Feature: She Festival at New End Theatre on February 27 and 28
Published: 24 February, 2011
by GERALD ISAAMAN
A circle of stories that celebrate women
IT’S theatre with a difference – fascinating, bewildering, experimental, a moveable feast linking two countries, two cultures, two families.
And it’s female too, which is why it is called the She Festival, which makes its breakthrough appearance at Hampstead’s New End Theatre on February 27 and 28.
The theatre will be transformed as never before in a promenade event where British and Israeli artists will attempt to merge their heritage, approaching prejudice and political unrest from a fresh angle.
The breakthrough bid is down to two women from two generations – 25-year-old Alexa Christopher-Daniels and Dorit Nitai Newman, 44, who are, respectively, the daughters of New End’s artistic director Brian Daniels and his counterpart Nico Nitai at the Karov Theatre, Tel Aviv.
The two women met last year at the Karov, where some performances take place in Tel Aviv’s New Central Bus Station, the fringe audience surrounded by African asylum-seekers and refugees. Alexa spent a six-month placement there, learning new ways of presenting theatre in the Karov socially activated style.
The She Festival takes the form of a circle of stories, mixing cabaret, performance art, dance, storytelling, puppetry and mixed media. “The audience move from room to room and see different performers inhabiting worlds and spaces where the audience are intruding,” explains Alexa.
“Then a leader takes them on. Do they want to leave or not? And within all this, the She Festival raises the question, what does it mean to be a woman, to be a person?”
The joint production, designed as a celebration of International Women’s Day – March 8 – presents seven artists from both countries, to demonstrate how two dynamic cultures merge to create individual and exciting tales in an eclectic fashion not seen here before.
“She London is far from apolitical,” adds Alexa, who started directing professionally when she was only 16, focusing on outdoor and street theatre, before reading English at King’s College, London.
“Our individual stories join together to create a wider social comment. We have Jewish, non-Jewish, British and Israeli-based male and female participants.
“It shows how a tiny, unfunded venue can have the freedom to challenge perceptions and reshape the little it has into something extraordinary.”
• She Festival is at New End Theatre, 27 New End, Hampstead, NW3, on February 27 and 28, 8pm. Tickets £10 from the Box Office 0870 033 2733