Foto Friday – Puppet Festival
Sometimes, a set of photos comes across one’s desk that is so arresting, little introduction is needed. I might be prejudiced — as a graduate of the Eleanor Boylan puppetry summer camp in Newton, Mass (1970 and 71) — but judging from the photos, the program for the 12th International Puppetry Festival looks just great. Details below but first, see these:
The festival mascot.
Traditional Indian puppets meet video in “The Magic Box”, a co-production between Israel’s Teatroni and the Holon Theater Center.
Award-winning Italian puppeteer Laura Kibel and her one-woman show, “Gone With The Feet”.
Above, a dramatization of Max Velthuijs’ fantasy, “The Painter and the Bird” (Photo: Giora Shlomi). Below, an exhibition of wooden puppets from the Czech Republic. (Photo: Jan Rosner)
Also on exhibit: puppets from the show “Avenue Q”. The festival will run from July 22-25 at the Holon Theater Center, 13 Remez St. Holon — a suburb of Tel Aviv that is cleverly reinventing itself as Israel’s capital of niche museums and the arts — and tickets are reasonably priced for adults (NIS 50 to 70) and kids (NIS 25-50). Activity workshops available for kids, too. To order: 972 3 502 1555.
Elliot Zimet and friends to magically appear in Israel tomorrow
Launched back in 2003 by Los Angeles’ comic Avi Liberman, the annual Crossroads Comedy Tour has been garnering media attention for its international and relatively high-profile talent pool.
The series of events is a fundraiser for Jerusalem’s youth-at-risk-oriented Crossroads Center, with this year’s shows including tomorrow in Beit Shemesh, Sunday in Ra’anana and two Monday performances in Jerusalem. Tickets are available by clicking here.
The 2009 fundraising tour, however, focuses less on stand-up comedy and more on the allegedly nefarious art of illusion, under the moniker “The Crossroads Comedy Magical Mystery Tour.”
Ben Cohen, who has served as a consultant for David Copperfield and has been named New York’s Magician of the Year, joins a lineup headlined by Elliot Zimet, the Bronx’s hop hop magical wonder.
Zimet’s style is somewhat new to the magic world, thanks to a show dominated by special effects, lighting, dancers and East Coast beats. Clips of his performances (pictured) can be seen on his MySpace profile. Zimet has put on shows at private events hosted by Sean Combs, at Madison Square Garden, and on several TV shows, including NBC’s America’s Got Talent. He has also toured with the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus.
The tour follows in the footsteps of Israel’s recent International Magic Convention, which was staged in Holon two months ago.
Yekev fun
Filed under: Food, General, Immigrant Moments, Israeliness
It’s great to be reminded of certain, extremely Israeli cultural phenomenons. I headed straight into one of those last week for a friend’s 40th birthday party, which was held at a yekev in Holon. Technically, a yekev is a winery, and in these days of Israeli boutique wineries, one might think that they’re heading to an evening of wine tastings, with a side of smelly goat cheeses.
Uh uh. This yekev, like others of its kind, is a completely different animal. It’s the yekev of yore, a wine club of sorts, where diners sit at long wooden tables, drinking cheap wine and eating family-style platters of bread, spreads and fried fish. There’s one in nearly every Israeli city. But the real entertainment begins when the MC takes the stage, a guy in a leather cowboy hat takes the floor, and Israeli songs of yore are played, their words displayed on huge screens on either side of the room, visible to everyone in the place.
Everyone, and I mean everyone, sings along, and the dance floor quickly fills with people of all ages, types and sizes. They’re dancing in circles, in lines, as couples, slow and fast, pretty much oblivious to the others around them. And some diners stick to their tables, standing on the chairs and the tables, an act that’s absolutely encouraged. Fun, as you can imagine, is had by all.
Our evening didn’t end with Andrew’s birthday. We headed home, directions clutched in our hands, the map book open on my lap. We knew how easy it is to get lost in these parts, as we’d gotten lost on the way, asking a string of taxi drivers and Holonites how to get to where we were going. But the streets were empty by the time we headed out of there, and at one point we sat at an empty traffic light, trying to figure out if we should be turning right or left. I finally turned my head to the right, to ask the driver next to us how to get to the highway, and found myself looking into the grinning face of a policeman, who rolled down his window and said, “I saw you sitting here through three green lights, and I figured you’d realize sooner or later that we were sitting next to you.” And, shockingly, he actually knew how to send us on our way.
