Last update - 00:00 25/05/2007
Hiroshima is (almost) here
By Zipi Shohat
Exactly a year ago, at the Jerusalem Cinematheque, director Ofira Henig saw an American action film. Nothing in it interested her much (in fact she doesn't even remember the name of the movie) except for one image that appeared on the screen: the famous mushroom cloud, symbol of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
"I was stunned by the aesthetics of the horror," says Henig now. "I couldn't fall asleep that night. By the next day I'd already started reading about Hiroshima. I came to realize that this was a conceptual area I was going to be spending a lot of time in during the coming year."
And so began the intriguing theater project entitled "Black Rain," which will premiere at this year's Israel Festival, which opened yesterday. After months of research, three artists and three cultural organizations joined forces in this production, which deals with an important subject that is not usually addressed by the theater: the nuclear threat.
Also involved in the production besides Henig - who is the former artistic director of Jerusalem's Khan Theater - the Israel Festival and Hama'abada (The Lab) Theater, are poet Shimon Buzaglo and visual artist Amit Drori. It's an encounter between visuals, poetics and drama, as Henig describes it. The Israel Festival was on board with the project from the beginning and was subsequently joined by the Haifa Theater and the Herzliya Theater Ensemble, which will mount the production after the premiere performances in Jerusalem.
"Black Rain" takes place in the 1970s, three decades after the dropping of the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and shortly before the dropping of a third bomb. The plot is nonlinear and shifts among three parallel channels. In Hiroshima, an encounter occurs between three nameless characters: an older sister (Salwa Nakara), a victim of the bomb, and her two younger sisters, who were born afterward (Ruthie Burstein and Silvia Drori). At the same time, a young and curious American student (Guy Mesika) decides to study the tragedy in Hiroshima, and en route there he meets a librarian (Yussuf Abu Warda) - a former scientist, who was involved in the development of the bomb. The third plot strand features a naive and upstanding couple (Liat Goren and Motti Katz), who are preparing for the future bomb under the guidance of a government politician (Uri Ravitz).
Quite surprisingly, neither Hiroshima nor the contemporary nuclear threat were the forces that motivated Henig with respect to this production. Although she is known as a political person and acknowledges that she is "preoccupied from morning till night with the world's horrors," she says that in this case, everything began with the form and not with any social-political content. She insists that the visual image was the basis for the play. However, while compiling the material for it, she started to ask herself questions: "Since the work raises universal moral questions about humanity killing itself, I asked myself: What can be done about it?"
No good or bad guys
And what did you conclude?
Henig: "To me, an artistic theatrical work is akin to musing aloud. I ponder something and then tell it. This pondering, unfortunately, is perceived as a type of condescension, but I don't think that it is. I do think that a work of art shouldn't provide answers, that it should remain open to interpretation. I can't stand the violence inherent in the demand - which comes from some of my colleagues, as well as from some of the audience - for absolute clarity, as if we're in a drama class."
Still, one could say that "Black Rain" has a distinct didactic aspect.
"I don't think so. This is the first time that there's political subject matter in which there are no good guys or bad guys; there is no occupier and occupied. The play deals with humanity, to which we all belong."
The politician in the play isn't a bad guy?
"He's not a bad guy. He recites the texts that were written for him, and these texts are from the American civil defense command. He doesn't shoot, he doesn't kill, he doesn't drop the bomb. He only warns the citizens about it. So the argument here is over the definition of the word 'didactic.' In the play I don't say what to do. What I say is: Come and stop together with me."
Dealing with this subject, Henig continues, "enables one to grapple with the dilemma of remembering and forgetting - a topic that relates to us, too. I discovered, for example, that the Japanese are the opposite of the Jews. They relate to Hiroshima as a natural disaster that happened; this is defined there as the psychology of forgetting. All of their observation involves erasing the past and looking forward. This interested me in relation to us. Not only do we preserve the memory: All of our political dynamics are charged with the memory of the past.
"But while at the start I focused on a comparison of how a nation copes with its tragedy, later I came to understand more and more that what really fascinated me was observing the past in order to cope with the present and the future - what we can do in the face of the major forces at work out there."
Are you troubled by the Iranian threat?
"I think that we are just as dangerous as Iran. I'm troubled by the political dynamic in the world that will eventually cause someone to push the button, and it won't necessarily be Iran."
Is there at least some hope for humanity, which is threatened with nuclear annihilation?
"I swear that I'm finishing this work without knowing. There isn't hope, but there is an option, and the option perhaps gives hope. The option is in our hands. After all, nuclear bombs are not natural disasters. Humans invented them."
Poetry and documentary
The divided stage looks as if it has been through a natural disaster. The black rain bubbles from the left, from a small bathhouse to which the American student who is learning about the catastrophe comes. The stage is raised and appears to hover over the theater's permanent stage. To the right is something that looks like either a shelter or a grave. This is where the couple hides during the bombing.
The set was designed by Amit Drori, who is one of the most interesting visual artists working in Israel. Drori, 27, completed his studies at Jerusalem's School of Visual Theater seven years ago. He won acclaim last year for his designs for the production of "Terminal," an experimental show about Stephen Hawking that was presented at Jerusalem's Hama'abada theater.
In "Black Rain," Drori had to deal with documentary-type texts, such as instructions from the American civil defense command for times of emergency, letters sent by Albert Einstein to presidents Roosevelt and Truman, and correspondence among scientists. In addition, the play includes dramatic and poetic writings from the play "The Seven Streams of the River Ota," and the screenplays of "Hiroshima Mon Amour" and "When the Wind Blows," as well as texts written by Shimon Buzaglo just for the production. The combination of the poetic and the documentary is reflected in the stage's two planes of action. "These two levels intersect and merge into one another," Drori explains, "and can exist simultaneously."
As for the third part of this encounter between drama, visuals and poetics, Shimon Buzaglo came into the picture once the research phase of the production was complete, about six months ago. A poet, translator and winner of the 2006 Prime Minister's Prize for Creativity, Buzaglo is also Henig's partner. This year, he was awarded the Israeli theater's Translator's Prize for his rendering of "Antigone" for a co-production by the Habimah and Cameri theaters.
"Ofira came to me with the idea and the passion for this thing and she found me at a good time, because writing for theater had started to interest me," he says. "Up until last year, I was deep into poetry. I'd never written for the theater. I'd only translated. But the connection with Ofira gave me the desire to write for the stage."
You went all the way back to Hiroshima in order to warn us?
Buzaglo: "The Hiroshima bomb is the background and a warning of what may come. When the librarian says that it will happen again, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. The problem with the atom bomb is mainly the technological-scientific ability that could destroy the planet. The human being himself becomes a force of nature. You feel that you could perhaps stop the person, but this feeling is phony. Ofira believes that it is possible to stop things, that protest and volunteering can bring about substantial chances, and I'm not ready to totally give up either. On the other hand, I believe that there is a dynamic that cannot be stopped from the moment a person has an atom bomb. The play says that there is a debate. It was important to us to convey this anxiety."