Search - The Renaissance Players :: The Sephardic Experience, Volume 3: Gazelle & Flea

The Sephardic Experience quadrilogy, is a priceless sound document in which The Renaissance Players present their own performance versions of well- and lesser-known romansas (ballads), kantigas (religious songs) and muwashshahat (poetical forms) which have survived for centuries entirely via oral/aural transmission by parents, grandparents, friends and acquaintances within the family circle, while working, or as a form of ad hoc entertainment in Sephardic communities of the West and East. Sadly, as the end of the 20th century draws near we are witnessing the alarming disappearance of Spanish-Jewish culture due to vast, worldwide changes in social circumstances. In fact, these songs are no longer a part of the rich, musical fabric of the everyday life of the Sephardim.The collection of Spanish-Jewish songs in this third volume, Gazelle and Flea, include satire, a panegyric addressed to a minstrel, wedding songs, laments, coplas, kantigas, and romansas. These are placed cheek-by-jowl with traditional dances from the Sephardim's host countries, Bulgaria, South Yugoslavia and Macedonia. The text covers themes of love from literal and figurative references involving animals, humans and insects (e.g. gazelle and flea) to more direct faces of love - courtships which are frustrated, sadly disappointed and sea/siren connected, and weddings, specifically the traditional marriage preparations with their expectations of nuptial bliss and love's frightful sufferings in a cycle of destruction-famine-exile. The songs and dances are performed with improvised decoration as the melodies to which these originally Hebrew texts were sung are lost forever in the ancient folk-memory.The four volumes of The Sephardic Experience (Thorns of Fire, Apples and Honey, Gazelle and Flea and Eggplants) can be purchased individually or together in a beautiful hand-wrapped black linen box.