Nostalgia Sunday – The “Fashion Show” exhibit

November 16, 2008 - 6:07 PM by Rachel Neiman · 1 Comment
Filed under: Art, General, History and Culture, Nostalgia Sunday, Pop Culture

Costume: Italian Straw Hat - Gila Lahat
An unusual and important exhibition opened this past week at the Jerusalem Theater. “Fashion Show” is a retrospective of costumes from the Hebrew-language stage, dating from 1922 to the present day. Some of the costumes are original, others were recreated from sketches and photographs.

This is the first exhibition of its kind in Israel and was a huge collaborative labor of love between the theaters, AMBI – the local branch of OISTAT (the international union of theater professionals), archives, museums, designers, researchers and private collectors. There are works by visual artists who sometimes contributed to the stage — Nahum Gutman, Natan Altman, Yossele Bergner, Moshe Mokady and David Sharir to name a few — as well as those costume designers less-known to audiences abroad.

Costume: Hanna Rovina in The Dybbuk

Here, for example, is the dress worn by legendary HaBima actress Hanna Rovina, in “The Dybbuk”. In her time, Rovina — “First Lady of Hebrew Theater” — and HaBima were so identified with the play that her character, Lea’leh, in long tresses and flowing white gown, became the theater’s logo for awhile.

Costume: She Stoops to Conquer - Lydia Pincus-Gani This dress from “She Stoops to Conquer” is by Lydia Pincus-Gani, one of the country’s foremost stage and costume designers in the 1960s and 1970s.

I studied with Lydia at Tel Aviv University in the 1980s, and she was not one to be trifled with. We’d slave for weeks over a maquette (a scale model of a stage set) and bring it, shaking and trembling, for Lydia to review. She’d stare at it, hunched over, centimeters of slow-burning ash dangling precariously at the end of a cigarette hovering above delicate bits of carton and balsa wood…

And then… flick! Somehow, most of the soot made it onto the floor. “What is this kakamayka?”, she’d ask, referring derisively to some nonsensical balustrade or extraneous stairway. (For bulky objects there was “What is this plonter?). Those who made it through the first year of her reign of terror benefited by being made her assistant on various shows at HaBima or the Cameri, and some of her students became the designers whose work is now on display.

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