An eight-day celebration of women's creativity features everything from dance and theater to music, visual arts and handcrafts.
By JJ LEVINE
In a similar vein to the current Holon Women's Festival, Netanya will be hosting the Muses Festival, an eight-day celebration of women's creativity featuring everything from dance and theater to music, visual arts and handcrafts.
Starting off the festival this Friday morning is television storyteller Yosi Alfi ("Festival of Storytellers"), who will host female personalities telling stories on the theme of "not in front of my husband."
On Sunday, breakaway bestselling author Noa Yaron-Dayan, the actor-turned Breslover hassid, will perform in a one-woman show open to women only. Yaron-Dayan will explore the humor and the passion that led this mother of six to write Mekimi, a novel which takes an honest, intimate look at the process of becoming religious.
For a look at a more exotic female culture, the festival is dedicating Tuesday evening to the women of India. Yanetz Levi will speak about everything from the birth of a girl, through traditional costume, to the rites of marriage and the status of widows in Hindu culture. Osnat Alkabir, author of Where the Rivers Meet, about her experiences over nine years in India, will explore the dance and music of South Asia. Finally on Wednesday, the Beit Lessin Theater Company will present Love of My Life, a Brazilian play about a woman whose story is told simultaneously by the version of her at 20 (television celebrity Maya Dagan) and at 50 (Yona Elian-Keshet, a familiar face from numerous TV series, movies and theater)
Running through Friday, March 14, festival events take place in the Netanya Cultural Center, with numerous exhibitions also going up in galleries around town.