Can Theatre Repair Damaged Urban Fabric? Toward a “Thick” Description of Haifa’s Wadi Salib Theatre Center
Abstract
This article explores roles of theatre as an urban cultural institution in Haifa’s politics, urban order, and spatial imagination—a “wounded city” (Till, 2012) infused with Jewish and Palestinian histories. The case study is the theatre center in Wadi Salib, founded in 1983 in a repurposed Palestinian building. The author proposes a theatre historiography of crises, dimming hopes, and even failure that temper the sense that theatre-makers can enact change, reconcile community wounds, and spark critical discourse. The article explores the theatre center through three spatial dimensions: the historic building and its location, the theatrical space, and then the repurposed Al-Pasha Complex building as a ruin. The author demonstrates how the center’s activity exposed both the wounded urban fabric and the theatre’s institutional inability, even when partly funded by the municipality and the state, to be an active, sustainable agent and partner in reconciliation and healing.
Keywords:
theatre in repurposed building, municipal theatre, Jewish, Palestinian, Arabic, theatre in Israel, Wadi Salib, ruinReferences
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Authors
Dorit Yerushalmidyerush1@univ.haifa.ac.il
The University of Haifa, Israel Israel
Dorit Yerushalmi - PhD, Senior Lecturer at the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Haifa, and former Head of Department. Her research focuses on Hebrew theatre historiography, aesthetics and ideological aspects in the works of contemporary Israeli directors, and theatre in “mixed cities." She is the author of The Directors’ Stage: on Directors in the Israeli Theatre (2013) and co-editor of Please Don’t Chase Me Away: New Studies on the Dybbuk (2009) and Habima: New Approaches to National Theatre (2017). She has also published numerous articles in journals such as Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, New Theatre Quarterly, T.D.R: The Drama Review and Performance Research.
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