תגובתה של נופר סלע ל׳הוסר זמנית׳ בפסטיבל ישראל

Nofar Sela’s Response to ‘Temporarily Removed’ at the Israel Festival

“Nooo!! Mom!! Mom!!! Moooom!!!”

My four-and-a-half-year-old daughter grabs my hand and won’t let go.

“Sweetheart, Mom has to go.”

“I want to come with you!”

“You can’t, love. You’re going to sleep now, and when I come back I’ll wake you up and give you a kiss, okay?”

“Nooo!! Mom, Mom, Mom, Moooom!!!”

When I finally manage to free myself and leave the house, I glance at my watch. It’s 8:12 p.m. I have three minutes to get there. I didn’t have time to shower or change my dress, and my hands smell like curry from the soup I’ve just finished cooking.

I leave the building, run to the end of the street, cross over to HaNassi Street and from there hurry toward Chopin Street. I can already see the Jerusalem Theatre. Israel Festival, Israel Festival, how can I show up like this? There’s no choice. It’s 8:15 now and I hurry inside, and the first person I see when I enter the theatre foyer is Erez.

A smile.

A breath.

Prof. Erez Maayan Shalev is co-artistic director of Tmuna Theatre and head of the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Haifa. Despite the impressive titles, encountering him is always somehow calming. Erez is a person who loves art and loves the people who make it. The very important and serious work he does, he does from the heart, at eye level, and with complete trust in artists and in art. He is the kind of person who makes it worthwhile to make theatre in this country of ours.

Tonight, Erez is one of three people leading the Temporarily Removed tour, artistically directed by Eve Crystal, alongside Dr. Idit Suslik and Itay Doron. The tours deal with incredible international works that did not make it here because of “the elephant that entered the room and cannot be removed,” as the program puts it. In one word: the boycott. I would like to attend all of the tours, but they take place simultaneously, and the sense of FOMO is part of the artistic choice made here.

We begin. We all put on headphones and follow our shepherd across the theatre plaza. Erez speaks and we listen. The headphones cut us off from the noise and commotion around us, and as Erez continues speaking, the disconnection becomes intimacy.

In fact, this is a tour following nothing. There is nothing to see, because the works being discussed did not make it here. All we have left is one another.

Erez opens the tour by saying: “One of the traditional roles of the Israel Festival was always to bring important performances from abroad to Israel. The festival was the place to come and see the best contemporary work being made elsewhere in the world. For Israeli artists, it was a way to keep a finger on the pulse of what our colleagues around the world were doing, to feel part of an international community.”

I hear this and my heart clenches. An international community. Once, we were part of a community. Since October 7, a great many relationships with institutions, colleagues and friends abroad have been shaken or severed. Artists from abroad don’t want to come here, and we aren’t particularly wanted there. We are shunned, isolated, boycotted against our will, regardless of our position on what our government is doing. Regardless of the complexity that can be seen from here and cannot be seen from there.

Erez tells us about a performance by Croatian choreographer Ivana Müller that he saw in Paris sometime in early 2023. He shows us some photographs and videos of the work on a tablet and tells us about it: six performers move through the space while tied to one another by a climbing rope. Generally speaking, documentation of performance work is one of the most frustrating things there is. Video, and even verbal description, cannot really convey the feeling you had when you were there, and any work you try to describe will always end up sounding more or less like the same old thing in a different guise. This time, the limitations of documentation serve another function: they are connected to the sense of absence that the tour seeks to make present.

I can’t make much sense of the images Erez is showing us, but I understand everything from the sparkle in his eyes when he talks about the work. He was so excited by it that he decided to contact Müller and invite her to Tmuna Theatre. Like any ordinary person, he contacted her through the “Contact” page on her website. She replied. They scheduled a Zoom call. Eventually, she agreed to come, even though there was already a boycott in 2023. Plans to bring her began to take shape.

Erez planned to bring Müller’s work We Are Still Watching to Tmuna, a piece performed by the audience, in which audience members sit in a square and read texts written for them. The texts are full of performance instructions, as well as questions such as: “Who wrote this text for us?” “Why are we reading it?” “Why don’t we just leave?”

The work deals with social dynamics, cooperation and obedience. When do we cooperate, and why? What is the force that drives us to participate, to follow instructions imposed from outside, to obey?

Erez says that as the plan to bring Müller took shape, their relationship deepened. He mentions almost in passing that they exchanged pictures of their children, and this touches my heart. There is something about that moment with people far away, from another country or another culture, the moment when you tell each other about your children. Anyone who has children knows the highs and lows of parenthood, the “Mom!! Nooo!!! Mom, Mom, Mom,” and that mutual understanding creates threads of connection in an instant, without words.

