Where Has the Political Theatre in Israel Gone? Rethinking the Concept of Political Theatre Today

Since the 1990s, Israeli scholars and practitioners have contended that the public theatre—once critical, politically combative, and a theatre of values—has become a theatre of high production values—more populist, escapist, devoted to the box office than before, and thus bad theatre.¹ Against a vast supply of such nonpolitical performances on the central stage, intellectuals draw attention to those few performances in the fringe theatre that still dare to challenge, resist, or subvert the sociopolitical status quo in Israel.²

Since for many years my concern as a theatre scholar and practitioner has not been the central stage but noninstitutional community-based theatre, I agreed with this contention, in that it reinforced my argument that community-based theatre in Israel should be regarded as a distinct and singular form of political theatre.³ The ideological roots of both assertions, that of the public theatre as nonpolitical and that of community-based theatre as political, are embedded in the so-called critical discourse that has been growing in Western culture in recent decades and that denounces the political potential of contemporary dominant cultural practices ruled by the market in favor of a political art of the oppressed that might be found far from the center, in geographic, cultural, economic, ethnic, and national peripheries.⁴

Recently, however, following a perplexing experience of a number of community-based performances, I realized that it has become difficult to perceive "politicalness" not only in the public theatre but also in the community-based theatre, which I had previously advocated as a clear case of political theatre. Rather than denouncing the entire theatre field as nonpolitical, however, perhaps it is time to reconsider the acknowledged concepts and assumptions with which we, theatre intellectuals in Israel and elsewhere, are used to experiencing and giving meaning to theatre and performance articulations in the established theatre venues as well as in nontraditional contexts. There may indeed be a need to look for new sources of inspiration that will stir us into thinking beyond the already acknowledged insights of what political theatre is. Thus, the intention here is to present Jacques Rancière's radical concept of the political as such a revisonary source and to demonstrate this through a discussion of several case studies taken from the Israeli theatre.

The Failure of the Tripartite Interpretative Key

One afternoon in 2012 I attended a theatre project held at the Center for the Blind in Tel Aviv. It was initiated by Peter Harris, a veteran and leading facilitator and director of community-based theatre in Israel. The idea was to provide a dramatic encounter between students from the Department of Theatre Arts at Tel Aviv University and blind and partially sighted members of the Centre for the Blind, with the intention of challenging social stereotypes of the blind. The encounter was founded on the appropriation of theatrical and performative devices to create an original script, based on the self-texts of the participants, that would then be devised into a public performance. During a nine-month period, the collaborative participants met on a weekly basis and explored together through playing and improvisations what seeing and/or non-seeing mean from the point of view of people in both groups.

The final performance, The 6:6 Inn, was a colorful collage of skits, dramatic scenes, monologues, songs, and dance routines in which it was difficult to distinguish the sighted from the blind performers. It was a high-spirited theatrical event, celebrating mostly the joy of mutual creativity and togetherness while also delivering from time to time satirical comments on the discriminatory nature of society.

As is my practice, I immediately tried to read the performance through the tripartite interpretative key, which I introduced in 2010, in my book Standing Front Stage: Resistance, Celebration and Subversion in Community-Based Theatre.⁵ This model is based on three modes of political theatre by which to explore community-based theatre projects: resistance, co-optation (celebration of the status-quo), and subversion. In my model, I argue that the height of...