Acco Festival: Between Celebration and Confrontation 9781618115126

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ACCO FESTIVAL Between Celebration and Confrontation

Israel: Society, Culture, and History Yaacov Yadgar—Political Studies, Bar-Ilan University, Series Editor Editorial Board: Alan Dowty—Political Science and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Notre Dame Tamar Katriel—Communication Ethnography, University of Haifa Avi Sagi—Hermeneutics, Cultural studies, and Philosophy, Bar-Ilan University Allan Silver—Sociology, Columbia University Anthony D. Smith—Nationalism and Ethnicity, London School of Economics Yael Zerubavel—Jewish Studies and History, Rutgers University

ACCO FESTIVAL Between Celebration and Confrontation

Naphtaly Shem-Tov

Boston 2016

Copyright © 2016 Academic Studies Press All rights reserved. ISBN 978-1-61811-511-9 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-61811-512-6 (electronic) Book design by Kryon Publishing, www.kryonpublishing.com Cover design by Dudi Ma’ayan. On the cover: Smadar Yaron and Khaled Abu-Ali’s performance “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Acco Festival 1991). Published by Academic Studies Press in 2016 28 Montfern Avenue Brighton, MA 02135, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com

Dedicated with love to my wife Vered and my daughters Shira and Avigail

Contents Preface and Acknowledgements vii Introduction ix CHAPTER ONE

 rtistic Direction and the Political: Exception A Takes the Stage? 01

CHAPTER TWO

Performance Repertoire: Representations of Social Conflicts 29

CHAPTER THREE  Organization, Budget, and Infrastructure: Between Center and Periphery 107 CHAPTER FOUR  Festival Reception: Judgment, Criticism, and Audience 135 CHAPTER FIVE

Host Community: Policy and Resistance 159

References 205 Index 219

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Preface and Acknowledgements While this book is based on my PhD thesis, Akko Festival as Site of Struggle in the Social and Theatrical Field, 1980–2004, supervised by Prof. Shimon Levy at the Tel Aviv University Department of Theatre Arts, there is a significant difference between the two. First, the book also addresses developments that took place in the festival from 2005 to 2012. Second, its methodological structure completely changed. While the chapters of the dissertation were arranged chronologically, in the book, I suggest a five-aspect approach to theater festival examination (artistic direction, performances repertoire, organization and budget, reception, host community), and I devote a chapter to each aspect. The dissertation, then, acted as database alone, while this book is an in-depth reformulation and extensive supplement. I would like to thank the people whose help and support enabled me to publish this study in its present form. Prof. Yehouda Shenhav, as editor of Theory and Criticism, greatly contributed to the formulation of ideas in the first chapter, first published in that journal. Thanks to Dr. Guy Ben-Porat, Prof. Yossi Yonah, and Dr. Bashir Bashir, who conducted the Public Policy and Multiculturalism research group at the Van Leer Institute and allowed me to develop the fifth chapter of the book as part of the group—it was first published in a book of essays by the group. Special thanks to Acco Festival General Manager and Senior Producer Albert Ben-Shloosh for his assistance in obtaining archival materials of the festival. I appreciate very much Dudi Ma'ayan and Smadar Ya'aron for creating the cover image collage from their masterpiece Arbeit Mucht Frei. A special thanks to Shai Marcus for his invaluable help at the Tel Aviv University theater archives. Thanks to all the theater makers who have participated in Acco Festival of Other Theater and have made it a site of celebration and confrontation. Thanks to series editor Ya'akov Yadgar who accompanied and supported the entire process. Thanks to the Open University and all my colleagues at the Department of Literature, Languages and the Arts for their dialogue and friendship.

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A translation note: I chose to literally translate the title of the festival from Hebrew as “Acco Festival of Other Theater” and not as it is translated into English on the official website as “fringe festival” or “alternative theatre festival.” I explain this choice in Chapter One. Furthermore, for consistency, I translated the name of the city as “Acco” even though in official documents and on websites it also is translated as Akko or Acre. Chapter One is based on my article, “The Exceptional Takes the Stage? Acco Festival and the Political” [in Hebrew], Theory and Criticism 34 (2009): 123–147. Chapter Five is based on my chapter edited by Guy Ben-Porat, Yossi Yonah, and Bashir Bashir, “Acco Festival and Multiculturalism: Political and Host Community” [in Hebrew], in Public Policy and Multiculturalism ( Jerusalem/Tel Aviv: The Van Leer Institute and Hakibbutz Hameuchad.) This research was supported by The Open University of Israel’s Research Fund (grant no. 504472).

Introduction This research critically and analytically follows the Acco Festival for Other Theater in the years 1980–2012. The festival has been an important cultural institution on the Israeli theater scene since its founding in 1980 by the theater department of the Israeli ministry of culture and the Acco Municipality. It takes place annually, on the fall holiday of Sukkot, in ancient Acco in northern Israel. The festival’s founder and first director is theater director and actor Oded Kotler, who wishes to “shock” the mainstream from its slumber. Thus the festival’s central aim has been to allow young and alternative artists who are not a part of the mainstream the ability to create different artwork. Kotler has preferred the term “other theater” since it combines several non-mainstream theatrical approaches, such as fringe, experimental, alternative, underground, and avant-garde theater. The festival’s performances take place in the heart of ancient Acco in the Crusade-era Crusader Halls, which was declared a world heritage site by UNESCO in 2002. These spaces give the alternative performances a unique atmosphere. Geosocially, Acco is a town of some fifty thousand residents, lying to the north of Haifa on the Mediterranean shore. It is a mixed Jewish and Arab town, with only Arab residents living in ancient Acco. Most of the town’s residents are of a low socioeconomic background, and the city deals with national tensions and complex social problems. Thus another important goal of decision-makers in the ministry of culture and the municipality of Acco is using the festival as an economic and publicity engine for the city. In fact, festival-goers account for a sizeable portion of Ancient Acco merchants’ annual income, and during the festival’s three-day run, the town receives positive coverage in the media.

The Festival’s Structure The festival is made up of three main frameworks: the prestigious competition showcasing the “other theater” performances, guest indoor performances, and street theater and outside performances.

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The artistic director and the artistic committee working alongside him choose about ten performances for the competition, from dozens of proposals and plays submitted by young and alternative performers, and assign some of them to the less-prestigious and less-funded frameworks. The artistic director also appoints a three to five member judging committee to award funding in different categories. The festival’s managing director is the producer-in-chief and is responsible for all of the festival’s financial, organizational, and technical aspects. The festival’s managing body—headed by the Acco mayor and staffed by functionaries of the municipality, the ministry of culture, and members of the theater community—is the body that appoints the directing manager and artistic director and that directs the financial policy. However, it does not intervene in the artistic content (at least not openly). The festival’s budget revolves around NIS 3–4 million, of which some fifty percent is funded by the ministry of culture; twenty-five percent is furnished by Acco Municipality; and the rest is from public funds, commercial sponsors, and ticket sales.

The Main Idea: A Site of Celebration and Confrontation The Israeli theater community migrates up north once annually to celebrate its artistic and cultural values and to consolidate its social and hegemonic identity. A site of celebration since its founding, the festival serves as a kind of “initiation rite” for young, just-beginning artists on their entrance into the Israeli theater field. Simultaneously, it is a celebration for the city’s residents, who flock to the festival gardens and free outside performances in droves, leaving their routines in favor of the festival atmosphere that temporarily transforms the city into a focus of interest for the national media. But Acco Festival is also a site of confrontation and struggle in two fields— the theatrical and the social. In the theatrical field, it harbors a confrontation between the festival’s directors and producers, who usually come from the mainstream of Israeli theater, and the young and alternative artists. This struggle revolves around the definition and boundaries of “other theater.” Another focus of the confrontation is over material conditions and feasible budgets, usually missing from the festival. Because artistic direction of the festival is usually by directors and producers affiliated with central, public theater, and because the festival is funded institutionally, it is critically perceived as belonging to the

Introduction

mainstream, or at least close to it, as opposed to its “other theater” manifesto (e.g., Oz 1999). But this claim is only partially true since the artists are not passive and totally subordinate and throughout the years they have struggled in different ways against the artistic direction: they have demanded to cancel the competition, to include postdramatic forms and outside events as a significant part of the festival, and to extend the artists’ autonomy as opposed to accompanying artistic direction (which is perceived as restricting and even sometimes “castrating”). There have also been protests and festival-closure threats for its harsh material conditions and payment demands over actors’ salaries. As most artists are not significantly paid, the festival’s producers and directors have fostered the myth that Acco Festival is a “springboard” or “entry ticket” into the mainstream throughout the years. In other words, the festival is a site for the accumulation of symbolic capital made up of recognition and prestige. In reality, the festival is a site of primary artistic experience accrual, important in itself for young artists, while they also receive temporary media attention. The festival also functions as the first step in the long and arduous trek through the theater field. Only seldomly have Acco Festival playwrights and directors been commissioned to create in the mainstream following the festival, and the most prominent of those are Shmuel Hasfari, Ilan Hatzor, Ravid Dovra, and Yossefa Even-Shoshan. The other confrontation is in the social field and revolves around ownership of the festival. Does it belong to the hegemonic group from the center of the state that directs, manages, and consumes it, or to the host community of Acco? In other words, is this a Tel Aviv festival that takes place in Acco, or an Acco festival? As a rule, the festival tends to exclude Acco Jews, to allow only a relatively small space for Acco’s Arab residents, and to call this “coexistence.” Lack of belonging to the festival is apparent in the fact that most local residents do not buy tickets for the festival’s inside performances and make do with its free, outside performances. Throughout the years, the residents have opposed and struggled against this exclusionary policy in different ways. Their main demands have been representation in decision-making processes, priviledge as commercial vendors over subcontractors from the greater Tel Aviv area, and content that would suit the host community. As of the year 2000, Acco Municipality is the body producing the event, and that has brought about changes, but those are far from satisfying the local community. The structure of

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“center-periphery,” then, has fashioned and informed the relation between the festival and its host town, creating complexities over the years. Thus, I claim that Acco Festival is a borderland bringing together established directors and producers from the center of the field with young and alternative artists outside of it, as well as bringing together the residents of Acco, including the Mizrahim1 and the lower-class Arabs on the periphery of the festival. The borderland features a contradictory dynamic of the crossing of and the recreation of physical and symbolic boundaries, for instance by simultaneous collaboration and resistance (e.g., Lavie and Swedenburg 1996, Anzaldua 1999). And indeed the festival fosters a simultaneous celebration of artistic values and preservation of social identity and belonging alongside a confrontation and struggle that brings together the mainstream and margins of the theater field and the center and periphery of the social field.

Theoretical-Methodological Framework Several academic papers regarding the different performances raised in the Acco Festival have been written, but there has been no single investigation into the festival itself as a theatrical institution, despite its great importance in the Israeli theater field. In fact, critical theater writing on theater festivals around the world has been scant even though theater festivals such Edinburgh and Avignon are an important, pervasive cultural phenomenon (Bardby and Delgado 2003, Fricker 2003). Simultaneously, festivals and special events studies, at the nexus of cultural geography, sociology, anthropology, economic and organizational studies, have been developed areas of the social sciences (for instance, Getz 2012). Getz (1991, 54) defines a festival as a “themed public celebration.” This concise definition points to the celebration as its main action, raising the 1

Mizrahim are Jews originally from Arab and Islamic countries. In the first decades of the state of Israel, the Israeli establishment discriminated against and oppressed Mizrahim socioeconomically and culturally, placing them along Israel’s geographical periphery, as part of a Eurocentric conception that European Jews were the “criterion” according to which Mizrahim were primitives that needed to be “civilized” through the shedding of their “Arabness” (E. Shohat 1988). This policy, despite the many socio-political changes that have taken place since, is still subtly at work in many areas of life (Chetrit 2010).

Introduction

questions of who is celebrating what, when, why, and how. Stanley Waterman (1998) focuses on art festivals where the community of artists celebrates its values. Following Bourdieu (1984), Waterman stresses not only communal celebration and communal values represented in festivals but also the planning and meticulous organization of artistic festivals, especially their social significance as sites allowing the field’s taste-makers and gatekeepers to award or to deny entry. Hence, most participating artists prefer to view the festivals as semi-private meetings that enable them to express their artistic abilities and to support their colleagues. Research has also highlighted the fact that “high art” festivals—such as classical music, opera, dance and theater festivals—are sites maintained by cultural and social elites and act as a means of distinction from other, lower social groups (Quinn 2005, Fabiani 2003). Distinction is manifest not only in economic access to performances (ticket cost) and the cultural capital allowing deciphering, understanding, and reception, but also merely in attendance of elites—presence at “the center of affairs” confers elites a distinction from others (Willems-Braun 1994). Following Bakhtin, art festival scholars cite festivals’ transgressive and subversive potential (Quinn 2005, Knowles 2004). Knowles perceives the festival as a hybrid site that “contaminates” the dominant group’s pure categories, such as center-periphery, indoors-outdoors, foreign-local, commerce-celebration, and high-low. This hybridity allows transgressive dissenting potential, showcasing alternative voices—even those of subalterns who express their dissent and transgress the reigning order. But the festival is subject to constant surveillance of festival directors and show producers who try to silence this transgressive option, mainly for economic and marketing reasons. Simultaneously, with actualization of transgression and dissent at a festival, the actualization may operate as an instrument for controlled “letting off the steam” of tensions among the lower classes, thus ultimately upholding the status quo. As opposed to other prestigious art festivals (such as the Israel Festival), Acco Festival does not take place within a town and community socially correlated to the festival’s attendees and artists. It is true that Oded Kotler, its originator and founder, first wished to situate the festival in the artist village of Ein Hod, a host community more socially similar to the dominant group creating and consuming it; but in 1980, as part of the newly-elected Likud party’s social conception, and in the spirit of the Neighborhood Rehabilitation

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and Renewal Project, the ministry of culture, which funds the festival, suggested Acco as the host town: a mixed, peripheral development town for which the event would be a tourism and economy catalyst. The intersection of the two groups is highly unequal, and it is because of this physical encounter that the festival employs different strategies to distinguish itself from both, attempting to arrive at an elitist festival that takes place in Acco.

The Five Aspects of Festivals: Approach and the Book’s Chapters In this research, I offer a model of five aspects of festival studies, and I devote a chapter to each. This model is based on an integration of different perspectives in festival studies (Getz 2010) and on Wilmar Sauter’s (2007) model of festivals as theatrical events, as elaborated in Festivalising!: Theatrical Events, Politics and Culture, by Theatrical Event Working Group, in the context of International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR) (Hauptfleisch et al. 2007). This is the most substantial investigation of festivals undertaken by theater scholars thus far. This research offers different theoretical concepts to be used in the investigation of a festival as a theatrical event. Sauter offers four inter-influencing aspects of festivals as theatrical events: 1) Cultural context—the political framework undergirding the festival and determining its general policy and budgeting, such as the ministry of culture, municipality, and public funds. 2)  Contextual theatricality—the organizational framework that produces the festival itself as event and structure, such as artistic and budgetary direction, frameworks of artistic activity, and production accompaniment. 3) Playing culture—the festive atmosphere created by designing the local environment, such as decoration and signage, organization of the physical space to fit the number of attendees, stalls, and outside performances. 4) Theatrical playing—the artistic activity itself and the aesthetic and social experience embodied in the relation between the stage and the audience.

Introduction

In my discourse with Sauter’s model, as well as with others’ (such as Yeoman et al. 2004), I offer the approach of five aspects and their tight links and interrelations to investigate Acco Festival. These five aspects are: 1) artistic direction; 2) performance repertoire; 3) organization, budget, and infrastructure; 4) reception; 5) host community. In my mind, these five aspects could also fit other art, theater, and culture festivals. This approach posits a series of questions on festivals as artistic, cultural, and social institutions. Each chapter in the book, therefore, is dedicated to a different aspect, and in each, the festival is reflected as a site of celebration and confrontation in different artistic, social, cultural, economic, and political contexts. Chapter One: Artistic direction. This chapter deals with struggles between festival directors, mostly from the mainstream, and young and alternative artists, from outside of it, over the definition of the term “other theater.” This struggle is conceptualized through the terms “exception” and “political.” While the festival is ostentatiously interested in “other theater,” in fact there are performances conceived of as exceptional and at odds with the artistic line, and they are relegated outside the competition to the less-prestigious frameworks or are altogether disqualified. These exceptions uncover the political boundaries of the “other theater” definition. Thus, it emerges that even a festival dedicated to the theater field’s “others” is not totally inclusive. Chapter Two: Performance repertoire. This chapter offers an investigation of the festival’s performance repertoire through three decades, according to three themes that emerged in the festival—representations of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; the Holocaust; women artists and gender. Throughout the years, the festival allowed different references to these themes, through both content and form, vis-à-vis the mainstream. Politically and socially critical plays that were rejected from public theater were accepted in the festival. Furthermore, women playwrights and directors, who were blocked from the mainstream, made the festival their home, developing a unique theatrical language interweaving gender, sexuality and the conflict-laden Israeli reality. Chapter Three: Organization, budget and infrastructure. This chapter presents the changes to the festival’s organizational structure and the movement of production bodies from Tel Aviv to the hands of Acco Municipality. It presents the economic crises through Israel’s culture policy as based on the structure of “center-periphery.” The fact that the festival takes place in the

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periphery, and that it serves young and alternative artists, fails to fit a cultural policy that is preferential to the large theaters of Israel’s center, bringing about economic and organizational crises in advance. Crises have happened on three levels: 1) for twenty years, Tel Aviv bodies have produced the festival with Acco subcontractors excluded in favor of Tel Aviv ones; 2) budgetary deficits have brought about frequent crises, including the passing of the Tender Law in 1997 that precipitated a fierce crisis that almost causing the festival’s cancellation; 3) actors have struggled for reasonable payment, board, and lodging, thereby frequently threatening festival closure. Chapter Four: Reception—judgment, critique, and audience. This chapter investigates the festival’s reception, exposing the relative conservativeness of the judgment and critique, siding with the mainstream’s aesthetic norms, vis-à-vis alternative artists’ creativity and innovation, and the younger audience’s relative sympathy for “other theater.” Since Chapter Two focuses on overtly political performances, this chapter focuses on performances that are formalistically “other.” Thus, Lehman’s (2006) “postdramatic” will be used as perspective to show the substantial differences between traditional dramatic conceptions of judgment and critique as opposed to the “postdramatic” conceptions of some of the participating artists. Chapter Five: The host community. This chapter deals with the festival’s exclusion of its host community, comprising Acco’s Mizrahi and Arab residents, and their opposition to this policy. It highlights three opposition and resistance events, following which only partial changes to the festival’s policy took place in favor of more inclusion of the host community. The festival’s policy toward the host community is investigated in a multicultural perspective using three criteria: community representation within policy-makers; representation of the community and its cultures in artistic activity; and the degree to which the festival appeals to the different audiences residing in the city, as opposed to the hegemonic audience of the center. At the heart of this chapter are these questions: to what degree is the festival a “Tel Aviv bubble” which just happens to take place in Acco, and, to what degree is the festival in fact connected to the city and host community in which it is rooted.

C H A P TE R

ONE

Artistic Direction and the Political: Exception Takes the Stage?

The term “other theater” in the festival’s title was coined by its founder and first artistic director (in the years 1980–1982), Oded Kotler.1 Kotler sought one term that would contain a wide variety of phrases signifying theatrical production outside the mainstream, such as avant-garde, fringe, alternative theater, experimental theater, etc. Defining “other theater” is central to artistic direction, e.g., the choice of plays and performances, performers and artists, the initiation of special projects, and the appeal to diverse audiences. Therefore, the changing definitions and boundaries of “other theater” with different directors has fashioned the festival’s place in the Israeli theater field, especially vis-à-vis the mainstream. Through the terms “the exceptional” and “the political,” artistic direction and its relation to “other theater” is investigated below. The political always emerges as an exception, and thus it can never be represented by established systems. Furthermore, these systems often blur the political. Thus claimed Yehouda Shenhav (2009) following Carl Schmitt (2004 [1922]) and Michel Foucault (2007). The exception therefore always stands outside a hierarchical organized system, opposing, undermining, or challenging it. A fierce act of dissent and undermining can expose a system’s power and violence—whether that be a governance system or a semantic-cultural one. Thus, from the viewpoint of the system itself, the political in its exceptionality 1

A list of artistic directors with dates is found at the end of the chapter.

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is perceived as a problem and is therefore either eventually established or gotten rid of. Therefore, at its base, the political is ephemeral and short-lived. I wish to ascertain how this methodological-historical process takes place in a system whose stated aim is to act as a site for exceptions—to glean the exceptional into it and give the exceptional a place, and thus to try to define the site’s boundaries and its political. Acco Festival is supposedly just such a system, ostensibly inviting the exceptional to come through its gates: The festival’s aim is to showcase artistic works seeking an original, new, or different language. The festival encourages works that examine the boundaries of theatrical concepts and expand them [emphasis added], interdisciplinary works, works suggesting original approaches to theatrical space, direction, audience-performance relations, etc.2 Examination of the boundaries of the theatrical medium and their expansion means allocating space for artists and works that evade the mainstream of Israeli theater, delineating new, wider, and more inclusive boundaries. Such a system would appear to undergo a politicization of itself, i.e., “the presentation of institutionalized power relations as problematic relations, i.e., undermining their legitimacy” (Ophir 2001, 136). I would argue that even a system like the Acco Festival, whose main goal is to seek out exceptions and give them a home, will not be totally inclusive, and the exceptions left outside it may in fact uncover its political. In other words, the self-politicization of a system is impossible. Artistic direction predefines and articulates the exceptions that will be included in the festival, but there is always the possibility that some exception will fail this definition and challenge it from the outside: after all, one of the characteristics of the exception is its refusal to be sorted into a disciplinary system’s categories. Therefore, I will show how the Acco Festival features an attempt to ostensibly uncover power

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http://www.accofestival.co.il. The festival has another, social-economic-touristic goal, to improve the city’s image and promote it as a tourist destination, thus contributing to its economic development. In Chapter Five, I deal extensively with this goal, as well as with the complexity of the festival’s policy toward its host community, i.e., the Jewish and Arab residents of Acco.

Artistic Direction and the Political: Exception Takes the Stage?

relations, to problematize and undermine them, but what is actually achieved is depoliticization of these same relations. Adi Ophir (2001) defined depoliticization as “the representation of relations of domination as if they were normal and natural, rendering them obvious.” But there is a difference between a system that has no interest in the political, i.e., presentation of power relations as natural, and a system supposedly always under self-examination, one that is interested in itself as a site of perpetual change, one that is perceived as having a self-image of an inclusionary system that is conscious of its own political. Therefore, in the case of the Acco Festival, a gap opens between the system’s stated boundaries, ostensibly delineated by the included exceptional works and artists, and its actual boundaries, which are challenged from the outside by excluded exceptional works and artists that have been left on its periphery. Therefore, the Acco Festival features a de facto process of depoliticization by differing degrees, blurring and hiding the gap between the exceptions that are internalized and those left outside or situated on its outskirts.

“Other Theater” and the Exception: Formal and Thematic “Other theater,” then, is meant to bring together works, styles, and artists that work differently than what is usually accepted by the mainstream, whether formally or thematically,3 such as fringe, alternative, experimental, and avantgarde theater. Theater scholars who identify the many terms included under the heading “other theater” use classifications that ascertain the distinction between formal and thematic (e.g., Aronson 2000, Graver 1995). In general, formal otherness seeks to undermine and challenge the mainstream’s received forms and to bring about transformation and renewal through the medium’s means of 3

My understanding of the terms form and content isn’t binary or rigid, and accepts post-structuralist criticism. As I show below, the link between the two terms is necessary and multi-dimensional, and the distinction between them is purely analytical. In research literature, these poles are formulated in terms of “art versus reality” or “the aesthetic versus the ideological.” So as not to arrive at conceptual confusion, especially with the terms “the political” and “the ideological,” I prefer to use the pair content and form, even though it is slightly archaic. In the last part of this chapter, I treat different theories formulating the tension between formal and thematic exceptionality.

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expression alone. Thematic otherness, on the other hand, seeks to influence social order and reality, fashioning transformation and innovation through the content presented with the theatrical medium. Therefore, in addition to my major argument that the system cannot be totally inclusive, I wish to argue that the exception to an artistic system has two senses: formal and thematic. Exceptionality can be expressed in different dimensions, and thus, a certain phenomenon can be perceived as exceptional along one of its dimensions and not along others, and correspondingly, one can point to partial exceptionality and therefore to partial politicization. We can therefore perceive a continuum and motion of phenomena within a certain system from full exceptionality to partial exceptionality and then non-exceptionality, i.e., in harmony with the system. This argument follows from the definition of the political as temporary, which might be able to be absorbed into the system—i.e., “absorption” into it is gradual, and its phases can be signified. “Other theater” that operates mainly on formal direction seeks to exceed what is acceptable in the mainstream, to oppose it, to undermine it, and to renew theatrical forms and expression modes. This is accomplished through techniques such as:

• • • • •

situating the work in an unconventional space abandoning written text in favor of the workshop-style forms from which the work emerges adopting acting techniques that are different than the received and realistic ones prompting audience participation integrating interdisciplinary work and new media (internet).

“Other theater” that operates mainly on thematic direction seeks to transcend the medium’s boundaries concerning social reality. It uses the medium to deal with exceptional themes that are hidden and blurred by the mainstream, or it takes an exceptional, more or less critical stance vis-à-vis well-known and talked-about subjects. Its thematic exceptionality is expressed mainly in its stance regarding social reality and the way it formulates that in the work. Before us, then, are four ways of combining the formal and the thematic: formal and thematic exceptionality; formal exceptionality alone; thematic exceptionality

Artistic Direction and the Political: Exception Takes the Stage?

alone; and lack of exceptionality in both dimensions. These options move from non-exceptionality to partial and full exceptionality. However, before I enumerate how these options manifest in the festival’s artistic direction, I briefly discuss Acco Festival and it structure.

Acco Festival: Inclusion and Exclusion Following is the artistic direction’s process of selection and repertoire building. Artists who are not supported by the ministry of culture, usually emerging artists or well-known artists who choose to work distinctly outside the mainstream, submit performance and original play proposals to the competition. The prestigious competition is the festival’s main framework. From dozens of submissions each year, the artistic director and the committee under him select approximately ten best. This framework awards a financial prize to the winning show and commendations for categories such as directing, writing, acting, and design. The winning play gets screentime in the media and with theater critics. Shows participating in the competition also enjoy the professional accompaniment of the festival’s artistic director and the members of the artistic committee. Sometimes the festival will not accept a certain show but will allow it to appear in one of its other frameworks, such as outside events, “the hothouse,” “the coexistence stage,” “the new immigrant stage,” and “special events,”4 and the festival will provide a small budget and limited publicity. Also, the festival hosts guest shows produced by others, thereby providing additional opportunities for participation in non-competition frameworks. It follows that the artistic director and the members of the artistic community are the ones who define what “other theater” is, and they determine the boundaries between formal and thematic exception and the festival’s mainstream.5 Formally, their definition revolves around the following questions: to what extent does “other theater” challenge the medium’s basic elements—actor, These are just a few examples, since the out-of-competition frameworks and their titles change periodically according to the decisions of the reigning director at the time. 5 However, festival repertoire is fashioned by the artistic director and members of the committee according to the constraints of having to juggle several elements: representatives of the ministry of culture and Acco Municipality, who fund the event; theater critics and the audience; and the host community (see Sauter 2007). 4

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audience, space, and time? To what extent does it expand its boundaries to neighboring media such as dance, video-art, performance art, music, and visual art? Are these performances still perceived as theater? To what extent is “other theater” supposed to be judged by professional criteria? Would applied theater, for instance, be accepted into the festival or left out because it is done by amateurs? Thematically, their definition revolves around these questions: to what extent does “other theater” deal with exceptional subjects or take an exceptional, critical stand vis-à-vis subjects on the public agenda? To what extent does the work oppose, challenge, and doubt that which is considered obvious, natural, and accepted in the social reality? The festival was set up and is funded by the ministry of culture and the Acco Municipality, so it is unsurprising that most of its artistic directors throughout the years came from the mainstream of the Israeli theater field; however, most of the artists are, as previously mentioned, emerging artists or more established artists who choose to work outside the mainstream. As Bourdieu (1993) explained, the struggle that takes place in the theater field is mostly about economic capital (budgets) and symbolic capital (prestige, recognition, and appreciation), between the center of the field, its institutions and established artists, and the newly emerging artists—the new, young artists outside the center. The history of the field is a history of the series of struggles past and present, which allow us to understand the allocation of capital within the field. Dan Urian (2008) has investigated the Israeli theater field and the struggles taking place between the seven established repertory theaters at its center and the young artists outside them. These established theaters attempt to consolidate their symbolic capital, among other ways, through a monopoly of the professional definitions of the theater medium and the standards characterizing appropriate, quality work. This monopoly belongs to the taste-makers who define what is acceptable versus exceptional and quality versus inferior and who ascertain whether a piece even belongs to the medium of theater. Taste-makers in the field are agents with great symbolic capital that allows them to set up judgment parameters, confer recognition and legitimacy to artists and artistic forms, or conversely reject and denounce them, bringing about—or stopping—changes to the field. Taste-makers are important artists, well-known theater critics, academic authorities, or major key figures who set the tone in the art field, whose recognition—or lack thereof—of an artist or work can affect symbolic value.

Artistic Direction and the Political: Exception Takes the Stage?

The festival, then, allows a substantial meeting between these two rival groups, with the mainstream firmly controlling both economic and symbolic resources. Bourdieu (1993 and 1996) claimed that struggle in the field often coalesces around oppositions like commercial and artistic, high and popular cultures. Due to budgetary constraints,6 the main opposition in the Acco Festival is between the formal and thematic exception and the rule. This opposition has coalesced through different directive approaches, under which the directors have formulated standards of artist inclusion and exclusion throughout the years. I will now formulate the main argument again in light of the distinction between formal and thematic: the hierarchy governing the festival’s frameworks is the main means of inclusion or exclusion of artists and works. Throughout most of its years, the festival’s definition of “other theater” was minimal, leaving many artists and works outside the competition, either placing them in one of the symbolically and economically less prestigious subcategories or perceiving them as substandard or irrelevant to the festival and excluding them altogether. Sometimes, shows that were only thematically exceptional were included, and in extremely rare instances the definition of “other theater” employed by the artistic director and the committee under him was inclusive enough to allow the inclusion of both formal and thematic exception. A minimal definition of “other theater” has drawn the festival’s criteria and excluded exceptions closer to the mainstream’s, and the festival has managed to come up with a self-image of a system conscious of its own political, even though it in fact silences and blurs the political.

“Other Theater” and Its Definition According to Four Approaches Between the Formal Exception and the Thematic Exception As already stated, the opposition between the exception (the extraordinary) and the rule can have four possibilities combining the formal dimension and the thematic dimension: lack of any exception; thematic exceptionality alone; formal exceptionality alone; and both formal and thematic exceptionality. 6

For the purposes of comparison, a play participating in the festival in the competition framework is usually budgeted some NIS 50,000 while a production in one of the mainstream’s repertory theaters usually costs some NIS 250,000.

7

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Acco Festival: Between Celebration and ­Confrontation

In the Acco Festival, each combination either expanded or contracted the boundaries of the definition of “other theater.” The two first options were dominant and competitive in the festival in particular and in the field in general, in contrast with the two last ones. I will now demonstrate these options using examples from the festival’s history.

Unexceptional Other Theater Artistic direction that prefers a lack of any exceptionality, in effect, abandons the very definition of “other theater” and seeks to fashion quality theater only according to formal criteria that actually fits the criteria of the mainstream. It seeks to almost completely separate the formal and the thematic and establish an autonomy of the formal. This stance makes a clear distinction between the outside world and art, which now establishes total autonomy. Artistic work is judged on solely formal values, usually having to do with structure, complexity, representation of relations, images, etc. The work’s political, moral, social, and community values remain irrelevant to the judging of it. The festival directors who take this stance seek to be perceived as operating under solely professional considerations, as creating distance from the political and as creating an apolitical space. These directors, in effect, perceive the festival as a sort of “small repertory theater,” and the plays that they accept into the festival fit the criteria of the small, limited-budget productions raised in the repertory theaters’ smaller halls. The autonomous barriers that this approach sets up between forms, styles, and media strengthens the festival’s hierarchical division of frameworks, relegating formal and thematic exceptions to its subcategories while outright rejecting others. Throughout the festival’s years, many directors have separated form and content, matching the mainstream’s criteria. Abandoning the term “other theater” and using hierarchical framing, they have carried out a depoliticization that has obfuscated and swallowed up the oppositional potential of theatrical production outside the mainstream. Tom Levy, who was artistic director in 1984–1985, thought it was important that the festival be “more professional and interesting, and less other . . . I did that consciously, to attract higher-level people, so that they wouldn’t be afraid to come to Acco” (Yilov 1985). “Higher-level people” here signifies established

Artistic Direction and the Political: Exception Takes the Stage?

artists, especially from the mainstream.7 And indeed the festival under his direction was “professional” by mainstream criteria, as critics flatteringly commented.8 Levy explained that Acco Festival was supposed to expand the stylistic range that was supposed to originally exist in repertory theater.9 Since repertory theater shirked this duty, the festival fulfilled the role, and so Levy intentionally directed the festival as “a small repertory theater.” In accordance with this approach, performance art doesn’t distinctly belong to the theater medium, so in his second year in office (1985), Levy separated it from the competition, shoving it instead into the “performance art today” subcategory, going so far as to stress that even in this category the accepted performances had to adhere to dramatic values, i.e., the theatrical criteria of the mainstream. Eran Beniel (1989, 40), artistic director in 1988–1989, claimed that “it’s better that artists deal with any subject they like . . . as long as they supply the festival with material for riveting plays and performances and an exciting celebration of theater.” He therefore preferred a formally and thematically apolitical conception seeking to contain only professional criteria. The use of the adjectives “riveting” and “exciting,” typical of mainstream discourse, highlights how important it was that the works ingratiate themselves with the audience rather than challenge it, i.e., that criteria for fashioning the different frameworks and then accepting works into them derive from mainstream conceptions. “Acco’s wonderful audience . . . deserves p-r-o-f-e-s-s-i-o-n-a-l theatrical experiences,” Beniel told Tel Aviv’s weekly Ha'ir, going on to explicitly highlight his relation to the political, “I don’t need to be always hurting in the context of a national concept,” especially as there were de facto “four materials of a [banal] political character, fighting ‘the situation,’ and they were all terrible” (Orian 1988). In general, Beniel (1989, 40) claimed that “only rarely can artists react immediately, with deep and valuable artistry, to the exciting events taking place around them.” In Beniel’s mind, then, a link between the thematic and the formal is not For instance, established actors Yossi Yadin and Gabi Amrani played in Ira Dvir’s debut play, The Binding (1984), and won a commendation for their acting. The play was later produced for television with their participation. 8 See, for instance, Michael Handelzaltz (1984) announcing “the best Acco Festival ever” or Nurit Ya’ari and Galia Schifman (1984) congratulating Tom Levy on “the relatively high level of the festival this year.” 9 Tom Levy in an interview on November 25, 2004, N.S. 7

9

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Acco Festival: Between Celebration and ­Confrontation

only unnecessary, it might actually harm a work’s value, and in most cases the outcome would be superficial and propagandistic, and thus, in Beniel’s festival, there was almost no thematic exceptions that dealt with politics, such as silenced subjects and taking a stand on them. Framing of the festival’s plays hierarchically continued over the years. Beniel created the “special events” framework that provided space for established artists, usually from the mainstream.10 Artistic Director Shmuel Hasfari (1990–1991) added “the hothouse,” a small competition for young artists, and outside events. Thus, some of the young artists, for whom the festival was originally founded, were moved from the competition to “the hothouse” while more established artists took over places in the competition and in special events. Roni Ninio, artistic director from 1998 to 2000, continued this framing process, adding a competitive framework for outside performances, and in 2000 innovating a framework for new Jewish immigrant artists (“Aliyah in Acco”) and for Arab artists (“stage for Arab performances”). Employing a multicultural rhetoric, in effect, he relegated non-Hebrew-speaking artists to the festival’s margins, slashing their budgets and public relations in the process (for more on this, see Chapter Five). Separation of artists along national-ethnic lines excluded them from the prestigious competition and minimized the possibility for their formal and thematic political pieces to appear.

Other Theater—Thematic Exception Alone Another dominant approach to artistic direction of the festival is promoting thematic exceptions, those that expose silenced subjects or take a critical stance on them. In this approach, the formal is usually totally harnessed to the service of the work’s political statement, i.e., it renounces formal exceptionality that could alienate the audience or make deciphering the work’s political message harder. Therefore, the more important it is for an artist to convey criticism of reality, the more the artist tends to give up formal innovation and opposition. In other words, with this approach, the artist prefers partial politicization through thematic exception and uses the dominant forms acceptable to the 10 It was in this framework that Rina Yerushalmi directed Hamlet, and following its

success with both audiences and the critics, it was adopted into the repertoire of the Cameri Theatre in Tel Aviv.

Artistic Direction and the Political: Exception Takes the Stage?

mainstream to that end. Artistic directors who have chosen this approach have given up on the exceptional formal possibilities inherent in the term “other theater,” preferring performances and plays that deal with Israeli reality (which has supplied and still supplies lots of raw material to work with). However, their renunciation of formal exceptionality has meant that, like their counterparts who totally gave up any exceptionality, they too ran the festival like “a small repertory theater.” Shimon Levy, artistic director from 1986 to 1987, was the most prominent proponent of this approach,11 and his firm opinion against the first approach came to the forefront in the publicized debate between himself and his successor, Eran Beniel. Against Beniel’s conservative approach that represented the theater field in the late 1980s—the height of the First Intifada—Levy (1989, 35) claimed that there was a feeling of “sick-and-tired-of-political-relevant-theater.”12 He also observed this tendency at the 1988 festival, “Much poverty was felt in the economic, social, political, and ideal messages, i.e., all areas that demand actual interface with the other . . . social withdrawal was a key concept.” In other words, he claimed that rejection of theater that was formed in reaction to social reality constituted de facto depoliticization through using strictly professional rhetoric—institutionalizing the exclusion of the thematically exceptional with professional excuses. While serving as Acco Festival Artistic Director, Shimon Levy claimed that it was supposed to be “a nature preserve of Israeli culture” and came out against the commercial entertainment tendencies of the mainstream (in Fried 1987). He stated that it was important for artistic creation in Acco to be “relevant in the wider, and not necessarily the immediate, documentary sense” (in Fried 1987), going as far as claiming that “for me there is no other theatre” (in Z. Shohat 1987). And in fact, the repertoire that he offered veered toward social realism that subjugated the formal to the thematically exceptional, 11 This approach began taking shape back in Oded Kotler’s tenure as the festival’s first

artistic director. In 1982, several in-competition plays were in reaction to the evacuation of Yamit and the first Lebanon War, the most prominent of which was Shmuel Hasfari’s Tashmad (a play whose title is itself a play on words—the Jewish year 5744, which also spells out the Hebrew word for “destruction”). 12 In the late 1980s, repertory theater produced musicals that tried to shy away from the hot-button issue of the First Intifada, such as Les Misérables at the Cameri Theatre (1987) and Sallah Shabati at Habima (1988).

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Acco Festival: Between Celebration and ­Confrontation

His reservation regarding the term “other theater” reflects his conception, according to which the festival is just a small repertory theater attempting to fill a void and take on the role that the mainstream itself had originally been intended to play. The play Gazzans by Moti Baharav (1987) is a distinct example of this approach. Revolving around a group of Palestinian laborers from Gaza working illegally in Tel Aviv, it highlights the unequal relations between them and Israeli society, portrayed on the stage mainly through their complex and demeaning treatment at the hands of their Israeli employer and border police soldiers. The Palestinians at first attempt to build themselves a home in an abandoned Jaffa building, but following the violent harassment of the border police, they decide to plant an explosive device there instead. Finally, the border police chase the Palestinians, and they all blow up in the abandoned apartment. The gruesome ending expressed the playwright’s warning of possible Palestinian uprising, which in fact happened. The First Intifada broke out some two months after the festival. The play’s writing process was unique (Reshef 1987). Baharav set up a troupe of Gaza Palestinians, fashioning the play’s materials through theatrical work with them. The troupe broke up six months afterward. He then tried to set up a troupe of Israeli Arabs to mount the play but this attempt failed as well. Finally, he mounted the play with Jewish and Arab actors. The play was accepted by the mainstream Habima national theater, but its production was delayed. Baharav approached another mainstream theater, Beit Lessin, deciding to submit the play to Acco Festival only once he was rejected from there. The scene depicting border police cruelty to the workers stirred controversy: the audience refused to believe that such an event could really take place (Paz 1987). This and other in-competition plays (Zionist Whore, Midnight Inspection) incurred the anger of both right-wing Acco Municipality council members and theater critics and of the public.13 This response points to a process of the festival’s (partial) politicization: exposing the violent power relations between Jews and Palestinians from the occupied territories in the days prior to the First Intifada, dealing with this issue, and presenting it in ways that are different than usual in the mainstream. Habima’s delaying of the play’s 13 See Chapter Five for a detailed account of demonstrations and opposition by the

host community in 1987.

Artistic Direction and the Political: Exception Takes the Stage?

production and Beit Lessin’s refusal to mount it highlight the festival’s role in the field under Shimon Levy’s direction: a space to assemble thematic exceptions and thus to allow exposure of the political. The production of this play and others like it in the 1987 festival, some two months prior to the outbreak of the First Intifada, highlights the artists’ sensitivity to this silenced subject, exposure of which was a process of undermining that raised objections from spectators.

Other Theater—Formal and Thematic Exception “Other theater” that is both formally and thematically exceptional is perceived as theater that uses oppositional, undermining, and innovative theatrical modes of expression to expose silenced subjects or to formulate a critical stance on them, thus allowing the political to appear (Kershaw 1999). Such theater exposes social reality by shattering the audience’s obvious boundaries. Exposition of power relations on stage is achieved through exposing the theatrical representation apparatus itself, exceptional use of acting techniques, direction and stage design opposed to what is accepted in the mainstream, and preventing the audience from identifying with the onstage fictional world. Formal and thematic exceptionality distances and alienates the audience from what is presented on the stage, thus allowing the audience to see beyond the obvious that surrounds it and limits its vision, i.e., allowing for full politicization of what seems natural and self-evident in reality, exposing it as socially constructed. The prominent artistic directors who tended toward that approach were Dudi Ma'ayan, who was artistic director in 1995, and Ati Citron, who was director in 2001–2004.14 Both encouraged formal and thematic exceptionality, distancing the festival from the mainstream and allowing its politicization. They allocated space for alternative genres and styles that allowed interdisciplinary artists to enter the festival and leave their mark on it. Acco-born Dudi Ma'ayan returned to the city in 1984 and founded, with others, the Acco Theater Center, an alternative theater influenced by Antonin Artaud, Jerzy Grotowski, and Richard Schechner, and others, combining a unique, exceptional acting method and a politically radical worldview. 14 Artistic directors Smadar Ya’aron and Moni Yossef also favored an approach similar

to Citron’s; see more detail in Chapter Five.

13

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Acco Festival: Between Celebration and ­Confrontation

He directed the festival accordingly, distancing it from the “small repertory theater” approach and seeking to foster “the growth of alternative culture. Acco isn’t, and can’t be, an entryway to more established theater. Acco is a laboratory-arena where we can investigate the roots of theater, as opposed to the rootless theater we all tend to consume” (Bar Kadma 1995). The use of the term “alternative culture” and the image of the laboratory, though already trite in theatrical discourse, speaks to his expectation that the festival acts as a sterile, artistic laboratory impervious to outside influences. His desire was for the festival to be able to expose, through its formal experiments, social reality’s silenced subjects and also to delineate, using the formal and thematic exceptions, a cultural alternative to the mainstream that collaborates with the reproduction of the status quo and that allows full politicization of the theatrical field. During the years 1992–1994, the festival’s artistic director was Yaakov Agmon; Ma'ayan was a member of the artistic committee and was active in the cancellation of several of the frameworks (“special events” and “the hothouse”), bringing all plays under one competitive framework. In 1995, he was appointed artistic director instead of Agmon (who was handed the direction of the national theater, Habima). Ma'ayan cancelled the competition, downsized artistic accompaniment, and gave artists full artistic freedom. The repertoire of the festival he directed was characterized by performances of unique genres and styles, open-space and audience-participation performances, and performances that blurred the distinction between fiction and reality and between actor and character. Thus, there was no hierarchical distinction between performance art, street theater, and outside and inside performances. It has been the most radical change undertaken in the festival’s history to this day. Cancelling the competition, removal of the hierarchical framing, and downsizing artistic accompaniment to a minimum allowed full inclusion of the exceptions. Formal and thematic exceptionality allowed full politicization of the festival, distancing it from the mainstream and signifying it as an alternative in the theatrical field. The undermining of the festival’s fundamentals, expressed in cancellation of the competition and hierarchical framing, resulted in Ma'ayan’s firing, with full support from the critics.15 As previously mentioned, the artistic director 15 Shai Bar-Ya’akov (1995) exclaimed, “Is this theater?” Shosh Weitz (1995) claimed

that “the outcome is disappointing,” and Michael Handelzaltz (1995) claimed that “people with little enterprise and talent got stage time.”

Artistic Direction and the Political: Exception Takes the Stage?

works under pressure from different bodies that wish to formulate the red lines that should not be crossed. In the eyes of the festival’s management, Ma'ayan’s changes were too far-reaching, clearly bearing the marks of being challenging and oppositional, i.e., of being a full politicization of the festival. Ma'ayan explained his firing as part of a larger trend of depoliticization of the theater field in particular and of the culture in general, “The problem runs much deeper, and it is connected to the way cultural institutions are run in Israel. Who exactly is the deciding authority: the artistic directors or the budget, sales, and public relations people?” (Bar-Ya'akov 1998, 32). Politicization was perceived as unwanted, so it is unsurprising that Ma'ayan’s successor, Itzik Weingarten, claimed, “I also reject the approach that reigned earlier [with Ma'ayan], ‘a dancer is also theater, a musician is also theater. . . . Anybody who performs on stage is theater.’ It’s more complicated when a dancer comes and says ‘I want to dance,’ that’s dance” (Citron 1997). Weingarten, then, reinstated the good old order, renewing the festival’s depoliticization: he brought back the competition and hierarchical framing, reformulated clear distinctions between genres and styles, i.e., returned to the first approach, of a theater that is not exceptional in any way.16 Ati Citron pronounced, “from a guest festival to a naturalizing festival,” as opposed to the popular view according to which it was a Tel Aviv festival that just happened to take place in Acco. Citron vigorously worked on two fronts: the artistic and the social. Artistically and organizationally, he dissolved the frameworks set up by predecessor Roni Ninio that distinguished Arabs from Jews, but he set up other frameworks that were only moderately distinct. Citron, who previously directed the School of Visual Theatre in Jerusalem, had an interdisciplinary artistic view that was very different from the mainstream. He therefore allowed a wide variety of styles, such as performance art, visual theater, new media, puppetry, public theater, and dance theater to participate. Socially, he expressed the festival’s “naturalization” through Arabic plays in the competition, Arab Acco residents as actors in some of the in-competition works, and joint Jewish-Arab community projects. 16 Weingarten’s approach is unsurprising given his central status in the theater field

during the mid-1990s when, besides directing Acco Festival, he was also head director at Habima and director of the Theatronetto Festival.

15

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Acco Festival: Between Celebration and ­Confrontation

By allowing the competition, instituting artistic accompaniment, and using frameworks in the festival, Citron did not go as far as Ma'ayan had.17 However, he did imbue the out-of-competition frameworks with greater importance and did highlight exceptionality in its double sense, formal and thematic—i.e., he expanded the boundaries of the definition of “other theater,” interweaving formal exceptionality with thematic exceptionality, which allowed the appearance of the political. Because of this, several members of the festival’s administration tried to have him removed from office. The critics, too, expressed doubts: a provocative newspaper headline called it a “Festival of Shahids” (Bar-Ya'akov 2003). Daniela Michaeli, who succeeded Citron in the festival’s artistic management (2005–2008), clarified that it was important to return to “classical values” and highlight dramaturgy and acting, which in Citron’s time were awarded less importance, especially in interdisciplinary works.18 In other words, in Michaeli’s opinion, clearly traditional artistic boundaries need to be drawn, thus again minimizing the definition of “other theater” to that of “small repertory theater.”

“Other Theater” as Formal Exception Alone The formal exception seeks to oppose and undo conventional forms, and it sometimes even creates new forms itself. The formal exception (partly) politicizes the theater field and its professional criteria, which are perceived as universal and always valid. It may be perceived as low-level work since it fails to size up to conventional professional criteria, and sometimes it can even be perceived as standing altogether outside the realm of the art of theater. The undermining of creative processes and artistic quality valuation criteria, and the new expression modes that the formal exception offers, may be altogether rejected, but their rejection can also be temporary, and eventually it may situate itself in the theater field and become engulfed by it. Formal exceptionality allows for partial appearance of the political since the formal exceptional doesn’t usually deal with silenced subjects and burning issues of the day from an exceptional standpoint, but it usually distances itself from direct social 17 As I will demonstrate below, even Citron’s inclusive approach was not fully so, the

distinct example being the performance of The Car.

18 Interview with Daniela Michaeli, February 10, 2008, N.S.

Artistic Direction and the Political: Exception Takes the Stage?

questions and allows the audience to make those connections itself. The formal exceptional, then, offers only partial politicization of the power relations of the mainstream and the margins of the theater field, a politicization focused on the field’s formal aspects, and its completion to full politicization may happen with the audience if it cannily deduces from the formal to the thematic. The festival’s different artistic directors did not take this approach, even though one could point to specific plays and performances that support it. Formal exceptionality alone, then, was not central to the festival’s direction, but artists outside the mainstream used it throughout its years. The 1981 festival’s repertoire featured visual theater, puppetry, and requisite theater performances, especially due to the influence of the Train Theatre of Jerusalem, founded at the time, whose artists (Alina Ashbel, Michael Schuster, Hadas Ofrat, and Mario Kotliar) participated in the festival. Visual pieces such as adult puppetry were formally exceptional in the Israeli theater field of the time. The festival jury’s relation to these plays speaks to the political potential of the formal exceptional, a potential restrained by the festival. The formal exceptional garnered ambivalent responses from the judges’ committee, which was entrusted with evaluating pieces for the festival’s repertoire: alongside recognition of the formal elements signifying “other theater,” there was also disappointment with the textual element’s secondary role in the repertoire and criticism of the lack of attention to social questions. In other words, despite some appreciation of the formal exceptional by the judging committee, the use of mainstream criteria (the importance of text and social commentary) restrains such performances, blocking politicization of the field. That is why the festival jury, headed by literature scholar Gershon Shaked, decided to withhold the first prize, giving out only a second and third prize as well as a special prize, “Unfortunately, it did not see a production worthy of a first prize.”19 The awarding of a special prize to the Cocooner Group perfectly illustrates the judging committee’s ambivalence. Members of the jury claimed that “this production exceeded the committee’s established criteria regarding this festival, though this is undoubtedly one of the more artistically interesting works this 19 Acco Festival jury minutes, October 10, 1981, Israeli Center for the Documentation

of the Performing Arts, Sourasky Central Library, Tel Aviv University, file 25.4.4, Acco Festival 1981 folder.

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Acco Festival: Between Celebration and ­Confrontation

committee has seen.”20 This group produced a performance piece with no coherent characters, plot, or story, staging an impressive spectacle comprising the motion of geometrical objects by different interpreters coming together in abstract situations. The embarrassed jury gave the group a special prize outside of the usual classification; on the one hand, it was impressed with its exceptional formal uniqueness, and on the other it had doubts about the performance since it claimed it went too far in its exceeding of established criteria and therefore did not belong, in its opinion, to the medium of theater. Awarding a “hesitant prize” illustrates the way the festival restrains the formal exceptional: by containing it and simultaneously signifying it, a performance can doubtfully even be labeled “theater.” This depoliticizes the formal exceptional, preventing any possible expression of the political and any option of exposing the boundaries of the system.

The “Censored” Car: The Political Appearing In 2004, performance group Orto-Da and director Amir Orian raised The Car, a protest performance in the style of street theater outside the official festival. This was Citron’s last year as artistic director. Reception of the performance illustrates how a formal and thematic exception piece that has been rejected by the festival allows the appearance of the political and of exposing the power relations between artists, the artistic director, and the artistic committee since this show refused classification according to the demands of a disciplining system (Shenhav 2009). This was an outside performance that took place in the festival’s parking lot, outside its usual site. A white car, with a loudspeaker mounted on its roof and playing old patriotic Israeli songs, drove slowly, and figures encased in black nylon bags—like bodies after a terrorist attack— emerged from it. The figures slowly worked their way out of the bags and began walking mechanically with no human expression. They took out cans of cleaning fluid to clean the car, but the cans contained blood which contaminated the car even more; then the figures threw a bucket of blood over the whole car. One of the figures, dressed in a cap and three-quarter-length pants, posed like the boy raising his hands in the famous Warsaw Ghetto photograph. The figures gave 20 Ibid.

