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stage and the computer, and Jews and
Arabs - is
not free of problems, and is certainly not a
whole
work, but the way in which it copes with
the matters it raises is
interesting and
perhaps even trail-blazing.
The division
between the virtual world and the
real world is actually
maintained by the
direction of the play - director Amir
Orian
advised Dibsi while Neo was responsible for the
virtual
characters.
The wrong button
The creator of
this show - the most
talked-about performance at this year's
Acco
Festival of Alternative Theater, has many
names. She was
born Neora Fox, her pen name is
Neora Shem Shaul, her Arab
acquaintances call
her Noor, in advertising material that
she
wrote she calls herself Irena Berger, and her
married name
is Neora Berger, but she prefers
to be called Neo.
"When
I began to surf the Internet about 15
years ago," she recalls, "I
toyed with
different identities and invented names for
myself.
Only someone who switches identities
like that on the Internet
understands the
feeling."
Neo traveled a long road from
working as a
programmer at the company Digital to being
a
theater artist. "Right at the beginning I felt
that the
Internet was going to change our
lives," she says. "People
thought I was a
dreamer, and I really felt ostracized. I
relate
to all the layers of technology: to aesthetics,
to the
creativity that it evokes, and to its
ideology, which in my case
is the ideology of
openness."
Ten years ago she wrote a
novel, "Digital
Romance," (in Hebrew) which was published
by
Hakibbutz Hameuhad publishers. The story
centers on the
love between an Israeli woman
and a Palestinian man who do not
know that they
are on opposite sides of the political
divide.
"That work dealt with the political side of
coping
with the virtual world," she explains.
"Since then I have managed
to work for big
American computer companies, and
become
self-employed, devoting most of my work to
building
Internet sites for institutions like
the Nahum Gutman Museum and
the Children's
Museum in Holon."
Neo says that although
the computer screen is
flat, it presents a three-dimensional
space
that exists on the Internet.
"The preoccupation
with the Internet culture,"
she says, led me to investigate two
avenues -
the connection between man and machine, and
the
connection between man and man via the machine.
Five years
ago, since not many were dealing
with this field, I was even
invited to lecture
at Tel Aviv University, and today I
teach
courses on the influence of the Internet on
cinema and
television, its influence on
language and more. All this when I
never
attended university myself."
Neo admits that she
prefers the computer to a
human environment, and spends most of
her day
at her computer. "To a great extent, the
computer
responds to me much faster than people
do," she says. "If I hit
the wrong button, I
get an error message, but with people,
there
can be a misunderstanding that be discovered
only much
later, if at all. The properties of
the computer aroused within
me a desire to use
the screen as an environment that can tell
a
story."
Saving the children
Neo relates
that when she began to work on
Medea, she treated the play like a
collective
subconscious that bears all the forms in
which
plays had been presented in the past. "I chose
to create
a confrontation between two main
layers [of presentation] via the
play -
technology opposite Greek mythology and
technology
opposite the Israeli reality."
Why did you choose
specifically the story of
Medea?
"It was clear to me that
I wanted to use the
virtual work to express the Israeli
reality.
Since I am dealing with a new language, the
theater,
I wanted to use a play from the
origins of theater. Eti Citrin,
the festival's
artistic director, introduced me to
Dr.
Hadassah Shani, an expert in Greek theater, and
she
accompanied the whole project. It took us a
while to find a
common language. We read a few
Greek plays together and I felt
that the story
of Medea had strong parallels to our
reality
here in Israel.
"When, for example, Euripides
chorus sings,
`Perhaps we could have helped the
children,
perhaps we could have saved them from murder,"
it
reminds me of what people say when they come
home tired, see the
news about some terrible
terror attack, and say that perhaps they
could
have helped, but switch to the sports
channel."
The play uses, among other things, texts from
Heiner
Muller's adaptation of the play. "That
text reminded me
immediately of Israel," says
Neo, "and suddenly I saw Medea as
a
Palestinian." That, says Neo, is how the play's
plot was
born. "Medea married an Israeli
officer, Jason, sacrificed
everything for him,
turned in her brothers, and ran away
from
Israel with him. Jason becomes a broker on the
American
stock exchange, and they have two
children.
"When they
return to Israel, Medea is exiled to
a refugee camp with her
children, while Jason,
who was close friends with Creon, a
general in
the Israeli army, is about to marry his
daughter.
The betrayed Medea is furious and
wants to take revenge on him by
murdering her
two children. But she does not murder them
with
her own two hands, like in the Greek play, but
rather
sends them to commit suicide attacks."
The
viewer-participant finds it difficult to
follow this complicated
plot.
"True. We live in a confusing era, and only
those
who are willing to accept this confusion
can feel comfortable in
it."
Two-dimensional characters
Are you
trying to arouse identification with
Medea, who murders her
children?
"The murder of children is the most
appalling
act that one can conceive, but I suddenly
understood
that Medea is not so distant from
all the mothers who send their
children to the
army. Our country is a place in which
hundreds
of children are murdered each year, with
their
mothers' consent."
Still, the play justifies the
decision by Medea
the Palestinian to murder her children.
"During the performance I ask the audience,
which is the
equivalent of the Greek chorus, if
betrayal justifies murder.
Does exile justify
murder? I reverse the events according to
the
audience's decision, and each time Medea goes
back to
commit that terrible act. In addition,
Jason is an Israeli who
claims that he took
Medea out of a country of barbarians, and
that
is how he relates to her - patronizingly
and
contemptuously. He is not only Israeli but also
an
American stock broker."
Why did you seat Medea in a
wheelchair?
"On the most concrete level, that is the
office
chair on which I sit day and night opposite
the
computer. Medea is pushed into a corner and
cannot do
anything: She is exiled from her
village, from her family, from
her country,
from her home - it is as if she functions from
a
chair for the disabled."
The virtual characters in the play
do not look
developed enough.
"The technology that I am
using is not the most
advanced. Even so, I am constantly
developing
the characters projected on the screen and
although
they will never be exactly what I
want, each day I add more
movements and forms
of expression. If someone would give me
a
proper budget I could use existing
technologies, but more
expensive ones, that
would enable me to create much more
complex
images, from a visual point of view.
"This is my
first attempt with theater, and it
is the first ever attempt to
do something like
this: to take a virtual three-dimensional
world
on the Internet, to project it around a real
audience on
a 360-degree screen, and let the
actress communicate in a live
manner with the
computerized characters, some of which
have
been preprogrammed and some of which are people
who have
entered the Internet in real time via
the Web site."
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