'Reality without filters': New A-Genre festival takes to the stage

Reality itself will be examined on stage during this week’s A-Genre festival at the Tmuna Theater in Tel Aviv. Borrowing the mechanism of a government-appointed national commission, artistic co-directors Itai Doron and Erez Maayan Shalev have invited artists, performers, and scholars to directly explore Israeli reality.

“We are offering a somber alternative,” Shalev told The Jerusalem Post, “a prism to think through.” The selected productions deal with “reality as it is, without filters.”

The Reaction Time Collective, for example, created an installation with charred trees from the fires in the bombarded North and soil from the Be’eri Crater. Patrons will be given earphones and invited to take an audio tour in the space, to learn how the ongoing war is affecting the land.

“This might sound less urgent when we compare it with the plight of those evacuated from their homes,” Doron said, “but we are fighting over land – and destroying it at the same time. Advanced weaponry is used with the sole purpose of destroying an entire nation’s economy. The role of art is to take this data and make it into something people can experience.”

In Musical Prolog to a National Commission, Cnaan Levkovich composed an opera using the reports submitted by the 1973 Agranat Commission, established after the Yom Kippur War, and the 2021 Mount Meron Commission for his libretto.

“I noted that, in many commissions, the members added their own personal reflections in the prolog,” Levkovich told the Post, “the Agranat report, for example, begins with the members bowing their heads in honor of the fallen soldiers.”

This became the dramatic engine of this production. The three singers (Tony Trotoush, Noa Carmi, Uri Shani) play six different characters, all members of various commissions. A stage clock displays the relevant years for each segment and, as the performance progresses, similar problems resurface. The clock begins to spin, showing years yet to come, with the commission members themselves – who are far from being powerful persons who demand answers – shown as well-meaning people locked in a “vicious circle, which includes the public cry that answers will be provided for it,” Levkovich said.

Another production, titled Scream to the Cabinet, invites patrons to enter a booth and scream to their heart’s content with the recorded message they later sent to government ministers. Co-created by Shalev and Nir Jacob Younessi, this is in step with trauma-inspired art, such as Prof. Aya Ben-Ron’s Field Hospital X (curated by Avi Lubin) which represented Israel in the 58th Venice Art Biennale and included a similar screaming space – as well as to protest-oriented creative actions.

Varied subjects

Hadas Ophrat will present Ink Flag. Inspired by the capture of Eilat during the War of Independence, when a make-shift ink-painted Israeli flag was raised to mark this achievement, the video depicts an ink flag washed and re-washed until it becomes white.

Doron remarked that the work could be seen as “a wish to become clean, or a need to call for a ceasefire. Such a desire is not weakness but a need to choose life.”

“It is no more provocative than the desire of an overwhelming majority of Israelis, 70%, for a ceasefire and the return of those held hostage by Hamas,” he added.

Just as a real national commission produces reports, the A-Genre Festival will issue three publications resulting from its own artistic and cultural examinations.

Historian Adam Raz will release two. The first, The Matzpen Commission on the Military Government is the result of a production directed by Einat Weitzman, in which the stage-performers, all former members of the radical Socialist group, will read findings dealing with how military control of Arab communities within Israel was carried out until 1966.

Raz’s other publication is tied to Performance of the Political Imagination, a staged reading of a national commission – unlikely to ever be formed – in which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s policy of building up Hamas as a countermeasure to the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization)-led Palestinian Authority (PA) will be examined.

The third publication is tied to a panel discussion to be held among 12 key figures on the local art scene – from Ophrat to Umm el-Fahm museum director Said Abu Shakra – about artistic responses to the crises and opportunities that the current reality presents to working artists. The conclusions will be published, thus leaving a trail for others to follow in the future.

Those seeking a more emotional theatrical experience might decide to take part in Carmel Ben-Asher’s Commission to Explore the Collective Subconscious of Zion’s Residents. In creating the fictional character of a card reader, Ben-Asher uses texts by 20th-century Kabbala scholar Gershom Scholem and a newly designed Tarot deck by Nadav Machete in a powerful performance.

“These cards are not like the traditional Tarot deck,” Ben-Asher told the Post, “instead of ‘the Tower’ or ‘the Wheel’ we have other cards, such as ‘the Lament’ and ‘the Calamity.’”

As a young man, Scholem translated into German such poetic Hebrew laments as Ask, She Burned in Fire by Meir of Rothenburg – written in response to the 1242 public burning of Talmudic books in Paris. 

“These cards correspond to the letters of the Hebrew alphabet,” Ben-Asher explained, “offering a sort of dictionary, or map, to deal with disaster and grief.”  

The A-Genre Festival begins on Wednesday, July 24, and ends on Saturday, July 27 at Tmuna Theater, Shontzino St., 8, Tel Aviv. Call (03) 561-1211 to reserve or to learn more.