Program

Six sixth-grade pupils of Zalman Aran Elementary School, near the School of Visual Theater, will perform a segment of their end-of-school show, a remake of "Water for King David", originally created by Israel's popular entertainer trio, Hagashash Hachiver ("The Pale Tracker").
Before their performance, a short discussion will be held on stage with their homeroom teacher, who is also the director and producer of their end-of-school ceremony, and will tell why they chose this piece.,

Daniel Yahel, performance artist and founder of the "Performance, education and development of live art" program, active since 2009 in promoting performance education in Israeli schools. In addition, he has founded a performance ensemble for children, active under the auspices of the Bat Yam Museum of Art beginning this year. At the ensemble, numbering twelve young students, performance is studied in depth and the group performs on various occasions.

Participants: Daniel Yahel and the pupils of Zalman Aran Elementary School, Jerusalem -
Osher Aga, Nitzan Nachum, Sahar Zangi, Kobi Shalit, Arad Revach. Teacher: Eti Mizrahi

perform.org.il

Can one restore a moment of innocence? When walls topple and people meet each other without fear or prejudice? The watermelon stands were put up every summer in what used to be no-man's-land, that hole gaping in the heart of the city and opened to the public after the wall fell that had separated east and west. It is a sweet moment in which watermelons and sahleb were the stage set, the excuse to sit and talk into the night – friends happy to meet again. Tears well up in the eyes of those who recall the nightly celebrations held until dawn.

This will be the second summer that we put up a stand, and of a second time one tends to say (and hope) that it is the beginning of a tradition. In 2012, for a week, the abandoned area below Notre Dame became the center of the world: people from east, west and all corners of the earth met for a week of watermelon and cheese, performances and joy. Eyes were teary again, but this time with optimism that perhaps in spite of it all – we shall be able to sit together.

Muslala group is an association and independent initiative of artists, residents and activists who believe in taking responsibility for public space and that art is the only international language. We create art tracks in the seam-line zone, a community garden, and operate the Muslala workshop – a creativity space open to all.

muslala.org

Photos by Hamutal Wachtel

"It is very difficult for me to close my eyes and ignore what is happening today. I'm going way back, to all generations. I think that in order to create something new - namely, innovation within me – I should relate to the old in me, the old which made me."

Dan Zakheim's conversation with Ilan Sheinfeld, TA 1986

Performance Art Platform is a center for interdisciplinary art, created by the Miklat 209 Foundation in memory of Dan Zakhem, under the artistic direction of Tamar Raban, serving as a home for performance artists in Israel and addressing unique, living, experimental art in the realm of Israeli contemporary art. Performance Art Platform offers original productions by Tamar Raban, in collaboration with artists-creators. It serves as the permanent home of the Ensemble 209 theatre group.
“Festival Zaz” is an annual international performance art festival, emphasizing immediate artistic response to various sites in Israel and in public spaces; it offers discussion encounters on performance art and its cultural contexts, as well as workshops in performance art, many of whose participants have become active performance artists. The creation of Performance Art Platform realized the vision shared by Shelter 209 artists – the late Dan Zakhem, Tamar Raban and Anat Shen, who founded the association in 1988.
Performance Art Platform, the New Central Bus Station, Tel Aviv
Performers and Creators: Tal Alperstein, Kineret Haya Max, Liat Ezra - Performance artists and members of Ensemble 209.

miklat209.org.il

The project budget for the conference is 1000 NIS.
The work proposed is a sculpture comprised of 1000 one-shekel coins. The sculpture is an artist’s fee including expenses, for exhibition and sale. The price of the sculpture is 8000 NIS (for information, please contact the School secretariat). On display, viewers can take, steal or donate coins to the installation, thus affecting the artist’s fee without impacting the cost of the work.