When October 7 came, Müller immediately wrote to Erez, expressing concern and empathy. But ultimately, she gave up on the idea of coming. Time passed, and Erez would remember and tell people about the artist who had been supposed to come here but ultimately boycotted us, like so many others.

At the end of the tour, Erez says with a smile and a sense of wonder: “Only now, when I was invited to lead this tour, did I go back to my correspondence with Ivana, and suddenly I realized that all this time I had been telling the story wrong.”

When he reread her emails, he realized that Müller had withdrawn from the visit with regret, and had even said that she hoped to come at another time.

“I felt like I was inside an Ivana Müller work,” he says.

Erez was astonished to realize that his memory had deceived him, that he too, like the audience in Müller’s work, had cooperated with a story that had been told here again and again: the story of the boycotting artists.

I have thought about this story a great deal over the past three years. Who exactly are these boycotting artists? What does it mean to boycott? Is choosing not to come here under the present circumstances a boycott? If I were in their place, would I come?

A year and a half ago, I was invited to create a work for a festival in Berlin. The war was in full force. I had heard endless stories about extremely difficult experiences Israeli artists had undergone abroad, and I felt that if I agreed to go to Berlin, I would have no choice but to represent something I did not want to represent. I wanted to speak about exactly that, but I was afraid. In fact, I was so afraid that I decided to create a work in which I was not present.

I called it Almost There, and designed it as a meeting over coffee with me, except that I am not there. The participant sits opposite an empty chair and hears my voice through headphones. I tell them about myself, ask questions about the listener, create intimacy. At the end of the work, I admit that I didn’t come because I was afraid that if we met, the war would stand between us.

Participants are invited to leave me a few written words, and I prepared myself for all the “Free Palestine” messages in the world. I did, indeed, receive a few. But to my amazement, most of the responses were supportive and deeply moved. There are human beings out there, lots of them, and their hearts are open. In this case, it was precisely absence that became the way to meet.

Erez called these “pockets of resistance,” the possibility of people meeting and acting together despite the stories dictated to us from outside. Ultimately, I am certain that my value system is not very far from that of the people who boycott us. After all, once we were part of the same community. But I am in a completely different situation from theirs, a situation they may not be able to understand, or perhaps, in some sense, they understand it better than I do.

And I also remind myself that it is entirely possible that if I lived somewhere over there, in Europe or elsewhere, and looked from the outside at what is happening here, at the destruction, dispossession and devastation we are wreaking around us, I would stay away too. I would be furious and opposed and I would boycott.

But when I live here, I have no choice. I don’t just love this place, I also depend on it. Now more than ever, I have nowhere to go, and wherever I do go, I will be Israeli and Jewish. I cannot disconnect myself from this country, but that does not make me better or more righteous. It only leaves me shattered into pieces, morally wounded.

It is impossible to live here without needing protection, and without being profoundly grateful to those who risk themselves to provide that protection for me and my family. It is impossible to put our children to bed at night without knowing that perhaps tonight, or tomorrow, or two days from now, we will have to pick them up in the middle of the night and run to the shelter, and that when they grow up, they too will probably have to put themselves at risk for an indifferent government that does nothing to extract us from this eternal cycle of bloodshed. And when you hold that soft hand and kiss that freshly washed, sweet-smelling head, you cannot help but decide to do everything you can to hide all of this from them.

“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. On the one hand, to contain and express the pain we carry with us, and on the other, as much as possible, to leave cracks through which we can also look at what is too difficult for Israeli society to see.

In this sense, the festival is providing leadership. Because it is asking all of us to create these kinds of pockets of resistance. To connect, to question, to act.

Our task as artists here, right now, is first and foremost to be good to one another. This field can no longer afford to be competitive and rigid. We have to be one another’s community, the best colleagues we can possibly be. To show up, to support, to comfort, to open our hearts. We have to create a shared home for ourselves here, because we need to act together, to hold one another’s moral integrity, to give one another space and courage to express ourselves, and also to protect one another.

We have to be our own home and our own community, so that we can move together, act for change, through art and through protest. Because the reality here has to change, and there absolutely, absolutely has to be a better future here, for everyone.

“I wrote to Ivana again yesterday,” Erez says, ending the tour with a question. “I asked her: maybe you’d like to come after all?”

He leaves us with a question mark and a great deal of room to breathe, and I return home with my head buzzing with thoughts.

I open the door and hear a soft, sweet “Mom” coming from her room.

I go to her, crouch beside the bed and give her a kiss, just as I promised.

“Good night, my love.”

She closes her eyes and goes back to sleep.