Whose Play Is It?

Whose Play Is It? The Issue of Authorship/Ownership in Israeli Community-Based Theatre Shulamith Lev-Aladgem Community-based theatre in Israel is a means for individual and social em- powerment generally initiated and sponsored by municipal and/or state wel- fare and cultural bodies, operating among underprivileged groups. Over the past 30 years this theatre has developed into a dynamic cultural intervention, operating with different groups in various locations throughout the country such as community centers, schools, boarding schools, prisons, rehabilitation centers, and senior citizens’ clubs. Lately, community-based theatre has evolved into two new subgenres: women’s and therapeutic community theatre. Formally, community-based theatre is defined as a theatre created within, by, and for the “people.” Similar to other such theatres throughout the world, it is a form of “believed-in theatre [...] in the fact that people are enacting their own stories and performing mostly for people of their own communities” (Schechner 1997:81). In Israel it is the task of a professional director/facilitator to recruit and or- ganize a group of local citizens into an ensemble. The creative process moves through several stages, always guided by the director/facilitator: 1. Exercises and games aimed at developing a consolidated, creative group. 2. Acting out significant life events. 3. Using these personal experiences to form the basis for an original play col- lectively created by the director and the group. 4. A public performance of the resulting work mainly presented to a local audience. 5. Following the performances, a discussion between the performers and the audience about the social intentions and messages of the performance. Because the source of the community-based performance is not dramatic literature but “community-owned” stories (Brady 2000), the issue of authorship/ownership over the performance-text is outwardly clear. It belongs to and is determined by the creative group itself. This issue-based, publicly per- formed “self-text” expands the circuit of ownership to the entire local audience. The Drama Review 48, 3 (T183), Fall 2004. ᭧ 2004 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 117 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1054204041667721 by guest on 27 September 2021 118 Shulamith Lev-Aladgem However, this proclamation of the transfer of ownership of the theatrical “means of production” to “the people” is in practice only deceptive rhetoric concealing the operation of different regimes of power within community- based theatres. Community-based theatre in Israel was and still is a function of the state’s community planning and development program. Community development, according to its own terminology, aims to bring about rehabilitation and pro- gress within groups with special needs, such as ethnic minorities, at-risk youth, battered women, prisoners, and the handicapped. Community-based theatre has become over the years a means to reduce cultural, social, educa- tional, and mental disadvantages within such groups. Born in the 1970s in a few dispossessed poor neighborhoods in Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv, inhabited mostly by Mizrahi Jews (originating from Arab coun- tries), Israel’s community-based theatre is prevalent today in many disadvantaged neighborhoods all over the country. Although recently these impoverished districts also have become inhabited by Jews originating from Ethiopia and the former USSR, the Mizrahim still constitute the majority of community-based theatre performers. Since its inception, community-based theatre has operated conditionally due to ideological disagreements between the sponsors and theatres concerning the mean- ing of “change.” Does change involve the integration of the minority group into the dominant sociocultural order or can it include resistance to integration? And if the latter, can theatre be used as a symbolic weapon? The struggle over what the performances mean constitutes a powerful manifestation of a complex politics of change indicating that despite the rhetoric, disenfranchised communities never fully own the theatrical means of production. The transfer by the institutional bodies of the skills necessary for communities to make their own theatre is always partial and depends upon whether the production re- flects or contests the state’s hegemonic ideology. Therefore, the crucial and permanently relevant questions in community-based theatre are: Who bears responsibility for the content of the event—the municipal and state establishment that sponsors the theatre; the facilitator/director who as a theatre prac- titioner is often an outsider to the group paid by the establishment; or the creative ensemble that is supposed to compose a performance text important to the entire community? And finally, what if the local audience while watch- ing the show objects to all or some of the performance? Politics of Change within Israeli Community-Based Theatre The story of Israeli community-based theatre usually begins with the performance Joseph