With enormous sophistication; enough care, enough preparation, enough daring any lie can become truth.
By HELEN KAYEMein Jerusalem311(photo credit: Courtesy)
Mein Jerusalem is subtitled ‘a performance by Sabine Sauber’ who is, as the program informs us, “a photographer/ conceptual artist born and raised in Leipzig, Germany.”Except that she isn’t. Sabine Sauber is a construct, a concept in a performance art piece created by director Eyal Weiser and immaculately realized by actress/artist Michal Weinberg.It’s very clever. In the theater lobby, there is an exhibition of Sabine’s photos, actually shot by Rami Maymon. The set by Yinon Peres that looks like a wooden fence – a reminder of The Wall between West and East Berlin that was so dramatically pulled down in 1989 – is converted into a series of tabletops that hold the shoe-boxes bearing the bits and piece of Sabine’s life.Sabine’s video – shot “by chance” – of the toppling of the Berlin Wall marks the start of her career as a photographer, and the shoe-boxes provide the historical and psychological background to the various phases of that career.Jerusalem comes into the picture when Sabine meets Elad, an Israeli. For the first time in her alienated, torn, narcissistic life, Sabine feels loved, almost secure. She comes with Elad to Jerusalem, and returns there after they have split up – he wants a family, she’s afraid – where she commits suicide. Or does she? The viewer vacillates. Is this or is this not a real person? After all, the program and the exhibits on stage chronicle her life. And that is precisely the point, made with enormous sophistication; with enough care, enough preparation, enough daring any lie can become truth.Tmuna Theater, July 20