Background
In 1972, the Portuguese-Argentinian Joao Delgado decided to expose the support mechanisms of the fringe theater he managed in Argentina. In the first act of his first play, on stage, he signed a contract with an urban producer stipulating the conditions and budget of the production itself. In the second act he took it back, and signed with the largest fund in the city that gives the smallest grants. In the third act he built a tower out of 2500 one-peso coins, comprising the meager budget of the entire show.
In the fourth act, to everyone’s surprise, the money vanished from the stage.
Play was performed only once and was a critical response to the ruling economic and political policy in Argentina at the time, when both foreign and local foundations and organizations attempted to dictate an alien cultural agenda, by force of their wealth. In this work, called “Total Investment”, Delgado preceded his time in a brilliant critical act and continued to work independently until his disappearance during the military dictatorship in Argentina.

Sala-Manca Group [Lea Mauas and Diego Rotman] is one of the leaders of alternative art in Jerusalem in the past decade.  Sala-Manca Group is the founder and manager of​ "Maamuta" Centre for Arts and Media since 2009.

sala-manca.net

Duet for Two Dancers
Two women reconstruct – an homage to Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker.
With tight, obsessive repetitiveness they glide diligently among chosen activities, looking for the point of truth. The women act along clear-cut schemes in precise, organized rhythms. They are very together, mutually attuned and conscious, busy concealing and revealing, exposing and disguising.
The element of searching for security, communality and belonging is taken from the story of Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz as a rare tale led by a strong female protagonist. The actions, repeated with communal neuroticism are slowly unraveled down to clean, stark solitude.

Choreography: Tamar Meizlish
Creator-dancers: Moran Bash and Tamar Meizlish

Everyone wants braids just like Noa’s, and not just because this way it’s easier to remember the days… Sign language of a girl who wanted her brown curly hair to be straight at all costs and cooperate with colored ribbons.

Choreography and performance: Moran Bash

Work in Progress
The work is a testing tool for the concept of “performance” and wishes to unravel its components and reconstruct them, distinguishing and examining each part and its function. Loss of performance orientation raises questions about our viewing habits, and about the term “performance” in general.

Choreography and performance: Ofer Zaid

Kelim is a place for thought and practice in choreographic work. An opportunity to re-examine the form of creation called dance. Kelim offers classes, workshops and performances that focus on research and dialogue between the work, the creator of the work, the audience and the community. At the core of these activities lies a desire to create a process which crystallizes and manifests the personal and human in the work. 

kelim.org

Yair Vardi is the founder and the curator of the ‘A-Genre’ festival for contemporary interdisciplinary performance pieces at 'Tmu-na' theatre in Tel Aviv. In 2009 the festival held a special program in which established contemporary artists from different fields in Israel were invited to create a short piece about their artistic process and languages while trying to reveal to the public their way of work.          
In this piece Vardi merged his roles in the festival as both a young curator and as an artist, and created a performance that is constructed as a “semi” lecture drawn from his experience curating the festival. In it he shapes the discourse created by the combination of the pieces in the festival, and the creator-curator dialogue, into an independent artistic form. Thus he re-opens and examines the question of authorship and the boundaries between the artist and the discourse. As a curator he laid down the platform for the pieces (and their materiality) to interact, and thus created the discourse in which they are perceived. As a creator he uses this materiality to return to the original concepts behind the pieces, and reverse the role of the curator. What is constructed is a self- portrait piece for both the festival and himself, based on the inevitable confrontation between the passion of creation and its roots on the one hand, and the social and artistic structures of curation on the other.

Created and performed by Yair Vardi
Co-director: Keren Ida-Nathan

Thanks to Hila Vardi

The Tmuna Theatre is an interdisciplinary space with the aim of promoting non-establishment art and independent artists by providing a quality stage where they can share their work. The theatre also initiates each year quality projects providing artist support. 
The theatre was established in 1981by artist Nava Zuckerman. In 1999 it became the home and producer of the Tmuna Ensemble and has put on over 30 productions. The centre hosts various other productions, and has become one of the most popular and snug music performance spaces in Tel Aviv.
The theatre include 4 distinct and alternative spaces for performance of music, poetry, theatre, installations, readings and much more.  

tmu-na.org.il

Links scattered all over, heaped in a pile like parts of an abandoned puzzle map, like imaginary ground that is turned out and forms into the topography of a place.
Restoration and mapping of a space that was and changed, will change again and again.
The spread-out map will gain movement and volume. Vertical layers of information are slowly revealed, floor becomes side, façade flattens into a platform.
The wasteland that had been before we came makes itself present again on the verge of a desert, as another independent entity.          
The layered, laid-out map resurrects; pulses, presents itself and vanishes.
The ever-changing space. Viewers as passers-by, in a given time layer.

