“Holy Names for Our Dybbuk” Przybysz / Weitz – a ritual performance

In Yiddish folklore tradition, the “dybbuk” is a wandering spirit that clings to a living body to communicate messages from the dead. Traditionally, a group of healers would loosen the spirit’s grip on the host body through a combination of interviews, prayers, and rhythmic chanting, culminating in a profound public demonstration of collective transmutation. Holy Names for Our Dybbuk reimagines a dybbuk exorcism for our times, as a movement-based score and site-specific ritual. The artists have chosen sites of Jewish commemoration in Poland to bring audiences and performers into direct and embodied encounters with Jewish grief embedded in the land. 

Created by Weitz, in collaboration with Polish choreographer Magdalena Przybysz, the 40-minute performance features Weitz as the lead performer and a multigenerational, Polish and Jewish-American ensemble. Weitz, as the dybbuk, becomes a channel for ancestral grief. Through rhythmic Hebrew chants and Hasidic-inspired choreography, the ensemble engages the dybbuk, creating a somatic and symbolic ritual to exorcize ancestral trauma from both the body and the land.