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Like all other theaters in Israel, the doors of Alfa Theater for Performing Arts were closed in March 2020 under coronavirus emergency regulations. At this time, when no one can tell how, and if, any artistic organization will survive the crisis, it may be an appropriate moment to pause for a brief review of the past, in the hope that it is not an obituary for a life project gone.
The highly praised, unique and intimate fringe Alfa Theatre, residing in an industrial, unprivileged quarter of Tel Aviv, was initiated as a drama school. The Academy of Performing Arts was launched by a group of theater artists as a nonprofit charity in 2010. All of its initial founders, well-known practitioners in Israeli theater, were resolved to train a fresh, new core of theater practitioners. From the very start, the students included a variety of ethnicities, coming to Tel Aviv from all areas of the country, Jews and Palestinians together. Several of the initial founders of the project had been part of the Haifa University Theater, which was closed by university authorities in 2004 after it insisted on mounting plays in Arabic side by side with the official Hebrew tuition language. Following a cooperation agreement with the Open University, the Academy of Performing Arts, Tel Aviv, was established as a professional conservatory, allowing students who chose to get academic credits on top of the professional training in acting, movement voice training, and speech to do so by arrangement with the university.
No ideological agenda was drafted for the new project, except for the initial definition, "a studying theater," which was coined by Tal Itzhaki, its managing director since its establishment to this day. Patterns of action, however, started to take shape as its artistic activity was progressing. From the outset, the school's productions, unlike other drama schools in the country, involved professional actors performing side by side with the students. This plurality has been manifested not only regarding the variety of experience but also in terms of social and ethnic pluralism. Since the very first production, Split Screen (2011), a combined intertwined dramatization of short stories by Israeli poet Dalia Rabikowitz and Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz, co-directed respectively by Jewish and Palestinian directors, the repertory involved...