The Speech Acts Chronicler Reports

I arrive at the group’s rehearsal space. It’s huge. Scattered desks, scattered chairs. When I walk in, they’re already working – four actors moving in space. They shake their body, and their shaking engenders words. Whispering, screaming, with a quiet voice, aloud, pleasantly, angrily. Their soft knee joints are like springs which shoot them up and down, each leap differently breaking their texts. And then –

They stop and stand by the walls.

Ronen speaks first: inviting, “look at me”. Ruth approaches him. He whispers, confiding a secret: “look at me”.

Siwar – from the other side of the room – suddenly calls out: “Please shut the door”, and Ruth turns around. Immediately, Ronen warns her: “Look at me!” That is – don’t go, stay with me.

For some reason, my attention goes to Shirley at the corner of the room. I go to her. In the background, Ronen is still beseeching us to look at him. Shirley clarifies something with me, “Do you forgive me?” – and I honestly feel like she just wants to clarify something with me, deeply. But I have no answer. Something within me quivers. I don’t know what to reply.

In a different corner of the room, Adi threatens us: “Do not pick the windflower!”

“Do not pick the windflower!”

I look at her, and something about my face makes her try a different speech act – she threatened me before, now she begs me. She uses the same words, over and over again, begging me. “Don’t pick don’t pick don’t pick don’t pick – don’t pick the windflower – don’t pick don’t pick don’t pick don’t pick…” But to my left, Shirley suddenly screams: “Do you forgive me?!” Silence.

Siwar restarts the exercise. In Arabic: “Shut the door please.” And the sounds return. The words return. Siwar asks me to shut the door, and then threatens me: “Sakri el Bab”. I focus on her, but in the background, each actor operates their own speech acts – until the room eventually quiets down. Ruth makes a suggestion: to work with these moments of silence – that aren’t “frozen” – but which help us prepare for what’s coming, prepare for whatever’s next.

The actors start again. Shirley quietly implores us: “Do you forgive me?” Ronen is silent, he smiles and leans on a wall. I look around – Adi issues warnings “Don’t” “Don’t” “Don’t” “P-I-CK” “THE WIND-FLOW-ER!” The tempo becomes quicker, the volume louder, the space is inundated with noise. Shirley keeps the speedy rhythm going, and asserts: “You – Forgive – Me”. She starts off slowly, but her legato becomes wilder and wilder, eventually reaching a mad crescendo –

Which breaks, with Shirley changing up the words she uses. She looks over and says: “Tell me something”.

Suddenly, the rules of the exercise have changed. All of the actors – each of whom had had only one single sentence up until now – suddenly start working with Adi’s text: “Don’t pick the windflower”. And then they all work with a different sentence: “Tell me something”… I understand – they’re now asking others – each other – to give them phrases, with which they can work collectively.

In reply to their request, Ruth says something. “Good morning”. They start to disassemble these words. They use Arabic – “Sabach El Hir”. Then Ruth says “Mumthaz” and they work with that. Adi continues: “Tell me something” – and I say: “I’m writing I can’t…” And Ronen uses that for a while. Ruth stops the exercise. They walk around the room, walk around the space. They breathe, shake their bodies, unload the things that happened during the exercise. The first part of the rehearsal is now finished. They take a deep breath, try to think over what they did, and prepare for what’s to come.

I park my car at the Liber Tower parking lot – on Pines street and the corner of Jaffa road, where the Neve Tzedek and Florentin quarters intersect. From there, I walk along the route of the new HaMesila Park – which is parallel to Jaffa road – making my way to the Alfred Gallery. It’s my first time in this new park – which reminds me of foreign cities, even though Tel Aviv’s first bridges stand erect above it.

My destination lies in the small final part of Chelouche lane, to the west of Eliphelet street. HaMesila Park ends exactly there – at a new tire repair shop. In the entrance of the gallery, where the group is performing, on the other side of the glass door and immediately to the right – there’s a small niche. That is where I’m going. A small niche that I have to get to. A cape, to which I’m led by the actors.

