International Mayumana ensemble’s capital premiere

June 5, 2009 - 12:03 PM by Harry · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Art, General, History and Culture, Israeliness, Pop Culture, Profiles 

MayumanaWith 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.

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Beresheet bumped up

June 19, 2008 - 7:15 PM by Harry · 1 Comment
Filed under: Music, Pop Culture, Travel 

BoombamellaIsraelis love festivals. The Israel Festival is a five-week affair this year, currently in progress. Hardly a week goes by without some kind of event being dubbed as the next big festival, from the Cinema South Film Festival in Sderot, which wrapped up two weeks ago, to this past week’s kosher food extravaganza in Petach Tikva.

The most lively mainstream events on the annual festival calendar in recent years have been the big three hippie festivals, Boombamela, Shantipi and Beresheet, each taking place during a major Jewish holiday, times when the nation more or less goes on vacation. Intoxicating blends of new-age spirituality, corporate sponsorships, Eastern ethnic jams, family camping, teenybopper-friendly pop, nudism, all-night trance parties, beach living and even Carlebach-style Jewish outreach, the big three have drawn crowds in the tens of thousands since before the millennium.

But stretch marks have begun to show. Shantipi, the first one in the game, tried to reposition itself as less tween-oriented and more family-friendly in 2004, and when efforts were met with lower attendance, planners attempted and failed to backtrack on the move. Shantipi didn’t even take place this past Shavuot, earlier this month.

Even the most robust draw in recent years, Passover’s Boombamela, has seen a drop in attendance. “I reckon we’ll have twenty-five thousand or even thirty thousand people this year,” the festival’s artistic director Mathaus Waldorf told The Jerusalem Post’s Barry Davis a few months ago. It didn’t pan out. While something like 15,000 tickets were sold, a solid turnout by any means, it was a mere half of the load that planners had invested in infrastructure to accommodate. Plus, many of the revelers didn’t stay for the entire four-day shindig – the schoolteachers’ strike of the autumn had made for a shortened vacation from classes, and Hamas missiles falling in nearby Ashkelon surely inspired many parents to ask their children to come home early – lending the proceedings a feeling of emptiness.

The Beresheet festival, which started out ten years ago as a Rosh Hashanah production, has also attempted to rebrand itself as something bigger and longer in recent years, opting instead to take place during the longer holiday of Sukkot since 2004. Brought to you by the same production crew that organizes Boombamela, this year’s Beresheet is set to take place over three days starting on July 14 on the sores of the Sea of Galilee, a far safer bet in terms of minimizing school schedule conflicts and a somewhat safer bet in terms of minimizing the chances of a missile attack. The move might just mark a return to the millennial days of booming attendance, but the pre-commercialized purity of the early days will probably remain elusive.

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