How many times have we expressed the fervent wish that “one day” things here would be different? That proverbial station in our existential continuum infers the arrival of a new dawn and the beginning of a better era devoid of violence, senseless killing, and deceit.
Only time will tell if that longed-for idyllic scenario materializes, but at least for now we can engage in some form of creative remedial endeavor which may very well help to induce a smidgen of inner calm. This is on offer at the close of this year’s Israel Festival, with the “One Day” multidisciplinary medley-structured event.
The program kicks off at the Sherover Auditorium of the Jerusalem Theatre at 5 p.m. on September 26, continuing through to 4 p.m. on the morrow. Festival artistic directors Michal Vaknin and Itay Mautner have gone for a suitably street-level format that conveys a sense of togetherness – and even intimacy – between the audience and the artists on the roster of the expansive festival finale.
An offering of hope in a year of war
While spelling out the all-too-familiar life circumstances here these days, the organizers toss in a caveat for anyone looking for a quick fix. “It took one day to change us all: our mental state, our worldviews, our topics of conversation, the actions we carry out each day,” they declare. “It will take much more than one day to restore our confidence [and heal] our pain and our fears.” Duly noted.
The second part of the multi-layered project header asks “What is it all about?” What indeed? Whether we will have a better handle on that philosophical poser by the close of play on September 27 remains to be seen. Regardless, Vaknin and Mautner have clearly done their artistic homework and culled a host of leading professionals from various disciplines to address the subject matter in as convincing, thought-provoking, and entertaining a manner as possible.
The relevant section of the Israel Festival website explains that the audience and performers will be “on the stage together for 24 hours.” That in itself has to fuel an immediacy neither party experiences in the normal, unstaged run of things.
The program will unfurl in a series of installments. The three-hour sunset curtain-raiser starts out with the aptly named Bright Future undertaking. With that inference to an inviting temporal horizon in place, actress Alit Kreiz and director-actress Ayelet Golan have duly gone about appealing to the next generation, gathering a diverse group of teenagers for the opener.
“These last months have left us speechless. Many questions continue to fill our lives,” the organizers succinctly point out. They say they have spent several months working together “on the act of questioning, on the ability to doubt, on the power of the question mark.”
THAT IS a particularly salient angle of attack, considering, for example, our prime minister’s statement at the outset of the post-Oct. 7 horrors, that “This is not the time to ask questions” or, indeed, the lack of a proper investigation into the effectiveness of the government’s response to COVID-19. Denying a person’s right to deliberate over the accepted wisdom of the day, let alone freedom of speech, infers a sense of societal and authoritarian insecurity, and efforts to parry all lines of inquiry.
Bright Future is described as a “performative ceremony” in which 55 young men and women from different places and backgrounds in Israel ask questions. The questions are gradually collected and accumulated, with the idea that they will continue to resonate with us.
“I think that an important part of the fact that we are human beings is our ability to cast doubt,” Mautner says. Well put. But how does that work on a stage?
“How do you craft a half-hour performance show at the core of which people simply ask lots of questions? Part of it is very declarative – don’t forget, you have performers and the audience together on the same stage. There is no separation,” he states.
The logistics were challenging, and a flexible format was patently in order.
“Part of it is frontal, with a microphone; part involves going up to individual people asking questions; and some shout out from afar.”
The performers will have to field some searching probes.
“There may be questions like ‘If I were a hostage in Gaza, would my friends organize a campaign for my release?’ That’s a question that touches on all aspects of life,” Mautner posits. There will be less taxing queries, too. “There is the whole spectrum [of themes], between the seemingly mundane and the fundamental, philosophical elements of life.”
If we are looking for something to cling on to, however, some gratifyingly simple, one-dimensional topic that has been fully resolved, Mautner says we are in for disappointment.
“What is wonderful about all this is that not a single question gets an answer,” he chuckles. “The thing is that as soon as you answer a question, you can delete it. It has an answer, there is no need to ask it [again].” Evidently, that is not the name of the game here. “If the question is repeatedly presented, you can get a different answer each time.”
Mautner dips into religious climes. “You have a hozer b’tshuva [literally: “comes back with an answer,” referring to a secular Jew who becomes observant} and a yotzeh b’she’elah [“leaves with a question” – a religious Jew who opts for a secular path through life]. It is the same here.
“As soon as you find the questions are left unanswered, with no clear-cut resolution, the brain is channeled toward coming up with definitive answers of yes or no, black or white, correct or incorrect. if things remain open, you can continue relating to them in different sorts of ways. It is like you can’t bathe in the same river twice,” Mautner observes, based on the premise that all our actions in life spawn reactions of some kind.
THINGS TAKE a more artistic and entertaining turn as the opening section gives way to Soundtrack of Now, created by actress-musician Dana Ivgy and street photographer Alex Farfuri. While Ivgy churns out a couple of numbers at the piano, Farfuri provides images that impart a sense of the national zeitgeist, or rather the subtext thereof.
