The art of political avoidance

In Israel, all art may be political, but there’s a reluctance to linger too long on sensitive issues – no wonder its theatre moves swiftly on to the next hot topic

The door of the Great Synagogue on Allenby Street, in Tel Aviv, is grandly proportioned, richly decorated with etchings, but was never designed to inspire. Nonetheless, on a hot day in Israel, a visitor wouldn’t think twice to see a young woman in a T-shirt raising her eyes from behind enormous sunglasses to sketch the door’s details. Rising cheerfully to assist a couple of tourists, uncertain if their summer attire is modest enough to gain entrance (it is), she is asked if she is an art student and laughs with amusement.

“Oh no,” she smiles at the mix-up. “I’m a soldier.” The 21-year-old is in the third year of her mandatory service in the Israel Defence Forces, on a reconnaissance exercise with her company; her sketch might be good, but it’s art in the service of security.

In the same week, a large delegation of international journalists in Israel might have wondered similarly whether the theatre, dance and music programme curated by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs ever had a similar agenda. All art is political, as George Orwell once dryly noted. Caught between rival historical and spiritual claims to the land; fraught with internal and external tensions; laden down with the millennia-old history of Jewish persecution and the horror of annihilation; undermined by the most intractable and bloody conflict in the Middle East; currently facing the consequences of last year’s Gaza bombardment for which both Hamas and Israel have been accused of war crimes by Amnesty International – any art in the 61-year-old state of Israel that seeks to reflect society is intensely politicised. Any art that does not, seems even more so.

Savyon Liebrecht’s parents survived the Holocaust and never spoke about it. The gravity and consequences of those events have come to define the work of the novelist and playwright. She is certainly not alone in this. The Holocaust is a frequent topic of discussion in Israeli art. “Yes, very much so,” agrees the director of the Beit Lessin Theatre. “But over the last three or four years it is the Holocaust from the point of view of the second- and third-generation [survivors].” In the 1950s, he says, when the first survivor testimonies were likely to be heard from the stage, “nobody wanted to deal with it”.

Liebrechts engagement is such a constant in her writing that the enormity of the Holocaust seems like a form of heritage drama. “I write a lot about the Holocaust,” she tells me. “About second-generation survivors and how the Holocaust affects our lives.”

She is similarly inclined to see the past in the present, making often unexpected leaps. “If we look at the 20th century, we see that three of the names who changed the world were Freud and Einstein and Marx, all German Jews. In the same century we have Auschwitz, another meeting point between Jews and Germans. The range is so wide.”

Her play, The Banality of Love, which depicts the relationship between Hannah Arandt, the controversial Jewish political theorist and her long-term lover, Martin Heidegger the infamous Nazi philosopher, is essentially a historical drama with a twist. Arandt, self-exiled in America and unpublished in Hebrew, was a staunch critic of Zionism, prophesying an Israel so involved in self-defence it would find little time to create anything. Liebrecht's memory play, so basic in construction as to be almost theatrically inert, seems to conspire to that analysis with its backwards glance and conservative form, yet in making sense of history and attempting to move it forward, it stands as a significant act of cultural creation. In art and politics, contradiction can be a useful place to begin.

“Daniella likes whatever they play on the radio,” sings a young man at the grand piano in a basement music club, “and the radio plays whatever Daniella likes.”

The singer is Shlomi Shaban, a flamboyant player with a rich understanding of classical technique and witty lyrics, and in the satisfyingly dark Levontine 7 venue, the young musicians criticise the dreadful conservatism of the Israeli mainstream, implying that they represent a better alternative. Israeli contemporary music is necessarily hybrid, they argue, by virtue of geography, history and culture. But while the acts stand in sharp contrast, I presume, to the contestants on Israel’s Got Talent, such diverse acts as the ferociously loud Screaming Peacocks and the ferociously seductive Efrat Gosh owe much to global trends in pop. No review of The Screaming Peacocks could be more eloquent than their T-shirts: Radiohead, Faith No More and, in a witty concession to self-reflexivity, The Screaming Peacocks. Gosh, meanwhile, hip, theatrical and playful, is equal parts Billie Holiday, Joanna Newsom and CocoRosie, but set apart by one crucial difference: none of the above ever sings in Hebrew.

“I can’t stand on the stage and not mean what I say,” Gosh tells me. “You know, it’s my language and I write a lot of my own songs. I can sing in other languages but I like Hebrew.”

Hebrew is itself deeply political, instituted by Ben Yehuda as the official language of the State over Yiddish, which has all but died out in Israel. Derived from the Bible and routinely updated by scholars to accommodate any new terms (“misron”, for instance, is the Hebrew for “sms”), Hebrew proceeds with extreme caution. As a result, Gosh’s music may be hybrid in form, but her lyrics are not.