Goes Down to Katamon (1972/73), directed by Arie Itzhak and produced by the Community Theatre of Katamon, an underprivileged neighborhood of Jerusalem. The performance used the biblical story of Joseph in a cynical and ironic fashion. It offered a stylized depiction of the harsh and help- less daily life of the local disadvantaged inhabitants who, as Mizrahi Jews, felt oppressed and discriminated by the dominant Ashkenazim ( Jews originating from Europe and America). Itzhak was at that time a celebrated professional actor who became a social activist for his own ethnic Mizrahi group. He was deeply inspired by radical ideas that reached Israel from America, and had already begun to realize them with at-risk youth in a shelter in downtown Tel- Aviv. “One day,” recalls Yamin Masica, one of the performers in Joseph Goes Down to Katamon, “a man approached us in the street. He looked different. He Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1054204041667721 by guest on 27 September 2021 Authorship/Ownership in Israel 119 said that he had come from Tel-Aviv to do theatre with us” (Masica 2001; un- less otherwise noted, all quotations in this section are from this source). Itzhak was a charismatic director who knew how to employ theatre as a method for raising consciousness among young people, and who instigated a creative process in which the performers followed him faithfully. “For us he was a hero who came from ‘there’ and led us to an underground activity,” states Masica. Itzhak’s dedication and enthusiasm was rewarded by the “boys from Kata- mon,” who stayed with him even after others found the work process too de- manding and dropped out. These boys had never dreamt before that anybody would really appreciate them, or that theatre was anything other than “rich people’s stuff.” Itzhak was usually accompanied by Michael Pharan, an outreach worker who introduced him to the municipal authorities. These agen- cies quickly embraced community-based theatre as a means of rehabilitating streetwise young people. However, in contrast to the authorities’ liberal intentions, the young performers, influenced by Itzhak’s socio-artistic agenda, appropriated community- based theatre as a political tool to protest their conditions and instigate social resistance. The performers wrote songs and scenes representing poverty, crime, housing congestion, and drugs. Itzhak introduced the biblical, metaphoric frame, and he also edited and molded the personal materials. The young performers were deeply impressed and excited by their director’s artistic choices, even if “we didn’t always really understand them.” One of the scenes, showing the brutal rape of a jailed prisoner, provoked a large part of the audience to object. They found it too painful to face as well as injurious to their neighborhood’s already dubious reputation. The municipal delegates, mostly the Ashkenazi and the ultra-Orthodox, who rejected the overall oppositional tone of the performance, took advantage of the local audience’s agitated reaction and asked Itzhak to cut the scene. Even though the performers supported Itzhak’s opposition to changing the scene, after long ar- guments, he gave in realizing that the alternative was that the show would be closed (Miller 1975). The Katamon case marked the beginning of community-based theatre in Israel both communicatively and ideologically. At that time Louis Miller, a community psychiatrist, one of the founders of community work in Israel and also the senior psychiatrist at the Ministry of Health, became acquainted with the Katamon group. He gave it official recognition as the prototype of community-based theatre. In a number of articles Miller described the performance and laid out the basic model for such a theatre (see Miller 1973, 1975, 1977). Community-based theatre practitioners such as myself perceive the Kata- mon case as important ideologically because it shows how community-based theatre can rise from the grassroots. But this is only part of the story. Kata- mon’s creative process was able to reach its final stage largely due to the excep- tional management of Michael Pharan, the outreach worker. As a community worker in the Municipal Department for the Advancement of Youth espe- cially involved in street gangs, he was sent to Katamon “to calm down the siz- zling winds, and to prevent agitation and disorder. A community worker was expected to be highly loyal to the municipal viewpoints, and not to become too involved with the community” (Pharan 2003). Pharan believed, however, that there should be an alternative approach, and when he met Itzhak he was “enlightened by him” (Pharan 2003). He joined the creative process, assisting Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1054204041667721 by guest on 27 September 2021 120 Shulamith Lev-Aladgem the group as much as he could, providing them with rehearsal space and equipment. He did not interfere in the creative process because he identified with it, considering that “this is exactly what is needed to sincerely ‘open win- dows’” (Pharan 2003).

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