“Charisma that God will preserve”: Singer and musician Nono chooses Ido Katzir’s stand-up show
Spoiler: It’s funny. Ido Katzir’s show is much more than stand-up. It’s a special and invested sound-light show that combines presentations, music and jokes. When I saw him it made me laugh, think and wonder about the essence of life. Ido brings up both painful and funny topics on stage and touches on the most personal, the most Israeli and the most global of the world (at the same time). takes place there. Ido doesn’t give out sweets in his stand-up and that’s very healthy, so you can’t worry about that. Ido has charisma that God will protect and a stage presence that the devil didn’t create.
2 Viewing the gallery
The stand-up artist Ido Katzir. “A stage presence that the devil didn’t create”
(Photo: Jordan Rokh)
“A good key to healing”: The musician and singer Hebrew Leader recommends the book “Emotional Inheritance” by Dr. Galit Atlas
Galit Atlas is a psychoanalyst who lectures at New York University. I have known her for many years since she was a musician. Her book “Emotional Inheritance” (Yediot Books) became a great global bestseller. Through stories about her patients, anonymously, and through her experiences in therapy, she deals with the idea of the emotional inheritance we receive and carry with us from previous generations, things that happened to our parents and were passed down to us in an emotional and even genetic way: how traumas are passed between generations, how the traumas of previous generations are expressed in our everyday life And how the discovery and recognition of this connection is a good key to healing. Psychology books are mostly didactic, and at Atlas the stories are interesting because they are about people. She also has a fascinating way of describing the therapeutic procedures she undergoes together with the patients. And it is very interesting, certainly for those who are being treated, to suddenly discover the point of view of the therapist.
“Tame the fear”: The writer and editor Yaara Shavari recommends the play “Movat Katan” by Mittal Raz
“I would play with fear, like with a child,” Yona Wallach once wrote. And here Mittal Raz in her wonderful one-man show “Little Death” calls fear to come, domesticates it. The stage is tiny and the size of a table, and the entire theatrical event is focused on the actress and her hands. At once she is a daughter and a mother (and also a cat and a goldfish). She talks to her parents about nothing and everything, and puts her finger-sized little girl to bed. When she plays with life and death, it seems that she dances not on the edge of a knife but rather on the tines of a fork. And the fork is also the pitchfork of death that appears before us. It’s impossible not to like him. It stings, but you can live with the sting. In fact, it’s even worth it. Because out of the laughter and out of the tears a miracle happened and we saw for a moment everything that was important. When the light came up, I wanted to call my mom. My mother is gone. I called anyway.
“The monster becomes a sentient being: The actor, director and choreographer Avshalom Polak chooses the film “Letter to Pig” by Tal Kantor
An image of a giant pig in front of a girl. The image is threatening and exciting, only it alone produces a strong emotional response of horror mixed with curiosity to peek through the locked hole into the world created by Tal Cantor in the short film “Letter to a Pig”, which won the Ophir Award last week. The photographed material is sanded and sensitively processed into a painting, creating a unique identity of a world where a pig and a girl meet.
The pig, an intelligent and tragic animal with bad public relations (especially among Jews and Muslims), is seen as a rude and threatening creature, assigned out of disgust, but in Kantor’s film he is transformed from a terrible monster into a hero who protects those who run away from human monsters. And so 16 minutes of illustrated magic and emotion pass like the flutter of an eyelid and leave a feeling that confuses the senses.
“Humorous, aesthetic and erotic pleasure”: Artist Roi Rosen chooses Tama Goren’s drawings in Facebook posts
I enter Facebook like cold water, because of the tangible violence beneath the ripples of likes. But there are posts whose constant drip, to continue with watery metaphors, relieves the cold. Such are the excellent images that Tama Goren conjures up: grotesque characters torn from stories and dramas that may never have existed. These friends, among them pyromaniac straw men, Shushi the profane and Gilad the dirty, are not distant relatives of Max and Moritz and of Heinrich Hoffmann (“Wild Joshua”). The side faces of some of the smiling men are reminiscent of the brave soldier in Josef Leda’s illustrations, and some have glittering eyes and teeth and character distortions full of cruel joy. In other words, Goren’s contemporary humorous, aesthetic and erotic pleasure quite clearly echoes historical trauma and memory. Personally, I tend to be shackled by a masochistic desire for narrative continuity, for contextual rigidity, for resistance to meaning. Precisely because of this, I learned to be grateful for the moments of releasing this carefree, energetic and beautiful burden.
