Dybbuks and Chicken Soup

One woman's journey through her mysterious and melancholy ancestral land of Transylvania, a place where memory, dreams, folk-tales, and superstition all come alive. 1995 Winner Judah Magnus Museum Video Competition.

Director Sally Kaplan is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Dance and World Arts and Cultures at UCLA where she teaches a series of courses in video production and critique of performance in the visual medium. Having worked with outstanding contemporary artists such as Meredith Monk, Ping Chong and Blondell Cummings, she began her work in film and video in 1984. She has worked on a variety of programs for public television as an associate producer and/or editor. Included are "The Art of Indonesia" made in conjunction with an exhibit at the National Gallery of Art and the Metropolitan Museum, "The Peter Sellars Project", a portrait of the controversial opera director and his "Mozart Trilogy" and numerous social issue documentaries with award winning video producer, Julie Gustafson. Since 1988, Kaplan has developed a distinct way of integrating text with Super 8 film and small video formats to create evocative personal visual storytelling. In 1988, she created a video-diary in order to re-tell her father's World War II stories (a finalist in AFI video festival). In 1989, Tanz Fabrik in Berlin commissioned her to create a film backdrop for a live dance performance. "Fragile Circumstances" has since toured Germany and Eastern Europe to highest critical acclaim. She collaborated with Tamar Telberg and Dancers to create a twelve-minute film for a dance work at the Cunningham Studio in New York City (Oct. 1991). She created a film that served as the moving set for Yancey/Dance Theater's New York production (Feb. 1992). She presented her work and served as a panelist at the Dance and Technology Conference (Fraser University, 1993). Kaplan joins composer Pauline Oliveros and writer Ione in directing a television opera using the myth of Hera to investigate questions of memory and history (for production in Banff, Canada, 1996). In the summer of 1994, she co- taught with Heidi Gilpin courses in experimental documentary and performance work through the Institute of New Dramaturgy in Romania. Currently, Kaplan is producing a personal documentary (shot In super-8 and transferred to Beta) exploring her ancestral roots in Eastern Europe. In Fall 1994, Kaplan served as guest artist at The Naropa Institute in Boulder, offering workshops in video as personal storytelling.