Nostalgia Sunday on Tuesday – Adloyada

March 10, 2009 - 11:34 PM by Rachel Neiman · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Art, General, History and Culture, Holidays, Israeliness, Nostalgia Sunday, Pop Culture 

agadat_queen_estherApologies for the delay in posting; this was due to circumstances far beyond my control. Whew. Okay. A moment before the Purim holiday ends, let’s take a look at days gone by, in particular the Adloyada parade.

“Adloyada” is a bastardization of the phrase “ad lo yada” or “unable to differentiate”, referring to the Purim tradition of drinking until one is unable to tell the difference between evil Haman and good Mordechai. The parade was instituted in 1912, in Tel Aviv, the first modern Jewish city, by a teacher at the Herzliya Gymnasium high school and became the stomping ground for Hevre Trask (”the noisy folks”), a band of merrymaking bohemians.

In the 1920s, the event had its profile raised by dancer-choreographer and bon vivant Baruch Agadati. Here he is, the crown prince of of Tel Aviv night life in the 1920s, pictured with Zippora Zabari, winner of the “Queen Esther” beauty contest for 1928.

And another Purim lovely:

And here’s a picture of the parade itself, which was famous for its floats.
adloyada_1

It had the support of Mayor Meir Dizengoff. This costume parodied his well-known penchant for riding around town on a horse.
dizengoff_on_horse

At the end of the 1920s, a committee of artists, poets, architects and theater people was established with the stated goal of giving the Adloyada a higher educational and artistic tone, and it became something of an establishment tool.

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Adloyada floats never shied away from politics, such as the 1926 coffin burying the British Mandate, and the 1934 anti-Nazism float. The event ceased activity in 1936 but after it was reestablished in the 1950s, the topical subjects continued. Here’s Egypt’s Gamal Abdul Nasser and David Ben-Gurion, acting out a prime ministerial summit that never happened in reality… as far as we know…

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The Adloyada shut down, once again, in the 1970s and was revived, once again in the early 1980s by the Sheinkin avant garde, led by a stellar performance artist, the late Danny Zakheim. This time, the tone was different and probably more like that of the original Adloyada of the 1920s – a punk street fair bacchanal that went on for days. Here’s Mayor Shlomo Lahat venturing into unknown territory.

chich_float

There are a few parades today calling themselves Adloyada. Holon – a sleepy suburb with ambitions to become Israel’s new center of the visual arts – has apparently been deemed the location for the national Adloyada. But the real deal has been and always will be Tel Aviv. It’s only a matter of time before the Adloyada comes back home.

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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-GaniThis 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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