The population of Israel is about the same as that of the Greater Toronto Area, Hamilton and London combined, yet the representation of its dance and theatre companies around the globe belies its small size.
Batsheva dancers [Gadi Dagon photo]
Why? The answer is simple. The government invites presenters and producers (and in my case, arts journalists) to come to an annual curated event called International Exposure (IE) to experience Israeli dance and theatre. The Israelis pick up the tab for hotel and land transportation, with a day trip to Jerusalem thrown in for good measure.
IE 2009 took place Dec. 5 to 13. The dance showcase attracted 125 people from 34 countries, while theatre, which also included Israeli world music, was attended by 34 people from 17 countries. Since we were there on the Israeli government’s dime, so to speak, we were heavily programmed. In all, I sat through well over 50 productions, with upward of seven events a day.
Tel Aviv Performing Arts Complex
Most of the dance IE took place at the Suzanne Dellal Centre for Dance and Theatre. Founded in 1989, the complex includes four buildings carved into theatres and studios on what used to be a private Jewish school campus. The centre is located in picturesque Neve Tzedek, first settled in the early 1900s by pioneers who moved out of the Arab town of Jaffa to found a Jewish city. From the seeds of Neve Tzedek, mighty Tel Aviv has grown, and the area’s quaint, narrow streets are filled with antique shops, artists’ ateliers and restaurants with atmosphere.
In terms of theatre venues, we were all over Tel Aviv. One of the most exotic spaces is the Hasimta (Alley) Theatre, located in the historic Jaffa casbah. Several small performance spaces have been created out of a warren of rooms, and there is a spectacular roof terrace decorated in period Arabic furnishings overlooking Jaffa City. A diametric opposite is the splashy, modernist Tel Aviv Performing Arts Complex, which houses the Cameri Theatre’s five venues and the Israeli Opera. And then there is the home of the fringe, the Tmu-na Theatre, which is spread out over a series of what used to be auto repair shops in an industrial part of Tel Aviv.
(And a side note: the day we were at the Cameri, one of its theatres was showing a production of Fiddler on the Roof to an audience of soldiers. These special performances for the military are underwritten by a father to honour his son who was killed on duty. In the courtyard, fellow soldiers were guarding their colleagues’ kit bags. We were allowed to peek into the theatre and saw a joyous sight – all these young men and women in combat fatigues singing and clapping along to the music.)
The emphasis of IE dance is contemporary. The three major Israeli companies, in terms of size and international reputation, were all at IE – Batsheva, Kibbutz and Kamea. The rest were smaller companies that were either already on the international circuit or companies Israeli dance curators were hoping would be picked up. It should be noted that Israel has an extraordinary number of strong male dancers, and that both the men and women are well trained.
In theatre, the story is the opposite. The biggest companies – Habimah National Theatre being the most notable – are not exciting foreign interest because, to be perfectly frank, they are pedestrian. The government apparatchik who curated the theatre IE was a candid woman, and she bemoaned the conservative nature of Habimah and its like. A typical example of dullness are the two plays we saw by Savion Librecht. She is, apparently, a highly acclaimed poet, but she is a mediocre playwright.
Librecht’s themes are extremely interesting, but she treats plots with plodding conventionality. The Banality of Love is about the relationship between Jewish-German political theorist Hanna Arendt and German philosopher Martin Heidegger. The two were lovers in pre-Nazi Germany, and Arendt came to the support of Heidegger, a Nazi apologist, after the war, much to the disgust of the Jewish community worldwide. Apples from the Desert tells the story of a girl from a haredi Jerusalem family who runs off with a free-spirited kibbutznik. What these plays, could have or should have been in more inspired hands, beggars the question. Not surprisingly, given the Luddite mindset of the Israeli theatre establishment, Librecht was awarded the 2004 Playwrights Award.
The bulk of the theatre showings were either physical theatre or object theatre because that is where innovation is taking place, and truly, there were breathtaking leaps of imagination in some of these performances.
Apparently, it’s the graduates of the School of Visual Theatre based in Jerusalem who are the front line of Israeli theatre experimentation. As well, Russian immigrants have enriched Israeli theatre life with their own clown/physical theatre tradition.
