Video: Some of the entries in this year’s competition, including Ofer Amram’s physical theater work Sanatorium

I took a detour from writing strictly about dance when I accepted an assignment to cover the Acco Fringe Theater Festival for the Jerusalem Post.  Though I’ve never been to this event, I’ve heard that it’s one of the most adventurous and intriguing festivals in the country – and I was certainly intrigued by how many programs in this theater festival are movement based.

Some shows are billed as dance theater (Yoav Bertel and Avigail Rubin’s A Compensating Experience), physical theater (Ofer Amram’s Sanatorium), or motion theater (the group Makhol).  Others are outright dance works, like the Acco Dance Greenhouse ensemble’s Neuronirvana, which was shown this summer as part of the Maholohet festival at Suzanne Dellal.

The international selections also feature a good dose of movement.  3Some, from Germany, was created by Israeli choreographer and actor Nir De-Wolf with Knut Berger, while The Vengeance Cell is by Japanese butoh artists Taketeru Kudo and Jun Wakabayash.  The Teatro Pavana street theater group from the Netherlands includes stilt-walkers, and the German group Grotest Maru employs physical theater techniques in The Waters of Acco – A Dance on the Shore.

To learn more about this year’s Acco Fringe Theater Festival, read my article below, which was initially published in the Jerusalem Post.

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Alternative Acco

In the midst of the Jewish holiday of Succot, modern-day Israelis added a new celebration.  Just as the ancient Israelites journeyed to Jerusalem for the holiday, hundreds of thousands of hungry culture-goers flock annually to the old city of Acco during Hol Hamoed to witness the latest harvest of alternative theater.  Now in its 30th season, the Acco Fringe Theater Festival is as adventurous as ever with 450 diverse performances challenging typical notions of theater.

Smadar Ya’aron, who is co-directing the festival for the first time with Moni Yosef, explains, “We are looking for pieces of theater which propose another approach, whether it’s visually, or concerning the content or other aspects of the theatrical event . . . What is also important for us is that the theater will be daring . . . To dare to do a step, to dare to say something which is maybe not so popular, to dare to try and explore.”

This year’s lineup certainly promises a wealth of bold, experimental creations.  Some works blur the borders between disciplines, such as the offering from the motion theater Makhol, which includes paintings by visual artist Kim Goldberg.  Other selections inventively refigure the relationship between performers and viewers.  Stage Fright is presented by one performer to one spectator, while in Les Souffleurs Comandos Posiques, actors whisper secrets into the ears of the audience via pipes.  Puppet theater, physical theater, pantomime, light shows and a variety of street theater add to the festival’s eclectic mix.

While the works themselves may be departures from conventional theater, the programming reflects a sense of continuity and tradition.  As in previous years, the 2009 Acco Fringe Theater Festival includes a prestigious competition for ten selected works. Several events are also designed to pay tribute to the festival’s 30-year run, including a special symposium, a photography exhibition, and a retrospective by the Ghetto Fighters’ House in honor of the play Arbeit Macht Frei fun Toitland Europa, which was performed 15 years ago at the festival.

Yet in their debut as directors, Ya’aron and Yosef have placed a fresh twist on the Acco Fringe Theater Festival.  Yosef notes that this year’s schedule boasts a wider array of international guests hailing from Japan, Italy, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Australia, Poland, Russia and the Czech Republic.

Video: Excerpts include productions from Germany, Japan, and Italy as well as street theater from around the world

Even as the program features a more global component, Yosef reveals that there is also greater emphasis on local flavor.  Initiated by the festival, Pablo Ariel’s Whispering Alleys takes audience members on a tour of the old city, and Yoav Bertel and Avigail Rubin’s A Compensating Experience follows six Acco residents who took part in last year’s riots.  Project Acco, a co-production of the festival and the city’s new center for culture, youth, and sports, includes Jewish and Arab Israelis as well as performers from France, Lebanon, Iran and England.  Meanwhile, local Jewish and Arab youth took part in an artist-in-residence project and will present their creations as part of the festival.

Yosef states,”We want very much for the festival to be a bridge between the culture and society.”  As these works tackle the complex cultural issues which characterize Acco, forge interaction, and spur dialogue, they establish a powerful link between art and life. Alternative never felt so real.

Related Links

• Acco Fringe Theater Festival
• Acco Festival’s YouTube Channel

(Video: The Noa Dar Dance Group in Tetris, a collaboration between Noa Dar and visual artist Nati Shamia-Opher)

I first wrote about Noa Dar’s Tetris (טטריס) in “From Studios to Stages” on my own blog and have edited an excerpt of that article for this post.

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It’s no wonder that Tetris (2006) premiered at the Acco Festival for Alternative Theater, or that it won a prize there.  This collaboration between choreographer Noa Dar and visual artist Nati Shamia-Opher shapes the performance space into the most alternative set-up that I have ever witnessed, and it left its mark on my mind when I saw it last year.

I heard about Tetris soon after arriving in Israel and eagerly looked forward to seeing a staging in Tel Aviv at the Noa Dar Studio.  I was familiar with the the chosen location because I had taken several contemporary technique classes there – but when I arrived for the performance November 10, 2007, I found the studio cleverly transformed.  Tetris’s treatment of the spectator-performer relationship in this redesigned space is so unique that I would like to describe a bit of it below:

As Tetris begins, each audience member enters the studio individually, stepping onto a stool surrounded by a small booth and sticking his or her head through hole in the top; it is as if each person is a block about to be dropped into the classic video game called “Tetris.”  Next, spectators receive their own stools, join a line of other viewers, and then – once the line is complete – they are ushered by dancers to move their stools to a grid underneath a large wooden hut with rows of holes in the roof.  All the while, two dancers maneuver underneath and on top of the structure.  Once the entire audience is seated underneath the hut, we are instructed to stand on our stools and poke our heads through the holes.  This action is accompanied by a lot of twittering: all of a sudden we are disembodied, with our necks surrounded by the cut-out holes and our heads protected by wire domes.  It is strange indeed to look around and only see heads!

Standing in the midst of the structure, with our heads poking up into what is now the “stage,” we are the ultimate spectators even as we become the objects of other audience members’ gazes.  Our role in the event grows more complex with the entrance of the performers.  The six dancers begin slowly, prowling on top of the hut, looking intently at us, sliding across the space on their bellies, and occasionally drawing so close that their body parts are directly in our faces.  We watch, and we are watched.  With our own disembodiment – and from this perspective, with our spectating eyes mere inches above the floor – the performers’ bodies assume an extraordinary power.  To see moments of intimacy, desire, and violence from this angle is something else altogether . . .

Here’s another glimpse of Noa Dar’s Tetris, performed in Acco:

(Video: The Noa Dar Dance Group in Tetris, a collaboration between Noa Dar and visual artist Nati Shamia-Opher)

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For More Information

Visit Noa Dar’s website and learn more about Tetris.  Tetris will be performed at the Noa Dar Studio in Tel Aviv on January 20, 22, and 24.  Check details on Noa Dar’s performance calendar and Dance In Israel’s Events page.  Call  03-6954440 for tickets.

Related Posts on Dance In Israel

For more about choreography which re-frames the relationship between dancers and audience members, read “Mamootot – Challenging the Performer-Spectator Divide.”

*This post was made possible thanks to a Fulbright student grant funded by the U.S.-Israel Educational Foundation and hosted by the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance.