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The performance garment was designed in collaboration with Horses Atelier in Toronto, and both the sketch above and the garment construction are by Tala Kamea. It is made out of striped Jewish men’s prayer shawls. In many Jewish sects women are still forbidden to wear prayer shawls, and are shunned or punished for doing so. Prayer shawls, or tallit, are worn to encourage spiritual protection and privacy. This garment serves as ‘protection’ as I usher these melodies and texts out of their ritual contexts and into secular spaces. It is a visual representation of the intent of the project — to reconstruct tradition and bring it into dialogue with the present-day challenges facing us, and to reconfigure a patriarchal lineage to make space for female and non-binary bodies, spirits, intellects, and voices. The garment visually represents my approach to my Jewishness - I have always taken my tradition seriously and reverently enough to challenge it, to wrestle with it, to re-work the parts that feel abrasive to me. I spoke more about the tallit garment in this interview with NuRoots in Los Angeles.