Because that’s where it’s all meant to happen. A rectangular space surrounded by white walls, with a greenish blue parquet floor. In the middle of the rectangle stands a bloc of chairs – six chairs of various sizes – a family portrait of seating furniture items. In the gallery. Immediately to the right.

Suddenly, the actors enter from both sides and stand on the chairs. They look like a sort of chorus, en face, with papers in hand. In that block, an actress suddenly starts talking. She asks questions.

– Adi (standing in the first row, on smaller chairs): “Excuse me?”

– Bashir (standing behind her): “Yes?”

– Adi: “What don’t you like here? What don’t you like here?”

– Bashir: “Everything here is wonderful. Wonderful. Just wonderful. Shut the door please.”

Adi, in position, asks the other actors – one after the other – “What bothers you?” And she gets different responses (“parking”, “the street”…)

After a few moments of that, the role of the interviewer starts opening up, there’s a change in the rules of the sequence. It starts with other actors echoing Adi’s words, changing them around, repeating them. They do the same thing to the responses of the interviewees. For example, when someone says that the cars’ honks bother him, everyone suddenly starts to bray: “Beeeeeeping, Hooooonking!”

And then they start moving around, changing places. They move within the crowded structure that they’re in – on the island of chairs, uncomfortably, they climb over each other – changing positions and taking each others’ chairs.

I slowly realize that all of this is happening in Haifa. So the chorus is talking about Haifa? Or is the chorus maybe talking about talking? I ask myself if you actually can perform a study about speech with no external object, but suddenly one of the actors protests, performing a very strong speech act, and that connects me to the actors again –

“She, maybe she has something against Arabs!”

(Someone doesn’t like the fact that the mayor doesn’t invest in the Wadi, in the Arab population there. Yona Yahav, the old mayor, did invest in us – the person says.) From there, it all breaks down to a cacophony of sounds –

What what what bothers what bothers what bothers

What what what bothers what bothers what bothers

And the dissembling of the texts becomes more and more intense, suddenly some sentences aren’t even coherent, suddenly it almost turns into a song. Staccato tune – “what bothers what bothers” – and it all starts feeling like an orchestrated mess. We steer away from the Q&A structure of the beginning of the sequence.

Someone laughs.

“What bothers me? The fact that there are no jobs here, no life, that the population is old, that’s it.”

“And Arabs.”

[Beat.]

Then, a chorus of mumblers tries to overcome the discomfort – I catch the following phrases: “the downfall of Hadar quarter”, “ever since they changed all the buses, buses no longer drive past Hadarrrrrrrrrr.” – All the actors roll their r’s and that leads them into a protest-like chant, repetitively shouting: “They have parking! We don’t have parking! They have parking! We don’t have parking!”

And that is suddenly cut through with the text of a parking ticket.

It serves to back up the claim that there’s no parking in the Hadar quarter – Adi takes the lead reciting it:

“On the 24.11.2020 at 11 o’clock in…”

Interrupting her, Bashir recites a monologue by someone who was born in the Arab village Tira:

He starts talking about the current parking problem in Haifa, but slowly changes topic – and drifts to a description of what happened to him in his childhood, and how he got from Tira to Haifa – “They bombed us there, from a large city it turned into a village with 14 houses…”

Adi and Bashir overlap. Simultaneously, the text of the Tira native criss crosses with the parking ticket being read out loud. We hear of the different possibilities to appeal and the dry parking regulations. The two actors also move and change places.

-(Bashir) They bombed us and ran!

-(Adi) The small penalty incurred by the court

-(Bashir) I don’t know anyone who just left, we were all expelled

-(Adi) Unless the court in Haifa

-(Bashir) My dad, one from Daliyat al-Karmel…

-(Adi) The court is qualified to penalize you

– (Bashir) Until 52, I think, then he returned to live in Tira

These two axes become louder and louder until Adi and Bashir stand face to face, one in front of the other.

He finishes telling his story.

But Adi insists: Documentation!

Documentation!

Documentation! In the Haifa COURT HOUSE!!!!

Silence.

Then, they start to sing.

