A Review of Israel/Palestine

by Taurie Kinoshita, Artistic Director, Cruel Theatre

Raging for decades, some would argue centuries, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a bitter battle that has seen unimaginable loss and destruction on both sides. What can we as individuals do to address this critical issue? What is an appropriate international response? What are the viewpoints of the Israelis and what are the viewpoints of the Palestinians? When facing a conflict mired in religious idealism with potentially massive political and economic implications, how and can we proceed to deal with this seemingly insurmountable problem? These are just a few of the questions explored in director Harry Giles’s ensemble-devised Israel/Palestine.

Using sections of text from Rachel Corrie, Caryl Churchill, Antonio Gramsci, Israel Horovitz, and Deb Margolin, as well as audience participation and improvisational theatre games, Israel/Palestine is a thought-provoking, entertaining and touching journey into the heart of the crisis. As the audience enters the actors seem to be warming up—though some were speaking to the audience out-of-character (very avant-garde and the only aspect of the performance I found inconsistent with the intelligence of the rest of the play.)

The actual performance begins with a section from Horowitz’ drama What Strong Fences Make. Itzhak Shiffman, played with a quiet intensity by Callum McGowan, approaches an armed soldier, Uri Ambramovich, played by Rosemary Sales with brilliant nuance. The scene progresses, Uri interrogates Itzhak, and the audience is mesmerized by the ensuing drama. Suddenly the palpable tension generated by the talented young duo is shattered with a hilarious meta-theatrical device: a third ensemble member, Kiirsi Viitma stops the scene yelling ‘Cut!’ The entire performance shares the frenetic and diametrically opposed styles of the opening sequence—alternating between serious and comic, texts and physical improvisation, realism and a meta-theatrical Brechtian self-awareness.

For me, this was the real genius of Israel/Palestine: the content and the goals of the performance matched the style in which it was performed. The audience is asked to think, is led without any trace of didactic aggression to question and explore, to try to understand the impact and meaning of the conflict. Both sides of the conflict are presented and the audience is never goaded or pressured to think in a specific way or do anything other than to simply reflect and truly consider the repercussions of this bloody war. To this end, the audience is warmly greeted by the director and asked to sit wherever they choose. The space is assembled—or rather dissembled—suggesting the chaos of war, the inherent imbalance of life in such a conflict: chairs are overturned, a smattering of random objects obstruct the room. The audience is informed that they may move whenever they want in order to gain a better—or different—view! At times, the single focus of a scene is split and multiplied so each actor performs for a different group of audience members, re-enforcing the idea that to even talk about the situation connotes a difference in perception. In addition to being directly addressed in small, almost private groups by different actors and being physically moved by actors, audience members are also drawn into the performance by two ‘talk sections.’ The first is a general discussion involving both actors and audience members. In the second section the audience members are asked to write something on a piece of paper—whatever they feel inspired to write. Audience written responses were then incorporated into a version of the improvisational game The Machine (a sound and movement piece).

The ensemble demonstrates not only the history of the conflict but also the history of humanity with stylized and side-splitting ingenuity. All of the young performers displayed a virtuousity in handling the texts, movement sections and participatory elements. The piece ends with a moment of silence and the announcement that the director was taking donations for humanitarian organisations in the region; this is theatre at its best—revealing, investigative and communal.The choice of an international cast (actors from Poland, UK, Estonia, Italy and France) gave the performance additional weight–underscoring the universality of the conflict. Shifting modes of perceptions and opposing points of view, typified through the use of different styles of theatre stressed the ultimately humanitarian concerns of Israel/Palestine, an inspired and provocative and moving piece of theatre.

(view a profile of Taurie here)

What have we been doing?

What have we been doing?

We’ve completed the first week of rehearsals. That’s over a third of the way through our progress to performance! (Many weeks of occasional planning precede rehearsal, and we’ve got three full-time weeks together to develop the show.) Part of the purpose of this site, this company, is to try and convey in hypertextual form our experiences of making theatre: to describe what we’re doing, explain what we can, mystifyingly demystify the black box of theatre production.

<<But an interesting thing happens to me, personally, when I’m in the rehearsal studio: spending so many hours exploring corporeal performance and being with others, interacting intimately, physically, mentally, emotionally, places me firmly in my body, my flesh, erodes my interest in the electronic and digital — in short, keeps me away from my internet lives. Whether it’s due to innate psychic needs or not, there is an opposition between the digitial and the corporeal, and, while we are all cyborgs, the more fleshly I get the less I seem to need to extend my body along wires and screens. Still: communication.>>

This first week has been marked “exploration”. At this point, we have little idea what our show will be, apart from a desire to be interactive and a fairly specific subject. Will there be scenes or sections? Will there be narrative or words? What is its tone? What is its content? What is its form? We don’t know. And for now we’re deliberately avoiding the questions, to prevent possible answers from guiding our investigations too firmly. We want to be, as far as possible, exploring unknown territory and discovering what lies there. Everything we do at this stage is an experiment aiming for unknown and indeterminate results. We’re doing, doing, doing, without trying, without judging too firmly. We’re building an intuitive sketchbook, drawing with our eyes closed, or asleep.