The emotive ante shoots up with the With(out) You segment when Noga Friedman joins forces with singer-songwriter Daniel Salomon and lauded a capella troupe the Great Gehenna Choir. Mother-of-three Friedman came to mass media notice after her husband, Ido Rosenthal, a veteran combat soldier, was killed on Oct. 7.
Friedman, a sociology doctoral student at Beersheba University, has made public her feelings and thoughts about the war and the government’s handling of the situation since its outbreak in an angst-filled no-nonsense manner. Mautner says it was an instinctive go-with-the-flow initiative.
“Noga is a voice we discovered, tragically, in the aftermath of Oct. 7. I remember reading her first post, and I was bowled over. It was so far beyond the consensus, and it took place at such a dramatic time for the country, and on such a stately platform. It was in the very first days of the war.”
The more Mautner read and learned about Friedman, the more he realized that she should be on the Israel Festival roster.
“One day I called her and asked her if she wanted to take part. I wasn’t even thinking then about ‘One Day.’ I thought about texts that she would recite, but she said the thing she most loved to do was sing. Then Michal [Vaknin] suggested connecting her with the Great Gehenna Choir, and Daniel Salomon has been working with her.” Sounds like a thoroughly moving venture. Certainly not your run-of-the-mill festival fare.
With Oct. 7 as a constant impassioned thematic baseline throughout, the accent is very much on immersive vignettes that, at the very least, should shed some welcome light on emotional well-being and how to go about reclaiming some of that.
THE THERAPEUTIC aspect is clearly in the mix. However, that does not necessarily mean everyone agrees with everyone else and all is comfy-cozy. Dissenting voices also have their place in a healthy society.
Some of that comes through in a bunch of stand-up comic sessions going through the therapy mill in Going into Treatment. The session sees comics Adi Helman, Dana Modan, Yuval Plotkin, and Tal Avraham deliver incisive humorous slots in what is said to be “a platform to the ego, the id, and the superego.”
For the less Freudian among us, that triad refers to the three levels of the ego psychology model of the psyche – the less fettered, the critical moralizing, and the organized, realistic mediating agent. Basically, according to Freud, that covers all personal psychological bases.
One of the stand-up comedians will act as the therapist while the others drop their defenses and dig deep into their own psyche – all, naturally, tailored to appeal to our funny bone. Mautner hastens to note that it is not designed to get the members of the audience to fall about laughing. “This is not about getting people to titter. This is about something funny and deep.”
He adds that there are precedents for the entertaining cerebral production.
The 9 p.m.-11 p.m. session is called Echo Song, which takes its name from a hit number by late crooner Arik Lavi. “It is a staple of The Israeli Songbook,” Mautner says, adding that the textual content references our current moment. Stellar singer-songwriter Shlomi Shaban will be on hand to offer his own reading of the song, at least to begin with, before he is joined by fellow indie artists Shuzin and Maayan Linik. Each of the musicians will play a grand piano, following their individual and collective muses and taking the Lavi hit any and every which way.
As befitting the “One Day” programming approach this, too, will follow the intimacy path. “This show talks about how everything in our life resonates, has a sort of ripple effect,” Mautner explains. “Shlomi chose two other pianists. There will be three grand pianos in the center of the stage, and the audience will sit around them. Each of the artists received a section of the song and they will take off from there.”
The cerebral and emotional continuum is in order here. “They will play individually and then play together, feed off each other, and support the others. Basically, this is a show that relates to echoing, to how the things we do bounce around. It is like when you go to the desert and shout out, and you hear your voice coming back to you.”
Mautner views that as a reflection of everyday life here these days.
“I think, if you look at our actions over the past 10 months [since Oct. 7], if you listen well, you see they reverberate.” That, apparently, can swing several ways. “Sometimes they swallow us up, and sometimes they elevate us. In any case, you can sense the importance of our actions now.”
There is plenty more to sink our teeth and hearts into across the 23-hour offering, which can be taken in separate segments or as an accumulative experience throughout the evening, night, and into the new day and, hopefully, a slightly moderated take on where we are at and where we should be headed.
Other acts to look out for in “One Day” include soulful singer-songwriter Eviatar Banai, the well-named Sprawling set, which runs from 12:30 a.m. through to 8:30 a.m., opening with DJ Wasse and culminating with Maya Dunietz – normally associated with jazz piano and accordion playing on the 8 a.m. Morning Show for Peace.
Sprawling also features mattresses for anyone who peters out and prefers to imbibe the music while they count sheep. The event organizers say the session “creates optimal conditions to dive into, to meet ourselves and our sense of self – between wakefulness and dream, between sounds and silence, between thoughts and feelings, between expression and restraint.”
Back in 1959, Dina Washington had a hit with a song called “What a Difference a Day Makes.” Perhaps “One Day” will help breathe a new, healthier spirit into the ongoing political-military-human morass and provide us with a reason to smile and hope.■
The Israel Festival opens Sept. 10. For more information and tickets: israel-festival.org/en/
