Letteratura scientifica selezionata sul tema "Jewish State Theatre"

This article discusses the phenomenon of openness and its nomadic nature in the activities of Jewish actors performing in Kaunas during the first Lithuanian independence. Jewish theatre between the two world wars had an active and intense life in Kaunas. Two to four independent theatres existed at one time and international stars were often touring in Lithuania. Nevertheless, Lithuanian Jewish theatre life was never regarded by Lithuanian or European theatre society as significant since Jewish theatre never had sufficient ambition and resources to become such. On the one hand, Jewish theatre organized itself in a nomadic way, that is, Jewish actors and directors were constantly on the road, touring from one country to another. On the other hand, there was a tense competition between the local Jewish theatres both for subsidies and for audiences. This competition did not allow the Jewish community to create a theatre that could represent Jewish culture convincingly. Being a theatre of an ethnic minority, Jewish theatre did not enjoy the same attention from the state that was given to the Lithuanian National Theatre. The nomadic nature of the Jewish theatre is shown through the perspective of the concept of nomadic as developed by Deleuze and Guattari.

Shimella (‘stork’ in Amharic) is an Israeli community theatre of Ethiopian Jews residing in Netanya and directed by Chen Elia. Shimella was founded in 2010, and has produced four different performances focusing on the Ethiopian Jewish community in Israel. Ethiopian Jews suffer from racism and discrimination in all areas of life, including housing, employment, education, and healthcare. These issues surfaced in Shimella’s performances, and the political aspect of Shimella’s performances therefore ranges from performing critical protest against the attitudes of the Israeli state and society toward Ethiopians, to a utopian performative moment, which emotionally and physically dramatizes the community’s desired future.

В 1920-е годы в РСФСР начинается процесс развития национального искусства, который тесно переплетался с задачами национальной политики, проводимой в стране. Российская Федерация так же, как и советская власть, предоставляет всем гражданам обширные права и свободы. Однако Советское государство давало возможность всем народам, проживающим в тот период, развивать свое национальное искусство, создавать собственные театральные коллективы; именно этот опыт, на наш взгляд, следует использовать при проведении национальной политики в ХХI веке. Именно поэтому автор статьи исследует особенности развития театрального дела в Еврейской автономной области. Автор подробно изучает процесс создания и работы театрального коллектива Еврейского театра имени Л. Кагановича на протяжении 1930-х годов, уделяя особое внимание формированию актерской труппы, ее профессиональным успехам. Статья повествует о начальном периоде становления театра, когда в условиях переселенческой политики евреев на Дальний Восток начинается его формирование как профессионального коллектива. При этом автор отмечает, что актерский состав на протяжении всех лет работы оказывал поддержку всем учреждениям культуры автономии: организовывал самодеятельные кружки, участвовал в смотрах, осуществлял шефскую работу над частями Красной армии. В период массовых репрессией члены творческого коллектива подвергались арестам, но это не сломило творческий настрой актеров, их профессионализм продолжал расти. В заключении статьи автор приходит к выводу, что профессиональная деятельность Еврейского театра Биробиджана, его жизнь в условиях формирования и развития Еврейской автономной области стала отражением национальной политики советского руководства в отношении еврейской диаспоры в 1930-е годы. In the 1920s Soviet Russia witnessed rapid development of national art which was intricately connected with the national policy promoted by the Soviet government. Soviet Russia as well as the Russian Federation granted all its citizens ample rights and freedoms. The Soviet State enabled all peoples inhabiting its territories to develop their national art, to create national theatres. The author of the article believes that this experience is worthy and should define the national policy of the 21st century. Driven by this conviction, the author of the article analyzes the peculiarities of the development of the theatre in the Jewish Autonomous Region. The author focuses her attention on the development of the National Jewish Theatre named for L. Kaganovich in the 1930s paying special attention to the theatre staff and their achievements. The article tells about the initial stage of the theatre formation when due to the resettlement policy many Jewish actors were forced to move to the Far East. The author underlines that the actors of the theatre supported all the cultural establishments of the autonomous region by helping organize amateur dramatic societies, giving patronage to the Red Army. The author concludes that the professional development of the National Jewish Theatre of Birobidzhan was a reflection of the Jewish policy of the Soviet government in the 1930s.

