A time-specific work
It happened during the pandemic, when private, physical, intimate time was subjected to “state of emergency” regulations. While scrolling through my feed, reading about the severe blow to Israeli democracy, I saw an invitation from “Haifa.it” – the Haifa Municipal Theatre’s young troupe headed by director Itai Doron. Although I lacked mental space for yet another Internet artwork, I clicked. I listened. The narrator’s voice sounded familiar. Gradually, I recognized it – it belonged to Maya Omaia Keesh. I was moved. I remembered her admissions interview for the theatre program at Haifa University, to which she arrived from her native village in the Golan Heights (the Syrian Heights pre-1967). Captivated by Omaia’s storytelling, I dove into the work.

A city-specific work
“Cranes” launched Haifa.it’s “Impossible Theatre Festival,” which Doron initiated under the inspiration of Imagined Theatres. It is a site-specific performance entwined with images and stage directions performed as speech-acts, a narration that produces a kind of audio tour. Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks stress that site-specific performances “are inseparable from their sites, the only contexts within which they are intelligible.” In “Cranes,” the site-specific is subjected to two-fold mediation – through both digital format, including animation and text, and the activation of the imagination – rendering the viewers and action “dependent” upon the conditions of the city. Therefore, my reading of the work includes elaborations addressed to the reader as a tourist of Haifa.

A “wounded city”
Located in northern Israel, Haifa extends from the Mediterranean Sea to Mount Carmel. Its topography divides it into three areas of distinct character: Pisgat Ha’Carmel, or the peak of Mount Carmel and its higher slopes; Hadar Carmel, the historical center of the Hebrew city; and the Lower City, the Palestinian city at the foot of the mountain near the sea, which flourished under the British Mandate. It is one of eleven cities in Palestine-Eretz Yisrael stripped of its Palestinian character post-1948. In the words of Karen Till, it is a “wounded city,” which has suffered both the physical and symbolic destruction of its urban space. In mere days in April 1948, expulsion, intimidation, and the gunfire of Israeli armed forces diluted the number of Palestinians in the Lower City from 70,000 to 3,000. Ousted from their homes, many waited on the port for ships headed to Lebanon. Jewish immigrants and refugees eventually populated the empty houses. Since then, the destruction machine of Hebrew Haifa has worked to erase the Palestinian city. But cities are not static. Starting in the late 1990s, demographic, economic, and cultural processes, as well as Haifa’s investment in the urban renewal of the Lower City, have cultivated this urban space as an arena for Palestinians’ struggle over the “right to the city.” Their activities and cultural resistance, partly through the arts, have helped turn Haifa into Israel’s “Palestinian culture capital.”

“A place without a place”
“Cranes” depicts the Palestinian exodus from Haifa. The rubber boats, says Omaia, arrive alongside a barge carrying “Palestinian Philharmonic Orchestra players.” A surreal performance unfolds in the sea. The musicians “start playing with the Captain as their conductor, who turns out to be none other than Maestro Zubin Mehta” (a well-known Indian conductor affiliated with the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra, a stronghold of national Jewish culture). The confusion of parts – a Palestinian orchestra with an Israeli conductor – subverts the regimentation of Palestinian citizens of Israel. According to Foucault, the space of a watercraft directly exemplifies a heterotopic space: “a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea.” The heterotopic space is formed through its affinity to real (non-utopian) spaces that represent additional, possibly contradictory, real spaces. The motion of the watercrafts forms a tension between utopian and dystopian space: are they moving away from the city or toward it? Is this an exile or a homecoming? Omaia’s mother tongue is Arabic, imbuing her Hebrew narration with Arabic musicality. Thus, a space of linguistic exile, the hybridity of Arabic and Hebrew, is also illustrated.

A seascape
A seascape image designed by Amir Gurfinkel shows a monochromatic frame of six cranes as delicate as children’s building blocks. Positioned horizontally, they “play the part” of undulating boats. The design employs a machine that creates motion in the sky to mark a watercraft moving in the sea. Like a watercraft, the crane is a heterotopic structure denoting a construction site. In Hebrew, the root of the word “cranes” (menofim) is “view” (nof) and therefore contains the plural word “views” (nofim). The Hebrew word for “view” or “landscape” is also the root of the word “elevating.” Thus, the title “Cranes” hints at the idea of viewing Haifa from above.

A “panorama-city”
De Certeau’s “Walking in the City” offers a dichotomy between two perspectives of a city: one from a bird’s eye view and the other through the lens of those “down below,” in the streets. The panoramic view of Haifa is a panoptic projection that purports omnipotence. It freezes the city’s mobility, transforming it into a sort of a picture. The breathtaking view of the port and bay from the west, or from the spectacular Bahai Gardens, is the asset that Haifa offers its tourists and upper class residents. From the prestigious Denia neighborhood at the top of Mt. Carmel and the adjacent Haifa University building (32 stories high), one can see skies, seas, and ships on the horizon, along with the two giant chimneys of the oil refinery, a true ecological threat, lit as colorfully as a circus at night. Since the Mandate period, this mountaintop view has been designated as a means of control and power.

The choreography of an urban apocalypse, or “lines of flight”
Like a skilled El-Hakawati (“storyteller” in Arabic), Omaia knows-yet-does-not-know where the story leads. She tells of industrial cranes rapidly reproducing against the Carmel landscape, depicting the city as a construction site. For a while, the cranes move in unified, regulated composition like rubber boats, but as the choreography unravels, these temporary structures eventually destroy the permanent city structures. Thus, the constructed image is partly apocalyptic (“the city skyscrapers collapse under the swing of the cranes”) and partly an image of “lines of flight,” movements of deterritorialization that stimulate meditations on dynamic, unstable identity and “flight” from a single, permanent meaning.

“Impossible Theatre Festival”
The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has literally brought the world to a halt. “State of emergency” regulations have had primarily spatial implications – the space is closed, stripped, supervised, and so is the movement within it. Through screens, we encounter images of urban space – cultural and routine sites – made desolate. This horrible view epitomizes the sweeping disruption of everyday life. The “Impossible Theatre Festival” by Haifa.it,” inspired by Imagined Theatres, provides a significant “line of flight” for its members and community. It is as if these interrupted times have encouraged or even forced Haifa.it to keep moving, imagining, and insisting on artmaking, despite the limitations of social distancing.