Żywizna – meaning “nature” in the Kurpie dialect – is the name of the new project led by the Warsaw-based musician Raphael Rogiński. Roginski is known for many musical projects, such as Shofar and Cukunft, which combine Jewish, ethnic and folk music with improvisation rooted in blues and jazz.

Żywizna is a special project, commissioned to be part of Six Verbs Movement. It fuses old Jewish lullabies sung in the Yiddish language with lullabies performed in the Kurpie dialect.

The decision to bring these two cultures together in this project was due to their identified influence on the Polish popular culture and folk music as we know it today. Even though and maybe because, both languages either no longer exist in Poland (Yiddish) or can be found only in very specific areas (Kurpie), the project aims to connect these two traditions through music.

Rogiński, together with the-Lublin based singer Genowefa Lenarcik and the Akademos Junior choir of Paderewski Primary School in Lublin, conducted by Elżbieta Nieczyporuk, will explore these two cultures through their lullabies and present us the result of their intensive workshop research during a lovely matinee concert in the Old Theatre in Lublin.