The paper is dedicated to Powiedz, że jestem… (“Tell me that I am…”), one of the last productions directed by Jan Dorman (The State Drama Theatre in Wałbrzych, prem. June 16, 1985). It addresses the issue of memory, linking it to the theme of hiding Jews during World War II. Both these motifs were firmly inscribed in the production, and they referred to a fresh and almost unrecognized issue on Polish stages at the time of the premiere. By addressing the issue of various media of memory and several models of its stage representation, the text attempts to reconstruct both the director’s concept and the artistic shape of the production. And by pointing out the most important departures from Dorman’s previous art practices, it sketches the evolution of Dorman’s concept of his art. Invoking subsequent realisations of the director’s staging concept and the theme of The Jewish “Renaissance” Theatre operating in Wałbrzych (unknown to artists), as contexts, expands the issue of memory in the theatre through including multilateral, performative, functioning of this particular staging.

From a contemporary Israeli perspective there is a clearly discernable connection between the concrete expressions of the national theatrical culture and some of the most comprehensive and fundamental ideological assumptions of this society. These assumptions are primarily based on its Jewish culture and religion and the national movement of Zionism as it has developed ideologically as well as practically during the last century, in particular through the establishment of the state of Israel. This article will examine the expression of some of these ideological trends and developments in the Hebrew and Israeli theatrical culture from the early 19208 until the mid-1970s.

The Arab, as presented in plays of the early days of settlement, is linked by his manual labour to the land of his birth. He might be primitive and his encounter with the chalutzim may be necessary to improve his situation and show him how the world has progressed, but he is also an example to be copied for his sheer work capability. He is seen as a powerful competitor with the Jewish work-force, due both to his ability to be content with little and to his forced acceptance of meagre wages. Towards the end of this period and for several decades afterwards, the Arab was pushed aside into the fringes of the labour market. Work that was previously thought by the Zionist pioneering ideology to be of utmost importance, was no longer considered as such. As occasionally the Arab image served as a reminder of an ideology of manual labour that no longer existed.The Israeli playwright is a representative of the beliefs and opinions of a particular group in Israeli society; mainly that of the western intelligentsia. Almost all of the playwrights mentioned in this article are from the ranks of the Labour Movement and Zionist tradition. Their attitude regarding Jewish labour and towards the Arabs who do the ‘dirty work’, derives from a yearning for standards and values that had formerly stood at the centre of education and debate for many prominent sectors of Jewish society. From the early 1950s, and particularly after the 1967 war, the ideology of Jewish labour, especially manual labour, became one of mere slogans, symbols, songs and folk dances, or as subject for study matter, but no longer an active component in the life of the Israeli Jewish citizen.From the beginning of the 1970s, but mainly towards the end of that period and continuing into the 1980s, the Israeli playwright saw the driving of the Arab work-force into despised jobs, under degrading conditions of exploitation, as a central cause for the unrest that led to the Palestinian uprising. The image of the exploited Arab was no longer an ideological, nostalgic reminder but, rather, a social time bomb that might explode at any time and fragment the Israeli social and economic structure. It is interesting to compare the reasoning given by the Jewish Israeli playwrights for the outbreak of the Intifada with an Arab-Israeli play staged in 1990 in Nazareth. In The Ninth Wave by Riad Massaraweh, although the playwright describes the labourers that line up daily in the Haifa ‘slave market’ as exploited, degraded and slave labourers, his main emphasis is on the Palestinian longing for national identity. Research too reveals that the nationalistic element and the state of the refugee camps are the most serious causes of the Intifada. Despite this, the Jewish Israeli playwright presents the economic factor as the important one. This discrepancy between the Israeli theatre and Palestinian reality, derives from the playwright's ignorance of, and lack of attempt to study the actuality of the Palestinian population in the occupied territories, as well as their ignorance of the conditions of daily life there. The playwright meets Palestinians in the local (Israeli) cafe or restaurant, on building sites and in other places where the Arabs work and where Jews are not willing to do so. He deals with the problems that bother him and with his target audience, and not necessarily with the problems that bother the Palestinians. However, the Jewish Israeli playwright nonetheless senses the indignity of their exploitation and the dangerous dependency of the Israeli economy on a hostile population, and he tries to express his reservations about this Israeli ‘work schedule’ when he takes refuge on occasion in ideals that no longer exist.

