“Traditionally,” says artist and film-maker Danielle Durchslag, with a grin, “challah does not want to be a hat.”
But the joyful Danielle has made an exception for her newest art project, the Sabbath Queen, in which she has styled herself into a jaw-dropping version of Queen Elizabeth I, with a magnificent challah headdress to represent the red hair of the monarch.
The New York-based and Chicago-raised Danielle is quite the phenomenon. Fiercely, and secularly, Jewish in every aspect of her identity — and happily married to a Muslim man — she is the antithesis of a starving artist in a garret. This is because on one side of her family there is great wealth, derived from her great-grandfather Nathan Cummings, who in 1935 bought an iconic company which became Sara Lee Cakes.
Sara Lee became the calling card of American convenience desserts, even inspiring a love song to cake for a commercial, written by the great composers of Cabaret, Kander and Ebb. Even though Sara Lee itself became the focus of many commercial takeovers and buyouts, the cake heritage enabled Danielle to practise her art, which is inventive, playful and creative.
She has said that “without the money I have, I wouldn’t be able to create the art I do; and also, in America, if you’re making work that has any challenging content about Jewish life, it’s basically impossible to get funding from Jewish institutions. So I’m doubly lucky”.
Danielle as Elizabeth is held aloft by Broadway dancers
One of her early projects was an answer to New York’s famous Easter Parade, in which it became traditional to wear specially designed — and frequently over-the-top — Easter bonnets. Why, thought Danielle, shouldn’t there be a way for Jews to participate on their own terms in the Easter Parade? Thus was born her Seder Bonnet, with the aim of “bringing Jews into a public space, as celebrants”. The unashamedly Jewish headgear was an instant and popular hit on the streets of New York — bringing Danielle plaudits from Jews and non-Jews alike. She’s also transformed herself into a magnificent Elizabeth Taylor, and even dressed up as a mechitzah — a divider in a synagogue to separate men and women.
The Seder Bonnet was just the start of Danielle’s mild hat obsession, which she says began with an entire hat wardrobe belonging to her grandmother. “I discovered these during a less-than-sanctioned exploration of her closet when I was a little girl. I said, what are these? One was covered in coins, one had embroidered swans with a dramatic veil. And she said, ‘oh, no-one wears these any more, I used to wear them on airplanes’.” Danielle begged her grandmother, if she was ever thinking of getting rid of the hats, to give them to her. They sit in Danielle’s apartment today, a source of inspiration for her various art works.
But back to Elizabeth I and that headdress. If there is a running theme connecting Danielle’s art, she says, “the thing I really insist on is joy and comedy, both for myself and hopefully for my audience”.
While looking at 16th century portraits of the queen the artist suddenly realised that the shape and “undulation” of the sleeves resembled challah. This made her laugh, but then she turned her attention to Elizabeth’s hair.
“It took me three months to figure out how to construct the headpiece. Even though it looks like a single piece of challah, it is actually dozens of individual pieces from different bakeries around New York. As you know, challah can be different colours depending on the recipe, and I wanted [the headdress] to have differences to represent the subtleties of colour in real hair”.
To pick out the right challah for her queen Danielle began visiting bakeries in Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens. Then she figured out how to apply resin to the different pieces and somehow weld them together. To retain the shine of the bread she re-resins the structure every couple of months, but so far her imperious Shabbat Queen has only had one outing — at the conclusion of the Jewish Currents annual conference in New York.
“One of the lovely things that came out of this is that when you go to bakeries repeatedly, and buy between six and 12 challahs, on the third or fourth visit they have questions for you. I would tell them, I am just very passionate about Shabbat — because I felt that telling them I was making a headdress based on the aesthetics of Elizabeth I seemed like a lot for that kind of conversation!”
Danielle Durschalg
There was no question, she says, of making her own challah, not least because she claims to be “a very bad baker”. But also, “I am fascinated by challenging materials that already exist, into a place that’s beyond what we think they do.”
For the bodice and sleeves of the queen’s dress, Danielle used real challah covers. A recurring part of her work, she says, is how Jews mimic the styles and behaviours of the non-Jewish world. She believes the newly-rich Jews of the 20th century took their cues as to how to behave from their WASP counterparts. “I joke and say, oh, our angora was softer, our pearls whiter, our wood darker… we really borrowed and emulated rituals from people who didn’t want Jews in their echelon”.
In a similar way, she says, “Jewish ritual objects —particularly in Ashkenazi life, which is what I can speak to — tend to copy the aesthetics of Christian royalty.” Jewish museums worldwide display candlesticks and kiddush cups styled after what royal families use, she says. “Once I went into a strictly Orthodox store here in New York which sold only Shabbat finery. And the tables were dressed as though for a king and queen. So the challah covers I used were right at home with the Tudor-inspired embroidery I designed the Tudor rose, obviously, and her pearl adornments”.
The character of Elizabeth, Danielle says, “is my comedic critique of right-wing Jewish power” — and, indeed, when we meet her, the queen, borne aloft by a crack team of Broadway male dancers — is flaying her audience with tongue-in-cheek satire and royal irony.
“This is a character who is haughty and imperious and intolerant — and when I performed as her I was communicating all those traits to the audience, through jokes.” Absent from Elizabeth’s side is her Jewish doctor, Rodrigo Lopes, whom the real queen had executed for his alleged attempt to poison her. Durchslag says she considered using him but decided against because scholars are still arguing, centuries later, about whether he was guilty or innocent.
But she does admit that disagreement is central to Jewish life, and she believes that it should “not only be allowed, but celebrated. I was brought up being told that we [Jews] are angel wrestlers — we are presented with tough questions, and we engage with them”.
Danielle’s Challah Diva is a massive team effort: just her make-up takes between two and three hours, and including the Broadway dancers there are 15 people involved in getting the Shabbat Queen on her feet.
We agree that food — from Sara Lee to challah — is not just a central expression of Jewish life, but a central expression of Danielle’ art. With great glee, she tells me that her next project will be the Pesach punk. “She is heavily inspired by the aesthetics of the punk movement, specifically in London, right at the beginning of punk fashion. I’m playing around with the idea of a matzah print and using it instead of a leopard print. And she will sport an enormous Mohawk hairstyle”.
I just hope it’s edible, in keeping with Danielle Durschlag’s alter ego as Foodie Queen of Art.
