Shards as Autoethnographic Performance: A Story of Jewish Emigration, Immigrat [Hardcover]

Evan Kent currently lives in Tel Aviv, Israel, and teaches qualitative research methods at the Levinsky-Wingate Academic Center. In addition, Evan also teaches traditional and contemporary synagogue music at the Hebrew Union CollegeJewish Institute of Religion, Israel.

1 Before Shards

2 Writing Shards

3 Moving from Writing to Performance

4 Performing Shards Before the COVID-19 Pandemic

5 Autoethnographic Performance During Covid

6 Beyond Covid and Epilogue

Index

Shards as Autoethnographic Performance explores the development, creation, and presentation of performed autoethnography. The author shares the impetus for the works creation and his method for writing and rehearsing performed autoethnography.

This book is essentially an autoethnography about writing and performing an autoethnography and functions as a play within a play. Through extensive discussions about the development, writing, and performance of Shards, the author reveals how contemporary political events and social issues as well as events in his ancestors history impact his writing, research, and eventual performance. The author takes us on an autoethnographic journey encompassing early 20th-century immigration from Eastern Europe to the United States, his personal development as a singer and actor, the practically obsessive need to perform, his education and eventual employment as a cantor in a synagogue, and how he negotiates these personal and artistic conflicts. Throughout the book, Evan shares with the realG