AbstractThe Jew available to be known in England in the 1590s is a Marrano - a covert figure whose identity is self-created, hard to discover, foreign, associated with novel or controversial enterprises like foreign trade or money-lending, and anxiety-producing. By and large, non-theatrical representations of Jewishness reveal less ambivalence than does Marlowe's Barabas. In the plays of Marlowe and then of Shakespeare, the Jew becomes a figure which enables the playwright to express and at the same time to condemn the impulse in both culture and theatre to treat selfhood and social role as a matter of choice. By becoming theatrical, the anxiety about identity and innovation implicit in the Marrano state gains explicitness and becomes available to the culture at large. Marlowe and Shakespeare play a central role in creating - not imitating - the frightening yet comic Jewish figure which haunts Western culture. But the immediate impact of their achievement is felt in the theatre, and is barely visible in non-theatrical discourse about Jews in the decades after their plays.

I recently translated and then served as dramaturge on the English-language world premiere of Patricia Suárez's Matchmaker (Casamentera), a contemporary Argentine play about the early twentieth-century sex trade in Jewish women imported from Eastern European villages to Buenos Aires brothels. Matchmaker was published in an anthology I edited, Spectacular Bodies, Dangerous Borders: Three New Latin American Plays, along with my translation of The Girls from the 3.5 Floppies (Las chicas del tres y media floppies) by the Mexican playwright Luis Enrique Gutiérrez Ortiz Monasterio (who goes by the acronym LEGOM) and Heather McKay's translation of Passport by the Venezuelan playwright Gustavo Ott. In February 2012, Matchmaker was staged in the Thurber Theatre at The Ohio State University. The production was directed by Lesley Ferris.

In its first season, Israeli television thriller Fauda proclaimed an utter symmetry between Israel “proper” and its Occupied Territories, by humanizing Hamas militants and treating them as equals to the Israeli characters. Throughout the story the Jewish warrior's body becomes a site for the detonation of explosives and a potential vehicle for suicide bombings, in a false but intriguing reenactment of the trauma of the second intifada, which has been repressed in Israeli consciousness. In this unwitting manifestation of Jewish martyrdom, the façade of the rule of law in the State of Israel is dismantled in what seems like a religious battle between clans. The discourse of pain in the series suggests a stream of constant retribution in a vicious circle that can never historicize the allegedly eternal conflict and work through its traumatic residues. Nonetheless, this dynamic of retribution and martyrdom also informs a multilayered structure whereby the secular, modern Jew returns to his roots by engaging with Arabness in the theatre of mistaʿaravim: in becoming Arab he also becomes, finally, a Jew.