That’s the theory: the practise is pretty specific. We play games and devise performances. I will divide the actors into groups and assign them tasks: using this line, or this scene, or this news article, or this propaganda video, or this movement, or this image — create a performance. Usually I’ll give them about half an hour. That forces uninhibited creativity: they just have to grab the first idea that floats past and runs with it. This produces an astonishing diversity of mini-performances, and helps to widen our performance vocabulary. Each new scene gives us new ideas to work with; each changes the way the audience sits, or stands, or might interact. Some are representative, some narrative, some silent, some obscure, some hilarious. All or none of them may appear in the final production (if indeed there is a “final”).

Sometimes I have a specific concept I want to try out (or one of the actors does), and then I or another will conduct a performance. A musical conductor is an appropriate analogy here, although there is no score except that which emerges organically in the mind. So, for example, I might start three actors reading from a speech, and instruct the four others to echo any words or lines they feel moved to, in multiple languages. Then I might ask one of the speakers to increase or decrease in volume. Then I ask one actor to move between all the speakers fluidly, gracefully, extending her body to express her thoughts. Then I ask two other actors to perform a cycle of movements we’ve previously rehearsed. Soon there a musical, textual and physical performance emerges: one which is about a few concrete ideas, which has a tone, which has a form. We stop, and then we talk about what it was like to be in, what it was like to watch.

Talking, observation and feedback are important to us. After most exercises we will ask what worked, what didn’t, what was most interesting. Without a video camera (the most important piece of equipment for many devising companies), this is our record, along with our unreliable memories. We will come back to these discussions and arguments later as source material.

Another way of responding is a lengthy and extremely taxing exercise we use to reflect from time to time. On Friday, we finished with it; I call it a “free-form improvisation”, though really it is highly guided. The actors begin in zero position, or what is usually called “neutral” (I dispute the concept of neutrality, though that’s an argument for another time). To enter the space they breathe in and out, deeply, twice. Then I ask them to let their minds wander through everything we’ve done, and said, and seen. Beginning with either word or movement, I ask them to express what they are moved to express. it may take up to 5 minutes, but eventually someone will say a word, or stamp, or stretch, or cry out. The momentum builds as the group responds to itself, its thoughts, the room, the atmosphere. A performance happens; it is like a dream.

Only it is almost not a performance. It is something else instead, or as well. They are no longer playing characters or ideas. They are themselves, although the subconsciously-driven approach means that they perform intuitive aspects of their selves, rather than a rationally overseen complete persona. They are being in the room, in a heightened, hyper-aware sort of way. Every action and word carries the same weight it would if it were a performance, but has the motivation of being. This is not a performance which points to something outside of itself: it is itself, we are being in the room. (Me, too. Voyeurism is participation.) Sometimes it is boring for a few minutes. It is often heartwrenching. Yesterday, the actors wrenched themselves; I watched them struggling and suffering to come to terms with the very difficult situation and material we are working with. I found it extraordinary.

Where will it all go? What are we going to perform for you, our audiences? What will you perform with us? Starting Monday, we’ll begin to transition into the next stage, which is to analyse what we’ve done and make decisions about what we want to do next. We will begin to assemble, or  grow, a complete performance. Some of it might be difficult. Some of it might be funny. We don’t know. We’ll see.

New Site Anxieties

It’s a funny thing building a new site, especially one that’s going to be important for your (for want of a better word) professional life. You have to construct the online image that the world is going to see — decide on your colours, your logos, your style, and that’s before you even begin to think about content. What’s the site going to be for? What’s going to happen with it in the future?

I won’t lie, I use WordPress because it’s fast, convenient and free, while still being reasonably stylish. The Web 2.0 craze, the Information Revolution, I mean, I do believe it in everything, but so much of it is so tacky. And badly spelt. So I use WordPress because it’s easy and it looks alright. But it carries an extra bonus with it: it is at heart a blogging site.

This site should be a publicity portal. But this is Open Source Theatre. And what that’s about is not just user/audience-generated content, not just participatoryand community theatre, but also about baring theatre’s soul, showing how it’s made, showing what its practitioners are thinking about, how they work. Hence this post, hence this blogging element, this personality that undercuts publicity (or perhaps doesn’t).

I don’t know what’s going to be here. But this is a start.