Beyond Arab Idol: Palestinian creativity is flourishing all over -
Amira Hass
Haaretz
▻http://www.haaretz.com/news/middle-east/beyond-arab-idol-palestinian-creativity-is-flourishing-all-over.premium-1.5
In the past 20 years, the number of Palestinian cultural institutions has grown with a common goal to encourage artistic creation and acquaint as many people as possible with the works, with the creators, and with the process. Every year, they operate close to 30 different festivals featuring musical performances, dance and plays to the West Bank public, including East Jerusalem and sometimes also cities like Haifa and Nazareth. They even reach, as well as they can, audiences in the Gaza Strip. It’s no wonder that sometimes there is conflict between events and competition for the same audience and the same funder.
Now all the institutions are hurrying to hold festivals before the holiday of Ramadan that begins mid-July. This means that, for culture lovers, there is a dizzying offering of cultural events crammed together in two and a half months: A literature festival that took place in May; concerts held in cities, villages and refugee camps as part of musical celebrations held under the auspices of Al Kamandjati Music School that are taking place now; concerts and playing workshops conducted by the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music; song and dance at Birzeit Heritage Week Festival; the Heritage Festival in al-Bireh that is targeted primarily at the thousands of Palestinian-Americans that come to visit in the summer; and the al-Quds festival of the Yabous Cultural Centre that was founded in Jerusalem in 1995.
For those who concluded that this is some form of cultural peace, last week an order came from Public Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch to close the al-Hakawati theater in East Jerusalem to stop a children’s theater festival from taking place. The closure was ordered based on the unsubstantiated claim, rejected by the theaters’ managers, that the Palestinian Authority supports and funds the theater’s activities.