International Mayumana ensemble’s capital premiere
Filed under: Art, General, History and Culture, Israeliness, Pop Culture, Profiles
With all the talk in recent years about Israeli popular music exports, it’s easy to forget that there are plenty of Israeli entertainers in other realms who have been enjoying growing successes overseas. The world over, there are plenty of Israeli illusionists, dub bassists, jazz saxophonists, supermodels and even boxers - you name it.
When the percussive Mayumana dance troupe got started 13 years ago, many dismissed it as a local knockoff of international sensation Stomp. Now the ensemble maintains a busy schedule touring worldwide. Today Mayumana employs 100 people globally and has starred in ads for brands like Fiat and Coca Cola. Last week, the ensemble premiered Momentum, its new show, for local audiences of thousands at the Jerusalem Theater, under the framework of the Israel Festival.
Ha’aretz recently interviewed Tel Aviv-born Mayumana co-founder Boaz Berman as well as producer Roy Ofer, who joined the team shortly after its launch.
Ofer believes that the key to Mayumana’s success has been the way that he makes sure to keep things in-house:
“We have our own people who we work with, and we rarely involve people from the outside. On tours abroad, we have our own way of doing things. We don’t just perform and leave. We performed in Madrid for eight months, we were in New York for six months, and so on.”
Berman, meanwhile, remembers the early days fondly:
“Our goal was to put on a show that would be different from anything else out there. We were so fired up that we were sure we’d succeed. The people who worked with us then did it for free, because they all believed in us. We worked all day every day, and when we had enough material we started doing open presentations to friends on Wednesdays, which evolved from week to week.”
But according to Ofer, it’s unfair to call Mayumana a “troupe,” when so much more comes into the performances:
“In a troupe, the members all do one specific thing – dancing or drumming or whatever,” Berman explains fervently. “With us, everyone does everything, even though on the face of it they’re completely disparate – one is a professional dancer, another is the national archery champion, another one’s an actor, this one’s a contortionist. Our job is to unite them. It’s a group of people, not a troupe.”
Hey, man. Whatever terminology you prefer. Just keep doing whatever it is that you want to call what you’re doing, because people seem to like it.
Spin Takes A Turn With ISRAEL21c
Filed under: A New Reality, General, Life, Pop Culture, Sports
ISRAEL21c is now a contributor to SPIN Earth, a new web video initiative from SPIN Magazine. The first video up: a profile of the Israel Parkour Team, who use the sidewalks and walls of Tel Aviv as their training ground.
Nostalgia Sunday on Tuesday – Adloyada
Filed under: Art, General, History and Culture, Holidays, Israeliness, Nostalgia Sunday, Pop Culture
Apologies 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.
It had the support of Mayor Meir Dizengoff. This costume parodied his well-known penchant for riding around town on a 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.
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…
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.
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.
Vote for the Gila dance video
Filed under: Art, General, Life, Pop Culture
ISRAEL21c’s video about the Gila dance troupe is in the running for Dance Media.com’s DanceSprit Video of the Month. There are still a few days left to February, so dance lovers and people who love dance lovers are invited to click here, register and vote.
The video is about Gila, a troupe of older women dancers whose choreography encompasses dance, acting, video, music, humor and life stories. Choreographer Galit Liss created the show two years ago, after interviewing elderly women and discovering the beauty of old age. Her aim: to show audiences across Israel that growing old can also mean growing young. Help spread the word about this unique project and vote!
If you have trouble viewing DanceMedia, see the video on ISRAEL21c’s YouTube Channel.
Nostalgia Sunday – 50 Years of Israeli Club Culture
Filed under: A New Reality, General, History and Culture, Israeliness, Life, Nostalgia Sunday, Pop Culture, War
Anhedonia is “an inability to experience pleasure from normally pleasurable life events” and in addition to being the working title for Wood Allen’s “Annie Hall” – it also describes a feeling Israelis wrestle with on a daily basis.
Nissan Shor, is the author of the new book “Dancing With Tears in Their Eyes,” a history of fifty years of dance clubs in Israel. In it, Shor – a music writer turned cable show host – makes a case for the tension between Israel’s often grim security situation, and just wanting to have fun, as unique. 
The book (available only in Hebrew but with lots of pictures that, because of copyright issues, can’t be posted) deals with places that played recorded music only, from so-called Salon Parties held in living rooms in the late 1950s to Dance Nation clubs such as Jerusalem’s Haoman 17 in the late 1990s. It does not, notes Shor, deal with “night clubs or variety clubs where there were performances, like magicians, jugglers or live music.” Over the decades, he says, “In Israel there has always been a de-legitimization of people who want to dance and have a good time, because of our national situation.”
“Throughout, we see people whose desire to have fun becomes an antiestablishment act. And a young person who dances isn’t necessarily protesting the establishment but the ideological hegemony is so strong, that people who deviate for the purposes of pleasure become, whether consciously or unconsciously, anti-nationalistic. You can’t just dance and be normal.”
Shor touches on the non-conformist bohemia of the early Yishuv pre-State settlement – whose Foxtrotting tea-dances were condemned by the poet Chaim Nachman Bialik, who wrote, “What emptiness! What tastelessness!… Degeneration and hollow soullessness!”
