The Israel Festival bridges past & present for Israel’s 70th birthday

This spring, the Israel Festival celebrates its fifty-seventh year and Israel’s 70th birthday with performances that are intended to provoke, spark, and engage international and Israeli audiences during its run in Jerusalem from May 23 to June 16.

 

How does Israel Festival Artistic Director Itzik Giuli know that he has done a good job with a festival whose reputation precedes it? “We measure success by the energy and response of our audiences,” he says. The festival’s programming is meant to "open up a different way of seeing things. Things that are challenging, exploratory, and change [our] way of doing things."

 

Giuli has screened hundreds of submissions and crisscrossed the globe to find contemporary art that expands the Israeli artistic landscape and our exposure to international art. "I try to find things that have a distinctive artistic point of view and a coherent language," Giuli explains. "Things that are different from other materials that you’d see on a daily basis in Israel." This impetus to seek the unseen is what’s keeping the festival fresh and exciting year after year, even though Giuli won’t let on to how he thinks the festival’s founders would feel about the show today. 

 

The Israel Festival also marks seventy years of Israel-French relations, “an opportunity to create a more thorough and massive cultural exchange” with support from the Ministry of Culture.

 

We've secured some specific recommendations for the not-to-be-missed performances this year:

 

What do you see when you dream? This performance blends live classical music with pseudo-psychedelic visuals from Nolab to offer audiences an immersive sensory experience. By blending dynamic visuals with auditory cues, listeners are able to hear and see music in a way they have not experienced before.

 

Twelve beings – three humans and nine monkey robots – join forces in this hour-long performance that explores the central events of life: birth, ageing, and death. Are the monkey robots representing our most primal state, or the most advanced? The performance takes us backward and forward in time, provoking us to take a second look at the way we view the world.

© Yair Meyuhas

This piece explores postcolonialism, managing to discuss a tenuous topic with humor and intricacy in a collaboration between German theater and Nigerian choreographer Segun Adefila. Expect to see contemporary dance that explores past, current (but hopefully not future) issues.

With a wink and a nod to classic vaudeville theater, this performance combines folk, classical, and pop music. Giuli recommends this piece as an interesting way to combine worlds and, according to him, it is full of humor, irony, and humanity.

© Simon Hallstorm

This piece offers a glimpse into the relationship between Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach and singer Nina Simone. While their decades-long friendship is quite surprising, the performance, starring Ester Rada and Josh Young, tells the story of two different people whose love of music connected them for years and years.

June 7, 8, & 9, Beit Shmuel, Mercaz Shimshon 

© Carol Rosegg

Across a winter landscape that blurs fiction and reality, choreography Gisèle Vienne brings theater, poetry, and live music to the stage. Guili highly recommends this piece as a vehicle to explore her world.

This very special two-hour guided tour in Jerusalem takes participants to strange places in the city via a guided audio tour, all the while asking you questions and turning all of Jerusalem into a stage.

© Erich Malter