During Succot, the ancient seaside city will offer visitors over 60 shows and all kinds of street theater events.
By HELEN KAYEplayback theater 88.224(photo credit: Courtesy )
This year's Acre Festival of Alternative Theater, sited as usual in and around the old city of Acre during Hol Hamoed Succot, runs from October 15 through 19. It offers 10 plays in competition and another 55 events ranging from guest productions to an especially large free street theater contingent featuring some 35 different shows, including seven from Europe.
Acre Festival artistic director Daniella Michaeli explains, "We never formally choose a theme. We find that each year one usually presents itself."
So it is that on its 60th anniversary, Israel itself is much on playmakers' minds, an Israel that is perceived by some to be more than beset by its many problems. The artistic committee chose 10 candidate plays from among 150 submissions - ample proof, says Arts and Culture Administration head Micha Yinon, that "the Acre Festival, which manages to reinvent itself every year, remains one of the country's leading theatrical institutions."
The competing plays include The Spud Zone, a play with music in which a family dreams of life beyond the confines of its potato patch and a war that may or may not be over; The Olive Harvest, by Nahad Bashir, to be performed in Arabic and Hebrew, which wheels through 24 hours in the lives of three women whose menfolk are gone; In the Name of Zion, in which Sharon Mayevsky and Tal Barnea are puppeteers whose puppets ask what has made and makes us who we are; Two-and-Twenty Pictures, wherein Ruth Ostermann asks what, precisely, defines the home; A Little Vacation, Nava Frankel's minimalist take on a family who must discover what defines its relationships; RPM - Revolutions per Minute, which uses objects as actors and humans as their subjects; The Burial of a Donkey, a peripatetic play featuring icon-bashing Honi Hama'agel who takes on the religious rituals surrounding death; and Emergency, in which the Tnua Tziburit (Public Movement) group examines the choreographed response to disaster scenarios.
Among the other productions, audiences will encounter a take on one of the more bizarre episodes of World War II. Russian forces taking a Polish city confiscated all the pianos, but the order confirming their removal to Russia never came and the pianos slowly rotted at the river's edge. Six grand pianos and the grim memories that escape are ceremoniously interred in Salto Mortale, a circus-type coproduction between our own Klipa and - in the framework of Poland in Israel year - the Polish theater group Strefa Ciszy.
Performance artist Adrian Howells returns with Foot Washing for the Sole, a one-on-one foot-washing/massaging encounter created, he says, to alleviate the religious tensions that stress us out; and in Grabung (Digging), a world premiere, German performers examine the things that have divided us through the centuries of Acre's history. There also local productions from the Acre Theater Center (ATC), El Laz and the Shlomi Group, among the rest.
The free street theater events include giraffes, antelopes, French poetry whisperers (through very long tubes), local and visiting clowns of various stripes, puppets, stilt-walkers, nightly parades and tons more. Also free are the various exhibitions whose subjects range from photographs to masks.
This year's opening event will star Shlomo Artzi. On October 14, Drs. Shimon Levi and Shimshon Shoshani will become Acre Festival Notables in recognition of their unflagging support of the festival. Levi in particular has been directly involved with the festival since 1983.
Tickets prices range from NIS 25-NIS 75. For more info, check out the Web site: www.accofestival.co.il (in Hebrew and English).
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