IF THE TENSION between aesthetic hybridity and ideological conservatism can be the grace note of a song, it is more pronounced in the Habima, the National Theatre of Israel. Like the Abbey Theatre, the Habima was a national theatre before there was a nation. Founded in Russia over 90 years ago as the first Hebrew-speaking theatre, it migrated to Palestine in the 1920s and 30s, long before the State of Israel gained independence.

A national theatre for a relatively young and exceptionally diverse nation built on

successive waves of immigration, it has more discrete constituencies with more complicated histories to serve than most national theatres could fathom, which is one reason that 80 per cent of Israeli theatre revolves around new work, less engaged with mining a canon than in creating one.

Although chronically underfunded, theatre holds a special place in Israeli art, attracting large audiences and constantly generating original work. “We have a very enthusiastic audience,” director Avishai Milstein tells me. “Everyone wants to see theatre. So we have to write them plays. We create classics for the future generations.

“Drama deals with conflict and Israelis have many conflicts, so that’s the place to go and to digest them. This is the reason why the exchange between the stage and audience is so vivid and so immediate, always.”

The most obvious and immediate of these conflicts, however, has apparently become harder to find on the Israeli stage since the days of the great artist engagé, Hanoch Levin. “The new trend is not to detail the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” Milstein continues. “It’s not that popular any more. Israelis are a bit fed up with it. It was very popular during the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s. All Israeli authors had written about this conflict, but now they find new conflicts, generational conflicts, religious conflicts, minorities and so on. The daily politic is at the centre, but not so much the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

Given the magnitude of such conflict, its priority on the news agenda and the focus it draws from the world, this may sound extraordinary, perhaps even callous, but it makes a sombre sense. What happens when a nation’s political, territorial and violent conflict outpaces, outlasts then outstrips its drama? If it can’t be solved, people would prefer not to want to see it.

In contrast, though, Habima's current co-production with Berlin's Schaubuhne theatre is a piece entitled Third Generation, featuring four Israeli, four Palestinian and four German performers, while the Akko Theatre Centre, in the historic and multi-cultural enclave of Haifa, is home to a company comprised of Israeli and Palestinian members. Encouragingly, The Palestinian National Theatre, founded in 1984, is based in East Jerusalem. Less encouragingly, the Gaza City international theatre festival, launched in 2005, has not been repeated due to travel restrictions imposed on inhabitants and visitors.

"It's a political show, in case you were wondering," says Rina Yerushalmi, artistic director of the Itim Theatre Ensemble, following her uninterrupted 28-minute synopsis of the new production, Dybbuk. For anyone familiar with Yerushalmi's Mythos, a piece which projected the Israeli-Palestinian conflict upon the Oresteia, which came to the Dublin Theatre Festival in 2005, this was hardly surprising. But Itim are the exception among Israeli theatre groups by looking to the classics to shed light on the present. "From my childhood I never liked anything new," says Yerushalmi. "Not my clothing, not the buildings, nothing. What I always intuitively wanted was to connect to the world. I felt that Israel isolated itself. Even though it's an old nation, it wants to be new. I'll tell you another forbidden story. I was originally a dancer and came back from Europe. We were paid to create folk-Israeli dance – can you imagine? – so that [Israel] could have one of its own. They [The Ministry of Culture] brought a group from Africa, women, to show us how to do a rain dance, which was beautiful in its simplicity, but it was made so complicated you had to take classes in folk dance to learn it."

IN REACTION, Yerushalmi's work, borne out by her extraordinary production of The Dybbuk, crystallises the tension between creation and conservatism, defiance and defence, at the heart of Israeli culture. Based on a Yiddish folk tale, it uses both Hebrew and Yiddish. Hybrid in performance style and exacting in execution, it merges text, dance, puppetry, design and a maelstrom of music to achieve a narrative flow. Focussing on the Kabbalah as a cult in which sexual desire is sublimated into religious extremism with tragic consequences, it is deftly satirical, stridently critical and universally recognisable. (Had it opened in Dublin, say, in the aftermath of the Ryan report, one would have thought it was tailor-made for an Irish audience.) Such a work points to the immediacy and intensity of contemporary Israel, underscoring the fact that defence and creation are not irreconcilable impulses, that culture can both commemorate and question the past and that a better future is possible if it can be imagined.

Remembering the girl soldier with the sketch pad, I ask about the tension involved in making art within a conservative, security-obsessed society. The response is mildly chastising: “The same Government that supports a very conservative military thinking can at the same time support very avant garde, rule-breaking theatre, because that’s the kind of country this is. You want to keep it alive even though it’s a big contradiction.”