TEAM etc. was founded by six architects, graduates of the department of architecture in the Bezalel Academy for Art and Design: Hagar Shaham Solan, Nadav Bigenich, Akiel Kaye, Lital Neta Folkman, Noam Batrani, Yoav Eitan. 
TEAM etc.. is a creative group involved in projects of social activism and research of public space. The group is active, interested and thinking in Israeli urban and social space.
The group engages in discussion of locality and identity through urban performances and interventions in public space.

Unfortunately the artist has cancelled he appearance at the conference.

Unfortunately the artist has cancelled he appearance at the conference.

The talk will introduce "social choreography" as a concept on a double axis. Social choreography offers a perspective of aesthetic continuum between everyday movement and dance. And, according to Andrew Hewitt (Social Choreography: Ideology as Performance in Dance and Everyday Movement, Duke, 2005), it redefines ideology's mode of operation as "aesthetic" and "performative", shifting focus from the mechanism of hailing subjects by way of power apparatuses to self-perpetuated embodiment. Social choreography features as a prominent form of ideology today as it demonstrates how social order can no longer be regarded as reflected or mimed aesthetically by the arts, but how it is aesthetically produced and instilled choreographically. Various practices of dance, performance and everyday movement since the rise of bourgeois society have served as a blueprint for rehearsing social order aesthetically prior to its political establishment. These insights will help us pose the question: how do movement and performance shape the public sphere today? What does social choreography reveal about the public and the eclipse of its political function?

Bojana Cvejic holds a PhD in philosophy (Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, London) and masters and bachelor degrees in musicology (University of Arts, Belgrade). She lectures at Utrecht University and at contemporary dance schools (P.A.R.T.S. Brussels and others) and works as theorist and performance maker in Europe. Author, dramaturgue or performer in many works since 2000 with – among others – J. Ritsema, X Le Roy, E. Salamon, M. Ingvartsen, C. De Smedt. Apart from publishing in performance and philosophy journals, author/editor of several books (recently, A Choreographer's Score: Fase, Rosas Danst Rosas, Elena's Aria, Bartok, co-authored with A.T. De Keersmaeker, Mercatorfonds, Brussels, 2012; Public Sphere by Performance, co-authored with A. Vujanovic, Bbooks, Berlin 2012; Parallel Slalom: Lexicon of Nonaligned Performance, co-edited with G.S.Pnstas, TkH/CDU, Belgrade/Zagreb, 2013. Civejic is member of the editorial collective TkH (Walking Theory) from Belgrade.

Along with the many changes taking place in dance discourse of recent decades and the impact of performance on it, certain gaps began to form between it and physical education. Contemporary artists and teachers often find themselves pulled between the demand for technical training, going through a mechanism of memorization and duplication, and the wish to promote choreography as an expanded, reflexive practice.
What, then, is the responsibility placed on choreographers and dance teachers facing the historical accumulation of repertoire and combinations? Is it important to study a certain movement idiom or another? Memorizing physical training of the past century? Or, as researcher and choreographer Marten Spenberg proposed during his visit at the School, should one concentrate on the “super contemporary” and get on from there?
Aided by the dance prism, this panel intends to discuss the place of restoration and re-enactment in artistic training in the 21st century.

