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Nemashim
Arab-Jewish Theater Community
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Dear friends!
The Israeli army has already broke in the Gaza strip in
June, after the kidnap of Gilad Shalit there, and the situation in the south
has been more and more hectic. But our group, in the meanwhile, could have
gotten ready to the theatre festival in Neve Yosseff, on which we reported last
time. We didn’t know, that the two festival days would
be the last two days before the war.
The next day after the festival, Wednesday July 12th things
have gotten worse in the north too, and on Thursday the first missile attacked Haifa, and the city
became city of ghosts.
Already in the month of June,
simultaneously to the preparations to the festival, we started the rehearsals
to the show with which we wanted to end the year in August. On Saturday after
the first missile we still managed to have rehearsals in tense quiet Haifa, when the next day
the members of the commune were thrown out of bed from the explosion in the
train’s repository, which is located right under Neve Yossef. This was a
serious shock and later we used this experience for our show.
Since that morning we started traveling down to the center
and to the south of the country until we decided, two weeks before the show,
not to perform it in Haifa.
Reaching this decision was not easy at all. We planned to present the commune’s
last performance in south Haifa
in the orchard of Al-Hayat, in a
summer-open-air performance, in order to bring this sad place back to life. But
the missiles were like rain on the city and we had to decide. The “Simta”
theater in Yaffa welcomed us warmly as refugees from the north and we started
to re-write the direction to fit the very small stage of the upper floor there.
In the meanwhile other dramaturgy thoughts were added; in a shocking and
striking way, the play we chose in May became more relevant than we ever
wanted, the dying soldiers began to surround us: friends of friends, family of
friends, five, ten, eventually 24 soldiers died in one day. All of a sudden our
dead soldier stood on stage, as if just came back from south Lebanon. What kind of esthetic
accuracy was needed for our pain? What should we say and what should we leave
to the intelligence and the sensitivity of the audience?
For a month we worked in different shelters until we finally
performed for three nights, on August 9th -11th. Every
night we asked for donations to cover the expenses of the production and that
of Nemashim in general. We cannot do everything we do without donations. This
is a project that was sponsored for years by European sponsors and barely has
any Israeli support. This is sad, but not so surprising. After the last
performance the new members of the commune went on stage and celebrated the
“change of guards” between the 2005-2006 commune and
the new one. The commune was praised a lot for its work throughout the years.
Pictures from the show are available here:
At
that night, when we finished our last performance, and the new commune went on
stage, far away from our little country, in another continent, where the sun
was still in its way, some people decided to go on cease-fire, which started
two days after.
Now life begins again (not for everyone) for Haifa, Beirut,
and for all the millions in the middle. The new commune entered the apartment
in Haifa with
many fears regarding cease-fire and regarding its work there in general. But
even if the cease-fire will sustain the damage is huge! This war showed again
how connected the military is to fortune and money. There’s no better proof to
this than the fellow Halutz…. The ones who suffered and will suffer the most
are the poor. And those are the Arabs, and the Jews who live next to Arabs. In Haifa, Akko,
and Nazareth etc. As a result of the war many more entered this circle
of poverty and so far the war has cost Israel tens of billions of Shekels.
Since there was no money for this, it was cut off from the education systems!
No doubt, Nemashim’s commune had much work, this year it’s going to have much
more!
Some think that the shared pain and suffer got the Jews and
Arabs closer in Israel,
we want to hope it is true…
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