The Room Theatre as an Other Theatre in Israel: innovative or traditional?

Abstract

The Room Theatre (Teatron Hacheder) is an alternative theatre in Israel established in 1985 in a little apartment in south Tel Aviv. It received its name because the performances took place in a small garret which held only 14 spectators. The Room Theatre has a unique perception of art, both theoretically and practically. It is independent of the establishment and has, in principle, refused to accept financial support, which is a rare phenomenon in Israeli theatre. Amir Orian is the artistic and administrative director of The Room Theatre. Through The Room Theatre's activities he has developed The Open Circle – an acting method – which he claims is his original and innovative creation. He has been teaching theatre and creating performances according to The Open Circle method for the last 26 years in The Room Theatre. This article query whether Orian's method creates a new perception of the theatre, one which differs from the Israeli mainstream and Western theatre overall. It argues that although Orian claims that The Open Circle is an original method, it implicitly corresponds tothe alternative theatre wave of the 1960s and 1970s, primarily to two ‘leaders’ of this movement: Schechner and Grotowski.

Keywords:

• The Room Theatre
• Israeli theatre
• The Open Circle
• acting method
• alternative theatre
• Amir Orian

Notes

1. Dan Urian is an Israeli theatre scholar who has researched the representations of Jewish aspects in the history of contemporary Israeli theatre.

2. Grotowski already used the term ‘laboratory’ in the 1960s for his experiments. Orian implicitly relates to him but does not note this in any of his publications.

3. The use of the term ‘method’ obviously corresponds to ‘The Method’ of the Actor Studio, which is mainly identified with Lee Strasberg.

4. This modernist assumption of the self is criticised by Philip Auslander, which I will discuss later.

5. In this article I focus mainly on the acting method and do not detail The Room Theatre repertoire.

6. In the last decade, The Room Theatre has continued produce political performances mostly against the Israeli army policy in the Occupied Territories during the Second Intifada in 2000, such as: The Car (2005) and Username: General (2008).