‘Theatre of the People’: Rhetoric versus an Apparatus for Subversion and Control in the Mizrahi Co-Community

Abstract

Theatre in ethnic co-communities began in Israel in the early 1970s, mainly within the Mizrahi co-culture (Jews originating from Arab/Muslim countries) and has since become known as ‘community-based theatre’. This form of theatre is generally initiated and sponsored by municipal and/or state welfare and cultural bodies as a means for interpellation. The institutional agencies assume that the participants’ self-expression through theatre will facilitate or testify to their integration into the dominant order. In contrast, from the bottom-up perspective of the theatre group, the theatre project provides an opportunity to articulate repressed and forbidden life materials that resist, challenge or negotiate in some way with the status quo. The history of Israeli community-based theatre thus illustrates the complicated interaction between the establishment and the co-community in relation to articulation and empowerment. While community-based theatre is defined formally as a theatre created within, by, and for the ‘people’, in practice it is usually controlled and policed by institutional bodies.KeywordsCreative ProcessProject RenewalTheatre ProjectLabour PartyIsraeli SocietyThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.