When residents of the Gaza border region were evacuated following the October 7 Hamas attack, Otef HaNegev Theater and its director Amitay Yaish Ben Ousilio went to meet them in their bewildered grief and offer support.
“The horrors Hamas did were inhuman,” Ben Ousilio told The Jerusalem Post, adding that “my focus is on the tragedy of the citizen who no longer feels at home.”
Embedded in the Western Negev, the troupe was personally struck by the tragedy. Ofer Kaldaron, brother of the theater’s technical manager, Nisan Kaldaron, is still being held in Gaza by Hamas.
“When a 72-years-old actor” – Miguel Orbach from Kibbutz Nir Oz – “comes to rehearsals and returns to Kibbutz Eilot [where he now lives], this gives him confidence and strength to deal with what he saw,” Ben Ousilio said. The theater building is still a closed military zone. The troupe was hosted by Eilat’s Elad Theater as work on this production took shape.
The result of an intensive, six-month long process, A Place to Live (Eshkol) is a multi-layered work based on testimonies, the personal experiences of the actors, and text messages sent on October 7. It will also be the first theater performance shown during this year’s Israel Festival.
“The premiere will be at a Gaza border community,” Ben Ousilio said. “We got all the needed security clearances. Culture and life are coming back. This despite the fact that life is still not back to normal – and can never be normal again – until those abducted by Hamas are returned.”
Roee Joseph
IN SHURA, named after the military base that bodies were brought to for identification after the October 7 terror attack, Roee Joseph examines the difficult but necessary task of forensic study to ensure that a burial can be carried out, and that a name can be given to the victim. The play is based on his own service at the base; he appears in it as a character.
Joseph named the play in English Ekkyklema, a roll-out body-carrying platform used in ancient Greek theater to present the death of a character to the audience. Just as the Greeks placed divine value on giving the dead a proper burial – this is the dramatic engine of, for example, Antigone – so did the various security branches commit to correctly identify the remains collected from the Supernova massacre and other locations.
“To bury it, you need to know what it is,” Joseph said, quoting a line from the play. “This is true for an experience as well,” he added.
“One has to recognize what one did to put it to rest. I hope for the audience that, so we can live here together, we will all figure out what it is we are now experiencing.”
The play presents various characters as they carry out the gruesome yet essential work. Joseph is not shy about depicting himself in a slightly comical manner – he phones Tel Aviv often, requesting facial creams and good tea – but he is also brave enough to describe the sort of discussions the living have over the dead.
One scene has two people arguing about just how cold the morgue is, another has a person bleakly stating that the hardest thing for him is to see the dead wearing shoes.
“They didn’t know this was the last time they laced their shoes,” he says on stage: “No one ever does.”
Like in his 2021 play Hereby I Declare, reality is the driving force that compels Joseph to create. That play dealt with his attempts to solve the death of a Palestinian man who was shot while carrying a white flag.
“My starting point is this,” he told the Post: “I agree to take part in what is happening around me, with what’s real.” Joseph said, pointing out that this is a different school of thought than the one focused on presenting fictional stories on stage.
“I see this play as a theatrical work that identifies life.” He offered, “I was sent to Shura to identify the dead. I was a living person offering a name to those who died, but I turned to writing to recognize the living.”
Volker Gerling
This year’s edition of the Israel Festival will also include German artist and performer Volker Gerling presenting his Portraits in Motion, based on two study sessions held in Israel in May and July with various individuals impacted by the Hamas terror attack of October 7.
In his native Germany, Gerling takes long walks between cities – for example, Berlin and Cologne. During these travels – the last one took five months – he meets people and shows them his art. In exchange, they offer him money or food. He often takes their pictures, which are later transformed into a flip-book.
He later shares these flip-books – and his real-life encounters – with the audience in performances that weave animation, photography, and story-telling.
An expert raconteur, Gerling will perform in English for the Israel Festival.
“I give the audience a chance to slow down time,” he said, “and take as much time as they need.”
This is because the physicality of holding the pages, and flipping them to form the animated movement, puts the control into the fingers of the people he presents the works to.
Gerling is deeply ethical and always offers something back to the people he documents, like Yael Noy and her son Aviya in this performance, usually by giving them the flip books they are in.
“I may be on stage,” he told the Post, “but there are many invisible people who are there, too.”
Nurit Dreamer
GRIEVING THOSE who depart from this life – and finding our own ways to process loss – is at the core of a new performance by Nurit Dreamer titled Never Ending Mourning. When she was a child, her own mother was killed in a traffic accident.
“This production refers to the character of Scheherazade from One Thousand and One Nights,” Dreamer told the Post, “because in it, I tell my sister” – who was a baby when their mother died – “what happened on the morning we learned of the accident and about our mother.”
Each story revolves around a character who takes to the stage. Dreamer is careful to explain that these are the real people in her story, not actors.
Naomi Yoeli
For example, one story is about how her mother took her to watch her first theater show, an adaptation of Sleeping Beauty directed by Naomi Yoeli, who appears on stage for that part of the performance.
“People have lost their loved ones recently,” she said. “Each person deals with loss in different ways, and these ways are related to the specific person that they miss.
“This production puts forth issues of solidarity and partnership around loss without calling for uniformity,” Dreamer concluded, “offering a net of mourning together – which does not request sameness – but instead allows us to hold on to the particularity of each life.”
The Israel Festival is directed by Michal Vaknin and Itay Mautner. It will begin with a performance of A Place to Live (Eshkol) on Wednesday, September 11, 8 p.m. at Eshkol Regional Council Culture Hall (NIS 75 per ticket). Never Ending Mourning will be offered on Wednesday, September 18, 9 p.m. at Jerusalem Theater (NIS 40). Portraits in Motion will be offered at the same date and location (in a different hall) at 9:30 p.m. (NIS 75) Shura will be performed on Thursday, September 26, 8:30 p.m. at the Jerusalem Theater (NIS). Many of these will have repeat performances. To book and for more info, call (02) 563-1544 or visit https://www.israel-festival.org/en/