Artistic Direction and the Political: Exception Takes the Stage?

the audience copies of that photograph. The performance’s distinct political message presented suicide bombings as the effect of violent Israeli nationalism. It strengthened the view of Israel and the victim that has turned into the perpetrator, a transformation already presented in many plays in Israeli theater in general, and in the Acco Festival in particular (see Chapter Two). The festival had originally commissioned the performance, but after the artistic committee saw it at the Bat Yam Festival of Street Theatre, which took place that summer, it decided not to allow its participation, reportedly for artistic reasons. The Orto-Da group decided to appear at the festival uninvited and with no budget, as a one-time protest performance outside the festival site. This protest action effectively delineated the festival’s boundaries. As an exception, the performance situated itself outside the system, allowing it to effectively oppose festival hierarchy and classification. From its place outside the walls of the festival’s garden, it garnered relatively large media exposure and raised a level of public interest that it probably would not have if it had been officially included in the “outside events” framework. The performance shocked the audience, and critics favorably noted the substantial effect of a double protest: against political reality and against the festival’s artistic direction (Goren 2004). This performance made the audience think, and it exposed the power relations between artists and the festival’s artistic direction and its place within the theater field. As already mentioned, Citron was actually considered an inclusive director in his understanding of “other theater,” which in his mind included formal and thematic exceptions, and was even criticized for this fact. Furthermore, previous performances by Orto-Da, such as Meta-Rabin and To Be Or Not?, which also dealt with silenced subjects and were presented as street theater, were accepted into the festival, so The Car’s rejection seemed strange. Its director, Amir Orian, vociferously dismissed the idea that it was rejected for purely “professional” grounds, “The festival makes liberal noises, but the minute you cross a certain line, censorship is immediately employed. The saddest part is that it is the artists’ self-censorship out of a desire to ingratiate themselves with the establishment” (Asterkin 2004). The Car tried Citron’s own inclusive criteria, showing that even more flexible artistic direction that employs an inclusive definition of “other theater” has its boundaries, or “self-censorship,” as Orian put it. The festival may have rejected The Car because of different constraints to

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artistic direction. Citron’s appointment to a fourth year of artistic direction (2004) was not self-evident, especially because of his inclusive, encouraging approach to performances that interwove formal and thematic exceptionality and because of intimations by Acco public figures of the festival management of discontent with his approach; as Citron (2005, 42–43) himself testified, “a coalition of Acco people [tried] to have me impeached at the end of three years of work, claiming I mingle politics and art. Under pressure from members of the Culture Ministry, my impeachment was prevented and my tenure was extended by another year.” Critic Shai Bar-Ya'akov (2004) stated with some satisfaction that The Car’s rejection was a positive act signifying “a certain moderating tendency” and that, more generally, “the hallmark of the [2004] festival was a move away from the political line” that had characterized it in the past. Sarit Fuchs (2004) claimed that “you couldn’t get a real emotional impact here” and that the 2004 festival “floated above current events and left radicalism outside.” She expressed her discontent with the festival’s political moderateness that did not allow it to “trouble anyone.” She regarded The Car, by contrast, as an important political performance that should have been officially included in the festival, “the event receives its power from the audience’s energy: from its horror, curiosity, disgust. Oh the audience, are we not the real show?” In her opinion, exactly the show that was removed from the festival’s repertoire was the one that was most instructive about the festival. Even though both critics’ opinions differ, they both attest to the limits of Citron’s inclusivity, which may have been a function of pressure put on him by the festival’s management. The Car, then, is a case study supporting my main argument, that even in a system meant to group together different exceptions, there is a predefinition of which exceptions will be invited, and hence, those who do not fit this definition will be excluded—and there will be protests against them from the outside. Despite its exclusion, The Car refused to disappear and be silent; it refused to be classified and “to moderate itself,” bursting outside the festival and exposing the festival’s boundaries. The struggle of The Car’s creators to perform at the festival politicized the different constraints to the term “other theater,” allowing them to expose the festival repertoire’s “gradual moderation,” i.e., its gradual convergence with the mainstream. Its presence clarified that even under a very inclusive approach, exceptions will be left out, and from there they will allow the political to appear.

Artistic Direction and the Political: Exception Takes the Stage?

Theoretical Discussion The four options discussed regarding the combination of formal and thematic exceptionality in the definition of “other theater,” in the context of the approach to the direction of Acco Festival, corresponds to theoretical approaches that formulate the relations between form and content in different ways. Most approaches are grounded in, and even based on, Marxist discourse. The approach wishing to separate form and content, focusing solely on the formal, is based on Immanuel Kant’s ([1790] 1973) “art for art’s sake” conception. “Art for art’s sake” means a disinterest in anything but the work itself and the aesthetic experience it awards, and it means a lack of any external purpose—social, personal, or other. This conception espouses art’s complete autonomy and a complete separation between it and reality. The work of art is constructed through formal values (such as structure, complexity, and relations). Content and values linked to the work’s social or psychological reality are regarded as criteria irrelevant to the work and its judgment. In other words, this approach seeks apolitical art that separates the formal from any reality-based content. In fact, Kant ([1790] 1973, 43) sought to separate the formal image and any possible content from reality, “Everything turns on the meaning which I can give to this representation, and not on any factor which makes me dependent on the real existence of the object.” In a wider sense, to the degree that art has a purpose, in Kant’s mind that purpose was “purposiveness without purpose,” so that art is autonomous and free from external goals. A non-formal purpose could lead to superficial, propagandistic work that achieves an opposite effect, mainly since the audience easily recognizes the non-formal goals and may recoil and become alienated from the work. The main criticism of this approach comes from Marxist circles that claim that the autonomous barrier between art and reality acts to blur the distinction between the super-structure (which includes art) and the economic base of social reality. The goal of this blurring, according to Marxist criticism, is depoliticization of art and its transformation into a sterile site free of political “contamination,” which then can identify and expose the relations between art and social reality. Sociologist Howard Becker (1982) added to this criticism, showing that separation of art from reality is in fact impossible as the artwork is a social action embedded in the web of different relations existing in material

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reality and as the dynamics of these relations influence the artwork. For instance, budgets, conditions that allow an artist to work, and the technology an artist needs to make the work, as well as education and other things the audience needs while interfacing with the work—all of these material conditions do not allow a total autonomous barrier between art as “purposiveness without purpose” and the material of social reality, to which art is geared. Exposing these material relations politicizes the artist and the work, sets their boundaries, and exposes the power relations constructed in the field between an artist and the audience. The approach seeking to use the formative for the purpose of thematic exception is based on Marxist Georg Lukács’s “critical realism.” Lukács rejected socialist realism, which sees art in general and theater in particular as part of the super-structure, understood as a simple one-way mechanical reflection of the economic base. He called this simplistic view of the relations between base- and super-structure “vulgar Marxism.” He found socialist realism’s artistic output to be mediocre and superficial; it served propaganda and actually held no power to allow the audience a complex experience. Therefore Lukacs attempts to formulate a more complex theory of art, especially of literature and drama. However, he also had reservations about modernist artistic tendencies. Modernism, according to Lukács, is any artistic movement that stresses technique and exceptional forms as against content and that has the main goal of formal experimentation with exceptional means of expression. He went on to claim that “a substanceless, pseudo-theatrical art appears which exploits with formalist cleverness the elements of suspense deriving from the original dramatic principle to provide trifling entertainment for the ruling class” (Lukacs 1962, 130). Lukács preferred critical realism, which does not eclipse the formal for the thematic (thus becoming simplistic and propagandistic), nor does it only stress an exceptional but escapist formalism. Stylistically, critical realism is clear and accessible to the audience and includes a detailed presentation of the characters and their surroundings, a clear linear plot, and the presentation of a specific time and place usually recognizable from reality. This realism’s criticality lies in the text’s consciousness of the social and economic processes that influence and fashion the subject. Thus, it is clear what the political context is in which the fictional character is embedded and what its boundaries and limitations are because of this context. Lukács said that when the character on the stage lives,

Artistic Direction and the Political: Exception Takes the Stage?

possibly expressed as the era’s most abstract problems as personal problems pivotal to a character’s life, a link between these abstract problems and the character’s experience is drawn in the audience’s mind. Lukács stressed a realist style accessible to audiences of low cultural capital (Bourdieu 1984). To decipher the work, and especially theater pieces where perception is immediate, it is pivotal that the spectator immediately understand the dramatic situation. This immediacy links the realist’s work to reality, allowing influence over the audience and its education: The dramatic conflict must thus be experienced by spectators as something immediate, with no need of special explanation, otherwise it can have no effect. Thus it must possess a great deal in common with the normal conflicts of everyday life. At the same time it must represent a new and peculiar quality, so that upon this common basis it can exercise the broad and deep impact of true drama upon the publicly assembled multitude. (Lukács 1962, 129) In other words, critical realism undertakes a partial politicization following the silenced subjects it exposes, subjects linked to power relations in reality, but it shies away from exposing the political in the formal dimension. Lukács preferred realism as a comprehensible form, clearly belonging to the mainstream, to visual exceptionality, which he regarded as decadent modernist art. The main criticism leveled at Lukács’s critical realism has to do with the importance it puts on the realist work’s instant comprehensibility. In this desire for instant comprehensibility lies a danger to the wider public whose cultural capital is meager and who will be swayed by patronizing writing that won’t allow for independent thinking and the development of a “correct” and “just” perception of reality. Furthermore, a piece’s immediate comprehensibility to the wider public could transform it into a commodity and thus defang it of all criticality. Therefore, the mainstream may appropriate the work, simultaneously congratulating itself for being “critical” and exploiting the piece, now transformed into a commodity, for financial gain and the accumulation of symbolic capital in the field. This was the fate of Ilan Hatzor’s play Masked, directed by actor Rami Danon and mounted in the 1990 festival, which won the prize for best play and was accepted into the Cameri Theatre’s repertoire.

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The play’s plot revolves around a Palestinian family veering between opposition and collaboration with the Israeli Occupation during the First Intifada. This is a realist play, one of the first that dealt with the intifada, and it was the first to feature only Palestinian characters (it doesn’t feature even one Jewish character). Masked was innovative for its time and had a defiant potential, but its very appropriation into the mainstream (mainstream because of the participation of established artists, among other reasons) restrained its scathing message, in effect, depoliticizing it in the field (see Chapter Two). Anti-realist approaches of the Bertolt Brecht and Theodor Adorno school form the basis of approaches that regard “other theater” as either formally and thematically exceptional or formally exceptional alone. Brecht, a Marxist playwright and director, pondered his obligation to both the work’s thematic and formal sides. Despite his Marxist obligation, and as opposed to realist conceptions subjugated to socialist ideas, he refused to reject theater’s pleasurable formal dimension, especially in its exceptional and innovative aspects. Brecht’s complex philosophy touches on different theatrical practices such as an acting method (Gestus), set design and dramaturgy, and the relation between the educational and the pleasurable in epic theater. I will refer here mainly to his method’s leading principal, the distancing effect (alienation effect), because of its great influence on the festival’s artists and directors, who interpreted it in ways that do not necessarily fit the techniques Brecht advocated for. Brecht ([1948] 1964, 204) claimed, “If art reflects life it does so with special mirrors.” He rejected the realist idea of simply reflecting reality, stressing the way this reality is represented on stage. Brecht’s aim was to rouse the audience to thought, to stop it from empathizing and identifying with the characters, to prevent it from being “swallowed” into realist bourgeois theater’s theatrical illusion. Realism fosters an illusion that what happens on stage is reality, and thus it blurs the construction of social reality and hides the political forces at its base. Walter Benjamin (1973, 18) claimed that the goal of Brecht’s theater is to rouse the audience of its serenity, to amaze and shock it. Theater is meant to expose the political of social reality’s power relations by exposing the apparatus of theatrical representation. Exposing acting, directing, and stage design techniques, as opposed to what is customary in realist theater, shatters the illusion and stops the audience’s possible identification with the fictional world on stage. This is the distancing effect (alienation effect): the audience should be distanced from what

Artistic Direction and the Political: Exception Takes the Stage?

is shown on stage to allow it to observe the social relations represented, denuded of any semblance of naturalism, and to show the social power-relations as politically constructed, i.e., politicized through their onstage representation. Brecht achieves the alienation effect with acting techniques that highlight the fact that the actor and the character are two separate entities: by using masks, exaggerated gestures, and other means. The plot takes place in many places, spread over an extended period of time, and is periodically interspersed with singing. The songs’ music is formally opposed to the plot, often melodious and harmonious though the words are critical and harsh. The set design also avoids realism; it makes do with simply signifying a place, for instance by using signs to delineate a time and place, and it employs means of expression that highlight artificiality, like a revolving stage to represent a long journey. Following Brecht, Benjamin (1973, 18) claimed that the artistic form, and not just its content, needs to be revolutionized, and therefore experimental theater, as formal exception, is supposed to be harnessed to exceptional content meant to shock the audience. The alienation effect, which is a simultaneous formal and thematic exceptionality principle, thus allows the appearance of the political in its two dimensions. The influence of Brecht’s idea has manifested itself in the festival, not necessarily in the adoption of his plays or the specific techniques he employed to make his theatrical vision a reality, but in the alienation effect, i.e., the harnessing of formal exceptionality to expose silenced themes for their full politicization. A formal exception combined with a thematic exception exposes the theater field’s politics in both its meanings—its received formal means and its thematic and subjective boundaries. Therefore, this approach was rarely employed. As we have seen, Dudi Ma'ayan, who did employ it relentlessly, was fired after one year in office, and Ati Citron was subjected to pressures and constraints meant to stop the full appearance of the political. In a certain sense, the approach of “other theater” as only formal exception fits with Theodor Adorno’s approach. As opposed to Benjamin, Brecht, and Lukács, Adorno rejects attempts to consciously combine the formal and the thematic, but he also rejects Kant’s approach of art’s full autonomy. Adorno ([1970] 1997, 5) posits “art’s double character as both autonomous and fait social.” He goes on to formulate a complex relation between the formal and the thematic, in effect, trying to combine his neo-Marxist approach with Kant’s. Art’s autonomy is important, and is an essential condition for unleashing its

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politically liberatory potential. Kant had in fact began identifying and developing the idea of art’s autonomy, but as opposed to him Adorno believes that autonomy is not a static state but a dynamic process that needs to be recreated each time anew in the creative process. Adorno ([1970] 1997, 8) claims, “Art is the social antithesis of society.” Autonomy allows the artwork to return and meet society as its social antithesis, i.e., to expose its boundaries. The artwork’s politics do not lie in its content (as in critical realism) but rather in its exceptional forms that tear through the old traditional forms that have ossified and become cliché. Adorno also rejects Brecht’s approach of combining formal and thematic exceptionality since an artist’s consciousness of this combination of critical content and exceptional form, he claims, undermines art’s autonomy; it turns it from an end in itself to a means, thus foiling the political’s ability to appear. Art’s autonomy allows the artistic director to offer an alternative to instrumental capitalist society and challenge its perception of the economic value of every human activity. The autonomous formal exception, which stands outside the capitalist culture industry, serves nothing but itself. It exposes the boundaries and power relations of the status quo, threatening them in its very establishment, in opposition to the profit principle. How is the link between art and social reality established, then? Adorno ([1970] 1997, 6) claims, “The unsolved antagonisms of reality return in artworks as immanent problems of form,” i.e., exceptional content is not expressed in an immediate, comprehensible, and conscious way in the artwork, but it is transformed into formal complexity through the artistic act. This complexity is characterized as exceptionality and the unraveling of the traditional formal exception, shocking the audience and simultaneously demanding it to invest thought and energy into the artwork’s details, which can lead it toward emancipation from oppressive society. The full politicization of the formal and thematic exception doesn’t exist consciously in the artwork, but rather it happens in the audience’s consciousness. It should be stressed that this is not just the unraveling of old forms but it is also the creation of an exceptional with an alternative interior logic that the audience has to experience to be able to be break free from the oppressive social order and be emancipated. During the 1981 Acco Festival, Hadas Ofrat showed The Parasite—an adult puppet show that was formally exceptional in its time. The performance

Artistic Direction and the Political: Exception Takes the Stage?

dealt with relations between a puppet called Self and a live actor called Him, against the backdrop of an alienated world. Following the ruling of the jury, which was mainly disappointed by a lack of reference to social reality, Ofrat (1981) wrote an open letter, defiantly asking, “Are the Jewish-Palestinian problem and the problem of ethnic integration the only themes on the agenda? How man looks, how he behaves, and how he treats the other—these are fatal existential (and hence, social) questions no less than the burning questions of the hour.” Thus, he tried to justify an approach that regards formal-only exceptionality as a complex stance that allows the audience to combine the formal and thematic exception itself and allow the political to appear in its own consciousness.

Summary According to the manifesto of Acco Festival’s artistic direction, the festival is a “home” for the exceptions of the Israeli theater field. Therefore, it may challenge the methodological-historical processes suggested by Shenhav (2009) regarding the appearance of the political following the exception. However, the artistic direction’s attempts to expose the system’s politics usually fails since the boundaries of the exceptions need to be predetermined, and as has actually happened with the festival, many exceptions have not been included in that definition. We have seen that an artwork’s exceptionality may be expressed in both its formal and its thematic dimensions, that different combinations of the two can bring about different definitions of “other theater” and can influence the process of the system’s politicization. Exceptions on both accounts may hasten its full politicization while exceptionality along only one dimension may create only partial politicization. Most festival directors have tended to define the boundaries of “other theater” in a minimal fashion that is close to mainstream criteria or they have tried to hide the boundaries altogether. Thus, a depoliticization of the theater field has happened, with festival frameworks acting to include, exclude, restrain, and domesticate the field’s exceptions. In summary, it seems that although Acco Festival proclaims its door to be open to the exceptions of the theater field, this house also has walls that block the exceptional, hence the appearance of the political.

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List of Artistic Directors 1980–2012 1980–1982 1983 1984–1985 1986–1987 1988–1989 1990–1991 1992–1994 1995 1996–1997 1998–2000 2001–2004 2005–2008 2009–2012

Oded Kotler Artistic committee alone Tom Levy Shimon Levy Eran Beniel Shmuel Hasfari Yaakov Agmon Dudi Ma'ayan Itzik Weingarten Roni Ninio Ati Citron Daniela Michaeli Smadar Ya'aron, Moni Yossef

C H A P TE R

TWO

Performance Repertoire: Representations of Social Conflicts

As already stated in the first chapter, the performance repertoire of Acco Festival is dependent on artistic direction and other constraints. In this chapter, I have chosen to discuss the diverse repertoire through a thematic-social perspective since the festival was frequently fashioned in relation to the social and political context in which it is rooted. Not only are the complex conflicts of Israeli society fashioned in the different performances, but the means of fashioning and the messages hinge, among other things, on the performances’ placement within the theater field. Acco Festival’s position within a borderland, trapped between the mainstream and the alternative margins of the field, is a challenge representing the dynamics of the Israeli theater field. As I have demonstrated in the first chapter, the repertoire was sometimes close to the mainstream’s work patterns and sometimes an alternative to the material the center rejected. Some of the taste-makers and gatekeepers of the theater field have stressed the festival repertoire’s supposed political-social engagement throughout the years. For these reasons, I have seen fit to structure this chapter through thee central social and political themes that have appeared in the festival: 1) the Israeli-Palestinian conflict 2) the Holocaust 3) women artists and gender.21 21 Even though Israeli fringe has had many performances dealing with Mizrahi iden-

tity, the festival included only a few dealing with it. This lack highlights the event’s elitist character. See Chapter Five.

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The research of Dan Urian (1997, 2000, 2001, 2004) deals with the theatrical representations of the three great conflicts of Israeli society. Urian (2002) suggests John Fiske’s (1987, 108–127) term horizontal intertextuality to organize and examine these repertoires. The assumption is that between the different texts there is an intertextuality that may reveal the meanings and different developments of the repertoire in relation to the social and political context and in relation to the theater field, i.e., that may organize groupings of theatrical texts in different ways such as theme and style and ascertain the intersections that are created between them. According to Urian, the relation between theme and genre is often indicative of the degree of the Israeli audience’s exposure to, or denial of, the social conflict presented on stage. The more the audience is ignorant of—or alternately denies—the power of the social conflict, the more likely the artists are to choose comic genres or stage interpretation that distances evidence and thus softens the power of the encounter between stage and auditorium. The more a conflict is present on the agenda, the more likely the artists are to fashion the conflict through genres “closer” to reality, like documentary theater and realism, formulating a sharper message. Representation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict takes up a sizeable proportion of the festival’s repertoire, usually as a response to wars and crises from the eighties to the present day: from the First Lebanon War, the First Intifada, the First Gulf War, the Oslo Accords and their dissolution in the Second Intifada, the Second Lebanon War, and lately the Gaza War. The Holocaust is another important theme that frequently comes up in the festival, usually from the viewpoint of second- and third-generation artists and from performances that deal with the impact of the Holocaust on Israeli society and especially on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The last theme— women artists and gender—is highly prominent because the festival has become a site where women artists whose path has been blocked receive a stage, and a sizable proportion of them have dealt with the intersection of gender and sexuality with gender and nationality. Performances dealing with Judaism often have been created by traditional and religious women, and therefore I will treat the Jewish aspect in this chapter.

Performance Repertoire: Representations of Social Conflicts

Representations of the Jewish-Arab Conflict This part is based on three main axes: 1) a historical axis that focuses on performances dealing with the main political events—the Lebanon War, the First Intifada, the Oslo Accords and the Second Intifada; 2) prominent performances and plays in the Arabic language; 3) co-projects of Jews and Arabs. I discuss these projects critically and at length because they are a distinct feature of the festival, the framework of which is often lauded and used by producers as a permanent image showcase of Jewish-Arab coexistence.

1. From the First Lebanon War to the Oslo Accords and the Second Intifada Acco Festival in the eighties reacted to the turbulent political events of that decade. In 1982, the evacuation of the Yamit region was completed, with Sinai returning to Egyptian sovereignty following the peace accords of the late seventies. In June 1982, the IDF embarked on the First Lebanon War against the Palestinian organizations in southern Lebanon. For the first time in Israel’s short history, this was perceived as a war of choice, and therefore there was widespread controversy over it. These events were reflected in the 1982 festival in several prominent performances. Allah Karim by Arieli-Orloff was written in 1912 but was first staged during the festival by director Uri Fester. It is a love story between Russian pioneer Naomi and Arab Ali, a Jaffa biscuit salesman in the early twentieth century. Ali’s uncle is murdered by Fogel, a radical extreme pioneer, and Ali takes his revenge by the sword. Knife and sword requisites would multiply in Israeli theater following the First Intifada as representatives of Palestinian murderousness in the Israeli artists’ political unconsciousness (Urian 1997). Dan Urian ascertained that Ali’s character was fashioned through the colonial stereotype of the “noble savage:” inferior, primitive, and violent, but also generous, courageous, and “natural and close to the source.” “They are all going to kill each other” is the ditty the Arabs sing throughout the play, accompanying themselves with a drum, repeating it like a mantra,

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like an already fulfilled prophecy in the Lebanon War happening outside the theater walls. If Allah Karim took place at the dawn of Zionism and prophesied the future, the plot of Shmuel Hasfari’s Tashmad (1982) takes place on a future night of Tisha B’Av, i.e., two years after the stage and non-stage time period. It is an apocalyptic date representing destruction, but according to the Jewish tradition, it may also be a day of celebration and redemption with the coming of the Messiah. In Tashmad, the superpowers force Israel to evacuate its settlements. Three men, a woman, and a baby hole up in the basement of a Samaria settlement, threatening to commit suicide if evacuation and secession continues. Each of the characters represents a different right-wing group: an ultraOrthodox; a secular nationalist; the ba'al tshuva who will portray the Messiah; and a Zionist, religious, settler girl. They yearn to bring the Messiah and redemption “through the gutter,” in the spirit of Sabbatai Zevi and Jacob Frank. The girl asks the men to rape her as part a symbolic performance in front of the television camera to illustrate the rape of Eretz Israel. Their behavior becomes more and more extreme and insane, they burn a copy of the Talmud, and catastrophe is not far behind as they blow-up the basement, committing suicide. This performance relates to the evacuation of Yamit that same year and to the destructive potential embodied in the crumbling of settler ideology on the eve of evacuation. Yitzhak Buton put two political prisoners in one Acco prison cell during the British Mandate in Enemies. One is a Jewish Irgun (Lekhi) extremist, the other is an Arab nationalist, and they are shackled to each other. From hatred and rejection, a relationship forms between the two and culminates in an escape attempt that includes killing the British guard that tortured them. The narrative ends in finding a common enemy—the British. His liquidation expresses the artist’s conception, which sees the superpowers as disputing forces manipulating peoples for their political ends, not for the ending of conflict. Holding the performance in the architectural space of the political prisoners’ incarceration during the Mandate charged the spectating experience and heightened the performance’s realistic impression. In December 1987, the First Intifada broke out, a popular uprising of residents of the Occupied Palestinian Territory that shook the Israeli government, which expected to stop the uprising within a short while. The intifada brought

Performance Repertoire: Representations of Social Conflicts

about a profound change in Israel’s relation to the Palestinians and their national aspirations, as expressed in the Oslo Accords of the early nineties. Acco Festival was one of the first sites to treat this complex uprising, attracting political performances excluded from the escapist theater mainstream, which ignored the Intifada and preferred to stage musicals. Some of the 1987 festival repertoire, which began some two months before the intifada’s outbreak, dealt with Palestinian oppression, thus “prophesying” the intifada. Moti Baharav’s Gazans presented Palestinian residents of Gaza working illegally in Tel Aviv, depicting their unequal relations with their Jewish employer, the border police, their families, and Palestinian society. The Palestinians try to build themselves a home in an abandoned apartment in Jaffa but are humiliated by the Jewish employer and the border police. They decide to plant an explosive device according to a covert message that they get over the radio, “Abu Amer is waiting in Jenin.” This message is laden with so much symbolic meaning; Abu Amer is none other than Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leader Yasser Arafat inciting rebellion. The sign comes too late, the border police chase the Palestinians, and they all blow up in the abandoned apartment. The Jaffa abandoned house, the attempt to rebuild it, and the explosion killing Jews and Arabs alike express Baharav’s warning of an impending Palestinian uprising destined to wreak havoc. The play’s writing process was unique. Baharav set up a troupe of Gaza Palestinians, fashioning the play’s materials through theatrical work with them. The troupe broke up six months afterward. He then tried to set up a troupe of Israeli Arabs to mount the play, but this attempt failed as well. Finally, he mounted the play with Jewish and Arab actors. The play was accepted by Habima, but its production was delayed. Baharav approached another theater, Beit Lessin, and decided to submit the play to Acco Festival only if he was rejected from there. This phenomenon, of the rejection of political plays by the mainstream and their acceptance in Acco, strengthened the festival’s image as a site of free, daring, and more political creation than the theatrical center. Hagit Ya'ari adapted Zionist Whore from Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Respectful Whore. Bat Sheva Knafo, a prostitute from Haifa, witnesses the murder of an Arab by an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldier. A member of Knesset Gideon Kalit and his son, who are related to the murderous soldier, try to convince the prostitute to lie to save the soldier’s skin. The performance brings together

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representatives of three groups in Israeli culture: the Members of Knesset (MK) who represents Zionist-Ashkenazi hegemony, the Arab murdered for no fault of his own who represents the oppressed group, and the prostitute who represents the Mizrahi group in the middle between the oppressors and the oppressed. The prostitute, as a Jew, is demanded to collaborate with Zionist ideology only through the hegemony’s calculated interest and to save her own skin. The performance not only protests against Zionist ideology and its hypocrisy toward democratic values, but shows the internal hypocrisy and racism toward Jews of non-European descent. Midnight Inspection by Sinai Peter examines the relationship of a couple; he is a Shin Bet interrogator and she is a theater critic. The performance uses the Bus 300 affair of 1984, when it came to light that Shin Bet operatives killed terrorists illegally. The husband is involved in the successful capture of terrorists, which is implied to be “exceptional,” and a MK who was present at the interrogation fails to back the interrogator. The wife critiques a performance of Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechuan and deals with the impossible demand made on prostitute Shen Te, the protagonist, to be moral within a flawed social order, thus justifying to herself the political state of her husband, the Shin Bet interrogator who is presented as “shooting and crying” for lack of a choice, forced to act immorally toward the enemy to stop him from harming the population and the state. Like Zionist Whore, this performance uses prostitution as an image of the morally impossible interim state. The 1990 festival saw the launch of Masked, Ilan Hatzor’s debut play, presenting a Palestinian family in the territories during the First Intifada. Haled and Naim are ordered to bring their older brother Daud, who is suspected of collaborating with Shin Bet, to the Palestinian organizations. Their younger brother, Nazel, was shot by the army and turned into a “vegetable.” Daud says that the Israeli officer has been prosecuted—and therefore suspicion around him rises—how does he know and from whom. The performance follows the brothers’ fateful two hours. Haled and Naim bring Daud to the back room of a butcher shop speckled with blood stains. It emerges that Daud was paid to collaborate, was given the possibility of working in Israel, and was promised his brothers would not be arrested but rather would be deported to Jordan. Haled understands that not only his friends from the Palestinian organizations are on

Performance Repertoire: Representations of Social Conflicts

their way to the butcher shop but also the Israeli Shin Bet. He hugs Daud, plunges a knife into his back and kills him. Avraham Oz (1999, 100–102) refers to the plot as a “pseudo-political melodrama,” a “morality play,” and a “problem play,” presenting the family with two choices: betray their people and thus survive and sustain the family or rebel against the occupation and endanger the family. Oz stresses the novelty of raising an Israeli performance from a Palestinian viewpoint in the attempt to create an “other” narrative during the intifada itself as “a valuable political act,” but he criticizes the structure of the plot itself for ignoring a long-term Palestinian vision, where for instance the state of Israel doesn’t exist. Urian (1997, 87–95) refers to character formation, claiming two stereotypes of Arab characters meet in this play. Samatocha, the Arab character of Hanoch Levin’s Queen of a Bathtub (1970) becomes the central stereotypical image of the docile, humiliated, and oppressed Arab. He calls Daud a tragic version of Samatocha because he only seeks a simple family life and livelihood, and therefore agrees to snitch and betray his people for the permission to clean “Jewish shit.” His murderous brothers, by contrast, represent the stereotype of the violent, dangerous Arab. This violence is especially expressed in the use of a knife, which was, as already mentioned, a stage prop representing Arab murderousness (Urian 1997, 51). Audience and critical reception was enthusiastic, and the performance was picked up for the repertoire of the Cameri Theatre. The Protocols (1990), directed by Yigal Ezrati and raised outside the competition, was a direct reaction to the intifada. It is a piece of documentary theater that presents a dramatic reading of the Givati Bet Trials and the trial of Colonel Yehuda Meir. The trials accuse soldiers and officers of beating Palestinians suspected of disturbing the peace, wounding them sometimes fatally. In all the trials, criminal behavior came to light. The festival reading portrayed shock and revulsion at the fact that the occupation and the norms of shirking responsibility resulted in the higher-ups making an immoral policy of “acceptability.” The event lasted some thirty-five hours, broken up into seven parts, with the participation of about a hundred actors who were people of culture, society and the law, the media, and academia. The reading was broadcast on closed circuit television to the festival gardens outside the hall. The space was designed as a court of law, and above was hung a motto taken from the Givati soldiers’ club, “The battalion will observe and arrest and beat those who break the order day and night.”

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This documentary technique was being developed as far back as the sixties by German playwright Peter Weiss, whose 1965 play, The Interrogation, used evidence and texts taken from the protocols of the Frankfurt-Auschwitz trials (1963–1965) of Germans who served as SS officers and soldiers in Auschwitz. Weiss (1971, 42) explains the tension in documentary theater between the political-realistic and the poetic-artistic, “The strength of Documentary Theatre lies in its ability to shape a useful pattern from fragments of reality, to build a model of actual occurrences.” The Protocols supposedly shies away from artistic stylization in favor of “true” recreation. But it was because of this kind of theatrical event’s uniqueness, because it lasts so long and has such a large number of participants, says Weiss, that it shapes a “model” of reality from the trial materials, allowing a renewed glimpse of the commanders of the First Intifada. During the first half of the nineties, there was a political shift. The left-wing government of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin signed the Oslo Accords with PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, founding the autonomous Palestinian Authority in the occupied territories. In 1994, the kingdom of Jordan also signed a peace accord with Israel. In 1995, against the backdrop of settler protest against the accords, Yitzhak Rabin was murdered by Yigal Amir, a religious Jewish rightwing activist. Hamas and Islamic Jihad, who had also opposed the accords, carried out a series of suicide attacks with dozens of Israelis killed and wounded. In 2000, following the failure of the negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, the Second Intifada broke out, which included violent demonstrations, terrorist attacks, and live fire. In 1994, the performance Samarian Clouds was raised, which related to the Oslo Accords and doubted the reconciliation between the two peoples. The performance was created by David Steinberg and the pupils of the Ironi Alef High School Drama Department of Tel Aviv. It represents two families during the Oslo Accords period, one from the Samarian settlement of Ma'ale Alonim and the second from Beit Sahar, a neighboring Palestinian village. A factory on the settlement is about to be sold to Palestinian Adnan, who has come to Israel following the Oslo Accords, after expulsion and a long exile in Paris. Eli, the Jewish manager of the factory, feels betrayed that it is being sold to a Palestinian. Adnan is willing to work with the settlers and invites Eli and his wife to his nephew Mujahed’s engagement to his daughter. They arrive and a certain

Performance Repertoire: Representations of Social Conflicts

intimacy is established between the two families. Adnan demands that Mujahed, a Hamas operative, stop his activity and turn himself in if he wishes to be engaged to his daughter. Following the accords, extradition takes one day. Mujahed is willing, but at the moment of truth, his Hamas friend knifes him in the back, killing him. The factory ends up being sold to an American Jew who bid a higher sum than Adnan. It seems that Steinberg tried to save his characters from the customary stereotypes of Israeli culture. The images of the settler as extreme nationalist and the Arab as violent primitive dissolve somewhat through their shaping in the play. The settler family is able to change its stance, meet, and work under a Palestinian from the neighboring village. Adnan is represented as an educated man of Western orientation who has renounced war and seeks peace between the people. Even young Hamas activist Mujahed is willing to give up the desire to fight and reconcile. However the plot doesn’t end in mutual reconciliation. An extreme Palestinian murders his friend, and here again the Arab stereotype recurs as a feature of the extreme Palestinian, because of whom coveted peace cannot be achieved. Even in the early days of Oslo, Steinberg is not optimistic regarding the reconciliation process, but he rolls the responsibility over to a moderate Palestinian, who has undergone a process of “modernization” and knows the Western world from Paris. The performance presents settlers and Palestinians in human light, but the ending reasserts the Jewish spectators’ values regarding their supposed desire for peace as opposed to the Palestinian side’s extremism. In 1997, The Alley of White Chairs, by choreographer Gabi Eldor and director Yigal Ezrati, is a movement-theater representing the history of a Jaffa house and claims of ownership to it by Arabs, Mizrahi-Jews, and Ashkenazis. Taher (Souheil Haddad) is a Palestinian refugee living in Jordan and returning to his house in Jaffa after the peace accords with Jordan. His visit brings up memories related to traditional Arab wedding and funeral rites and a forbidden love between a young man and woman of rival Palestinian families. Most of the scenes are based on movement, rhythm, voices and music, and very little spoken word. Thus, for instance, bowls filled with rice and everyday objects raise Arab cultural images, building up to a unique movement language. Eldor says that the scenes of the performance were created following material that the actors or visiting Palestinian artists raised during the performance’s rehearsals

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in a Jaffa hangar. This performance touches on memory, identity, and the narrative of the Palestinian “other” and his right of return. His return is not only to a physical place but to his identity and to the memories imprinted on his Jaffa house. The 1998 festival contained the first references to Rabin’s murder in Israeli theater, and the most important performance was Avishai Hadari’s Rust. The performance presents figures and scenes that interweave traumatic memories, such as the Holocaust, with events of the hour, such as terrorist attacks and demonstrations, culminating in the murder of a leading politician, which clearly alludes to Rabin’s murder. The performance was shaped in the visual style of Polish artist Tadeusz Kantor. The performers appear like dolls, sculptures, and mechanized automatons in absurd, grotesque situations, with Hadari on stage, directing the action and simultaneously participating in it at its apex. Hadari’s choice to portray Yigal Amir himself did not just come from the visual similarity between the two, but he sought to fashion a significant artistic message regarding all our responsibility for trauma and for release from it. Hadari’s transformation, from the role of director managing the action to the role of the murderer, highlights all of society’s responsibility for the act. The fragmented style where images of historical memory are interwoven with the trauma of Rabin’s murder signifies the chaos, confusion, and inconsistency that characterizes political reality itself. This performance shaped the experience of confusion and society’s shirking of responsibility of Rabin’s murder into visual theater. The repertoire of the 2003 festival reacted radically to the Second Intifada. Critic Shai Bar-Ya'akov (2003) claimed that “one of Acco Festival’s striking characteristics this year was the return to distinctly oppositional political theater, with blunt transgressive messages,” and he provocatively titled his essay “Festival of Shahids.” The subhead read, “The performances of Acco Festival this year highlighted the Palestinian as a victim uprising against Israeli tyranny,” and he said “the tone [of the performances] is sometimes extreme and manipulative.” He claimed that this came from the desire to sound a clear, unequivocal voice against the growing gulf between the festival and the theatrical establishment. Despite his misgivings, he concluded that “it is hard to remember when the last time was that I left a performance of repertory theater with so much to think about and discuss.” The two prominent performances in this context were Medea X and The Bus.

Performance Repertoire: Representations of Social Conflicts

Medea X by Neora and Amir Orian is an adaptation of Euripides’ classical tragedy. Palestinian Medea is married to Jason, an Israeli officer for whom she handed over her brother and with whom she fled to the United States. There, Jason becomes a stock broker, and the couple has two boys. Jason cheats on Medea when they return to Israel, preferring the daughter of an IDF colonel to her. Medea and her children are expelled to a refugee camp, and she decides to take revenge on Jason by murdering her two boys, who are sent to carry out a suicide attack. The performance takes place in an enclosed rectangular space with the audience sitting in the middle and virtual figures such as Jason, the chorus and others projected onto the white walls. Medea, portrayed by Khaula Al KhajjDabasi in a mechanized, computerized wheelchair in one of the space’s corners, maintains a dialog with the virtual characters. The wheelchair and Medea’s placement in the corner become an image of her political and emotional state as a downtrodden person pushed into extreme and violent acts. The audience, sitting on swivel chairs, participates by sending text messages to navigate how the plot unfolds or to place the situations in different times and places. The spectators become partners in the moral choices the performance raises, and they must take a stand. The choice of a Palestinian Medea as a character, portrayed by a flesh and blood actress as opposed to the oppressive Israelis/ Greeks as virtual characters, allows proximity and identification with the Palestinian woman and highlights her humanity as opposed to the Israeli. Aiman Jabbaria’s The Bus, directed by Fuad Awad, also deals with the Intifada and terrorism, in a more traditional fashion. The performance was raised in Arabic with translation, interweaving Hebrew as part of the performance. At the center of the plot is a trip on a bus to the north, within which is a microcosm of Israeli society. The space design is minimalistic and acting is done with Brechtian techniques, with live music on stage and rap in Hebrew, explaining to the Hebrew-speaking audience what is happening in Arabic. An Arab bus driver drives an Egged bus from Tel Aviv to Nazareth. All riding together are Mukhtar, a Palestinian from the occupied territories; Amal, an Israeli-Palestinian young woman; an ultra-Orthodox man; a new immigrant from Russia; and a Mizrahi man. The Jews on the bus are racist and suspect the Arabs of being suicide Shahids. Amal assertively refuses humiliating security checks. Mukhtar, who is in love with her, is silent, fearing reaction, and

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the older Arab driver abases himself in front of the Jews. The performance presents three Palestinian figures and ways of dealing with their being an oppressed minority, positively characterizing Amal’s mutinous and oppositional way.

2. Prominent Performances and Plays in the Arabic Language The 1982 festival program included an excited mention of the fact that an Arabic play was submitted to the competition but was not accepted. During the first decade, no single performance in the Arabic language was deemed worthy of entering the competition on artistic grounds—a surprising fact when one takes into account the immaturity of many plays and performances raised in the context of a festival, which is by definition geared toward the experimental work of young artists. Outside the competition, the Haifa Beit Hagefen Theatre and the Palestinian El-Hakawati Theatre of East Jerusalem raised different shows. During the second decade, in-competition Arabic performances were raised every now and again, and in 2000, they were brought together under the framework of “stage for Arabic performances,” thus again excluded from the competition. Only in 2001 was a policy put in place that at least one or two in-competition Arabic performances be produced. Performances in Arabic veer between the raising of well-known Arab playwrights while alluding to the political situation and original creation. In 1988, the performance The Brothers, by Moshe Koren, which was written in English and translated into Hebrew and Arabic, was raised. Jewish and Arab actors played in both languages, and both versions were perceived as two different in-competition performances. Thus, an Arabic performance was included in the competition for the first time, but the play, written under the inspiration of the Theatre of the Absurd, dealt with the relations between two brothers in a universal manner unconnected to local questions. Performances by Sa'ad Alla Wanos (1941–1997), a well-known Syrian playwright whose critical plays deal with social and political issues, were raised several times in the festival. The Head of Jabbar (1989), directed by Fuad Awad, was raised in the context of the competition framework. A Day in our Life (2004), directed by Muhammed Bakri, and Handallah’s Journey (2000), directed by Saleh Azam, were raised outside the competition framework. Jabbar’s Head, then, was the first Arabic play raised in-competition at Acco

Performance Repertoire: Representations of Social Conflicts

Festival. In fact, it won the Best Performance prize and had an interesting meta-theatrical conception, as opposed to the other two plays which were in the social realist style. Therefore, I will discuss Jabbar’s Head at length. Sa'ad Alla Wanos wrote Jabbar’s Head in 1971, and it is considered his most well-known play. Wanos uses a historical event from Baghdad in the caliph period and a theater-within-theater trope, shaping a sociopolitical message in the Arab world following the 1967 defeat. The play was adapted to the Israeli-Palestinian reality and was infused with implicit political allusions. The performance space is defined as a coffeehouse. A waiter receives the audience, handing them a summary translated into Hebrew and sometimes translating for them what is going on. The translation is meant not only to include the Jewish audience but also to reshape the power relations between Hebrew-speakers and Arab-speakers. The Jewish-Israeli audience is dependent on the mediation of the translator, who is also necessarily an interpreter. A theater troupe arrives at the coffeehouse and presents the story of Jabbar. It does so in the style of popular Arab story theater, interweaving singing, pantomime, and puppets. The coffeehouse’s manager and the troupe’s director are characters watching the performance and commenting on the action, their reactions perhaps alluding to the reactions of the real audience. The troupe presents Jabbar, who betrays the kingdom for personal gain and ends up being executed. A fierce political struggle erupts between the governor and the minister, but the people are indifferent and do not take a stance due to fear and desperation. The economic situation deteriorates, but no one does anything. Jabbar decides to betray the governor and serve the minister. He becomes the minister’s messenger and sends a message to the King of Persia to conquer Baghdad. In the encrypted message it says that Jabbar the messenger should be decapitated. The actors dance on top of traitor Jabbar’s head, calling on the coffeehouse guests to take a political stance. The coffeehouse owner panics and calls the police, who disperse the troupe, mixing reality and fiction. Durgham Joeih (2002, 99–101, 183–184), who researched Sa’ad Wanos’s plays, shows how he commingles Arabic tradition and modern theater. This trend is not uniquely Wanos’s, according to Marvin Carlson (2003, 42–47), who has surveyed theater festivals in the Arab world. Awad, like Wanos and other Arab artists, uses original oriental sources and Brecht’s alienation technique with the meta-theatrical ploy. Urian (1997, 57) claims that this is the

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reason Awad raised this play: it allows a double appeal to a Jewish and an Arabic audience. The use of an Arabic folklore allegory and the technique of a play within a play on the one hand allow the Arabic audience to recognize the political analogy between itself and the performance, and on the other hand, the performance does not deal directly with the intifada, so it does not threaten the Jewish audience but rather seeks dialog with it. For instance, the play’s director is angry with an actor who did not dress in period costume, and the latter answers that in every period a police detective is muhabarat, which in Arabic means both detective and Israeli Shin Bet man, and therefore an allusive but unthreatening link between the legend and reality is established.

El-Hakawati Theatre Performances El-Hakawati Theatre was founded in 1977 in East Jerusalem by Francois Abu Salem, an exiled Palestinian, and today it is considered the Palestinian national theater. Dan Urian explains the special unique blend of East and West that this theater offers in its double appeal to a Palestinian and Jewish-Israeli audience: The artistic quality and rich and colorful theatrical language of the El-Hakawati productions, drawn from such Palestinian folk theatre traditions as that of the storyteller (El-Hakawati, Rawi) and influenced by the experimental French theatre (mainly Savary and Ariane Mnouchkine) helped the Palestinian claim to penetrate across the Green Line [the Israeli border prior to 1967]. (1997, 52–53) In 1985, El-Hakawati Theatre was a guest of the festival for the first time with Ali of the Galilee. Ali leaves his village for the big city and masquerades as Eli, a Jewish-Mizrahi man. He is on a journey of discovery and masquerade concerning his Palestinian identity. After some trouble, Ali is hospitalized in a mental asylum, where he sees—together with the clown-narrator—his life story in different styles. The protagonist is also spectator of his own life performance. The plot revolves around the love story of Ali, who has become “king of falafel.” It is an ironic term since it is an originally Palestinian food that was appropriated and crowned as the national Israeli food. Ali-Eli falls for Jewish Aliza, and a love story develops, which, like other stage love stories dealing with

Performance Repertoire: Representations of Social Conflicts

the conflict, ends in separation. An explosive device goes off, and Ali, seeking refuge, runs to Aliza. He reveals his Palestinian identity to her, but not only does she refuse to have any connection to him, she even turns him over to the Israeli security forces. The medium’s self-reference is bridled to a critical message, not only regarding the political reality but also regarding the means of its representation. The question of identity as man’s universal, existential search is located in Palestinian identity, torn because of its oppression under Israeli occupation. During the show, Palestinian artists asked that an Israeli flag hung on the premises be removed, and their request was granted, which drew criticism from right-wing elements in town. In 1987, El-Hakawati was asked to participate again in the festival, raising two performances: The Story of Shama Village, a fairytale about a king and a clown and their encounters with men, and Other Prayer Stories, a monodrama with actor Yussuf Abu Warda about the medieval dominion of lords and the church over commoners. The two performances raise dominator-dominated relations in differing degrees of explicitness, and the political allusion to the relation between Israel and its Palestinian residents is clear. This time, too, the question of removing the flag in the hall was raised, provoking and outraging right-wing viewers (see a detailed account in Chapter Five). The next time El-Hakawati Theatre was invited to the festival was in 1994, following the Oslo Accords. But as opposed to optimistic performances fitting the festival’s “peace” policy, El-Hakawati casted doubts regarding the possibility of reconciliation and peace between the two peoples, “a play about fury and the impossibility of forgiveness,” as it was defined by its creators. Former Palestinian prisoner, 24-year-old Islam, does not believe in reconciliation with Israel, despite attempts by those surrounding him to convince him. He joins an ambush and is identified by an Israeli soldier as wanted. The performance includes a satirical portrayal of Yasser Arafat pontificating about revenge and about eggplants, looking in the mirror and only caring about his beard. The scene ridicules the empty rhetoric of the Palestinian struggle, portraying Arafat as caring only about his status. Also presented is a settler trying to promote the occupation of Jericho, shooting Arabs and missing, when the voice of God emerges, telling him his time is up and now there is peace. This scene is aimed at Baruch Goldstein’s act of murder in Hebron, presenting the chances of peace in sarcastic irony. At the end of the performance, Islam starts dancing in a white dress, a dress of death signifying the continuation of war and struggle.

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Most critics saw the performance as “foreign, unconnected, anachronistic” (Fuchs 1994) to the time’s optimism and as “expressing Palestinian society’s confusion in peacetime” (Handelzaltz September 21, 1994). Following the outbreak of the Second Intifada in 2000 after the collapse of negotiations between Ehud Barak and Arafat in Camp David, these Palestinian artists seem today as more sober than the Jewish theater critics regarding the aims of Israeli governments during the Oslo process, and as critical of Arafat’s acceptance of it. In 2009, El-Hakawati raised Pere Ubu at the Butcher Market for the first time in the competition framework and won the Best Performance prize. It is a free adaptation of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi, which satirically deals with interPalestinian politics and the relation between the Palestinian Authority, Israel, and the United States. Francois Abu Salem, who adapted it, also acts in the performance, placing the events at the butcher shop of Abu Ubu, who together with his wife, Umm Ubu, and his son scheme to take over their clan with the metaphorical and literal tools at their disposal, i.e., through murder and violence. The performance’s design was done under the influence of Artaud’s form of theater known as Theatre of Cruelty (1970), and it frequently uses fresh meat, animal organs, and blood on stage. Thus a sensual phenomenological experience is formed that raises the audience’s disgust and forms a significant part of the performance’s message criticizing local and regional political corruption and aggressiveness.

3.  Jewish-Arab Projects as a Third Space In this part, I wish to discuss projects and performances that Arab and Jewish Acco residents took part in when their explicit motive was to shape the festival’s link to the host community, between “other theater” and the physical and human landscape that surrounds and holds it. Since these performances and projects were built into the unequal political context of Jews and Arabs, they were identified as a colonial encounter taking place in a “third space” (Bhabha 1994). This space was characterized by ambivalence, where clear categories were blurred, liquefied, and even broken down. Therefore, I will first present three categories of relation or means of communication (abstention, dialog, and struggle) that are possible between rival groups. Afterward, I will present, through the performances and projects, their blurring and even collapse within

Performance Repertoire: Representations of Social Conflicts

the third space created in the festival. This ambivalence allows the simultaneous existence of collaboration with and opposition to the occupier. Thus, on the one hand, the festival can shape an enlightened and liberal image for itself, while simultaneously (artistically and politically), alternative artists can stress their opposition and subversive characters despite their collaboration within an institutional festival. Homi K. Bhabha’s postcolonial stance stresses the hybridity and simultaneity of conqueror and conquered identities during the encounter between them. He claims that in the colonial encounter, a third space opens up where the binary patterns of oriental and occidental, through which the West highlights its superiority (Said 1979), are suspended; an entanglement of shuffled and blurred identities forms, which “contaminates” the binary patterns’ “cleanliness” and “purity,” creating an ambivalence that simultaneously produces double and opposing meanings. In Acco Festival, performances including Jews and Arabs take place in the third space, where the exact nature of the connection between the two groups becomes ambivalent, with contradictory meanings despite the intention of Jewish and Arab managers, producers, and artists. While the festival as an institutional event is funded by the state and interested in collaboration and a harmonious, or at least dialogic, image of so-called “coexistence,” Jewish and Arab alternative artists are actually interested in highlighting subversion of, and opposition to, the unequal and oppressive hegemonic order between Jews and Arabs. However, we shall see in this analysis that on the one hand, performances whose starting points can be seen as collaborative can also be perceived as transgressive, and on the other hand, performances that were originally created as oppositional can also be interpreted and received as collaborative. Following are three communication methods between rival groups that we will later see becoming blurred during analysis of the performances. Following Martin Buber (1970), Avner Haramati and Miriam Shapira (2001) offer a model based on three options of communication between groups in conflict. Group moderators using this model can identify and analyze the means of communication of members of mixed groups embroiled in national, religious, and cultural conflict and the like. The three options present a kind of continuum with “abstention” on one pole, “struggle” on the other, and with “dialog” in the middle. I will use this model to analyze six examples of projects,

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performances, and plays that dealt, in the festival, with relations between Arabs and Jews, and with their national narratives. As mentioned, the separation between the three options is only for analytic purposes, and in reality, we see that these ways of communication interweave, becoming a thicket that cannot be unpacked and creating ambivalence. Abstention is a form of communication characterized by circumnavigating difficult and controversial subjects. Because of fear, participants prefer to ignore, avoid, and abstain from deep speech about the identity of the self and the identity of the other. The aim of this form of communication is not “to raise the demons,” not to touch the painful wounds of the conflict. It is superficial communication and does not allow real intimacy and significant acquaintanceship between participants. A “folkloristic evening of ethnic food” is a distinct example of this form of communication where questions regarding power relations, oppression, and historical injustice are avoided between participating groups, and they undertake a superficial celebration of supposedly symmetrical unity and partnership. Festival management will tend to favor this kind of event, celebrating “coexistence” between Jews and Arabs and creating a harmonious image without dealing with the complexities of the conflict. But even then, forms of communication and even struggle can come out through the cracks. Struggle is a form of communication aimed at conquering, subjugating, and convincing the other with whom one is struggling. Struggle can have a violent character but can also manifest in a gentle fashion, with intellectual brilliance and persuasion. The aim of struggle is to transform the other, to draw him nearer to the speaker’s stance, and to convince him of the speaker’s correctness, without the speaker having to change or get nearer to the other’s stance himself. A distinct example of this form of communication can be seen in debate shows on television, where participants passionately state their arguments, trying to convince, defeat, and ridicule their different counterparts. Artists with a radical political agenda tend to adopt this stance in the festival, expressing dissent and open protest against the unequal hegemonic order between Jews and Arabs. However, as I will show, these manifestations, despite themselves, can also lead to abstention and sometimes even dialog. The aim of dialog is not necessarily to solve the conflict or to offer compromise but rather to allow a space of listening despite disagreements. There is no giving up of any side’s identity or principles, but rather, there is a dialog of

Performance Repertoire: Representations of Social Conflicts

acquaintanceship, understanding, acceptance, and joint contemplation. A dialog means the participants’ ability to contain difficult emotions of anger, powerlessness, and discomfort, and it also means hope. Jewish and Arab alternative artists working together to raise performances in the festival have tended to try to create dialog between the groups, but as stated, forms of abstention and struggle have been intertwined with them.

Axis I: The Gap between Fiction and Sociopolitical Reality This axis deals with the relation between the fictional world of a performance and reality and with the political meaning of this distance. In other words, what meaning and effect does the performance have on the audience, from the proximity or distance of the performance’s materials to the sociopolitical reality in which it is rooted.

