New Books in Performing Arts

Most of the Yiddish songs we know today were created in the first half of the 20th century and distributed through commercial channels such as sheet music, concerts, radio broadcasts, records and CDs, theater stages, and more recently through songbooks produced in educational settings around the world. Our discussion focuses on lesser-known songs – Eastern Yiddish musical folklore, which emerged over a period of approximately four hundred years preceding the formation of the “popular” repertoire. Although we lack transcriptions of melodies or lyrics from before the end of the 19th century, a comparative study of documentation collected from then until the middle of the 20th century reveals that older layers of this musical-poetic creativity had been preserved over long periods of time. I refer to this older repertoire as the "musical pripetshik." Similar to the traditional combined home-heat-generating cooking oven known as the pripetshik, this old song repertoire was an integral part of Jewish culture, evolving in meaning and function over time. While for many, the image of the pripetshik corresponds to the nostalgic song by Mark Varshavski of 1901, this lecture will explore the earlier history of this and other poetic and musical images to offer an appreciation of their significance.

This lecture originally took place on July 23, 2024.
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This is Dr. Swati Joshi's inaugural episode on the New Books Network. In this episode, she interviews Dr. Lucy Jeffery about her monograph, Transdisciplinary Beckett: Visual Arts, Music, and the Creative Process (ibidem Press, 2021). She is also co-editor and author of Replaying Communism: Trauma and Nostalgia in European Cultural Production, published by CEU Press and AUP in 2026. She is co-founder of the Replaying Communism project, which received funding from the AHRC SWW-DTP (2023) and the Visegrad Fund (2024). Dr. Jeffery's published research is on Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Ezra Pound, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Magda Szabó. Her monograph—Transdisciplinary Beckett: Visual Arts, Music, and the Creative Process—was published by Ibidem in 2021, and, in 2022, she co-edited a special issue for Green Letters, entitled ‘A New Poetics of Space’. 

This episode weaves together Beckett's transdisciplinary creative process with Dr. Jeffery's journey of research, and cogitation over challenges to preserve integrity and creativity of the author's works in the wake of rapidly developing AI tools. Furthermore, the colour blue occupies an integral role in Dr. Jeffery's monograph, so this episode entails analytical segments on pigments used in Beckett's works beyond the black, white, and grey. Dr. Jeffery and I also briefly discuss our ongoing special issue, "A Writer's Palette: Colour in Late Modernist Literature," for Textual Practice. Colleagues interested in sharing their proposal until 12th December, can write to us on latemodernists@gmail.com, for more details.
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Architecture and Choreography: Collaborations in Dance, Space and Time (Routledge, 2024) examines the field of archi-choreographic experiments: unique interdisciplinary encounters and performed events generated through collaborations between architects and choreographers. Forty case studies spanning four decades give evidence of the range of motivations for embarking on these creative endeavors and diverse conceptual underpinnings, generative methods, objects of inquiry, and outcomes. Architecture and Choreography builds histories and theories through which to examine these works, the contexts within, and processes through which the works emerged, and the critical questions they raise about ways to work together, sites and citations, ethics and equity, control and agency.

Three themes frame pairs of chapters. The first addresses disciplinarity through works that critically reflect upon their discipline’s tools, techniques, and conventions juxtaposed against projects that cite or use other art forms and cultural phenomena as source material. The second interrogates space and the role of spatial dispositifs, institutions, and sites, and their hidden and not-so-hidden conditions, as conceptual drivers and structures to subvert, trouble, unsettle, remember. The third asks who and what dances, finding a spectrum from mobilized architectural bodies to more than human cybarcorps. Modes of collaboration and the temporalities and life cycles of projects inform bookending chapters.

Architecture and Choreography offers vital lessons not only for architects and choreographers but also for students and practitioners across design and performance fields.
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In this episode, J. M. Tyree, the editor of Film Quarterly discusses a dossier of articles about David’s Lynch’s 2001 Mulholland Drive on its 25th anniversary with dossier editor Eileen G’Sell.

Film Quarterly (FQ) is published four times a year by the University of California Press. For more information about the journal, including subscription and submission information, please visit FQ’s website.

If you are interested in supporting the work of UC Press and its Journals Program, please consider making a charitable donation to the UC Press Foundation. To learn more about the UC Press Foundation and how to contribute, please visit UC Press’s Support Us page.

Articles mentioned:


“Uncanny Intimacies, Abject Desires,” by Eileen G’Sell (Film Quarterly 80 no. 1, Fall 2026)

“The Radical Intimacy of Rot: Mulholland Drive's Queer Proliferations,” by Laura Westengard (Film Quarterly 80 no. 1, Fall 2026)

“Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This): David Lynch, Simone de Beauvoir, and ‘Feeling Like a Feminist’,” by Lori Jo Marso (Film Quarterly 80 no. 1, Fall 2026)

“‘That’s Not My Voice’: Telephonic Logics and Paranoid Listening in Mulholland Drive,” by Temperance Aghamohammadi (Film Quarterly 80 no. 1, Fall 2026)

“‘This Is the Girl’: Mulholland Drive, Naomi Watts, and the Double Abjection of the Hollywood Starlet(s),” by Eileen G’Sell (Film Quarterly 80 no. 1, Fall 2026)


A complete list of University of California Press journals is available at UC Press Journals.

J. M. Tyree is the editor-in-chief of Film Quarterly and an associate professor in the Cinema Program at VCUarts.

A Rabkin winner for arts journalism, Eileen G'Sell is a film critic and teaching professor at Washington University in St. Louis.
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Chapal Rani was one of India’s most famous performers of jatra, Bengal’s popular theater. Traditionally, all the roles, including female roles, were played by men—and Chapal Rani was perhaps the most prominent performer of women on the stage.

He’s also the subject of a new book from Sandip Roy, titled Chapal Rani, the Last Queen of Bengal. Roy, who joins us the show today, tells the story of Chapal Rani’s life, from stardom to obscurity and later rediscovery; how Chapal Rani would transform himself every night onstage; and how jatra changes how we talk about gender and performance.

Sandip Roy is a writer, columnist, and podcaster currently living in Kolkata. He is a columnist for Mint Lounge, The Hindu, and the host of the Sandip Roy Show on Indian Express. His work has appeared in The New York Times, BBC, The San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, Huffington Post, Conde Nast Traveller, among other publications. For over a decade, Roy was editor of Trikone, the world’s oldest magazine on LGBTQ+ South Asian issues. He is the author of the novel Don’t Let Him Know.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Chapal Rani, the Last Queen of Bengal. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.
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