Daniel Brenner

Daniel Brenner started performing in 1987 alongside the late comic legend Chris Farley (as part of the Ark Improvisational Theater ensemble) and has been doing theater ever since. In rabbinical school, he created the one-man- show Faster, Rabbi, Drill! Drill!, won an All Out Arts New York playwriting award (2000), and wrote a series of Chassidic folktale plays for Philadelphia’s Theatre Ariel. Since then, he had a play produced by New York’s Vital Theater and spawned a handful of Purim shpiels. He performs regularly with the band Midnight Nosh with Yiddish vocalist/accordionist Debra Caplan. Shvitz! The 80s Klezmer Aerobics Experience is a family-friendly interactive dance/storytelling workout where “the 1880s meets the 1980s.” The show’s creator, Rabbi Daniel Brenner, plays an aerobics instructor and leads an audience participation workout as he tells the original story Levi and the Old Badchen – a tale about a dancer and his apprentice. The audience learns the traditional gestures of the Old Badchen and the dances that Levi learns and creates when he runs off to Warsaw. Framing this experience, Daniel traces the 1980s klezmer revival and parallels the technological shifts of the industrial and digital revolutions.

At Art Kibbutz he performed on August 7th - the wonderful performance was mentioned in the New York Times - among other publications - giving this sort of exposure to Art Kibbutz for the first time ever.