New Israel Festival artistic team
The dust had hardly settled on the 2021 Israel Festival when the announcement was made that Itzik Giuli would step down from his role as artistic director after a six-year tenure.
Giuli oversaw a radical shift in the event, away from grandiose productions from abroad, with the pandemic situation subsequently impacting on our collective and individual state of mind and, hence, on the way culture and the arts are perceived and presented.
The incoming successors – yes, in the plural – are Itay Mautner and Michal Vaknin. The former needs little introduction to culture consumers in these parts. His bulging bio features establishing and serving as artistic director of the Jerusalem Culture Season, which morphed into the ongoing Mekudeshet festival.
Mautner’s other notable achievements in the field to date include a bunch of envelope-pushing events, such as the Under the Mountain Festival,
which presented works of art on and in the environs of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the Babayit (At Home) Festival based on site-specific works of art exhibited in people’s homes, and the Balabasta event which turned Jerusalem’s Mahaneh Yehuda on its head and metamorphosed the market into a high-energy, multicultural, multisensory celebration of sound, color and smells. He also did his bit to spread the artistic word in the media, presenting his own TV show and the Night Birds radio show on Army Radio, as well as playing a major role in the arts biennale in Tel Aviv.
His new sparring partner at the helm of the artistic planning of the Israel Festival, Vaknin, also brings some hefty professional baggage with her into the new slot.
For some years now, Vaknin has toed the line between individual works of art and artistic direction, specializing in creating total participatory artistic experiences, such as The Opposite of Alive nocturnal offering, based at Jerusalem’s Museum of Natural History, which featured an intriguing dynamic between actors and stuffed animals.
Vaknin, too, has some “previous” with the Mekudeshet festival and has also done her bit with the Puppet Cinema project. She is also an award-winning documentary filmmaker.
Israel Festival director Eyal Sher was suitably enthused by the new artistic director team, noting the common bond of what he called “curiosity for new artistic configurations.” He also talked of “curiosity for teamwork and combining forces and minds,” which he termed “a commodity which we need so much in these times.”
Should be interesting to see which way the Israel Festival wind blows in 2022.