Palestinian kids and Holocaust survivors face the music
Filed under: A New Reality, coexistence, General, Life, Music, War
The Strings of Freedom Orchestra (AP)
It happened last week in Holon, as part of ‘Good Deeds Day,’ an annual event run by an organization connected to Bank Hapoalim heiress and billionaire Shari Arison. The 13 musicians, aged 11 to 18, belong to ‘Strings of Freedom,’ and the survivors are patrons of Holon’s Holocaust Survivors Center.
According to the Associated Press, most of the Holocaust survivors did not know the youths were Palestinians from Jenin, one of the more extremist terror strongholds in the West Bank, and the youths had no idea they were performing for people who lived through Nazi genocide — or even what the Holocaust was.
Some 30 elderly survivors gathered in the center’s hall as teenage boys and girls filed in 30 minutes late — delayed at an Israeli military checkpoint outside their town, they later explained.
Some of the young women wore Muslim head scarves — but also sunglasses and school ties.
As a host announced in Hebrew that the youths were from the Jenin refugee camp, there were gasps and muttering from the crowd. “Jenin?” one woman asked in jaw-dropped surprise.Conductor Wafa Younis, from the Arab village of Ara in Israel, then explained in fluent Hebrew that the youths would sing for peace, prompting the audience to burst into applause.
“Inshallah,” said Sarah Glickman, 68, using the Arabic term for “God willing.”
Glickman, whose family moved to the newly created Jewish state in 1949 after fleeing to Siberia to escape the Nazis, said she had no illusions the encounter would make the children understand the Holocaust. But she said it might make a “small difference.”
“They think we are strangers, because we came from abroad,” Glickman said. “I agree: It’s their land, also. But there was no other option for us after the Holocaust.”
Younis said the main mission of the orchestra, formed seven years ago to help Palestinian children overcome war trauma, was to bring people together.
“I’m here to raise spirits,” Younis said. “These are poor, old people.”
However, back home in Jenin, the event drew strong condemnations from refugee camp leaders and political activists, who accused the organizers of exploiting the children for “political purposes.”
According to The Jerusalem Post, Adnan al-Hinda, director of the Popular Committee for Services in the Jenin refugee camp, said that the participation of the children in the concert was a “dangerous matter” because it was directed against the cultural and national identity of the Palestinians.
He accused “suspicious elements” of being behind the Holon event, saying they were seeking to “impact the national culture of the young generation and cast doubt about the heroism and resistance of the residents of the camp during the Israeli invasion in April 2002.”
Ramzi Fayad, a spokesman for various political factions in the Jenin refugee camp, also condemned the participation of the teenagers in the Holocaust event, saying all the groups were strongly opposed to any form of normalization with Israel.
“There can be no normalization while Israel is continuing to perpetrate massacres against our people,” he said.
Leaflets distributed in the Jenin area over the weekend also attacked the event and accused the organizers of exploiting the children. The leaflets also warned the Palestinians against participating in similar events in the future.
Sources in the camp said that the political factions in Jenin have also decided to ban an Israeli Arab woman who helped organize the event from entering the city.
Fatah activists in the city also filed a complaint with the Palestinian Police against the woman under the pretext that she had misled the children by taking them to the Holocaust event. The activists also sealed an apartment that had been rented out to the woman in the refugee camp.
So, just like most attempts to draw people together here, the Jenin-Holocaust survivors summit seems to have ended on a sour note. But let’s hope the youth orchestra returns to play again, and that some day, a group of young Israeli musicians might even be able to go to Jenin and play some music there, without having to fear for their lives.
Foto Friday
Head to Holon, Israel’s new cultural mecca, to view the photographs of Meir Paz, and what he sees in the peeling bark of the eucalyptus tree. The trees aren’t native to Israel, but were planted in great numbers at the turn of the century because of their ability to drain swamps, create shady forests and supply wood.
These elegant trees lose their bark gradually over time, and as a result, comments Paz on trekearth, one can see naturally carved shapes on their trunks — kind of like images in the clouds — that can look like people, animals and other abstract forms. Paz was so fascinated by this when he discovered the phenomenon that he goes back “again and again to spend hours near them in order to photograph and commemorate their special appearance.”
“Face of the Eucalyptus” will be shown at the Holon Theater, Yad Lebanim, 11 Kugel Avenue, Holon, opening September 4.
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