It sounds like someone composed the text of the parking ticket, or it might be the Ministry of Transport’s telephone jingle: “Save time and cut lines…” The pieces of paper start falling, flying, oozing out of the actors’ hands. And out of their song, an angry voice rises.

Ronen attacks the interviewer: “What are you trying to claim, where are you leading, with your [inciting] questions?”

Ronen is the citizen who won’t be asked, won’t have people pry in his business and awaken sleeping dogs, the citizen who wants his city to keep it all in, in the stomach of the Carmel.

And so it ends.

Just before noon, right outside the gallery, a group of children and adults sits on a bench, under a tree – waiting to hear a story. Someone says: “I came here from Kibbutz Gvat”, someone else answers – “And I drove down here from Jerusalem!”

The door opens and Ronen greets us: “Gooooooood morning everybody”. He invites us to follow him up the steep stairs. There’s a small foyer on the first floor. We all stand before the workshop door where the show will take place. Ronen turns with his back to the door and faces us, promising: “We’re about to enter the world of the ants.”

We go in, and a kid named E. catches my eye. He seems shy. Siwar – wearing shorts and knee pads, with two buns in her hair – beseeches him to “make ants”. His mother, Y., advances towards him. She caresses him and encourages him to participate. As the actors start talking about the ant queen, E. plunges in, and – with the support of his mother – starts participating in the show. They’re asked to dip their finger in an inkwell filled with brown paint, and then to imprint their fingerprints on a long piece of white paper, by pressing their colored fingertips on it.

The stage consists of four long, interconnected, narrow wooden benches, which create a lightning-like shape in the center of the space. A long piece of white paper extends along the length of the benches, representing an ant trail, and that is where we create ants using our stained fingers. We each get a round sticker, on which we’re invited to draw an ant. We also write our names on our stickers – either in Hebrew or in Arabic, whatever we prefer. Siwar and Ronen, who work together on one side of the room, switch between Hebrew and Arabic, so the instructions are sometimes in one language and sometimes in another. Siwar asks E. if he wants her to write his name down in Arabic. He says he’d love that. He’s proud to say that he knows how to count in Arabic, and Siwar praises him: “Well done, bravo!”

Then the actors start ringing small bells, to announce that we’ve finished “one preparation out of three”.

We immediately start with preparation No. 2 – “Ant Gymnastics!” Everybody looks at Ronen and Siwar, who get up and lead us in an antenna workout. They speak in both Arabic and Hebrew. At first, we work with our fingers only – which we use as antennas – but by the end of the exercise, we’re moving with our whole body.

“Foot foot hand hand hand! Come on, ants, let’s go: foot foot hand hand!”

I take special note of the children, doing their ant workout:

1. tries to follow the actors’ instructions as accurately as possible; E. is shocked and stands at a distance, looking at us. It’s as if he can not believe what the people in front of him are doing.

In both languages, during our workout, Ronen and Siwar start telling us about the different types of ants that exist. The actors then pick up a bench, which represents a bridge, and ask us to crawl under it. We crawl like babies, like ants. The audience, which has transformed into an ant colony, is now on all fours – crawling under the bench which the actors hold high up in the air.

The third preparation, which we move on to now, is called “Ant School”. Siwar and Shirley greet us – and teach us that ants run around all day. In Arabic: “Turkod”. Turkod Turkod – We play with the word, both in Arabic and in Hebrew. We say: “the ants run-run-run-rrrrun” with a loud, squeaky voice. Then staccato, then legato. We try to roll our R’s. Siwar and Shirley sit facing us, and they help us disassemble the word. We focus on the various letters which make it up. We take the letter “Tsadhi” from the Hebrew word for running. We say it – making it sound like Morse, like a faxing machine. Shirley gets stuck on this “Ts” sound, shooting it out until she runs out of air. Which leads us to the following phrase:

“The ant has got to run run run run run”

Shirley then announces that she’s found a crumb! The other actresses pass around crumbs from a cake. Then, as we’re eating, the actors open a large box and take things out of it: a timbrel, belts, things they need in order to start S. Yizhar’s story.

