“Since the Israel Festival can no longer be a platform for international work, it has been asking itself what its role is at this moment,” Erez says.
Looking at this year’s program and those of previous years, the answer is very clear: the festival has taken it upon itself to create and sustain local art that thinks, that has compassion, that kicks back.Read more
Before the audience, a kind of creative tapestry inspired by Hillesum was woven, speaking about her and with her through the experiences of our lives here today, and it was intelligent and delicate and moving and funny. And yet there was only one thing missing for me, one voice that was not heard or present onstage: the voice of the man, of the male performer.Read more
Jonathan and the work have managed to articulate a moving insight about the role of the extra in society as a whole, and not only in art. About the freedom afforded to marginal figures, beside whom the heroes seem domesticated, almost devoid of imagination. It is a beautiful way of unsettling the question of who tells the story, who is interesting to listen to, what stories we miss when we cling to familiar aesthetics and familiar melodies, and more broadly, what stories we allow ourselves to let slip away, to close ourselves off to, to lose.Read more