Here are just two examples of supreme theatrical originality. Orto-Da Theatre’s Stones is inspired by the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Monument by sculptor Nathan Rapoport. Coated in Dead Sea mud, six actors recreate the monument’s six sculpted figures, and then narrate the uprising through the eyes of the rebels. You believe you are looking at pure stone until they begin to move. Daniel Landau’s One Dimensional Man is even harder to describe. Imagine large egg-shaped video screens. Then project onto these screens, real faces distorted through animation. Then have these oversized eggs become faces for live actors. Then have figures covered head to toe in black, like kuroko stagehands (stagehands in traditional Japanese theatre dress all in black) from kabuki theatre, manoeuvre these eggshell faces around the stage as the live actors move behind them to a pre-recorded story.
We did see a highly touted production of Hamlet at the Cameri Theatre, which placed the audience, each of us on a swivel chair, in two facing groups. The action took place down the middle and all around the exterior. Actor Itai Tiran has become a heart-throb of the teenage set with his modern-day, rebellious, spoiled-brat Hamlet. Other than that, it wasn’t a particularly innovative show for those of us used to Canada’s Stratford Festival.
Israeli dance tends to be similar to contemporary dance around the world – a typical mix of narrative dance theatre, abstractions on a theme, gender issues and personal essays. I have a short fuse when it comes to Eurotrash, which I define as self-indulgent, pretentious twaddle that usually involves an elaborate use of props and sets, postmodern movement pedestrianisms, and an incomprehensible through line (the underlying motivational or structural unity of a scene, play or character). Well, Israel has Eurotrash, which, needless to say, is popular with European presenters. For example, Trout, by the Inbal Pinto and Avshalom Pollak Dance Company, involved all manner of silly vignettes performed in water with a lonely figure who resembles Queen Elizabeth I wandering through the flood.
One of my favourite shows was Michal Herman’s droll dance theatre Fellowship. Based on a Kafka absurdist short story, the plot involves a group of five who don’t want to be a group of six. The bulk of the dance is taken up with how the five try to shut out the sixth. Each of the characters has his or her own delightful personality and choreographic motif, supported by a solo musical instrument.
I also loved the satiric 4 Men, Alice, Bach and the Deer, co-choreographed by Yossi Berg and Oded Graf, who use a brilliant combination of burly movement, text, song and male-specific props such as Mexican wrestling masks, rifles, and a large deer to portray a humour noir skewering of machismo – and all to Bach. Alice is their ideal woman.
I have to say that I was surprised by the lack of political works both in dance and theatre. There are two notable exceptions.
The cast of Arkadi Zaides’ heartfelt dance piece Quiet includes two Israelis (Zaides and Ofir Yudilevitch) and two Arabs (Muhammad Mugrabi and Rabia Khuri). It is a piece that is about aggression and compassion, set against the backdrop of cut-out doves of peace. The beginning is unforgettable as each man outlines the body of the other, but can’t quite bring himself to enact physical touching. The progression finds the dancers both moving closer, yet drawing farther apart. It is a troubling, yet hopeful, meditation on war and peace.
The play Janana (Flipout) by Yiftach Klein features Arab actor Shadi Srour and Israeli actor Einat Weizmann who respectively play all the male and female roles. Based on Klein’s own army experiences during the first intifadah, the flashpoint is the accidental killing of an Arab child at an Israeli checkpoint and the domino effect of that death on people’s lives.
An extraordinary thing happened at the Q&A that followed. I told Klein that his play had a zero chance of being picked up for North American audiences because the prevailing sentiment on this side of the Atlantic is that Israel can never be shown in a bad light. At this point, our government apparatchik launched into a tirade, telling us Israel wanted the world to see that the country can tolerate self-criticism, and the bane of her existence is the tunnel vision of North American Jews.
I left IE with a deep sense of envy. Without doubt, Israel has a culture where the arts are given pride of place. Our own country could learn a thing or two.
Paula Citron is an arts and theatre critic based in Toronto.
