The Israeli National Community Theatre Festival: the Real and the Imagined

Abstract

This article focuses on the National Community Theatre in Israel in order to demonstrate what happens when co-communities (marginal communities) appropriate the concept and the rules of the game of festival to their own benefit. Community theatre in Israel is a means of self-representation within co-communities that usually exist on the geographical, social, political and artistic margins of the public sphere. The National Community Theatre Festival is thus a subversive tactic by which the powerless groups present their move from the margins to the centre and transform themselves to visible social agents. This Festival then celebrates the latent potential for social activism that these groups have when they are coming together and imagine themselves powerful, united and prestigious.