Local, regional, national and international theatre festivals have increased in number exponentially in recent years and many productions are now conceived specifically for festival performance. While scholarship is catching up with this burgeoning field of festival theatre studies, book-length histories of long-running festivals remain a rarity. A welcome addition, then, is Naphtaly Shem-Tov's monograph about the Acco Festival in northern Israel.
This festival was founded in 1980 by Israel's Ministry of Culture and, like many at that time and since, was intended to be a ‘tourism and economy catalyst’ (p. xiv) and an incubator for ‘young and alternative artists’ (p. ix). Shem-Tov's history addresses matters of artistic direction, repertoire, organizational structure, reception and the city–festival relationship. This is a methodologically sophisticated book, drawing on a variety of theatre and performance studies theories along with other disciplinary approaches ranging from globalization studies to event management. The reader is rewarded not only with a richly detailed account of the Acco Festival, but also with provocative and important questions that might be brought to bear on festivals elsewhere.
Chapter 1 tackles the challenges built into the festival's structure. Shem-Tov examines selection criteria behind its mandate for ‘other theatre’, a category that encompasses both style and subject but which is always marked by difference to the mainstream productions on Tel-Aviv's best-regarded stages (p. 27). How this difference materializes in repertoire is carefully elucidated through examination of three key festival themes – the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, the Holocaust and issues of gender and Judaism (pp. 29, 97) – and supported by case studies that serve, too, to introduce a variety of performance work to readers who lack specialist knowledge of theatre in Israel. Shem-Tov also considers matters of management, finances and cultural policy. After years of budgetary hardship and crisis (a condition surely familiar to most festivals), control was given to the municipality of Acco in the year 2000, engendering a new organizational structure with a local resident as the festival's director general and a steering committee ‘headed by the mayor and . . . peopled by Jewish and Arab council members, central government (ministry of culture) functionaries, and theater and art people’ (p. 124). Budget issues continued beyond the handover and only the threat of cancellation of the 2014 festival resolved long-endured disputes over artists’ pay (p. 127).
The final two chapters address impact. Chapter 4 examines jury assessment (starting in 1981 when no production was found worthy of the first prize (p. 141)); critical appraisals; and festival audiences that come from three distinct constituencies: ‘theater and art people’ from Israel's mainstream, ‘young people’ interested in innovative/experimental work and members of the local Acco community (pp. 153–4). For those who travel to the festival, however, the attraction is not just theatre. It is an opportunity to experience the old city, ‘Acre’, a UNESCO World Heritage Site recognizing its continuous occupation since the Phoenician period (p. 126), and the signature food, hummus. Shem-Tov explains that hummus ‘became a central image of the festival’, as the ‘restaurants owned by Arab residents near the festival's gardens’ were championed as producers of ‘authentic’ hummus, ‘as opposed to industrial hummus that has been “converted to Judaism”’ (p. 157). In other words, both festival and food were advertised as alternative ‘tastes’ to more commercial products in Tel-Aviv theatres and restaurants. But what was initially successful marketing turned in the 1990s into ‘a negative image of institutional, fake “coexistence” between Jews and Arabs’ (p. 158). The book concludes with discussion of the festival as politically encoded, site-specific space – its presence in Acco over the years. Despite a local population made up of ‘Arab and Mizrahi-Jewish residents and immigrants from the former USSR’, Shem-Tov argues that the festival ‘was founded for the needs of the Israeli theater field, most of which operates in the greater Tel Aviv area’ (p. 159). If management has ignored the local community, the people of Acco have resisted this exclusion (p. 160). Finally, the author offers hope that a more ‘multicultural’ approach might make the city and its residents more appropriately partners in festival production (p. 201).
Published in the Israel: Society, Culture and History series, The Acco Festival is valuable both as a comprehensive history and for its contributions to thinking about contemporary theatre in Israel. Its signal importance, however, comes from the breadth of topics so thoughtfully addressed, which collectively suggest a productive model for other scholars working on theatre and festivals anywhere in the world. Shem-Tov's careful navigation of interactions between politics and aesthetics across the history of the Acco Festival should interest scholars studying theatre festivals and sharpen the questions such work must necessarily address.
