in Minnesota, living in New York City, he is obsessed with cities, shadows, anonymity and how we perform power. His parents are a Jewish teacher and legal scholar and a non-Jewish teacher and writer. Aaron's recent work Night Keeper premiered at The Chocolate Factory Theater in 2023, and is now out as an album on Hallow Ground Records, created in collaboration with composer Norman Westberg (ex-SWANS) and performer Jehan Young. He is working on a game that is a performance score about algorithms. His prior work has been commissioned and presented in the US, Netherlands, UK, Australia, Norway, Serbia and Belarus. Aaron is the founder of Perfect City, a working group at the intersection of art, organizing, popular education and design. His awards include a Creative Capital Grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Princeton Arts Fellowship. He is the instigator of Perfect City, a 20-year working group dedicated to uplifting local knowledge in cities and changing power dynamics in communities. He co-authored The City We Make Together with Mallory Catlett, published by The University of Iowa Press. Additional pieces of writing have appeared recently, or will soon, in Urban Omnibus, Longleaf Review, The Iowa Review, Spoon River Poetry and Theater Magazine. He is a Lecturer at Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts.
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