Wolves in Acco: Community Theater and Political Allegory Following the First Intifada, tensions between Jews and Arabs rose in Acco and in Israel in general. Wolves in Acco (1988) was created under the initiative of then artistic director, Eran Beniel, to highlight harmonious “coexistence” as opposed to the unstable reality outside. It was an outdoors performance of community theater carried out by local Jewish-Arab youth, directed by Peter Kiddle of the British Theatre of Public Works, a body specializing in arranging community outdoor performances in conflict areas. This performance took place on the beach in movement and masks, presenting a group of innocents and hunters defending themselves from wolves who have infiltrated the town. The residents gather around the tomb of Nimrod so his spirit can guide them, but it turns out that he is actually the leader of the wolves. In a joint effort, they manage to kills the leader of the wolves and then celebrate their victory in a procession through town. The performance celebrates the residents’ cooperation against “the wolf,” i.e., the common enemy. In light of Beniel’s conception, it is unsurprising that the communal performance used a mythic story far removed from the tumultuous reality of the First Intifada. Therefore, the performance’s starting point is “abstention,” i.e., a connection trying to avoid, ignore, and not directly touch the pains and harsh

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disagreements between Jews and Arabs. The performance highlights fictional cooperation between innocents and hunters and a communal reality of JewishArab cooperation for the production of a joint artistic event, i.e., it highlights the cooperation and touches on the complexity of relations between the two groups. On the other hand, allegory allows one to treat reality dynamically, shaping a multi-layered theatrical message that is open to wide interpretation. Who are the hunters, and who are the innocents, and against which wolf are they fighting in the reality of Israel and Acco? This is a transgressive question with a potential for dissension. Does the show offer Arabs (as innocents?) and Jews (as hunters?) cooperating against the wolf? Who is the wolf—is it the oppressive establishment discriminating between Jews and Arabs or, perhaps, the violent impulse that all harbor? If it is an “internal wolf,” then the dialog approach emerges, meaning everyone should conquer their internal wolf, and their violence, to allow the other to exist. If it is the “institutional wolf,” we can see the seeds of dissent and struggle against oppressive and discriminatory policies that do not allow cooperation and sane coexistence. Indeed, Eran Beniel (2004) testified that “in boardrooms, nervous public representatives pounce on us [ . . . ] demanding to know what the moral of the youth project Wolves in Acco’s name is.” Thus, allegory—because of its wide interpretation—simultaneously creates opposing meanings that blur the official stance on which the communal Jewish-Arab project was based, creating a third, ambivalent space.

Fassateen: The Memory of the Nakba in Ancient Acco Fassateen (2001) is a performance that challenges the materials of sociopolitical reality head on. This performance, in total opposition to Wolves in Acco, was created under the artistic direction of Ati Citron, who reacted to the October 2000 events when Ancient Acco was a part of them, so many Arabic performances and joint Jewish-Arab projects were raised (for a detailed account of the October 2000 events, see Chapter Five). Citron wanted protesting and dissenting performances that would express the hardships of Acco Arabs and Arabs in general. Fassateen (Dresses) by Al-Laz Theatre, with artist-performer Raida Adon, was raised in the context of the competition in Arabic as part of Citron’s new policy. The play was written by Muhammed Ali Taha and directed by Mazes Gattas. It treats the Palestinian narrative in an extreme way, unfamiliar

Performance Repertoire: Representations of Social Conflicts

to the Hebrew stage. It was raised on Sheikh Abdullah Square, outside the festival’s site, at the heart of an Arab neighborhood in Ancient Acco. The performance used the space and incorporated the Arab neighbors living on the square. Its content deals with the experiences of the Palestinian refugees of 1948. It is a site-specific performance that relates to the physical-geographic and communal-historical dimensions of the site (Wilkie 2002). The occupation of Ancient Acco in 1948 and the experience of the refugees were a searing memory shared by the Arab audience attending the performance, and the performance ventriloquized the walls and houses, i.e., the silence of Ancient Acco residents, crying their pain and their protest. The materials of the performance and the physical and political reality are interwoven into one continuum against the suppression and negation of their people’s memory. Raida Adon tells the unique story of the 1948 Palestinian refugees, with Yussuf Habish accompanying the performance with percussion and other instruments. She looks for her wedding dress and finds mourning dresses representing the Palestinian refugees, through which the story of the Nakba is told. One of the refugees is Aisha of the village of Sejera, who was forced into exile from the village and who decided not to sleep with her husband until he returns her to her home. Another central figure in the performance is Suar of Tashiha, whose husband escaped to Lebanon and became a fighter. He clandestinely returns to Palestine every once in a while, and after each visit, she becomes pregnant and gives birth to a child. The performance is shaped like narrative theater, where props and feminine actions, such as dresses and the kneading of dough, become a series of images and representations. The performance opens with the screening of a film about mourning dresses being screened on one of the square’s walls. The mourning dresses billow from the windows. Adon performs on a stage at the center of the square, afterward also appearing in one of the windows, and then amongst the audience, performing movements for the spectators, which highlights again and again the interweaving of fiction and reality. The birth of Suar’s children from her husband in Lebanon is represented by a black dress billowing from one window and seven white balloons flying upward from it. A child who is a “white balloon” simultaneously represents hope, innocence, and purity destined to pop. Thus, Suar’s grim story continues when she herself becomes a freedom fighter hijacking a plane, but she is caught by the IDF and finally thrown into

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prison, where an Israeli guard rapes her. Thus, the narrative that opens with a search for bridal gowns, i.e., intimacy, love, and family ends with a cruel enemy’s rape. Throughout the performance, Adon appeals to the residents of the square who watch from their homes, seeking to wake them and fashion with them the Palestinian narrative, with the Nakba as one of its main fundaments, calling on them to continue the struggle in the present and the future. The message of the performance was that Palestinian resistance was the only solution to the situation. Therefore, despite the complexity of the artistic language, the show tended toward the “struggle” pole, where the other is an enemy to subdue, persuade, or block. But this performance was also caught up in the ambivalence characteristic of the third space, mainly due to the complexity of its reception. Before the performance, the local audience was asked to translate the performance to Hebrew-speaking Jews, and so small groups formed around local translators. The translation was done by Arabic-speaking spectators by default because the Arabic text was not translated into Hebrew on time, and Arab residents of the neighborhood were recruited to whisper the text to the Jewish spectators who did not speak Arabic. The unique character of the reception of the show, where the Arab spectators translated to the Jewish ones, mediating between them and the content of the show, achieved a role reversal between occupier and occupied; it created a situation that had dialog but also abstention and struggle. Unlike the performance’s harsh messages, on the communal, theatrical level there was real dialog between the non-Arabic-speaking Jewish visitor, missing the certain cultural capital required to understand the performance, and the local Arab host, who had the power and knowledge to translate, mediate, and explain the Palestinian narrative represented in the performance from a viewpoint not necessarily convenient to Jewish spectators. But theater critic Eitan Bar Yosef (2001) attested to the complexity of the situation between the Arab translator and himself because of the content of the show, and his text shows the signs of tension between the struggle, dialog, and abstention during the translation, “It became apparent that the good Nazil [the Arabic translator] doesn’t want to translate exactly what was said there, in the square, but makes do with a general impression, to protect us, the round-glasses Jews who have come from afar, from Raida’s new nationalist fervor.” Bar Yosef wondered, “It seems the dutiful

Performance Repertoire: Representations of Social Conflicts

spectators who applauded so enthusiastically didn’t really asked themselves: wait, what were we actually being told here? Are we clapping ourselves to death?” He ended with a humorous point, as if the Crusader of Acco who had invited Muslims who “play and sing, and the Crusaders, who didn’t understand Arabic . . . loudly cheered a beautiful Arab woman who predicted . . . the soonto-be-realized withdrawal [of the Crusaders themselves].” His text indicates not only the intentions of the Arab artists but also the fears of the critic himself. The performance’s harsh content, signified by struggle, often left the Arab translator embarrassed, abstaining from fully translating, a fact understood and keenly felt by the critic. Thus, the content of the show, as in Bar Yosef ’s case, caused embarrassment and abstention between Arabs and Jews, a feeling that what was presented on stage was intended for an internal Palestinian discourse, the exposure of which to the Israeli Jew was inconvenient and complex. Indeed, the Jewish-Israeli critic positioned himself clearly in the struggle position against what he called the artist’s “nationalist fervor.”

The Peacock of Silwan: between Acco and East Jerusalem The Peacock of Silwan (2012) by Alma Genihar, directed by Chen Alon and Sinai Peter, was created following an investigative process carried out by all of the artists involved, both Jews and Arabs. For nine months, they studied the complex situation in the East Jerusalem Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan, which, though it lies about a quarter of an hour from the cinematheque and the Khan Theatre in the city center, is, according to the artists quoted in the program, invisible to the Israeli public. During the British Mandate, some Jews still lived in Silwan alongside its Arab residents. Following the 1948 war between Israel and the Arab states, East Jerusalem was occupied by Jordan. After 1967, Israel reoccupied and annexed East Jerusalem, unlike the rest of the occupied territories of the West Bank. Palestinian residents of Silwan have received permanent resident status. The plot takes place in a building in Silwan where two Palestinian families and one Jewish settler family live, where archaeological excavations to uncover Bat Sheva’s Spring (Bat Sheva was one of King David’s wives) are taking place under the house under the auspices of the right-wing Jewish NGO of David’s Kingdom. This is a site-specific performance, and it takes place in the private

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home of an Arab family in Ancient Acco not far from the festival site, with the audience accompanying the actors throughout the various spaces of the house. On the ground floor lives Amal, a poor woman, with her young, mute son Tamer who often disappears. On the top floor live a father, Jameel, and his two daughters, Iman and Yasmeen, who operate a beauty salon out of their home. Iman is a closeted lesbian who loves to sing rap songs, and Yasmeen is a singer who dreams of going to Paris, for which she saves money, hiding parts of it in the beauty salon. Jameel is a neighborhood leader who opposes the excavations and gets the court to issue a temporary order to stop them. Jameel is opposed by David’s Kingdom Chairman Yoram, a seasoned lawyer and extreme rightwing politician who tries to evict the Palestinian families from the house by different ploys. To that end, he installs settler woman Shosh there to spy on Jameel for him. Shosh is a 38-year-old childless, ultra-Orthodox, Jewish woman, and Yoram exploits her distress, assuring her that the house will be hers—and that the divine presence there will eventually award her a husband and children. Efrat is the archaeologist responsible for the excavation and exhibits a supposedly neutral and apolitical stance on the conflict, allegedly with only scientific interest. Finally, the house’s residents are joined by Na'ama, a young, secular, and politically clueless Tel Aviv woman who wants to photograph the house, before she leaves on a long trip to India, for her grandmother who used to live in it before 1948. Yoram exploits her for his ends, trying to prove that Jews had lived in the house before the Palestinians. Jameel takes Yasmeen’s money without her permission; she finds out and is helpless; and then Tamer, who is in love with Yasmeen, steals Na'ama’s money from her car, money she had intended to use for a trip to India, and gives it to Yasmeen. Yoram, conscious of the developments because of his spy, Shosh, can see who broke into Na'ama’s car using security cameras. However, to get him evicted, Yoram goes on to accuse Jameel of breaking into the car. Yoram commands the excavations’ security guard, Michael, to arrest Jameel, but Jameel manages to get away. Michael pulls out a gun and tries to shoot Jameel, but the bullet accidentally hits and kills Tamer. The plot begins from the end, with two directors, Chen Alon and Sinai Peter, leading the pallbearers carrying Tamer’s body to the house’s entrance. Michael, a Russian immigrant who runs security for the excavations, deciding who can enter and leave, greets crowds on the street near the entrance to the house. The drilling of excavations is heard in the background. Michael turns to

Performance Repertoire: Representations of Social Conflicts

the audience and maintains his innocence, telling spectators, “How did it all begin? . . . Please . . . listen and judge for yourself ” (Genihar 2012, 2). The security guard plays a double role of character and narrator, leading the audience from one space to another in the building, up to the final scene, where he accidentally kills the boy, ushering in the tragic ending. The performance is in fact a backward reconstruction of the events, with the spectators acting as a kind of jury who must examine the facts and different viewpoints and reach a conclusion regarding who is responsible for the boy’s death. Therefore, other characters also occasionally turn to the audience, speaking in the past tense and seeking to justify their actions and be exculpated of the murder. Spectators are therefore also supposed to examine the different viewpoints and decide who is guilty. The performance veered between two opposed styles, hyperrealism and epic theater, which places its style between reality and fiction. The performance took place in the private residence of an Arab family in Ancient Acco, thus creating the effect of an actual experience and a certain overlap between the fictional space and physical space. The effect drew spectators near and raised identification with what was happening before their eyes. In addition, the knowledge that the play is based on in-depth research of Silwan’s harsh reality only enhanced the realistic effect with the spectators. But the narrative structure creates distance, constantly reminding that it is just theater. The plot does not occur in the present, it is only a reconstruction for the spectators who are asked to judge the events. Thus, acting ranges between realistic dialog that upholds the convention of the “fourth wall” and that breaks the convention when the actors turn to the audience, i.e., dialogs are in the present tense, as opposed to appeals to the spectators that happen in the past tense, highlighting the fact that the events being watched are only a recreation. Another element that veered between the realistic and the epic was the translation from Arabic into Hebrew. Arab characters spoke Arabic between themselves as part of the performance’s realistic conception. Settler Shosh, who spied on them, transmitting over the phone to Yoram, the NGO Chairman, translations of their speech into Hebrew. In a Brechtian manner, the spectators heard Shosh’s words over a loudspeaker, but the Arab characters did not. The choice of which Hebrew translation would be done by a settler highlights the position of Arabic in Israeli society. Study of Arabic language and culture by Jews is always carried out under the idea of “knowing the enemy” and serving

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the aim of Israeli Intelligence, not of developing a profound understanding of the Arab world. This performance dissolves into a third space because it presents the viewpoints of those involved in the tragedy, leaving critical judgment to the audience. The performance’s creators, working from a left-wing conception, were interested in dialog between the groups so that settlers’ plights and points of view could be seen alongside that of the Palestinian families. However, Chairman Yoram is represented in an almost stereotypical fashion as a clichéd, absolutely immoral politician who has no hesitation or doubt. With this representation, the creators aimed for a struggle connection, one that presents political opponents in an extreme, uncomplicated fashion. However, an abstention connection can also grow as spectators see that responsibility is spread over all the characters, both Jewish and Arab. Therefore the audience can infer equal responsibility and can conclude that there is no point in taking a stand on any side.

Axis II: Folklore Construction and Deconstruction In this axis, we will look at events and performances that use folkloric images and patterns of the Palestinian-Arab orient in different and opposing ways. At one end, we will see events that are based on and that preserve stereotypes and worn orientalist patterns in order to point to harmonious cooperation that tends toward abstention. On the other end, we will examine performances that attempt, by breaking down folkloric patterns and images, to shape dialog and sometimes even resistance and struggle. Even in these cases, we will see that these performances and events fall into a complicated, ambivalent thicket that produces an effect at odds with the artists’ original intention.

“Between a Cup of Coffee and Music”: Hospitality Encounters by Arabs for Jewish Visitors In the previous section, we analyzed how, in addition to the community theater of Jewish-Arab youth, in the 1989 festival, Eran Beniel added a series of meetings between Jewish and Arab writers, poets, and journalists. Festival goers from the center were invited to “encounters” with Acco residents who hosted them in their homes “over a cup of coffee and some

Performance Repertoire: Representations of Social Conflicts

music” (Acco Festival Program 1989).22 These meetings, and especially the hosting of Jewish spectators in residents’ homes, highlighted the desire for dialog, but they also may have covered for polite hosting uninterested in touching the pain and difficulty of frank discussion of oppression and fear between the groups. In other words, how these encounters were constructed, personal hosting of Jews in Arab’s Ancient Acco homes, reinforced the principle of “don’t raise the demon,” a kind of courtesy visit and peep into the life of the other. These meetings were built on an orientalist conception of the Arabs as “warm, good-hearted, hospitable people.” Simultaneously, these encounters took place in the private homes of Ancient Acco residents so could not be fully under the surveillance of the festival management. In this private space, an inversion of the power relations could occur, where the Arab is the landlord, quite literally, hosting the Jewish guests. This private space could produce a closeness and a dialog between hosts and visitors that could generate an exchange of ideas, thoughts, and feelings, and could even allow debate marked by struggle—in contrast to how the meetings could have been feared by festival management. Thus, the orientalist foundation of “Arab hospitality” in these encounters could have been undermined and sullied because of weak supervision of private space that created intimate terms and allowed dialog and even debate between Arabs and Jews.

Diwan: Dismantling the Hospitality Pattern Diwan (1993), moderated by Moni Yosef of the Acco Theatre Center, is based on the hosting of Jewish visitors by Arab Acco residents. Diwan signifies an Arab tradition of men gathering in a room to socialize and hence its transposition into the development of a theater event of narrative, singing, dancing, and refreshments. The event is divided into two parts. In the first, the audience is divided into small groups of about ten people, an Acco-resident participant leading each group to his home and telling his story. In the second part, the groups are led to a tent in the central festival site’s courtyard, for the main event. The performance begins 22 http://www.accofestival.co.il/

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with vigorous belly dancing, creating the sense of a hafla,23 and then it continues with stories and songs. Suddenly, provocations break out, supposedly spontaneously, by participants who are with the audience. In a revealing monolog by Abu Acco, one of the participants, two plainclothes detectives take to the stage to arrest him because his sister had launched into speeches against the authorities. The event consists of two opposing principles: a celebration of the values of the host Palestinian community and community protest against oppression. Community-based theater researcher Baz Kershaw (1992, 82–84) believes that such a combination increases the effect of the performance on the spectators, although the protest and resistance performance may achieve the opposite result because a spectator could come away even more entrenched in his conservative prejudices. Therefore, Kershaw offers an approach that combines two well-known theatrical forms, carnival and agitprop, which represents interweaving poles. An event that celebrates the values of the community, carnival is made up of a spectrum of comic genres that are compared to agitprop, a term indicating propaganda theater interested in promoting revolution by changing consciousness. Kershaw sees the interweaving of carnivalesque, humorous celebrations with resistance and protest as an effective way to obtain the audience’s agreement and bring it closer to messages or content than it would have accepted otherwise. We could say that these two forms of performance reflect the two poles of the relationship: abstention, which is similar to carnival celebrations and is humorous in ways, and struggle, which is similar in spirit to radical agitprop. Diwan, therefore, incorporates carnival, which celebrates the values of the host Palestinian community and its protest. Like carnivalesque reversal, the oppressed Palestinian, in Israeli society in general and in Acco Festival in particular, temporarily changes the power relations, controlling the performance and leading the audience, made up mostly of Jews. Also, the stories, poetry, and dance in the performance create a convenient solidarity that finally allows expression of Arab protest. In other words, the show at the beginning seemingly shapes a connection of abstaining in the “folkloristic-touristic” hosting drama, which allows ease and familiarity, which in turn allows the expression of protest and the demand for the recognition of Acco Arabs’ oppression and difficulty. 23 An Arabic word signifying “concert” and meaning a large party with music. The

word has been naturalized in Hebrew slang with a similar meaning.

Performance Repertoire: Representations of Social Conflicts

The encounters between Acco Arabs and the Jewish visitors of the festival in previous years were characterized by abstention from the hard questions and by touching instead on the superficially shared “cup of coffee and some music.” In Diwan, these encounters are transformed into an ironic pattern through which the Acco Arab hosts try to lead the Jewish spectators into a dialog about the complexity of their lives. On the other hand, one could say that the combination of carnivalesque celebrations and resistance may create a suspending effect with the audience in which a separation is established between the protest and the hafla, with its myriad of oriental folklorist images. The combination could create anger or disappointment from the fact that the performance does not continue to fit the folklorist pattern, positioning the Jewish spectator away from the dialog. Moreover, expressions of anger and rage by the Arab performers may reinforce the stereotype of the “violent terrorist Arab” found in abundance in Israeli theater (Urian 1997). Therefore, the performance, because of its dual structure—carnival/agitprop—may replace the image of the Arab from one orientalist stereotype (warm and hospitable) with yet another orientalist stereotype (the threatening terrorist), missing the complex dialog that has begun to emerge. Thus, Diwan falls into a thicket of conflicting simultaneous meanings between resistance and collaboration as a result of conscious exploitation of folkloristic images that could act as double-edged swords.

Hummus, Fries, and Salad: Hummus as an Image of Fake Coexistence Hummus, Fries, and Salad (2008) by Avigail Rubin and Yoav Bartal is a fierce meta-­theatrical satire (a play within a play) on the festival’s pretensions to represent “coexistence.” Which is probably why this performance was not accepted into the competition and was produced instead by the Acco Theatre Center as a guest performance. The plot revolves around three characters: Michaela Danieli, an Ashkenazi-Jewish Tel Aviv resident and director of the festival,24 24 The name is an Anagram of the name of Daniela Michaeli, festival director during

this period. This, however, was not a personal attack against her, but criticism of the policy of “coexistence” which I expand on in Chapter Five, on the host community.

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played by actor Nadav Bossem and shaped in extreme drag show fashion; Gal, a Jewish gay theater director (with an Arab partner) who adapts Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew into The Taming of the Shrew in Sector (i.e., the Arab sector); Reem, an Arab actress from Galilee who plays the character of Katherina, who is transformed from a troubled woman to a good, devoted wife by the end of her ordeal, “Women, prostrate yourselves, shower your loved ones with honor and respect, and if my husband asks what is my desire, I answer, to serve my lord” (Rubin and Bartal 2008, 14). The show was raised as site-specific at a hummus restaurant, with actors sitting around the table, actors Misra Masri, Ali Ali, Ibrahim Kadura, and Khalil Kadura playing the roles of Arab waiters, serving hummus to the audience and the main characters. Michaela, Gal, and Reem meet at the restaurant during rehearsals for the festival and a dispute breaks out among them regarding the performance’s message. Reem objects to the performance’s conformist final monologue that perpetuates the patriarchal order, “What message am I giving the Arab audience here? That women should remain submissive? . .  . To end the performance like that is chauvinistic, primitive, and unrealistic” (Rubin and Bartal 2008, 14). Gal’s main argument is that in the Arab sector, from his experience with his Arab partner, there is rampant violence against women and homosexuals, and he wants to show that on stage. During the discussion between Reem, Michaela, and Gal, in which they are trying to force her to finish the play, the stereotypes and prejudices of the “enlightened and liberal” Tel Aviv group against Acco Arabs start emerging. Reem lashes out, saying they don’t know anything about life in the Arab sector, alluding to their prejudices. Michaela replies with language that is loaded and is rife with orientalist images, which humorously exposes her racist thinking with the worn “some of my best friends are” cliché: Reem, I don’t know in which village you studied acting or on the back of what camel you arrived in Acco, but I suggest you make sure you know who you’re talking to really well before you shoot off your old Kalashnikov rifle here with sentences you’ll later regret. . . . On my fortieth birthday, there was more than twenty percent Arabs. . . . Do you hear what I’m saying? More than twenty percent! (Rubin and Bartal 2008, 14)

Performance Repertoire: Representations of Social Conflicts

Afterward, Michaela apologize for her words, but Reem refuses to be conciliated, laughing out. At this point, Michaela and Gal appeal to the theatrical hierarchy of director and actor. Michaela demands, “Just sit down and say yes. It’s your goddamn director, an authority!” And Gal adds, “I am the director and I say who goes where, when, and what exactly he’ll say . . . this monologue will be in the play because I want it to” (Rubin and Bartal 2008, 7). Theatrical hierarchy is perceived as legitimate in justifying the hierarchy between Jews, as producers and directors of the festival, and Arabs, as artists and suppliers of other services at the event. Finally, Reem is stressed and reluctantly agrees to utter the final monologue, and they shower her with praise. After she finishes her monologue, she runs out in despair, creating an analogy between Katherina’s ordeal in The Taming of the Shrew and Reem herself, who eventually collaborates with Jewish-liberal paternalism disguised as a joint project of “coexistence.” Gal and Michaela’s praise in fact constitutes hypocrisy and flattery because, at the beginning of the meeting, when Reem hadn’t yet arrived, Gal tells Michaela that she is not Arab “enough,” meaning that she doesn’t have a pronounced accent and isn’t dark enough. Anat Hadid, who played Reem, is a Druze actress whose full name and speech do not disclose her Arabness, i.e., she passes as Jewish. This dialogue reveals the thoughts of the audience throughout the show—is actress Anat Hadid, who plays Reem, indeed an Arab or a Jew, emphasizing the stereotypes through which the audience watches the performance. In various connecting scenes, the waiters deviate from their role as service providers and dance in an increasingly violent fashion until their anger at the arrogance of the festival director and the Jewish director is exposed. For example, in this passage, where Gal complains to Michaela of Reem’s blurred “Arabness,” the waiters respond threateningly: The waiters put the forks down on the tables and freeze in place . . . Now the waiters are already very close to the two’s table, performing a short piece and eventually whispering to Michaela and Gal in Arabic, a line from a poem by [Palestinian national poet Mahmoud] Darwish. “Write down on my ID, I’m an Arab.” The waiters go back to serving the audience. Gal and Michaela remain frozen in place. (Rubin and Bartal 2008, 5)

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The quote from Darwish’s famous poem deals with the Arabs’ complex dual identity as Israeli citizens on the one hand and as Palestinians on the other. The waiters’ gesture of resistance expresses the complexity of the identity in which they are trapped. On the one hand, their livelihoods depend on the Jewish audience arriving at the festival, and on the other hand, they are not happy at all to do all the “dirty work,” reproducing the unequal power relations of Jews and Arabs. Throughout the performance, Michaela complains of the Arab waiters’ slowness, sloppiness, and lack of hygiene. Her racist and condescending attitude corresponds to the skit “Samatocha” in the Hanoch Levin play Queen of a Bathtub (1970). Samatocha is an Arab waiter in a café in Tel Aviv who is completely subordinate to the Jews, does everything he’s told, and during the skit, he hardly says a word. Urian (1997, 28) sees Samatocha as a stereotype of the submissive, obedient, Arab one can find in many Israeli plays. In this performance, the waiters are perceived by Michaela as “Samatocha,” but throughout the show, with their nonverbal and stylized movements, they emphasize their opposition to the racist image and deconstruct it. Finally, the restaurant manager, Abu Ibrahim, erupts on Michaela after her paternalistic comments, “We’re sick and tired of you, old lady. . . . You come here once a year . . . dress like you were in a left-wing, shit here and leave it to us to clean” (Rubin and Bartal 2008, 21). The performance ends with the Arab waiter presenting “the bill,” a metaphor for the reparation that the dominant group, with its liberal self-image, will be forced to pay for its denial, racism, and hierarchical relationships, in the festival and in the larger society. This performance, despite its resistance to the festival’s policy of “coexistence,” does harbor the possibility of dialog and abstention, creating a third, ambivalent space. The very fact that the performance is made through cooperation of Jewish and Arab artists suggests another possibility of connection between them. Rejection of the “coexistence” policy in the performance does not mean elimination of the possibility of connection between Jews and Arabs, but rather it is a call for meaningful dialog that does not disguise the inequality of existing Jewish-Arab power relations that are inherent to the structure of the festival. Paradoxically, the declared opposition may actually dissolve with the joint Jewish-Arab performance, leading toward dialog. The choice to place the event in a hummus restaurant, where the audience is defined as diners and served hummus, is derived from the image of hummus itself as an Arab signifier with positive popular connotations, creating a kind of

Performance Repertoire: Representations of Social Conflicts

folkloric celebration atmosphere. In Chapter Four, I deal at length with the image of hummus in the festival’s reception. Here, I will only mention that Dafna Hirsch and Ofra Tene (2013) have shown how, on one hand, hummus is transformed from a Palestinian dish to an Israeli dish and how, on the other hand, the hummus served in Arab restaurants is perceived as more authentic and delicious than industrial Israeli hummus. In this sense, Jews are interested in “authentic” hummus more than in any connection with the Arab preparing and serving it. The performance therefore criticizes this form of abstention adopted by many Jewish festival attendees. The performance is built on the tension between realism and Brechtian elements in the acting method. In this realism, there is no fourth wall but rather an overlap between the fictional and social realities of a hummus restaurant in Acco during the festival and the audience eating real hummus while being served by real Arab waiters. This realism is shattered by the Brechtian acting of Michaela, who is portrayed by a man presenting an extreme, parodic, and ludicrous drag show. Another shattering of the acting happens when the waiters shift from realistically serving clients to stylized, symbolic, and oppositional movement. The tension between these two forms creates an irony that has a very clear message. However, the ironic, parodic, and humorous representation of Michaela, Gal, and their Jewish counterparts in the festival might provoke laughter that again reasserts the liberal self-image. For “we have laughed at ourselves and our prejudices” and thus “cleansed our conscience” without working to change the extra-theatrical reality. In fact, this performance dissolves into a third space where, alongside its avowed struggle, there is also a dialog connection in the mere joint JewishArab effort, and even abstention may occur precisely because of the sense of self-criticism that makes real change to the political reality.

The Holocaust and Its Representations in the Festival The Holocaust is a traumatic, significant, and fundamental event in the shaping of Israeli identity, and its expressions are explicitly and implicitly present in almost all areas of society and culture, including theater. Tom Segev called Israelis “the seventh million,” explaining it this way: Alongside the real impact of the legacy of the Holocaust, it was used, prettified, and commercialized. The more it became apparent that

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their secular Israeli existence could not afford them a rooted identity—the more many Israelis were addicted to the legacy of the Holocaust as a sort of popular, bizarre, cult worship of memory, death, and kitsch. At one point, the Holocaust became a source of their collective identity . . . so much so that I called them “the seventh million.” (1991, 9) Liat Shtayer-Livni (2014) chose The New Holocaust Memory in Popular Culture in Israel as the subtitle of her book. Her research focused on representations of the Holocaust since the eighties, mainly by artists of the second and third generations in their wider sense, i.e., including those who are not direct descendants of Holocaust survivors but rather Israelis who were educated and became part of “the seventh million.” Shtayer-Livni’s claims will serve me in reviewing and analyzing representations of the Holocaust in the festival because the festival has been present in work since 1980 and has been a site of artistic expression for many artists of the second and third generations. Shtayer-Livni (2014, 12–13) argues that these generations are returning to the Holocaust in two ways, “one perpetuating the trauma and re-narrating it, the second blurring the memory and distancing it.” She focuses on the second channel, which has received less focus in research, emphasizing that these are the psychic defense mechanisms of the second and third generation “who are keeling under the weight of national memory and seeking to distance the trauma, not because they disparage it or because they moved away from it but rather because they are totally immersed in it and seek to find peace for themselves.” Moreover, she shows that, paradoxically, the further one is removed from the Holocaust temporally, the more references there are to it culturally. In her view, this multiplicity is necessarily indicative of an attempt to move away from the Holocaust and not re-experience the trauma. According to Shtayer-Livni, three defense mechanisms are reflected in the memory of the Holocaust in an attempt to distance it: humor, politicization, and ethnicity. These mechanisms are also integrated, e.g., humor serves as a critical politicization of the Holocaust. From the eighties onward, we have seen performances at the festival dealing with re-narration of the trauma by members of the second and third generation and performances by the second and third generation dealing with

Performance Repertoire: Representations of Social Conflicts

politicization of the Holocaust in two main ways: analogy to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and deconstruction of the Holocaust myth and its customary modes of representation. Humor, as mentioned, is present in quite a few different performances. But the link between the Holocaust and Mizrahi ethnicity, more prevalent in present-day culture, is almost absent from the festival, further revealing the festival’s elitist character. Several Holocaust studies were conducted on Israeli performances (e.g., Feingold 2012; Kaynar 1992, 1994, 2013; Rokem 2000) or had in-depth references to these performances in other contexts (e.g., Oz 1999, 2014; Urian 1993a, 1993b). Most, however, focused on the mainstream, with little reference to Acco Festival performances in particular and performances created on the margins of the field in general. At any rate, almost no work addressed the performances of the festival as a whole, examining possible trends in the context of Holocaust representation that grew on site. Most studies dealt with the politicization of the Holocaust, either with how these Holocaust performances contributed to shaping national-Zionist remembrance or with how theater criticized in different doses the nationalization of the Holocaust by Zionists or by those who made an analogous inversion between the Holocaust and Israel as oppressor of Palestinian victims. In this section, I will analyze Holocaust performances along three axes: performances by second and third generation that present and retell the trauma, the dealing with and deconstruction of the myth and the representation of memory, and Holocaust politicization. I also devote a separate and lengthy discussion about performances by the Acco Theatre Center, especially about Second Generation Memories in Ancient Acco (1988) and Arbeit Macht Frei (1991)—they are unique and significant in the theater field as a whole to this day, and the three trends are intensely interwoven in these performances.

1.  The Second and Third Generation Re-Present the Trauma In the eighties and nineties, the second generation of Holocaust survivors reached maturity and their voice was first heard. In addition, the Demjanjuk Trial (1987) and the First Gulf War (1991) were two significant events that fiercely raised Holocaust anxiety and trauma on the agenda for younger generations. Therefore, they began retelling the trauma, especially concerning the

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complexity of relationships with surviving parents and growing up under the shadow of the Holocaust. This trend has also affected the Acco Festival. Yizkor: A Nostalgic Performance (1983) by Shimon Zimmer was the first performance in the festival that dealt with the experience of the second generation; it examined the difficulties and the complexities of a son’s relationship with his old, Holocaust-survivor mother. A Train in Bavaria (1986) by Malka Marin is about a journey of a daughter of Holocaust survivors on a train to Germany, following her German lover. The external journey is analogous to an internal journey of guilt, thoughts, and charged experiences. Ophelia Shtral wrote Encounters in the Woods (1985) based on her childhood experiences, and she presents the relationship between a mother and daughter and their symbiosis during the Holocaust. Similarly, Name: Family (1990) deals with the ways the second generation copes with the horrors of the Holocaust survivors, and so does Levi’s Son (1989) by Nadav Ben-Yehuda, which deals with the relationship between a parent who is a Holocaust survivor and his Israeli-born soldier son. Ruti Osterman wrote, directed, and played in Twenty Two Pictures (2008), which is about the role of the third generation and the reverberation of the Holocaust and specifically about the anxiety of the previous two generations as it relates to obsessive cleaning and eating. On stage, a Holocaust-survivor grandmother, played by Dalia Friedland, is trying to erase the trauma of the Holocaust using bleach. The mother hides from memory in the bathroom and, paradoxically, in the shower itself—a sign of cleanliness but also of “gas chamber.” The grandmother compulsively tries to feed her granddaughter, and the ensuing hunger becomes an endless experience. Stylistically, this show is not realistic in nature but rather tends toward absurdity and indicates how the younger generation tries to break free, not always successfully, from the trauma that haunts it. Hitler, the Robot and the Knife (2007) by Boaz Dabi also contains insane relationships. The performance consists of two short plays that are steeped in black humor and deal with the education and training of children by their parents. It is not a performance that deals directly with relations between generations immediately after the Holocaust, but there are clear allusions to it. In the first play, parents raise a child as a robot, and he ends up believing he is one. In the second play, a strict mother violently educates her daughters; in a closet

Performance Repertoire: Representations of Social Conflicts

to which they are forbidden entry, they find a puppet clothed in Nazi uniform, and they become convinced that their mother is in fact Hitler. Rigid and violent relationships indicate how the trauma becomes a metaphor for warped parent-children relationships and how the metaphor captures the third generation in its broad sense.

2. Dealing with and Deconstructing Myth and National Remembrance Liat Shtayer-Livni (2014) argues that the many references to the Holocaust in recent decades indicate the creation of defense mechanisms to distance the trauma. Instead of concrete references to events and historical materials, artists use “the images, metaphors, simulacra, simulations, and clichés that dominate popular culture alongside the dismantling, ridiculing, and personification of concepts, personalities, and events associated with the Holocaust.” In Acco Festival, too, various shows dismantled serious national remembrance, based on the Zionist “Holocaust to revival” trope and the heroism of the Holocaust. Some main strategies to unload worn Holocaust memorial representations are questioning, black humor, self-deprecating humor, and juxtapositions. In the 1981 festival, Simcha Spector raised Jewish Medea. The performance has two levels of reality: Jews in a concentration camp raise Euripides’ Medea. The actress playing Medea is having an affair with the Nazi commander, creating a sort of analogy between Nazism and male oppression. This interpretation also examines the Holocaust from a universal rather than a Zionist perspective, i.e., not as an exceptional historical event but as a version of a story from Greek mythology, which is perceived as one of the foundations of Western culture and is centered on universal questions about the human being, and in this case about passions and cruelty. In the eighties in the mainstream, performances eroded representations of the Holocaust and especially the myth of heroism and the morally problematic black/white division between the partisan heroes and those who, on one hand, passively “went like sheep to slaughter” and, on the other, were “collaborator bastards.” For example, Yehoshua Sobol’s Ghetto (1983) deals with the Judenrat and their complex moral decisions, and Kastner (1985) by Motti Lerner showed Kastner, a Hungarian Zionist leader who saved more than a thousand Jews in

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opposition to Hannah Szenes’s model of self-sacrifice, which saved not one single Jew in Hungary. Acco Festival performances also dealt with the heroic myth and tore it apart. Only the Stars were So Close (1987) by David Palma dealt with a historian who unsuccessfully goes back in time to save Hannah Szenes from her death sentence. The performance tries to ascertain if Hannah Szenes, the person behind the myth, was in search of the personal and psychological motivations for her actions. The search shows the second generation’s attempt to approach the materials of the Holocaust from a more personal, human, less heroic, and purely symbolic approach, which is not effective anymore. Jacob the Liar (1989), by Shuli Cohen and Nadav Ben-Yehuda and based on the York Becker book Jakob der Lügner, presents Jacob in the ghetto during the Holocaust. He lies to his friends, saying that he owns a small radio, and he invents hopeful “news.” Jacob’s character reinforces the importance of survival, faith, and optimism against the Zionist heroic myth. Honi Hameagel is a provocative, multidisciplinary artist, and in many of his performances, there is Dadaist deconstruction of Jewish and Israeli myths and symbols. As a second generation of Holocaust survivors, he is frequently involved in dismantling remembrance in his performances. Scapegoats (1989) is an outside performance that copies “a slice of life/death,” a sort of surreal reconstruction of Nazi mass murder of Jews in a mass grave. On the Ramp (1993), which was created in the framework of the competition, exaggerates the deconstruction of Zionist myths, revealing the connection between violence in Israel and worldwide and Nazi racism. Rag Group that was led by Honi Hameagel, presents reality materials and cultural images that create an emotional and sensory experience. An associative relationship develops between the images in the performance that is reminiscent of a “happening.” The space is a kosher butcher shop that is shaped like a similar one in Berlin in 1933, with the audience sitting on either side of an elongated stage. Through the windows, slaughtered livestock can be seen hanging on hooks, and you could smell the spoiled meat. At the entrance, a girl dressed in a Nazi uniform stops the crowd. She shouts “Jew!” and makes passports that state that all the spectators are “Jewish pigs.” On stage stands a motorcycle that emits stifling smoke when it is turned on. A German soldier shines a light on the audience, forcing them to sit down. El Al flight attendants stand up to explain to the spectators what to do in case of an emergency. They are followed by a woman, speaking

Performance Repertoire: Representations of Social Conflicts

French, in an evening gown and a turban tied to a loaf of bread. After her comes a boxer who boxes with himself. A wooden cylinder is hung from the ceiling that turned into a butcher’s block, on which a butcher cuts meat. In one of the highlights of the performance, Honi stands naked on stage, urinating into a basin while a female figure moves next to him to spit on him. Thus, this performance deals with the myth of the Holocaust, and especially with its representations, in an attempt to deconstruct them and raise a disharmonic experience through the live presence of reality materials that are treated in unconventional ways. Honi Hameagel refers to the artistic conception: The space dictates the work for me; the character, colors, smells, and local thrill in all their diversity. My stance was not to use “actors” but rather copy pieces of life and cultural patterns, including all of their elements, authentic figures, and people. I think provocation is not a dirty word. It means awakening. The main enemy of art is indifference. Acco Festival . . . exists also in order to create provocations, to provoke us to think, to feel, and to see things from a new, different perspective. The experience and the audience’s total Happening also mean fulfilling fantasies and releasing pressure valves. (2004, unpaginated) In the performance Ori (2002) by Uri Dromer, the figure of a fetus, played by a large-headed puppet with shriveled limbs, leaves his mother’s womb in the crematoria of the Holocaust for a journey to the land of Mussulmen, joined by Mendel the bookseller. On the side stands a large bed on which lies a half-dead woman. To her side, there are wood cabinets, out of which the characters come. It is an associative journey that is shaped by Jewish images and symbols and that examines Jewish memory. Duralex Sedelex, who performed in Auschwitz in the eighties, accompanies the show with music and becomes a significant part of its development. The fetus represents the Jewish-Israeli future pessimistically and horrifically, as well as Israel’s detachment from its past and Jewish culture destroyed in Europe. “The play seeks to mourn a destroyed world, but the devastation is so complete that there is no way to remember or to represent the life that preceded destruction,” and therefore “all that remains is the image pessimistic of the

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immigrant community crumbling, haunted, and extinguished, with no possibility to break the shallowness of existence and consciousness of its own destruction” (Zer-Zion and Yerushalmi 2002, 26). In 2003, in-competition performances Garinim [Nucleuses] and Gases are two performances that deal with the existential anxiety of the atomic bomb and the Holocaust; they are not only major disasters in human history but they are also the trauma resonating and being represented in Israeli and worldwide in the present time. These shows can be understood in light of the remarks of Adi Ophir, “We are not just after Auschwitz, but always in front of it, facing it. Not only after Hiroshima and Nagasaki but before the next bomb. The planet of the drowned is our planet” (Ophir 2005, 383). Ariel Ashbel’s Garinim is “a theatrical collage” dealing with the atomic bomb that the United Stated dropped on Japan during World War II. The performance is built of sections that illustrate the horrors of the atomic bomb and that present a tangible apocalypse on the national and global level. The performance, which was supposed to be raised in the Crusader Hall section of Ancient Acco, was moved, due to technical problems, to the municipal building, a structure that is made of exposed concrete and looks like a fallout shelter— thus serving the performance and its content. Ashbel used images from Joan JoAnne Akalaitis’s work Dead End Kids (1982) and the testimonies of Japanese survivors. He examined the relationship between scientific curiosity on one hand and the desire for power on the other, bound together in the production of the bomb. The Givol Anata Choir joined several facets. The U.S. figures are typically verbose compared with the Japanese characters that express the pain of the victim through movement and body language. The sound of the entire event creates chilling effects, recharging visual images of the atomic bomb. For example, Ashbel uses a series of pulses growing in volume until unbearably loud, testing the audience’s ability to listen, accompanied by an image of horror, extending man’s boundaries. The performance ends with a monolog by an actor sitting in the audience, wearing a knitted yarmulke, justifying the bomb, and asking what history would have looked like if the bomb were dropped on Germany right at the beginning of the war. This monolog places the performance in the Israeli and global contexts alike, showing the complexity and danger of the existence of disruptive technology harnessed to nationalist ideology.

Performance Repertoire: Representations of Social Conflicts

Ran Apfelberg’s Gases, directed by Shifra Haefrati, is a black comedy about the Holocaust. It centers on Zuko, a Jewish clown and star of silent movies. The Nazi concentration camp commander builds a gas chamber and seeks to ascertain its effectiveness; the victims of the experiment are Zuko the clown and Lala the gypsy woman. Zuko, in humor and humanity, tries to beat evil. The performance is made up of tragicomic and horrific scenes: the German soldier charged with applying the gas chamber asks for Zuko’s signature for his mother, who adores him, and the camp commander requires Zuko to stage a funny bit from a movie before his execution. Zuko’s humanity, which cries out from the humor, is of no use, and he is executed together with Lala the gypsy. Party-Zen/Stones (2005) by Yifat Zandani, Yinon Tsafrir, and Avi Gibson Bar-El, designed by Mickey Canaan, was presented by street theater group Orto-Da outside of the competition. Actors portray the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes (in Warsaw, by sculptor Nathan Rapoport), representing the myth of heroism during the Holocaust in Zionist narrative. Throughout the performance, the monument is eroded by circus-like and entertaining humor and various political allusions accompanied by the sounds of planes, shells, and lively music. For example, in a humorous circus act, one of the characters magically pulls out of his mouth a long yellow ribbon; the rest of the characters use it to make a patch with a large Star of David, then later a swastika, and finally a childish kite. Flupenbach and Zufenheim—Reeducation (2010), by Eran Tubul in collaboration with the actors, is a site-specific performance that engages the audience and deals with the analogy between strict German education and national Israeli education. The public is invited to go through an education process carried out by volunteers from the land of Germanooststrromkampf, whose language is a mixture of German, Hebrew, and gibberish that creates irony and inversion. For example, the word “baboon” means “citizen” who needs to be reeducated to be a “maximum spitz,” i.e., the best. They have arrived in Israel because they claim the Jews have money but lack order. Volunteers dress in traditional German clothes, some wearing black boots and all the men having narrow Hitler-style mustaches. Members of the audience are asked to do exercises and games to learn military discipline and work toward becoming super-human. Initially, each spectator is given a sticker with a number and receives instruction concerning

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Germanooststrromkampf state and culture. Then, there is the congress where speeches and songs are performed, as well as various exercises. Finally, there is the meal that ends in murder. This performance uses Nazi aesthetics and content to make an analogy to nationalistic trends in Israel. All actions are bathed in grotesque humor and laughter combined with total horror. This performance creates a simulation of reeducation through which the artists deconstruct the representations of the Holocaust Memorial and completely secularize it. Mein Kampf by George Tabori and directed by Gil Alon was raised in the 2011 Acco Festival. It is one of the most important plays by this renowned German-Jewish playwright, whose repertoire is mostly about the Holocaust and is filled with smashing taboos; crossing boundaries; and black, terrifying humor that flies in the face of the customary Holocaust representations on stage. Therefore, only a small number of productions of his plays have ever been raised in Israeli theater; most have been raised outside the mainstream. The story takes place in a Vienna sanatorium in the early twentieth century. In this production, the audience members sat on beds and were part of the scene. Tabori creates a comic-tragic encounter between Jewish Shlomo Herzl (a combination of King Solomon and Theodor Herzl) and Adolf Hitler, a failed painter. Herzl, a starving intellectual, is writing his book entitled My War, and Hitler soon steals this title for his infamous book Mein Kampf. Herzl encourages evil Hitler, prepares him for the entrance exams to the Academy of Arts, and comforts him after he fails. Moreover, Herzl encourages Hitler to become a politician and conquer the world. He even shaves the little-mustache look onto Hitler instead of killing him and possibly changing history. The performance highlights the complex love-hate relationship between Jews and Germans, raising horror at the thought of how the Jews did not foresee what was to be and emphasizing the Germans’ senseless hatred and cruelty toward the Jews. This was a critical play, and Tabori’s audience members were European Jews and Germans but not Israelis. In the Israeli context, such a performance would get credited with an unforeseen political twist because it strengthens the Zionist thesis that the exilic Jew needs to be forsaken: in the performance, Herzl’s alter ego tries to integrate into morbid and murderous German culture and to establish a sovereign state with a strong army to fend off possible future Hitlers. Tabori would undoubtedly dislike this statement. We Are Building a Port (2012) by Anna Cohen-Yanai, Neta Wiener, Yonatan Conda, and Raz Wiener presents a spoken-word performance built of rhyming

Performance Repertoire: Representations of Social Conflicts

text, wordplay, and ironic and humorous quotations from Hebrew sources of various periods and linguistic levels. The performance veers between standup comedy and rap to associative linguistic combinations that deconstruct the clichés of the Zionist ethos, including how Holocaust remembrance has become empty and used in a cynical political way. The story’s framework is made up of the five stages of a takeover by seamen who come to the new land and take advantage of the creatures living there to build a port to strengthen their position. The fourth stage is the new port’s launch. The president of the port authority, a female Holocaust survivor, delivers a speech in praise of railway transportation above all other: We were created for the joy of enforced traveling, roundup for free. Sit tight and wait in the car. Pomeranz’s elbow is right in Bedrick’s throat. And when it’s hot it’s hot. Terrible. And when it’s cold, so cold. Why air condition the cars if we’ve already become accustomed to cattle cars . . . So next time cars—no windows and no shutters, and nothing else, no polka dots and pockets. Check out the Whermacht’s Facebook page once—we always looked our best in stripes. (rehearsal text, unpaginated) This monolog reveals the clichés regarding Holocaust representation and shows how Israelis “live” this memory, enjoy it, and cynically use it to promote the political goals of domination and conquest. Puns connect different periods, such as linking “Baron” de Rothschild, who contributed to the establishment of settlements in Israel in the late nineteenth century, with the death cars to Auschwitz, or linking Facebook with the Wehrmacht. These connections drain the meaning out of the experience and break the taboo that enforces the “right” way to remember the Holocaust.

3. The Victim Becomes the Executioner: Politicization of the Holocaust Holocaust remembrance has always been a political tool in the hands of both the right and the left. Since the state’s establishment, the political equation supported by the Israeli establishment to date is that the Israeli Jew is still a victim in the face of the Arab world in particular and of the international

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community in general, of those who embody the “Nazi,” as in, “All the world is against us.” Israeli politicians frequently use such comparative expressions. Seventies Foreign Affairs Minister Abba Eban, who opposed the withdrawal from the occupied territories, called the 1967 borders “the borders of Auschwitz”; in the early eighties, Prime Minister Menachem Begin of the right compared Yasser Arafat to Hitler; and recently, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Affairs Minister Avigdor Lieberman compared the attitude of the West toward Iran’s nuclear program to England’s and France’s attitude toward Czechoslovakia in 1938 with the infamous Munich Agreement. However, since the eighties, a new trend has emerged from the left side of the map that suggests, in different levels of explicitness, that the Jewish victim has turned into the executioner since the First Lebanon War and the occupation (Zimmerman 2002, 134–137). During this period, philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz used the harsh expression “Judeo-Nazis” in his statements against the occupation and offered this explanation: [That] we’ve traditionally treated the areas of our conquests in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Lebanon like the Nazis did in their areas of conquests . . . we did not set up concentration camps . . . But what a terrible thing it is that we need to present this fact as what differentiates us from the Nazis. (Sheshar 1988, 78) Ben-Ami Feingold (2012, 19) claims, in his book The Holocaust in Hebrew Drama (2012), that from the eighties onward, analogies between the rise of Nazi Germany and the parallel processes of militant nationalism in Israel, revealed in the margins of society, began to emerge in Israeli theater. These analogies are characteristic, in the playwrights’ view, not only of the right wing but also of the “hawkish, activist fundament of Zionist ideology in general.” This phenomenon is well represented at Acco Festival, and Gad Kaynar (2013, 124) claims that some of these occurrences are “breaking taboos and infringing the ‘legitimate’ borders of relating to the phenomena that engendered the trauma— the Holocaust and its alleged affinity with the Palestinian problem, the Israeli habitus of oppressing the Palestinians.” Kaynar also emphasizes the close connection between these performances and Ancient Acco, which is both the site of the festival and the residence of the

Performance Repertoire: Representations of Social Conflicts

Arabs of Acco, and he emphasizes the complex relationship between the festival as a detached colonial bubble and the Arab residents: This encapsulation assimilates between the depotentialized myth of the Holocaust and the concrete urban framework of the Festival— the Crusader Halls in the Arab Old City of Akko. It simultaneously constitutes a metaphoric “crusader” stronghold of a liberal and oppressive Jewish hegemony over the Arab citizens of that quarter. Thus, the Festival is paradoxically both a “Jewish ghetto” and a cultural occupation force that “ghettoizes” the Arab population that encases it. (2013, 124) The Dance of Genghis Cohn (1984) is an adaptation by Michael Kahana of the novel by Roman Gary about a former Nazi officer haunted by his living-dead Jewish victim. A complex relationship is formed between them involving revenge and guilt. Finally, the spirit of the Jewish comedian shoots the Nazi officer. The play won first place after a difficult dilemma by the judges regarding the “Judeo-Nazi” message of the text, as Shimon Levy (1996, 46) , who was on the jury with author Hanoch Bartov and Goren Agmon, recounts. Bartov initially refused to award the prize to the performance because of its extreme message, but he was convinced after recognizing that he himself had written about how he, as a soldier in the Jewish Brigade at the end of World War II, had protected a German mother and daughter, preventing them from being raped by his friends who wanted a kind of Jewish revenge on them. Bartov’s indecisiveness illustrates the difficulty of apprehending the “role reversal” and the analogy between the Holocaust and Israeli reality. Shimon Levy highlighted and explained: The victim shoots his murderer not as a revenge. This bold substitution is not intended to compare the Jews to the Nazis but rather warn of the possibility that this could happen to Israelis. . . . The sane Jewish comedian did not only become a “Nazi” murderer but this revolution that has taken place in him makes him denounce the exclusivity of any suffering, both in terms of the victim and the killer. (1992, 179)

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Michael Kahana treated these subjects again in Polygraph Hess (1988), which was raised outside the competition framework and which presented an inversion between executioner and victim. Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, meets with Israeli youth, telling them his story while he is connected to a polygraph; they punish him for any lies that he tells. The performance deals with “the legality of the Nuremberg Trials, [questions of] reward and punishment, atonement and repentance” (1988 Acco Festival Program). In contrast, the same year saw the raising of Carnival at Venice (1988) by Moshe Shamir in the competition framework; the performance clearly belongs to the tradition of seeing Israel as the victim of the prevailing political situation. Shamir brings forth Shylock and his daughter, Jessica, characters from The Merchant of Venice, five years after the end of the Shakespeare play. They hold a dialog on Jewish identity and the relationship between Jews and gentiles. Shylock is poor and blind and wears a yellow badge with the inscription, “Caution, blind Jew.” Jessica, her eyes covered, is true to Christianity, her new family, and her Venice community. Her father warns her that those around her will betray her because they hate Jews, even those who convert to Christianity. Jessica refuses to believe this, but it turns out her father is right. Jessica’s children and property are taken from her. The motif of blindness and sober vision at the bedrock of the work is a clear statement, “The whole world is against us,” the Jew is perceived as a victim of anti-Semitism. On one hand, raising the performance during the First Intifada justified the fear and hypocrisy of Israel’s self-image as a victim, but on the other, it was the only performance in the festival’s entire run that gave expression to a rightwing attitude—an exception to its repertoire. Alienation—Irtirab (1993) by Daniel Rosenfeld was an in-competition performance of young Jews and Arabs, conducted in the Beit Hyman Community Center in Acco. An apocalypse leaves a group of survivors and their mutual relations. The plot begins with alienation, through expressions of violence and cruelty to a situation in which evil becomes the purpose for existence. Now there is a reversal, and the survivors realize that the communication, dialog, and mutual support are essential conditions for their existence. The direct allegory of the Holocaust to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is clear; the Holocaust is a trauma for which both Jews and Arabs perceive themselves as perpetual victims and they are unable to take responsibility for their fates. But the plot is unique because of the optimistic end of the long-awaited reconciliation. Hard as it may

Performance Repertoire: Representations of Social Conflicts

be, because of the history of violence, reconciliation is not only possible but necessary. Reconciliation is consistent with the spirit of the Oslo Accords, in stark contrast to most of the shows dealing with the conflict, which usually end in either a pessimistic or open way (Urian 1997). The optimism of the early nineties dissipated in the subsequent decade, after the collapse of the Oslo Accords and the growing violence following it. Folio (2012), which was raised in the competition and which also brings together the Arabs and Jews of Acco, is very pessimistic. Hila Golan, Niva Dloomy, and Neal Levi—Israeli artists living in Berlin—created a performance that dismantles the memory representation of the Holocaust in the Israeli education system as an analogy to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This was a site-specific performance held in the Arab elementary school, Al Manara, near the gardens of the festival, and Arab pupils and the parents’ artists participated in and contributed to the blurring between reality and fiction. The choice to dismantle the clichés related to memory and particularly to national Holocaust remembrance, in the space of an Arab school, which contains didactic slogans in Arabic, fashioned an uncomfortable experience with the Jewish audience. The event breaks down Zionist initiation rites, revealing their fascist dimension. A Hanukkah ceremony is held to mark the victory of the Maccabees over the Greeks; Arab pupils play the rebel Jews. Niva directs a Holocaust Memorial Day ceremony, running through the space in a hysterical and parodic manner, screaming fragments of texts and slogans used in Holocaust Day ceremonies, emptying them of their meaning and introducing them as hollow clichés. This paranoid persecution continues when Niva, like the Pied Piper, leads a convoy of Arab pupils to the tune of the song Ponar, which describes the murder of Jewish children in the Holocaust. Arab children portray Jewish children, and the former Jewish victim is now the executioner. This presentation won the prize for best show.

