Theatre Festival in Acre

The 31st Acre Festival of Alternative Theater will take place from September 26 – 29, 2010 in and around a Crusader Fortress in the Old City of Acre (also known as Acco) in Northern Israel. A series of plays, outdoor street performances, special projects, art installations, music and dance will be featured during the 4 day festival. The organizers of the festival “seek to provide new theatrical language for familiar themes” and they also seek to address and question the extent that artistic expression can affect the reality – especially the complex reality of life in Israel and the political situation in the region.


Performers and artists from 15 different countries were selected by a committee to present “alternative” styles of performance. There are street performers from Romania, Spain, German, Slovenia and Holland, a collaboration performance between Israeli and Croatian performers, political cabaret shows, various clowns, and a bus ride combination thriller performance with an Israeli component about religiosity and faith.

Nine plays will be competing in the festival for top honors. A favorite is likely to be The Family Table, which is a three hour multi-layered work by David Ma’ayan. It is a play that takes eight groups of performers through the alleyways of Acre’s Old City and brings them together around a huge dining table. Other entries include an Austrian/Israeli collaboration of cousins Markus Kupferblum and Pablo Ariel called Response to a Letter My Father Never Wrote Me, where we see what happens when ideas and ideologies clash and another is a cheeky and political take on Israeli reality called Don’t worry, Be Happy by Roby Edelman.

There are also three Arabic language monodrama plays from the recent Masrahid festival which will be guests at the Acre festival and an installation by artist Iman Abu Hamid dedicated to her grandmother. Some of the plays and performances require advance purchase of tickets but many of the performances and the outdoor music can all be enjoyed for free.

The Jerusalem Post reporter, Helen Kaye, is a reliable source, informing the public of the many offerings at the Acre Festival and for more details and information she gives a link to the festival website http://www.accofestival.co.il/. Israel hosts many cultural, music and art festivals year round. As exemplified on the Acre Festival website, the advertisements for the events will often appear in Hebrew, English and Arabic – highlighting the multiethnic and multicultural backgrounds of participants or members of the audience. Although the reporter does not express a point of view on the Festival, the organizers of this Festival explain that they seek expressions of “alternative” theater, which is characterized by daring and original thinking about familiar themes and offers a different take on them, including political issues. Often, in a democracy that allows freedom of speech, artists and theater productions will serve as a means of self examination, raising awareness of people to overlooked issues and often can lead to criticism that leads to change.

Although I did not find articles relating to current art and theater in the Palestinian publications, possibly because they may not exist or be considered worthy of coverage, I came across an article in Ha’artz called Where would Palestinian art be without Politics? The article interviews three Palestinian artists who are members of an organization called Palestinian Peace & Youth Forum and is written by reporter Philip Kleinfeld. Of course, by interviewing Palestinian artists who are members of such a Forum, the expected views would be considerably more progressive and left of center than artists in Gaza might be. The newspaper Ha’aretz, being left of center itself, makes a point of seeking out and finding like minded Palestinians. The artists interviewed discuss Palestinian street artists who produce graffiti in the streets of the West Bank and are so influenced by the political messages of the PLO that their art consists almost solely of topics dealing with the conflict with Israel, the occupation and the Palestinian people as either victims or heroes. Being so political has been a drawback for Palestinian artists, claims Majd Abdel Hamid, 22 a graduate of the International Art Academy of Palestine and the Malmo Art Academy of Sweden. He argues that self criticism in art and in society in general will benefit the art, culture and people of Palestine. This is the same point made by the organizers of the alternative theater festival in Israel - art of any kind often serves as a people's response to their political and social realities, but in order for artists to grow, there must be a chance to self examin so that their artistic expression may even one day affect reality. Hopefully in a postive way.