Acre Festival 2015 winners

The five-member jury included playwright Dani Horowitz and composer Ori Widislavski.

By HELEN KAYE
YOAV BARTAL and Abigail Rubin’s ‘Yabalek.’ (photo credit: YOHAN SEGEV)
YOAV BARTAL and Abigail Rubin’s ‘Yabalek.’
(photo credit: YOHAN SEGEV)
 This year’s Acre Festival ended in a blaze of glory with prizes awarded in 16 categories, full houses for all the plays and some 120,000 people on the streets taking in the free shows on stages and streets in and around the Old City of Acre.
The five-member jury, which included playwright Dani Horowitz and composer Ori Widislavski, awarded Best Play to the multi-disciplinary trilogy on the sources of fear entitled Yabalek by Yoav Bartal and Abigail Rubin, citing among the rest the play’s “theatrical language moving [seamlessly] from one technique to the other...and on the extraordinary dedication of the ensemble....”
This prize is NIS 10,000. Yabalek also won the choreography prize for its creators.
The other three major awards went to Itai Doron’s iconoclastic “rapper” satire M.C. Coriolanus, based on Shakespeare’s tragedy, which shows up our own reality via the Roman general Coriolanus who trashes the republic he and his countrymen created.
Doron received Best Director, Ronen Yifrach in the title role got Best Actor and Michal Rubin won Best Actress for her on-the-edge performance as Volumnia, Coriolanus’ mother. Another well-deserved reward went to Nadav Vikinski for the marvelous music accompanying the wrenching Slaughterhouse 5, based on the iconic novel by Kurt Vonnegut.
Outgoing artistic director Gil Alon summed up the three years of his tenure saying happily that this year’s nine competition plays vigorously “kicked at society’s outworn conventions and clichés, and that most of them will continue on after the festival.”