4.  Acco Theater Center and the Holocaust Acco Theatre Center, founded in 1984, is an alternative theater that creates throughout the year in Acco, and its founders were artistic directors of the festival: Dudi Ma'ayan (1995), Smadar Ya'aron (2009–2012), and Moni Yosef (2009–2012). Acco Theatre Center repertoire presented at the festival was, and

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still is, a significant milestone in Israeli theater and in the whole field, and therefore I devote a separate part to it. Three shows particularly stand out from this repertoire and deal with the Holocaust: Second Generation Memories in Ancient Acco (1988), Arbeit Macht Frei vom Toitland Europa (1991), and The Anthology (1998). Memories and Arbeit even won best performance awards. These three performances are thematically and formally interrelated, while Arbeit being the most significant and canonical of the three. I argue that with these three unique performances, Acco Theatre Center combined three trends in the representation of the Holocaust in the festival repertoire and shaped the Holocaust not as an event in the past but as a kind of spectacle through which Israelis can regard their realities psychologically, socially, and politically. These performances, often based on the personal experiences of second-generation participants, deconstructed customary and “sacred” Holocaust representations, politicizing them through the role-reversal of victim and executioner. Cross-references and analogies happened during performances, between the Holocaust and the Israeli reality in our time, not only sharpening the reversal of roles but also criticizing the Israeli refusal to acknowledge aggression and the distorted self-image of the “eternal victim.” In 1984, directors Dudi Ma'ayan, Shuli Cohen and a group of actors came to Acco to establish a permanent experimental-alternative theatrical framework to take advantage of Crusader Halls that Acco Festival uses during Sukkot. The desire to establish the center arose from Ma'ayan’s search for new creative avenues after having studied abroad under Eugenio Barba and Jerzy Grotowski. Ma'ayan has said that this kind of work “spoke to me and was closest to what I believed then should be a theater center” (interview with Ma'ayan April 12, 2005). Ma'ayan was in fact influenced by Artaud’s (1970) perception of theater, from Grotowski’s (1969) acting approach, and from Schechner’s (1973) environmental theater. The environment also includes the community in which the theater is located, i.e., the Arabs of Acco who live near the center: We were artists who came to Acco to affect the community in which we live. First there was total silence, then great curiosity on the Arab street. They came in and then integrated into the learning workshops and eventually became actors and participants in the space. Besides

Performance Repertoire: Representations of Social Conflicts

that, our performances and our content took place in the alleys of Ancient Acco. Later, when we built the Acco Theatre School, the students studied and performed exercises together with and inside the city’s Arab population. Our audience always viewed our performance with one ear hearing the Israeli music of the play and the other hearing the Arabic music of reality, such as the muezzin. Combining realities was an important key to understanding our work. (Interview with Ma'ayan, April 12, 2005) In terms of the budget, the center was hardly supported by any public body early on, except for Acco Municipality. The ministry of culture ignored the group, and “only after our work started to make waves was there a change in the state’s attitude” (interview with Ma'ayan, April 12, 2005). After they presented Arbeit (1991), the ministry of culture began supporting the theater, but the total support, including the municipality’s, never exceeded thirty percent of the budget. Institutional recognition and budgetary support came after seven years of operation, during which time the members barely made ends meet, though they stubbornly continued to create in an uncompromising artistic way. As already stated, founding the groups was rife with organizational, budgetary, and mental difficulties, “I think the main impact factor was first of all a matter of relocation of residence and disengagement from Tel Aviv” (interview with Ma'ayan, April 12, 2005). In 1985, some members of the group left, including Shuli Cohen, and the new group formed, including Dudi Ma'ayan, Moni Yosef, Khalid Abu Ali, and Smadar Ya'aron. The first production that Ma'ayan directed with the new group was Vienna Prague, which deals with the life of Franz Kafka. In 1986 they raised The Prince, a formally experimental work that combines actors and audience in one space, with materials from legends and mythical childhoods. These two performances were raised only as guest performances at Acco Festival. In 1988, Memories was raised at Acco Festival, and it won the Best Performance prize. The performance deals with autobiographical material and marks a search combining the personal experience of an artist with materials from reality in an intimate environment shared with a limited audience. In Vienna Prague, Smadar Ya'aron had a small room. During the performance The Prince, each actor had a room, and the audience walked between the rooms. In Vienna Prague, they began working on personal and

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family materials. In Memories, the group shaped the performance out of autobiographical materials arranged as a theater of rooms, a kind of environmental theater. In Arbeit, theatrical language became more precise, arriving at a total theatrical event. Second Generation Memories in Ancient Acco Memories (1988) was exceptional in that year’s competition because it proposed alternative theater bridled to experimental theater language and a pronounced political statement. The performance was shown in several spaces and was created from personal experiences of the artists. Ilana Ben-Meir (1991) researched this performance and its relation to psychodrama and environmental theater. The performance is organized into simultaneous settings, a situation where the spaces work simultaneously and there is movement between them (Pavis 1998, 337). The theatrical event is divided into two parts. In the first part, twenty-four invitees are divided into six groups of spectators in four small rooms, and each actor raises experiences from childhood and relationships to parents. Sometimes the audience is asked to participate, creating intimacy between them. In Smadar Ya'aron’s room, decorated with jars containing personal belongings, family photos, and so on, she is seen conducting dialog with her father, a Holocaust survivor, reversing the roles between them and presenting pain and guilt. Then the audience is allowed a break for exchanging notes, and then they go for a Seder meal. The actors and the audience sit together at the Seder table, and the boundaries blur between spectators and artists. In the Haggadah part about the liberation from Egyptian bondage, Arab actor Khaled Abu Ali, the only one without a room of his own in the first part, builds a brick wall in front of the table. Former slaves are now oppressors. The other characters, whom the audience members met during the first part, sit at the Seder table with them, often relating through personal-family experiences and political realities. The performance, in fact, presents a course beginning with personal pain and memories of different rooms, which accumulates sociopolitical significance, linking the biblical myth and the Holocaust with Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians and the occupation. Ma'ayan harnesses the experience of the Holocaust and traumatic memory, shaping them into a unique aesthetic based on the principles of environmental theater: giving special treatment to architectural space and its quality, participating with the audience, and using

Performance Repertoire: Representations of Social Conflicts

personal material and acting techniques that increase spontaneous play rather than rehearsed acting. Arbeit Macht Frei vom Toitland Europa Arbeit was created as a collaboration between director Dudi Ma'ayan and artists Smadar Ya'aron, Moni Yosef, Khaled Abu Ali, and Na'ama Manbar. The performance deals with memory and the shaping of the Holocaust myth and its impact on society, and it was one of the overall highlights of the Acco Festival— its impact on Israeli theater in general is apparent. The performance traveled to Germany (Berlin and Hamburg) and Switzerland and was adapted to German society and the new physical environment (Rovit 1993, Roms 1996). In Berlin, the performance was raised in Wannsee Villa, where the Final Solution for the systematic extermination of the Jews was decided on. In Hamburg, it was raised in a concentration camp site near town. Three documentaries were made about the performance: Don’t Touch My Holocaust (1994) by Asher Tlalim, Mess by German director Andres Fiel for German television station Arte-ZSF, and a documentary by interdisciplinary artist Honi Hameagel. Tlalim’s movie follows the creative process, including the trip to Germany, while Mess focuses on the connection between the Holocaust and the conflict with the Palestinians. Shimon Levy and Corina Shoef (2002) placed this performance in the canon of Israeli theater, most of which consists of plays presented in mainstream theater. This is almost the sole theatrical event out of all the festival performances over the years about which academic articles were ever written in Hebrew, English, and German, and it is probably the most significant piece created in the festival to date. This is a unique event that embodies the model of quality alternative theater spoken about so much by the critics and the festival management throughout the years. The performance is characterized by a unique creative process that lasted three years, including extensive research on the Holocaust and its representations and work on personal experiences related to it. Also, it shapes special actor-audience relations in which a small group of spectators accompany a journey that is literally and figuratively conducted by artists; the artists also include personal material supplied by the spectators during the performance. Historian Amnon Raz-Karkotzkin (1994, 113–132) even explained the performance’s social and

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historical importance to the memory of the Holocaust and its impact on the Israeli present: The uniqueness of this theatrical happening is primarily that it undermines the existing memory of the Holocaust, but it does so out of recognition of the Holocaust being the primary cause that shaped Jewish-Zionist consciousness and out of responsibility for that memory. Arbeit Macht Frei allows us another kind of memory, built into the criticism of existing memory, but growing out of it. The medium of theater (here used in a special way) allows for simultaneous representation of what exists and what signifies another reality. It allows the creation of a dialog between the denying present and the denied past, thus transforming the memory of the Holocaust into the foundation of a completely different ethical base. Audience participation creates a theatrical event with the opportunity to transform critical exposure into the foundation of a comprehensive base. (Raz-Karkotzkin 1994, 124) As stated, Arbeit critically combines the three trends that have emerged in the festival regarding the Holocaust and that thematically and aesthetically grow out of Acco Theatre Center’s repertoire. However, among the many researchers25 who have analyzed Arbeit in different contexts, almost none examined it in relation to other festival performances that dealt with the Holocaust, and almost no one placed this performance in the larger context of Acco Theatre Center’s repertoire. Examining these two neglected research contexts would demonstrate that Acco Festival is a creative space allowing a dialog between artists and performances and is vitally important to the development of Acco Theatre Center and its contributions to Israeli theater. The performance lasted about five hours and took place in two main spaces: the Holocaust Museum at Kibbutz Lochamei Hageta'ot and the Crusader Halls of Acco Theatre Center, playing to twenty (active) spectators. The show starts on the bus ride from Acco to Kibbutz Lochamei Hageta'ot, 25 Abramson 1998, 184–190; D. Cohen 1998, 82–118; Kaynar 2013; Oz 1999,

280–282; Rokem 1988, 389–399; Rokem 1996, 217–238; Rokem 2000; Shani 2004; Urian 1993a, 129–147; Zimmerman 2002.

Performance Repertoire: Representations of Social Conflicts

where the spectators meet Selma (Smadar Ya'aron), a Holocaust survivor guiding visitors at the museum. Right at the start, her questions to the audience allude to a connection between the Holocaust and Israel’s wrongdoings today against minorities, particularly the Palestinians. Then Khalid Abu Ali explains to spectators the activity of the Treblinka extermination camp, using a scale model at the museum, which causes Israeli spectators a sense of discomfort for violation of the convention that Holocaust remembrance is an experience reserved only for Jews, while Arabs certainly have no right to engage in it or teach it. The museum functions on a daily basis to strengthen and preserve the memory of the Holocaust in accordance with the Zionist narrative. In the performance, Selma strives to undermine the narrative and to expose and deconstruct it as she guides the audience at the museum. In other words, the museum functions as a “site of memory” (lieu de mémoire), which according to Pierre Nora (1989) is a site that attempts to freeze and preserve a society’s super narrative, i.e., the official historical legacy of the state, thus silencing other voices. However, a “community of memory” (Shenhav 2006, 141–142) is memory carried out dynamically, changing and challenging the official national narrative. In these respects, Arbeit, a site-specific performance that takes place in a site of memory, like a national museum, while challenging it, thus becomes a community of memory. After a tour of the museum, performers and spectators drive back to the Crusader Halls to a series of enclosed dramatic spaces in a sequence of stations, an all space-related occurrence related to the Holocaust and the shaping of its memory in Israeli consciousness. Events deconstruct the worn symbols of Zionism and the Holocaust representation framework. A parody of Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony is directed by Selma. Then spectators are interviewed about their experiences of the Holocaust. This information is then used in the performance. Then you move to a room with bunk beds that resemble barracks in a concentration camp, where you hear Selma lecturing, musically with a piano, on the thematic and melodic similarities between Israeli-Zionist homeland songs and German folk songs, shocking the spectator with the similarity between the brutal, bloody, and macabre texts. The following scene is a Shabbat dinner that descends from the ceiling unexpectedly. Moni Yosef plays a chauvinist Israeli officer, humiliating his wife and insulting the guests around the table using information given in an interview, revealing the racist face of

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the Israeli-born —the myth of the New Jew, designed, among other things, on the model of the Aryan German. At the end of the meal, Khaled tells the spectators about himself and his native village, and then the spectators go out to the final scene. A clamor of Israeli patriotic songs, the sound of drums, and corporeal images of actors, such as a naked woman in a pot full of food, Khaled flagellating himself and asking others to beat him, and Selma—completely naked—picking breadcrumbs out of her genitals. Then, the answer to the question, “Where does a Mussulman hide his bread in the Holocaust,” which Selma had asked the spectators back in the museum, is revealed. Selma and Khaled finally embrace in a Pieta-like image, in which a Holocaust survivor and a Palestinian are united into one body, with the inscription Arbeit Macht Frei flashing in colored lights above them, as in a discotheque or shop window. Dan Urian (1997, 113–128), who writes about the performance in the context of the Arab figure in Israeli theater, analyzes it with an emphasis on the relationship between the memory of the Holocaust, anxieties that accompany this memory, and the oppression of the Palestinians. Urian also highlights the position of Khaled Abu Ali as an artist and a character in the performance. Avi Oz (1999, 280–282), in his discussion of “prophetic theater,” examines the event through a political context. The performance exposes the Zionist myths of extinction, the resurrection, and their relationships to the Holocaust, exposing the mixture of relationships using “blasphemous” images of the Holocaust out of context. Freddy Rokem (2000), in his book Performing History, analyzes the performance with a focus on the tension between the nascent present and the (gone) past. To him, in the performance, the remembrance of the experience of the Holocaust is a kind of artwork that tries to break free from the past; but ironically, the performance also points to the Zionist idea of “work is our life” and the title of the entire performance, Arbeit Macht Frei, means “Work Liberates” and was inscribed on the gates of Auschwitz. In another essay, Rokem (1996) suggests looking at the transformation of images of evil and suffering. He analyzes the body of Selma, which is projected in a Holocaust film, showing how images in a film can transform parts of a survivor’s body. Dalia Cohen (1998) explores the performance through the concepts of “ceremony” and “pageantry,” terms that the artists use in a deconstructing and parodic manner.

Performance Repertoire: Representations of Social Conflicts

She examines, for example, the parodic scene of a Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony at school as a pageant exposing the worn symbolism representing the Holocaust and the ineffectiveness of this toward the second and third generations. Moshe Zimmerman (2002) and Gad Kaynar (1994) each delineate the stages of development of the theme of the Holocaust in Israeli theater (Zimmerman’s scope also extends to cinema). Zimmerman presents a model that was influenced by psychological discourse and myth research, and he sees the creation of the Zionist myths as responses to the trauma of the Holocaust: repression, denial, awareness, recognition, and insight. In Arbeit, the meaning of the myth of Jewish statehood is examined, why it occurs, its circumstances, its structure, its goals, and its effects in the present. In this sense, Arbeit indicates an important step that Israeli society and culture took in its attitude toward the Holocaust and in breaking free from it. Arbeit also provides an opportunity for Israelis to gain insight and critical understanding of the Holocaust as a historical event rather than a filter through which to experience the present. Kaynar makes a similar distribution but emphasizes the aesthetic-thematic aspect rather than the psychological aspect: negation and denial, analogy, metonymy, and iconic stage. Arbeit is a good example of the iconic stage, meaning that it engages images of the Holocaust, delves into the shaping of the second and third generation who have no direct connection to the actual experience, and emphasizes the effects of the Holocaust in the present. The theatrical language and expressive means employed in Memories evolve in Arbeit. Urian (1997) cites a list of alternative artists with whom the performance corresponds, especially Artaud (1970) and his Theatre of Cruelty. The acting conception totally and deliberately blurs the boundary between the personality of the actor and the character in an approach similar to that of Grotowski (1969), whom Ma'ayan studied and was influence by. Also, ‘cruelty’—literal and imagistic—is at the base of the artistry, especially that of Smadar Ya'aron (the tattoo on her arm, her nakedness, the violent meal, etc.). In terms of the space, the use of environmental theater (Schechner 1973) is a departure point of both performances. In Memories, the Holocaust is one of the major, but not the exclusive, themes, as in Arbeit. Holocaust experience is shaped mainly in Smadar Ya'aron’s

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room, which is filled with jars of private items connected to the experiences displayed in the dialog with her father. In this scene, the boundary between herself and her Holocaust-survivor father is blurred. She puts eye patches on her eyes and speaks like her father, who suffered from diabetes and was blinded. Meanwhile, a tape of Smadar herself appealing to her father is played. The few spectators are very close to her, and she asks them to read a letter she wrote to her father. Experiences that emerge from the dialog engage the complex relationship of the second generation: identifying and feeling guilt and, on the other hand, revolt and remoteness. Memories runs into the rehearsals of Arbeit, so that her father’s Holocaust experiences take up more and more room in the dialog with him in the scene described (Ben Meir 1991, 204–206). The blurring of boundaries between private Smadar and Selma, the Holocaust survivor in Arbeit, strengthens throughout the performance and from the work on Memories. Smadar tattoos the date of her father’s death on her forearm for Arbeit. The spectators of Arbeit see video documentation of Smadar tattooing the number on her arm, and in the play Selma tries to delete it with a handkerchief dipped in saliva. The number on an arm, as a clear sign of a Holocaust survivor, becomes a symbol of burning the branding of Holocaust remembrance into the minds of the second generation. Smadar and her father’s relationship, which unfolds in Memories in its personal and psycho-therapeutic aspects, gains wider social significance in Arbeit regarding the relationship between the survivors to the second and third generation. The last scene of Arbeit embodies, above all else, the complex connection between Smadar and Selma. When Smadar’s anorexic nude body is visible and she is taking pieces of bread out her genitals, in performance language, this is Selma revealing where Mussulmen hide the bread, which is linked to when, at the beginning of the performance at the museum, she had asked the question. But spectators see the body of a young woman, not an old one, so the distance between Smadar and Selma is fashioned as physical gesture in the form of a heavy accent and the hair and clothes of an older Eastern European woman that disappear in the nude photos. The Mussulman and the tattoo are part Smadar, who represents all of us in the second and third generations. Smadar’s room in Memories is a sort of family museum, crammed with objects and images of Smadar and her family. In Arbeit, it becomes a constitutive element of the performance—the first part is shown at the Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum.

Performance Repertoire: Representations of Social Conflicts

Photos and documentaries on the Holocaust, as well as art inspired by it, fill the museum. The museum becomes a theatrical space, thus the actress relates the museum’s materials as theatrical ones, and Selma makes ironic use of them. In the second part, we see how photographs become images of memory. During the parody of a Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony at the school, we watch a video documenting a real ceremony in an elementary school, and we can see the children being bored, laughing, and not understanding what it is about. The video strengthens the parody and gives it more depth beyond humor, connecting Israeli spectators with similar experiences that they may have had in school. The last scene of Memories, you may recall, is a joint Seder meal with all spectators and actors who were earlier separated into rooms. In Arbeit, the meal scene has evolved. Moni Yosef again runs the meal, albeit a Shabbat dinner and not a Seder, but the principle remains significant, a meal of traditional religious and familial meaning. Joseph plays the character of a cruel and racist Israeli officer, using the spectators’ private confessions and prohibiting them from eating for about half an hour. This festive meal, which was supposed to be a family treat, becomes a nightmare. Instead of a tablecloth, there are Nazi-era newspaper clippings, creating the connection and highlighting the reversal from victim to executioner. In most aforementioned analyses of the performance, reference is made to Smadar Ya'aron’s identity as the daughter of Holocaust survivors and to Khaled Abu Ali’s Palestinian national identity. But apart from Zimmerman, none of them deals with the ethnic identity of the other artists. Zimmerman (2002, 298) sees Dudi Ma'ayan’s and Moni Yosef ’s Mizrahi identity as important to understanding the subversion and complexity of the work in relation to previous works that dealt with the Holocaust. In contrast to second generation artists of Ashkenazi origin who have dealt with similar personal experience out of familial proximity, these artists are free from such personal experience, which allows them to open these wounds and to deconstruct the myths about them. Dudi Ma'ayan (2002, 73) writes in Mizrahi culture magazine Hakivun Mizrach about the question of identity and memory and shares with readers an experience that is instructive of a possible departure point for Arbeit: When I was a child, my father was an amateur director of municipal Holocaust pageantries in Dimona. During rehearsal, I would eat a

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large peach in his office. I watched in amazement mixed with fear as the amateur actors, dressed in striped pajamas with yellow badges, cried pathetically toward God in heaven. However, the actors were new immigrants from Morocco, and the text was uttered in a heavy Moroccan accent. This riveting excerpt tells us of the transgressive prism through which Ma'ayan experienced Holocaust remembrance as a child, i.e., an analogy between the oppression of Mizrahim in a peripheral development town and concentration camp prisoners. Audience reception was very powerful, as documented by Urian (1997, 127–128) in interviews with spectators, as a result of the combination of three trends creating a complex language that allowed a deep and unique experience. The competition jury, made up of acting school director Nissan Nativ, television director Ram Levi, and actress Sandra Sadeh, provided Arbeit with the Best Performance award and Smadar Ya'aron the Best Actress Award: This play is a rare theatrical event, a special blend of form and content which will serve as example and model for future work in the theatre. The research, text, directing, design and sets were made in painstaking teamwork, almost worship. It is the crowning work of Israeli designer and director Dudi Ma'ayan, and the performance is one of the most important achievements of Acco Festival since its establishment. (In Zadok September 27, 1991) Arbeit continued to be performed consistently for five years at Acco Theatre Center, and audiences from across the country came to see it. The performance arrived in Berlin in 1992 for the Berlin Festival and won the award for best foreign performance, and in 1993, it won Hamburg Festival’s first prize. The Anthology Following its success in Israel and abroad, and after being taken off the stage, Smadar Ya'aron and Moni Yosef to this day raise The Anthology, based on the character of Selma in Arbeit. She and her son, living in Acco, both tell Selma’s

Performance Repertoire: Representations of Social Conflicts

Holocaust history through hosting and playing the piano. The show is in fact an extension of the piano scene in Arbeit in which Selma compares Israeli patriotic songs with German ones. Through playing the piano, Selma invites the audience to an intimate evening where she tells her stories, expresses her opinions, and presents her complex relationship with her only son. In accordance with alternative artistic conceptions, “The event takes place in the present, the text is not constant, and interaction with the audience takes place in real time and is a conversation opener, with new content and events each time,” as the artists declare in the program, inviting the spectator to participate actively in the theatrical event. Shulamith Lev-Aladgem ( Jackson and Lev-Aladgem 2004)26 analyzes the performance with respect to audience participation and to the significance of The Anthology as a theatrical event. Selma chats with the audience in a heavy German accent about art, religion, the meaning of existence, old age, and death, telling jokes and offering cognac and marmalade. She recounts how she survived mainly because of her ability to play the piano. The audience approaches her, creating an intimate and liberated atmosphere. During the discussion, she expresses racist views against minorities: she hates blacks and Arabs, gays and lesbians, and the Ethiopians as monkeys whose acculturation will take forever. But at the end of all her racist statement she apologizes and says, “This is not what I wanted to say.” She is most cruel toward her son, whom she makes repeat the performance she had put on for the Nazis. The show ends with Selma expelling the audience, shouting, “It’s over, you do not understand, go away.” According to Lev-Aladgem, the end of the performance is indicative of the event’s potential sociopolitical and therapeutic potential, placing the spectator in the liminal zone between levels of performance, life, insanity, and history, and she confronted this with the image of the Israeli former victim who has become the oppressor in the present. In interviews, Lev-Aladgem conducted with twenty spectators, who reported an image of a gripping emotional and intellectual experience related to the characterization of the performance as audience-collaborators. They mentioned Ya'aron-Selma’s reference to any look, motion, or utterance that they made and their influence on the course of the 26 The article was written with Anthony Jackson and describes a number of events

centered around the incorporation of audiences into the events. Lev-Aladgem analyzes the performances that took place in Israel.

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performance, i.e., the spectators felt the unplanned dimension of the event, of which they were part, seeing it as a significant component of their experience.

Women Artists and Gender From its very inception, Acco Festival has been a framework for creative women who have often been blocked by the mainstream, which has not provided them the possibility to create in the seven major repertory theaters. Also due to the festival’s stated objective of promoting “other theater,” different artists have been searching for a theatrical language that would directly engage with questions of gender and sexuality, and in some cases the intersection of gender, nationality, and religion. From a managerial and organizational standpoint, throughout its 30 thirty years, the festival has been run mostly by men. Daniella Michaeli, who performed at different times, usually associated with gender-related plays, ran it in 2005–2008, and Smadar Ya'aron directed the 2009–2012 festivals jointly with Moni Yosef. In 1994, the jury was exceptionally made up entirely of women artists: Smadar Ya'aron, director Nava Zuckerman of Tmuna Theatre, actress Dina Balai of Itim Ensemble, and director Ruth Kenner. Thus, in contrast to women artists’ intense presence at the festival throughout the years, on the artistic management level women have had a very limited presence and therefore very limited shaping power over the festival of “other theater.” The performance repertoire discussed in this section is divided into three main themes: 1.  Gender and sexuality. Secular women artists who deal with questions about gender in today’s secular society and what it means to be a woman in a society that has supposedly gone through the feminist revolution of the sixties and seventies. Some artists do not explicitly deal with these themes, but the festival has been for them a place to develop a complex and experimental theatrical language. 2.  Gender and Judaism. Women artists who usually form the national-religious sector and use the theatrical medium in a groundbreaking way to examine the relationship between Judaism and the present status of women in religious society.

Performance Repertoire: Representations of Social Conflicts

3. Gender and nationality. Performances that deal with the role of Arab women in Arab society and their place in relation to the Palestinian national liberation struggle. Sharon Aharonson-Lehavi (2013) identifies four strategies of feminist theater: 1) feminist realism—a performance that partially meets realistic conventions but that has a change or break, for instance, by the introduction of absurd elements in the design of the space or the movement of the characters (Diamond 1993); 2) feminist epic theater—theater that adopts the Brechtian alienation effect to emphasize that gender and sexuality are a construction, for example, by casting actors whose gender does not match their character (Diamond 1997); 3) écriture feminine—distancing from linear narrative, based on associative, cyclical, and essentially poetic writing (Cixous 1984); 4) performance art—moving away from narrative and representation of fictional worlds, mostly toward nonverbal text and sensual and physical images (Forte 1992). I will use these four strategies to distinguish between various examples within the three main themes.

1.  Gender and sexuality In the 1980 festival, performance art was the leading strategy to represent gender issues. Ronit Haham-Herson and Yohanan Herson created Enkidu. The performance consists of three performance pieces, all of which deal directly with women-men relations. Every performance has a major social image that was developed to create an emotional experience. For instance, in the first piece, Woman Births Woman, Haham-Herson is trapped in a large, clear, plastic bubble. The soundtrack has her voice delivering a long monologue about her potential, until she bursts the bubble. The image of a woman bursting a bubble to realize herself stands at the center. In the eighties, the most notable trend in the performances of different women artists in the festival was écriture feminine. Adi Etzion, with Shemparahat (1985) (this Hebrew name means a portmanteau of “wasteland” and “flourishing”), presents a “theatrical musical journey” through Amos Kenan’s portrayal of a bereaved mother lugging her son’s gravestone until it finally crumbles way. A Bird in the Hand (1986) by Bilha Feldman is a poem performance

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depicting the relationship between three women—a grandmother, a mother, and a granddaughter—dealing with their feminine identities and their gender roles. Patriarchal oppression is represented as a pattern of behavior that the characters have internalized, and they try to break free from its chains. The performance fashions a feminist statement with poetic texts. Rena Baruch raised Tongues (1985), which deals with language and communication between human beings through dance theater and live music on stage. Daniella Michaeli serves, in sound and movement, Cecilia, Christina, Cornelia and the Rest (1985), poems by Yona Wallach27 and other Israeli poets. Michaeli is a choreographer and director, and it was the first time where within a solo performance her abilities as an artist came to the fore. In 1990, Daniella Michaeli collaborates with Alice Dor-Cohen to create Come Come Come Baby Come, dance theater that examines femininity, sexuality, and attitudes toward men through lyrical texts generated by bodily rhythms and ritualism. Michaeli sings popular Israeli song I Will Go Crazy If You Say Goodbye in hysterically exaggerated tones and increasing speed, and Dor-Cohen sang Hava Nagilah, finally screaming, “Got to be happy!” Movement and intonation create new meaning to familiar songs, ranging in polarity between humor and cries of grief. The title Come Come Come Baby Come expresses ironic humor as an appeal to aggressive and oppressive masculinity. Anulah Shamir and Noga Eshed dealt with lesbian identity in their work, through correspondence with epic-feminist theater. Skin (1985) deals with the relationship between Boaz and his daughter Noam, which are characterized by hurt, misunderstanding, and compulsion. Noam separates from her family and meets a girl named Tal. They maintain a lesbian relationship. “Changing skin” is a central motif in the performance and is a metaphor for legitimizing lesbian identity, even in light of their difficult relationship with the obsessive, tyrant father. Character portrayal, getting into the “character’s skin,” was done entirely by women, so a woman played the father figure, which actually corresponds with one of the characteristics of epic-feminist theater. Shamir wrote the piece with autobiographical materials, and since she was the daughter of writer Moshe Shamir, the performance also consisted of a gossipy angle, shedding light on the author’s personal relationship with her father. 27 Yona Wallach died very close to raising the show, and Michaeli devoted it to her

memory.

Performance Repertoire: Representations of Social Conflicts

What Do You Remember Jonathan, Jonathan . . . (1989), also by Shamir and Eshed, is based on two biblical stories as epic-feminist theater. Before the defeat of Saul and his son Jonathan in battle, Saul arrives in the presence of the witch and conjures the spirit of Samuel, who had anointed him king. Unlike in the Bible, the viewpoint here is the witch’s, and like Skin, all the characters are portrayed by women. The witch manages to bring together three generations of male leaders and fighters: Samuel, Saul, and Jonathan. Their complicated relationship is expressed in Samuel’s disappointment with Saul’s policy, as embodied in the story of the honeycomb, in which Saul swears his fighters to fast until the end of the war with the Philistines. His son, Jonathan, defies the fast by eating honey he finds in his path. The artists’ intention in casting women as the men is that women know how to reveal deeper emotional layers than some men dare to express. Real beehives were placed on the stage, and the artists wore protective overalls. Thus, the ban on eating and its transgression were highlighted. The performance combines feminist statements about the boundaries of permitted and prohibited behavior in gender relations and about messages concerning nonaggression and nonviolence. In 1990, the “greenhouse” as a competitive framework for young artists was founded. The actual separation between the “greenhouse” frame and the competition was unclear because Acco Festival artists are mostly young. In 1990, most of the repertoire of the “greenhouse” had solo performances by women artists examining their femininity through autobiographical experiences or deconstruction of feminine images, so the shows veered between écriture feminine and performance art. Einat Cohen raised Barefoot, a one-woman performance in which the actress reveals herself during a crisis in her life and depicts five memory images. Orly Jacobson raised Love I Say Love, based on Yitzhak Orpaz’s Eternal Bride and Tomojna Street. In the performance, we meet a grandmother rising from the lime pit she was thrown into to die. Shaped like a young-old, living-dead witch, she is back to carry out a vendetta against her son. Miri Tzemach created Romano Studio based on her own life. At first, the audience (consisting of only eight spectators) watches a video in which the thirteen-year-old performer participates in a relative’s wedding. Then they go into the studio and see the subjects of the video from a different perspective—spectators are defined as wedding guests and are seated around the wedding table.

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In the nineties, we see oscillation between feminist realism and performance art, with the exception being a remarkable production of Waiting for Godot, directed by Nola Chilton in 1995 as a feminist interpretation of the canonical play through casting women for male roles. Hava Ortman portrayed Didi, Ofra Weingarten was Gogo. Arnon Zadok and Dalik Wolenitz alternately played Pozzo and Daniela Michaeli was Lucky: Didi and Gogo are a couple of not-so-young women in friendly dialog, who have already long ago told each other everything there is to tell, and now move freely between the skirmishes to moments of support and closeness. Pozzo and Lucky are a couple, a husband and wife, their relationship based on power and degradation. (Bar-Ya'akov October 20, 1995) The relationship between Didi and Gogo as a couple of women represents an alternative female relationship contrasted with the repressive and patriarchal model of Pozzo and Lucky. Yona Yona (1996), written and directed by Hagit Rechavi, is based on the life of poet Yona Wallach and is built as feminist realism. The character of Yona Wallach was portrayed by Orna Katz. The story begins at the end of her life, when she is sick with cancer. Her relationship with her mother and her lover Yuval are examined, and memories of her early life rise, combined with her poems that express her world. Despite the playwright’s statements that the play reflects the tragic life story of a great poetess, critics focused mainly on the fact that the play “is based on the personal and the piquant” (Feingold October 3, 1996), meaning that the play’s reception and the excitement it raised resulted mainly from the aspect of gossip that might stand out in this kind of play. When possible, the actions of the characters in the performance can be paralleled to real people in Wallach’s biography. The realist line continued with Arten (1997) by Daniela Carmi and directed by Revital Eitan, presenting two women who suffer from mental illness. The two (Ofra Weingarten and Regine Shushan) are locked in the warehouse of a mental health clinic for a whole night. They pop many pills and conduct a celebration in which they come clean about themselves, their families, the doctors, and the social workers who are supposed to deal with them.

Performance Repertoire: Representations of Social Conflicts

Almost hopeful human relations between the two women are shaped in such a dark place. However, The Story of Tongalen (1997) by Ofra Levy and Bits (1997) by Anat Ben-David deviate from this line, offering interdisciplinary performances based on movement, music, and video art and emphasizing the body of the artist as against the spoken word. In the third decade, écriture feminine returned to center stage, and the performance Unraveled (2005) by Odelia Moreh-Matalon and Eliana Schechter spread a gallery of female characters sewn and unraveled through rhyming poetic text using humor and satire, with all of them sharing female distress.

Story Theater: Ruth Kenner Theatre Group Ruth Kenner is an actress, director, and acting teacher at the Tel Aviv University Theatre Department. I devote a special place to her work because it was significant at the Acco Festival and particularly in developing a unique story theater language. One of the main characteristics of her work is the use of non-dramatic texts (prose, poetry, non-fiction, etc.) as the basis for the performance. Already in her Master’s thesis (Kenner 1994), she put forth the principles of story theater that she later worked out. The central feature is the interweaving of telling and visual showing of the same story and the existence of a storyteller/narrator alternately located outside and inside the story. Her theatrical language grows out of the relations between the showing and telling, such as an analogy between what is said and done on stage or contradiction between what is said and what is observed, which creates complexity and irony between the layers of the performance; a relation of reinforcement and addition alternately between word and image, or a situation in which what happens on stage is analogous or metaphorical to what is said and does not simply literally represent it. Evening and Morning (1995), based on a story by Yosef Haim Brenner, presents a romantic triangle based in autobiographical experience; Yehezkel, his wife Hadassah, and his good friend Eliezer, who is also Hadassah’s lover. Kanner designed the space of the stage like an exposed boxing arena. Actors read the stage directions from the page and externalize their trouble with Brennerian Hebrew pronunciation, distancing and alienating characters and

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actors. Rafi Malkiel played the trombone on stage and accompanied the performance, as Kenner explains: An arena is also a circus and the vaudevillian element in the performance was carried out by the trombone player. Music is sometimes an inner voice that advises a character, sometimes it is an external gaze responding and commenting on what is happening. In its low tone, the trombone sounds pompous, and in its high notes, trying to be soft and poetic, it is pathetic (Koren June 10, 1995). The Brechtian elements of the exposure of mechanisms of representation, such as empty space, few and multifunctional requisites, the reading of stage directions, and live music that is a “character” in the plot attest to the beginning of a search for a unique theatrical language that crystalized in Kanner’s later performances. In 1998, she founded her group, which operates to this day, and the leading actresses in most of her works are Tali Kirk and Shirley Gal. Eimos (1998), based on a story by Moshe Yizraeli, was the group’s first show. It also won the Best Performance prize in the competition. Eimos is a rodent living in an agricultural field, trying to survive among the irrigation pipes until his tragic death. On the stage are three artists; Tali Kirk plays the rodent who narrates its survival from its own point of view; Shirley Gal plays the rest of the characters including farmers, sprinklers, water, and nature, personifying some of them, and in the back of the stage, musician Amos Trompfer produces sound through percussion and the injection of gas into pipes, transmitting the feeling of suffocation that the rodent must feel with the irrigation system. On stage was a metal structure with a wooden pallet-length representing the journey through the irrigation pipes, with Gal blocking it through changing the stage construction. The performance is based on an ongoing tension between the telling and the showing, through the word, body language, and movement in space, sound, and scenery. For example, in one of the situations, the rodent is waiting at a roadblock in one of the tubes, Gal blocks his body, pulls out a nail file, and files her nails like an indifferent receptionist. The rodent’s waiting is analogically linked to waiting in line for service, lengthened to infinity. The rodent becomes a universal image of the other as such.

Performance Repertoire: Representations of Social Conflicts

Discovering Elijah (2001) was a significant performance in the group’s development of theatrical language, and it was joined by other actors, winning the Best Play prize. The performance is based on a book by S. Yizhar and deals with a battalion of lost soldiers who are trying to survive during the Yom Kippur War in Sinai. The plot rests on the narrator, played by Tali Kirk, who is caught in the war and looking for a relative named Elijah. The central metaphor through which the story is presented is childhood games. The soldiers do not use guns, only hand and arm movements to signify rifle. They scatter desert sand from combat boots and a box of ammunition on the playing surface, which resembles a sandbox. Their trip in a civilian Volkswagen is a kind of children’s game in which Shirley Gal, in a blue dress and with big glasses and a German accent, plays the car, and the soldiers cling to her. The battle scene toward the end of the performance creates a playful parallel between the children-game signifier and the war-signified. The soldiers are dispersed on the surface and are muttering a monolog. Tali Kirk, as the narrator, is in a far corner, shooting small red Ping-Pong balls at them. When a ball hits one of the actors, he stops his activity. Termination of word and action signifies death. Childhood games, representing the terror of war and fighting, create an ironic and painful message wherein the soldiers are children sent to their deaths without supervision in a meaningless war. The performance took place in an open-air amphitheater in a closed area near the fortress wall, above which flew an Israeli flag, and it was guarded by border policemen. So, the political reality of occupation and guarding fits the image of war on stage. In 2004, during the festival’s twenty-fifth anniversary celebrations, they raised Dionysus at the Center, based on a book by researcher Tamar Berger and adapted by Avner Ben-Amos, which presents the history of the site where today the Dizengoff Center shopping mall in Tel Aviv stands. The performance was created with alumni of Tel Aviv University Theatre Department. The site is the protagonist of the piece, not the characters. The performance’s narrative begins in the present with the prestigious shopping mall and goes back to Palestinian Hinawi’s vineyard that used to stand on the grounds before the state of Israel. After the 1948 war, the poor Jewish neighborhood of Nordia was built on the ruins of the vineyard. The piece deals with the poverty of Nordia’s population and the almost forced purchases of homes by the wealthy capitalists who built Dizengoff Center in the seventies. The show ends with the deadly bombing of a

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Palestinian suicide bomber on the site during the Purim holiday of 1996. The performance combines times and events and crossing viewpoints in the space as the audience sits around the arena surface. On a tall structure in a corner sits accordionist Amit Bar Tzedek, accompanying the event. The performance starts with actors on stage getting dressed in white shirts and khakis. Pioneer Zionist dress and the playing of the accordion symbolize the Zionist super-narrative that is to be exposed, like the actors are exposed now. In the opening scene, the actors conduct a kind of “fashion show,” while counting and grading consumer goods in Dizengoff Center shops. Then the plot goes back to Hinawi and his vineyard, scrolling through the site’s past and presenting official documentation that contradicts or complements the stage play, developing tension between telling and showing. When the plot reaches the expulsion of the Hinawi family from their land, the property becomes “abandoned property” of the 1948 war. The performers sort through the family’s belongings like they did with the consumer products introduced earlier. A fascinating, ironic, and painful juxtaposition of times (1948/2004) and places (Tel Aviv-Jaffa/Acco) is created, exposing the false pretense of enlightenment, progress, and the aesthetics of the mall vis-à-vis the injustices hiding—literally—under it. The juxtaposition is created through the objects and items of clothing that represent the Palestinian refugee and the Israeli imagining himself as Western, enlightened, and “aesthetic.” The performance ends with a monolog by an Israeli mother who lost her daughter in the 1996 suicide bombing at the shopping mall. The monolog is moving and touching and closes the excavation campaign and reveals the pain inherent in the site for the Israeli mother and the Palestinian suicide bomber, the (metaphorical) offspring of those expelled from it. These dynamics highlight the conflicting national narratives and the complexity of the situation. The use of the site as the main protagonist of the plot shapes it as a heterotopia, a “counter-site” to utopia (Foucault 1986). While utopia is a site with no real place, pointing toward a single, omniscient, ideal order, “heterotopia” describes and represents contradictory and conflicting utopias that coexist in the same physical space. Thus, the Zionist utopia and the capitalist order dictating a “mono-vocal” history of Dizengoff Center, are exposed as a heterotopia of conflicting voices and narratives of national and class conflict, through Kanner’s unique theatrical language.

Performance Repertoire: Representations of Social Conflicts

2.  Gender and Judaism Since the eighties, the phenomenon of theater groups, mostly of women, dealing with the intersection between gender and Judaism, has been growing in the field of theater. Mostly Orthodox and traditional women artists are the ones addressing the complexity of halakha, gender, and the theater arts combined (Rutlinger-Reiner 2008), but secular women artists are also part of this trend. Over the years, Acco Festival was a site that channeled this phenomenon, and many groups have found a place in it for expression often blocked by the mainstream (Urian 2000). Epic-feminist theater has been the most dominant trend due to a preoccupation with Jewish texts in quite a few plays, emphasizing the gap between the patriarchal traditional text and the feminist statement of editing the text and performing it. Bruriah Act (1982) by the Jerusalem Theatre Group tells the story of Bruriah, wife of Rabbi Meir, of the Second Temple period. This is one of the earliest and most significant performances presenting feminist questions regarding Jewish texts and inspired religious and traditional artists in subsequent decades. The actors were a group of women28 associated with the halakha who dealt with the intersection of gender and Judaism through traditional Jewish texts. They deconstructed the texts, examining the patriarchal notions that characterized them, and the feminist point of view in this context. Rivi Feldmesser-Yaron (2003, 58–59) saw the performance and the group’s work in general developed since Bruriah Act as an expression of feminine-feminist theater language, according to three parameters: the organizational structure of the group—a female ensemble with no hierarchy of artistry and production roles; the group’s intention and agenda—dealing with female characters and bringing the female voice to the stage, usually concerning canonical Jewish texts; and means of artistic expression—rereading these texts, deconstructing and reconstructing Jewish myths, women writing and combining language and voice techniques, mixing theatrical techniques, interdisciplinary combinations, circular plot, subplot proliferation, and integration of styles. Urian (2000, 59–80) analyzed Bruriah Act in depth as a unique “Jewish women’s theater,” using Cixous’s écriture feminine, which sees feminist work as 28 Gabriella Lev, Ruth Wieder-Magen, and Aliza Elyon-Israeli

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undermining logocentric, phallocentric speech, seeking through female voice and body to rewrite the ancient myths and make present the place of the woman. The creators of Bruriah Act thus rewrite the character Bruriah, particularly her horrific end, through means of expression and opposition to linear, male-subject centered traditional theater. Bruriah Act is a collection of nine Talmud pieces regarding Bruriah and her family, and the demise is mentioned only in Rashi’s commentary on the Bible, which has been raising controversy for generations. Bruriah is considered wise and versed in Torah, but Meir, her husband, tricks her to prove that women are superficial. He sends a student to woo her and make her betray him. She betrays him and commits suicide. This story theater is built with movement, sound, the aesthetics of ritual and worship, and an almost empty stage. The character design uses mainly gestures to help change roles and cloth sashes to indicate identities and new situations. The narrative is presented succinctly in the prologue, in detail in scenes 1–7, and as double and mirror in the epilogue. The prologue is told from the male perspective, as originally written. Scenes 1–7 are rewritten to undermine, and the epilogue crumbles the act and disrupts it retrospectively. The performance opens with the actresses emerging from the audience and shining a path through it in the darkness. They use lit candles, water, and white clothes strewn around their bodies. One recalls the act of Bruriah, the other writes the names of the characters of the story on a white paper spread out in the depth of the stage and marks them with red Xs. The narrator concludes by saying that Bruriah committed suicide, according to Rashi, without any explanation why—and splashes red paint on the paper. Scenes 1–7 show the sequence of tragic incidents that happened to Bruriah’s family, a punishment for their sins according to the Jewish sages: burning, stoning, death of children, prostitution, and suicide. The cruel cases are presented to demonstrate the strictness of male religious law. This cruelty implicitly projects on the historical context of the raising of the performance, and although the show does not engage directly in state-level politics but only gender politics, Aliza Elyon-Yisraeli says: The play was put together during the Lebanon War (1982). . . . The question of personal responsibility and its limits which is raised in the play . . . becomes a burning issue in war. (Urian 2000, 77)

Performance Repertoire: Representations of Social Conflicts

The playwrights of Unmatchable (1990), Hana Azoulay Hasfari and Michal Vered, are actresses in repertory theater who expose the story of young ultraOrthodox women in a repressive society. This is a realistic play written by the actresses as part of the Cameri Theatre’s chamber playwrights’ workshop and inspired by the suicide of two ultra-Orthodox sisters in 1978. The story takes place in the home of Haya, the older sister, shortly before the wedding of her younger sister, Rachel. Unmarried Haya lives alone, and her difficult story emerges while she prepares young Rachel’s dowry. Apparently the community’s “modesty patrols” photographed Haya getting her hair cut by a man before her marriage and talking to a secular man on the street, evidence of a lack of modesty, and subsequently her wedding is canceled. It also turns out that Haya still holds her dowry, and the two sisters open the suitcase only to see that it is full of moths. The peak is the discovery of a sheet stained with blood, indicating that Haya’s sin was much graver—she had sexual intercourse with her lover prior to marriage and is no longer a virgin. The performance’s Hebrew title, Betulot Shiduch, is a play on the words “virgin” and “cancellation,” indicating the oppression of women in religious society with a lack of independence and with exposure to constant supervision. Dalia Cohen-Knohl (2005, 148–157) argues that the oppression in Unmatchable highlights the superiority of the modern secular world to the oppressive ultra-Orthodox one. The story takes place in a closed, disciplined, and regulated room versus the secular world, which is represented as an open space, free and safe from oppression. The secular man on the street whom Haya gave directions to (explained the “right way” to) is represented as naive compared to the malicious ultra-Orthodox men who photographed them. The stark contrast between the two worlds represents enlightened modern secularism as equitable to women. Of course, in the absence of ultraOrthodox spectators and with the appeal to secular audiences, this performance highlighted the fact that this celebration of protest against oppression is actually a celebration of the secular world and its pretense of freedom, liberalism, and egalitarianism. Unlike Unmatchable, which was created by secular women about the ultra-Orthodox ones, Hannah’s Shabbat (1992) was an exceptional production because it is based on the life story of writer and actress Victoria, who came from an Orthodox Jerusalem home (and therefore she refrains from writing her

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last name). The performance deals with an ultra-Orthodox woman who seeks to be freed of social oppression. An Orthodox girl, who sings at bars at night, is sitting Shiva for her husband, who apparently committed suicide. Only a dozen spectators are defined as comforting her in her mourning. She tells about her life and her relationship with her husband, who is living inside her like a possession. The intertextual connection with An-ski’s Dybbuk charges the piece as a metaphor for the rupture between the religious world to which it belongs and the heroine’s desire to express herself creatively, to sing and perform in contradiction to religious law, i.e., to release herself from the possessiveness that has taken control of her body and her soul. Creation (2001) by Yossefa Even Shoshan and director Geulah Yeffet Atar29 deals with Spanish Hebrew poet Shlomo Ibn Gabirol, who creates a woman as a figment of his imagination while suffering from an incurable skin disease. The plot thickens when the woman wants to transform from Golem to an actual woman who can exercise her femininity and demonstrate her independence. The couple Victor Atar, playing the poet, and Arab actress Mira Awad creates through movement and poetic text a dialog between creator and creation, which blurs the two roles. Do Not Say Water Water (2002), directed by Miri Lavi, uses Jewish texts that concentrate on gender issues in a patriarchal religious world. Six religious actresses and one religious actor workshopped the performance under the direction of Moni Yosef of Acco Theatre Center. The legend of the four who entered the grove, i.e., a journey in search of the hidden meanings of the Torah, becomes an image for the journey of six women who find themselves and their gender in a religious world. The women try to find their way between their traditional worldview and their desire to realize themselves as artists and as educated women. The only male participant in the performance was not part of the journey but is only in a viewing position from which he presents their journey. Director Lavi deliberately chose the Burj Garden as the orchard grove that the women enter and as the harmonious paradise lost which they seek. 29 Yossefa Even Shoshan, a playwright who deals with Jewish mysticism and gender issues,

raised The Last Demon at the 1991 festival in the “greenhouse” framework and Crown of Majesty in the 1994 festival competition. Geulah Yeffet Atar and her partner, Victor Atar, raised The Seven Beggars, also based on Jewish sources, at the 2000 festival.

Performance Repertoire: Representations of Social Conflicts

Elit Weber uses the biblical story of Tamar (Genesis 38) as a basis for Woman (2002). Tamar is widowed by Er and marries Onan in levirate marriage, but he too dies, leaving her with no children. Judah, whose two sons have died, refuses to marry Shelah, his young son, to Tamar. She is interested in fulfilling motherhood but is bound by biblical law. She poses as a prostitute, sleeps with Judah, is impregnated by him and fulfills motherhood. Actor-dancers Renana Raz and Yuval Fingerman operated five puppets representing the characters. The puppets fit the operator’s body and become a part of it. Much of the show is done in wordless stylized bodily movement, with only the voice of Weber, the narrator, reading verses from the Torah. Weber sees Tamar as a feminist coping well with the patriarchal world and explains how puppet theater became involved in her message: I raise a question about the place of women in relation to the men who decide for them . . . the puppet’s apparent activation allows emphasis of the power-relations between man and something greater than himself. Tamar makes her decisions reluctantly. Against impossible odds, she manages to have a child. According to the laws of levirate marriage, she can become pregnant to continue her husband’s lineage. (Z. Shohat 2002) Thinly Sliced (2004), created by religious women artists, also deals with femininity in the religious world, but it does not use Jewish texts. The show consists of parodic music and acting segments. The three performing artists30 are dressed, made up, and wear blonde wigs to resemble Marilyn Monroe. The performance begins with an intentionally long stretch of washing wooden bowls and transferring them from one end of the performance area to the other, as a laborious and automatic action, while another actress does mechanical sit-ups. The bowls are washed with small washcloths that are used to test the end of menstruation in religious women. The cloths’ original use and the concave shape of the bowls suggest both vaginal images and allusions to the policing of the female body in religious ceremonies. 30 The performance was created and performed by Tovah Birnbaum, Rachel Getz-­

Salomon, and Rachel Keshet, who also participated in the performance Do Not Say Water Water

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This section exhausted part of the audience, an effect used by the artists to highlight the difficulty and lack of compensation associated with the traditional roles of women. Ona'at Dvarim—A Talmud Play (2006) by Avigail Gertz uses Jewish sources in a sophisticated way through the dramatization of a Talmudic issue. A sister and brother are studying the issue of ona'at dvarim, i.e., the prohibition of manipulating and deceiving, primarily by speech. The performance veers between the relationship between brother and sister, the way he manipulated her as a child, and examples from the Talmud of the charged relationship between siblings from the family of Adam to the present day. One of the highlights of the performance was the story of the rape of Tamar by her brother Amnon. Amnon entraps Tamar with his lies and rapes her.

