Nate Yaffe is artist in residence at fabrik Potsdam from 4 August to 12 October 2025 as part of the Studio Québec residency programme. He will present the first results of his new project A Hard Garment in an open studio.
A Hard Garment (working title) is a work of performative archaeology, an excavation of Nate Yaffe’s personal Jewish history within the context of the political use of archaeological digs to legitimize land claims and national myths. Through prayer-poems (piyyut), experimental noise and dance, he revisits the Jewish folktale of the Golem, a mythical hero/antihero made of clay.
With Gambletron, Thea Patterson, Maxine Segalowitz, Yoav Admoni and Daph Bendavid V'yosef, he explores the Kabbalist philosophy of sacred heresy, and gematria meditations to shatter calcified cultural artefacts, remembering that, above all, culture lives in people, and dies when appropriated to serve the nation-state.
This new work explores doikayt, a Yiddish term meaning “hereness”, strengthening jewish communities wherever they live. The artists will create a clay golem from shattered artefacts, scan for angel messages on ghost radios, and remount prayer dances from ancestral muscle memory.
Studio Québec is a residency programme for artistic exchange in the field of choreography between Germany and Québec. Each year, Canadian and German artists are invited to spend several weeks in residence in the other country. Studio Québec is a cooperation between fabrik Potsdam, Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec and the Goethe-Institut Montréal with the support of the State of Brandenburg and the City of Potsdam.
Nate Yaffe is a Montréal-based experimental dance, theatre and video artist whose practice aims to uncorrect the self-censored body. the_johnsons 00:11:56, his dance-film examining privacy and surveillance culture was presented at the Cinedans festival in Amsterdam and in film festivals across Canada. The companion interactive video-dance installation the_johnsons 00:21:51 was presented in Montréal at the Darling Foundry, at Eastern Bloc and Monument-National in 2015-16. His most recent work for the stage, Dunno wat u kno (2017), lies at the intersection of the sensitive body and our virtual lived experiences. As a performer, Nate collaborates regularly with Montréal choreographers Katie Ward, Dorian Nuskind-Oder, and Audrée Juteau. He received a Helen Hayes Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for the role he created in Molly Maxner’s play Occupied Territories (2015), which he reprised in the off-Broadway production in 2017. He is also the creator and curator of the residency series This is actively built, which brings together artists from the queer community into a shared space for collaboration and discussion.
