By Noa Koren ~
Down Jerusalem’s weathered cobblestone Old City streets and down hip beachfront boulevards in Tel Aviv, Israel pulses with a cultural rhythm that can be found nowhere else on the planet. Here, hundreds of stones hundreds of centuries old that existed before the very world itself hundreds of centuries prior tell centuries-in-the-making stories—and where street art, electronic beats, modern dance, and experimental theater mix an ever-morphing modern landscape.
This is not a balancing of war, but of symphony. Today Israel is going through a cultural renaissance, balancing the vast rich cultural past and the new trends in world art, to present us with a picture as complex as stimulating.
Tel Aviv: The City That Never Sleeps with an Artistic Heart
Tel Aviv has long been renowned for flashes of genius, and lately, the spark has ignited into a wildfire. Its Florentin quarter is a city government museum of city artists, transforming collapsing walls into explosion hues and message. City urban art strolling tours—like Street Art Tel Aviv’s—guide the throngs along a stroll of murals and graffiti from the realm of politics to popular culture.
Nightfall kills the nightlifeOf clubs like Tel Aviv’s electronic dance underground. Its mainstream nightclubs like The Block provide foreign DJs with doors, alternative clubs like Teder.fm merge live events with vinyl pop-up bazaars, street food, and broadcasting equally. Lines of demarcation are erased there, experimentation lingers in the air, Time Out Tel Aviv asserts. Tel Aviv nightlife is not only robust—it’s revolutionary.
Modern dance is another arena where Israel must be at the forefront. Batsheva Dance Company, based out of the Suzanne Dellal Center, shocked the world with charged, raw performances. Under the artistic direction of Ohad Naharin, the dance company that created the movement language of Gaga, a mad, frantic movement, took over the world and has been teaching dancers all over the globe on the planet. It was pronounced “one of the most influential forces in modern dance” by The Guardian.
Alongside Jerusalem Design Week, the summer festival held at Hansen House (a restored 19th-century leprosarium reimagined as a complex of culture), artists and technologists attempt to chart where futurism intersects with tradition. With interactive screens and virtual reality, Jerusalem Design Week is the peak of Jerusalem’s increased cultural awareness. Tourist tourists from overseas in the thousands come to Jerusalem Design Week, tilting the city’s personality and cyber fantasy.
Even the Mahane Yehuda Market, a once-fruit and spice market only, is a night life district, cocktail culture, and music scene every night. There are remnants of what used to make up the old-style shuk, now with jazz nights, open mic nights, and even art performance multi-sensory, reverberating with the city’s new and bohemian renaissance.
A Countrywide Canvas
The renaissance doesn’t stop at city boundaries. In the Negev desert, there is Midburn Festival, an Israeli Burning Man-style festival which thousands of artists descend upon for a week-end celebration of radical self-expression, art, and community living. It’s where Bedouin oral weavers and Tel Aviv tech startup culture meet in harmony through shared vision of Israeli creative freedom.
In the north, nevertheless, Safed (Tzfat) retains a musical and mystical center. The old Kabbalistic city attracts an annual Klezmer Festival celebrating Jewish people’s music, with musicians from all over the world. Israel’s Ministry of Culture and Sport encourages such festivals as being among those that can unite and consolidate identity.
And in between, artists are taking over derelict buildings, closed-down military bases, and abandoned public space to show everything from video shows to performance poetry.
A Living Tapestry
We are a museum in the fresh air without walls, says Haifa curator Liat Erez. “Our art is in the streets, in music, in the way we speak and argue and dream.”
This multicolored brocade of life is constantly being woven together by Israel. Resounding through its citizens by more than 80 nations and states, the country’s art intertwines Ethiopian rhythms, Russian drama, Mizrahi tales, and European ideas of form into something obstinately new.
And yet, beneath it, is respect for what came before. For each electronic heartbeat of the streets of Tel Aviv, there is music ringing out of a synagogue. For each mural on the side of a street, there is history going back as far as an ancient manuscript.
It is on soil of contradictions that time gets woven with art.