3.  Gender, Nationality, and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Throughout the festival there have been performances that centered on the characters of Palestinian women and their liberation struggles, both nationally and gender-wise. In 1992, in the competition framework, three such performances were raised; Abir written and directed by Hagit Ya'ari, Naomi by Ruby Porat Shoval, and Umm al Robbikha, directed by Yusuf Abu Warda, and adapted from a text by Emil Habibi. Mohanty (1993, 196–220) argues that Western feminist writing on women in the third world reproduces colonial stereotypes of women as ignorant, poor, and sexually oppressed by their families, as tame victims. These Western writers implicitly shape Western women’s self-perception as educated, modern, in control of their sexuality and bodies, and enjoying freedom of choice. Abir is about a Palestinian woman living in the West Bank who is torn between political activities in the intifada and her role as a woman in traditional society. Abir agrees to marry Fouad and goes to school before her marriage, having convinced his mother. She is not a virgin before her wedding, so old seamstress Kamel sews her hymen prior to the nuptials. Her husband is arrested, and she opens a bakery. Her friend Ghazal convinces her to transform the place into a women’s cooperative to disseminate intifada leaflets to the men fighting the occupation, hiding leaflets in

Performance Repertoire: Representations of Social Conflicts

the bread loaves. In return, Fuad is put on the list of detainees to be released. When he gets out of prison, he demands that Abir stop her work. Ghazal pressures her to stay, threatening she will tell Fuad that Abir lost her virginity with a university professor and was therefore expelled, not for political reasons. Abir continues to work on the Palestinian struggle, and her husband Fuad imprisons her in the bakery. She gives birth to her third daughter. Fouad takes the baby, divorces her, and she is left destitute. The tragic ending illustrates the complexity of Palestinian men being nationally oppressed and oppressing on the level of gender. Naomi, created by Ruby Porat Shoval, is a one-woman performance based on research and meeting with young bedouin women. Naomi/Naima escapes from a hated husband to university, establishes a bedouin cultural center, receiving the audience there. The museum is a bedouin tent decorated with rugs and the accessories of this culture. Naomi hosts the audience as part of the bedouin hospitality ceremony, telling her long and arduous tale in traditional and patriarchal society, centered on the purity ritual tuhar al bant (literally, “purity of the girls,” i.e., female circumcision), usually performed by the bride’s mother or another relative. The razor used for the ceremony is an item at the museum. While telling the story, Naomi grinds coffee and makes pitas to offer the audience. Throughout the performance, there is tension between a museum that safeguards bedouin culture as orientalist folklore and Naomi/Naima’s live performance narrating the complex process of a brave woman struggling with her condition and seeking liberation despite the price she must pay. In shaping the character, Porat-Shoval has tried to dismantle the stereotype of the bedouin woman as dependent, ignorant, and sexually controlled, and to create an analogy to the state of oppressed Jewish-secular women who are “castrated” in a more metaphorical and indirect way. Although the design of the characters in Abir and Naomi grapples with the colonial feminine stereotype, the question arises about why Jewish-Israeli playwrights prefer to write, direct, and play Palestinian women roles, ventriloquizing their double oppression as women and as occupied subjects, rather than portray their own subjugation in Israeli society. Are these artists hiding behind a Palestinian figure living in a situation of crisis, whose oppression is

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clearly visible in contrast to the more complex and subtle oppression of a liberal Western society such as Israel? Umm Al Robbikha was a solo performance in Arabic based on two short stories by Emil Habibi (Lost Objects and The Gypsy Woman). Fifty-five-year-old Hind, played by Bushra Karman, is a used-objects peddler who refused to abandon Haifa in 1948 and go with her family to Lebanon so was left alone in the neighborhood of Wadi Nissans. The story takes place in August of 1968, when her family visits her from the occupied territories. Urian (1997) distinguishes between pieces written for an Israeli Arab audience, presenting the stereotype of an Israeli villain responsible for the Nakba, and pieces that also appeal to an Israeli Jewish audience, emphasizing the human side, the tragic refugee situation, and Israeli-Palestinian fear of the continued expropriation of land. This performance appeals to Jewish as well as Arab audiences, presenting a Palestinian as a woman in a tragic situation, a refugee stripped of her homeland. Hind collects artifacts that belonged to the refugees of 1948, such as a gold chain with a heart containing the image of man and woman and love letters testifying to life and love before the war. Hind’s expectation is to return the items to their owners, signaling a desire to return things to the way they were. Hind is shaped as a liberated and independent woman who has wasted her life, the victim of the personal circumstances that shaped her fate. Habibi’s choice of a protagonist who remains under Israeli-Zionist rule is his response to all Palestinians living in the diaspora and regarding Palestinian citizens of Israel as traitors to their homeland. “Staying is the most natural thing,” Habibi tells Karpel, “those who left are the ones who need to supply explanations. Neither she, nor they [refugees in the diaspora], nor I sold the treasure” (Karpel 1992). Thus treasures are the image of patriotism and remembrance of life prior to 1948. Shintian (2002) of Al Laz Theatre, directed by Abbas Gattas and written by Iyad al-Hajj, is a monodrama performed by Khawla Alhaji Dibsi. It is centered on an elderly Palestinian woman, 80-year-old Fatma, who is preparing to visit her dead in Kafr Yasif, with musician Salam Darwish playing music at her side. The performance was raised at the Lighthouse Hostel, an intimate space containing thirty spectators seated on small stools. In her yard, she hangs the shintian, the pants worn under a dress, while remembering the dead and the experiences of

Performance Repertoire: Representations of Social Conflicts

oppression that shaped her life, such as her lover Ass’ad and his murder and Fairuz, whose braids, along with the houses of the village, were set on fire by the British. The Turkish and British occupations are at the center of the experiences, and there is no Israeli presence. The representation of colonial oppression in the past alludes to the Nakba and the present oppression of the Israeli occupation. Orna Akkad directed and wrote two performances in the festival about Palestinian women. Letter to a Stupid Woman (1995) is based on the playwright’s research and focuses on the phenomenon of battered women in Arab society. University graduate Hiyam is married to an abusive man who works as deputy principle of a school in the north of the country. During her university studies, she had fallen in love with Nidal (whose name literally means “struggle”), but his parents were opposed to the liaison, so he just gave up (contrary to his name) and married someone else. The parents’ opposition was rooted in the fact that Shadia, Hiyam’s aunt, was pregnant out of wedlock and was subsequently murdered by her family. The spirit of Shadia haunts Hiyam. To cope with the situation, Hiyam translates the poetry of Nizar Qabbani, a Syrian poet living in Egypt and writing about the status and liberation of women in the Arab world, therefore called “the women’s poet.” The title of the performance, Letter to a Stupid Woman, is from a Qabbani poem. When her husband discovers the feminist poetry translations, he feels that his position is being undermined, and he beats her. Hiyam moves into a battered women’s shelter but is forced to return home alone without the support of her parents and her family. Nidal, her erstwhile lover, returns to persuade her to get back on track, that is, to return to her husband. Hiyam finally stays with her husband. Like Naomi and Abir, Hiyam is an educated woman, and her spiritual world is fed by the image and poems of an Arab feminist poet. Thus, Akkad tries to shape an anti-stereotypical character in contrast with the Jewish audience’s expectations. But at the end of the plot, when Hiyam stays with her husband, submissive to the dictates of society, Akkad discloses a pessimistic stance, not belief in a simple solution to the situation. Clouds on a Mountain Road (2004) by Akkad combines nationalism and gender issues closely following the Second Intifada. The performance presents the Israeli occupation from the point of view of two Palestinian women. Poet Fadwa Toukan is in her destroyed childhood home in Nablus, full of bricks and books. In the rubble, she engages in a dialogue with Inshirakh—a desperate,

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young, religious, Palestinian woman. Each presents a different worldview vis-à-vis opposition to the Israeli occupation. While Toukan presents the secular line of the older generation, Inshirakh represents the younger generation returning to Islamic fundamentalism. Finally, the young woman is not convinced by Toukan’s words and decides to carry out a suicide attack. The performance raises the questions of how the poetry represented by Toukan, and art in general, provokes people to use violence in resisting the occupation and how poetry is an alternative, moral, and saner route of action.

C H A P TE R

THREE

Organization, Budget, and Infrastructure: Between Center and Periphery

Following Acco Festival’s organization, budget, and infrastructure reveals economic hardships and a struggle over the material resources for its existence. A problem is the format of a cultural institution situated on the periphery as opposed to the budgeting establishment’s clear preference for the format of the larger, more established theatrical institutions of the center. Scant funding has often blocked artistic continuity and development, badly influencing the event’s artistic and cultural quality. Furthermore, in its first twenty years, artistic direction, as well as organizational and budgetary production, was in the hands of external producers from Tel Aviv. As a supplier of material services, Acco Municipality was subject to these producers who wielded much power and authority. External Tel Aviv producers, for instance, preferred subcontractors they knew from the center rather than Acco-area professionals, a fact that created much frustration with the town’s residents. Only in the year 2000 was organizational management passed into the hands of Acco Municipality, and despite the fears of the funding establishment, Acco Municipality has since produced the event in a better fashion than its predecessors. Even though now the festival itself is managed by the municipality, artistic direction usually stays in the hands of theater people from the center. Therefore, in the current structure, there is constant tension. For local Acco producers, the festival is first and foremost a means of public relations and a touristic economic engine. In contrast, the event’s ultimate goals as far as artistic direction is

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concerned, are the development of different kinds of “other theater” and giving young artists, mostly from the larger Tel Aviv area, a chance. Therefore, the question arises about who exactly runs the festival: is it the “all-knowing theater experts” from the center or the local Acco producers for whom the event is very meaningful for the development of their town? Structurally and organizationally, Acco Festival has become a model for “other theater” and culture festivals in Israel. Its success has influenced development of towns on the periphery in terms of establishing culture festivals to leverage themselves with image, tourism, and economy. The festival’s structure, producing premiere performances and framing them in a prize-giving competition, has become the model of theater festivals set up after it. In this chapter, which investigates festivals, I first explain the festival’s organizing bodies. Then I investigate its organizational, budgetary, and infrastructural history, illuminating the transformations and crises that took place in it over the years. I conceptualize these crises using the structure’s “center-periphery” and its reflection in Israel’s cultural policy. Finally, I briefly show how Acco Festival became a model of Israeli theater on the periphery through comparing it succinctly with the model of Canadian fringe festivals to illuminate its uniqueness, for good and bad.

Acco Festival’s Organizational Structure Within theater research, theoretical and analytical work on festivals has been scant, claim Contemporary Theatre Review editors David Bardby and Maria Delgado (2003) in a volume dedicated to the investigation of festivals worldwide. Karen Fricker (2003) likewise stresses the insufferable gap between festivals as a worldwide artistic, cultural, economic, social, and touristic phenomenon and the scant academic treatment of festival roles and meaning. Research revolves around tensions between globalization and localization, between “artistic values” and “commercialization,” between “high” and popular culture, and between host community and tourists. Subsequently, research into Acco Festival has also been limited, and besides scattered Hebrew surveys, impression pieces, and serious academic treatment of only a few single performances produced in the festival, no work has been done on the festival as a comprehensive theatrical event.

Organization, Budget, and Infrastructure: Between Center and Periphery

IFTR’s Theatrical Event Working Group, headed by Willmar Sauter (2007), has published Festivalising!, a unique investigation dealing with the history and theory of theater festivals and applying the “theatrical event” model to theater festivals using the following inter-influencing criteria: performances, festivities, politics, and organization. As opposed to theater studies, the social sciences have seen an avid debate on aspects of “festivals and special events” as an interdisciplinary branch of cultural geography, tourism studies, organization, business and economics, sociology, and anthropology. Festival Management & Event Tourism, edited by festival scholar Donald Getz (1998), is a distinct example of the newfound importance of festivals and special events. The publication highlights the different branches of this field of research, such as cultural festivities (festivals, carnivals, religious events), art and entertainment (concerts, performances, and rituals), business and commerce (fairs, markets, meetups, and conventions), sports competitions (the Olympic Games), education (seminars, workshops, congresses), politics (appointment and coronation ceremonies), and private events (birthdays, graduations). I have therefore used the insights of festival and special events scholars in the context of Acco Festival. Festival scholars offer a possible organizational structure for a festival (Yeoman et al. 2004, Getz 2012). I present this structure and compare it to Acco Festival: • Founder and catalyst—A person or group who comes up with the idea of the festival, initiates its development by applying to public or private institutions and usually accompanies the festival in its formative years. Oded Kotler, then manager of Haifa Theatre and a member of the ministry of culture’s National Council for Culture and the Arts, came up with the idea of establishing a festival of “other theater” for young artists and creation outside the mainstream, not funded regularly like repertory theater is. Kotler was joined in the festival’s establishment by Leah Porat (deceased), the head of the ministry of culture’s Theatre Department; Yossi Frost, then the managing director of Omanut La'am; and Yossi Fitussi of Acco Municipality. •  Directing bodies—The planners, decision-makers, organizers, operators, and evaluators of festival organization on the level of content and

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artistic activity, appointments, responsibility delegation, maintaining infrastructure, organizing, production, and fundraising. In Acco Festival, these roles are divided between several bodies and committees. o The producing body—legally responsible for the festival and responsible for allocation of all budgetary flows, appointment of executive producers, and is usually headed by the director-general and the chief producer. In its first decade, the festival was produced by Omanut La'am; in its second decade by The Israeli Association for Culture and Art, until its dissolution in 1997; at the end of that decade, Zionists of America House produced the event for two years; and then in the year 2000, after twenty years, Acco Municipality produced the festival. o  General manager and producer—in effect, head the producing body. They are responsible for organizing and budgeting the festival, including fundraising. Often one person inhabits both roles, but sometimes there is a separation. Usually these functionaries come from the producing body and are appointed by it. Since 2000, the festival’s director-general is an Acco Municipality events director. o Festival management (called “the steering committee” since 1999)—made up of theater, culture, and art people, mostly from the mainstream; representatives of the ministry of culture, the producing body, and Acco Municipality. Its role is to consult, oversee, and give the festival a wide, professionally artistic back. Municipality representatives have been mainly responsible for technical infrastructure and have not been involved in artistic content until the year 2000. Today, the steering committee is headed by the mayor of Acco, who is also the producing body. The steering committee coordinates the different elements and discusses and decides key issues, including the appointment of the artistic director and the executive producers. The year 2005 saw the first tender for the role of artistic director, handled by a special committee made up of a select number of steering committee members. o Artistic director and artistic committee—the artistic director is responsible for curating the festival’s repertoire and employs different strategies to formulate this line. The artistic committee

Organization, Budget, and Infrastructure: Between Center and Periphery

comprises three to five members, usually artists appointed by the artistic director, and their role is to consult, aid in the sorting process, and choose and accompany the festival’s chosen artists. In its first years, the festival did not have an official artistic director, and Oded Kotler, the chairman of it administration, was acting artistic director. Alongside him worked lectors and a sorting committee. In 1984, Tom Levy was officially appointed artistic director. In 1992, Yaakov Agmon appointed an artistic committee (he called it artistic management), and from 1995 onward, the festival has been functioning with a director and a committee. o Jury—since its inception, the festival has featured a competition of the different performances chosen by the committee and produced by the festival. The jury comprises three to five judges, some theater people, and other public figures. They choose the winning performance and award a cash prize, other prizes, and commendations to artists from different fields, such as director, playwright, designer, and actor. o Festival staff—until the year 2000, when an external body from the center began producing the festival, the festival staff, comprised of representatives of Acco Municipality departments, were responsible for different aspects of festival infrastructure and organization, such as city cleaning and ornamentation, infrastructure arrangements on festival grounds, operating local community centers and bands, and establishing sleeping arrangements for the artists. When Acco Municipality began producing the festival, this body became an organic part of the producing body, and now it answers to the festival’s director-general. •  Public bodies—Fund and support the event financially, organizationally, and in production.The ministry of culture, through the Department of Culture, the National Council for Culture and the Arts, and the head of the Theatre Department, is the most important and influential body backing the festival throughout the years, and its representatives take part in the festival’s management. The ministry is usually the biggest funder, providing some fifty percent of the festival’s funds, and its representatives perform a significant role in the festival’s cardinal decisions, such as appointment of artistic directors and dealing with

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the financial crises that have afflicted the festival. Acco Municipality, as organizer and producer, funds a quarter of the festival’s expenses and is the body legally responsible for the event. The Company for the Development of Ancient Acco is the government body responsible for the development and upkeep of Ancient Acco’s archeological buildings, including the Crusader Hall site where the festival takes place. The Company coordinates with festival management regarding preparation of the halls and buildings for the performances and regarding their conservation. •  S ponsors—Give financial contributions to the festival for commercial and public reasons. During festival years, commercial bodies have been given advertising space and preference for their products on the event site. Public bodies like the European Union, Peres Center for Peace, the Jewish Agency, and different foundations and associations have contributed money to the festival, usually for specific productions that fit their worldview and goals, such as Jewish-Arab community projects and new immigrant performances. •  Artistic  activity and its frameworks—The festival’s repertoire of performances and events and how they are framed or hierarchized. As already stated, the festival is devoted to young artists and artists working outside the mainstream who are not regularly funded by the ministry of culture. These artists submit proposals to the festival, and those that fit with the director’s view are chosen for the competition, sometimes as guests of the festival. In the competition, some ten performances are produced, competing for a cash prize and commendations. This framework is the festival’s core, setting it apart as initiator-producer, not just a festival hosting extant performances like other festivals around the world. There have been other frameworks in this festival, but they were usually less important than the competition in terms of recognition, exposure, and financial support, such as outside performances, street performances, special events, out-of-­ competition debuts, guest performances, performance art pieces, exhibitions, and guests from abroad (for details on the frameworks, see Chapter One).

Organization, Budget, and Infrastructure: Between Center and Periphery

•  H  ost community and volunteers—Are significant parts of a festival’s structure, and their relation to the festival’s bodies can be pivotal for the event’s success (Derrett 2004). Acco Festival did not grow out of the host community, but rather, it was chosen by institutional bodies (Omanut La'am and the ministry of culture), and the event’s goals were not connected with the city’s values, identity, and culture. In professional literature, one can find instances of a festival including volunteers from the host community, such as youth and pensioners, helping with advertising, dispensing flyers, and selling tickets, and they do so with a local-patriotic approach of belonging, identity, and identification with the festival and the town. In Acco, we did not find any similar phenomenon. On the contrary, we found a remoteness and alienation between the town, festival goers, and artists. We also found a suspicious or indifferent relation with the host community.31 The lack of volunteering attested to the complexity of relations between the festival’s theatrical and community goals and the different social groups that do or do not take part in it. The “volunteers” in this festival were artists that were unpaid for their work and only received a modest sum for production needs, with the festival supplying very basic room and board conditions. A production budget has been around NIS 20,000–60,000, which theoretically also includes the artists’ pay, but in fact the budget usually doesn’t even cover the production itself (sets, music, costumes, etc.). This “volunteering” has often resulted in tensions between artists and the festival management and has led to threats by the Israeli Union of Performing Artists (IUPA) to shut down the festival.

31 Different artists have attested to children throwing rocks at them during rehearsals. Thus, this is how Dudi Ma’ayan described the reception that the residents of Acco

gave to rehearsals of The Inn of the Spirits in 1980. A similar description was provided by Lisa Jacobson, who produced the outside performances in 1995. It bears mentioning that Ma’ayan then moved to Acco in 1984 to both live and create. Following this, Jacobson proactively included the children, youth, and adults of Ancient Acco in the outside performance site’s activities.

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The First Three Decades: Organizational Development alongside Budgetary Hardships During the festival’s three decades, we have seen its budgetary and organizational hardships change alongside its development and increase in recognition. However, throughout the years it seems to have suffered chronically from a lack of adequate funding, especially when compared to the large public theaters usually situated in the larger cities and especially in Tel Aviv. Acco Festival produces on average forty performances annually, depending on that year’s budget, with a quarter to a half of the performances raised as debuts and produced by the festival. However, a central public theater (like Habima, Cameri Theatre, or Beit Lessin) is budgeted three to four times more than Acco Festival by the ministry of culture. This happens even though public theaters are usually run by established artists and the entrance of younger artists is very moderate, while Acco Festival gives many young and alternative artists, as well as artists from Acco and its vicinity, chances to express themselves in the festival. Acco Festival, situated on the periphery in relation to parallel institutions in the center, is discriminated against as a cultural institution despite its artistic, cultural, and social importance. The festival’s budget is NIS 3–4 million. Generally, budget allocation in the festival is based on some fifty percent funding from the ministry of culture; twenty-five percent from Acco Municipality; and the rest from commercial sponsors, funds, and different public associations from Israel and abroad plus ticket sales.

The 1980s: “Childhood Illnesses” During the first decade, the body that produced and founded the festival was Omanut La'am as the executive arm of the ministry of culture. In practice, the National Council for Culture and the Arts, under the Culture and Arts Administration and its Theatre Department, was the ministry of culture body that sponsored the festival. The council’s chairman was Avner Shalev, and the producers were, in effect, the heads of Omanut La'am: director-general Yossi Frost and Haim Treger, coordinator of Omanut La'am Northern District. Culture Administration head Leah Porat (who died a short while before the start of the first festival) agreed to fund part of the project, and Yossi Frost

Organization, Budget, and Infrastructure: Between Center and Periphery

(2009) described how Bank Discount, headed by Leon Rekanati, agreed to fund part of the budget, allowing the actual production of the festival. They were joined by Yossi Fitussi of Acco Municipality and Shai Levy, Managing Director of the Ancient Acco Development Company. The first years of the Acco Festival were characterized not just by lack of funds for the different performances but also by harsh working, artistic, and viewing conditions. Selection and choice of the performances began only some four months before the start of the festival, with little if any time left for rehearsals and staging at the Crusader Halls. On top of this, actors received no payment or living accommodations, a fact that raised much protest and changed little throughout the festival’s years. This harmed its artistic quality and the ability to administratively address all of the artists’ demands. Besides this, there were many mishaps, such as power failures due to overloads to a grid that was not designed for high consumption of lighting and sound amplification; large delays caused by a dearth of halls—every two productions had to use the same space and alternate sets and lighting throughout the festival. The unventilated Crusader Halls were overcrowded, seats were unassigned, and the chairs in the halls were not padded. The artists did not receive payment, and the working and sleeping conditions were very hard. Yossef Mar-Haim (1981), a musician with the Cocooner Group, which performed in 1981, harshly criticized the festival’s planning and organizational direction under the unflattering headline “Cave Festival.” The artists’ complaints can also be gleaned through a symposium that took place during the third festival (1982) under the headline “Acco Festival Whither?” moderated by journalist Michael Handelzaltz. The way the discussion went can be discerned from Handelzaltz’s (1982) published account, according to which he is sorry that a debate that should have revolved around “essence, form, and content” mainly revolved around “organization, money, [and] conditions.” Each of the young artists “brought his small pain to unload.” He explained that it was “the cheapest festival there ever was. . . . Anybody who knows anything [about theater production] knows these are pennies.” However, as early as the fourth festival (1983), organization became better and the festival passed with no mishaps, as opposed to the previous years (see, for instance, Handelzaltz October 6, 1983). The sixth festival (1985) saw the

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awarding of the $20,000 Knesset Chairman Prize.32 Extant halls were ameliorated, permanent and assigned seats were installed, and other halls were added so that each performance took place in an assigned space with no need to change sets and lighting as before. Unlike previous years when performances did share space, they started on time and each show performed ten times during the festival because of the addition of halls. Better technical infrastructure strengthened the festival’s self-image as a quality event. The different archives and the media offer no documentation regarding the festival’s budget during the first half of the eighties, except for the first festival’s budget (1980), which was I£2 million (currency changed from Israeli Lira to the Old Israeli shekel in 1980). From the mid-eighties, the budget grew relatively. In 1986, it stood at NIS 337,91533; in 1988, it rose steeply to NIS 515,61734; and in 1989, when the festival celebrated a decade of existence, it stood at NIS 750,000. Room and board budget for each actor also changed, from NIS 5 in 1987 to NIS 27 in 1988. This small raise was, among other things, a function of the artists’ protest against the terrible material conditions and UIPA’s intervention to ameliorate the artists’ employment conditions. Despite the rise in budgets during those years, there was rising frustration in the festival regarding institutional budgeting as compared with the public theaters. Thus, artistic manager Shimon Levy compared the festival’s budget to that of public theater and was quoted angrily saying, “According to publications, Les Misérables was budgeted at the Cameri Theatre at NIS 1.5 million. They sell cultural junk under the guise of quality theater” (Z. Shohat 1987), i.e., they budget a commercially entertaining musical at a public theater at three times the cost of the entire festival. He thus excoriates the organizing establishment of unfair budget allocation between theater institutions. In its decade, despite a significant rise in budget, “At the cost of two productions at the public theaters, we create twenty original productions here, raised as debuts to ticket-buyers, plus seventeen other outside performances,” claimed artistic director Eran Beniel (Fuchs 1989). 32 The prize was stated in dollars because of that period’s high rate of inflation. 33 Acco Municipality Archives, Closed Festival File: “Budgeting versus Execution in

1986” (n.d.)

34 Acco Municipality Archives, Festival of Other Theatre File 3/3: “Execution—Acco

Festival 1988 as of December 88.”

Organization, Budget, and Infrastructure: Between Center and Periphery

The 1990s: Between Development and Crisis During the first half of the nineties there was a rise in the festival’s budget through sponsor fundraising, infrastructure amelioration, and other avenues. But the lack of organization, the poor wages (harming especially those artists who did not received funding on time), and protests over working conditions and the lack of payment to artists continued. During the second half of the nineties, there was a severe budgetary crisis, and the funding decreased. This was not just an economic crisis; it also reflected the fact that the ministry of culture, under the aegis of the National Religious Party, was uninterested in a festival that promoted values at odds with its religious and political conceptions. Also at this time, the Israeli Association for Culture and Art replaced Omanut La'am as the producing body. This body was made up of people from the center, not Acco residents. Actor Mosko Alkalai, Israeli Union of Performing Artists Chairman and a 1991 festival judge, sent a letter of protest in the organization’s name, during the festival (September 24, 1991), to all media culture departments, speaking out against the appalling conditions under which its artists were working and protesting the lack of payment. In an interview by Galei Tsahal with Muli Shapira (1991), Alkalai threatened to strike, “There will be no festival next year if the people, the actors, do not receive remuneration for their work, because it is an elementary thing, all the functionaries who set up policy receive full pay.” During the festival, artistic director Shmuel Hasfari and general manager Avi Yifrach quit because of festival conditions “making any artistic achievement difficult because of supply paucity and the difficulty of dealing with the material, as well as the transience of the festival’s organizational infrastructure, which brings a situation in which each year its very existence is in doubt, while the institution backing it treats it as a self-evident thing” (Handelzaltz 1991). The low budget hurts the artistic quality and blocks fulfillment of its artistic goals. In the years 1992 to 1995, there was a deep shift in festival organization, infrastructure, and budget. Yaakov Agmon, who had much experience in managing theaters and cultural institutions, was appointed as both artistic and organizational director on a long-term contract, as opposed to his predecessors, which allowed the manager a three-year plan. Agmon decided to bring back the selection committees and lectors that were in place 1980–1983. He set up an

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artistic committee that answered to him directly; it was made up of theater people from both mainstream and alternative theater, as it exists to this day. The committee sorted and built the festival’s repertoire and accompanied and consulted the different competing performances. The budget rose significantly due to Agmon’s approach of bringing in commercial sponsors to market their products as part of outside performances and due to other reasons. Thus, in 1992 the festival’s budget was NIS 2,117,33435 as opposed to 1995 when it reached NIS 3,395,898.36 Agmon also worked on festival infrastructure, air-conditioning the halls and replacing seats for greater spectator comfort; adding telephones, chemical toilets, overnight sleeping arrangements, and showers and drinking water especially for the younger audience. New sites for events and outside performance were added, and five generators were installed in case of a power shortage. However, in 1992 discord grew with IUPA over artists not getting paid and, in effect, working voluntarily. Yigal Ezrati, Tali Yitzhaki, and Judy Kupferman, three of the festival’s longest-working artists, addressed a letter to culture minister Shulamith Aloni claiming, “This is an impossible and immoral situation,” especially when “everybody [producers, directors, stage hands, and ushers] is paid” except for the artists (Peleg 1992). Protest almost reached threats to shut down the festival if this was not fixed. Agmon agreed that voluntary artistic work should be stopped and remuneration instituted, but “the budget I was handed was like that of last year’s with only a cost adjustment” (Peleg 1992). Hence, artists could not be paid that year. In a letter dated August 2, 1992, Attorney Zohar and Yaakov Agmon thanked the Minister for the NIS 200,000 increase, on top of the NIS 705,000 already budgeted, meant for productions and “ensuring artists payment.”37 In practice, it was decided that every group would get up to NIS 25,000 per production, and as opposed to earlier years, the management would not interfere with allocation of funds between its different elements. Artists could allocate part of their budget for wages. In most cases, artists preferred to use the entire sum (admittedly meager 35 Acco Municipality Archives, General Festival File: Israeli Association for Culture

and Art (February 7, 1993), “Execution Report Acco 92.”

36 Acco Municipality Archives, General Festival File: Israeli Association for Culture and

Art (May 19, 1996), “Acco Festival 1996 Summary versus Acco Festival Budget 1995.”

37 Education Ministry Archives, 950: volume 4, folder 9.

Organization, Budget, and Infrastructure: Between Center and Periphery

in relation to repertory theaters’ budgets) for production and not for wages. On the festival’s fourth day (October 14, 1992), representatives of the artists set up a press conference protesting their exploitation and publicizing their decision not to take part in the 1993 festival unless they would get paid for their work. The 1993 festival saw an increase to the budget, so, following the actors’ and artists’ struggle, it was decided to pay them a small wage. Actors would get wages of NIS 1,500 for the rehearsals, NIS 180 for each performance, and NIS 34.90 room and board per day. Of course, these were very low wages when compared with established theaters but still a remarkable achievement for the artists’ struggle, which began in 1987 and reached its apex in the year prior with their threat to shut down the entire festival. However, this understanding did not survive throughout all of the festival’s years. After Agmon’s tenure, with the financial crisis that the festival underwent in 1996–1997, the artists’ conditions reverted to their previous state. Agmon managed to expand the budget and the artistic opportunities, including limited pay for artists, but this was mainly achieved through sponsorship from commercial bodies. Theater critics claimed that beefing up the budget with sponsors tended to give the event a commercial character. Handelzaltz (September 23, 1994), for instance, declared that he was “seriously contemplating divorce” from Acco Festival; he perceived commercial success and efficient marketing as highlighting “the needs of the enthusiastic audience . . . and the needs of the artists . . . but art mainly has to do with demands, proportion, claims, and not just need fulfillment.”

Like an Idiot I Screamed: Culture Minister with No Culture (Itzik Weingarten): Budgetary Crisis38 The second half of the nineties (1996–2000) was characterized by an ongoing organizational and financial crisis because the Israeli Association for Culture and Art, which had produced the festival, was dismantled following the Mandatory Tenders Law of 1992, leaving a financial deficit. The main crisis took place in 1996–1997 under artistic director Itzik Weingarten. Since its inception, the 38 The information about this crisis is based on media reports and an interview I con­

ducted on April 7, 2005 with Sara Lissovsky, then head of the Theatre Department.

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festival’s budget was meager, but this crisis threatened its very existence. The crisis was also perceived as having political undertones, as being a culture war between seculars who were identified with the ministry of culture, such as the event’s main funder—which showed that the festival is also a site of resource allocation through which competing groups struggle to accumulate symbolic capital. Itzik Weingarten was appointed artistic director following the resignation of Dudi Ma'ayan; in March 1996, he was signed on for only a year. The short term made it difficult for Weingarten to organize the festival and limited his ability to prepare for the years to come. The symptoms returned that the festival suffered from in the eighties, when an artistic director who did not receive a multi-year contract quit once every two years.39 Yaakov Agmon, we shall remember, was signed for three years, and the appointment of Dudi Ma'ayan, who was a member of the artistic committee under him, created an overlap that was very right for the festival. For the first time, the trend of budget rising was stopped, and in 1996, it was lowered by some NIS 400,000, standing at only NIS 3,048,034.40 The 1997 festival faced a severe financial crisis, and its very existence was thrown into doubt. The crisis was a function of the Mandatory Tenders Law addendum that forced the Israeli Association for Culture and Art, including the festival’s producer, to farm out some of its work through tenders, after it finished dealing with all of its debts, among them the Acco Festival deficit of the year prior. The association’s work was brought to a halt, rendering it unable to make any contract obligations, or pay artistic director Itzik Weingarten and producer Gad Oron, or subsequently fulfill obligations with the festival’s artists. As tensions between artists, the association, and the ministry of culture rose, the crisis took on a political character and meaning. In June 1997, five months before the festival’s opening, Weingarten and Oron tender their resignation since they’d been working for six months without 39 Tom Levy, Shimon Levy, Eran Beniel, and Shmuel Hasfari directed the festival for

only two years and quit over similar reasons of production and organizing budgetary problems. 40 Acco Municipality Archives, General Festival File: Israeli Association for Culture and Art (September 22, 1997), “Acco Festival 1997 Budget versus Acco Festival 1996 Budget.”

Organization, Budget, and Infrastructure: Between Center and Periphery

contract or pay and couldn’t pay the members of the artistic committee or transfer funds to future productions, and hence the future of the festival was unclear. Weingarten enlisted the directors of established theaters to the struggle, some of whom had directed Acco Festival in the past. They wrote to then culture minister Zevulun Hammer of the National Religious Party about their concerns regarding a drop in the artistic level following budgetary constraints and calling on the minister “to address the issue urgently and ensure the festival’s existence.”41 Meretz Chairman Yossi Sarid enlisted with the campaign, saying, “Hammer is simply envious of events not meant for settlers, such as the Acco Festival” (Z. Shohat 1997). This strengthened the artists’ perception that this was a political-cultural battle and not just a budgetary crisis, as we shall see below. David Alexander, head of the Culture and Arts Administration, promised that the funds would be transferred immediately and that subsequently contracts would be signed with the festival’s directors, and thus Weingarten and Oron retracted their resignations. On September 8, Weingarten called a press conference in which he was supposed to present the festival’s repertoire, but the event turned into a show of protest and concern about the festival’s mere existence because of the ongoing financial crisis. It emerged that the ministry of culture transferred some of the budget to the association but that the association had used it to cover its deficits from other projects that it had produced, which, according to its managers, happened with the ministry’s authorization in keeping with the Mandatory Tenders Law. Managers of the association also claimed that the ministry had in fact not transferred the entire sum it had pledged to transfer in June. During this event, many artists complained that they were using their own money to fund productions and that it was unclear whether they were even going to be reimbursed. Some even threatened to shut down the festival. The day afterward, the festival’s artists and directors came together for an emergency conference at Zionists of America House in Tel Aviv to ascertain possibilities for saving the situation and to voice protest. 41 Signatories to the letter, as published by Zipi Shohat (1997) in Ha’aretz, were

Yaakov Agmon (Habima), Noam Semel and Omri Nitzan (the Cameri Theatre), Oded Kotler (Haifa Theatre), Ori Levy (Gesher), Razi Amitai (Bat Sheva Theatre), and Ophira Henig and Yaron Sadan (the Khan Theatre).

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The event took on a political character, and the crisis was perceived in terms of a culture war on a free and secular society. IUPA head, Shaikeh Levy, declared that it was “a political subject,” and playwright Miriam Keini claimed that in the eyes of the minister and the religious group he represented, Acco Festival was a “laughingstock,” and that “they need to be shown they can’t win.” She continued with, “I’m ready to enlist to violent action,” and added, half-jokingly and half-seriously, to incarcerate the minister in one of Acco’s Crusader Halls. Weingarten suggested demonstrating in front of the minister’s office until he agreed to meet the festival’s directors (Z. Shohat 1997). Following the conference, some fifty performers organized and demonstrated with loud drumming in front of the minister’s Jerusalem office, calling on him to meet them under the slogan “Culture minister with no culture.” The ministry’s director-general, Ben Zion Dal, decided to meet with them, and at the end of the meeting they came up with a suitable solution regarding paying advances to the artists. Weingarten, interviewed by Ati Citron (1997) described the meeting: We came [to the director-general] with ropes around our necks, not as in suicide but to say: we depend on you, and it’s terrible when art depends on politicians . . . so [the director-general] said “It depends. If there are any losses, I’m not willing to [sit in jail] for even one day for Acco Festival. . . . They don’t understand the importance of secular art. In their minds, it is not important. The festival took place but the financial crisis did not end, so in October of 1997, after the festival ended, the producing association still owed artists funds, including the competition’s financial awards. In December of 1997, the association disbanded and there was still no arrangement regarding its debts to the artists. Yigal Ezrati and Gabi El Dor’s Local Theatre, which had won first prize, brought suit against the association in court, as did other artists. The political crisis meant a more limited repertoire, harmed artists’ motivation, and created an unwanted image for the festival that year. Theater critics

Organization, Budget, and Infrastructure: Between Center and Periphery

who usually disapproved of the festival’s artistic level found themselves supporting it in its hour of crisis, especially for political considerations. Thus, Shai Bar-Ya'akov (1997) confessed that although the festival “is already not really playing that role [of experimental art outside the establishment], this institution is too important to original art to let some culture functionary in the education ministry bury it . . . [to] save some money for the minister’s new ‘baby’, the Department for Moral Education,” and he concludes, “the struggle for Acco is the struggle over being able to sustain an open, searching theater culture here.” Guy Cohen (1997) was even more vociferous, opening with “While that demagogue Eichler compares the funds for yeshiva students with those meant for theater students . . . the Ministry of Religion continues to funnel funds to yeshivas, fostering the folly of ‘Torah culture.’” His main argument was that “Acco Festival is the last in a line of secular cultural institutions that are harmed by the budgetary preference given to Torah culture.” The budget of the 1997 festival was eventually NIS 3,210,00042 (with NIS 200,000 dedicated to covering the deficit, so, de facto, it was some NIS 3 million alone). Its full transferal happened only in the beginning of 1998, after artists sought legal remedy. In fact, some of the budget has not been handed over to artists to this day. In that sense, the crisis that happened after the dissolution of the Israeli Association for Culture and Art had not reached an end, and the 1998 festival was also facing closure. Festival producers Yoram Kleiner and Gad Oron, who had managed the association and now, following its dissolution, managed the Zionists of America House and new artistic director Roni Ninio decided that if artists were not paid for the 1997 festival, they would not hold the current event. July 1998 saw a positive development when the ministry of culture and Acco Municipality promised to cover the festival’s debts, which were about NIS 770,000. This promise allowed festival preparations to go through, but its execution was delayed until the end of September, with the festival scheduled to begin on October 5. UIPA 42 Acco Municipality Archives, General Festival File: Israeli Association for Culture

and Art (December 7, 1997), “Budget versus Execution on 7.12.1997.”

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chairman Shaikeh Levy called on artists to shut down the festival if money was not transferred to the artists. Several days prior to October 5, a budget to cover the previous year’s debts was passed and the festival was opened. The budget was lower than before, at only NIS 2,981,000.43 However, the 1999 festival budget rose by some NIS 30,000 to NIS 3,323,300.44

The 2000s: Acco Festival for Acco Residents Although it contributed a major part of the festival’s budget throughout the years, Acco Municipality’s role remained in the realms of technology and infrastructure (festival staff). Professional representatives from Acco Municipality never sat on the festival’s management team, only contributing representatives responsible for infrastructure. In other words, the municipality’s authorities and influence on the event’s design were very limited, which frustrated city residents and their elected officials. The ministry of culture feared transferring the event’s production and implementation to Acco Municipality authorities, but there was little hesitation. After two decades, it was decided that local government had the experience and knowledge necessary to produce and lead the festival. The festival’s director-general is an Acco resident, and under him are the producer and the artistic director, who usually come from the professional ranks of the center. The steering committee (the festival management’s new name) is headed by the mayor and is peopled by Jewish and Arab council members, central government (ministry of culture) functionaries, and theater and art people. The 2000 festival was the first time Acco Municipality officially produced the festival with no external bodies from the center. Albert Ben-­ Shloosh of the municipality, who had been involved in festival production 43 Acco Municipality Archives, General Festival File: Zionists of America House

(March 1, 1999), “Budget Suggestion 1999—Planning 99 versus Implementation 98.” This budget is lower by NIS 300,000 than the 1997 festival and is the lowest sum since the 1993 festival. 44 Acco Municipality Archives, General Festival File: “Producer Report—Implementation Acco Festival 1999, 24.11.99.”

Organization, Budget, and Infrastructure: Between Center and Periphery

since the late eighties,45 was appointed as the festival’s director-general. Acco Municipality has so far shied away from exclusively running the festival, and even the public bodies, especially the ministry of culture, found it hard to believe that it was able to do so. Yoram Kleiner, director-general of Zionists of America House, the body that produced the festival in 1998– 1999, claimed, “I am worried . . . this is a 250,000-visitor event with profound budgetary and logistical problems” (Timan March 2, 2000). Yaakov Agmon, who was the festival’s managing director in 1992–1994 by contrast said, “The problem is not whether or not they can produce the festival but what its message and character would be. On the other hand, there is merit to the municipality’s approach that there needs to be sensitivity to the local population, and that it needs to be included in the festival” (Timan March 2, 2000). The ambivalence of Agmon’s words highlights the structural tension between the festival’s artistic theatrical goals, mainly connected to theatrical work in the larger Tel Aviv area and Jerusalem, and its socioeconomic goals in developing the town and integrating the host community into it. Agmon’s apprehension raises the question of the festival’s ownership—is it a theater festival whose location in Acco is secondary, or is it a local event of the Acco community who hosts it? This tension between the festival’s different goals has characterized it throughout the years, making it a site of struggle over cultural and symbolic capital. Economically, the allocation of technical production jobs was usually done by external producers who preferred working with Tel Aviv subcontractors, which fostered anger and frustration with city residents. The festival’s management and production by Acco Municipality repaired this injustice by giving preference to local professionals. The ownership of an important cultural institution that signifies an artistic celebration of creativity, artistic experimentalism, and solidarity of the culturally-theatrically hegemonic group (Tel Aviv) is 45 Albert Ben-Shloosh is an Acco Municipality events manager. In 1988–1992, he was

a member of the festival staff, and in 1993–1999, he was a member of its management. In the years 1996–1997 and 1999, he was appointed by the municipality as a festival project manager, and in 1998, he was Executive Producer. From 2000 on, he has served as Deputy Director-General.

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transferred to “peripheral hands,” raising the question as to what extent will Acco Municipality allow this hegemonic group to keep consolidating its status through the festival. It seems that most fears were in vain. The festival’s organization did not decline from that of previous years, and artistically-­theatrically, its alternative character was buttressed. The significant role of artistic direction remained in hegemonic hands, so the event’s essence has remained similar despite some changes vis-à-vis the host community.46 However, the festival’s general manager proclaimed that both goals (the theatrical and the socioeconomic) are interdependent, thus, so is the fine balance between them. The very fact that the festival maintains its theatrical goals is what draws spectators from all over the country, who then spend a few days in town, consuming and becoming agents for the city’s image. Hence maintaining Acco Festival as a national festival aimed at the larger audience also serves the extra-theatrical goals dear to the city elders’ hearts. During its first years of this decade, the festival carried over the late-nineties deficit, and this was compounded by the deficit created by the postponing of the 2000 festival because of the events in October 2000, which meant that some of the performances had to be cancelled (see Chapter Five). The budget decrease and the accumulating deficit didn’t make the festival’s existence any easier, and it signified a continuance of the downward tendency that had been in effect since the mid-nineties. However, the festival’s renewal on both the aesthetic and the social-community levels worked well with UNESCO’s international recognition of Ancient Acco (Acre) as a World Heritage site, mainly for preservation of its historical layers, like the Crusader buildings, where much of the festival takes place. Ati Citron’s approach to dialogue and “coexistence” between Jews and Arabs mainly included encouraging Arab spectators to attend the performances by subsidizing tickets and organizing rides despite the harsh reality of the Second Intifada, which ended up helping 46 During this time, Ati Citron was the artistic director of the festival, and he came up

with the slogan “from a guest festival to a naturalizing festival,” i.e., full inclusion of the Acco community in the festival. However the real picture was more complex, with many conflicts between Acco Municipality and Citron erupting over the festival’s political character. See Chapter One and Chapter Five.

Organization, Budget, and Infrastructure: Between Center and Periphery

the festival’s budget from 2002 onward. The Rich Foundation contributed NIS 92,289; the Bracha Fund contributed NIS 187,235; the Jewish Agency’s Partnership 2000 Western Galilee contributed NIS 227,430; the European Union gave NIS 47,475; and the Peres Peace Center gave NIS 100,000. Public support of Jewish-Arabic dialogue-themed projects came to NIS 654,429 of the non-government budget, some seventeen percent of the festival’s overall budget of NIS 3,746,691. This was a significant rise in comparison with the year 2000, when public support of performances alone stood at NIS 39,320— this is an incomparable budgetary rise.47 During the second half of the 2000s, the festival budget stood at NIS 3–4 million, with the division of the ministry of culture supplying half the sum, Acco Municipality contributing a quarter, and the rest fulfilled by public funds and commercial sponsors. Even though this research’s timeframe is 1980–2012, we can see that the issue of artist’s pay was not settled. The sum awarded to every production, NIS 50,000, is a global one and is also intended to cover artist pay, but mostly artists prefer to give it up since they spend most of the small sum on production needs such as sets, costumes, requisites, etc. In 2013, Shaham (the Israeli Actors Guild) demanded that festival management pay wages outside of global funding. Well-known actor Moshe Ivgi, one of the guild’s leaders who began his career at the first festival, was at the head of the protest, announcing their intention to shut down the festival. Ultimately, it was decided that each actor would receive a sum of NIS 6,200 for the entire rehearsal period, still a very small sum when compared with customary pay at repertory theaters. In 2014, this payment clause began burdening the artists because production budgets were not raised correspondingly, and the demand to spend thousands of shekels on artists’ pay alone left in-competition productions with no budget for production costs. Therefore, after a struggle by the artists and threats of shutting the 2014 festival down, Acco Municipality agreed to add sums to the in-competition productions’ budgets meant for artists’ pay separately. The festival’s organization, infrastructure, and budget has undoubtedly improved since its founding in 1980, but compared to 47 Acco Municipality Archives, 2002 Festival File—Budget (Folder 6): “Budget 2002

versus Suggested 2003 Festival Budget” (December 25, 2002).

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repertory theater, it seems to have a long way to go to be transformed into a significant institution in the Israeli theater field.

The Festival between Center and Periphery and Its Reflection in Culture Policy Most researchers stress the idea that the “center-periphery” structure does not simply signify the exclusive holding of all political, economic, and social power in the center, but rather signifies that constant motion between the two in fact happens (e.g., Heilbruner and Levin 2007, Zarycki 2007). The motion between center and periphery attests to mutual interdependency on different levels, with the cultural one interesting us in this chapter. The center, which tries to suppress and exclude periphery culture, in fact requires it to strengthen its selfimage as “modern and progressive” as opposed to “backward periphery” and as “exotic” raw material to pump “new blood” into the mainstream while appropriating and processing it to fit with cultural and artistic institutions including the theater. Israel is a geographically small state, so the term “periphery,” rather than signifying large physical distances, in fact signifies considerable sociocultural differences between populations that might actually sometimes be quite adjacent. Historically, Israel already had created its periphery back in the 1950s with the construction of development towns and new immigrant agricultural settlements in the south and north of the country, especially for Middle Eastern Jews who had immigrated into it after the establishing of the state. Thus, an ethnoclass distinction was established between the veteran residents of the center, usually of European descent, and the Mizrahi residents of the periphery (Chetrit 2010), who were joined by some immigrants from Russia and Ethiopia in the nineties. The Israeli cultural policy, and especially the ministry of culture funding policy, is based on four major elements which can be seen as connected to the center-periphery structure (Horowitz 2009), similarly to other places in the world (Mulcahy 2006, Van Hamersveld and Smithuijsen 2008). I will now demonstrate each in relation to the theater field. 1) The national element: historically, Israel has been interested in fostering a national Zionist culture as part of its nation-building process.

Organization, Budget, and Infrastructure: Between Center and Periphery

Theater is perceived as a “secular synagogue” for the elucidation of important national, social, and cultural questions (Urian 2000); it plays a part in the rebirth of the Hebrew language, and therefore it becomes one of the central institutions of nation-building. Therefore, among the arts, it is, to this day, the best funded; 2)  The aesthetic element: the cultural policy also is based on the idea of “art for art’s sake,” with interest in funding professional, high quality art that would disappear if not for the state’s support. Thus, canonic and “respectable” theater is perceived as much more valuable than alternative, innovative theater such as Acco Festival, which challenges these ideas of “respectable”; 3)  The social element: this mainly has to do with allowing cultural access to periphery spectators and access to the center’s cultural production, as compared with very little support of the cultures and artists stemming from the periphery. This approach is tinged with the center’s patronization, telling the periphery “what to watch,” and is a function of civilizing approaches vis-à-vis non-European groups of the periphery. Ministry of culture buying bodies in the past (Maman 2007), such as Theatre for the Transit Camps [Ma'abarot] and Omanut La'am, and Culture for Israel today build a subsidized series of “quality” performances, mostly for periphery residents, according to Western criteria. The series is put together by “expert” committees according to the different arts. Periphery residents have almost no say in the decision-making process. Furthermore, the artists and frameworks functioning on the periphery are usually poorly funded. 4)  The financial element: financial support today is contingent on the number of original and ongoing performances and the establishment’s budgetary balance each year. The large institutions of the center, which enjoy greater financial ability, can generate more original and ongoing performances and usually maintain budgetary balance. Smaller institutions on the periphery, by contrast, struggle to do so, but they are still supposed to compete with the larger institutions for spectators and to maintain budgetary balance. This reality fortifies the inequality between the center and the periphery. The majority of cultural functionaries who represent the ministry of culture and fashion cultural policy tend to work under the same Western cultural approach that fortifies the status quo.

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The national, aesthetic, and financial elements in fact justify the gap in support between large cultural institutions, including theater, mostly in the center, and others on the periphery. Libi Bamizrach, the Coalition for Just Reallocating of Israeli Cultural Resources (Ben Dayan et al. 2012) shows that research into ministry of culture data reveals a harsh and growing inequality in the funding of Western and other cultures: Mizrahi, Arab, and Ethiopian. These non-Western culture frameworks are usually found outside the geographic center, so this inequality, in effect, reproduces the supremacy of the center over the periphery. The social element is supposed to balance this discriminating policy, and in fact there is funding, albeit much smaller, for institutions on the geopolitical periphery. As already mentioned, throughout the years, state buying bodies were set up to further a national-Zionist and Western conception to culturist and civilize periphery residents of non-European descent. In recent decades, the social component was challenged by a multicultural conception that demanded the recognition and funding of cultures other than the Western-Zionist one. Yossi Yona and Yehouda Shenhav (2000) have researched two culture policy reports, one published by the ministry of culture (“Hazon Culture Document 2000”) and one by the Van Leer Institute (“Bracha Report: Culture Policy in Israel 1999”), showing that these reports adopt multicultural rhetoric supposedly invested in cultural diversity, but in effect, they stress the importance of a national-cultural core. The social component, then, does not balance things out either, even coming across as mockery, and only means strengthening the center’s liberal self-image as being somewhat tolerant of peripheral cultures but not more than that. The foundation of the festival in Acco sprang from a cultural policy interested in both developing the periphery (a mixed city of lower-class Jews and Arabs) and allowing young artists outside the mainstream a theatrical alternative. These decisions seemingly square with the social component. However, the other components of the cultural policy allow us to understand why the festival has had funding difficulties throughout the years. Low budgets created a recurring “crisis and resolution” process once per decade because the festival was discriminated against as a peripheral institution of secondary importance in relation to the large theaters, both nationally-culturally and aesthetically-theatrically. The festival is not an

Organization, Budget, and Infrastructure: Between Center and Periphery

important national-cultural institution, as reflected by the nineties crisis. It wasn’t “national” enough in the eyes of the right-wing politicians of religious Zionism who control the ministry of culture. Simultaneously, the festival is also not “respectable and canonical” like the large theaters of Tel Aviv, despite the fact that it is the professional producer of many performances (twenty to thirty productions per year). The festival is perceived as a marginal field of experience by young artists or older alternative artists, and therefore it is granted little funding. The festival’s production, until the year 2000 by Omanut La'am, the Israeli Association for Culture and Art, and Zionists of America House, highlights the center’s patronizing attitude and its distrust of Acco’s ability to produce the event and therefore be the main executor of the center’s economic control over the periphery. From the year 2000 onward, that situation has changed and Acco Municipality is the producing body, but the complex relations with the artistic directors and representatives of the ministry of culture from the center in the festival’s management highlight the power relations between center and periphery.

Acco as Model Israeli Festival Acco Festival was one of the first festivals founded in Israel, and one could say that its design inspired the formula for the organization and construction of the culture and theater festivals that came after it. For the first time, an artistic cultural festival was created in a peripheral development town to build social, economic, and touristic leverage; these goals are in addition to the festival’s own artistic goals. This is an event that makes the residents of the center leave their places for a few days to recreate and consume culture outside of the greater Tel Aviv area. Thus, besides its original goal to extend the theatrical field and enrich it with new forms and artists, the festival was also created to improve the image of peripheral Acco, aid its economic development, and position it as a tourist destination. This model appealed to cities and settlements that were either remote or suffered from a problematic image and that wanted to transform into a “cultural metropolis” for several days. Thus, the Arad Hebrew Song Festival, set up in 1982, and the Karmiel Dance Festival, founded in 1986, were events created

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according to the Acco model. The southern, desert town of Arad and the northern town of Karmiel, adjacent to the Lebanese border, both with low-­ income populations, were transformed during the summer months into an attraction for music-loving youngsters (Arad) and mature folk-dance enthusiasts (Karmiel). However, these events are distinct from Acco Festival in their appeal to wider audiences with popular culture and art, as these events do not distinguish between inside and outside performances that appeal to different spectators. The competition, a distinct aspect of the festival, influenced the design of theater festivals that were set up after Acco. Other fringe festivals around the world, to the best of my knowledge, do not hold a competition, a feature apparently adopted from film festivals. Despite the problematic aspects of a competition comparing performances of different styles and genres, and despite the detrimental effects to solidarity among competing artists, the marketing consideration trumped. And indeed, now “other theater” festivals in Israel include a competition. These include Haifa International Children’s Theatre Festival, Theatronetto, Masrahid (an Arabic monodrama festival), Bat Yam International Street-Theatre Festival, and Tel Aviv University student theater festival SmallBama. Frequently, there is feedback between the different festivals. Producer Jacky Bachar and director Moshe Malka, who were involved in the development of street theater in Acco Festival in the nineties, are significant figures in the development of the Bat Yam festival, and monodramas that succeeded at Theatronetto are shown in Acco. Assi Mamonov’s One on One project, originally developed at SmallBama, was elaborated and presented as a special event at Acco Festival in 2004.