The main characters in Yizhar’s children’s story are a child named Zeevi and his father, who decide to go on an evening outdoor stroll, during which they meet a very special ant. We hear a bilingual version of “The Adventures of Humit,” which begins with Ronen portraying the tractor by getting on the benches, walking on the ant trail. In the middle of the road, a pile of golden wheat grains falls off the tractor. In our show, these are inflated Ziploc bags, tied on to a stick, with golden grains inside them.

Zeevi and his father look, reflect, and decide that there aren’t enough of the fallen grains to make bread – it’s an amount that might be enough for just one cookie. They continue their walk, but then a large drum is heard. The day is starting to set. “The clouds quickly turned pink,” one actress says; Ronen and Adi pick up sticks with pink and purple trash-bags attached to them. They caress the audience’s heads with their beautiful plastic “clouds”. Behind them, Siwar is playing the drum and Shirley is playing the xylophone. Together, they create a beautiful sunset in a wintry field.

But Zeevi suddenly remembers what happened, and asks his father, “What’s happened to the pile of grains?”

Then, he exclaims “Shof!” – in Arabic – the golden pile is moving all on its own, running around!

“An entire colony of ants has raided the forgotten pile.” But it’s going to rain on them! What will they do?

The crowd is split up into two groups, each “ant” taking two Ziploc bags of ‘grains’ in an attempt to save the wheat from the rain. The plan is to find the ant-bed – because when we do, we’ll know where to put the grains. So we try to look for the ant-bed. The actors make rustling noises with their grain/bag – and suddenly a voice is heard from the other side of the performance space – “To the nest!” To which Ronen replies “Yes! Yes!”

The sky becomes darker and darker, together with the field in which Zeevi and his father walk. They should really go home, but just at that moment – they meet Humit for the first time. A sound of a triangle is heard. Who is Humit? “One ant amongst many, almost identical to her peers; Zeevi’s smallest fingernail is five times her size.” E. turns around and smiles at his grandfather. How can you tell which one is Humit, if she looks just like all of the other ants? You can tell by the grain she’s holding!

Humit is trying to get to the ant-bed. In both languages, the actors describe the obstacles which stand in her way. They drop the bench on Adi, who is portraying Humit, and she has to get up and climb, to run and jump, in order to get herself home. We learn that she can carry twenty times her body weight, and see her climbing up the bench – “a climb just like the ascent of Mount Hermon.” Then, white confetti – snow – is thrown on Humit, and a melody is played on a xylophone. The room is silent, and the audience becomes more attentive. On stage, two ants stand facing each other. Are they enemies? No. It turns out that this is “An obstacle not harmful, but thoughtful.” Humit gives her grain to the second ant, portrayed by Siwar, who goes on to take it to the ant-bed.

But what now? Humit does not rest – or pause – but runs in another direction and disappears between her fellow ants. Blends into a colony of ants which look just like her. “And now, when the road home is already beseeching us to return, something unexpected happens.” What happened? I don’t know – the actors explain it in Arabic. But I feel like it was something serene, peaceful. It’s okay for me not to understand. I feel like it was the stuff of sunsets, of a country road which extends in the winter, at night. An actress asks us in Hebrew: “Who knows if there’s more to life, then what we have, right here and right now?” Another actor recites, “Let us wish that this ants’ hour will not pass as quickly as everything else.”

Small cymbals ring and the actors get up, turning their backs. Thus ends the show. Everybody in the audience starts clapping, except for E. He’s surprised. An actor gives him a tiny booklet as a souvenir, and that makes him smile. When the applause ends, no one gets up to leave. We talk to the actors, hug, thank them. An audience member asks: “How much time did you spend learning Arabic?” Ronen answers: “A lot, but it’s still just a drop in the ocean.” The spectator answers, “Well done. It’s hard work, learning a language like that.” You’ve got to be diligent. Just like an ant.

The actors lead us up the old staircase at the Alfred Gallery. The audience makes its way up, two by two. Some hold the wooden, turquoise-green handrail; some peek at the window view of the trees; a woman caresses the unique sketches on the wall.

The gallery’s staircase used to be white but is now dilapidated by use. The actors, who lead us upwards, repeatedly ask each other the same question: “Excuse me, how do I get to Zionism?” At first, their question sounds like a logical contradiction, like a mistake.

But answers to the Zionism question echo up and down the stairs. The actors, some above and some below me, respond to their peers’ bizarre enquiry. They send their voice from the top floor to the bottom, from bottom to top. For example:

Shirley teases: “Ah! Zionism! Depends which!”

Another actor specifies: “You’ve got 115, 37a…”

A third rushes us: “Up up up the stairs and you’ll get there. Up up up the stairs.”

And just like that, having been rushed, pushed and urged with instructions – we all arrive at the roof of the building. The audience sits on wooden benches, and everyone takes off their face masks.

It’s hard to believe how beautiful it is, the roof. I look around. To the west, the landscape is almost cliché – the sea spread out, erect breakwaters galore. Early evening fog slightly blurs the horizon, the blackness of the sea intertwined with the dark sky, but Jaffa remains visible with its Clock Tower, along with a handful of boats sailing away. Hanukka music emerges from HATACHNA – The nearby shopping complex: “Oh the wonders and miracles done by the Maccabees…” To the East, or maybe to the South, skyscrapers block whatever view lies behind them.

In front of the wooden benches, on which the audience sits, four actors stand on an elevated, large grey block. Two stand in front, two stand behind them. The sequence begins when Adi – in the front row – wails like a siren. Someone declares: “Next stop, Hadar Ha’Carmel!” And then a second actress asks, “Excuse me excuse me – how do I get to Zionism?”

This question, which the actors used to bring us up to this roof, now receives various answers. The responding actors now say something about the Zionism’s beginning, or end, and I automatically think of names like Herzel or Lillienblum – who have streets named after them right around here, streets that I can see from this roof where we stand – names that might be considered the beginning of Zionism…

But then the penny finally drops. They’re talking about a boulevard. The sequence revolves around asking for directions, someone asking someone how to get to the Zionism boulevard in Haifa. The ensemble of actors give different answers – all taken from what must be a real life, recorded conversation, that actually took place on the Carmel. They are recreating, and re-engendering a conversation which they documented. The actors, still on the grey block, still four, stand with Tel Aviv behind them – performing street sounds which took place in Haifa – maybe in the Hadar quarter, or maybe in Wadi Nisnas.

They assemble and disassemble the same short dialogue. An actor asks: “Where is Zionism?” – there’s always only one actor asking – and the three other performers respond. Crowded in their small acting space, they start changing places – so that the actor asking the question is always on the right.

And the leading question gets a different answer each time. For example, suddenly a pious choir of girls takes the stage: “Thanks thanks thanks thanks thanks” – a chorus that makes the audience laugh. Later on, the instructions: “Go right and then left” – are transformed into a military march by the choir, “Left right left right”. The audience finds this surprising and comical as well.

Slowly, it starts getting cold. The actresses’ hair scatters in the wind. Ronen is bald. I sit there, looking at Tel Aviv, listening to a group of actors working with a dialogue that took place in a bus stop in Haifa. “So, where is Zionism?” an actor asks. A second actress stops him – “I’m not from here.” He answers politely, “So where are you from?” Shirley stops to think for a second, then concludes: “Not from here.”  This dull exchange makes a few people in the audience laugh, and I smile as well; these mundane language games can be so comical, so absurd.

Four women who arrived early sit by the entrance to the gallery and talk:

Shira, the ensemble’s manager, offers the early birds a programme. It’s pleasant outside and there’s a breeze. The two speakers look like sisters. They’re very surprised to hear that the ensemble has recruited new actors.

Shira explains this evening’s plan. The audience inundates her with questions and she explains, clarifies “The Adventures are – “ so and so; or “We won’t be playing At Sea today” etc.

The sisters’ names are Yael and Hanna. Hanna purchased their tickets. “Tell me, what did you present at the museum? That was At Sea, right?” Shira gently clarifies:

Little by little, more and more people start to assemble under the LED light at the entrance to the gallery. A young audience member expresses her shock, “You’ve really turned this place into something decent!”

Suddenly, through the gallery’s glass door, I start seeing the actors – all dressed in white. They enter the room and settle in. Paul, the stage manager, invites the audience to come in – and we all start trickling indoors. The actors lean on the walls, ready to start. I enter with the rest of the audience and stand in the center of the space, surrounded by the actors who stand in the corners. From a distance, I can hear:

The audience walks around among the actors – each actor tries out his or her text with different speech acts. In response to the audience’s reactions, or because of some invisible and internal drive, each actor hops from one speech act to the other. The speech is diverse, different, dynamic. It’s a little difficult to understand what’s going on here: is this some kind of overture? Are we getting our feet wet before the show? We walk around in the center of the space with the actors around us, trying out their texts in different ways. I try to make sense of what’s happening in terms of an orchestra tuning itself before the conductor walks on. But might this be an installation already? Did the work begin, without me noticing it?

And then, I suddenly see Ebaa in the floor above: “Sunglasses on his heeeeeead heeeeeead”. “W-h-i-t-e shirt… Whiiiiiiite Shirrrrrt”. She also disassembles her words – describing what we’re wearing – but she doesn’t use speech acts. Her focus is the actual utterance, the Locutionary Act. Ebaa breaks up, confuses and reassembles utterances. Simultaneously, the sentences she recites are projected on large screens – “Sunglasses on his head”, “White shirt”. A few audience members seem to enjoy it when she describes them.

Then, Ronen invites half of the audience to follow him, while Shirley and Siwar invite the other half. They only use two words: ‘Please’ and ‘Sorry’.

We all leave and climb up the stairs. We enter a dark room – where a sound installation with five speakers is performed.

People walk around. Some listen to one speaker, some listen to another. There’s also a large group that remains static, glued to the walls. This installation, I feel, is also about the plasticity of language – and the internal subconscious links which drive our speech forward. I try to think about this mechanism, how it works – what is this Design-without-Designer which dictates what we say next? I remember a famous Wittgenstein quote which I read once, ‘In most cases, the meaning of a word is its use’… But suddenly a loud voice is heard, and my focus shifts back to the sound installation: “I know you… I’m not sure… From some Kibbutz…”

Verbal Plasticine:

“Near Atlit”

Shocking – funny!

Wear something normal                                     Reuven’s Ashkenazi too

Bar Mitzvah                                                      They told you Turkish people can’t have broad beans

No bread? Let them eat their heart out!

The installation ends. I can still hear the faint sound of one voice, but we’re invited to come up to the roof. The actors encourage us to hold conversations with each other, on metallic chairs that were made especially for tonight. Each chair offers a different composition, a different conversational mise-en-scène. One set up has the speakers sitting back to back, another has one sitting much higher than the other, and so on. I decided to spy on the different conversations unfolding on the roof.

Daniel approaches people, with slips of paper. He gives these to audience members to read. He takes three audience members back downstairs. The other actors follow his lead, and finally we’re all downstairs again. One at a time, we enter a Lost & Found installation. People sit in pairs – and are asked to describe an item they had which they loved and had lost. The listener’s meant to draw that item – and Adi scans the drawings. These are then projected on the gallery walls, for all to see. I suddenly realize that the drawings look too good – and that those doing the drawing aren’t audience members, but professional artists. One after the other a xylophone, a teddy bear, an old vase are all projected on the wall… People inspect the different art stations, sit down when it’s their turn, and finally see their lost item projected in the gallery. The actors also walk around, still in white. Naomi and Ebaa join us too – back in their everyday clothes already – and we all smoke, talk, conclude everything that’s happened here tonight.

The young woman, whose conversation I documented on the roof, listens to her boyfriend: “I feel like this was something modern. And it’s also a whole process that you sort of go through during the performance. It changes – you sort of like open up…”

Little by little, people start leaving. The two women who spoke on the roof say their goodbyes. Quietly. So it goes. Quietly, the lights go out.

Yotam Gotal!