In She Wanted to Dance, a new play written by Hadar Galron, survivors of the Supernova music festival massacre take to the stage with those first to respond to the October 7 attack.
Social media influencer Jessica Elter, who lost her partner Ben Shimoni, plays a character quite similar to herself.
Rafaela Treistman, who lost her partner, Hanan Glazner, plays Leia, a young woman who went missing during the massacre.
Ron Mizrahi, a combat duty soldier, plays Tomer – a man shouldering the burden of going to war.
With a service-issued Glock 19 pistol on her hip when offstage, officer Yael Tamir plays a policewoman who serves as a line of defense between terrorists and civilians.
Having begun at the Beit Zvi acting school as a theatrical exercise, the October She Wanted to Dance premiere will begin a tour with shows planned well into next year. Each performance will be followed by a discussion with the performers.
London-born Galron, who wrote the award-winning 2004 play Mikveh, told the audience gathered at a press conference last Monday at Tzavta Theater that “the State of Israel needs to see this” and that she is in awe of the young generation, which “carries us on their backs after we have made many mistakes.”
During a brief preview of some of the scenes, it became clear that the play is a bold attempt to contain much of Israel’s multifaceted society in a melodrama.
The engine of the plot is Gabriel, a young man raised in a conservative religious family who, unknown to his parents, leads a double life.
He dates Leia and was among the Supernova participants.
Fleeing from Hamas terrorists, he left Leia behind and is now desperately trying to understand what happened to her. When his father rebukes him for feeling compassion for “idol worshipers who dance around the golden calf,” he responds by saying that these are “pure souls.”
Later, when he meets Elter’s character, she informs him she was meant to be at the party as well but decided to observe Shabbat, and was saved as a result.
His belittling response quickly backfires when he learns she was able to locate several missing persons due to her skills on social media.
“That part is sadly fictional,” Jerusalem-raised Elter told The Jerusalem Post. She spent five frantic days trying to locate Shimoni before it was announced that he was murdered. He was shot while trying to rescue as many people as he could from the attack. He drove back and forth to the site of the terror attack three times, picking up survivors who needed to escape, before he was killed. Elter was on the phone with him during his last moments.
The daughter of Liverpool-born dentist David Elter, a known figure in the capital’s English-speaking community, Elter was told to be mindful when she travels outside the country due to her habit of wearing a Star of David around her neck.
“Yet tragedy struck me right here at home,” she told the Post.
WEARING THE light-sand-colored boots of the US Army 2nd Cavalry Regiment (given as a gift after a joint training exercise with his IDF unit) Mizrahi was among the first to serve in Be’eri and Gaza. He is also a trained actor, having studied at Sapir College.
Speaking about his character, Tomer, he noted it is a representation of all of us who serve as reserve soldiers.
“He puts on stage just how hard it is to return home,” he explained to the Post. He noted that where he lives, there are blue barrels used for farming – an inconsequential fact, yet one that fills him with emotions.
“In Gaza,” he shared, “a blue barrel just like this one often conceals the opening of a [Hamas] tunnel.” In the performance, Tomer nearly shoots Gabriel when the young man demands information aggressively.
Yuval Siman-Tov, who plays a DJ, was shot in the back while attempting to flee the massacre. Outside of acting, Siman-Tov runs a foundation that helps Holocaust survivors. “I took the pain,” he told the Post, “and turned it into post-traumatic growth.” On his ankle, he tattooed the words “I’m Alive.”
“I was hiding in a bush and heard gunshots and wanted someone to know,” he said. “The [Supernova massacre] experience is not just mine,” he said, “it is also yours.”
Tamir noted how important it is to show the public a woman in a combat role and emphasized that thanks to brave officers of both sexes, lives were saved on October 7.
“As women officers, we bring our intuition into each security situation,” she told the Post.
“Here, we tell the story of the entire State of Israel, including the histories of those who are not here to share them.”
In his 2009 documentary Dancing with Tears in Our Eyes, a study on Israeli club music, Nissan Shor traced its black and queer origins. He also noted how different it was from rock or disco music.
Songs were replaced by tracks, and playing the guitar became secondary to knowing how to use a Roland TB-303 synthesizer.
In Israel, Shimon Shirazi organized a 2004 party near Eilat with an actual golden calf for people to dance around and drag queens to take camel rides.
With the Supernova massacre, it seems any subversive values this music might have once held had evaporated.
Rather than Acid Tracks leading people to the Rave Against the Occupation, a real party in 2002, Israelis are now forced to recommit to the brutal values of a country at war and its need to defend itself from a hostile world.
Creating art inspired by tragedy so soon
Some might question the wisdom of producing a play so rapidly after a massive national trauma. In comparison, it took the English-speaking world 17 years to produce a theater play about the 1988 Pan Am Flight 103 with Deborah Brevoort’s The Women of Lockerbie.
She Wanted to Dance presents a fusion of social media and Jewish practices often seen as superstitious. A young woman tears her old, flashy, clothes in an attempt to force heaven to shred any punishments designed for the Jewish people – and asks Tomer to film it on his phone to upload online – is one such example.
Readers might consider it “schund,” an unsophisticated piece of Jewish theater meant for mass consumption. It would be better to see this production before passing moral or artistic judgment on it.
The people of Israel have been brutalized, and time will tell which artistic expressions depict this pain and elevate it to a form useful for generations to come.
She Wanted to Dance will be presented on October 30, 8:30 p.m. at the Petah Tikva Cultural Hall. NIS 99 per ticket. Hebrew only. Shows will be held in Holon, Modi’in, Ma’aleh Adumim, and more. www.leaan.co.il