A-Genre Festival 2018 Comes to the Back Yard at Tmuna Theatre

What does the back yard mean in the social-political arena in Israel and the world? The back yard of the social network, the back yard of family history, the back yard of morals and social norms, the back yard of the national anthem, the back yard of childhood.

April 25th to April 28th
A-Genre Festival takes a look at what is found behind the front of the house - "the back yard." Artists participating in the festival were asked to respond to the back yard as a concept and an idea: a place where things are discarded when they're not worthy of the front of the house or the inside - things we have no room for any more, things we're ashamed of.

From the moment this idea came up, reality went by in staggering speed and flooded us with questions: what does "the back yard" mean in the social and political arenas in Israel and the world today? Is what was once the back yard now redefined as "front of the house?" Is there still a need for the concept of "back yard," when shame no longer exists, at a time when concealment has been exchanged for revealing everything? Are we living at a time when the world is redefining its language and the relationship between the back yard and the front of the house?

This year in A-Genre Festival the artists invite the audience to do an introspection both personally and politically - an experience where they might redefine their concepts and the boundaries between them. 13 performance pieces examine the unspoken, the back yard context - and attempt to rephrase language and recreate social codes.

This year the festival hosts a special performance piece on its opening day, a collaboration between Tmuna Theatre and the Polish Institute. This collaboration is the result of a long and growing relationship between Tmuna Theatre and the Polish theatre and performance art scene. henryk czesnik - a world renowned painter is accompanied by a Polish musician and a Polish poet encounter Adi Keisar - one of the most prominent contemporary Israeli poets - on stage, and create a piece which incorporates painting, music and singing.

Show A

Asmarov Negosha - What Do You Think of Me?
Street performance - racism as a back yard
Asmarov Negosha - a 21 year old asylum seeker - arrived in Israel from Erythrea 6 years ago. He feels like he belongs here by now, but the state won't allow him to stay and plans to deport him. Several months ago he stood in the street wearing a white shirt and a blindfold, handed the passers by black markers and asked them to write what they think about him on his shirt. Now he's coming to A-Genre Festival and asking the audience to write their thoughts on him.

Radio Tmuna - Back Yard Conversations
Radio Tmuna returns to A-Genre Festival as a backyard radio. Broadcasters will conduct interviews with people we consider to be backyard people. The tmuna Theatre bar will be transformed into a radio station, greeting the people who enter the gates. During the evening it will become a performance piece that will broadcast podcasts from back yards in Israel and the world, on subjects such as: conspiracies, sex, UFOs etc.
Curator: Mor Lidor

Lior Zalmanson and Maya Magnat - I Don't Want to See This
Lecture performance - the back yard of the social network.
A contemporary interactive piece about the back yard of the social network and new moral boundaries.

When we run into disturbing content on the internet, we click on the "report" button. But happens to this content afterwards, and who decides what happens? You're invited to a lecture performance based on the official Facebook training presentations which were leaked to The Guardian. The performance exposes the backstage of the largest social network in the world, enabling the audience to participate and make moral choices based on the the spirit of society and as employees of the company.

Maayan Tzdaka - On The Spot
Sound performance, collaboration with Lewinsky Library - The back yard of Tel Aviv under the deportation shadow
The piece is a sound performance which uses field recordings from the back yard of Tel Aviv - Neve Sha'anan, Central Statio and Lewinsky Garden. In the center of the sound circle is a report depicting the lives of asylum seekers' children in the south of Tel Aviv. The recordings are made by volunteers. The piece invites the audience to read the report and actively participate in raising awareness of the state of the neighborhood's children. The report was composed by the Library staff: Yoav Shfrank, Chen Rave and Dafna Lichtman, and includes interviews with the children who are a part of the library.

Hagar Mitelpunkt - Background Noises
The backyard of society - rejects living in an abandoned building
A normal woman from a normal place feels like a stranger who doesn't belong in her place.
Drowning in the swamp of us and choking in a great desert of buildings.
She is looking for a way out through a continuous artistic activity she performs in an abandoned building. She meets another character who sharpens her questions but also floods a couple of answers. They create a story together.
Hagar Mitelpunkt found an abandoned building near her home. She went in and found people living there - illegal residents, Palestinians, etc. She creates a home for the people living in this building. She brings this home with her to festival and invites the audience to come in and feel the place.

Moran Aviv and Pandora Collective - Traces
A backyard for culture, reality and language barriers
Action around a sand table. I re-traced my steps, 15 years into the past, to a tribe that lives in the desert between Be'er Sheva and Arad. I visited my friend every day for 2 weeks. This time I came by myself. So much has changed and yet not much has moved. The days were filled with movement and emptiness. I used a small house in Arad as a home base. Can there still be such a deep and honest bond between us, beyond the barriers of language, culture and reality?I will share my findings on a table of desert sand.

