original idea, recorded, directed & designed by Winter Family (Rosenthal & Klaine)
with Ruth Rosenthal
sound & video Xavier Klaine
light design and technical director Julienne Rochereau
sound engineer Sébastien Tondo
additional voices Yael Karavan & Jean-Baptiste Duchenne (version française) Marilee Scott & Brian Gempp (english version)
artistic collaboration Yael Perlman
Winter Family and ESPAL du Mans
creation residency at la Ferme du Buisson, scène nationale de Noisiel and at la Fonderie au Mans
Running time 55’
National Première
Played in French with Italian subtitles
‘Jerusalem Cast Lead’ why the title ?
because the names of the military operations are cinically poetic.
The Israeli military operation in Gaza began in 2009 during Hanukkah,
‘cast lead’ is a phrase taken from a children song, sung for the jewish festivity.
Also because Jerusalem is called ‘city of gold’, when for our eyes it’s more like a city of cast lead.
A young woman from Jerusalem guides the public on a journey of sound, images and texts through the Israeli society. The pain, the memory and the courage are celebrated everywhere, the codes and symbols are stretched to exhaustion. The songs, speeches, dances and sirens are omnipresent from birth to death of individuals, who are hostage, become actors in a dazzling and macabre collective hallucination and jump into a violent and sad national whirlwind. Meanwhile Israel accelerates its desperate and futile headlong: the emotional dictatorship. Winter Family repeat and translate the specific procedures used by the Israeli regime on its own people. Finally, and beyond the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Winter Family questions the manipulation of individuals until their total blindness. During the anniversaries of both the State of Israel and the ‘reunification’ of Jerusalem, in 2008, the French-Israeli experimental music duo Winter Family recorded in Jerusalem the sound piece Jerusalem Syndrome commissioned by the national French radio ‘France Culture’ and broadcasted on May 2009. Ruth Rosenthal and Xavier Klaine (founders of the duo) then decided to develop and deepen the work by creating a documentary theatre performance.
Review by Clare Shine Financial Times
Jérusalem Plomb Durci, Festival Impatience/Le Cent Quatre, Paris
by Clare Shine Financial Times June 27, 2011
Making artistic sense of current conflicts is risky. This multimedia production boldly goes where not many have gone before, into the Middle Eastern conflict as experienced on the ground in Israel (also note US journalist Lawrence Wright’s The Human Scale, performed in Tel Aviv last month). The “cast lead” of its title – originally from H.N. Bialik’s Hanukkah poem – is a sardonic nod to Israel’s code name for its 2009 military operations in Gaza.
You might expect polemic from the subtitle – “a hallucinatory journey in an emotional dictatorship” – but the work is more nuanced. Visually and acoustically, it pits a tiny, frail individual against gigantic representations of state machinery and symbols, removing the protective filter of family or community.
Building on two landmarks – Yom Ha-Zikaron (a memorial day for fallen soldiers and victims of terrorism) and Yom Ha’atzmaut (celebration of the creation of Israel) – the production interweaves television footage, home video, speeches, sirens and martial processions with candle ceremonies and folk dance to convey national paradoxes. The outside world is portrayed via intoned voice-over of successive United Nations resolutions. The sadly familiar phrase of this geopolitical liturgy, “continue to follow the situation closely”, takes on increasing elegiac force.
(…) The shrinking space evokes the wall that boxes in the territories of the mind as well as the land.