Top-Down versus Bottom-Up: Acco Festival versus Canadian Fringe Festival Acco Festival is sometimes mentioned alongside other fringe festivals of the world, such as Edinburgh (Scotland) and Avignon (France). Comparison between Acco and these international festivals really wouldn’t hold because of the huge differences of volume, quality, and intention. However, a

Organization, Budget, and Infrastructure: Between Center and Periphery

comparison to the model offered by Canadian fringe festivals may illuminate the meaning of Acco Festival’s model in particular and that of Israeli theater festivals in general. I do not wish to go into a detailed comparison, as that would demand an entire other and not uninteresting body of research, but I will highlight several aspects below. Throughout the eighties, seven fringe festivals were founded in different Canadian towns (Paterson 1997). Each of these festivals lasts an average of seven to ten days, hosting one to two hundred theater troupes performing before some half a million spectators. Canadian fringe hosts young artists and groups working outside of the Canadian mainstream. Acco Festival lasts three days and hosts some forty performances performed in front of a quarter of a million spectators. This similar data can form a basis for comparison between the two models. In Canadian fringe, each group or artist submits a performance suggestion that includes a fee. Performance acceptance is not handled by committee but by a “first come, first serve” model, with a lottery held in several cases. The performances do not compete with each other, and there is no prize to be won, only “jury judging” by the critics and the spectators. The festivals give every production a site, technical specifications (lighting and amplification), program mention, and ticket sales. Group members invest their own money, raising funds from public funds and bodies for the rest of their expenses, such as sets, music, and room and board. All the proceeds go to the group, with festival income coming from the artist fees, government funding, public bodies, and commercial sponsors. Especially when the performances are successful, groups travel with them between different fringe festivals, their success influencing their acceptance into the next festival. In this model, there is no artistic and professional accompaniment by a committee and an artistic director, no competition, no prizes, and no commendations, and all get a chance to work regardless of artistic quality. Also absent from this model are frameworks and the hierarchies between them, which promote genre, style, and performer equality. Organizers’ and producers’ artistic authority is very limited, and all they need to do is appeal to artists and groups and encourage them to submit suggestions. Artists, for their part, need to invest not only in artistic production but also in profit

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making, i.e., to fundraise for their productions, and in return, all box office income goes to them. In other words, this model fosters “bottom-up” motion. The artists’ way to work is open, with no sorting or accompaniment, but they have financial responsibility for the performance. This model also encourages appeals to the wider audience to try and cover production costs and might harm artistic considerations. Acco Festival, by contrast, is built “top-down.” Festival institutions have a lot of authority in sorting applications and accompanying artists, setting up frameworks, and fashioning the hierarchies between them, budget allocation by production needs, and awarding prizes and commendations. In this sense, Acco is centralist, most of the control in it is given to the funding bodies, as opposed to an average Canadian fringe festival, which offers a more open and egalitarian model, where most of the control is in the artists’ hands.

C H A P TE R

FOUR

Festival Reception: Judgment, Criticism, Audience

Marvin Carlson interweaves two main concepts of reception theory— Hans Robert Jauss’s “horizon of expectations” and Fish’s (1980) “interpretive community,” claiming that memory of previous performance spectatorship, in effect, structures an audience’s expectations and taste-makers’ interpretive strategies as elements of an interpretive community (Carlson 2003). Through memory, the audience recognizes elements of the current performance that are familiar and that are new, thus expanding the repertoire of theater spectator experiences. This expansion makes reception ability more elastic upon next encountering new and alternative texts and styles. This process is central to the reception of Acco Festival, especially with the critics, since the festival is a “cyclical-ritual” event that has many new artistic and other experiments. This event is not just stored in memory but also physically in archives and websites. Memory brings up a comparison between the current festivals and those that came before, especially with theater critics who return to it annually. Therefore, the critics use recurring imagery and arguments year after year to describe the festival throughout the years. This clearly shows the festival’s reception as a “memory machine,” in Carlson’s terms, which points to the critics’ horizon of expectations as an interpretive community, which remains pretty constant vis-à-vis the event, despite the changing repertoire from year to year. Cyclically, the festival’s reception moves throughout the years along two more or less constant axes. The first axis is the motion between “quality theater”

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and “other theater.” The second axis is a motion between “art theater” and “political theater.” The two axes are sometimes crossed in criticism, and separation is for analytical purposes alone. The axes “quality” versus “other” issue raises the question of whether one can talk about “quality other theater” simultaneously and how it can be identified. Generally, judges and critics that side with “quality theater” in effect exalt the classical principles of Western theater, especially of the mainstream, and are suspicious of innovations and the expansion of artistic boundaries. Those who side with “other theater,” in contrast, are more tolerant of trial and error processes and are willing to take hardship and failure, sometimes making due with interesting and bold choices even if the greater scheme is still not perfect. The other axis moves between conceptions of “art for art’s sake” and “socially engaged political art,” usually in a left-wing understanding. There is a partial correspondence between the two axes, so that those who side with “quality theater” usually exalt the autonomy of art, and those who side with “other theater” usually want “quality theater” to offer an alternative theatrical language through which to formulate a political statement regarding the burning questions of the day (usually the Israeli-Palestinian conflict). However, some of the critics are interested in traditional theater that has a distinct political statement, and some side with experimental theater that is isolated from, or at least does not directly deal with, the political content of the day. This chapter deals with three foci of reception: the jury, theater criticism in the media, and characteristics of the audience. I begin with a theoretic introduction regarding the term “postdramatic,” through which festival reception, competition judgment, and the audience are examined. Afterward, I deal with the judgment and reception of the 1981 festival as a test case, and then in that light, I will highlight developments that took place in festival judgment and media criticism along the two axes described above. I end the chapter with two more points: the audience’s social characteristics and Acco’s orientalist images in the eyes of the critics.

The Festival’s Reception through the Postdramatic The two axes (“quality versus other” and “artistic versus political”) and their interweaving can be understood through Hans-Thies Lehmann’s (2006) term

Festival Reception: Judgment, Criticism, Audience

“postdramatic theater.” The distinction between “dramatic” and “postdramatic” may explain the opposing expectations of judges and theater critics and the way that they perceived Acco Festival in particular and the medium of theater in general. Postdramatic theater is a historical and theoretic term designated especially for phenomenas, artists, and theater performances from the sixties onward that deepened and enhanced anti-Aristotelian tendencies that sprang up earlier in the twentieth century. It deals with artists such as Jerzy Grotowski, Peter Brook, Ariane Mnouchkine, Robert Wilson, and Tadeusz Kantor. The postdramatic is partially congruent with postmodern theater, but because the postdramatic focuses mainly on the language of theater and less on wider social and cultural contexts, it includes both modernist examples of sixties alternative theater and postmodern performances of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Here, the “post” signifies “beyond drama” and especially beyond written text and the spoken word, which in conventional theater is the most significant element, the one to which all other theatrical elements are subordinate. Postdramatic theater severs itself from two important elements of drama: the representation of a fictional world and a linear structure of time. In other words, the postdramatic eschews the customary semiotic conception according to which a performance is made up of sign systems that signify a fictional world. Therefore, the time structure of the action on the stage is not linear-Aristotelian. Postdramatic theater is based on the presence of the actor, his body, motion, and voice, and the physical and material presence of the rest of the elements (sets, lighting, props, sound, etc.). This is a move from the semiotic to the phenomenological, from a representation to the here and now. It means a move from a spectating action of sign deciphering and conferring meaning on a fictional world to a sensual conception raising different associations and eschewing clear and coherent meaning. Lehmann compares it to the experience that forms between the analyst and the patient in psychoanalysis: Here everything depends on not understanding immediately. Rather one’s perception has to remain open for connections, correspondences and clues at completely unexpected moments, perhaps casting what was said earlier in a completely new light. Thus, meaning remains in principle postponed. Minor and insignificant details are registered

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exactly because in their immediate non-significance they may turn out to be significant for the discourse of the analysand. In a similar way the spectator of postdramatic theatre is not prompted to process the perceived instantaneously but to postpone the production of meaning (semiosis) and to store the sensory impressions with “evenly hovering attention.” (2006, 87) “Evenly hovering attention” as a spectator experience is not just aesthetic and therapeutic, it is also distinctly political. For Lehman (2006, 175), “the political” is everywhere and is in constant process, and power is not reserved for an elite that can be unequivocally signified and acted against. Power is defused in a micro-physically expanding web. “Therefore, political conflicts increasingly elude intuitive perception and cognition and consequently scenic representation.” Political theater can no longer deal with “problems of the hour,” represent “oppressed people,” and discuss political content on stage, since the difference between those with power and the powerless cannot be clearly signified. Therefore, political theater can only subvert and deconstruct political discourse and show how it establishes itself authoritatively. In other words, “it is not through the direct thematization of the political that theatre becomes political but through the implicit substance and critical value of its mode of representation” (178). The deconstruction of theater representation is a political act of exception through breaking the boundaries of customary laws and norms. In Lehmann’s words (178), “Theatre as aesthetic behavior is unthinkable without the infringement of prescriptions, without transgression.” Political theater, according to Lehmann, does not need to represent a fictional world and its “political” content, but rather it “exposes the body of a performer in its temporality, the themes of the oldest theatre traditions reappear, albeit certainly in a new light: enigma, death, decline, parting, old age, guilt, sacrifice, tragedy and Eros” (181). Moving away from representation and linearity toward the visual, the corporeal, and the material, then, is a distinctly political act. Lehmann calls it “the politics of perception” that comes from “an aesthetics of response-ability.” As opposed to spectatorship and consumption of media, especially television, which transforms the events of the day,

Festival Reception: Judgment, Criticism, Audience

including disasters, into aesthetic images and mass products of consumption, postdramatic political theater suggests a different conception with no representation. It is a sensual experience of shock following exception, transgression, and the breaking of taboos on stage. It compels the spectator to responsibility and moral response that illuminates the rift between personal experience and perception of the image after mass media. Thus, on the one hand, Lehmann saves postdramatic theater from the danger of “socially-isolated formalist theater,” and on the other hand, he extricates himself from superficial “political theater” that deals with messages and representations of the oppressed, which could be appropriated and reified by the entertainment industry of late capitalism. The term postdramatic is new and began being used only in the beginning of the twenty-first century, but it relates to artistic phenomena linked to the early twentieth century avant-garde, the first wave of alternative theater in the sixties, and the postmodern performance of the late twentieth century. These phenomena undoubtedly influenced the artists of Acco Festival, as reflected in their performances, and therefore some of the festival’s repertoire can be seen as falling under the wide title of “the postdramatic.” Furthermore, in my mind, the terms “the politics of perception” and “the aesthetics of responsibility” focus the gaze on the audience’s act of spectating the postdramatic performance and therefore reveal not only the critics’ and judges’ interpretation of the festival’s reception but also the audience’s interpretation. Following Lehmann, we can understand that the tensions between “quality” and “other” and between “political” and “artistic” in the festival’s reception are derived from some of the judges’ and critics’ horizons of expectations for dramatic theater versus some of the artists and critics who support theater that can retroactively be called “postdramatic.” As we have seen in Chapter One and Chapter Two, a not insignificant part of the repertoire is text-based and conventionally constructed and sometimes even features a political thematic that represents the oppressed, in Lehmann’s terms. Therefore, in this chapter, the focus will be on different performances that tend to the postdramatic and their complex reception.

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I will begin with the words of writer A.B. Yehoshua looking at the first festival through a conception of the postdramatic, summarizing the tensions and subjects that have accompanied the festival’s reception throughout the years. As chairman of the jury (alongside actress Hanna Maron and academic David Alexander), Yehoshua (1980) published his impressions after the event. He was impressed with the young audience and with the festival’s organization and lamented the noticeable lack of institutional theater people at the event. He was thrilled with the actors, “I had the feeling of a different generation of actors. . . . I would even say they had a different physiognomy . . . for the first time, I felt that this Israeli melting pot is still producing variations” (8). His enthusiasm continued when he noticed actors “really giving themselves” and their ability to do “painful things . . . unreservedly. In holiness.” He stressed their abilities of movement, voice, and speaking, and he saw them as completely new. The weak points, to him, were the content and especially the verbal texts. As a writer and playwright, he was sensitive to the written and spoken word, criticizing the performances’ low quality and praising performances that tried, unsuccessfully, to adapt literary text to the stage. He added that he missed humor in the performances, and that most performances were missing a direct political touch. These words, written early on, presented the complexity of the festival’s reception in the relation between dramatic and postdramatic theater. On the one hand, Yehoshua admired the actors’ work, bodies, and total dedication, carried out in holiness and pain. Physical presence and examining the boundaries of the body are distinct postdramatic features. Yehoshua’s politics of perception places this physical presence in the ideological Zionist discourse on the “exilic Jewish” body versus the body of the “new Jew”; therefore, he was excited about the young performers’ “other physiognomy,” a function of the “melting pot” that genetically, socially, and culturally melts Jews of different backgrounds. It is unsurprising that Yehoshua identifies these two characters above all—holy dedication (a mental character) and “other physiognomy” (a physical character), since in Zionist discourse, the “new Jew” is willing to devotedly fight for the homeland and therefore also has a healthy, fine, and strong body in keeping with that of the model of biblical heroes and the bodily models of European nationalism (A. Shapira 1999). On the other hand, Yehoshua complained about the low level of the written text and the lack of “political” thematic, distinct characteristics of

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dramatic and political theater in their traditional senses. In Lehmann’s terms, the weakness was in fact in Yehoshua’s perception when he failed to register that the performers’ physical presence and totality replaced the centrality of the written text, as evidenced by the powerful sensual experience he had just undergone. Furthermore, the lack of “political content” contradicted Yehoshua’s own words that placed the performers’ bodies in the Zionist discourse concerning the melting pot. As Lehmann said, the old political themes reemerged through the exposure of the performer’s body. “The political,” then, appeared not only in the “messages” of the festival’s repertoire but also in the performers’ total devotion and other physiognomy, as opposed to the well-known actors of institutional theater. But the alternative offered in the performance in relation to mainstream theater was perceived by Yehoshua conservatively as an effect of the Israeli melting pot, a central image in the electoralization and socialization of Zionist discourse in creating a new Jew.

Reception of the 1981 Festival: “The Festival Exceeded Customary Criteria” I have decided to deal with the reception of the 1981 festival through “the postdramatic”—judges’ reasoning, criticism, and artists’ reaction. This case study tangibly clarifies the two tensions around which festival reception has been built throughout the years. A group of Jerusalem artists of an interdisciplinary and visual performance orientation founded the Cabin Theatre that year, and later the School of Visual Theatre and the Interdisciplinary Arena, and was dominant in the competition, in effect, fashioning the festival repertoire’s “postdramatic” line. Most of the performances focused on nonverbal elements: movement and the dancer’s body, props (mainly puppets), space design, sound and music, shifting written text, and Aristotelian narrative from central to secondary and finally totally absent from some of the performances.

The Jury: “No Production Worthy of First Prize” The jury was made up of literature scholar professor Gershon Shaked, actress Pnina Gery, and Dudi Ma'ayan. The jury (jury minutes October 10, 1981) “unfortunately did not see a production worthy of First Prize,” awarding Second

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Prize (IS 9,000 for each production) to Roni Pinsker’s Man/Large Puppet, since “the crew managed to anthropomorphize the prop and convey an emotional message,” and to Woman from the Earth by Eti Reznick, who was commended for having dealt well with the text and the music, and for her parodic gaze while conveying a feminist contemporary message from Jewish tradition. Third Prize was shared by three performances (IS 6,000 each): Hadas Ofrat’s The Parasite for brilliant visual ideas, Shmuel Hasfari’s Black Chuppah for use of space and interesting theatrical means, and Ronit Chacham’s Man to Man for dealing with a burning social-ethnic issue by using interesting theatrical language. It was noted that the work was not yet finished and that the prize was meant to encourage the group’s work. The jury missed a well-written drama and “did not find new and original stage adaptations of extant literary texts.” With several of the performances awarded, such as The Parasite, it noted that the visual aspect was brilliant and impressive but based on “a problematic textual foundation.” Similarly, it felt that Black Chuppah strengthened “the visual sides” over weakly fashioned dialogues. The jury criticized most of the performances’ text level as low and problematic, noting with negative tones an ignoring of social and political subjects, and that is why they did not award First Prize. The jury expected not just “other” aesthetic, but its use for a definitive political stance. The jury therefore judged the repertoire with the criteria of dramatic theater which not fit the style and genre they were taking in, i.e., postdramatic theater. Besides the usual prizes, the jury awarded Ami and Rachel Berkman’s Cocooner Group a Special Prize of NIS 5,000. The jury’s (jury minutes October 10, 1981) reasoning illuminated its vacillation between admiration of the visual side and a narrow understanding of dramatic theater, “This production exceeds the jury’s usual criteria in regard to this kind of festival, but this is undoubtedly one of the more artistically interesting pieces it has seen.” It is a performance with no representation of a fictional world, plot or characters, but theater whose protagonist is a prop: geometric shapes that create abstract situations in movement and sound. A frame divided by nine equal windows, in which are balls and pieces of cloth, moving to the beat of electronic music and fashioning abstract relationships. There is no verbal text and the operators aren’t seen but for a very short instance. The ambivalent relation to this performance illustrates how much of the jury’s experience was powerfully sensual, on the one hand, and how trapped it was in its conception rejecting the postdramatic, on the other.

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It seems that Gershon Shaked, as literary scholar and chairman of the jury, led this approach preferring the verbal over other performance elements. Shaked (1981) published his impressions and his reasoning as judge in an essay under the provocative title Other than What? Like most critics, he views the term “other theater” as vague and agrees that it is unclear who fits under this title or whom it opposes. Still, Shaked distinguishes between two major trends in the Israeli “other theater” of his time: social-documentary theater, whose main representative is Nola Chilton, and stylized group-narrative theater based on myth and legend in workshop-type work. Shaked examines the festival’s performances against this axis, arriving at the conclusion that most shows belong to group theater. He claims that the main weakness of “other theater” of this kind is its relation to and treatment of text. He sees the play and the written word as “the main elements” and laments the fact that the festival decided to put “secondary elements,” such as props, puppets, and body movement at center stage. His approach attests to a hierarchical, conservative conception that fits dramatic theater and is hardly surprising when it comes out of the mouth of a literary scholar. He criticizes group theater for building performances out of the actors’ interpersonal and therapeutic dynamics and therefore failing to make a connection with and be comprehensible to the audience, which was not present during the process. The workshop process, interpersonal work, and lack of concrete comprehensibility are aspects of postdramatic theater that are more important than the centrality of the written text in traditional dramatic theater. Unwillingness to accept the dominance of the postdramatic in the festival is rooted, among other things, in understanding of the relation between the festival and the mainstream. Shaked (1981) explains that “other theater’s role is to open a new possibility for professional theater: to bring it slightly raw material so that it can make its own mark on it.” In effect, Shaked sees “other theater” as a limited tool meant to aid institutional theater, perceived by him as “professional” and hence of higher quality. “Other theater” is only that which can be appropriated by the center and serves its artistic needs and, no less importantly, marketing needs. In other words, at the end of the day, the development of nonverbal means that postdramatic is supposed to serve mainstream theater, which is dramatic in the traditional and conservative sense. This conception does not allow “other theater” an existence independent of the benefit that it brings to the

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center. It is a conception that ignores a larger view of culture that posits diversity and dialogue between the center and its outsides. However, despite Shaked’s reservations about group-process-based performances, he did not ignore the powerful sensual experience he seems to have had in the festival, and therefore he sees great potential for “other theater” in performances that center around a puppet and prop: A very interesting interweaving of the medieval non-acting tradition (where the actor is representing an idea) and the modern theatrical tradition (Stanislavsky, Strasberg). If you find a complex synthesis of these elements, perhaps you will find a new theatrical way. (Shaked 1981) He continues along these lines and praises the performance Man/Large Puppet, seeing it as an experiment nearing “other theater” that could be called “postdramatic”: Conveying the prop’s emotions allowed exposing movement and primary emotions, which human behavior is still apparently unable to discover by power of its own body . . . it seems the designers managed to achieve this small (big) thing cleanly and completely. And perhaps opened the way for other, really other, theater. (1981) Shaked concludes that otherness at the festival belongs to the audience itself, many of whom are young people, and also what he calls a bourgeois audience which clamors for a new revelation of other Israeli theater. Spectators “fought for tickets and [tried] to ‘sneak’ into the field-of-culture rather than the soccer field.” He answers the title question: Other than what? Other than the violent reality, other than rudeness, other than Israel which you sometimes feel is so reduced until this kind of event [Acco Festival] comes by and reminds you that there is also—“other theater.” (1981) “The political,” then, appears in the larger event as a cultural and theatrical alternative to the mainstream, and young people’s enthusiasm for it proves that.

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Shaked does not position this enthusiasm as a rejection of what is done at the center of the theater field but conservatively praises his social group as a cultural elite keeping the fire of “beautiful old Israel” alive. He distinguishes (Bourdieu 1984) between the audience and other cultural groups only alluded to through the “soccer field” image, employed against the background of the ethnic tensions that arose during the 1981 election (Chetrit 2010) between Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Jews, its meaning clear.

Criticism: “The Stranger, More Mysterious, Less Comprehensible and More Ritualistic—the Better” The horizon of expectations of the critics as interpretive community is similar to that of the jury. The criteria leading the critics’ essays are of well-written drama alongside sociopolitical thematics. Most of the critics examine the festival as a finished product, like the mainstream, ignoring the fact that the process of searching for and fashioning of an “other” theatrical language does not necessarily and automatically lead to high quality results. Other critics offer to examine, explain, and mediate between spectator, artist, and artistic process, not just criticize finished pieces. Most critics cite the lack of performances with a clear sociopolitical message, “part of the essence of other theater needs to be the spirit of rebellion and fight, without which the festival is lackluster,” asserted Boaz Evron (1981). Other fierce criticism has been leveled at artists’ lack of dealing with the written text, “The quality of the texts was one of the selection committee’s failures,” asserted Michael Handelzaltz (October 21, 1981). Sarit Fuchs (1981) was surprised that most artists write their own texts, wondering “But how many Hanoch Levins and Nisim Alonis can be born overnight?” Therefore, there were several critics who favorably accepted the jury’s decision that “none was worthy of First Prize” (Handelzaltz October 19, 1981). In contrast, Emmanuel Bar Kadma angrily asserted: How is it that in a festival that by definition is devoted to experimental, exploratory theater there could not be found one who could meet the criteria of the gentlemen and ladies of the jury? Who did they expect to award the prize to—the National Theatre, with Lawrence Olivier playing Shakespeare? (1981)

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The question of otherness in the festival and its relation to the mainstream troubles the critics. Throughout the years, Handelzaltz (October 19, 1981) has led the “quality” versus “other” line, clearly siding with the former and treating experimentalism with irony, “The stranger, more mysterious, less comprehensible, and more ritualistic—the better.” He was supposedly conscious of his own handicap when writing about Kav Group’s Spring/Coveted Tomb, “As I am not Japanese, I have no way of relating to this production” (October 21, 1981). However, it is unclear if this was a serious remark or sarcastic ridicule. More moderately, Shosh Avigal (1981) asked, “What exactly will they be giving for an award here—for a performance’s professional wholeness—or on its ‘otherness’? . . . Must other theater always dally in certain amateurishness?” She lamented the fact that there was no “other theater coming from inside the institution, from artists feeling suffocated there, seeking an outlet to do things differently,” concluding that “the value of marginal art festivals is in pushing the margins closer to the center, interweaving the areas and changing proportions and criteria.” This relation to the center was also taken up by Bar Kadma (1981), “the real justification for this kind of festival—is if it really influences theater life in Israel.” Handelzaltz (October 21, 1981) also agreed with the festival’s role as serving the center, claiming, “The festival’s test . . . is what happens in the time of activity between festivals.” Performances offer a spectating experience different than that of repertory theater, and in Lehmann’s terms, a spectating experience of evenly hovering attention that appeals to the sensual and associative, rejecting a stable, coherent meaning. Critics have perceived it as a weakness deriving from the lack of well-written text, political thematics, and the customary production processes of the mainstream. In this sense, criticism has served the conception of the center, for instance in the development of original Hebrew drama, not the search for the medium’s nonverbal visual language. Criticism has dealt mainly with the finished product, without understanding that “other theater,” by definition, cannot automatically supply quality outcomes, and even more importantly demands new criteria for its deciphering.

The Artists’ Letter: The Jury and Critics Must Have an Understanding of “Other Theater” In light of the jury’s decision, positioning traditional dramatic theater as the benchmark, some of the artists, including those who had won awards, penned a

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public letter criticizing the jury’s approach (as it arose from its decision not to award a First Prize and its stance that there was not enough treatment of local problems). The Train Theatre, which produced several of the performances, published the critical letter, and its leading spokesman was Hadas Ofrat (Ofrat 1981). Other signatories included Mario Cotliar, Alina Ashbel, and Michael Schuster (Train Theatre members), and they were joined by Shmuel Hasfari (Black Chuppah) and Rachel Berkman (Cocooner). Their first claim attacked the competition, the very existence of which is incompatible with the character of “other theater,” “Instead of a communal group spirit . . . we experienced an atmo�sphere of hostility, gossip, and schadenfreude,” Ofrat told journalist Amos Oren, adding, “We recognize the fact that the competition dimension is good for festival marketing but it . . . lets in an atmosphere of negative tension” (Oren 1981). The second argument was pointed against the training and experience of the judges themselves, who were unable to examine the stylized and mostly visual theater, i.e., the postdramatic theater that was revealed in most of the festival’s performances, and which is based on visual and nonverbal values such as prop and movement, sound and body. “There weren’t any people there with anything to do with dance or aspects of visual art” (Oren 1981), Ofrat railed, giving an example, “The Cocooner Group . . . was not given a prize because the jury said it did not fit the criteria. So what is other theatre? Mainstream theatre criteria?” He exposed the center as the body creating and constituting its own margins, allowing minimal boundaries for the term “other theater.” Ofrat, in effect, demonstrated how removed the jury’s conception was from the artists’ conception, expressed mainly in visual theater, and which can be called “postdramatic.” The third argument deals with the judges’ and critics’ argument that the repertoire lacked political thematics. “Are the Jewish-Palestinian problem and the problem of ethnic integration the only themes on the agenda? How a human being looks, how he behaves, and how he treats the other—these are fatal existential (and hence, social) questions, no less than the burning questions of the hour” (Ofrat 1981). Ofrat expands the boundaries of the political, similarly to the expansion of the boundaries of theater, highlighting again the jury’s limited worldview. “The political,” according to Ofrat, is not necessarily connected to the representation of the oppressed on stage but to the transformation between man and puppet, body and inanimate object, and from the formulation of a new

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visual language that questions man and his existence, which are no less political than a direct appeal to current affairs that rise anew. While political theater was perceived by the jury and the critics as a well-written drama on current affairs, the political in mostly-visual “postdramatic” theater stems from the principally formal language of theater itself and from questions related to the medium, such as the relation between operator/actor and operated/puppet; complex political questions on human liberty arise in an associative and sensual manner. Ofrat concludes that the judges’ and critics’ criteria need to change: Not only the artists and audience need to understand other theater . . . but the judges of the jury . . . and theater critics (where were all the representatives of repertory theater?), some of whom openly admitted to lacking sensitivity, understanding, interest, and sometimes even knowledge, in the subjects and processes they so mercilessly judged. (1981) In Lehmann’s terms, the argument between judgment and criticism clearly points to the boundaries of “the politics of perception” and the tension between the “dramatic” and “postdramatic” criteria. Furthermore, what seems to be socially unengaged, formalist theater is based on “an aesthetics of responsibility” that encourages thinking about the political in the wider and more profound sense of the term.

The Jury: Perception Changes The professional and personal identity of the jury’s judges and especially their positioning within the field of theater and culture changed throughout the festival’s thirty years and therefore so did the criteria for examining the repertoire, i.e., the politics of its perception of “quality,” “other,” “artistic,” and “political.” During the first decade, judges came primarily from the mainstream and had no significant link to “other theater.” For example, there were artists and actors like Hanna Maron, Moti Kirchenbaum, Edna Shavit, Yossef Karmon, Miriam Keini, Yonah Elian, and writers and scholars like A.B. Yehoshua, Moshe Shamir, Gershon Shaked, and Sasson Somech. It is unsurprising, then, that the importance and centrality of the text were significant in judging a performance’s quality, as well as sometimes the expectation of “political engagement.” In the

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second decade, we find artists from outside the mainstream, well-known artists with links to theater and even festival “alumni” such as Shmuel Hasfari, Gabi Eldor, Gil Alon, Tali Yitzhaki, Shosha Goren, Judy Kupferman, Tzahi Becker, Yonatan Cherchi, Yigal Azrati, and Sinai Peter. The 1994 festival was unique in this context, as it was made up of female “other theater” artists: Smadar Ya'aron, Navah Zuckerman, Dina Blai, and Ruth Kenner. The performances that won cash prizes were distinctly postdramatic: And So We Continue by Martin Mugliner and Zik Group’s 1:10 the Concrete Senses Performance. And So We Continue was created by a group of young people and deals with their experiences of disappointments, loneliness, death, and violence in movement images and loud rock music. A translucent screen separated the audience and the stage, behind which performers move with broken movements, using props behind a rock band playing at high volume. Zik Group’s 1:10 the Concrete Senses Performance took place in a closed space and included water, fire, and earth (clay for the making of vases) accompanied by slides, video, and music. On large stones sits a potter making vases, building and destroying shapes and the guiding principle, “objects operated by performers and undergoing transformations” (Ben Shaul 2005, 24). The performers are not portraying characters, they are producing and creating images in event-time and a space adapted ad hoc to the performance. In the third decade of the festival, a rather significant part of the judges are from “other theater” or have an alternative conception, and some were even creators in the festivals, such as Marit Ben Yisrael, Ravid Dovra, Hadas Ofrat, and Ya'el Inbar. In the year 2004, the judges Ophira Henig, Hadassa Shani, Oded Zehavi, Riad Massrawa, and Smadar Ya'aron awarded First Prize to the performance Cloning by Yaniv Shenzer, a theatrical event without text that offers a mostly postdramatic experience. The performance deals with “creation” through the cunning technology of genetic engineering. This is performance art with no words, taking place in the corridors and crannies of the Posta, a space designed as a cloning lab. The audience walks through simultaneous events, and there is no separation between spectators and performers. Along the first corridor, mounds of plaster body parts, fingers, and hands are revealed, achieving a nightmarish Holocaust feel. Lab workers wearing coats and frightening animal masks frenetically move along the corridors.

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In another space, lab workers play, hanging metal letters and numbers, alluding to creation with the word in Judaism, or creation through numbers and formulas by science. In the background, there is electronic music with a mechanical beat. Finally, the audience reaches a back room, where there is revealed an Indonesian orchestra playing traditional tools, and within the audience, against the backdrop of the music, a nude man and woman walk toward each other, Adam and Eve, toward an act of love as opposed to everything that was presented before. In the parodic ending number, a puppet that looks like Dolly the cloned sheep opens its mouth and sings with a human voice. Despite the lack of a plot, the segments’ order structures a narrative process beginning with the lab nightmare of human cloning by a hybrid creature and ends in an act of love by a man and a woman, testament to a positive message despite the performance’s overall apocalyptic experience. This choice again raised discontent from the critics, decrying the festival’s distancing from the mainstream of theater. The win “was received with sympathy on the one hand and harsh criticism on the other. Many claimed that a festival that is fundamentally a theater festival is growing further and further from theatre” (Z. Shohat 2004). A debate broke out about the competition’s role, and there was a suggestion to award two prizes: the first according to the category of the prominent theatrical event and the second to be awarded to theater productions whose center of gravity would be text-based; since different performances “are very different from each other and are diverse genre-wise, it seems that the demand to compare between them is almost impossible.”48 In other words, make the distinction between “dramatic” and “postdramatic” theater in the awarding of prizes. Despite the conservatism that still characterizes the judges, festival judgment seems to have come a long way, and what had seemed unrelated to the theater medium at its beginning achieved a certain place and recognition alongside the dominant textual conception of the mainstream.

Criticism between the Poles Throughout the years, the influence of the conception of some of the critics on the festival’s artists was great, with the critics demanding well-written plays 48 InYudilovitch(October5,2004):http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-2985976,00.

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with political themes like in the mainstream (see Chapter Two). The preeminent representative of this conception is Ha'aretz critic Michael Handelzaltz. Handelzaltz has been a prominent and influential theater critic from the seventies onward. Throughout the festival, he fashioned the dichotomized thinking on “quality theater” versus “other theater,” siding with quality theater along mainstream criteria. Thus, under the tenures of Tom Levy (1984–1985) and Eran Beniel (1988–1989), who stressed professionalism over “other theater,” Handelzaltz (1984) was satisfied and full of praise. He declared 1984 “the best Acco Festival” and wrote about Beniel’s period, “There were . . . performances that fit the criteria of ‘otherness’ without deteriorating into bad theater.” However, about Dudi Ma’ayan’s period, alternative in character, Handelzaltz concluded (1995), “People with not enough enterprise and talent . . . were given a stage,” because artistic direction lacked “professional and artistic criteria.” Ma’ayan’s policy as artistic director, to “breach the boundaries of theater,” opened the floodgates to “charismatic and esoteric charlatan” artists and to “empty rituals.” He concluded that “perhaps it is time to confess that we have a festival, but this is not a theater festival” alone but also a touristic event. Following twenty years of being a spectator at the festival, Handelzaltz (2000) claimed that “the theatrical portion of Acco Festival has been over several years ago and forms no challenge or interest to a work of any importance.” Amir Orian is an important representative of the opposite approach which stresses the need for “other theater” as an alternative to the mainstream and as an entity dedicated to an “oppositional” approach to culture and society from the left. Orian began his way as an actor and, since the early eighties until 1993, published theater reviews; he founded The Room Theatre (1985) and created the “open circle” method, influenced by the second wave of alternative theater in the West (Shem-Tov 2012). Orian (1982) did not find in the festival an experimental theatrical language serving fierce alternative messages with what he called “the pain of birth.” Elsewhere, Orian (1985) said “We need a lab, not festivals, but there’s no one to talk to,” and he (1986) diagnosed that “the system castrates as usual” and that “it gets dumber with the years,” concluding “you can feel the fear of the fascinating state of being other.” Therefore, in striking opposite to Handelzaltz, Orian (1984) saw Tom Levy’s period as “institutional and closed management. Theater is defined here almost like it is in Habima . . . the festival’s shows are amazingly conservative.” On the Eran Beniel period, Orian

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(1988) said, “it seems that Acco has entered the mainstream once and for all, and will live there forever,” and he provocatively claimed that the festival is “blooming cultural escapism alongside political toeing of the government line.” Orian (1990) also referenced the mode of criticism the festival is worthy of, “It is irrelevant to criticize a performance in Acco as if it were a Habima play. I have done so in the past but have broken the habit now.” He claimed that performances need to be viewed in the unique context of the festival as a comprehensive event, which creates other spectating conditions: remoteness from home and an intimate meeting with the artists. He recommended personal or academic reporting and dialogue with the artists, not assessment and judgment as is customary with newspaper criticism. Orian’s relation to the festival’s “political” was more complex than that of other critics who stress the presence or lack of political themes in the repertoire. For instance, the 1982 festival, which took place during the Lebanon War and was full of performances that dealt with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, failed to impress him. Orian (1982) perceived the term “festival” as celebration and awards, but now with critical and innovative dimensions—hence, the festival appropriates the artists’ work, which may be very sincere for them, but the event “mainly serves the patron who gave the money.” Like the conception of Wilmar Sauter (2007), pointing to celebration as a significant element of all festivals, Orian treated the festival as a comprehensive theatrical event, not just as the sum of its performances, dwelling on the sociocultural living experience of the festival. Theater historian Postlewait (1991) stated that in reconstruction of a theatrical event, a large amount of documents does not automatically attest to its centrality with spectators, and so critics’ focusing on the in-competition performances and their sociopolitical messages is not necessarily the experience of the festival as a whole. The average spectator only sees a small part of the in-competition performances and spends the most time in the space of outside performances, magicians, dancing, and performance art. Therefore, in Orian’s (1982) eyes, the festival is “a celebration for the commercialized accepted theater and the fringes of Israeli entertainment. . . . The inside events here [i.e., the in-competition performances] are an excuse for the craftsmen fair celebration outside,” i.e., the larger context of the festival as theatrical event manages to defang the competition repertoire’s sociopolitical edge. The two critical poles represented by Handelzaltz and Orian continued into the festival’s third decade. For instance, the 2003 festival stressed the

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interweaving of experimental artistry and political engagement, especially with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Institutional critics had their doubts. Shai Bar-Ya'akov (2003) claimed that “one of the main features of Acco Festival this year was a return to distinctly oppositional political theater with harsh, subversive messages” and titled his essay provocatively “Festival Of Shahids”, with the subhead, “Acco Festival performances this year highlighted Palestinians as victims rebelling against Israeli tyranny,” and he wrote that “the performances’ tone is sometimes radicalized and manipulative.” Ben Ami Feingold (2003) saw “much politics and almost no soul” in the festival, claiming the performances that dealt with the conflict were “clearly propagandistic,” concluding that “people here do not understand the difference between political theater and propaganda theater.” As opposed to the institutional and professional critics of the larger-circulation newspapers, Einat Yakir (2003), a young writer and translator, published a review in Time Out that was favorable to the festival performance’s political orientation but located the problem in the inclusion of the political in a festival that is fundamentally a celebration. Like Orian, she perceived the festival as a comprehensive theatrical event, diagnosing the complexity between the content of the performances and the event’s character, “You enter the sheltered site, you watch an alert performance that criticizes the government/society, you clap and leave, accompanied against your will by the police, so that we can safely arrive at our authentic plate of hummus and good Arabic coffee.” She lamented that “the festival atmosphere . . . swallows theatrical-social radicalism and highlights the deep gap between optimistic fantasy and dour reality,” but concluded that “the worse the situation in Israel gets, it sees that Acco Festival’s importance as a subversive enclave rises.” While other critics have been taken aback by the performances’ political straightforwardness, Yakir using adjectives like propagandistic, radicalized, and manipulative revealed apprehension that the festival celebration defangs these performances politically, and she signified a young, other, and oppositional direction for criticism.

The Audience: “A Branch of Dizengoff” in Acco The festival’s audience can be divided into three main groups: “tastemakers”—theater and art people from the center, young spectators interested

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in non-mainstream theater, and the local Acco audience.49 Between the taste-makers and the youngsters, there is a distinction (Bourdieu 1984), i.e., a clear hierarchical distinction, between the audience from the center and the (Mizrahi-Jewish and Arab) Acco audience, highlighting the fact that the theater is meant for the community of theater-goers and its young members who have the cultural capital to experience and decipher “other theater,” as opposed to the residents of Acco. Therefore, from its very inception, the festival was a framework and encounter of the Israeli theater community. “You can see a lot of faces from Kasit, The White Gallery, and Tzavta, from the Cinematheque, from Shmil and the corresponding institutions in Jerusalem,” including “Knesset Members and the managers of institutional theaters,” Bar Kadma (1981) described, concluding “Acco has become an important place to see and be seen.” Boaz Evron saw the “nice and polite youth of Israel,” was impressed by their alternative dress, and stated: I did not notice . . . even one yarmulke. This is another Israel, with the atmosphere of the left-wing youth movements, the educated classes, a liberal and full-of-life atmosphere, which makes you feel . . . a connection and identification with this bit of humanity, with whom you speak the same language. (October 19, 1984) As opposed to Evron, who is so enthusiastic about the young spectators of his own ethno-class standing, Shosh Avigal (1984) called the audience of the center “people who have occupied Acco” and observed “the mostly Ashkenazi audience . . . young and older people from the center, the third Israel: neither religious nor nationalist; a branch of Dizengoff.”50 She used clear ethnic and geographical terms and rhetorically paraphrased the term “second 49 Because the last chapter deals extensively with the host community, I do not treat

the Acco audience here. In short, this audience mainly takes in the outside events, enjoying the colorful celebration. This audience takes in the inside performances only rarely, usually at an Arab-speaking performances or if an amateur production of locals is performing. 50 Dizengoff Street is a major thoroughfare in central Tel Aviv, named after Tel Aviv’s first mayor, Meir Dizengoff.

Festival Reception: Judgment, Criticism, Audience

Israel.”51 However, she felt ill at ease and stated “Acco—with no illusions—is a branch of Dizengoff, so it’s hard to call this festival a real Israeli festival.” She claimed Arabs look at it “askance. They are alien to the celebration. For them it is ‘another settlement,’ rape with the force of culture,” adding that “they [the Arabs] are not interested in the third Israel and the festival’s Peace Now profile.” To illustrate this, she described the impatience of left-winger Yossef Mondy with the Arab children who were noisy next to his performance American Mysteria between A and B. The young audience is praised mainly when there is an adverse relation between the repertoire’s low quality in the critics’ eyes and the exuberance of younger audiences to take in performances and take part in a festival. Handelzaltz (September 30, 1983) described the audience as different than the regular subscribers of repertory theater, as impatient but wanting to view things that are not necessarily fully complete, so that demand outweighs supply. “The real commendation at the festival should be given to the audience, which according to preliminary numbers outnumbered previous festivals’ audiences.” Miri Paz (October 18, 1981) concluded that “someone should come up with an award for this gay ‘happening,’ for the large audience of theater-lovers in Israel.” Fried (October 4, 1987) describes the young Tel Avivi spectators in military terms, “Tel Hai is occupied, Acco is theirs, even Haifa is threatened, and its film festival is on its way to total institutionalization, i.e., the obvious settlement of that center-of-the-Carmel Tel Avivi-ness.” His use of the terms “occupation” and “settlement” to describe the young Tel Avivi (Ashkenazi/left-wing) audience is supposedly ironic but reflects the feeling that Acco isn’t a host community that offers the festival a unique identity but rather a peripheral site occupied for the cultural purposes of the center. Fried goes on to cite seventeen-year-old Ido of Ramat Aviv: Habima and the Cameri Theatre bore even my grandparents, it’s all so musty and kitschy. The truth is that I prefer the cinema to theater but Acco has a good vibe [ . . . ] though the level seems catastrophic to me this year. (Fried October 4, 1987)

51 “Second Israel” is a Hebrew term referring to Israel’s social and economic periphery.

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From the standpoint of educational theater, Dan Urian (1991, 75) claims that “the festival’s greatest achievement is having become an effective curriculum of theatre education and the encouragement of a young audience, for the fostering of interest in theatre with teenagers.” Therefore, he suggests expanding the festival performances and repertory theater in the entire northern region, not just Acco. “Most importantly, [this suggestion] would make the curriculum given to younger audiences more interesting, since only good theatre can convince audiences of the intensity of the wonderful experience one can have at the theatre” (Urian 1991, 78). Erella Baron and Urian (1998, 96–97) furthered this argument, viewing youngsters as the festival’s “most important asset,” for whom the festival is “an important site of meeting and learning.” They conclude, “these spectators, in conversations among themselves and with us, are revealed as witty and refined critics who can assess the performances and learn from them, sometimes even mainly from the bad ones.” In other words, Acco is a “school of theater” not only for the young artists gaining experience and perhaps also recognition, but also for the young spectators who accumulate skills of critically spectating the art of theater, thus consolidating their cultural capital as part of the middle class that Avigal called “a branch of Dizengoff.”

“Knights, Napoleon and Hummus”: the City of Acco through Critics’ Eyes Critics gaze at and imagine Ancient Acco through orientalist images from Acco’s history. These images highlight the orient as an object of Western domination, with its superiority and self-definition, depending on the inferiority of the orient and its definition as other and different (Said 1979). “Knights, crusaders, and Napoleon” versus an orient that is simultaneously decadent, dirty, “exotic,” and with “authentic” hummus. “The people of the theatre conquered Acco, who even Napoleon failed to subjugate,” thus, with colonial formulation, Giora Manor (1980) humorously said about the first festival, intimating that the center (Tel Aviv) had “conquered” Acco, and was not, God forbid, in dialogue with it. In the year afterward, Manor mused that there is no better place for theater but “a Crusader citadel that even Napoleon couldn’t conquer, which was eventually turned into a prison and finally a madhouse” (1981). Bar Kadma (October 3, 1980) pronounced in a

Festival Reception: Judgment, Criticism, Audience

headline, “Festival under the Crusaders,” writing that he can hear “the rattling of Crusader armors,” and the years afterward, he even imagined that he could see Richard the Lionheart sending “warm regards from the Middle Ages” (Bar Kadma October 23, 1981). The Acco reflected in the criticism’s reporting is an ancient and riveting geographical-archeological space, and as Boaz Evron (1980) put it, “It is a delight . . . to stroll in the evening’s enchanted silence in the beautiful courtyard of the Jezzar Pasha Mosque.” His enchantment with the place was exotic but he failed to notice the worshippers. Alongside this exoticism we can also find the city’s decadence and neglect. Bar Kadma (1980) said, “I’m talking about plaster, whitewash, brooms.” Handelzaltz (October 21, 1981) had a similar impression, “the city was not cleaned, and the hygiene in the alley in front of the Crusader Halls was far from satisfactory.” Critics refer to the hummus restaurants owned by Arab residents near the festival’s gardens as producing “authentic” hummus, as opposed to industrial hummus that has been “converted to Judaism.” Daphna Hirsch and Ofra Tene (2013) have shown how hummus, originally a Palestinian food, was transformed into a national Israeli dish through its industrial marketing in the sixties and obfuscation of its Arab source. They claimed that in the eighties there was reversal, a dichotomous discourse about industrial-Israeli hummus, now perceived as cheap and of lower taste, versus “Arabic-authentic” hummus marketed with orientalist images. Therefore, it is unsurprising that in the eighties, critics were enthusiastic about Acco hummus, seen as opposed to the industrial hummus sold to Jews in Tel Aviv. Journalists extolled “the pleasure of eating real hummus” (Evron 1980). Hummus became a central image of the festival, even receiving a commendation, “you can eat here the best hummus south of Beirut and north of Cairo” (Bar Kadma 1981), and “countless plates of hummus and cold drinks” are guzzled “in a day and a half ” (Handelzaltz September 26, 1983). However, by the late eighties, the tone was completely reversed. Following the First Intifada critics were not so enthusiastic about “authentic” hummus. Avigal (1988) highlighted the lack of Jewish-Arabic dialogue by use of the hummus image, “Ancient Acco, an Arabic town, discovered the festival only through hummus. Restaurant owners and merchants got the memo and prepared in advance, the local audience is still absent.” Two years afterward, Avigal (1990) demonstrated the separation between the festival and political reality, saying, “The festival is like

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a bubble, a small self-contained world breathing theatre and hummus.” Before the 1991 festival, critic Amir Orian (1991) published a critical essay smashing certain truths about the festival under the title “The Myth of Hummus,” in which, among other things, he complained that the hummus is only as good as the audience’s hunger. Since then, hummus has become a negative image of institutional, fake “coexistence” between Jews and Arabs, in which it is clear who serves whom. In 2008, the satire Hummus, Fries, and Salad, which deals meta-theatrically with actors producing a performance in Acco, was raised out-of-competition. The site-specific performance took place in a hummus restaurant in Ancient Acco, and the Arab actors-waiters who served the audience their hummus demanded “the check” at the end from the Jewish audience. The image of hummus, therefore, was used in the third decade as hard-tostomach, critical, raw material regarding the complex relations between Jews and Arabs.

C H A P TE R

FIVE

Host Community: Policy and Resistance

You come here once a year . . . Dress like you’re in a left wing demonstration Shit and leave it for us to clean up (from Hummus, Fries, and Salad) Host community is an important term in festival research (Getz 2012) as one of the elements to use to examine the relation of the event and its goals with the site it takes place in and the audiences it is meant for. Local residents of the host community may be involved in production and may even volunteer out of local patriotism, but they can also be uninvolved, excluded from the decision-making center and feel alienation to it (Derrett 2004). The host community in Acco is ethnically, nationally, and economically diverse—Arab and Mizrahi-Jewish residents and immigrants from the former USSR. Therefore, the question arises: how much does festival policy take the host community and its cultural complexity into account? Though it proclaims to be “a festival of other theater” vis-à-vis the mainstream of the theater field, Acco Festival is socially unremarkable when compared to other theatrical institutions that are mostly controlled by the hegemonic group (Urian 2008). The festival was founded for the needs of the Israeli theater field, most of which operates in the greater Tel Aviv area. As already mentioned, the festival appeals to young and alternative artists outside the mainstream and is an artistic space for those to whom the doors of mainstream theater are closed. As elaborated in Chapter One, a struggle over the

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definition of “other theater” takes place between the older directors and the younger artists, but the social identity of most directors and artists alike is hegemonic, with both sides having little interest in the host community. Therefore, most of its directors, producers, and artists perceived it as beholden to narrow theatrical goals, as is written in the festival’s regulations, “The festival is meant for professional theatrical productions that are original and innovative by content, form and design and fit the conditions of the site.”52 This formulation of the festival’s goals stresses only the theater’s main goals and does not relate at all to Acco and the interrelation of its Jewish and Arabic residents. A formulation that emphasizes the “theatrical” and excludes the festival’s social-community goal can be found in its very manifesto, then. The formulators of its manifesto wished to ground it in universal professional criteria of content and quality. As I will argue, it is a logic that camouflages the festival’s distinct cultural bias in favor of the hegemonic group—the group from which its directors and target audience come from. Furthermore, reference to the host community within its repertoire in the context of festival policy throughout the years took place only following residents’ protest actions. In other words, this chapter examines to what extent this is a “Tel Aviv” festival taking place in Acco and to what extent it is “an Acco festival.” The chapter deals, on the one hand, with the festival’s exclusionary policy toward the host community, and on the other, with the Jewish-Mizrahi and Arab residents’ opposition to this exclusion. The exclusionary policy is based on a hierarchical separation of the high “theatrical-universal” and the low “community-particular.” This separation has allowed the hegemonic group to structure the festival both as a “sterile” space detached from social affinities to the site and as a way to maintain the power relations between center and periphery. Opposition and protest by local residents challenged this separation and thus they partially succeeded in changing festival policy toward the host community. Since Acco Festival is an event that brings together the hegemonic (Ashkenazi-secular) group of the center, which creates and consumes it, and lower-class Arab and Jewish residents, I examine the complexity of that encounter through the analytical framework of “multiculturalism.” First, I shortly introduce the theoretical framework of multiculturalism and spatialization, and 52 http://www.accofestival.co.il/index.php?dir=site&page=content&cs=3019

Host Community: Policy and Resistance

subsequently, the way Acco Festival situates itself in the urban and state space. Afterward, I discuss the historical and social context of Acco as a mixed town, through which residents’ opposition to the festival can be understood. This opposition will be researched in light of three of its manifestations at different points on the time axis: 1) the demonstrations and protest against the 1987 festival policy; 2) the events of October 2000 and their effects on the festival; and 3) the violent clashes that took place between Jews and Arabs in Acco in October 2008 and their effect on the festival. I show the transformations that took place between each event, attesting to a rising consciousness of the host community’s need for cultural recognition within festival policy. I claim that these transformations still reflect an only partial and limited application of a multicultural conception.

Multi-culturalism and Spatialization As elaborated in Chapter Three, organizationally at the top of the pyramid is the festival management, which elects the artistic director and the members of the artistic committee who accompany him. Management includes Acco Municipality workers, representatives of the ministry of culture and well-known theater people. Management is responsible for the event’s overall policy, including organization and budgeting, and is supposed to (at least declaratively) stay away from the artistic content. The artistic director and the artistic committee set artistic policy, choose the performances for the different frameworks, and accompany and supervise the artists. This policy encompasses not only the implementation of the “other theater” conception but also the relations toward the host community by the artistic committee decision-makers influenced by their own social identities, the competition jury, and the artists; these relations affect repertoire content and the degree to which it appeals to the different audiences, including Acco residents. As we have seen in Chapter Three, during the festival’s first twenty years, it was produced by public bodies from the center of Israel who acted as an executive arm of the ministry of culture, and not by Acco Municipality. The municipality only supplied technical services. The producing body from the center preferred to employ subcontractors it knew and with whom it had worked in the past, i.e., companies and professionals from the center and not from Acco and the area,

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which fed the frustration of the host community. Following deep deficits and the ministry of culture’s growing dissatisfaction with the bodies that had been producing the festival, and as a response to pressure from Acco Municipality which sought to produce the events itself, it was decided in 2000 to transfer festival production to its hands. This raised concerns by different parties that the municipality would not be able to take on events of this organizational and budgetary magnitude, and some even feared the festival would turn local, only serving the host community and not the larger theater field. These fears arose from the structural tension between the festival’s theatrical-artistic goals, mainly connected to theatrical creation in the larger Tel Aviv area, and goals regarding the development of the town and the inclusion of the host community. To whom does the festival belong—is it a festival of the Israeli theater community (most of which is located in the center) or is it a festival that belongs to the host community? Albert Ben-Shloosh, the festival’s general-manager since 2000 and a resident of Acco, has claimed that it is a national festival and hence “competition performances should not be productions of the local community center, however in the ‘perimeter’ (i.e., in the frameworks outside the competition) the local should be expressed.”53 Even though local goals are important to Ben-Shloosh, he understands that if the festival became amateurish in its artistic content, that would diminish its artistic prestige, and finally the city would lose materially and image-wise. This tension between the festival’s artistic and social goals has characterized it since its founding, fashioning it as a site of struggle over cultural and symbolic capital. The manifestations of these tensions will be examined against the analytical backdrop of multiculturalism, using three underlying principles that allow us to ascertain to what degree public policy (including the action patterns of institutions) is in line with this principled stance. These principles are content, representation, and target populations.54 The more festival content is culturally diverse, and the wider its social representation of professionals is on the different decision-making committees, and the more the repertoire appeals to socially diverse audiences (populations), the more festival policy will be defined as multicultural. Besides the multicultural framework, I will examine the host 53 Interview with Albert Ben-Chelouche, December 9, 2007. 54 Guy Ben-Porat, Yossi Yona, and Bashir Bashir, introduction to Public Policy and

Multiculturalism in Israel [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Van Leer Institute, forthcoming).