Participants: Bojana Cvejic, Iris Erez, Maya Levy, Anat Danieli, Anat Shamgar, Tami Lebovits, Ran Brown, Lior Avizoor
The discussion is open to audience participation

A music evening of new compositions, underground versions, performance and sound.
1. In Hebrew:
Whitewashing, concealment, covering
2. “Often the cover version resembles the original, but might be performed in a different musical form or style, and that is why it has been defined as cover version. In many cases artists perform a different version of their own song, and this version would then be considered a cover, although performed by the same artist. Sometimes the artists performing the cover version give the song their own personal flavor, thereby changing its meaning altogether.” (Wikipedia)
3. According to the Guinness Book of Records, the song that has been given the greatest number of cover versions is the Beatles’ Yesterday.
4. Leonard Cohen once said – I once heard the song Suzanne sung in an unfamiliar accent by cracked voices on a small wooden boat at dawn somewhere on a river in South America. Then I knew, ‘this is no longer my song’.”
Participants:  Guy Sherf and the Visual Theater School Orchestra, students.
Open bar, and for whoever so wishes – open microphone as well.

Take Cover
Shira Z. Carmel

Songs transform their identity, their language, their homeland.
​Is such a transformation possible for a song? For a person?
Is a good song universally good? What about a bad one?​
How do you strip a song naked when it is dressed in other clothes?
How do transformed songs affect the singer? What about the listener?
"Take Cover" is an experiment in changing and borrowing identities, an attempt to understand and strive to the roots of Pop culture in Israel and abroad and to examine the relationship of Israeli culture to popular music.

shiracarmel.com

The strategy of copying refuses the notion of the expression of the unique object, and embraces the relational meanings that lie between objects. Versions of objects or actions, separated in space or time, draw the attention to the tensions that exist between them, between the individual and the group, and suggest the relation between the single individuated human being and their community.
Smith will trace the presence of copying and parallelism in the work of Station House Opera as a method of focusing upon perception and the imagination in the physical world, from the first piece, based on the re-enactments of a recurring dream, through to the latest, where performers on opposite sides of the world are obliged to copy one another in order to affirm their presence.

Julian Maynard Smith has produced solo and group performance work since 1978. In 1980 he founded Station House Opera and is its artistic director. Since then the company has produced 35 productions at major venues world-wide. Commissions include marking the centenary of the Brooklyn Bridge (1983), the Bicentenary of the French Revolution (1989) and the Allied bombing of Dresden (1996). In 2004 the company began a series of telematic productions linking performance sites around the world.
Recent productions include Dominoes (2009-13), an Olympic commission linking the five boroughs of the London Games and now being produced throughout the world, and Mind Out (2009-11), on tour in Britain and Europe. The next production is Dissolve, due for production in Berlin and London in 2014.
He currently holds an AHRC Research Fellowship in the Dramaturgy of Telematic Theater at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, London.

stationhouseopera.com

Julian Maynard Smith has produced solo and group performance work since 1978. In 1980 he founded Station House Opera and is its artistic director. Since then the company has produced 35 productions at major venues world-wide. Commissions include marking the centenary of the Brooklyn Bridge (1983), the Bicentenary of the French Revolution (1989) and the Allied bombing of Dresden (1996). In 2004 the company began a series of telematic productions linking performance sites around the world.
Recent productions include Dominoes (2009-13), an Olympic commission linking the five boroughs of the London Games and now being produced throughout the world, and Mind Out (2009-11), on tour in Britain and Europe. The next production is Dissolve, due for production in Berlin and London in 2014.
He currently holds an AHRC Research Fellowship in the Dramaturgy of Telematic Theater at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, London.

stationhouseopera.com

Hundreds of years ago, among the green Galilee hills, was a village of falaheen, farmers. One day the villagers appealed to the palace-owner who lived nearby, asking him for help. But the high and mighty palace owner refused and immediately chased the farmers from his grounds. Heads hanging and heartbroken, the villagers went home and that is where the people’s culture began to take shape. What is the singing of Ya halali ya mali”? Dabke dancing? How are they associated with “Rap” or “breakdance” in the NY Bronx or perhaps the Rio Carnival in Brazil? The links of popular and street art with social change are the theme of this workshop.

