Showtime: Getting active at Hazorea Forest

Environmentally minded members of the public can roll up their sleeves, get stuck into some earnest green activity at 3-day Activism Festival.

By BARRY DAVIS
Activism Festival 521 (photo credit: Courtesy)
Activism Festival 521
(photo credit: Courtesy)
Getting active at Hazorea Forest
Environmentally minded members of the public can roll up their sleeves and get stuck into some earnest green activity next week at the three-day Activism Festival, on from Thursday to Saturday.
The event will take place at the Hazorea Forest, south of Yokne’am, and includes a large number of workshops, treatment sessions, shows, exhibitions and movies on environmental and environmental-related issues. Vegan meals will be prepared by volunteers, supervised by professional cooks.
The festival site will be divided into separate thematic areas, and will include an entrepreneurial spot designed to promote social initiatives and help activists. One novel facility at the festival is the Mobile Tent, where anyone can go to ask questions and raise any issue that bothers them.
There will also be a permaculture area, and an ecoyoga site focusing on the connection between physical, spiritual health and environmental health, and social justice.
There will also be screenings of movies with environmental themes, followed by panel discussions, music shows and stalls with products made by environmental and environmentally-aware organizations.
More information: http://www.activismfestival.org.il/ and http://www.facebook.com/festivalactivism
Spring is here!
The 2011 international Spring Festival is up and running in Rishon Lezion, and ends this Saturday.
The 12th edition of the festival offers a wide range of outdoor entertainment, including a breathtaking show by the Flying Indian troupe from Mexico, in which four members of a Mexican Indian tribe perform daredevil stunts and play musical instruments while spinning around a 30- meter-high mast upside down.
There is more acrobatic entertainment on offer from the Flying Frenchmen act, with the members of the group creating an enormous work of art on a 15-meter-high surface, while engaging in a theatrical dance on scaffolding and attached to abseiling equipment.
Elsewhere in the Spring Festival program, there are 16 dance troupes from Israel and abroad, and a wide variety of musical acts, including Keren Ann.
More information: www.springfestival.co.il
Friendship revisited
Veteran Israeli-born classical violinist Zvi Zeitlin will participate in a memorial concert for the late composer Ben-Zion Orgad on May 15 at Hateiva in Jaffa at 8:30 p.m.
The 89-year-old Zeitlin, an internationally renowned violinist and the Eastman School of Music’s Distinguished Kilbourn Professor, met and befriended Orgad in Israel in the 1940s. In 1949, when the two were students together at the US Tanglewood Music Festival, Orgad wrote a ballad for Zeitlin, which the latter subsequently performed for the legendary violinist Jascha Heifetz.
During his long career, Zeitlin has performed with almost all the world’s leading orchestras under such illustrious conductors as Bernstein, Mehta, Levine, Maazel, Boulez and Stravinsky.
Kaniuk looks back to 1948
Yoram Kaniuk’s prize-winning book, 1948, has been turned into a play and, as of yesterday, can be seen at the Haifa Theater. The play is based Kaniuk’s recollections of his part in the War of Independence as a member of the fabled Harel Brigade. Rather than being a historical presentation of the war, it is a very intimate and non-official version of events as the writer saw them.
The play is directed by Noya Lanzet. The cast includes Keren Or, Maayan Weisberg, Omer Zonenstain and Yonatan Schwartz. Forthcoming shows will be on May 21-24, June 15-16, and 18- 20, all at 8:30 p.m.
Tickets and more information: (04) 860-0500 and www.ht1.co.il