“Engaging writing, without keeping a distance”: The writer and screenwriter Dekla Kidar chooses the book “Aviv Mezi”
Many times good prose is one that creates a new order in reality. But it is rare that the same private and personal order results from private writing, as in the case of “Aviv Mezi” written by Hanan Aloma and Neri Aloma, from their personal world. In the first part of the book (which was published in Poalim Library), Hanan Aluma records turbulent mental episodes from his 20s. In the second and shorter part, Neri Aluma, a veteran writer and editor, writes from her point of view, as Hanan’s mother. In intense, honest and gripping writing, the narrators take the reader hand in hand into the heart of discrimination, into the maelstrom of the biggest fears there is, for me at least: the fear of going crazy, and being a mother to a child who is going crazy.
Perhaps because there is no interpretation, explanations, overt or hidden messages in the text, the reading experience is one of total presence in their world. without distance And despite the chilling, shocking, heart-breaking moments, readers are kept in a protected space. Hanan’s captivating character makes you want there to be a happy ending, for Ben and his mother, and to know very well that “the end” and “the good” are so relative.
“Sexy and exciting book”: Actress Joy Rieger chooses the book “Kasharon Divor” by Shari Shavit
“Kashron Divor” by Shari Shavit (Ahuzat Beit Publishing) is a novel between a young student in the literature department and an experienced and famous writer who goes to the desert to be alone and write a book. She offers him a ride and they drive and get closer. When Shavit called me and asked me to come record the digital version of the book, I sat down to read it, and after 24 hours I was already in the recording studio with her. It is a special, feminine, sexy and exciting book.
Saturday afternoon, I made an appointment with Naomi Levov at the cinema, I’m running late and my mind is scattered with thousands of thoughts. This is how I get into the movie “Black Notebooks”. Ronit gathers in a huge group on the screen and there is silence. Silence that this movie obliges you to. Silence of Ronit Alkabats, which is always stormy and fascinating. Then you get an opening to peek into a wound. Petah Al Ronit is tired, confused, exposed, still mesmerizing, but fighting to be present on the set of a film she is shooting with her brother Shlomi Alkabetz. Their relationship is so alive and warm, brotherly love of a kind I have never seen before. And her dealing with an illness, star records at the premiere in Paris alongside great pain while training in the apartment, physical and mental pain, fears about the future, about family. The drama queen seems to be in the biggest drama class of her life. The end is known and sad. I slide down the seat in the cinema and cry.
In the last year I had the privilege of seeing three plays directed by Yair Sherman: “The Seagull” by Chekhov and “The Bride and the Butterfly Hunter” by Nissim Aloni at the Gesher Theater, “The Death of an Agent” by Arthur Miller at the Chamber Theater. The original thought in adapting classic plays, the stage design and the ability to maximize the acting abilities of great actors (Rami Baruch, Laura Rivlin, Efrat Ben Zur, Sasha Demidov and Doron Tabori, a partial list) – make Sherman a wonderful director, but what makes him absolutely unique is the ability His to deceive in time. In the two long plays – “The Seagull” and “The Death of an Agent” – the viewer loses in a short time any dimension of time, and the illusion of real time exists only in the work itself. On the stage. This is a rare ability that puts you in an imaginary illusion that can take you even for hours of watching the work Art without feeling the passing of time. One-time directors like David Lynch and Edward Young say that theater is a medium for playwrights and cinema for directors. So they say. Yair proves that this statement is empty of content.
2 Viewing the gallery
Yair Sherman in rehearsals at “The Seagull”. “original thought”
(Photo: Amit Shael)
“A secret creation, like her life”: The singer and musician Assaf Amdorski chooses Batia Apollo’s exhibition “At the door of mothers”
Bethia Apollo was a name I heard a lot at home. My parents cherished her work and also loved her very much. I never had anything to do with her, apart from holding for long hours the covers of Dan Ben Amutz’s books, which her paintings decorated.
The sometimes long processes that creators like me experience are almost always accompanied by obsession, but this seems light compared to the way of Apollo, who would also work for six months on a painting, not one to destroy works that are not complete with them and adopt old and torturous techniques such as painting with brushes of a single hair, on a small scale and encrypted. As secret as her life. Apollo’s detailed paintings full of secrets were bought very quickly and left in the home of the buyers. This is her first solo exhibition and it consists only of private collections of those who did agree to share and take out of their homes these delicate and important treasures.