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Interviews
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Amit Lahav and The Arab and the Jew Rivka Jacobson talks to the co-director of Gecko Amit Lahav admits, with a hint of embracement, that he really cannot speak Hebrew. He was born in Israel but at the age of three his English mother and Israeli father immigrated to the UK. Amit explains that he does not feel Jewish but Israeli. His co-star Allel Nedjari was born in London but spent part of his childhood in his father's hometown of Bou-Ismail, close to Algiers. The two met seven years ago while working in South East Asia in the David Glass Ensemble Lost Child project, which has involved him working in Argentina, Brazil, Cambodia, Italy, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam. The project centres on working with disadvantaged children or children who have been abandoned by society. Their paths had to cross. Both are passionate not only about physical theatre per se but also about bringing the dynamic skills of physical theatre to a new and larger audience, in particular the younger community. Amit and Al are involved in teaching theatre through theatre. In one instance Amit directed Streetz Ahead, in which the cast involved over one hundred dancing school children from Haringey who performed at the Hackney Empire. The ambition to do something different and use their training and experience in physical theatre was the driving force behind the setting up of Gecko. "Is there a story behind the company's name?" I asked. Amit explained that they searched for a name from the animal kingdom. Gecko seemed right. Like the gecko, the two proved able to climb walls with an acrobatic ease. Gecko carries some of the Lost Child project's ethos by setting up workshops to facilitate creative performance work. Amit explains, "We are led by the students to explore processes. When you watch the creativity in the students, you realise it is not just about making a show but that we are exploring metaphors of their lives." They teach the young students the new language where body, space and emotions can articulate ideas louder than words. Gecko's approach to participatory work engages the whole of the body and the emotions. "We must be able to access these emotions quickly, deeply and truthfully and express them fully. We are athletes of the heart." This is the core of Gecko's aspiration and training programme. The critics and audience responded enthusiastically to Gecko's productions, in particular the multiple-award winning production of Taylor's Dummies (which the British Theatre Guide's reviewer Peter Wood hailed as "sexy, sweaty and unmissable" and Simon Callow the actor commented, "The best hour I've ever spent in a theatre!" to quote but a few) and to The Race. The Race This production was inspired by Amit's personal experience as a father. The birth of his first son was the trigger. The experience of fatherhood is explored in this play. It deals with the question of what a man feels like to have a child. "The challenge was to expose how a man deals with having a child. It has nothing to do with the woman or the child but the anxiety of the man, the evolution, the terror of being a different person, a complex man psychology." The Arab & the Jew (Rivka reviewed The Arab and the Jew at the Lyric, Hammersmith) I wondered how the two conceived the most obvious idea for a play, considering their seemingly polarised backgrounds. Amit explains, "Over the past few years during the development of our working relationship, it has dawned on us that our respective 'Arabness' and 'Jewishness' may indeed be essential ingredients to the way we operate. In many ways, our artistic sensibilities and our artistic communication are born out of our respective non-English backgrounds. We share a certain exuberance and otherness with which we express ourselves and communicate artistically; a direct influence from our parents, grandparents and relatives and our own experiences. "At the same time, we too have our Arab and Israeli flags buried somewhere deep inside us. And so, when the issue of Arabs and Israel is raised, as so often happens due to the barrage of images and stories we see and hear, we engage in a careful dance of reason and conciliation, our deep-rooted unconscious allegiances simmering beneath the surface. The co-existence of these differing inner loyalties and our shared artistic sensibilities were the starting point of an exploration that has become a new Gecko show, a two-hander involving the company's two artistic directors. In keeping with our style, our show is very human, an emotional, poetic journey focusing on the relationship between us and our hidden loyalties. "We wanted to concentrate our skills and use the opportunity to understand ourselves. I was born in Israel; my mother is half-Jewish. I don't feel very Jewish; I feel Israeli. I went to Israel many times and had some sort of childhood there. My father is Israeli. Inside me I am Israeli." Amit elaborated on the process of reaching the final product. "We don't make a theatre with objectives. It is a process to find our way through it. We are exploring our brotherhood. We are using our identities and a means to do that as we made the show. The issues of Israel and Palestinian are there; we have no answers but a lot of questions. It is a provocation. We were making the show for over a year but it is rather like funnel. It is like bouncing down a funnel, we start and gradually focus more on the ideas. It is a long organic process in which we find the language of the show. Sometimes it is chaos and sometime it is clear that every idea has a different journey." I questioned the meaning of the cabaret in the production. He smiles and explains that one of the comments they wanted to make is that the outside world wants in a way to perpetuate the conflict by imposing the clichéd perceptions of the Arab and the Jew. "They don't want to hear that the Arab and the Jew have a lot in common and that they can love, laugh and co-exist together." Amit and Al manage to highlight the ridiculous in the press-managed perceptions and prejudiced views of the two peoples. The idea that Arab and Jew become something different when looked at as 'performers' to the press gallery gets lots of laughs from the audience. Amit explained, "It is rather dark and ridiculous cabaret, a child-like cabaret." He picked on Spike Jones' parody of the song You Always Hurt the One You Love, which has the touch of a perfect cementing component of ideas expressed in this exhilarating parody. It's a song Amit admits to have heard many times before and felt just right here. I asked about the boxing scene. Amit was quick to point that they were really punching and boxing. The scene was introduced to highlight that the outcome of the failed dialogue. "Where there is no more dialogue, there is real violence. We wanted to explore the essence of pain on us. We are violent with each other." In the scene where each acts his search for his roots, Amit comments, "It was a long journey to find the identity. Al had the hookah, then he spoke to his father who told him about the orange trees and the orange grove in Israel. Oranges came to symbolise the wealth of the land. The voice is that of his father calling and telling him who he is. He is richly endowed with the land; he has a stake in the land." Amit identifies with Israel and its history. His theme is rich in allegories. The first image was that the Jew has a calling. The mannequin of a girl who appears represents his daughter. He is called by her. When he follows, he interacts with his family, which he cannot quite relate to. Within that there is a dark past of the Jew. I was thinking of the Holocaust. His paternal grandparents are from Yemen, which explains the dark colour arm upon which he climbed to reach the lit object, representing hope. "I was thinking of my grandmother," Amit explains. The arm embodying his paternal grandmother gives him light which Amit sees as 'hope'. "She gave me hope to grow. Taking the lit object down and burying it in the ground revealed many more lit objects buried there. Hope is already growing in the land but then it slips to the fight over the land. The end is anti-climax where we are going round and round and have no solutions." Would you consider putting up your show in Arab Countries or in Israel? Amit admits that they are negotiating with theatres in Israel. "Arab countries? Would love to have it shown there but ……." Who knows? Gecko may just manage to carry the hope to the Middle East and other countries where some answers to the questions raised in The Arab and the Jew may be found.
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