Concept, moderation and performance: Lee Meir & Roni Katz

Co-creators and performers: Einat Amir, Rasha Nahas, Maya Valentine, Idit Herman, Sahar Damoni, Rela Mazali, Dr. Yali Nativ, Lilach Livne, Laura Kirshenbaum

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2015 / Intimadance Festival / Tmuna Theatre, Tel-Aviv / Israel/Palestine

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Hexenküche (Witches Kitchen/מטבח המכשפות) was a one-time event that took place in the bar of Tmuna Theater, Tel-Aviv as part of Intimadance festival. The festival invited works dealing with art and defiance in reference to the Weimar Republic. Looking specifically at the creative and cultural prosperity that occurred in Germany during this period as a model for art that constitutes defiance, our project aimed to draw lines between the above and the situation of art and artists in Israel/Palestine today. For this project we traced the heritage of the outstanding performance artist and dancer, the German-Jewish Valeska Gert. A large part of Gert's artistic and political involvement was the establishment of bars/night clubs in which she presented her extreme and nonconventional performances and hosted other artists. Gert created a space for wallowing in radical political questions about art and its role in society. Inspired by Gert and her bars, we invited 9 Israeli and Palestinian female artists, varying in age, background, religion, artistic and theoretical fields, to create this event with us. Together we set up a temporary space that blurred the borders between the personal and the political, individualism and collectivity, performance and hang-out, in order to ask how artistic work can constitute defiance in Israel/Palestine today.

 

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“Witches Kitchen was a well made event, a kind of salad consisted of happening, performance-art and a kind of academic cabaret, in which lots of beer flowed freely on the tables, making it easier to break the barriers between the audience sitting at the tables and the various performers, who were busy with activating the audience in diverse and charming ways… the event and the format created quite a bit of stimulations… I thoroughly enjoyed”.

Ora Brafman, DanceTalk, Tel-Aviv, 31.7.15