But the book really gets started with the introduction of Rock ‘n Roll and the noar salon (literally, “living room youngsters) Israeli-style Greasers later immortalized in the movie Eskimo Limon (Lemon Popsicle). Says Shor: “They didn’t go to Zionist youth movements because the framework – uniforms, hierarchy – wasn’t their style. They wanted to be like the other young people all over the world, wear jeans and leather jackets, listen to Elvis Presley and Cliff Richard. And by the way, there were noar salon who went to both youth movement and dance parties.”
Photo by Fritz Cohen
The summer of 1965 marked a milestone in the history of Israeli clubbing, when the first discotheque opened on the veranda of the Hammam nightclub in old Jaffa. The venue, owned by author Dan Ben Amotz and poet Haim Hefer, was leased out to entrepreneur Rafi Shauli – a key figure in the creation of a new paradigm in Israeli nightlife. Shauli really deserves a full column devoted to his accomplishments, but it should be noted that in addition to the many clubs he opened in the 1960s and 70s, (Mandy’s, Mandy’s Cherry and Mandy’s Singing Bamboo – all in honor of then-wife, the glamorous and scandalous Mandy Rice-Davies), he also opened HaMoadon in 1977, a members-only discotheque that raised the bar for all clubs in the Jewish State.
The phenomenon “gave rise to serious debates in the Knesset from all ends of the spectrum about the deterioration of Zionism and all sorts of dangers to the nation’s future. And this discussion comes up every few years. When the Coliseum club opened in 1982, around when the [first] Lebanon war broke out, the national debate was ‘how can people dance when others are dying?’, and [state-run] Channel One called it ‘the last days of Pompeii.’ The 80s New wave clubs – Penguin, Sirocco, Liquid, Kolnoa Dan – said rock had to be sung in English,” leading to another outcry. “And when the second intifiada broke out, the national debate was about the ‘Tel Aviv bubble’. It’s constant.”
Photo by Moshe Milner
In the early Nineties, euphoria over the Oslo Accords and the promise of a New Middle East, dovetailed perfectly with the introduction of muti-channel television and increased Western cultural influence in Israel. “The Israeli electronic dance music revolution came in with the consumer revolution, chains stores, cable TV – and Ecstasy. By 1997-98, it dominated youth culture.” That euphoric balloon, he adds, “burst with the second Intifada.”
Given that clubs have become a target for terrorists, Shor says that going clubbing during times of high alert has evolved into a form of national pride for some young people. “For example, right before the first Gulf War, there were ‘End of the World’ parties. After the suicide bomber attack at the Dolfi-Disco, the club re-opened and the kids kept on coming. It wasn’t heartlessness. It was saying, ‘No, you won’t stop me living my life.’”
Shor worked on the book for four years, inspired by his own love of nightlife, and the lack of an authoritative source on the subject. “I saw there was this genre of literature in other countries. I think that the conflict, that the subject deviates from the conventional, is one reason why no such book had been written. And this book tries to analyze that convention and introduce it into the Israeli discourse. It seemed right from an Israeli point of view.”
The generations of accidental rebels, he adds, “Weren’t trying to be political protesters. It was a rebellion only because of their actions, trying to live a western life in Israel. I think this is true Zionism – to live as every other nation. I think Herzl would have preferred endless partying to endless war.”
Video: Haoman 17 Jerusalem closes
Nostalgia Sunday – Simchat Torah flags
Filed under: General, History and Culture, Holidays, Religion
It’s Jewish flag day! Well, not really. Tomorrow is the last night of Sukkot when we finish up reading the Torah for this year, and the people are readying to dance in the streets.
The tradition of children dancing with flag aloft, says Tel Aviv University historian Dr. Chaim Grossman, dates back to 17th century Ashkenaz, Eastern Europe’s pale of Jewish settlement. Unfortunately, he adds, no flags exist from that time, as these were made of delicate paper, then put in the hands of small children, and so were destroyed within hours (and not by Cossacks).
In Israel, Simchat Torah is still one of those holidays were secular Jews turn up at the local neighborhood shul if only to gawk at the dancing revelers. This is particularly true of secular Jews with children who’ve made a flag in school, or purchased one at the dollar store. This one actually sells online for NIS 2.5, and even features an 3-D pop-open window, just like the old-fashioned ones
At times, Israel’s military might has been honored in flags:
And here’s a particularly lovely one from the Seventies:
Like its New Year’s counterpart the Shana Tova card, the Simchat Torah flag is one of those holiday items that isn’t written in any place – and likely were adopted from another culture – yet has become part of tradition.
In the US, at least in New England where I’m from, the Simchat Torah flag tradition has been conflated with the other autumn holidays and children top their flagpoles with candied apples. In Israel, flags often come with a small horn, though there is some question as to whether or not the kids are permitted to tootle on a holiday.
Links to previous posts:
Nostalgia Sunday – Heaters
Nostalgia Sunday – Yom Kippur
Nostalgia Sunday – Rosh HaShana
Nostalgia Sunday – Old Coins
Nostalgia Sunday – Historic Homepages
Nostalgia Sunday – Tango
Nostalgia Sunday – Tel Aviv Night Run
Nostalgia Sunday – Missing Dad
Nostalgia Sunday – Clique HaClick
Nostalgia Sunday – Tel Aviv 100
Nostalgia Sunday – Eurovision
Nostalgia Sunday – Old Israeliana
Nostalgia Sunday – Classic Movie: The Blaumilch Canal
Nostalgia Sunday – Plaid Bedroom Slippers
Nostalgia Sunday – Historic Photo Shop Shuts Its Doors
Nostalgia Sunday – New Israeliana
Nostalgia Sunday – High Windows
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