Drama is the most neglected genre within Hebrew cultural development. In fact, until shortly before the foundation of the State of Israel, few plays in Hebrew had been staged. Although a large number of works in dramatic form had been written, particularly in the nineteenth century, few of them were viable theatrical dramas. They fell into the categories of rhetoric and allegory, devoid of believable dramatis personae. There were some milestones along the way, such as Somi's Zahut Bedihuta de-Kiddushin (An Eloquent Marriage Farce, c. 1600), Luzzatto's Leyesharim tehilla (Praise for the Righteous, 1743), and some modern plays, but these were not sufficiently feasible for the establishment of a dramatic tradition. An important factor qualifying the late development of Hebrew drama was the language, for within the communities' diglossia throughout the ages, Hebrew was reserved for more elevated discourse than playacting. Moreover, Hebrew, the language of the sacred texts, was inadequate for the expression of everyday life. Nowhere in the diaspora was there a Hebrew-speaking audience; there was no folk life in Hebrew as there was in Yiddish. Also, the potential playwrights were faced with the problem of the divine imperative in Jewish history, which precludes anything like the theodicy that gave rise to classical tragedy. Other religious restrictions against certain forms of representation, together with the small value Jewish religious authorities traditionally placed on theatre for its own sake, were also crucial factors mitigating against the drama's development.

Thesis (Ph. D.) -- University of Maryland, College Park, 2004.
Thesis research directed by: English Language and Literature. Title from t.p. of PDF. Includes bibliographical references. Published by UMI Dissertation Services, Ann Arbor, Mich. Also available in paper.

In the nineteenth century, theatre and newspapers were the dominant expressions of popular culture in the northeastern United States, and together formed a crucial discursive node in the ongoing negotiation of American national identity. Focusing on the five decades between 1820 and 1870, during which touring stars from Great Britain enjoyed their most lucrative years of popularity on United States stages, this dissertation examines three instances in which English performers entered into this nationalizing forum and became flashpoints for journalists seeking to define the nature and bounds of American citizenship and culture. In 1821, Edmund Kean’s refusal to perform in Boston caused a scandal that revealed a widespread fixation among social elites with delineating the ethnic and economic limits of citizenship in a republican nation. In 1849, an ongoing rivalry between the English tragedian William Charles Macready and his American competitor Edwin Forrest culminated in the deadly Astor Place riot. By configuring the actors as champions in a struggle between bourgeois authority and working-class populism, the New York press inserted these local events into international patterns of economic conflict and revolutionary violence. Nearly twenty years later, the arrival of the Lydia Thompson Burlesque Troupe in 1868 drew rhetoric that reflected the popular press’ growing preoccupation with gender, particularly the question of woman suffrage and the preservation of the United States’ international reputation as a powerfully masculine nation in the wake of the Civil War. Three distinct cultural currents pervade each of these case studies: the new nation’s anxieties about its former colonizer’s cultural influence, competing political and cultural ideologies within the United States, and the changing perspectives and agendas of the ascendant popular press. Exploring the points where these forces intersect, this dissertation aims to contribute to an understanding of how popular culture helped shape an emerging sense of American national identity. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that in the mid-nineteenth century northeastern United States, popular theatre, newspapers, and audiences all contributed to a single media formation in which controversial English performers became a rhetorical antipode against which “American” identity could be defined.
text

In the summer musicals take place in the tiny, insular, homogenous culture of girls’ non-Orthodox Jewish summer camps in Maine. Each of these summer camps was founded by Jewish women—all early twentieth-century progressive educators—for socioeconomically privileged Jewish girls. Since the early 1900s, girls who attend the summer camps have participated in theatre as a required activity alongside swimming, volleyball, and arts and crafts, so musical theatre shapes their experiences in profound ways. This chapter visits four of these summer camps in the same state where Stephen Sondheim spent many summers at Androscoggin, an all-boys’ Jewish summer camp. Over the course of their years at camp, most girls perform in seven musicals and see forty more. In this consciously created community, the excitement, pressure, and camaraderie of musical theatre production creates an even more intense bubble in its midst.

