Prof. Haviva Pedaya is an Israeli writer and poet, Kabbalah and Hasidic Judaism researcher, culture and art critic, graduate of School of Visual Theater, and Professor of Jewish history at Ben-Gurion University in the Negev. During the last two decades, she designed and created five musical performances which were exhibited in festivals such as the Oud Festival, Israel Festival, and the Jewish Music Festival in Krakow.
“My exploration of art is parallel to and nurtured by the same pillar found in mysticism studies. I find great interest in the relation between the visual and the musical, between the image and the term. Theoretically speaking, it shifts the research to examine the two extremities of language – In ecstatic states on the one hand, and traumatic on the other – and how the structural relation between sight and hearing is expressed within them.
On the performative level (since I operate as an artist as well), my interest resides in world-making through music, through the expression of symbols and objects in a reduced visual representation, using music in a theatrical, ritualistic manner. This I do in correlation with my interests as a religion, culture, and trauma researcher, and my investigation and preservation of musical traditions, working from within them”.
The talk takes place in the salon of the school of visual theatre.
Photo credit: Eric Sultan