Filming for the ritual reconstructed project

The RR research project is a creative, multiplatform, performative endeavor, part of the ‘Connected Community’ AHRC strand - a bricolage ‘happening’ evoking ritual objects, photographs, storytelling, rabbinical dialogues on ‘queering religion’ and the making of the 5 LGBTQI Jewish ritual films, directed by Searle Kochberg. The project’s Principal Invesigator is Prof Margaret Greenfields of Bucks New University. Searle Kochberg of University of Portsmouth is one of the Co-Investigators.

The films and project as a whole are conceived as a ‘reconstruction’ (after Kaplan 2010) of Jewish 'seder' or 'order': liturgy and ritual as experienced by non Mainstream Jews, in this case Liberal LGBTQI Jews. In Pride Seder, the orange, the drag queen’s high heel shoe, the brick, the foreign fruits, the rainbow coloured ribbons, all ‘make a statement about Jewish inclusiveness…’ The orange is there ‘to symbolise inclusivity…made up of many segments… it form[s] a whole'.