This chapter investigates how theatre found a place in pre-modern Jewish societies. This was nearly exclusively a result of its association with the Jewish holiday of Purim. Closely linked to the celebration of Purim in Ashkenazi communities at least as early as the mid-sixteenth century was the performance of a Purim play, or purim-shpil. The actors were yeshiva students or artisans; dressed as non-Jews and where necessary as women, the purim-shpilers marched through town, performing their play in the wealthier Jewish homes, occasionally on an improvised stage. In eastern Europe, by the nineteenth century, the purim-shpil had become the property of the lower classes; it was often staged annually by the same group of players, with parts and even costumes passed down from father to son. Some of these groups travelled and performed in neighbouring towns. The earlier purim-shpils were apparently skits parodying local events; from the mid-seventeenth century, they began to be based on biblical stories.

This chapter traces the journey of the German Theater's founder, Ludwig Ney, from Europe to Paraguay and, ultimately, Argentina. Shifting to Jewish actors, the chapter then reconstructs three Jewish thespian refugees' flights to South America and explores how their work onstage both exposed them to Nazi persecution and facilitated their escapes to an unlikely reunion in Argentina. This discussion emphasizes the interdependency between actors and audiences at theaters in times of crisis, casting dramatic performances as a laboratory for testing survival strategies amid the rise of European fascism. Another focus is the evolution of theater management during the 1930s. Bereft of state subventions, stages were compelled to upend the tradition of cultural theater, adopting instead a market-based approach to repertoire and advertising similar to popular entertainment venues, like the cinema. This controversial model became the blueprint for the Free German Stage in Buenos Aires.

This chapter examines the Polish Jewish cultural frontier as the cradle of Poland's first mass culture. It identifies Polish Jewish intellectuals and artists that was connected to the entertainment industry, such as in music, film, theatre, and cabaret. It also describes the developments in America during the main centre of popular culture and the entertainment industry, which was mostly shaped by immigrants and several Jews from eastern Europe. The chapter reviews the beginnings of the Polish record industry that dated back to the early twentieth century and mentions the Jewish entrepreneurs that saw both its potential. It discusses Syrena Record as the first record label in Poland that was founded in 1904 in Warsaw by Juliusz Feigenbaum, who drew upon his family's generation-spanning tradition in the music business.

This chapter discusses Jakub Rotbaum (1901–1994), artistic director and principal producer of the Vilna Troupe from 1929 to 1936. The Vilna Troupe was the best-known Jewish theatre company in Europe, and Rotbaum was its director and longest-lived artist. Rotbaum initiated the changes in the company's repertoire and artistic and ideological image, directed its groundbreaking performances of six plays, and won for the troupe the collaboration of the noted scenographer Andrzej Pronaszko. Critics of his own time considered Rotbaum a pioneer of social theatre and an innovator in stagecraft, as well as a transformative figure in Jewish literary theatre. The graphic quality of his stage conceptions and his use of pantomime and of rich musical accompaniments earned him public admiration and the acclaim of connoisseurs of both Polish and Jewish theatre.