Walaa Sbait, born in Haifa to a family of expelled inhabitants of Iqrit village, a social activist-artist, uses popular Palestinian and African art as a tool for expression and social therapy. He is a graduate of Brandeis University (US) in theater, sociology, conflict resolution and education for peace. At present he lives amidst the ruins of Iqrit with a group of third-generation youth, sowing life anew in their grandparents’ village.

The panel brings together artists and activists involved in acts of return and performative building, generating change. The founding of a communal settlement and creative collective in an abandoned urban space, branding and re-defining religious and community identity, the transformation of ceremonial practice that is known as religious into a civil public act, the return to a village that has been conquered and depopulated. The renewed settling is associated especially with the founding of the commune by "Empty House" group, the events of "Rebranding European Muslims" and Civil Fast by Public Movement and the return and re-settlement of a Palestinian community in the village of Iqrit.

Participants: Elad Shavit [Empty House], Saar Székely, Dana Yahalomi [Public Movement], Walaa Sbait
Host: Dr. Daphna Ben-Shaul

Photo by: Yuval Yairi

Marco Polo, itinerant merchant and explorer returned to Venice in 1295 from his winding travels along the Silk Road and an extended stay in the Mongol Empire, as guest of its ruler Kublai Khan.
His traveling companion was Princess Coackhin, Kublai Khan's daughter, on her way to the court of her Persian fiancé. On the way the two cross epochs and continents, looking for a home, for closeness, freedom, a beating heart.
Oh Marco! is an experimental pop opera offering a free interpretation of the historical narrative of Marco Polo, an eclectic array of quotations, gestures and mysterious symbols, a look at culture and the way in which it is perceived by foreign eyes.

Created by Ana Wild
Performed by Michal Dar, Kosta Kaplan and Anna Wild

Michal Dar is a poet, musician and artist, soloist with OX4; Her book Galshan (surfer) was published by Maayan in 2011.
Kosta Kaplan is a musician, soloist with the Haya Miller band; plays with creator-performers Ze'ev Tene, Ram Oryon and others.
Ana Wild is an independent stage artist, graduate of the School of Visual Theater.

Three Different Speakers is a performance work structured as a speech, composed of a score of discrimination stories. The texts are a personal collection of painful experiences in which participants were segregated on the basis of their difference. Still, we discover their racist opinions and the separations they carry out on a daily basis, directing us to acknowledge the human tendency to separate and categorize as an inseparable part of our humanity.
With quotations from Martin Luther King's familiar speech "I have a dream", we expand the range and place the issue as something moving from daily confrontations to international incidents. The speech is reminiscent of historical moments in which one man spoke to the crowd and his truth is one. Here are three speakers standing side by side and delivering their speeches simultaneously. The different tones, sounds, texts and voices are composed as a musical unit, in spite of the dissonance between content and form. The array of discrimination and segregation stories becomes a harmonious experience that contains both pain and acceptance.

Created by Ma'ayan Miriam Mozes
Creator-performers: Uri Levinson, Hader Abuseif, Yana Friedman
Music: Adaya Godlevsky
Illustration: Lia Shwartz
Thanks to Ira Avneri

The things happen to the second, the one called Saar.
A two-dimensional fighting ring between body and image, Saar Székely for, against and behind Saar from “Big Brother” (television reality program).

Participants: Saar Székely, video screen

Members of Maakaf will document the different events at the conference and confront the question how to revive them in their next issue. Maakaf is an online journal for dance, performance art and visual theatre; it aims to promote discourse of the performing arts and constitute a platform for researchers, writers, artists and intellectuals. Maakaf wishes to openly dynamically examine the representations of body and performance in contemporary culture as well as the link between cultural phenomena and artistic activity. Maakaf aspires to expose the best activity in this realm both locally and abroad, pose questions and, most importantly, stimulate discussion.

Participants: Tammuz Binshtock, Noa Mark-Ofer, Ran Brown and Lior Avizoor

maakaf.co.il