Yoav Barel - No Lion Out There
A light and sound transformation performance - the backyard of childhood
What do you mean there's no lion out there? But I can see it! Maybe it isn't a lion. Maybe I'm not really seeing it. Maybe it sees me but I don't see it. Yet. There is a lion out there. There's definitely a lion out there. There has to be a lion in all this darkness, it's a statistical thing, and there definitely isn't anyone here that will promise me there is no lion out there. I sometimes see tails and hear the ends of growls. I can never go into the backyard in the dark, and turning the light on is the most dangerous thing. Not to take out the trash. Not even to see that there's no lion out there.What does the place that scared us most when we were children look like?What would happen if the memory of this place started to changed suddenly?what would happen if the memory of that place would leak from the backyard of our mind into the front of our consciousness? What of memory is not a thing that lies still, but a living creature that can be reborn in a new form?What if our most repressed fears suddenly start moving toward us?
Based on a childhood memory from the book "No Lion Out There" by Nurit Zarchy.

Shahar Marcus - The Orchard
Video performance - the backyard of pioneering.
In this performance the artist seeks to revitalize the historical orchard. He uses his body and breath to take the viewer back in time to the earliest settlement in Israel.
The video was shot among the fruit trees of the orchard and in a lake. Marcus is seen standing in the lake, among the oranges which fill the water, with only his head staying above water. While being sunken in the water he sings the song "Hakol Zahav" by "Hatanegolim", a song which was released in 1963, and has a charmed and optimistic view of the world. With his musical accompaniment and singing, he sets a nostalgic tone which is mixed with a contemporary cynicism.

Alex Ben Ari and Faye Shapiro - Hatikva 69
69 variations of the national anthem.
When Ben Ari - a poet - was asked to read a poem on independence day 2 years ago, he didn't know the experience would lead him to take the anthem "Hatikva" apart and put it back together again in 69 different ways.
Hatikva 69 is a collection of 69 variations of the anthem created using a mathematical procedure based on the most prominent Hebrew dictionary - Even Shushan. The authoritative text of the anthem is dragged on a journey where it is taken apart over and over, melted into the furnace of the Hebrew language and rises out of it in a different way each time.
The process reveals the fragility of the song as well as its strengths in the face of the bustling experience.
What the text does with words, Faye Shapiro - the vocal artist - does with her sound. She performs 22 of the variations simultaneously, accompanied by a historical recording of the IDF orchestra. The experience uses body and voice to expose the broken down essence of what we have come to know as a cohesive and authoritative text.

Show B - Participants
Neta Weiner, Stav Marin, Uri Turkenitch and Eran Sagi, Roni Yaniv, Lilach and Hana Livne

Neta Weiner and Stav Marin - Crack
Choir performance - the backyard of the story

This is a new piece created in collaboration with RE-SEARCH center. The piece was born out of a meeting of different dance traditions and different fighting traditions. This meeting became a base for the movement language of the piece, which is based on a struggle between stories, specifically the struggle between the story which is told at home and the stories that have been erased, repressed and exiled to backyards or even outside the fence. The piece uses a text which was written by Neta Weiner in Hebrew, Arabic, Yiddish and Russian about the dismantling and the reconstruction of textual and emotional baggage in an attempt to build a new story.

Roni Yaniv - 7 Notebooks
A historical family backyard - survival
My grandmother filled 7 notebooks with her life story.
The notebooks have not let me be for years.
I summoned the family to the table to read the notebooks.
Read them physically
as if they were matter,
as if the words were just said and they're hovering over the table.
And then I wanted to take the words
And reconnect word for word
word for word
until a story is formed
and there will a map
and the rules of the road will be written.
7 Notebooks is a family performance piece - Roni Yaniv invites her father Eli, Her brother Uri and her uncle Eli for a ceremony around her grandmother's WW2 survival journal. These are the texts that walk by their side through life, perhaps becoming a part of the DNA. Can they be free of the backyard of family history?

Uri Turkenitch and Eran Sagi - That's Not the Way it is
the backyard of impulse
2 men tell 2 stories about the 2 sides of evil - the one who causes it, or operates it, and the one who is (perhaps willingly) victim to it. The times and responsibility can get mixed up, reversed, and 2 people stand - or dance - on a lit stage in the darkness, and above them (they hope) - something opens up.
This is a collaboration between a writer and a choreographer looking for a new language of text and movement based on stories they tell each other. The stories examine the boundaries of morality, evil and shame.

Hana Livne and Lilach Livne - Naked in the Streets
The backyard of the mother-daughter relationship.
An intimate piece where mother an daughter share things they have never said.
They are searching for the naked truth. Using the darkness, words and movement to illuminate what lies in the backyard of the soul.
They try to give shape to their relationship, a writer an a choreographer who are also mother and daughter.

Special performances in the festival:

25.04 at 22:00 - "Boom! I Fell in Love!" by Yael Tal and Naama Redler
Spoken word piece about masculinity, femininity, war and love, and the war of love.

26.04 at 22:00- "The Last Arab" by Smadar Ya'aron and Dr. Natali Turjeman
With contributions by: Maria Masri, Maysara Masri.
Musical management by Ziwar Bahlul
Apocalyptic theatrical event where Israeli and Palestinian artists collaborated around the subject of separation.

The times and our natural need to separate ourselves from the Palestinian people were the main inspiration for this piece, which is created by Israeli and Palestinian artists in the aim of promoting the Utopian concept of separation.
Ticket: 65 NIS
Ticket+musical show: 100 NIS
Tickets

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