About a quarter of an hour after the play "Narcissus" opens, its creator and performer introduces himself to the audience: "Very nice, I'm Benjamin Yom-Tov, and I'm an actor. And the truth is that I'm not a bad actor, it turns out. I didn't say that. I got it for it Confirmation from reality. I'm actually the best player as of 2019. I'll show you the award, the state gave it to me. It means I was the best player in 2020 but because it didn't happen that much, or rather really really happened, then as of the last three years , I am the best actor in the Land of Israel."
Yom-Tov refers to the "Golden Hedgehog", the award for excellence in the field of fringe theater that he received for his first work, "Peacock", and about a month ago he was awarded a kind of "continuation of tenure", when he was also awarded the same title at the Israeli Comedy Festival named after Ephraim Kishon, where he presented his new job.
Tonight (Thursday), "Narcissus" opens its Tel Aviv debut at the Hayit Theater in Jaffa, in its "debut incubator" for creators and creators at the beginning of their career, "Peacock" was born.
It is hard to miss the connection between the two works, which also echo each other in the oil, and especially in the performative language that has already become Benjamin Yom-Tov's hallmark.
At its core is not only his absolute identity as a performer with the performative action but mainly the intentional conceptual and formal challenge of the conventional theatrical format: "It is a theater show but it also has elements of a performance, stand-up, and even a party," explains Yom-Tov, who already sees the evolution its future into "a line of parties that combine a musical adventure in a club with elements of theater".
From "Peacock".
Yom-Tov won the Golden Hedgehog Award, photo: Gaya's photos
In both shows, the breaking of the boundaries is expressed in the frequent exchange of characters (regardless of whether they are human or mammals), "zigzagging" between gender and ethnic identities (through accents and dialects, and a distinctly stereotypical female/male body language or intentionally queer), and above all - an interweaving of The mythical, the fantastic and the actual Israeli.
In "Peacock", Binyamin Yom-Tov's childhood memories of Netanya and his Persian family roots lead to a meeting between Eve and the snake from the biblical story;
In "Narcissus", the myth of the beautiful Narcissus who fell in love with his boa and was punished for his generosity is a starting point for Yom-Tov's introspection on himself, and on what he identifies as a constant search for the alpha male ("You can say that Bibi, for example, is a myth", he says in the context This, and in the show does share the audience during the imagined date between them).
Similar to "Peacock", the world of "Narcissus" is activated by two aesthetic "forces": the performing language is based on an emphasized theatricality, "larger than life" in its intensity and totality, but the stage is modest and mostly empty, and the performing mechanism is exposed - as in a performance.
Yom-Tov breaks the "fourth wall" of the theatrical illusion and addresses the audience directly, and the sound manipulations are also openly activated by a musician.
This breaking tension helps in turning the body into the central generator of the experience in the show through the complex of dimensions that it is - presence, sound and movement.
As a result of this, the stage occurrence evokes sensory flooding, a quality that is identified with what the theater researcher Hans Thies Lehmann defined "post-dramatic theater".
In his seminal book from 1999, Lehmann explains that while the realist theater presents drama, the post-dramatic form is a theater of changing visual and emotional states.
Accordingly, the orderly logical structure (which is organized around the "three unities" - plot, time and place) and the traditional hierarchy between the elements that maintains the primacy of the text, are replaced by a disjointed narrative, with simultaneous occurrences and compression of images.
From "Narcissus". Performance language larger than life, photo: Tomer Zamora
In the performance language of Benjamin Yom-Tov, the primal is the one that becomes the dramaturgical compass of the works and leads to the interpretation of their stage world as the subconscious of the creator-performer, thus giving the viewer the multi-layered reflection he is aiming for.
Yom-Tov claims that "in modern society we greatly glorify the individual while in fact we are governed by the same archetypes represented in the myths that shape our consciousness."
In "Narcissus", the mirrors that stand on the stage literally and metaphorically present the same system of social-cultural-gender patterns, thus opening an opening for their dissolution.
But no less significant is the reflection on the theater itself: in one of the scenes, Benjamin Yom-Tov tries to present his "methodology" to the audience, but is repeatedly stoned.
For him, the method is "an image to present in a search", and above all "a wish for healing", since in the overflow of narcissism lies the possibility of being freed from it.
But it seems that with Yom-Tov's insistence on the method ("And I will not die. Because I am a recurring motif!") he manages to touch the heart of the act of creation as the existential reflection of the artist, and on the stage - despite the chaos in it - as the clearest mirror to the soul of the performer.
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