Crumbs of humour are laid as he variously speaks, sings and plays abrasive guitar riffs. Drummer Antosh Wojcik commands the dynamic deftly, alternately caressing cymbals or bashing out a beat, while harpist Marysia Osu applies a similar dexterity. She manoeuvres with ease from dreamlike plucking into a dissonance resembling nails scraping down a chalkboard. Add to that the sinuous, sensuously writhing bodies of Si Rawlinson, Elisabeth Mulenga and Jay Yule, and the scenes are very much set. Never has a satsuma falling from a tree been so expressly executed as through the contortions of these three dancers, nor a goldfish gliding through the murky depths of a watery underworld.
To say Seder is beautiful would be selling it short. It’s so much more. It is sincerity, history, grief, anger, passion and quick wit. Kammerling shares moving memories, from his own to his family’s. A Slovenian rock festival, for instance, at which he cried guttural, deep-from-within sobs because he arrived off the back of a 10-day research trip that included stops at Auschwitz, Theresienstadt and Krakow. Or stories of his grandfather’s childhood in Nazi-occupied Austria and “the fear of inheritance” that kind of suffering can bring. Or even the anxieties brought on by the thought of history repeating itself – a heaviness that kept Kammerling from getting out of his car one day – a memory aided by a soundtrack of news reports on the rising death toll in Gaza since 7 October. Seder may not plough a new furrow – after all, intergenerational trauma is an oft-visited theme in Jewish culture – but it is discerning and shown through a unique lens that is at once timely and enduring.
By Danielle Goldstein
Adam Kammerling: Seder runs Tuesday 17 February. 7pm. £20. JW3, London, NW3 6ET. adamkammerling.co.uk
This review was of the Norwich Arts Centre performance on Sunday 8 February.
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