Nemashim Arab-Jewish Theater Community

Nemashim:

Report on February’s Workshop

by Miriam Asnes

What is theater? And what is the difference between theater and reality? Can one person’s theater become another person’s reality, and can the opposite occur?

These were the central questions of the fifth workshop in this year’s First Year Nemashim workshop series. High atop a hill overlooking Nazareth and the Jezrael Valley, ten Palestinian and Jewish youths met together for the fifth of six workshops addressing different aspects of theater.

Telling stories

One of the first orders of business, after an initial group check-in and dinner, was the presentation of the participants’ “homework.” Each person was charged with telling a story to the group, using costumes or music to create an atmosphere.

In the space of two hours, the Nemashim workshop was graced by a tale of Rabbi Nahman told by a Hasid (Or); a cynical and metaphorical tale told by an amusing/repulsive creature of the earth (Zohar); a humorous anecdote of a drunk stumbling home (Khaled) (a short video-clip about those); the tale of the King of Hummous and the Queen of the Bathtub accompanied by music (Danial); a tale of Japanese samaurai codes of honor told in costume (Yosi); a folkloric tale of two friends told sitting on the floor and punctuated by multiple pourings of Arabic coffee and puffs of ‘argileh (Muhammad al-Mughrabi); a recounting of various cases brought before a fictitious judge (Ahmad); a Jewish folktale about a young boy who wants to touch the stars on the roof of his synagogue (Renana) (a short video-clip about those) ; a tragic romance that takes place in the darkroom (Muhammad); and a sad and angry story about the tormenting of an old Palestinian woman at a checkpoint near Ramallah (Fatina.)

However, the simplest task proved to be the most difficult—while the participants were very comfortable acting their stories and chosen characters in a theatrical way, no one completely succeeded in being “present” with their audience. Breaking the convention of “playing” and being an actor proved harder than most had realized—Uri repeatedly urged the actors to recognize who their audience was and what the present reality was. In the same vein, Uri noted that several of the stories were based on culturally specific knowledge that might not be understood by everyone present; he challenged participants to think critically about the issue of a multi-cultural audience.

Performances by Khaled and Ahmad also served to highlight the linguistic issues inherent in performing theater for a mixed group. After Khaled told his story in Arabic, Shadi told him that if some of the audience did not understand the language, “your body has to work twice as hard” to communicate the events. Ahmad chose to speak in Arabic and then translate himself into Hebrew, which proved difficult and tedious. In the discussion afterwards, it was noted that bilingual theater must be carefully planned out and that there are ways of making a story understood in two languages simultaneously without translating every sentence word-for-word.

Playing with masks, continued

Each participant arrived in Nazareth carrying their plaster mask from the previous session which they had decorated. Danial brought one traditional pantomime mask and one blue feathered creation that proved very evocative in later scene work; Ahmad had split his full-face mask down the middle and colored one half black and one half white. The artistic Zohar had embellished the features of her mask to include full cheeks, high brow and prominent nose and further exaggerated each of these additions with skillfull painting and sequins.

Through a series of drills and improvisations, the participants began to feel the different energies elicited by the various masks. (Video) Ahmad and Yosi got in touch with their feminine sides with help from Zohar and Danial’s masks, respectively. In one memorable scene Ahmad played a prostitute to Mohammed al-Maghrabi’s easily excited construction worker (video). Another video-clip and another one.

Or, too, used a mask to help create the character Griselda, who stirs up a pot of trouble in order to try and destroy the world. He reveled in Uri’s instruction to use the theatrical convention of asides, confessing to the audience that he might be persuaded to give up his pursuit of universal annihilation if only he could have a nice little cottage in the country!

Zohar and Khaled were another new and successful pairing, demonstrating comic timing in a scene between a cop and a robber who is polite “to a t” with the Law while cursing unmentionable parts of the policeman’s mother’s anatomy in his asides.

The initial two-person scenes were expanded into multi-character multi-scene presentations in which each participant was charged with taking on at least two roles. Renana, Yosi, Or, and Khaled presented a series of schooldays scenes, though differentiating between characters with body movement proved challenging. Fatina, Muhammad al-Mughrabi and Ahmad presented a series of scenes adapted from a play which used comedy to treat the topic of marital strife in an Arab household—in the discussion following the scene, Fatina was complemented for being able to differentiate between the characters of mother and daughter and for her eventual melding with the energy of the masks.

The third group discussed the idea of setting their scene in Purgatory; when one participant dissented, citing religious reasons, the group instead decided to set their presentation in the waiting room of a gynecologist’s office. This scene was postponed for presentation to the final day of the workshop.