Host Community: Policy and Resistance

community’s opposition to policy through the terms spatialization and borderland. Spatialization that refers to the concept of space, its organization, and the power-relations that physically, socially, culturally, and economically fashion space and are fashioned by it interests critical researchers (e.g., Ophir 1992). Furthermore, shining a spotlight on space reveals conflicts and tensions that take place in the borderlands, in which the groups operating are not just opposed to the government but also to one another, and therefore it cannot be perceived as a binary.55 This opposition is neither linear nor consistent, but on the contrary—sometimes it contains many internal contradictions (Sandoval 1991). Thus, for instance, Yehouda Shenhav’s (2006) research into protest and cooperation between Mizrahi bodies sought to reject binary thinking that clearly separates between protest and resistance and cooperation and identification. This more nuanced understanding, he clarified, allows us to find critical voices within conformist Mizrahi frameworks that identify with Zionist ideology. “In other words, opposition and cooperation are not mutually exclusive; they can be engendered from each other and nourish each other” (182). Therefore, expressions of resistance, including violence and racism, are not meant for a clearly defined side of the conflict; they necessitate an ascertaining of the speaker’s positioning and identity. This insight is relevant to Acco Festival. It needs to be added that the borderlands highlight the tension between the violent dimension disciplining and fashioning the subject in the space—which works “from the top down”—and resistance and subversion—which are “bottom-up” practices. And indeed, throughout the festival’s years, the discourse on the space’s nonlinear character was distinctly manifest, for instance in the conflicting opinions of playwright Hillel Mittelpunkt and artistic director Ati Citron (2004–2011). Mittelpunkt, who was a member of the festival’s management in 1995, claimed that the festival was not urban-local but rather a Tel Aviv festival that took place in Acco.56 Citron, on the contrary, claimed that the festival should be transformed “from a visiting festival to a naturalizing festival” (Kaynar and Nagid 2001), i.e., should connect the festival and its artistic goals to the site 55 See for example: Foucault 1986, Giroux 1992, Bhabha 1994, Appadurai 1996, Lavie

and Swedenburg 1996, and Anzaldua 1999.

56 Acco Management Meeting February 22, 1995, Acco Municipality Archives, General

Festival File: Ministry of Science and Arts—Culture and Art Administration.

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and the host community.57 While Mittelpunkt sought to separate the space and to discipline the festival space, Citron was interested in bisecting the space through a dialogue that would challenge the spatial status quo. And indeed, in the borderlands, there is a tension between a top-down power, separating and disciplining, and bottom-up power, challenging and opposing the status quo in its spatial expressions. The top-down power never fully succeeds because the space contains possibilities and limitations through which it is possible to oppose its attempts at policing, disciplining, and undermining. The use of “spatialization” and “borderlands” as theoretical concepts in the context of Acco Festival is done for several central reasons: first, a festival is a temporary event that takes place in urban space, transforming it into a site of celebration; secondly, most preparations for Acco Festival take place in the center, and during the festival’s three days, this center travels northward to meet peripheral Acco; and thirdly, Acco is a mixed city so its spatial organization is fashioned out of different ideological, political, socioeconomic and historical conceptions (Torstrick 2000). Acco’s characteristics are not dissimilar to any mixed town in Israel. Acco has some 50,000 residents, mostly of low socioeconomic class,58 and is defined as peripheral.59 Its population is made up of Israeli Palestinians (33%), Mizrahi Jews mostly of North African descent (67%), and Jews who immigrated from the Caucasus from the nineties onward. Acco has 12,800 households; 5,600 are administered through welfare authorities, of which 2,600 are Arab families. After the town’s occupation in 1948, the remaining Arab residents were concentrated in Ancient Acco, and today only 10% of the city’s Arabs are descendants of the Arab families that lived there prior to 1948. A large number of the deserted Palestinian houses in Ancient Acco are owned by governmental public housing companies. In the early fifties, 57 Though Citron furthered a “coexistence” approach, he did not break through its

boundaries, maintaining the dichotomy of a national dialogue between Jews and Arabs that disregards the ethno-class distinction of Acco Jews, as I show below. 58 According to the Israeli Bureau of Statistics, Acco is situated in the low Cluster 4— Cluster 10 is the cluster of settlements of the highest social-economic status in Israel. 59 The Israeli Bureau of Statistics rates Israeli local authorities according to a peripheral index, ascertained by an authority’s access to different resources and its distance from the Tel Aviv district. On a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being “very peripheral” and 5 being “very central,” Acco was awarded the placement 2. Also see http://www. cbs.gov.il/reader/newhodaot/hodaa_template.html?hodaa=200824160

Host Community: Policy and Resistance

Arab refugees and North African immigrants lived side by side in the deserted houses of Ancient Acco. In the sixties, following the immigration of the Jews from Arab lands, new neighborhoods began being built in Acco, and some of the Jews who had been living in the old town were transferred to new housing projects and were replaced by Arabs newly arrived from the villages around the old town. The Wolfson neighborhood was built in the sixties and was meant for the Jewish population alone, but a collapse of a building in Ancient Acco put the city’s Arab population’s housing and crowding crisis on the agenda. Protest and pressure applied by Arab residents, especially middle class and those working for the municipal authority, meant they could sometimes buy apartments in the neighborhood. In that, Acco is different to most mixed cities, since Jews and Arabs in it live in real neighboring relations, right next door. From these spatial dynamics, we can learn about the complex relation between festival and the host community and its different constituent groups. These dynamics will also supply the “material” through which Acco Festival’s action processes will be ascertained, along a time axis in light of the value of multiculturalism as a guiding principle of public policy in the art field.

Resistance I: 1987 Festival During the 1987 festival, there were changes in the festival’s policy toward the host community because of artistic director Shimon Levy’s positive stance (1986–1987) regarding the Arab host community. On the level of representation, jury judges Professor Ellis Shalvi (chairman) and radio person Doctor Yitzhak Ro’eh were joined by actress Salwa Nakarah-Haddad. It was the first appointment of an Arab professional representative on the jury in particular and to the festival institutions in general. On the thematic level, Arab was included alongside Hebrew for the first time in the festival program, appealing to the Arab community of Ancient Acco in particular and artists and the Arab audience. However the program was not equally bilingual—performance and play titles were translated to Arabic but not the synopses.60 Included in the competition were performances openly dealing with the conflict and the occupation, such as Moti Baharav’s Gazans, dealing with Gazan 60 Dov Alfon (1987) points to translation errors, claiming they sprang from an

attempt to simplify the Hebrew text since “they are just Arabs, what do they understand of our nuances.”

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workers in Tel Aviv, presenting their oppression and exploitation, and Hagit Ya'ari’s Zionist Prostitute, an adaptation of Sartre’s play The Respectful Prostitute that revolves around a prostitute who witnesses the killing of a Palestinian by an Israeli soldier and the establishment’s attempts to silence her. These performances were mainly produced by Jewish artists of the center; however, the festival also hosted the Palestinian El-Hakawati Theatre of East Jerusalem outside the competition, which this time too did not include a single Arabic play. Hence, the target audience that the festival appealed to was first and foremost the hegemonic group; on the margins, it made a tiny gesture to the Arab community in whose midst the event took place; it totally ignored the Jews of Acco. Therefore, it was not surprising that there was resistance from politically right-wing elements of Acco Municipality, which led to demonstrations and protest to the “left-wing” repertoire and the lack of Acco professional representation within the festival’s institutions.61 Even before the festival’s debut, Acco’s municipal council decreed, in its meeting on September 13, 1987, that the festival would be independent in its professional decisions but demanded display of the Israeli flag throughout the festival site. A group that would refuse to perform under the flag would not be allowed to perform. The decision was founded in the fact that El-Hakawati Theatre had asked, during it previous performance at the 1985 festival, to remove the Israeli flag from the hall it was performing in. The council’s decision was an attempt to appease both the left and the right. Before the festival’s opening, an anonymous public statement was circulated, apparently by the Likud faction, in which the performances Zionist Prostitute and Gazans were described as “a clear blow to the IDF and security forces. Our soldiers are represented in them as oppressive and frustrated murderers.” The statement raised the demand to stop the production of those performances and that of El-Hakawati Theatre, and Likud activists demonstrated on the eve of the festival’s opening. In his opening speech, Mayor Eli De Castro of the labor party stressed freedom of artistic expression, stating that the performances had been approved by the Council of Film and Play Criticism (the censor).62 As emotions rose, the festival was beefed up with soldiers and border policemen. On October 61 These events took place some two months before the First Intifada, and in a sense,

they were an echo of the political atmosphere of the late eighties.

62 Censorship of plays was revoked by Minister of the Interior Aryeh Deri of Shas in

1989.

Host Community: Policy and Resistance

12, 1987, two of El-Hakawati Theatre’s actors performed The Story of Kafr Shama. Likud activists demonstrated outside the hall. Two Israeli flags were hung inside it, on both sides of the stage. According to theater critics, Israeli flags were not hung in any of the other festival halls, and the flags were hung purposefully for the El-Hakawati Theatre performance (Handelzaltz October 16, 1987, Nagid 1987). The theater people decided to go on and perform despite the flags and not to be dragged into provocation. Ten minutes after the performance began, six Kach activists revealed their yellow shirts, waved a flag, and cried “Arabs out.” They were taken out by ushers and arrested. Some of the audience called to them, “fascism will not pass.” After half an hour, an announcement was made that there was a bomb in the hall, the performance was halted, and the hall was combed. Police stayed in the hall throughout the performance. The Likud demonstration outside ended with a singing of the Israeli national anthem, and an Arab passerby who refused to stand at attention was arrested. Handelzaltz says that Likud people called him derogatory names while he documented the events. Two months after the festival, on December 9, 1987, a four-hour “postmortem” meeting took place in Tel Aviv, attended by the festival’s management, artists, and theater critics. They discussed the political demonstrations that took place during the festival. The Mayor of Acco, the only Acco resident attending the meeting, asked that in the next festival “there be a professional representative [i.e., professionally trained] who is a resident of Acco, so that they can represent the stances of the city fathers” (Handelzaltz October 16, 1987). The demand raised fierce opposition and was perceived as a desire to intervene politically in the festival’s content. This demand of Acco as the host community came from the frustration of the municipality’s representative: They were required to take part in the expenditures of the physical elements . . . (preparing halls, lighting and amplification, cleaning, street beautification, etc.) but were not awarded appropriate status and sufficient representation in the bodies that direct the festival’s character as well as its related events and performance selection. (Hareuveni 1987) Protest by right-wingers of the host community can be perceived as resentment and to a degree even as antagonism—attitude patterns investigated by research

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into the interrelations between the host community of cultural events and the audience that frequents them (Derrett 2004). The alienation and antagonism exhibited by the host community springs from complex relations between Jews and Arabs in Acco, their violent manifestations in the mid-eighties and in general (Torstrick 2000), and in the ignoring and marginalization of Acco residents by the festival’s management in particular. Anthropologist Rebecca Torstrick, who has closely followed the tensions, violence, and the inclusion of Mizrahim and Arabs in Acco, claims that Acco’s history as a mixed town reflects a struggle over unfulfilled promises. It is a struggle between local efforts to develop the community and to ameliorate relations between Jews and Arabs, the national-Zionist discourse, and conflict-laden Israeli reality, relations which harm and come into conflict with local communal efforts to fashion normal existence (Torstrick 2000, 81). Relating to the events of 1987, it was right-wing sources who took part in a municipal coalition headed by the labor party, rightwing sources interested in deteriorating the already-fraught relations in Acco to consolidate their power in the local elections. Alongside this sociopolitical context, the strained relations around the festival are linked to the structure of relations between the host community, the organizers, and the audience members who mostly come from the center. The local protest grew against the background of deep feelings of alienation, separation, and exclusion of the host community from any real influence on the festival’s character, i.e., a lack of representation of the city’s residents on the festival’s production team. Albert Ben-Shloosh, the festival’s present director-general, claims that when it was produced by an external producer, not Acco Municipality, the producer enjoyed full authority, as stated above, in employment and making contracts with service subcontractors.63 In most cases, the external producer, who came from the center, preferred to work with subcontractors familiar to him rather than with locals residents. Feelings of alienation buttressed Acco Jewish residents’ already-extant frustrations with the fact that they did not reap economic benefits from the festival’s attendees. While the Arab merchants, located at the heart of the festival’s events and enjoying its fruits, most Mizrahi Jew-owned businesses are located in the new part of town, which is not interwoven with the event’s celebration. This spatial 63 Interview with Albert Ben-Chelouche, March 3, 2004.

Host Community: Policy and Resistance

division creates an economic hierarchy that favors the Arabs, exacerbating tensions between Jews and Arab in town and increasing the violence coefficient between the two groups. This spatialization is a direct outcome of the festival’s management by the Tel Aviv hegemony, which ignores the Jews of Acco and only focuses on Ancient Acco. The spatialization was also reflected on the artistic level. When Acco’s Mayor Eli De Castro asked, during the 1987 postmortem meeting, to interweave professional municipal representation in the festival management to express the host community’s values, beliefs, and interests, his words were rejected as an attempt to censor and “shut mouths” of performers and the artistic director, which would not be the host community’s legitimate right. The frustration and alienation deepened when the festival management began formulating a favorable social-community approach toward the host Arab community, ignoring Acco’s Mizrahi Jewish residents. The very holding of the postmortem meeting in Tel Aviv in the presence of only one Acco resident (the mayor of Acco) distinctly expressed the perception of the festival as a Tel Aviv event that takes place in Acco, strengthening the internal agreement against the protest of Acco Jews and highlighting the hegemonic group’s feelings of exclusive ownership of the festival. This ownership and the distinction between festival-goers and the host community was expressed by theater critics from the center. Boaz Evron (1984) favorably identified this site as “another Israel, with the atmosphere of the left-wing youth movements, the educated classes, a liberal and full-of-life atmosphere, which makes you feel . . . a connection and identification with this people, with whom you speak the same language.” As opposed to this conception, Shosh Avigal (1984) critically references this distinction, claiming that “these are people who have conquered Acco.” She describes “a mostly Ashkenazi audience,” concluding that this is “the third Israel, neither religious nor nationalist, a branch of Dizengoff.” In fact, the festival’s physical space is organized according to the repertoire of performances offered in the different frameworks. The in-competition and other inside performances are the core of the event and take place in the Crusader Halls; these appeal to the cultural capital of spectators of the center. The street performances, outside performances, and tourist-entertainment activities (including the eating of hummus), which take place outside of the

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festival site and are located around its entrance and margins, are geared toward local festival-goers (Arabs, Mizrahim, and Caucasians). Thus, a correlation between the festival’s framing “on paper” and its real-world delineation, i.e., the artistic direction disciplines the physical space as a “Tel Aviv center” by the marginalization and neutralization of peripheral Acco elements.

Protest and Racism: Between Resistance and Collaboration The question of how to interpret Mizrahi resistance to the festival’s “left-wing policy” and to preferential treatment of Arabs as a target audience is part of a larger theoretical question that critical research has been wrestling with—why do Mizrahim, who come from a weakened strata of Israeli society, support the right wing and hawkish national conceptions, especially in regard to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Why do they not join movements representing universal ideas of “human rights” and centering around liberty and equality? Sociologist Nissim Mizrachi (2012) discusses critical theory’s response to this question, seeking to point to its theoretical “blindness.” He also seeks to offer another critical response to these questions. In his opinion, institutional sociology considers Mizrahim as a pre-modern population in need of modernization processes to bring it nearer to Enlightenment ideals, but critical theory is of different stripes and recognizes institutional sociology’s cultural prejudice against the Mizrahi public. But like institutional sociology, critical sociology ascribes the Mizrahi public’s alienation from Enlightenment values “to the same external oppressive forces that shape their behavior but are invisible to them [Mizrahim themselves]” (Mizrachi 2012, 61). Critical theory offers different variations of “false consciousness”: ethnic-class oppression, economic-political manipulation, suppression by the Ashkenazi hegemony, etc. Nissim Mizrachi employs three main critical approaches in this context. I will present only two of them below, the most relevant to this discussion,64 and will seek to investigate Mizrahi opposition to the 1987 festival through these approaches. 64 The third approach, which I will not discuss, is the assimilation regime approach of

Yoav Peled and Gershon Shafir, similar in logic to the post-colonial one. According to this approach, to achieve equal status for being Jewish, Mizrahim have no choice but to stick to an ethno-national discourse since they have been excluded from the liberal and republican discourses.

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According to the class approach, Mizrahi opposition to Arabs stems from economic competition on the job market regarding low-wage work, and their opposition to the labor party and the parties to its left stems from the Ashkenazi left’s “betrayal” of the weakened classes from the fifties to this day (Svirsky 1981, Gutwein 2000). This approach may explain Mizrahim’s opposition to the festival, since the Arab merchants of Ancient Acco are its main economic beneficiaries, since the festival mostly takes place there and not in the new city. This claim has indeed been raised frequently by the Jewish merchants on Weizmann Street, a street leading to the ancient city, but in my mind it is not an exhaustive explanation of this resistance. The post-colonial approach deals with the role of Mizrahi cultural identity in relation to Zionism as a colonial force, and its explanations have to do with the oppression of that identity from an orientalist Zionist standpoint. Ella Shohat (1988) claims that Mizrahi opposition to the left stems from Mizrahi oppression at the hands of the Ashkenazi elite, and Sami Shalom Chetrit (2010) continues to claim that this was the main reason for their “ballot rebellion” during the 1977 general elections. Yehouda Shenhav (2006) focuses on the Arab-Jewish category, suppressed by the term “Mizrahi” through the Zionist discourse. He thinks the Mizrahim’s assimilation into Israeliness is contingent on the effacing of “Arabness” from their cultural identity, and therefore they take national/nationalist stances to distance themselves from any link between them and Arabs. Anat Rimon-Or (2002) claims that Mizrahim violence toward, and racist cursing of, Arabs are attempts to participate in the Zionist discourse and to simultaneously undermine it. Thus the Mizrahi takes a radical stance, exposing “that which is hidden and forbidden to explicitly utter” within Zionist discourse (the death of the Arab), and therefore he is paradoxically protesting against this Zionist discourse, which posits him at its margins. This approach allows reading Mizrahi protest against Acco Festival and against performances such as Gazans and Zionist Prostitute as reflections of a last ditch effort of the Mizrahim in Acco to assimilate into a discourse regarding festival management. More than being directed at Arabs, the curses and racist slogans that emerged from the midst of the Mizrahi population were meant to save the Mizrahi from a division of his Arab-Jewish identity. The festival demonstrations allegedly strengthened Mizrahim’s Zionist stance in the public discourse while denying the Arab element of his identity, but this explicit talk

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uncovered Zionist discourse’s “anti-moral and racist” character. However, this stance also left the Mizrahim outside of a status of influence in this discourse: thus, the demonstrators’ representatives were not invited to the postmortem meeting, and their demand for representation in the festival’s institutions was ironically perceived as censoring. While festival management sought a dialog with Acco Arabs, it viewed the Mizrahi audience as a nuisance to be disregarded. It should be noted that Acco Mizrahim do not employ ethnic terms to formulate their protest but rather use tangential terms such as “center-periphery” and “right-left.” It makes sense that according to the critical approaches, the use of this cluster of terms would strengthen the claim of a paradoxical motion between opposition and collaboration, since the use of geopolitical terms awards Mizrahim legitimation in the hegemonic discourse, as opposed to the use of an ethnic discourse that could exclude them. Nissim Mizrachi seeks to understand the Mizrahim’s protest through their perspectives rather than through perspectives invisible to them, hence he follows Charles Taylor’s use of the terms honor and dignity. Honor is contingent on social hierarchies, hence one can speak of different degrees of honor according to class, age, role, origin, religion, nationality, etc. The second is “human dignity” which is inherent to any human regardless of their innate or acquired identities. Dignity supplies the fundamental values from which a cluster of human rights and basic civil rights is derived. Nissim Mizrachi, as opposed to Taylor, thinks that honor and dignity coexist in constant struggle in today’s society. While the logic governing dignity seeks to traverse hierarchies, distinctions, and boundaries, the logic of honor is an attempt to deepen social, gender, ethnic, and national distinctions and boundaries. “The tension between honor and dignity, then, is in large part a struggle with the limits of social collectivity, solidarity, and responsibility, and as such is intimately linked to moral decisions” (Mizrachi 2012, 65). Honor and dignity are embedded in distinct social networks, in moral experience, and in feelings of belonging and selfworth, and they are connected to worlds of meaning and a customary cultural repertoire, any exception from which by an individual is no simple feat. Nissim Mizrachi writes: The cultural logic of honor can throw light on the worlds of meaning of traditional Mizrahim, while the interpretive use of the term dignity

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allows us to clarify the worlds of meaning of secular-Ashkenazis who belong to the upper middle class and to trans-national networks. However this distinction is far from identifying the “essence” or “nature” of Mizrahim or Ashkenazim. Though the worlds of meaning ascribed to dignity and honor are embedded in distinct social networks, they are not closed—liquidity and dynamism can be found in them in different contexts. (2012, 66) Nissim Mizrachi claims that Mizrahim, out of a sense of honor, feel threat and anxiety from the demand to burst open the boundaries of the national collective that the Ashkenazi-left offers in its conception of dignity when it tries to traverse boundaries and hierarchies. He continues and gives examples according to which, on the personal level, Mizrahim often voice empathy and identification with the state of non-Jews (Palestinian workers from the occupied territories or refugees and migrant workers in the south of Tel Aviv) but refuse to “make the leap” to left-wing political conclusions because they are anxious and threatened by the transgressing of boundaries: I am not opposed to the claim that Mizrahim’s rejection by the Ashkenazi left influences their opposition to protest, even at the price of harming their own economic interests. However, I suggest viewing their opposition not just as a response to rejection and oppression but also as independent behavior grounded in the world of meaning that prefers identity, solidarity, and a feeling of belonging to liberal values of “social justice” and “equal opportunity.” In fact, if we turn our gaze to the moment when opposition breaks out, the threat of universal politics particularly to Jewish identity is again revealed. (2012, 67) Mizrahim’s opposition to the festival can be read as fear of the bursting of collective boundaries and their national identity. The fact of Mizrahim’s and Arab’s shared life (“next door”) in Acco actually exacerbates the feelings of anxiety, highlighting the fragility of the relationship. In this relationship there is a separation between friendship and a personal, friendly empathy and a “political conclusion” leading to “Jewish-Arab solidarity,” which raises anxiety and a

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threat to national identity.65 I have witnessed this in many random conversations with Acco Mizrahim who stated the neighborliness and friendliness they share with their Arab neighbors, together with their displeasure with the “left-wing character” of the Tel Aviv festival taking place in Ancient Acco. Nissim Mizrachi (2012, 24), then, calls for “dialogic thinking and action,” one that invites: a search for tangential points between networks, attempts to create new networks and the identification of mediating figures who would be able to bridge the gaps between the different worlds of meaning. Those figures could take part in what I elsewhere called “modular translation,” i.e., the matching of content belonging to one world of meaning to another world of meaning. They could further “narrow agreements,” which are, as Taylor presents them, agreements between groups regarding norms of action and behavior that are not based on consensus about their justifications. (2012, 69) This suggestion in the context of Acco Festival highlights appropriate representation and the recognition that Acco Mizrahim and Arabs should be given representation in the festival’s committees, with the choice of representatives of stature that would be able to mediate and bridge the two worlds. On the level of content, for instance, there is an attempt to fashion Jewish-Arab dialog through traditional Mizrahi-Jewish history, stressing values of peace and tolerance, and not out of a mainly Western-universal basis. At any rate, this complex state of affairs allowed the Tel Aviv group to “occupy” Acco and appropriate it as a unique physical site for its artistic, cultural, and social needs. This group celebrates its belonging and its achievements—or at least its desire to fashion a unique artistic-cultural identity—while distinguishing itself from, and excluding parts of, the host community. Acco 65 I have presented a similar process that took place elsewhere at a Mizrahi-Arab

community theater in Ramle. There was an intimacy and strong friendship between the different participants, even though the Mizrahim did not change their rightwing political views throughout the years of the group’s existence, explaining the separation between personal friendship and overarching political conception (Shem-Tov 2010).

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Arabs are perceived as a group to be in dialog with, but de facto the number of Arabic performances is very low, and this community has almost no representation in the festival’s institutions. Mizrahim are not even recognized as a group in the host community because, among other reasons, they are recognized as an ideological and cultural rival to the group that directs, consumes, and criticizes the event. In other words, the practical translation of the festival’s “coexistence” policy fits the liberal left’s conception of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the “ethnic problem”—the closeness and dialog with the Palestinians stand in opposed, alienated, and suppressed relation to the dialog with Mizrahim in Acco. This policy flattens inter-minority dialog, silences the deep chasms that characterize the interrelations of the Jewish groups themselves, and strengthens the different groups’ stereotypical images, all while reasserting the cultural hegemony as humanist and enlightened. It is no wonder, then, that the term “coexistence” is critically received in the relevant literature. Uzi Benziman and Atallah Mansour (1992, 78), for example, write that although the institutions of the state “strove” for Jewish-Arab coexistence, “the government’s fundamental alienation of the Arab sector, despite its stated policy change, did not really change at all.” They find this reality to be unsurprising since it fits well with coexistence in as much as this term is meant to describe an asymmetrical, oppressive, and problematic situation, i.e., the term “coexistence” does not necessarily mean equality, recognition of historical wrongdoing, or commitment to transformative change; as I have stated, the term “coexistence” also presupposes a binary national separation of Jews and Arabs, which allows the blurring of other categories, such as ethnicity, class, and geographical positioning. It allows secular Ashkenazi middle-class Jews of a left-liberal-Zionist orientation, for instance, to totally disregard the Mizrahi Jews of Acco and other social groups and maintain a “dialog” in their name with Arabs, as if Jews and Arabs were homogeneous social groups. As I seek to argue, the use of “multiculturalism” is meant, among other things, to challenge the term “coexistence” and its ramifications to the interrelations of Jews and Arabs in Israel.

Policy Change: “Harmonious” Coexistence In 1988, the festival’s artistic and community policy changed following the events of the 1987 festival in particular and the First Intifada in general, which

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heightened tensions between Jews and Arabs. On the level of content, artistic director Eran Beniel (1988–1989) formulated his “manifesto” as avoiding head-on collision with loaded political subjects, “The friction between the two parts of the city has become unbearable” following the intifada, thus “only if we succeed in bringing together . . . the Arab and Jewish audience around exceptional cultural events . . . only then can we create an atmosphere for the festival to thrive” (Hameagel 2004). Beniel wanted to allow the festival to run smoothly, stressing a “coexistence” that would highlight harmony and would not deal with painful and controversial questions and tensions. This “manifesto” was expressed in the content of the festival and its different performances, as well as in the framework of the competition, in which almost no performances referencing the burning political reality of the period were presented. However, for the first time in the competition’s history, it included an Arabic performance that even won the Best Performance award— The Head of Jabbar by Syrian playwright Sa'ad Alla Wanos and directed by Fuad Awad. In the different frameworks, Beniel created for the first time a community theater of Jewish and Arab teenagers, who raised Wolves in Acco. A colorful street performance with masks and movement presented a fairytale about collaboration between the city’s residents against wolves who invade and threaten them. This allegory lends itself to broad interpretation and blurs any direct political message, evading directly dealing with the conflict. Also in those years, encounters between Jewish guests from the center and Arab residents of Ancient Acco “over a cup of coffee and some music” (from the program) took place. These orientalist encounters did not require dialog about the hardship and complexity but rather were a kind of non-binding glance by the Jews into the “exotic” lives of the Arabs. By the end of the eighties, an explicit policy of “coexistence,” ignoring cultural multiplicity and stressing national categories alone, began developing in the festival, based on an allegedly harmonious conception that sometimes had orientalist-folklorist hues (Said 1979).66 On the representative level, there was not a single Acco representative, Jewish or Arab, among decision-makers (in the artistic committee or the jury). The festival’s target audience remained mainly Jews of the center, with a slight 66 For a detailed account of these performances and the complexity of Jewish-Arab

projects at the festival, see Chapter Two.

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but pronounced change: an in-competition Arabic-language performance and out-of-competition Arab-Jewish projects meant for the local community, Mizrahi and Arab alike. Therefore, it seems that until the late eighties there was almost no reference to the host community in festival policy. Shimon Levy brought in some change, but his goal was only for the Arabs of Acco; thus, for the first time in the festival content, there was a program that was partially translated to Arabic, and the Palestinian El-Hakawati Theatre was hosted in the out-of-competition framework. Among decision-makers, there was representation of an Arab female artist on the jury for the first time. Following the opposition and protests, new director Eran Beniel declared his intention of reconciliation between Jews and Arabs. Beniel founded a framework of encounters between Jews and Arabs, operated a Jewish-Arab community theater outside of the competition framework, and the competition included for the first time a performance in Arabic, but during his tenure there was no representation of an Arab artist in any of the festival’s committees. In both cases, the target audience that the festival was aimed at was mainly the audience of the center, with place for locals, Jews, as well as Arabs, given on the event’s margins. Therefore, if we treat the three conditions—content, representation, and target audience—that a cultural institution needs to maintain to be considered multicultural, Acco Festival of the years 1987–1988 did not pass this multicultural test very well.

Resistance II: 2000 Festival In July 2000, Prime Minister Ehud Barak traveled to Camp David to negotiate with Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat to arrive at a final agreement that would spell “the end of the conflict.” The talks failed, and on September 28, 2000, Ariel Sharon, the head of the opposition, mounted the Temple Mount and Al-Aqsa Mosque, a move interpreted by the Palestinians as a provocation and a continuation of Israel’s lack of willingness to achieve reconciliation. The event precipitated the breakout of the Al-Aqsa Intifada. Violent demonstrations took place in the territories, which resulted in a disproportionately violent response by Israel, which used arms against civilian populations. On September 30, Muhammad Al-Dura, a twelve-year-old Palestinian boy, was killed on live television. This documentation exacerbated the protest, bringing Palestinians

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of Israeli citizenship to call a general strike on October 1 and protest events in the territories. During the demonstrations, thirteen Palestinian-Israelis were killed from police fire, and heavy public pressure brought about the convening of a national committee of inquiry headed by Justice Orr to investigate events. Like the residents of other Arab towns and villages, the residents of Acco took part in these demonstrations.67 On October 2, 2000, a protest march left Ancient Acco, in the context of which some participants vandalized Jewish restaurants and businesses as well as businesses owned by Arabs who did not participate in the demonstration, set Israeli flags on fire, and waved Palestinian flags. Some threw stones at policemen and were dispersed by use of tear gas and water jets. Two Arab citizens were hit and injured. On October 8, during the evening hours, hundreds of Acco Jews assembled at the Home Center junction, throwing stones at passing cars, hitting a police car and overturning a parked vehicle. After several hours, they broke into the McDonald’s in the commercial center, shouting “death to Arabs” and vandalizing the restaurant. Eight demonstrators were arrested and the assembly was dispersed. On the evening of October 10, some 150 Arab residents pelted the local police precinct with stones. The mayor as well as prominent Jewish and Arabic residents tried to calm the situation to no avail, and the Mayor was pelted with stones. The police dispersed the demonstrators by force. Later that night, stone-throwing continued at the Marina police precinct. Police reported the burning of Jewishowned businesses in Ancient Acco and complaints of Arab-owned businesses having their windows broken. Police set up three roadblocks at the entrance of Ancient Acco to stop Jews from entering it. Several performers from abroad canceled their participation in the festival following the events, the Jewish audience feared entering the ancient town, Arab groups decided to boycott the festival, and the festival’s happening on October 14–17 was shrouded in deep doubt. The media represented fears of the festival’s cancellation as the breakup of a symbol of Jewish-Arab “coexistence” in Acco. The idea of Acco was allegedly a positive example of the two peoples’ communal life, with the festival as a symbol of that shared existence, and the riots were exceptional and surprising (Z. Shohat 2000a). On October 17, 2000, 67 For a description of the October Events, as based on the findings of the Or Commission, see http://elyon1.court.gov.il/heb/veadot/or/inside_index.htm (in Hebrew) and http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Society_&_Culture/OrCommissionReport.html

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a conference attended by the festival’s artists took place at Tzavta in Tel Aviv, and Culture Minister Matan Vilnai announced the festival was only to be postponed, not canceled. Zipi Shohat described the conference: The Tzavta conference took place in an atmosphere of reconciliation, calling for Jews and Arabs to coexist. Excerpts of festival performances were raised on stage. Jewish and Arab actors and artists made impassioned speeches. [Roni] Ninio68 . . . says that he called the conference to discuss the effect of the violent events on the muses. “The artists here gave artistic, social, and political expression to us as Israelis—Jews and Arabs. I did not want to turn the conference into a contest of opinions. The general tone was an appeal for quiet, so that we can do our theater.” (2000b) The conference expressed the public’s general anxiety at the time, as well as the real and imagined threat it was under. Despite the presence of Arab artists in the conference, artists refrained from condemnation and protest, preferring a general and non-committing plea for quiet, i.e., for a separation from the complex political situation. The fact that a group of left-liberal orientation refrained from formulating a stance can be understood in light of its disappointment with the Palestinians’ rejection of Ehud Barak’s suggestion, as Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophir (2002) analyze it. This lack of a clear stance fits with artistic director Roni Ninio’s policy even before the breakout of the riots. Ninio announced some two months before the festival that “we are not dealing with politics and national trauma this year” (Timan August 28, 2000), and two days before the start of the intifada he said, “This will be a festival with a stress on emotion” (Timan September 27, 2000), i.e., the festival performances would deal with universal human subjects unrelated to what was happening outside. The holding of the “support conference” in Tel Aviv also highlighted the festival’s “Tel Aviv” character, seeking “normalcy” and the delineation of clear boundaries between mixed, complex Acco and the “sane” center that just wished to continue “creating in quiet,” i.e., to evade taking a stance against Arabs’ opposition and ongoing oppression. 68 Roni Ninio was the festival’s artistic director in 1998–2000.

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The festival finally took place during one weekend (November 2–4, 2000) in a limited capacity. The religious parties on the Acco city council opposed holding the festival on the Sabbath, so its activity was stopped from later Friday afternoon until Saturday evening. In reality, the performances were raised to the eyes of the performers alone during the Sabbath, so that artists could take in the performances of their colleagues. On the eve of the Sabbath, all of the participants, including the technical crew, some 150 people, held a solemn Kabbalat Shabbat ceremony including Kiddush, Sabbath and Eretz Israel songs, and some of the artists played, sang, and danced. “There was a feeling of elation and a desire to be together . . . there was a lot of positive feeling, encouragement . . . and especially a feeling of belonging and togetherness”—that is how Ninio describes the atmosphere of cohesion created in a traditional Jewish ceremony that included national-Zionist songs (Hameagel 2004). This atmosphere characterized the general mood of the Israeli public, which tends toward nationalism and “national cohesion” in the face of a common enemy, during the first months of the intifada (Azoulay and Ophir 2002). This ceremony, fashioned spontaneously in a national-Zionist way, excluded Arab artists and technical crew members from the festival, thus taking a consensual stance aligned with what was happening outside the theater walls and contradicting the appeal to “create in quiet,” allegedly with “no politics.”

Multicultural Encounter or Ghetto? On the level of content, even before the October 2000 events, Roni Ninio founded two new frameworks for the festival—“stage for Arab performances” and “Aliyah in Acco”—for two minority groups: Palestinians and new immigrants from the former USSR and Ethiopia. Ninio explained the logic behind setting up the frameworks, “We live in a multicultural society that has an audience for Hebrew theater alongside audiences for Arabic and Russian theater, for example” (Meiron 2000). The framework for Arabic performances had existed in the past and was expanded under the tenure of Agmon and Dudi Ma'ayan (1992–1995), but it disappeared and then was seldomly applied to the competitions. In contrast, the new immigrant framework only appeared in 1991 when the festival hosted fledgling Gesher Theatre. It seemed that allegedly the festival had for the first time adopted a multicultural viewpoint recognizing groups in Acco in particular and Israel in general (however, the omission of Mizrahim

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and religious residents of Acco is glaring). The festival supposedly recognized the cultural differences between these groups and awarded them separate frameworks for self-expression. However, I would argue that it is cultural exclusion using multicultural rhetoric and that it actually maintains the power relations through a hierarchy between the frameworks, i.e., positing the competition as the most important framework and the rest of the frameworks after it. In other words, it is a cultural ghetto meant to exclude those groups of material and symbolic resources. The immediate expression of this cultural ghetto was the year 2000 budget allocation;69 the competition framework got NIS 529,462, and each production got some NIS 66,000 on average; “Aliyah in Acco” got NIS 150,000 from the Ministry of Immigrant Absorption, and each production got an average of NIS 50,000; and “stage for Arab performances” got NIS 39,320 from the Arab Department of Education and the ministry of culture, and each production got an average of NIS 13,000. This glaring inequality and the support of funding bodies in each framework point to a liberal multicultural conception recognizing minority groups, and the competition framework is supposedly universal in its makeup and so funded by the festival’s running budget. A significant portion of competition members have belonged to the hegemonic group—Tel Aviv youngsters who graduated from prestigious theater frameworks such as Chich’s Neighbors of Ramat Aviv, graduates of the Ironi Aleph high school, and Nissan Nativ Acting Studio in Tel Aviv. Needless to say, not one performance in Arabic or any other foreign language was presented in the 2000 competition. Yossi Yona and Yehouda Shenhav (2000, 163–188) analyzed two reports on culture policy and similarly demonstrated how the liberal multicultural conception acknowledges minority groups but expressly ignores the hegemonic group who is, in effect, in the center and in control of the center, thus concealing itself as a particular group and “masquerading” as transparent and universal. Accordingly, one can view Ninio seeking “to acquaint Israelis with Arab and immigrant theater—and to acquaint Arabs and new immigrants with Israeli theater”—as an acknowledgment of Arabs and minority groups as distinct groups and of Israelis as a “transparent” universal group, even though 69 Acco Festival 2000 Final Implementation, December 31, 2000 festival budget file,

Acco Municipality Archives.

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most of the artists in the competition come from the hegemonic group (Meiron 2000; emphases mine). Thus, the categories “Israeli theater,” “Arab theater,” and “immigrant theater” become labels differentiating between privileged “transparents” and the “labeled” who are not given a real, equal chance. The category label also raises a different complex subject—who is included in the category “Israeli theater” and who is excluded from it or placed at its margins.70 On the level of representation, despite the multicultural rhetoric, there wasn’t a single Arab or Mizrahi resident of Acco represented on the artistic committee or the jury that year, similar to most of the festival’s years. The separation and hierarchization of the different festival frameworks meant that the target audience of the festival was overwhelmingly the center audience, with an appeal to the Arab and Russian audiences on the margins. Ignoring Mizrahim on the level of content resulted in pressure from them, and so several of the outside performances were staged in the square of the municipality on Weizmann Street in the New City, several minutes’ walk from Ancient Acco, which the festival’s director-general, Albert Ben-Shloosh, says happened because “we worried . . . that alienation would happen and we wanted there to be a good feeling” (Z. Shohat 2000c). It is doubtful whether these outside events, on the margins of the festival both physically and artistically, aided in achieving closeness and a good feeling, and at any rate, they highlight Ninio’s extremely partial approach as artistic director of the Jews of Acco.

Does Coexistence Mean Politics of Reconciliation and Multiculturalism? Outside of the competition, the Arabic-Hebrew Theatre of Jaffa, raised The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, directed by Yigal Ezrati, under the title 70 A multicultural approach could further different kinds of theater according to

ethno-national distinctions, but the problem in the festival is the binary distinction between Israeli theater and theater in Arabic and Russian and the lack of an overarching conception that sees them all as parts of Israeli theater. The question about boundaries of categories arises in the context of non-Jewish artists. For instance, do actors Muhammed Bakri and Makram Khouri belong to Israeli theater? And, are writers Amil Habibi and Anton Shmas included in the category of Hebrew literature? For a detailed discussion about the complexities of defining “Hebrew literature” and “Israeli literature” and about the place of Mizrahi and Arab writers within these categories, see Hever 2000, 165–190.

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“special project” and not in the framework of “stage for Arabic performances.” It is a documentary performance based on the testimony of Jews and Palestinians hurt by the conflict, and some of the texts were reworked to incorporate the situation of the Al-Aqsa Intifada.71 The performance was built on the inspiration of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission set up in South Africa after the fall of the apartheid regime, and it includes parts of testimony given by Jewish and Arab actors such as Sinai Peter, Gabi Eldor, Giuliano Mer, and Salwa Nakkara as well as public figures and citizens hurt by the conflict. This combination of actors and witnesses sharing their testimonies interweaved political reality and theatrical fiction, creating a political event bordering on a demonstration. Thus, for instance, bereaved father Yitzhak Frankenthal, whose son was murdered by terrorists, and flight attendant Yuli Gerstel, who was wounded by a terrorist in London in 1978, took part in the performance. The artists’ original intention was to present an attempt at reconciliation following a protracted bloody conflict, but the outbreak of the Second Intifada proved how far the two sides actually were from reconciliation. And though it was a documentary performance, i.e., one that bridges fiction and extra-theatrical reality, the reconciliation on the stage was a distant vision from the burning reality outside the festival site. “Judges” listened to the testimonies, including Nadia Hilu, a labor party member; Roni Ninio, the festival’s artistic director; and Itzik Weingarten, its previous director (1996–1997). Weingarten was supposed to play a Shin Bet (Israeli intelligence service) officer confessing his deeds in the show, but he claimed he could not portray the role following events.72 Actor Giuliano Mer, by contrast, made his stance on Palestinians’ clear, criticizing the festival as an image of coexistence: I am participating in this festival only to expose the illusion of coexistence . . . I was glad they canceled the original festival, that the mask 71 Yigal Ezrati raised a similar documentary performance at the 1990 festival, The

Protocols, based on the Givati trials, in which soldiers of the battalion were prosecuted for excessive violence against Palestinians in the territories during the First Intifada. 72 Weingarten’s “inability” is perhaps the most instructive of left-liberal Jews’ ambivalence during this period.

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was finally ripped off of this illusion, which is only meant to cover the situation of real oppression. It’s time to throw all of this lie into the trash. It’s a political issue. This country needs to be separated into two states and stop the oppression. Later, if I feel like it, I will reconcile. But only if I feel like it. I don’t have to reconcile. The performance is called The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, but I’m not coming to reconcile, I’m coming to tell the truth and talk about the pride I feel, at least of my Palestinian side. Finally this people has managed to raise their heads to the oppression, and not wait for the two weeks before an election to get a sewer pipe. (Argaman-Barnea 2000) This performance and Giuliano Mer’s statement raised the question as to what degree the festival’s policy of “coexistence,” and not only that year, fits with politics of reconciliation or with multiculturalism as defined by scholars Will Kymlicka and Bashir Bashir (2008). They claim that politics of reconciliation does not necessarily fit multiculturalism. A country that has been through hard wars and struggles may be interested in adopting the idea of reconciliation to build a new nation that includes all groups in it as a “color blind” democracy awarding rights and equality to all. But they think that is not enough: reconciliation demands recognition of historic injustice, reparations, symbolic mentions, etc. to minority groups exposed to injustice, oppression, and other man-made trauma in the past (Rouhana 2008). This recognition was not part of the festival’s official policy; as mentioned, the policy that guided it celebrated “coexistence.” As stated above, Ninio was interested in symmetrical recognition between Israeli, Arabic, and immigrant theaters in the minimal sense of knowing and encountering, not necessarily recognition in the larger sense of the historic injustice perpetrated by the Jewish majority against the Arab minority. It is unsurprising that Giuliano Mer stresses “truth” over “reconciliation,” identified by him as a fake “coexistence.”

Policy Change: “From Visiting Festival to Naturalizing Festival”? Following the events of 2000, there was a significant change in festival policy toward the host community under the aegis of artistic director Ati Citron

Host Community: Policy and Resistance

(2001–2004), who replaced Roni Ninio. In an interview with Gad Kaynar and Haim Nagid (2001), Citron also referenced the policy of “coexistence” guiding the work of Acco Festival. Citron’s policy toward the host community was formulated in his announcement, “Acco Festival from a visiting festival to a naturalizing festival,” and he linked his policy to the events of October 2000, “We really want it [the Arab audience] to feel at home [at the festival], even though just last year thirteen Arabs were killed in the riots. I want to create a situation where we can cope with it, with ‘other theater’ as a kind of springboard to openness in general, to dialog between man and man” (Kaynar and Nagid 2001, 19). Citron also recognized the relations of oppression and inequality between Jews and Arabs in Israel, claiming that “during this entire period [since the foundation of the state] it didn’t happen that someone invited them to be partners” (Kaynar and Nagid 2001, 19). “How did we not do anything like that in the little microcosm of the festival?” he cried. He did mention that the previous festival included three performances in Arabic, but he was angry over the way those were fashioned in the repertoire “in a kind of Arab ghetto,” with the paltry budget of the ministry of culture’s Arab department and not as an integral part of the festival. On the representational level, for the first time in the festival’s history, Citron appointed an Arab artist as a member of the artistic committee, Dirar Souleiman, and an Arabic-speaking artistic director assistant, Mali Baruch. Citron’s period is perceived as a time of great changes to the festival’s artistic and social content, when an alternative-experimental conception, both formally-theatrically and sociopolitically, came into being. Citron canceled the separate framework for Arab creation, and since then, one or two Arabic-­ language performances have been raised in the competition framework each year, and other shows in the competition have been coproduced by Arab and Jewish artists, sometimes even with the participation of Ancient Acco residents. In the out-of-competition frameworks, diverse projects with Arab and Jewish participation have been carried out, such as Joint Language, a workshop of Jews and Arabs operating with Indian theatrical techniques and creating a performance of folktales from both groups; a clown troupe with the participation of Jewish and Arab teenagers from Acco; Augusto Boal’s (1979) Theatre of the Oppressed, a forum theater that raised on stage oppression experiences of Jewish and Arab audiences; a resident artist—a visual artist who came to live

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in town several months before the festival, worked with local materials and the community, and showed work in an exhibition during the festival. Citron sent a letter of invitation to Arab artists, “I want you to feel like [the festival] is yours. The festival is called the Festival of Other Israeli Theater . . . and Israeli to me includes Jewish and Arabic.” And indeed, Arab artists agreed to create at the festival. Citron explained that the term “from a visiting festival to a naturalizing festival” means “having a dialog with the Arabs with whom we visit in Acco . . . to create a discourse with Acco . . . with the people living in it today, both Arabs and Jews.” His words allegedly express a novelty— for the first time, there is mention of the Jews of Acco, too, but Citron qualified, “My thought was clearly first and foremost about the Arabs, since the festival takes place in an Arab town” (Kaynar and Nagid 2001). The argument that the festival takes place in Ancient Acco and hence reference should be made especially to the Arab residents is problematic to say the least. As can be understood from Citron’s own statement, this is an explicitly political agenda vis-à-vis the Arab minority, all the more since holding the festival in the old city is a choice subject to change, extension, or reexamination. Thus, it seems that the festival’s placement is a kind of excuse allowing Citron to avoid explicitly referring to Mizrahi Acco Jews and to ignore their ethno-class difference. This argument is based on a “regime of justification” (Shenhav and Yona 2008, 13–46) meant to normalize the political separation of Acco Jews and Arabs and to justify the denial of the identity of the Acco Jews in the festival policy. In other words, the placement of Acco Jews in the festival remained marginal since the events of the festival apparently take place in Ancient Acco, an Arab-only neighborhood. However, despite Citron’s announcements and his recognition of the Arab’s historic injustice, he delineated the red line of the coexistence policy. Interviewers Kaynar and Nagid challenged him, suggesting he decentralize power and found a bi-national festival so that alongside Citron there will be an Arab artistic director and the festival will show performances by Palestinian artists and actors from the occupied territories. Citron expressed doubts, saying, “I do not feel it is my mandate to found a Palestinian theater festival” (Kaynar and Nagid 2001, 19). The decentralization of power and creation of a more egalitarian and communal festival on the level of representation and on the level of content is a red line for Citron. Even more

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surprising is his answer, according to which, allegedly, the realization of such a suggestion would transform Acco Festival into a Palestinian-only festival. The expansion of the place of Arab artists and the residents of Ancient Acco at the festival can only happen as long as they do not receive the power to undermine the control of the hegemonic group over the event and limit it. Citron’s coexistence policy was broader than his predecessors’: the appointment of an Arab artist to the artistic committee, raising two Arabic performances in the competition, raising co-projects for Jews and Arabs in the other frameworks, and creating an atmosphere of dialog. In this sense, the festival’s target audience was slightly broadened—there was an explicit appeal to the local Arab audience alongside the traditional appeal to the audience of the center. However, Citron did not adopt a multicultural approach that also recognizes the ethno-class difference of the Mizrahim and Jewish residents of Acco. Citron’s approach, similarly to that of his predecessors, was formulated only through a national category, not at the intersection of ethnicity, class, and religion. His policy portrayed all Jews as one monolithic group. To summarize Roni Ninio’s period, one could say his intentions were formulated in a multicultural rhetoric that actually camouflaged a cultural ghetto. On the level of content, performances in Arabic and Russian were excluded from the competition and were allocated only limited public relations. The competition framework was characterized by distinctly Tel Aviv artists and groups. From the year 2000 and onward, as stated earlier, the festival was produced by Acco Municipality, and therefore there was wide representation of Jewish and Arab Acco residents in production team decision-making but not on the professional-artistic team. The committees artistically fashioning the festival (the artistic community and the jury) did not contain one single Arab or Acco-Jew artist. During Citron’s period, there was a significant shift. In his “manifesto,” he set the social goal at center stage, calling for the naturalization of Acco Festival. Therefore, on the level of content, there was a significant presence of Arab artists in and out of the competition, co-projects of Jews and Arabs, and on the representational level, for the first time, an Arab representative was appointed to the artistic committee and not just the jury. But Citron, too, focused on a coexistence approach that was insensitive to the multicultural complexity of Acco and its residents. Therefore, the target audience was the

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audience of the center and a local Arab audience, with the Mizrahi audience outside the picture.

Resistance III: The 2008 Festival In October of 2008, violent clashes between Jewish and Arab residents erupted that lasted for four days, mainly in the mixed neighborhoods where Jews and Arabs live in great proximity. These tensions exist in the town because of very complex neighborly relations that almost do not exist in mixed towns where there is a clear separation between Jewish and Arab neighborhoods. Thus, Acco offers neighborhoods with a Jewish majority and an Arab minority, or an Arab majority alongside a Jewish minority—except for Ancient Acco which is an Arab-only area. As mentioned, Torstrick (2000) claimed that the city’s history since 1948 is a series of local attempts to fashion sane daily relations between Jews and Arabs, which have failed because of the Zionist discourse that fashions state policy and undermines these attempts. Besides from this structural conflict, tension at the time was rising following the Second Lebanon War—Acco, a northern town, was hit during the war and suffered fatal casualties; the Jews of the town supported the war while its Arab residents opposed it. In the years before the war, tensions had risen following the foundation of the Northern Wind Hesder Yeshiva at the heart of the Wolfson neighborhood, which today has an Arab majority. The yeshiva’s students used to walk around town with guns and announce that it was their goal to stop Acco from becoming “an Arab city” since, in their eyes, it was “a Jewish city” alone. During the celebration of Simchat Torah in 2006, a violent clash erupted between the yeshiva students and Arab residents of the neighborhood.73 To compound all of this, in October 2008, elections were held for the local authorities,74 and February 2009 saw the general election for Knesset. During elections, politicians at the state and local levels take more extreme stances, so election propaganda exacerbated the already tense situation in Acco. City resident and Knesset member Abbas Zakour (United Arab List-Arab Movement 73 For a detailed account of the events, see: http://www.knesset.gov.il/mmm/data/

pdf/m01593.pdf

74 In the election for Acco mayor, Shimon Lankri got 64 percent of the votes and was

elected to another term in office.

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for Renewal75) wrote to the Minister of Defense before Yom Kippur, saying that he feared violent clashes and that policemen should be stationed at the points of friction between Jews and Arabs. This letter is an attestation to the atmosphere in town before the events. On October 8, 2008, Yom Kippur Eve, Taoufik Jammal drove his car to Ben Shushan Street, a majority-Jewish street, to pick up his daughter from relatives. The action raised anger over the desecration of the holiday’s sanctity, and Jewish residents began pelting him with stones, totaling his car. The police rescued the driver and his relatives for fear of his life. A rumor spread in Ancient Acco that Jews had killed the Arab driver, and a mass mobilization of Arab residents began toward the neighborhood, chanting obscenities and vandalizing cars and store windows. At the holiday’s end, on October 9, violent clashes renewed in the city’s eastern neighborhoods, in the northern housing complex, and in the Wolfson neighborhood. Police dispersed residents with tear gas, water jets, and stun grenades. Knesset members of the left and right attacked police for their ineptitude in not being prepared for such a scenario. On October 10, Mayor Shimon Lankri decided to cancel Acco Festival. In the afternoon hours of that day, demonstrations took place on Alkalai, Ben Shushan, and Achad Ha'am streets and were dispersed by police. During the evening and night, the clashing escalated to mutual stone throwing and the setting of trees and trash cans ablaze all over town, and three Jews were arrested when they tried to damage an Arab-owned house. A call by Jews to boycott Arab-owned businesses was circulated. On October 11, three Arab-owned apartments were set alight in the East Neighborhood, and on Lopez Street stone-throwing continued. Arab representatives denounced the driver and conducted a meeting with Jewish representatives in an attempt to curb the violence. Lankri called on police to crack down on rioters of both sides. On October 12, violent clashes ended. Fifty-four men were arrested during the events, of whom half were Jews and half Arabs. The Hashomer Hatza’ir youth movement of Acco pitched a “peace sukkah,” hosting Jews, Arabs, and public figures. On October 13, Israeli President Shimon Peres came to Acco and met with local leaders and a forum of rabbis and sheikhs to calm spirits. The effects of these events, besides the immediate harm to bodies and property, was 75 Two separate parties running on the same ticket.

