Ladino, much like Yiddish, covers pretty expansive cultural subtexts and domains, which suits Galit Giat down to the ground.
Giat has been putting her stuff out there, across a panoply of entertainment market sectors, for close to three decades now.
Some may know her as a TV actress in popular productions such as Shemesh and Kesef Katlani (Lethal Money), while others probably caught her in her glittering hoofing spot on Dancing with the Stars.
But it is Giat’s vocal chords and emotive sonorous delivery that will be front and center when she stars on the final day of this year’s Ladino Festival, which takes place in Safed through Thursday.
When I ask something in the vein of “will the real Galit Giat please stand up?” the 49-year-old mother of three responds that she has juggled her genre act spread from the off.
“I have always acted and sung and danced, at the same time,” she says, adding that she, unsurprisingly, is not a fan of pigeonholing.
“I don’t define myself as this or that. I think that as soon as you do that, you reduce yourself, you limit who you are. I don’t think that is right for me. So, I act and I sing, I do TV cinema and also work on stage, and do emceeing, and I sing in my productions all around the country.
“So, you want to try to define me?” she throws back at me.
I politely left the gauntlet where it landed and explained to Giat that I am not looking to shackle her, just trying to get a better handle on where she comes from and how that informs her multifarious work today.
When it comes to singing, Giat has certainly paid her dues.
“I went to Thelma Yellin [High School of the Arts in Givatayim],” she explains. “I did a lot of plays, with music, and somehow all the parts they gave me were singing parts.”
That was followed by some invaluable on-the-job training in an IDF band, although in a different field of entertainment. “I thought I’d probably sing in the troupe, but I played the comedic role.”
Giat says she has never had a problem with casting her creative net far and wide. “That’s what I really enjoy. That’s my own fun, doing all the things that I love.” That, she admits, is how she stays on the ball and keeps herself engaged. “I am always looking to do different things, in different styles, and to convey a different message.”
That mindset led her straight into the core of Ladino.
“I have been performing in Bustan Sephardi [Spanish Garden] for 22 years,” she says, referencing the long-running hit musical theater production based on a play written by late Israeli president, academic and author Yitzhak Navon, in Ladino.
That, along with a plethora of other projects, helps to keep Giat on her toes. “I have been singing songs by [Egyptian diva] Oum Kulthoum, for seven years, with the Jaffa Theater. That’s something very different. My world is wide and varied, and I love it that way.”
Not that there hasn’t been the odd internal tiff. “Sometimes I tell myself that I should, maybe, focus on something, on just one thing – maybe I should just be a singer or an actress. But I don’t know how to do that.”
Giat isn't entirely sure where her split creative personality comes from, although she thinks her father may have had something to with it. “My mother told me it was hard to get me to go to sleep when I was a baby. Then my dad came up with the idea of putting a radio in my crib.” There was no premeditated music schooling at home. “I have no idea what music played on the radio back then, but it was probably a mix of things.”
She ventures that that nonjudgmental open-eared acceptance of the sounds that surrounded her in her infancy possibly formed her eclectic professional line of thought. “I didn’t listen to the radio when I was a baby. I don’t think you intentionally listen when you are so young. You just hear them, without any sort of agenda or prejudice. I think that is a healthy thing, in life, in general. That is part of the reason why everything interests me.”
In fact, it seems there was quite a lot of gentle guidance in the Giat home.
“My father used to play all sorts of music for us,” Giant recalls. “There was Yemenite music, [hit mid-seventies disco group] Boney M., or ABBA, liturgical material, Israeli stuff, classical music and rock. All sorts.”
The previous generation also got in on the willy-nilly artistic educational act.
“My mother’s side of the family has Algerian roots, and I’d hear my grandparents speaking Arabic. They loved the Arabic language, and I’d watch the [Friday afternoon] Arabic movie on TV with them. I didn’t understand it, but I was charmed by the sound of the language.”
To this day, Oum Kulthoum singing turns notwithstanding, Giat says she does not speak Arabic too well, but that its rhythms and textures are etched into her heart. “Something I remember my grandfather telling me was: ‘You will never understand the depth of Arabic.’ That is probably true, but I have taken it to my heart. And my grandfather was very happy I later sang songs in Arabic.”
The box also helped to draw Giat into the climes of this week’s festival.
“I remember watching the original production of Bustan Sephardi on our black-and-white TV,” she laughs. “There were Shabbat songs and ‘Sheharhoret’ [Ladino classic ‘Morenica’].
“Those songs were always part of my personal soundtrack, as an Israeli. So Ladino was never alien to me. I had to pinch myself when I landed a part in the show.”
She says it was a natural fit for her. “When I got into Ladino music, that added another layer, another color, to my personality and my personal makeup.”
That enduring love affair will fuel Giat’s Ladino Festival finale on Thursday (10:30 p.m.), when she takes the stage with a band that also features her Argentinean-born flutist husband, Marcelo Zuber.
Other big names lined up for this year’s three-dayer include world-renowned Ladino-flamenco vocalist Yasmin Levy, globe-trotting guitarist-vocalist David Broza, Cypriot-born singer Trifonas and popular TV and radio presenter, and vocalist, Shimon Parnass.
For tickets and more information: www.ladinoz.com