Nemashim, unmasked

The new topic that facilitators Uri and Shadi elected to introduce this session was Unseen Theater or Guerilla Theater. This kind of theater is written, cast and carefully rehearsed like regular plays, only the performance space is the real world and the audience doesn’t know it is an audience. Uri led a discussion on the theory behind Unseen Theater, emphasizing his opinion that this theater has more transformative potential than staged theater.

The participants then split into two groups, each charged with creating a scene that could be performed as Unseen Theater.

Muhammad, Fatina, Renana, Khaled and Zohar created a scene of mild harrassment. Zohar played the harrassed Jewish woman, commenting that she often finds herself in this situation in real life! In the enactment of the scene within the confines of the workshop, Zohar said she felt much more supported and free than she would in her own life and therefore felt comfortable yelling at her harrassers in a way she never thought to do before.

Muhammad al-Mughrabi, Danial, Ahmad, Renana, Or, and Yosi created an interesting scene involving Muhammad as a Palestinian protagonist who refuses to let a fellow Palestinian borrow his phone but is eager to let a young Jewish woman (Danial) make a phonecall. (a short video-clip from the rehearsals) The practice session was successful enough to prompt Uri to suggest taking the scene to a public venue—the Nazareth souk was decided upon. Shadi voiced dissention and told the group he would not accompany them; nevertheless, Uri urged the participants out the door.

The scene took place in the crowded vegetable market as prayers at the mosque were letting out. At first the performers milled about in a half-panic, trying to subtly locate each other. The scene was delayed by a misunderstanding about timing; finally Ahmad arrived on the scene and the performers quickly regrouped and began the confrontation. While the participants balked at emphasizing the Jewish-Palestinian dynamic of the scene and instead focused on the gender dynamic, many passers-by were nevertheless titillated by the shouting and even interfered in order to keep peace between Ahmad and Muhammad. Other participants who took on roles of bystanders reported that “it seemed like the whole market heard about what happened” and had the entire story recounted to them by various locals who happened to be on the scene.

In the processing of this trial in Unseen Theater, the group realized that it had done many things wrong, the most prominent errors being a failure to think through every eventuality and a lack of logistical certainty (many participants were not familiar with the area and got lost!) Muhammad noted that at one point he was afraid friends of Ahmad from the neighborhood were going to start a fight with him; Danial related that after the scene, she felt lost and alone and was taken aback when a local told her not to go back to the souk and “stir up more trouble.” The group also realized that it had not given any of the primary actors scripted ways to exit from the scene and the location.

Some participants expressed their unease with a kind of theater that seems to take advantage of people. Uri noted that this is the most problematic aspect to Unseen Theater, that it is not based on the conventional pact between actor and audience and that bystanders are never told that they have been witness to a scene. However, this kind of theater occurrence can encourage people to look at their own realities with the same critical eye they direct at theater—a small measure of alienation can in fact serve to break old habits and introduce new ways of seeing the world.

Shadi also told the group that he felt that his concerns about the excursion were not listened to—he urged others to feel comfortable in similarly airing grievances and concerns.

Wrapping up

The final night and day of the workshop were taken up with the sharing of personal stories through an exercise called “Playback.” As one of the tenets of the exercise is that everything shared remains confidential, we can only report that the participants described the experience as both “amazing” and “hard, sad.”

It was also revealed at the end of the workshop that Uri and Shadi had been engaged in a little Unseen Theater of their own—Shadi’s dissent to participate in the performance in the souk had been planned. The facilitators also revealed that they had given “tasks” to certain participants in order to create additional tensions in the group as well as let the participants feel what it is like to be on the receiving end of Unseen Theater. Because the workshops are based on trust, Shadi and Uri felt it necessary to come clean to the group and debrief.

In the meanwhile, some real tensions remained simmering below the surface. It was noted on more than one occasion that while the workshops ostensibly take place in both Arabic and Hebrew, since none of the Jewish participants know Arabic conversations are inevitably dominated by Hebrew. Even though this weekend was held in Nazareth, the linguistic inequality meant, in the words of one Palestinian participant, that the workshops take place “on their territory.” On the other hand, many of the Palestinian participants told their stories and shared personal experiences in Arabic and their Jewish counterparts tried their best to understand and give feedback. Clearly, the issue of language will continue be central to this class of Nemashim in the final workshop and in the coming year’s commune.

Looking ahead

In the sixth and final workshop, which will take place on March 9-11 in Nazareth, the facilitators will have one final chance to encourage and challenge the Nemashim participants—thereafter, individual processing and exit interviews will help Uri and Shadi determine who will be the volunteer theater and community activists in Nemashim’s 2006-7 commune.

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