THE ISRAELI NATIONAL COMMUNITY THEATRE FESTIVAL: THE REAL AND THE IMAGINED

Community theatre in Israel is a local-specific popular theatre that aims at generating social change and empowerment within marginal communities. It emerged at the beginning of the 1970s, in Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv, in several disadvantaged neighbourhoods that were mostly inhabited by Mizrahi Jews (originating from Moslem countries), who appropriated community theatre as a symbolic weapon to counteract their low cultural and socio-political status. Today community theatre is a dynamic cultural practice of and for communities such as the Mizrahi Jews, Ethiopian Jews, Jews from the former USSR, Israeli Arabs, the disabled, prisoners and battered women. All these groups generally share a similar socio-aesthetic pattern, which characterises the Israeli version of community theatre and also differentiates it from any other form of amateur theatre. Each group consists of local non-professional performers who are first and foremost activist representatives of their own community. These performers, guided by a theatre practitioner, create original performances, based on their own life materials, and present them in front of their local community in order to stimulate self-reflexivity and raise consciousness. There are currently many community theatres operating independently in various places throughout the country, and thus the explicit intentions of the national community theatre festival are to facilitate interaction between the groups, to discuss mutual practical issues and to try to reach more institutional recognition and thus more finance for additional community projects (Alfi 2002). Having been involved in the field of community theatre for many years as a practitioner, teacher and researcher, I find the festival a special frame of eventness for exploring the political energies of community theatre. As all the community theatres exist on the geographical, social and artistic margins, I suggest here that the concept of an annual national festival that gathers together different communities in an elegant theatre building in the centre of the country is somewhat of a subversive tactic that manifests the joint move of the powerless from the margins to the centre in order to transform the invisible into the visible. This celebration implies that marginal groups, referred to in this chapter as co-communities,¹ have the ability to unite and that together they can demonstrate the substantial power necessary to engender social change.