Nemashim Arab-Jewish Theater Community

Nemashim Workshop

6 and 7 January 2006

Givat Haviva

No rest on this Sabbath: A weekend retreat with Nemashim

“I know you are an informer for Israel.”

The angry brother stood, barely containing the physicality of his anger, in front of his older brother who sat slumped in a chair with a towel like a rope around his neck. He refrained from looking in his brother’s eyes, and touched his newly-shaven chin as if, if he rubbed hard enough, the words that were just spoken would run off his skin like the shaving cream had.

The place: The West Bank.

The time: The First Intifada.

“Cut,” said Uri Shani. “What about you?” he said, indicating the tall boy sitting between the other two. “Try to interrupt them, try to diffuse the situation and make peace between your brothers. You, Ahmad, ignore him, push him away” he continued, turning to the older brother.

The place: Givat Haviva.

The time: Friday, January 6, 2006; 10pm.

(video 1 , video 2 , video 3)

Both versions of the scene, the imagined and the actual, took place as part of the fourth iteration of Nemashim, the brainchild of Swiss-born Israeli citizen Uri Shani. Nemashim is a two year program for Palestinian and Jewish citizens of Israel in their late teens. In the first year, participants meet once a month for a two-day bilingual intensive workshop in theater. In the second year, a select and self-selected core group elect to take a year of community service and live in a commune together in Haifa, balancing work schedules with volunteer activities and theatrical workshops and productions.

Erev Shabbat

This weekend, I was invited to pay my own way as a guest of the program in the Jewish-Arab retreat center Givat Haviva, just outside of Hadera. Feeling a bit out of place in a group of teens that already knew each other, I befriended one other newcomer, an Ethiopian girl who had traveled six hours from the Eilat region to participate.

In a surprise trial-by-fire, this young woman was asked to perform the monologue with which she had auditioned for the group by way of introduction. Nervous but composed, she began talking in the voice of a young Ethiopian woman complaining about the mother of her boyfriend, who was “racist.”

Uri then asked Zohar, a woman of Polish descent, and a young man named Or to enter into the second performance of the monologue and improvise a scene as the boyfriend and his mother. Zohar didn’t spare any punches, calling on her own experiences to create an overbearing mother figure who had her son by the britches and refrained from addressing Wassan’s character directly; instead, she asked her son to bring some air freshener “because it smells like Ethiopians in here.” Thus aggravated and fired up, Wassan was asked to perform her monologue again with vigor.

The Philosophy

At Nemashim, no punches are pulled and the situations onstage are at times inseperable from the realities of these thirteen young men and women who bravely air their dirty laundry under the careful guidance of Uri and his partner Shadi Fakhr al-Din, a local Palestinian actor and group leader. Uri noted later that many of the Palestinians perked up at Wassan’s monologue—“it is interesting for them to realize that some Jews face the same kind of discrimination they do.” The group shook their heads collectively as Wassan explained that a line about blood in her monologue referred to an infamous incident when, for fear of AIDS contamination, hundreds of pints of blood taken from Ethiopian donors was secretly disposed of by the Israeli Ministry of Health.

While most of the participants are experienced amateur thespians, and both greetings and farewells at the beginning and end of the two days were filled with invitations to the performances of various participants, not everyone comes from a dramatic background. Yossi, a high school student from Jerusalem, teamed up with Daniel in a poignant and politically spiced scene from a children’s play about the banality of prejudice. In a workshopping of the scene that was cut short for lunch (“I felt that we left off in the middle and there was no closure,” noted Daniel later) Yossi was asked to improvise as a big shot lecturing about a subject he was an expert in. He proceeded to explain to us what “modulation” meant, as music and not drama is his background.

One scene that had the most dramatic makeover was Zohar’s monologue—she played the character Abir (the play by Khagit Yaari), a young Palestinian woman who was active in the women’s movement while her husband was in jail but wants to leave now that he is back home, and more violent than before. (video) When Zohar performed the scene on Friday evening, the other participants commented that it was very honest but lacked tension. The next day, Renana, a young Jewish woman who lives in the Sadaqa-Reut commune in Yaffa, was asked to play Abir’s elder companion, to whom she was supposed to be speaking. In the middle of the scene, Shadi asked Khaled to play the role of the husband, calling for his wife and raising the stakes of the scene considerably.

At the height of the newly emotionally charged scene, when Abir makes the decision to escape from her husband, the two women spontaneously embraced, an act that Uri noted “would have meant less anywhere else in the scene—but placed as it was, it was powerful.” (video) Shadi observed that had Khaled decided to add his physical presence to the improvisation it would have created an interesting new triangle.

In fact, the number three played a significant role in many scenes, so much so that one begins to wonder whether, in a context that is based on the diametrical opposition “Palestinian-Jewish Israeli” whether a third character or perspective is ultimately what lifts the scenes, and the conflict, out of a two-dimentional binary world? Certainly Uri and Shadi use the technique of making dialogue into trialogue as a way of fleshing out and expanding the dramatic possibilties of interactions.

Making Faces

All official time that was not spent workshopping scenes, or warming up, was devoted to making and using plaster masks. (video) The actors noted that the making of the masks was a surprisingly relaxing and even meditative experience, where they got to know each other by touch instead of conversation. “It was like I was in a beauty salon,” remarked more than one. The dramatic mask workshop was unfortunately hurried due to time constraints, and participants had just begun to feel the freedom and confinement of the technique. “I feel free, like no one is watching me and I can do whatever I want,” said Fatina of the experience.

Shir begged to differ. “I felt really uncomfortable and self-conscious at first,” she said. “Because it is a new element, we all reverted to our ‘comfort zone,’” she observed. “I knew that Fatina would do some sort of dancing, and that Muhammed al-Maghrabi would do martial arts, because that is how we are most natural.” Other actors complained about blocked line of vision, though Muhammed al-Maghrabi noted that “when you can’t see as well all the other senses have to be heightened so you can sense where other people are, interact with your surroundings.”

Uri explained that the “neutral mask” was most often employed to inact mythical scenes and characters, and that the participants should now choose a character for their mask that will influence both the decoration and use of the masks. The next phase of the mask workshop will emphasize both the Arabic derivation of the word for “mask,” which comes from the root qaf-nun-ain, “to convince.”

Context is Everything

“Forget the other’s shoes—you are the other” seems to be the programs motto. Uri and Shadi are fond of cross-casting in the scenes they dole out as homework, and all the plays they choose are in some way related to Palestinian-Jewish or Arab-Israeli relations. Perhaps it is the loaded content of the scenes themselves that make the young people shy away from talking politics and take refuge in the safe waters of theater talk. For now, when Uri asks the students to relate a scene to their own lives, or asks for personal opinions, the answers are perfunctory and carefully worded. These budding actors are not naïve; they will know exactly if, and when, the bridges being built between them will be strong enough to bear the weight of the truth.

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