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a dire toll suffered by merchants in Ancient Acco, both because of the festival’s cancellation and the significant decline in the number of tourists on Sabbaths.

Cancel the Festival or Have It at the Appointed Time? As stated above, on October 10, 2008, Mayor Shimon Lankri announced the festival would be canceled (de facto, as events died down, it was decided to postpone it until Hanukah, as was also done after the October 2000 events). This decision resulted in heated debate, especially regarding the financial ramifications and the political motive perceived as the basis for the decision. Acco Jewish public figures called for the festival to be canceled while public figures from both left and right opposed its cancellation. Culture Minister Ghaleb Majadlah met with Lankri to try to dissuade him, but to no avail, and MK Gideon Sa'ar (Likud) claimed that it was “a sorry and wrong decision that put out a message of weakness and capitulation to rioters and violence.”76 Lankri claimed that, taking into account the residents “feelings of anger and insult . . . it is not the time for celebrations,”77 and some voiced concern that holding the events at the appointed time would foster violent incidents and provocations. Lankri’s decision was not backed by the police, who claimed it was possible to hold the event at its appointed time. Ancient Acco merchants’ main livelihood is from tourism, and a major part of that hinges upon the festival, so Lankri’s decision, in opposition to the stance of the police and security forces, and against the backdrop of the local elections, was perceived as “punishing the Arabs.” Among the people of the theater who had taken part in the festival throughout its thirty years of existence, there was almost a consensus in favor of holding the festival. A petition that called for holding the festival at its appointed time was circulated online, and dozens of supporters signed it. The petition celebrated the festival’s role as a basis for coexistence: Artists, educators, people of culture, Arabs, and Jews who worked in the framework of the festival for three decades made it, together with 76 http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-3607263,00.html 77 Ibid.

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the residents of Acco, one of the most important artistic events in the country . . . Acco Festival of Other Theatre has always been a place of meeting and frank dialog between Jews and Arabs.78 The petition also raised arguments of a different character. Canceling the festival, it claimed, would mean economic losses for the city and its merchants, and it might undermine the trust between the audience and the festival in the years to come, as happened after cancellation of the 2000 festival. Upward of 9,000 men and women signed the petition. Perusing the names, one can recognize many Israeli theater and art figures, most of whom resided in the larger Tel Aviv area. On the internet, many theater people responded against the decision to cancel the festival, demanding that it be held at its appointed time.79 The main arguments were, “Don’t let a handful of loudmouths set the agenda of Israeli society” (Acco Festival Artists Petition 2008) and “canceling the festival means force and violence have won . . . it means we’ve given up” (Shira Berger). Guy Cohen challenged, “What is this stupid thing of canceling the festival? The police are ready, the municipality doesn’t want to, who’s asking them? Why can’t we just do [the festival]? This voice needs to be sounded much more clearly, we’re not canceling, we bring a large peace- and culture-loving audience, an appropriate Zionist response to the rioters and the punks.” These responses assumed a clear distinction between “enlightened” artists, “dark” Acco residents, and the event’s “true” belonging to the hegemonic group. The only Tel Aviv artist who dared express a different voice in this missive was Shelly Goral, who claimed that “holding the festival would be a distinctly colonialist action.” She explained that holding the festival would necessitate large police forces that would buttress suspicion, hatred, and tension, a fact that would only stress the extent to which the festival is an occupiers’ event. Goral said that she saw coexistence as “an illusion bridled directly to the establishment’s horses,” claiming that the idea that several of the artists had, of arriving 78 http://www.atzuma.co.il/petition/zidan/1 79 The quotations that follow are taken from an email (in Hebrew) that Amir Orian, of

the Room Theatre, sent on October 16, 2008. Orian used to send a widely published weekly missive to dozens of theater people working in and outside the mainstream.

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independently in Acco and performing for residents on the city streets was problematic, “Execution needs to be weighed well” not to collaborate with the establishment, because “any action is the action of an occupier.” As opposed to voices of support, Acco resident artist Natalie Turjeman, who worked at the Acco Theatre Center, appealed to Tel Aviv artists and presented the following dilemma: For many years the festival was a symbol of coexistence, and its cancellation is the thing and the symbol of the thing. Those who live inside the city daily . . . know that the tension between Arabs and Jews has been growing in the last years (for economic, religious and other reasons) and unfortunately the festival’s cancellation attests to that. But if the latest events in the city of Acco surprised you—it’s time for some soul searching [emphasis in the original]. First I would ask myself (because I’m not brazen enough to ask you)—to what extent is the festival connected to the residents of the town? Is it still, after 29 years, a Tel Aviv festival? She concluded by referencing the petition calling to hold the festival: Initially I had wanted to sign the petition calling to hold the festival at any price. But on second thought I thought we should take a step forward and instead of signing petitions or demonstrating at Tzavta in Tel Aviv, just take a train and come to Acco (and sooner rather than later). The claim that Tel Aviv people do not understand the reality in Acco and the complex relation between the festival and the city was reiterated also by Albert Ben-Shloosh, the festival’s director-general, who provocatively opened with, “Dear friends, it is very easy to sit outside of Acco and give us recommendations without taking any responsibility.” Louie Haj, a member of the festival’s management and its former producer, who lives in Acco, wrote Ben-Shloosh a letter saying, “With all the pain, the sadness, and the personal doubts involved (as an Acco resident myself), the decision to postpone the festival is right and necessary in light of the harsh events that you and I have experienced.”

Host Community: Policy and Resistance

Palestinian writer Raji Bathish of Nazareth described his experiences of the 2001 Acco Festival, explaining why he supported canceling the festival, despite the economic losses that Ancient Acco merchants would suffer.80 We remember that the festival under Ati Citron’s directorship (2001–2004) was perceived as having a wide “coexistence” policy in relation to earlier years. However, Bathish claimed that it was a festival designed and directed in an orientalist fashion for Tel Aviv “tourists” who come to encounter “the exotic orient” when they are awash in prejudices and stereotypes: It seems that this festival in a general glance is similar to a public performance for the white feudals, in an unnatural preserve for the indigenous residents. And I ask myself how many of the festival’s Arab fans have managed to understand where the main performances of this “other theatre” take place, and how much a ticket to one costs, if there are even any tickets left (since most tickets are bought in advance for the orientalist expeditions arriving from Tel Aviv and its suburbs . . . ) since the “spiritual” elite that arrives from Tel Aviv and Jerusalem wanders festival’s paths in ridiculous sleeves and absorbed in a pleasing anthropological experience, in hues of hummus and labneh, behind the nargilah stands. . . . It wouldn’t hurt if every once in a while during the festival they mixed with the miserable families, since life is sometimes so close to the ground . . . so what’s the difference between Acco and India. He also lashed out, not only against the visitors but also against the festival’s artists who produce it in Tel Aviv: The productions are hauled in on trucks from the center like Ikea furniture, unpacked and assembled in Ancient Acco for four or five days, during which the city is forced to live through a ravishing spectacle tailored especially to the rulers’ tastes, to be photographed and 80 His text was published in Arabic on the website “arabs48” (http://www.arabs48.

com/display.x?cid=12&sid=125&id=57702) and translated by Rachella Mizrahi, who published it on the Kedma website with an epilogue of her own: http://www. kedma.co.il/index.php?id=2123&t=pages (accessed October 19, 2008).

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watched, until the end of the celebration. And then the festival is again dismantled (and others are left with the waste and neglect, of course), and afterwards the leaving south. Bathish concluded by saying that Acco Festival is a “project safe to any expression of racism,” recommending that “this festival (postponed or canceled) check its content, so that the place’s new wound can be dealt with.” During Hol Hamo’ed Sukkot (October 15–18, 2008), the festival’s original time, two events took place. The first was Theatre in Time of Plague, an event of festival participants and organizers and art and theater people of Tel Aviv. The second was an event organized by the Coalition of Acco Residents, made up mainly of Arab activists and artists. I will now briefly analyze the differences between the two events, which took place simultaneously in Ancient Acco, and each one’s different character. A call came out over the internet addressed to “all festival participating artists and their friends” to come and participate in a series of encounters entitled Theatre in Time of Plague. These were encounters that mainly included speeches by public figures, artists, and social activists. Some of them included performance excerpts, and songs were sung communally. Another encounter, which was organized before the events, was attended by almost all past festival directors, and there was a debate about “the situation.” Simultaneously, a protest event was held at Tzavta in Tel Aviv under the title No to Violence Yes to Culture. The call appealed mostly to the hegemonic group, both in its title and its content, with expressions such as “the encounters were meant to narrate, even to ourselves, the huge importance of art in general and the art of theater” or later, “the encounters are also geared toward ourselves, as theater people, to remind ourselves of what is important and what is unimportant” (all emphases mine). The call explicitly appealed to the hegemonic Tel Aviv group by speaking of a collective “we,” in effect excluding the residents of Acco, both Jewish and Arab (the call was not translated into Arabic). Furthermore, the call used a cluster of medical images to describe political reality. The violent events were called “plague” and “great wounds,” and the encounters were described as a treatment of “the wounds,” “artistic bandaging,” or “the healing power of the art of theater.” The images camouflaged “the political,” since a plague or a disease is allegedly independent of human intervention. Healer images also have a

Host Community: Policy and Resistance

paternalistic-colonial side, representing the people of the center as having the ability to “heal” the “plague-stricken” people of the periphery. These encounters and the discourse around them through images of medicine turned out to be a “support group” where mainly Tel Aviv theater people talked to themselves and reasserted their enlightened and “healing” image, as opposed to the residents of Acco who “spoiled their celebration.” The Coalition of Acco Residents, organized by Zbeideh Azidi and journalist and writer Allah Halihel, by contrast, decided to hold an alternative festival of plays, performances, and movies in Arabic at Al Laz Theatre in Ancient Acco.81 In this context, they raised the performance Huash, which was supposed to appear in the festival. Alongside it, Muhammed Bakri raised his famous solo performance, The Opsimist, based on Amil Habibi’s novel of the same title. Music, artistic performance pieces, and movies by Arab artists were also shown. In total opposition to the encounters and discussions produced by the hegemonic group at the festival site, here Arab artists and residents of Ancient Acco initiated their own festival event—both to try to deal concretely with the economic ramifications of the festival’s cancellation and as a principled response attesting to independence and the creation of an non-establishment alternative. Rachella Mizrahi tells of her visit to the Al Laz Theatre: In the visit on Thursday in Acco following the call to attend a series of events, performances and movies in Arabic, the outcome of local organizing, and a talk with older town residents, I was impressed with a general sigh of relief on the side of Acco residents following the festival’s cancellation. “This festival is not meant for us,” said one resident, whose elder parents were barred entrance into their own neighborhood with their car for fear they would “endanger the safety” of festival-goers.82 81 A Palestinian theater founded in the Galilean village of Rama by deceased director

Mazen Gatas which has continued its work in Acco from 2001 onward. This theater raises performances all year long, and in the context of Acco Festival it produces and hosts Arabic in- and out-of-competition shows. Jewish audiences usually do not go to Arabic festival performances. The theater is not close to the festival gardens, where the Theatre in Time of Plague encounters took place, but it is situated in the heart of Ancient Acco. 82 Mizrahi translated Bathish’s text to Hebrew and added an epilogue regarding her experiences at the performances at the Al Laz Theatre in Acco; see note 80.

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As opposed to the internal “support” encounters that mostly included internal discussion and talk by the hegemonic group, this organization acted to create a real cultural alternative in light of the festival’s cancellation. In a certain sense, this organization may carve a way to an appropriate multicultural policy for Acco Festival that would include significant professional Arab representation in the decision-making process and would increase the number of Arabic-­language performances and their diversity.

And Yet It Moves: the 2008 Hanukkah Festival As already mentioned, eventually the festival took place in December 2008 during the Hanukkah holiday under the title Talking Art in Acco. The festival’s framework was smaller than usual since some of the artists could not perform on the new date due to earlier commitments. The title Talking Art in Acco contains an internal tension between the supposed desire to stress dialog (coexistence?) as an important goal and a means of dealing with the October 2008 events and the desire to blur the painful subject and not deal with it. The title does not specify who will be doing the “talking” and which groups have been asked to “speak” in the context of the festival. Furthermore, the title Talking Art can be interpreted as a call for dialog (of an unspecified nature) through art, or alternately as a call to talk only about art, and not, for instance, politics, i.e., neutralize and suspend the political from the professional-artistic. On the level of content, the competition performances, set before the violent events, mostly stayed away, in differing dosages, from dealing with sociopolitical questions. The only performance that dealt with Acco was Hummus, Fries, and Salad by Avigail Rubin and Yoav Bartal. The performance was not accepted into the competition but was produced by the Acco Theatre Center and was raised in the less prestigious framework of guest performances. It is a biting satire of Acco Festival’s “coexistence” approach. The plot revolves around the festival’s female director, a Jewish theater director, and an Arab actress who meet at an Ancient Acco hummus restaurant during the rehearsal period of the festival. Disagreements erupt between them regarding the representation of an Arab woman in the performance, while the “enlightened” Tel Aviv groups’ stereotypes and prejudices are exposed. The performance was raised at a hummus restaurant and the audience sat around the tables. Arab

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waiters served hummus to the audience and were part of the performances’ actors. To segue between different parts, they danced in an increasingly violent way, to the point of exposing their anger with the condescension of the festival’s director and the Jewish director. The performance ended with the Arab waiter asking for “the check,” a searing image that brought back the bitter reality of two months prior, exposing the hierarchy between festival decision-makers and tearing the mask off of fake “equality and enlightenment.” Daniela Michaeli (in Yudilovitch December 25, 2008) summarized her tenure as artistic director (2005–2008), referencing the festival’s policy toward the host community. She started by confessing that “I did not pay enough attention to the question of how to create integration with the city and what just happened flooded all with question marks . . . we talked a lot about connection to the new town and we did too little.” Later she justified herself by saying, “It’s true that for years Acco Festival was hosted by the town and was not naturalized like Ati Citron, the artistic director before me, claimed. Is that a sin? Is that a crime? Is it a mistake? The city enjoyed and profited from it.” In other words, the festival is not intended for Acco residents, and their role as host community is secondary if even important at all, except for the economic aspect. She justified that through an artistic-professional separation between the main artistic goal, “the creation of other theater,” and secondary concomitant goals, having to do with economic-image development, “My first commitment, I confess, was to the artists and the artwork, because that is my profession, and for me that was the heart of the matter. It’s them that I wanted to promote, take care of, and make present.” And she is unapologetic about saying that Acco Festival has elitist pretensions, “If we’re talking about elite genre, this is the elite of the elite.” In so saying, Michaeli expressed the prevalent approach of the festival during most of its years, an approach that was formulated by Hillel Mittelpunkt, who saw the festival as “a Tel Aviv event taking place in Acco.” However, on the representational level, she continued the line begun by Citron and appointed professional Arab representatives to the artistic committee and the jury.

Toward Multicultural Change In the years 2009–2012, the festival was directed by Smadar Ya'aron and Moni Yossef of the Acco Theatre Center. Acco Theatre was founded in 1984 and was

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led by Dudi Ma'ayan (who was born in Acco), Smadar Ya'aron, Moni Yossef, and Khaled Abu Ali. The theater is situated in the festival gardens and operates year-long, hosting Jewish and Arabic artists from Acco and the area. It is a theater with an alternative vision that is unique in the Israeli theater field. As opposed to Michaeli’s approach, which fit with that of most of the directors before her (see Chapter One) and that hierarchically separated between the creation of “other theater” and the economic-touristic development of Acco through the festival, Acco Theatre focused on creating an alternative aesthetic that would fashion the contradictory, complex, and painful narratives of the different social groups throughout its existence. Accordingly, Ya'aron and Yossef were interested in fashioning the festival’s policy toward the host community: Toward the next festival, we will want to get to the neighborhoods . . . Acco’s strong population left the town long ago for the Krayot or Nahariya. Those left over are the weak. We need to allow them a way to externalize the pain. There is a wound here that everybody is ignoring. The press talks about the extreme margins, but in Acco there are also underground waves that have been there for years. Inside there is jealousy, hatred, a sadomasochistic relationship that no one talks about. People are silent. It’s time to stop being silent. (Yudilovitch October 25, 2008) They explained the difference between the mainstream and Acco Festival inside it and their conception of representation: Performances that deal with the conflict and these pains have been written in most cases by Jews. Jews speak for the Arabs and what usually ends up happening is slogans . . . We work differently. With us, each one talks their own text. We do not take over the narrative. (Yudilovitch October 25, 2008) Ya'aron and Yossef distinguished themselves from the festival’s “coexistence” approach up to that point, using the trite image of hummus to do so: The problem is the hummus. People really think that if they pal around, sit and eat hummus together, or even as artists create

Host Community: Policy and Resistance

together, that will be an answer? The hummus is confusing. The answer is not there. There’s something in other instances that has to be resolved. It’s on the state-political-social level. We can do a bloodletting until tomorrow and do our best, but it won’t help. You have to understand, Acco is Israel. Weak, very diverse populations are channeled to Acco; this is Israeli society with its hard edges. It is a very exact mirror of Israeli society, and it is not a pretty one. The solution is not with the artists and not with the mayor. It’s a state thing. (Yudilovitch October 25, 2008) Ya'aron and Yossef highlighted cultural diversity and its ethno-class and national complexities, and in their understanding of a shallow “coexistence,” ironically, they described how eating hummus in Ancient Acco only harms diversity, flattening it out and eventually reasserting the status quo. They concluded by saying that “the festival happens in Ancient Acco, and maybe it’s time to break this habit where artists land here two days before the festival begins, set up the sets in the Crusader Halls, and operate in total isolation from the place.” Therefore, they want “festival productions to relate to the place, to be part of it over time. The festival has to be part of the place, and in order to do that, it needs to know the people intimately, to create work in town and create works by local artists in a process of close accompaniment” (Yudilovitch October 25, 2008). And indeed, in the 2009 program Ya'aron and Yossef wrote, “We seek to encourage multicultural, risky, committed theater that tests the boundaries of the artistic act from every possible angle.” This “manifesto” was expressed in the festival’s content: three performances by Arab Mizrahi and Ethiopian Acco-resident artists were raised in the context of the competition, besides those of Tel Aviv artists; Jewish and Arab Acco artists raised Whispering Alleyways—a performance that deals with the complex history of the place, where the audience accompanies actors touring Ancient Acco, listening to Arabs’ and Mizrahim’s stories of life before 1948 and the fifties and watching performance excerpts in the houses’ yards. Another performance by Jews and Arabs in Acco was Restorative Experience—a satire about the violent clash of the year before. Acco artist Natalie Turjeman raised Chicken Freud, an alternative performance dealing with the artist’s identity as an Acco resident and referencing the violent

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events that took place in the town.83 Ethiopian-Israeli theater group Holgab raised Matoko’s House, dealing with the oppression of Ethiopian Jews in Israel. The Palestinian El-Hakawati Theatre returned to the festival after a twenty-year hiatus, presenting Abu Ubu in the Butchers’ Market (an adaptation of Jarry’s Ubu Roi) in Arabic. It is a biting satire about internal Palestinian politics and the oppression of Israel and the United States. Nekudah Tovah Theatre Ensemble, whose actors are religious Jews, raised Tateh, which deals with the believing man’s misgivings. Outside the competition, projects by Jewish, Arab, and European artists were raised that had an alternative orientation and were in the spirit of the festival. Similarly, in the 2011 festival, you could “feel the political, conceptual, and social earthquakes” of social protest (Levy 2011, 32); representation grew in the repertoire of the feelings of disgust with occupation, with “the oppression of migrant workers . . . the right-wing’s recklessness . . . and the shameless covetousness of the tycoons who steal the air, the water and the land of all of us” (Levy 2012, 10) As for representation, festival directors in the last few years have been Acco residents. Ossam Massri is a theater person and Acco-born journalist. The artistic director of Masrahid (the one-man performance festival that takes place in Acco) was appointed to the artistic committee. Actress Khaula Dibsi was born in nearby Kafr Yassif, acted in the festival in the past, and was appointed to the jury. With this representation, the festival’s target audience significantly expanded: alongside the Tel Aviv audience, it now appeals to an Acco, Mizrahi, religious, and Ethiopian audience, inviting them to watch performances connected to their community life and presented in their language. During this time, a significant shift occurred in festival policy toward a multicultural conception that attempts to award place to the city’s diversity and multiplicity.

Epilogue: From a Policy of Coexistence to Multiculturalism? To summarize, Acco Festival’s critical analysis through the three parameters for examination of the degree of public policy’s multiculturalism—representation, 83 Natalie Turjeman is quoted above in an open letter, which she sent out close to the

time of the violent events of 2008, in which she criticized the festival for being isolated from the city and continuing to be “a Tel Aviv festival.”

Host Community: Policy and Resistance

content, and target audience—reveals that despite the changes and transformations to it working patterns, the festival is far from reflecting the value of multiculturalism. Examining the festival’s working patterns over three decades and the sociocultural identity of decision-makers on the artistic level (artistic director, members of the artistic community, and the jury), of performance content and their target audience, reveals that the policy governing it was lacking. Acco Festival’s working patterns are bound up in practices of social exclusion and marginalization of different social groups. The festival well reflects how a theater field, trying to contain and further the consumption of art, simultaneously also creates rigid social hierarchies. Examining its work patterns also allows arriving at conclusions regarding the work patterns of other culture and art institutions in a multicultural context. The argument of social exclusion and creation of social hierarchies may look strange in light of the coexistence policy stated in the festival’s different documents. But as I have sought to show, the coexistence policy only began being formulated and realized following opposition from city residents. Furthermore, during most years, this policy was secondary in the festival and separated from the main goal of creating “other theater,” even though alternative theater theoreticians and artists in Israel and around the world actually deal with the interweaving of the two, using artistic-experimental language as a platform for sociopolitical and community-critical expression (e.g., Graver 1995). As already mentioned, “coexistence” is a problematic term that does not in fact point to egalitarian relations, and it holds a national ( Jewish-Arab) dichotomy that ignores the intersectionality of other ethno-class identities. Social hierarchy reproduction and social exclusion are reflected in the festival’s working patterns and are mainly formulated through a regime of artistic justification that separates the artistic-aesthetic (creation of “other theater”) and the social-economic-touristic (development of Acco). Using professional-artistic justifications, the hegemonic group excludes the other groups from meaningful roles in the decision-making process concerning the festival’s fashioning, which structures content that interests the hegemonic group and therefore appeals to the target population, which comes from the center and especially from Tel Aviv. With this preliminary examination, we can identify a glaring inequality between the hegemonic group, which directs and consumes the festival, and the host community.

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When we examine the level of representation and ascertain the social and artistic identity of the festival’s directors historically, we find that the hegemonic group controlled the event’s character throughout the majority of its existence, as opposed to the extreme underrepresentation of other groups in the festival’s committees. In the years 1980–2013, there were 14 artistic directors, all secular Jews of differing left-wing orientation. Overlapping, there were 12 men, 12 residents of the center, 11 Ashkenazis, and 9 mainstream Israeli theater directors. Among the members of the artistic committees and the jury, it seems that the situation is no different. When we then examine Arab representation in the committees—since supposedly the coexistence policy was supposed to fix this distortion—we see that in 1980–2000 there was almost no Arab representation: actress Salwa Nakkara-Haddad was appointed to the 1987 festival jury, and director Fawad Awad was appointed to the 1993 festival jury. In the first two decades, no single Arab artist was appointed to the artistic committee, whose job is to sort the performances submitted to the competition and accompany them. Only during the third decade did the picture change slightly—one Arab representative out of five members was appointed to the artistic committee, and an Arab representative was appointed to the jury. Gad Kaynar and Zehava Caspi (2013, 19) claim that there is a polar dialectic between the daring marginal theaters and the conservative mainstream, which means a struggle “not only on the right to set the canon . . . but also over the degree and daring of representation of the Israeli experience as it really is.” But it seems that, as opposed to their words, Acco Festival was often characterized by a lesser degree of daring in representing the multicultural and politically complex Israeli reality. On the level of festival content, examining in-competition performance repertoire reveals similarly dire data. During the first decade, no performances in Arabic were raised at all. During the second decade, and especially during the first half of the nineties, in-competition Arabic performances were raised occasionally (twelve performances including joint Jewish-Arab projects). During the second half of that decade, Arabic performances all but disappeared from the competition and the festival at large. As mentioned, since 2001, one Arabic performance is usually raised in the competition framework. In light of these findings, it is apparent that the festival’s main target audience has been Jews of the hegemonic group, while the Jewish and Arab residents of Acco were the

Host Community: Policy and Resistance

target audience, if at all, of the outside events and street theaters which are perceived as secondary in importance and placed in the margins of the festival. In conclusion, one of the main means used to camouflage the social hierarchies reflected in Acco Festival’s working patterns, despite the important changes to these patterns, was the distinction between the event’s theatrical goal and its social goal. The “theatrical-professional” goal was perceived as central and important, allegedly universal and “color blind.” This practice allowed the hegemonic group to maintain control over the festival, both in its dominant representation in decision-making processes and in setting festival content, and therefore in deciding what its target population would be. The separation strategy shows how this institution, which hides the power relations that exist between the group who controls the symbolic and material resources and the weakened groups. These power relations are usually invisible since most of the art and theater institutions are situated in and operate in the hegemonic center; they are exposed when the institutions migrate to the periphery. Acco Festival supplies an illuminating example of this kind of exposure. It allows us to view the stark opposition between the festival as an artistic institution directed by the center and the residents of Acco who are excluded from it, i.e., in this case, we can learn how to critically examine the overarching work patterns that allow a cultural institution to select its central directors and artists on a supposedly professional-artistic basis and therefore ignore the lack of representation of weakened groups. These work patterns also allow furthering an artistic repertoire that is supposedly only based on professional criteria but that is in fact hiding cultural prejudices (usually Western). This dynamic serves the hegemonic target populations and allows them to base their status and social distinction on the consumption of “high culture” (Bourdieu 1984). Acco Festival could have a different character. It could become a productive and creative multicultural encounter because of its geographical-social position (as Smadar Ya'aron and Moni Yossef indeed tried to do). To turn into such an institution, it would have to change its central worldview regarding the term “other theater,” artificially separate from social-community questions dealing with the city of Acco and with the concept of it as a microcosm of Israeli society. The necessary conditions for this change are recognition of the different identities of Acco’s social groups and the removal of the hegemonic group’s ethno-class transparency. This recognition would have to include reference to

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the inequality, oppressive relations, and historical injustice, at least as they have been reflected in the history of the festival itself. This kind of recognition would necessitate affirmative representation in all festival committees, especially in artistic direction roles, and could be the start of a process of speaking about a commitment to transform the city itself into a central and important part in leading the celebration that is called Acco Festival. However, the complexity of relations between Mizrahim and Arabs in Acco necessitates further thinking regarding the question about how partnership in the event’s management can be achieved against the backdrop of tensions and different, even opposing, political orientation. Following Nissim Mizrachi’s conception, one of the ways of dealing with this is choosing representative figures that could mediate and bridge between the worlds, while referencing a dialog that is based not only on universal values but also on those deriving from Mizrahi and Arab traditions. Therefore, I suppose that change from the festival’s discourse to a discourse based on a multicultural viewpoint would legitimatize not only a national ( Jewish-Arab) discourse but also an ethno-class discourse, a change that may weaken opposition and strengthen partnership.

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Index Abir, 102–103 abstention, 47 Abu Ubu in the Butchers’ Market, 200 Acco Festival for Other Theater. see also artistic direction; budget of Acco Festival; organization of Acco Festival; performance repertoire; reception of Acco Festival; women artists and gender contextual theatricality, xiv cultural context, xiv as a model Israeli festival, 131–134 model of five aspects of, xiv–xvi oppositions, 7 performances, ix playing culture, xiv site of celebration and confrontation, x–xii structure, ix–x theatrical playing, xiv theoretical-methodological framework, xii–xiv vs Canadian Fringe Festival, 132–134 Acco Festival’s critical analysis, 200–204 level of festival content, 202–204 level of representation, 202 professional-artistic justifications, 201 Acco Municipality, ix–xi, xv, 12, 77, 107, 161–162, 166, 168 festival’s management and production, 5–6, 109–112, 114, 124–127, 131, 161, 187 funding of festival, 123–124 as supplier of material services to Acco Festival, 107, 124 Acco residents and Acco festival, 124–128 Acco Theatre Center, 55, 57, 63, 80, 86, 100, 192, 196–197

Holocaust and its representations, 75–79 Adon, Raida, 48, 49 Adorno, Theodor, 24–26, 25–26 adult puppet show, 26 Agmon, Goren, 73 Agmon, Yaakov, 117–118, 125 Aharonson-Lehavi, Sharon, 89 Akalaitis, Joan JoAnne, 68 Akkad, Orna, 105 Al-Dura, Muhammad, 177 Alexander, David, 121, 140 Ali, Ali, 58 Ali, Khaled Abu, 77, 79, 81, 82, 198 alienation effect, 24–25 Alienation-Irtirab, 74 Ali of the Galilee, 42–43 Alkalai, Mosko, 117 Allah Karim, 31–32 Al Laz Theatre, 48, 104, 195 The Alley of White Chairs, 37–38 Alon, Chen, 51, 52 Alon, Gil, 70, 149 Aloni, Shulamith, 118 Alonis, Nisim, 145 Amer, Abu, 33 Amir, Yigal, 36, 38 Ancient Acco, ix, 48, 49, 52–55, 55, 68, 72, 77, 112, 126, 157, 158, 164, 165, 169, 171, 174, 176, 178, 185–188, 188, 189, 190, 193–194, 195, 196, 199 And So We Continue, 149 The Anthology, 76, 86–88 Arab hospitality, 55 Arabic-Hebrew Theatre of Jaffa, 182–183 Arabic performances, 40–42 Arabs of Acco, 76–77

220

Index Arafat, Yasser, 33, 72 Arbeit Macht Frei vom Toitland Europa, 63, 76, 77, 79–86 Arieli-Orloff, 31 Artaud, Antonin, 13, 44, 76, 83 Arten, 92 “art for art’s sake” conception, 21 artistic direction, xv artistic director and the committee, role of, 5–7 critical realism and, 22–23 de facto process of depoliticization, 3 formal and thematic, 3–5 formal and thematic exceptions, 13–16, 25 inclusion or exclusion of artists and works, 5–7 of Other theater, 4 process of selection and repertoire building, 5–7 promoting thematic exceptions, 10–13 purpose of, 21 relations between form and content, 21–27 site’s boundaries and its political, 2 theatrical production outside the mainstream, 8–10 artistic directors, 1980-2012, 28 artistic theater, 139 Ashbel, Alina, 147 Ashbel, Ariel, 68 Atar, Geulah Yeffet, 100 audience reaction to festival, 153–156 autonomous formal exception, 26 Avigal, Shosh, 146, 154, 169 Azidi, Zbeideh, 195 Azoulay, Ariella, 179 Azrati, Yigal, 149 Baharav, Moti, 33, 165 Bakri, Muhammed, 195 Balai, Dina, 88 Barba, Eugenio, 76 Bardby, David, 108 Barefoot, 91 Bar-El, Avi Gibson, 69 Bar Kadma, Emmanuel, 145, 146, 154, 156 Baron, Erella, 156 Bartov, Hanoch, 73 Bar-Ya’akov, Shai, 38, 123, 153

Bashir, Bashir, 184 Bathish of Nazareth, Raji, 193 Bat Sheva’s Spring, 51 Becker, Howard, 21 Becker, Tzahi, 149 Begin, Menachem, 72 Beit Lessin, 33 Beniel, Eran, 47, 54, 116, 151, 176, 177 Benjamin, Walter, 24, 25 Ben-Meir, Ilana, 78 Ben-Shloosh, Albert, 168, 182, 192 Ben-Yehuda, Nadav, 64, 66 Benziman, Uzi, 175 Berkman, Ami, 142 Berkman, Rachel, 142, 147 Betulot Shiduch, 99 A Bird in the Hand, 89 Bits, 93 Black Chuppah, 142 Blai, Dina, 149 Bossem, Nadav, 58 Bracha Fund, 127 Brecht, Bertolt, 24–26, 34, 41 Brook, Peter, 137 The Brothers, 40 budget of Acco Festival, xv–xvi, 107–108, 114–131 Acco Municipality contribution, 123–124 Agmon’s approach, 117–118 budget allocation, 114 commercial sponsors, 118 contributions, 127 during the first half of the eighties, 116 institutional budgeting, 116 during mid-eighties, 116 during nineties, 117–119 2000s, 127 second half of the nineties (1996-2000), crisis, 119–124 The Bus, 38–40 Bus 300 affair of 1984, 34 Buton, Yitzhak, 32 Cameri Theatre, 23, 99 Canaan, Mickey, 69 Canadian Fringe Festival, 132–134 The Car, 18–20 Carlson, Marvin, 41, 135 Carmi, Daniela, 92 Carnival at Venice, 74

Index Caspi, Zehava, 202 Cecilia, Christina, Cornelia and the Rest, 90 Chacham, Ronit, 142 Cherchi, Yonatan, 149 Chetrit, Sami Shalom, 171 Chicken Freud, 199 Chilton, Nola, 92, 143 Citron, Ati, 48, 122, 126, 185–187, 193 Cloning, 149 Clouds on a Mountain Road, 105–106 Coalition of Acco Residents, 195 Cohen, Dalia, 82 Cohen, Einat, 91 Cohen, Guy, 123 Cohen, Shuli, 66 Cohen-Knohl, Dalia, 99 Cohen-Yanai, Anna, 70 Come Come Come Baby Come, 90 Conda, Yonatan, 71 Cotliar, Mario, 147 critical realism, 22–24 Crusader Halls of Acco Theatre Center, ix, 73, 76, 80, 81, 115, 122, 157, 169, 199 Dabi, Boaz, 64 Dal, Ben Zion, 122 The Dance of Genghis Cohn, 73 Danieli, Michaela, 57 Danon, Rami, 23 De Castro, Eli, 169 Delgado, Maria, 108 Demjanjuk Trial, 63 depoliticization of festival, 3, 8, 11, 15, 21, 27 Dibsi, Khawla Alhaji, 104 Diwan, 55–57 Dloomy, Niva, 75 Do Not Say Water Water, 100 Don’t Touch My Holocaust, 79 Dor, Gabi El, 122 Dor-Cohen, Alice, 90 Dovra, Ravid, 149 Dromer, Uri, 67 Eban, Abba, 72 écriture feminine, 89 Ein Hod village, xiii Eitan, Revital, 92 Eldor, Gabi, 37, 149, 183

El-Hakawati Theatre, 40, 42–47, 43, 166, 167, 177, 200 Ali of the Galilee, 42–43 Jewish-Arab Projects, 44–47 Other Prayer Stories, 43 Palestinian politics and relation between the Palestinian Authority, Israel, and the United States, 44 Pere Ubu at the Butcher Market, 44 satirical portrayal of Yasser Arafat, 43 The Story of Shama Village, 43 Elian, Yonah, 148 Elyon-Yisraeli, Aliza, 98 Encounters in the Woods, 64 Enemies, 32–33 epic theater, 53–54 escapist formalism, 22 Eshed, Noga, 90–91 Eternal Bride, 91 Etzion, Adi, 89 Evron, Boaz, 145, 154, 157, 169 exceptionality to an artistic system, 4–5 experimental theater, 25 Ezrati, Yigal, 35, 37, 118, 122, 182 fashion quality theater, 8 Fassateen, 48–51 Feingold, Ben-Ami, 72, 153 Feldman, Bilha, 89 Feldmesser-Yaron, Rivi, 97 feminist epic theater, 89, 91, 97 feminist realism, 89, 92 Fester, Uri, 31 Festivalising!: Theatrical Events, Politics and Culture, xiv, 109 Festival Management & Event Tourism, 109 Fiel, Andres, 79 Fingerman, Yuval, 101 First Gulf War, 30, 63 First Intifada, 30, 31, 32–33, 34, 36 First Lebanon War, 30–31, 72 Fish, Stanley, 135 Fiske, John, 30 Fitussi, Yossi, 115 Flupenbach and Zufenheim—Reeducation, 69–70 Folio, 75 folklore construction and deconstruction, 54

221

222

Index “folkloristic-touristic” hosting drama, 56–57 formal exceptionality, 4–5, 7 Foucault, Michel, 1 Frankenthal, Yitzhak, 183 Fricker, Karen, 108 Friedland, Dalia, 64, 155 Fuchs, Sarit, 145 Gabirol, Shlomo Ibn, 100 Garinim, 68 Gases, 68–69 Gattas, Abbas, 104 Gattas, Mazes, 48 Gazans, 33, 166, 171 Gaza War, 30 Genihar, Alma, 51 Gerstel, Yuli, 183 Gertz, Avigail, 102 Gery, Pnina, 141 Gesher Theatre, 180 Getz, Donald, 109 Givol Anata Choir, 68 Golan, Hila, 75 Goren, Shosha, 149 greenhouse, 91 Grotowski, Jerzy, 13, 76, 137 Ha’aretz, 151 Habibi, Emil, 104 Habima, 33 Haefrati, Shifra, 69 Haham-Herson, Ronit, 89 Haifa Beit Hagefen Theatre, 40 Haj, Louie, 192 Hameagel, Honi, 66, 67, 79 Hammer, Zevulun, 121 Handelzaltz, Michael, 115, 145–146, 151, 152, 155 Hanukkah ceremony, 75 Hanukkah Festival, 2008, 196–197 Hasfari, Hana Azoulay, 99 Hasfari, Shmuel, 32, 117, 142, 147, 149 Hashomer Hatza’ir youth movement of Acco, 189 Hatzor, Ilan, 23, 34 Hava Nagilah (song), 90 The Head of Jabbar, 40–41 Henig, Ophira, 149

Herson, Yohanan, 89 Hilu, Nadia, 183 Hirsch, Dafna, 61, 157 Hitler, the Robot and the Knife, 64 Holgab, 200 Holocaust and its representations, 61–88 Acco Theatre Center and, 75–79 Alienation-Irtirab, 74 The Anthology, 76, 86–88 Arbeit Macht Frei vom Toitland Europa, 63, 76–77, 79–86 black comedy, 69 Carnival at Venice, 74 clichés of Holocaust, 71 The Dance of Genghis Cohn, 73 Dead End Kids, 68 deconstruction of Jewish and Israeli myths, 66–67 Encounters in the Woods, 64 Flupenbach and Zufenheim— Reeducation, 69–70 Garinim, 68 Gases, 68–69 Ghetto, 65 heroic myth, 65–66 Hitler, the Robot and the Knife, 64 in Israeli education system, 75 Jacob the Liar, 66 Jewish Medea, 65 Levi’s Son, 64 Mein Kampf, 70 memorial representations, 65, 75, 81–85 Name: Family, 64 Nuremberg Trials, 74 Only the Stars were So Close, 66 Ori, 67–68 Party-Zen/Stones, 69 politicization of the Holocaust, 71–75 Polygraph Hess, 74 On the Ramp, 66 Scapegoats, 66 Second Generation Memories in Ancient Acco, 63, 76, 77, 78–79 A Train in Bavaria, 64 Twenty Two Pictures, 64 We Are Building a Port, 70–71 Yizkor: A Nostalgic Performance, 64 The Holocaust in Hebrew Drama (Ben-Ami Feingold), 72

Index Holocaust Museum at Kibbutz Lochamei Hageta’ot, 80 horizontal intertextuality, 30 host community, xvi, 159–160 distinction between “enlightened” artists and “dark” Acco residents, 191–192 festival policy and, 184–188 multiculturalism and spatialization, 160–165, 180–184 protest and racism, 170–175 resistance to festival, 165–204 target audience, 202–203 Hummus, Fries, and Salad, 57–61, 158 hyperrealism, 53–54 IFTR’s Theatrical Event Working Group, 109 Inbar, Ya’el, 149 infrastructure of Acco Festival, xv–xvi, 107–108, 127–128 Acco Municipality role, 124 “center-periphery” structure, 128–131 International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR), xiv The Interrogation, 36 Israel Festival, xiii Israeli Association for Culture and Art, 110, 117, 119, 120, 123, 131 Israeli theater, x, xii, 1–2, 6, 17, 19, 29, 31, 38, 57, 70, 72, 76, 79–80, 82–83, 108, 128, 133, 144, 154, 159, 162, 181, 182, 186, 191, 198, 202 Ivgi, Moshe, 127 I Will Go Crazy If You Say Goodbye (song), 90 Jacobson, Orly, 91 Jacob the Liar, 66 Jammal, Taoufik, 189 Jauss, Hans Robert, 135 Jewish-Arab “coexistence” in Acco, 44–47, 172, 173–174, 175–178 Jewish-Arab conflict, representation of, 30–42 Joeih, Durgham, 41 Kadura, Ibrahim, 58 Kadura, Khalil, 58

Kahana, Michael, 73, 74 Kant, Immanuel, 21 Kantor, Tadeusz, 38, 137 Karman, Bushra, 104 Karmon, Yossef, 148 Katz, Orna, 92 Kaynar, Gad, 72, 83, 202 Keini, Miriam, 122, 148 Kenan, Amos, 89 Kenner, Ruth, 88, 149 Kershaw, Baz, 56 Khan Theatre, 51 Kirchenbaum, Moti, 148 Kleiner, Yoram, 123, 125 Kotler, Oded, xiii, 1 Kupferman, Judy, 118, 149 Kymlicka, Will, 184 Lankri, Shimon, 189, 190 Lavi, Miri, 100 Lehmann, Hans-Thies, 137–138, 141, 146, 148 Leibowitz, Yeshayahu, 72 Lerner, Motti, 65 Letter to a Stupid Woman, 105 Lev-Aladgem, Shulamith, 87 Levi, Neal, 75 Levi, Ram, 86 Levin, Hanoch, 35, 145 Levi’s Son, 64 Levy, Shai, 115 Levy, Shaikeh, 122, 124 Levy, Shimon, 73, 79 Levy, Tom, 8–9, 151 Lieberman, Avigdor, 72 Love I Say Love, 91 Lukács, Georg, 22–23 Ma’ayan, Dudi, 13, 25, 75, 76–77, 83, 85, 120, 141, 151 Majadlah, Ghaleb, 190 Mandatory Tenders Law of 1992, 119–121 Man/Large Puppet, 142, 144 Manor, Giora, 156 Mansour, Atallah, 175 Man to Man, 142 Mar-Haim, Yossef, 115 Marin, Malka, 64 Maron, Hanna, 140, 148

223

224

Index Marxist conception of art alienation effect, 24–25 anti-realist approaches, 24–27 “art for art’s sake,” 21 art’s autonomy, 25–26 barrier between art and reality, 21–22 critical realism vs socialist realism, 22–24 depoliticization of art, 21 purpose of art, 21 Masked, 23–24, 34–35 Masri, Misra, 58 Massrawa, Riad, 149 Massri, Ossam, 200 Matoko’s House, 200 Medea X, 38–39 Mein Kampf, 70 Members of Knesset (MK), 34 Mer, Giuliano, 183 The Merchant of Venice, 74 Mess, 79 Michaeli, Daniella, 88, 92 Midnight Inspection, 34 Mizrachi, Nissim, 170–171, 172–174 Mizrahi, Rachella, 195 Mizrahim, xiin1, 86, 168, 170–175, 180, 182, 187, 199 Mnouchkine, Ariane, 137 modernism, 22 modernist artistic tendencies, 22–23, 37, 102, 128, 144, 170 Mohanty, Chandra T., 102 Mugliner, Martin, 149 multiculturalism, 160–165, 180–184 Munich Agreement, 72 Nakba, story of, 48–51 Nakkara, Salwa, 183 Nakkara-Haddad, Salwa, 202 Name: Family, 64 Naomi, 102–104 National Religious Party, 117, 121 Neighborhood Rehabilitation and Renewal Project, xiii–xiv Nekudah Tovah Theatre Ensemble, 200 Ninio, Roni, 123, 179–180, 183–184, 185–187 Nissan Nativ Acting Studio, 181 Nora, Pierre, 81

Ofrat, Hadas, 26, 142, 147–148, 149 Omanut La’am, 114, 117 Ona’at Dvarim-A Talmud Play, 102 Only the Stars were So Close, 66 On the Ramp, 66 Ophir, Adi, 3, 68, 179 The Opsimist, 195 organization of Acco Festival, xv–xvi, 107–114 artistic activity and its frameworks, 112 artistic director and artistic committee, 110–111 artists’ complaints, 115 directing bodies, 109–111 festival staff, 111 first decade, 1980s, 114–115 founder and catalyst, 109 general manager and producer, 110 host community and volunteers, 113 jury, 111 Knesset Chairman Prize, 116 management or steering committee, 110 producing body, 110 public bodies, 111–112 selection committees and lectors, 117–118 sponsors, 112 Ori, 67–68 Orian, Amir, 151–152, 158 Oron, Gad, 120–121, 123 Orpaz, Yitzhak, 91 Oslo Accords, 30, 36, 43, 75 Osterman, Ruti, 64 Other Prayer Stories, 43 Other than What?, 143 Other Theater, 1, 3–5, 4, 88, 147, 151 anti-realist approaches, 24–27 festival’s definition of, 7 formal and thematic dimensions, 7–8 formal and thematic exceptions, 13–16 as formal exception alone, 16–18 promoting thematic exceptions, 10–13 theatrical production outside the mainstream, 8–10 Oz, Avraham, 35

Index Palestinian El-Hakawati Theatre, 40 Palma, David, 66 The Parasite, 26–27, 142 Party-Zen/Stones, 69 Paz, Miri, 155 The Peacock of Silwan, 51–54 Peres Peace Center, 127 Pere Ubu at the Butcher Market, 44 performance repertoire, xv, 5n5 Allah Karim, 31–32 The Alley of White Chairs, 37–38 in Arabic language, 40–42 The Brothers, 40 The Bus, 38–40 character formation, 35 of community theater, 47–48 A Day in our Life, 40 Diwan, 55–57 El-Hakawati Theatre, 42–47 “encounters” of Jewish visitors with Acco residents, 54–57 Enemies, 32–33 Fassateen, 48–51 folklore construction and deconstruction, 54 Gazans, 33 Handallah’s Journey, 40 The Head of Jabbar, 40–41 Holocaust and its representations, 61–88 Hummus, Fries, and Salad, 57–61, 158 hyperrealism and epic theater, 53 impact of the Holocaust on Israeli society, 30 The Interrogation, 36 Israeli-Palestinian conflict, representation of, 30 Jewish-Arab conflict, representation of, 30–42 Jewish-Arab Projects, 44–47 Masked, 34–35 Medea X, 38–39 Midnight Inspection, 34 overlap between fictional space and physical space, 53–54 of Palestinian resistance, 48–51 The Peacock of Silwan, 51–54 prostitution as an image of morally impossible interim state, 33–34

The Protocols, 35 Queen of a Bathtub, 35 reading of Givati Bet Trials and trial of Colonel Yehuda Meir, 35 relation between fictional world and reality, 47 Rust, 38 Samarian Clouds, 36–37 of Second Intifada, 38 of social and political issues, 40–42 Tashmad, 32 of traumatic memories, 38 uprising of residents of the Occupied Palestinian Territory, 32–33 use of an Arabic folklore allegory, 42 Wolves in Acco, 47–48 women artists and gender, 88–106 Zionist Whore, 33–34 Performing History (Freddy Rokem), 82 Peter, Sinai, 34, 51, 52, 149, 183 Pinsker, Roni, 142 political theater, 38, 136, 138, 139, 141, 143, 148, 153 Polygraph Hess, 74 postdramatic theater, 136–145 The Prince, 77 The Protocols, 35 Qabbani, Nizar, 105 Queen of a Bathtub (Hanoch Levin), 35, 60 Rabin, Yitzhak, 36 Raz, Renana, 101 Raz-Karkotzkin, Amnon, 79 reception of Acco Festival, xvi, 135–136 axes, 135–136 criticism, 145–153, 156–158 of the 1981 festival, 141–145 jury perception, 148–150 postdramatic perspective, 136–145 Yehoshua’s politics of perception, 140–141 Rechavi, Hagit, 92 Rekanati, Leon, 115 The Respectful Whore (Jean-Paul Sartre), 33 Restorative Experience, 199

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226

Index Reznick, Eti, 142 Rich Foundation, 127 Rimon-Or, Anat, 171 Ro’eh, Yitzhak, 165 Rokem, Freddy, 82 Romano Studio, 91 The Room Theatre, 151 Rosenfeld, Daniel, 74 Rust, 38

Sobol, Yehoshua, 65 socialist realism, 22–24 socially-isolated formalist theater, 139 Somech, Sasson, 148 Spector, Simcha, 65 Steinberg, David, 36, 37 The Story of Shama Village, 43 The Story of Tongalen, 93 Sukkot, Hol Hamo’ed, 194

Sa’ar (Likud), MK Gideon, 190 Sadeh, Sandra, 86 Salem, Francois Abu, 42 Samarian Clouds, 36–37 Sarid, Yossi, 121 satialization, 160–165 Sauter, Wilmar, xiv, 109, 152 Scapegoats, 66 Schechner, Richard, 13 Schmitt, Carl, 1 Schuster, Michael, 147 Second Generation Memories in Ancient Acco, 63, 76–79 Second Intifada, 30, 31, 36, 38, 44 Second Lebanon War, 30 Sedelex, Duralex, 67 Shaked, Gershon, 141, 143, 148 Shalev, Avner, 114 Shalvi, Ellis, 165 Shamir, Anulah, 90–91 Shamir, Moshe, 74, 90, 148 Shani, Hadassa, 149 Shapira, Muli, 117 Sharon, Ariel, 177 Shavit, Edna, 148 Shemparahat, 89 Shenhav, Yehouda, 1, 171, 181 Shenzer, Yaniv, 149 Shintian, 104–105 Shoef, Corina, 79 Shohat, Ella, 171 Shohat, Zipi, 179 Shoshan, Yossefa Even, 100 Shoval, Ruby Porat, 102, 103 Shtayer-Livni, Liat, 62, 65 Shtral, Ophelia, 64 Silwan, 51 Skin, 90 small repertory theater, 8

Tabori, George, 70 Taha, Muhammed Ali, 48 The Taming of the Shrew in Sector, 58 Tashmad, 32 taste-makers, 6 Tene, Ofra, 61, 157 Theatre of Cruelty, 44 Theatre of the Absurd, 40 Theatre of the Oppressed, 185 Theatrical Event Working Group, xiv, 109 theatrical representations of conflicts of Israeli society, 30 1:10 the Concrete Senses Performance, 149 thematic exceptionality, 4–5, 7 Thinly Sliced, 101–102 Tlalim, Asher, 79 Tomojna Street, 91 Tongues, 90 Torstrick, Rebecca, 168 A Train in Bavaria, 64 Train Theatre, 17, 147 Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 183 The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 182 Tsafrir, Yinon, 69 Tsahal, Galei, 117 Turjeman, Natalie, 192, 199 Twenty Two Pictures, 64 Tzemach, Miri, 91 Ubu Roi (Alfred Jarry ), 44 Umm al Robbikha, 102, 104 UNESCO’s international recognition of Ancient Acco (Acre), 126 Unraveled, 93 Urian, Dan, 30, 31, 41, 42, 82, 83, 97–98, 104, 156

Index Vered, Michal, 99 Vienna Prague, 77 Vilnai, Matan, 179 vulgar Marxism, 22 Waiting for Godot, 92 Wallach, Yona, 90 Wanos, Sa’ad Alla, 40, 41, 176 Warda, Yusuf Abu, 102 We Are Building a Port, 70–71 Weber, Elit, 101 Weingarten, Itzik, 119, 120–121, 122, 183 Weiss, Peter, 36 What Do You Remember Jonathan, Jonathan . . . , 91 Whispering Alleyways, 199 Wiener, Neta, 70 Wiener, Raz, 71 Wilmar Sauter’s model of festivals as theatrical events, xiv–xv Wilson, Robert, 137 Wolenitz, Dalik, 92 Wolves in Acco, 47–48 Woman, 101 Woman Births Woman, 89 Woman from the Earth, 142 women artists and gender, 88–106 Abir, 102–103 Arten, 92 Barefoot, 91 Betulot Shiduch, 99 A Bird in the Hand, 89 Bits, 93 Bruriah Act, 97–98 Cecilia, Christina, Cornelia and the Rest, 90 Clouds on a Mountain Road, 105–106 Come Come Come Baby Come, 90 Creation, 100 Do Not Say Water Water, 100 Enkidu, 89 Eternal Bride, 91 gender, nationality, and Israeli-­ Palestinian conflict, 102–106 gender and Judaism, 97–102 gender and sexuality, 89–93 Hannah’s Shabbat, 99–100 Letter to a Stupid Woman, 105

Love I Say Love, 91 Naomi, 102–104 Ona’at Dvarim-A Talmud Play, 102 Romano Studio, 91 Shemparahat, 89 Shintian, 104–105 Skin, 90 The Story of Tongalen, 93 Thinly Sliced, 101–102 Tomojna Street, 91 Tongues, 90 Umm al Robbikha, 102, 104 Unmatchable, 99 Unraveled, 93 Waiting for Godot, 92 What Do You Remember Jonathan, Jonathan . . . , 91 Woman, 101 Woman Births Woman, 89 Yona Yona, 92 Ya’ari, Hagit, 33, 102, 166 Ya’aron, Smadar, 75, 77, 81–82, 83–84, 85, 86–87, 88, 149, 197–199, 203 Yakir, Einat, 153 Yassif, Kafr, 200 Yehoshua, A.B., 140, 148 Yisrael, Marit Ben, 149 Yitzhaki, Tali, 118, 149 Yizkor: A Nostalgic Performance, 64 Yona, Yossi, 181 Yona Yona, 92 Yosef, Eitan Bar, 50–51 Yosef, Moni, 55, 75, 77, 81, 85, 86, 88, 100, 197–199, 203 Zadok, Arnon, 92 Zakour, Abbas, 188 Zandani, Yifat, 69 Zehavi, Oded, 149 Zik Group, 149 Zimmer, Shimon, 64 Zimmerman, Moshe, 83 Zionist ideology, 34 Zionist Prostitute, 166, 171 Zionist Whore, 33–34 Zuckerman, Navah, 88, 149

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