Considered repositories of objects(Cuno 2009), museums have been analysed through the object-oriented policies they mainly focus on. Three main purposes are often mentioned: preservation, dissemination of knowledge and access to tradition. Beyond these informative and cultural-laden functions, museums have also been labeled as theatres of power, the emphasis lying on nation-oriented policies. According to Michael F. Brown (2009: 148), the outcome of this moral standing of the nation-state is a mobilizing public sentiment in favour of the state power. We consider that the constant flow of national and international exhibitions or events that could be hosted in museums has a twofold consequence: on the one hand, a cultural dynamics due to the permanent contact with unknown objects, and on the other hand, some visibility strategies in order to attract visitors. This latter effect actually embodies a shift within the perception of museums from entities of knowledge towards leisure environments. Within this context where the concept of edutainment(Eschach 2007) seems to prevail in the non-formal way of acquiring new knowledge, contemporary virtual museums display visual information without regard to geographic location (Dahmen, Sarraf, 2009). They play ?a central role in making culture accessible to the mass audience(Carrazzino, Bergamasco 2010) by using new technologies and novel interaction paradigms. Our study will aim at analyzing the way in which civilization was e-framed in the virtual project ?A History of the World in 100 Objects, run by BBC Radio 4 and the British Museum in 2010. The British Museum won the 2011 Art Fund Prize for this innovative platform whose main content was created by the contributors (the museums and the members of the public). The chairman of the panel of judges, Michael Portillo, noted that the judges were impressed that the project used digital media in ground-breaking and novel ways to interact with audiences. The two theoretical frameworks used in our analysis are framing theories and critical discourse analysis. ?Schemata of interpretation? (Goffman 1974), frames are used by individuals to make sense of information or an occurrence, providing principles for the organization of social reality? (Hertog & McLeod 2001). Considered cultural structures with central ideas and more peripheral concepts and a set of relations that vary in strength and kind among them? (Hertog, McLeod 2001, p.141), frames rely on the selection of some aspects of a perceived reality which are made more salient in a communicating text or e-text. We will interpret this virtual museum as a hypertext which ?makes possible the assembly, retrieval, display and manipulation? (Kok 2004) of objects belonging to different cultures. The structural analysis of the virtual museum as a hypertext will focus on three orders of abstraction (Kok 2004): item, lexia, and cluster. Dividing civilization into 20 periods of time, from making us human (2,000,000 - 9000 BC) up to the world of our making (1914 - 2010 AD), the creators of the digital museum used 100 objects to make sense of the cultural realities which dominated our civilization. The History of the World in 100 Objects used images of these objects which can be considered ?as ideological and as power-laden as word (Jewitt 2008). Closely related to identities, ideologies embed those elements which provide a group legitimation, identification and cohesion. In our analysis of the 100 virtual objects framing e-civilization we will use the six categories which supply the structure of ideologies in the critical discourse analysis framework (van Dijk 2000: 69): membership, activities, goals, values/norms, position (group-relations), resources. The research questions will focus on the content of this digital museum: (1) the types of objects belonging to the 20 periods of e-civilization; (2) the salience of countries of origin for the 100 objects; (3) the salience of social practices framed in the non-formal teaching of e-civilization/culture; and on the visitors? response: (1) the types of attitudes expressed in the forum comments; (2) the types of messages visitors decoded from the analysis of the objects; (3) the (creative) value of such e-resources. References Brown, M.F. (2009). Exhibiting indigenous heritage in the age of cultural property. J.Cuno (Ed.). Whose culture? The promise of museums and the debate over antiquities (pp. 145-164), Princeton, Oxford: Princeton University Press. Carrazzino, M., Bergamasco, M. (2010). Beyond virtual museums: Experiencing immersive virtual reality in real museums. Journal of Cultural Heritage, 11, 452-458. Cuno, J. (2009) (Ed.). Whose culture? The promise of museums and the debate over antiquities (pp. 145-164), Princeton, Oxford: Princeton University Press. Dahmen, N. S., & Sarraf, S. (2009, May 22). Edward Hopper goes to the net: Media aesthetics and visitor analytics of an online art museum exhibition. Visual Communication Studies, Annual Conference of the International Communication Association, Chicago, IL. Eshach, H. (2007). Bridging in-school and out-of-school learning: formal, non-formal, and informal education . Journal of Science Education and Technology, 16 (2), 171-190. Goffman, E. (1974). Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hertog, J.K., & McLeod, D. M. (2001). A multiperspectival approach to framing analysis: A field guide. In S.D. Reese, O.H. Gandy, & A.E. Grant (Eds.), Framing public life: Perspective on media and our understanding of the social world (pp. 139-162). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Jewitt, C. (2008). Multimodality and literacy in school classrooms. Review of Research in Education, 32 (1), 241-267. Kok, K.C.A. (2004). Multisemiotic mediation in hypetext. In Kay L. O?Halloren (Ed.), Multimodal discourse analysis. Systemic functional perspectives (pp. 131-159), London: Continuum. van Dijk, T. A. (2000). Ideology ? a multidisciplinary approach. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage.