Israeli Performing Arts
Performing arts include music, song, dance, theater and pantomime, along with the instruments, costumes, masks and props they use. They are part of weddings, festivals, religious ceremonies and everyday entertainment, and some are tied to particular places, which UNESCO calls cultural spaces [1].
Many of these traditions are fragile. When cultural life becomes more uniform, local forms are often abandoned. Tourism can help revive them, but it can also turn them into shows cut off from the communities that created them. Writing traditional music down in Western notation, for recordings or teaching, can also flatten what made it distinctive [1].
Safeguarding therefore starts with transmission: teaching the techniques, playing and making instruments, and keeping the relationship between master and apprentice alive, so that the fine points of a song, a dance or a role are not lost. Research, recording and archives help document these traditions, while schools, the media and cultural institutions can bring them to new audiences [1].
In Israel, the history of Performing arts begins well before the founding of the state in 1948, in synagogues, kibbutzim, and immigrant communities as much as in concert halls. Long before there were theaters or orchestras, Jewish communities sang their prayers and liturgical poems, the piyyutim. Each community had its own melodies, shaped by the countries where it had lived, and brought them along when it moved [2]. The National Library of Israel’s Piyut and Tefillah project has gathered thousands of audio and video recordings of these traditions, with texts and commentary: prayers, Bible readings, songs for weddings and other life-cycle events, and songs in Jewish languages from Morocco to Iraq to Eastern Europe [2]. Many of them were first sung at home or in the synagogue, far from any stage.
Habima, Israel’s national theater, grew out of a Hebrew-language troupe founded in Białystok in 1912 and re-established in Moscow in 1917. Its 1922 production of The Dybbuk, directed by Yevgeny Vakhtangov, made it famous. The company settled permanently in Tel Aviv in 1931 and was named Israel’s National Theatre in 1958 [3][4].
On 26 December 1936, Arturo Toscanini conducted his orchestra in a first concert in Tel Aviv. The violinist Bronisław Huberman had founded it that year with Jewish musicians forced out of European orchestras by the Nazis. In 1948 it became the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra [5].
Folk dance grew mostly outside professional circles. At Kibbutz Dalia, five festivals held between 1944 and 1968 gathered dancers and troupes from all over the country and helped launch the Israeli folk dance movement. Letters, programs, photographs and film footage from these festivals are now kept in an archive that can be consulted online [6].
Sara Levi-Tanai took another path. In 1949 she founded the Inbal Dance Theater with young dancers from the Yemenite Jewish community. She drew on Yemenite traditions, but turned them into stage works of her own rather than reproducing folk dances [7].
Fifteen years later, in 1964, Baroness Batsheva de Rothschild founded the Batsheva Dance Company, with Martha Graham as artistic adviser. Ohad Naharin, artistic director from 1990 to 2018, made it one of the best-known contemporary dance companies in the world [8].
Theater in Arabic has its own place in this history. In Old Jaffa, the Jaffa Theatre, founded in 1998, brings together a Hebrew-language company and the Arab Al-Saraya company in a historic building by the sea [9]. Its plays often deal with current social issues; performances are followed by discussions with the audience, and the theater regularly holds festivals for children, for women, and on the cultures of the Middle East [10].
For UNESCO, safeguarding the performing arts depends above all on transmission: the bond between a master and an apprentice, a choir leader and a young singer, a parent and a child [1]. The 2003 Convention also recognizes that communities constantly recreate their intangible heritage in response to their environment and history [11]. A song that changes from one generation to the next has not been lost. It is still being sung.
Folk dance is a form of intangible cultural heritage that encompasses traditional dances performed by communities, often passed down through generations. These dances are expressions of cultural identity, social customs, and historical experiences.
Folk music heritage can appear in a wide range of situations: religious or profane, classical or popular, work-related or entertainment. In fact, music can narrate a community's history. There is an endless list of occasions when music is played: weddings, funerals, rituals and initiations, festivals and entertainment.
Traditional theater practices that communities consider part of their cultural heritage and that are being passed down from generation to generation. These can include dance-theater or music-theater, ritual theatre linked to religious or seasonal events, puppetry and shadow theatre, and classical or traditional drama with specific costumes, music, and staging.
References
[1] UNESCO. “Performing arts (such as traditional music, dance, and theatre).” Intangible Cultural Heritage.
[2] National Library of Israel. “Piyut and Tefillah.”
[3] Habima National Theatre. “About.”
[4] Encyclopædia Britannica. “Habima.”
[5] Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. “Our History.”
[6] National Library of Israel. “The Dalia Dance Festival Archive.”
[7] Jewish Women’s Archive. “Sara Levi-Tanai”; Goren-Kadman, Ayalah. “Community Dance Practices in the Yishuv and Israel: 1900–2000.”
[8] Batsheva Dance Company. “More about the Company.”
[9] Jaffa Theatre. Official website.
[10] America-Israel Cultural Foundation. “Jaffa Theatre: A Stage for Arab-Hebrew Culture.”
[11] UNESCO. “Text of the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage” (Article 2).