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THEATRE

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Dylan is a dynamic theatre artist whose work extends into directing, producing, and creating devised theatre projects, specializing in stories rooted in Yiddish and Jewish culture. Dylan’s directing and producing credits include collaborations with organizations such as the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, the Workers Circle, the Museum of Jewish Heritage, and the Yiddish New York festival. Dylan also assistant directed the Outer Critics Circle Award-nominated play King of the Jews. Her work has been featured in Hey Alma and The Forward. Explore below to discover more about her diverse portfolio of theatre projects.

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The Jewish Wife

Through the Alliance for Jewish Theatre, where she was a 2021-2023 fellow, Dylan received a grant to write and perform a Yiddish translation of Brecht’s playlet The Jewish Wife, produced at the Center for Performance Research.

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Dylan's bilingual co-translation, combining Yiddish and the original German, works to underscore the protagonist's sense of alienation from German society. As she prepares to flee the Third Reich, the linguistic interplay magnifies the growing chasm between herself and the world she once held familiar.

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Shakespeare: Translated and Improved!

Presented as part of the Yiddish New York festival at Hebrew Union College, Dylan's "Shakespeare: Translated and Improved!" reimagines the Bard's works with humor and a Yiddish twist.

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Commissioned for the festival, the piece opens with Dylan, playing a character fed up with Shakespeare proclaiming (in Yiddish) that his acclaim is undeserved! Her collaborator counters, suggesting that while Shakespeare may falter in English, he excels in Yiddish.

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The performance culminates with Dylan's rendition of Romeo's "But soft, what light" monologue in Yiddish (translation by Y. Goldberg) accompanied by her colleague's playful "Jewish English" translation for the audience.

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Dylan's performance garnered praise in The Forward: "Dylan Seders Hoffman, a Folksbiene actress, gave a polished and skillful delivery of a monologue from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet . . . The actress splendidly and movingly performed the Shakespeare piece."​

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Nat'l Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene Purim Spiel

In the spring of 2024, Dylan created and directed the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene's Purim show for the Museum of Jewish Heritage -- an interactive, hour-long experience for children and children at heart!

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Through lively Yiddish songs, an adaptation of Purim Chicken by Margery Cuyler (a whimsical tale of barnyard animals putting on a Purim spiel!), and a humorous and imaginative retelling of the Purim story itself, Dylan brought the celebration to life.

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The show featured the contemporary English Purim song "4 Mitzvot 4 Purim" along with two beloved Yiddish classics "Makht Oyf" and "Homentashn" which were translated into English for the young audience. The program concluded with a hands-on craft, as children made their own paper plate homentashn to take home!​

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Vandershtok: a (web)site-specific journey

A flower grows through a crack in your floor. A hidden CD, nestled in dirt, circles the stem. Find a dusty desktop. Load the CD. Blank screen. Nothing. Close your eyes. A whirring jolts you awake. The screen reads “Upload Complete.” Green light seeps under your door. Reach for the knob. Turn. Enter.

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​Explore the digital realm of Vandershtok. Let your desires lead you as you travel through the immersive world. Through the choices made by each audience member and the moments of chance embedded in the piece, no two performances are the same.

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In her Philadelphia Fringe Festival directorial debut, Vandershtok: a (web)site-specific journey,Dylan investigates how the digital realm is able to bring people together, blur the line between the audience and the performer, and hold space for both choice and desire. The piece will be live again Spring 2025.

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In 2018, Dylan launched The Challah Project, a durational performance piece centered around baking the perfect gluten-free, vegan challah. Every Shabbat, Dylan invited a new baking partner into her West Philly kitchen to bake challah and share a meal. Partners chose a dish that reminded them of home, and the evening was spent baking, speaking/learning Yiddish, and sharing stories. The project ended when Dylan successfully baked the perfect gluten-free and vegan challah two weeks in a row.

 

Click here for more on the project.

A Torah School dropout turned Yiddishist, a Conservadox Jew, a cultural Jew, and one Quaker.

 

What does the next generation of Judaism and Jewishness look like? What possibilities open when we define Jewish continuity for ourselves? And what exists in the space between longing and belonging? In this performance, mixing together dance, Yiddish song, Hebrew prayer, flowing water, and hot oil, Hoffman and her collaborating artists illustrate the ways in which their generation is embracing, rejecting, and reconstructing their Jewishness.

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Click here for more on the piece.

A hybrid performance duet which explores the connection, holiness, and slippage of time felt when cooking Ashkenazi food. It portrays a particular Jewish-American diasporic-ness and the searching and growth that comes with this through moments of humor paralleled with slow moving, impressionistic images.

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In this piece, Dylan continues her work with the boat built originally for Lovingly Called Boat. However, instead of the boat being filled with water, as it was in the original piece, this time the boat is docked and dirt is piled around it. What does it mean to have this object inherently so full of movement be stationary? Instead, grocery carts act as boats as Genevieve and Dylan move through the space searching, for something.

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Click here for more on the piece.

A hybrid performance piece created collaboratively with Jewish dance artist Sarah Marks Mininsohn and Hindu theatre artist Shreshth Khilani. The piece explores each of our individual journeys and shifting relationships with our respective religions and cultures.

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We constructed a 8 x 4 foot boat which we subsequently filled with water and immersed our bodies into during the piece. The act of immersion physically connected us but at the same time highlighted our religious differences as we took turns describing our unique connections to boats and water.

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Click here for more on the piece.

A site-specific dance piece set in Bryn Mawr College's Canaday Library. For the performance, audience members were instructed to bring a pair of headphones or earbuds, a mobile device, and themselves to the library.

The dancers guide these headphone wearing audiences of 10-15 people through the library through dance and by using aural soundtracks listened to through headphones. The duet investigates the private spheres that are curated by studying inhabitants inside the inherently public space of the library.


Click here for more on the piece.

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© 2024 Dylan Seders Hoffman

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