Authorizing Haifa – Haifa Literature Celebration, June 2022

Haifa Arts Foundation, in collaboration with the Haifa Municipality and the National Lottery Council for Culture and Art, supported Authorizing Haifa – an event of music, theater and art, produced by A Place for Poetry.

Authorizing Haifa invites the audience to celebrate the diverse literature written about the city from a literary and theatrical perspective, via theatrical, music and art performances.

Haifa is a literary laboratory of encounters; city and nature, sea and mountain, Arabs and Jews, classes, ethnic groups and languages coexist in space. For the literary world, Haifa is a platform and horizon for an abundance of gazes, insights and imaginations. Its streets and landscapes contain depths and contrasts beyond what any other Israeli city can imagine. Authorizing Haifa event—supported by the National Lottery Council for the Arts and Culture, the Haifa Municipality and the Haifa Cultural Foundation—invites the audience to dive into the city and literature at once. The event celebrates the diverse literature written about the city through a literary and theatrical perspective: literary and music events alongside theatrical and performance acts that shed a new light on Haifaite literature.

Says Rotem Attar, director of A Place for Poetry center in Haifa: "When I was exposed to the gamut of literature written about Haifa and the richness of this literature, I realized that something had to be done with it. An event that will give a platform to this wealth, a place where it will be possible to discuss the interesting question, what makes the literature written about Haifa unique? How is it different from the literature about Tel Aviv or Jerusalem? So many important authors have written about the city and dealt with it: A.B. Yehoshua, Yehudit Katzir, Amir Gutfreund, Esti G. Haim, Amos Oz and many more. Each had a different attitude towards the city as a character or as a backdrop to the occurrence in the book, but there is a broad common denominator that touches on what is unique in Haifa: the multiculturalism, the possibility of a different encounter. It is a most interesting reflection of Israeli society".

As part of the event, the following theater performances took place:

First Reading | Multilingual Performance

Cast: Noa Bar-Nir, Tasha Weinstein, Ido Ziv, Bashir Nehara, Yarden Feiglin, Efrat Karni, Sani Ruffo.

Reading from the books:

Trumpet in the Wadi / Sami Michael, Corner People / Esti G. Haim, Outbreak X / Edna Maziah, Cut at the Seam Line / Dafna Levin, Boars / Carmit Rosen,نجمة  البحر, أولاد الغيتو ٢/ الياس خوري, Про великого поэта Соломона ибн-Габриэля и фарфоровую куклу / Денис Соболев

Photo from video: Chelle Natansky

18:00 Pevzner Library Hall, free admission

 Living room. A show inspired by 'Ephraim' by Yoel Hoffman | HaYadit Theater

A European living room is set in the library plaza, an intimate cube of light in which words, music, relationships and dramatic action take place. The literary text connects and decomposes in front of an audience in an experimental-visual-poetic outdoor performance.

Video Link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_n7zDA_Vkw

Director: Shiri Giorno

Cast: Claudia Dolici, Hans Steel, Jonathan Conde, Karin Shtang

Photo: PR

20:15 Haifa Theater Plaza, free admission

Photo: PR

20:15 Haifa Theater Plaza, free admission

The full event

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