In the final scene of the play "Blueberry", one of the two winners of this year's best play/performance award at the Acre Festival for a different theater, the creator Nathalie Zuckerman and her partner Tomer Kopel, a partner in the creation and performance, watch the ultrasound of the last pregnancy they experienced, with their voices from that moment heard in the background: The main thing is that there is a pulse and everything is fine."
What happened next, Zuckerman asks the actress Lir Katz to tell on her behalf: "I'm good at reporting things," she tells her, "I can't experience it again."
Natalie Zuckerman's works can be defined as "auto-performance", a term coined by theater researcher Michael Kirby as early as 1979, to indicate the absolute affinity between the creator of the show and its performer in works with an autobiographical dimension, in which the personal content is explicitly presented.
But Zuckerman is first of all a body artist in the deepest sense: her shows vividly and sensibly fulfill the experience of her body in the world through action and material.
In "The Other Body", which she created together with Atalia Beranzburg, she explored her scars by repositioning her body in physical and emotional situations, such as the accident she had with scouts at the age of 12 that left her with a "transparent" disability, and painful relationships;
In "Practice Makes Perfect" she called upon her body to perform a series of challenging fitness and dance exercises, in order to provoke thought about the way in which failure and success are perceived;
And in Blueberry, which collects these works into a trilogy, Zuckerman captures the waiting state of her body during the last six years, during which she and her partner underwent fertility treatments.
From the show.
The explosive layers are revealed, photo: Yohan Segev
The play is indeed based on a text written by Natalie Zuckerman, but it does not function as a narrative tool, as is customary in realistic theater, but serves as a means of shaping the soundscape of fertility treatments.
This is a space where the words spoken by the medical establishment and the social environment are technical and laconic, vague and emotionally opaque, but mostly present in the space to the point of suffocation: generic subtitles of "a patient tells... to a room..." projected on the wall and heard in an announcement, items about pregnancy and fertility (including stories of "heroism" in the style of "our rare pregnancy") in talk shows that are broadcast in a loop on television, training videos of the Ministry of Health and the IVF unit that are filmed to the point of horror, and condense long and agonizing processes into "a positive answer, great joy" versus "a negative answer, Sad, a big disappointment, but we must not despair."
The explosive layers of fertility treatments are revealed through the performers Ataliya Berenzburg, Uri Lankinski, Lir Katz and Shira Hasid - who are listed as co-creators - and Samhar Badarna Mansor, Miri Farber, Shay Farber and the child Gil Farber are also in the show.
Like a Greek chorus, they alternately transcribe Zuckerman, but interweave their own and Koppel's story as well, thus illuminating how personal is also collective and shared by many and so many.
But when Zuckerman assigns roles to each of them ("Be me", "Can you be the doctor?"), it seems that she is also trying to create a little control over the circumstances that left her helpless or, alternatively, to distance a little from the "materials" of the reality of her life, because Entering the womb - the private one, which is still so "national" in Israeli society - is unbearably difficult and accompanied by concealment and shame.
Not by chance, in the place where the professional words that are supposed to explain and comfort fail, and the silence around thunders, the body speaks for itself, and weaves a dramaturgical-aesthetic thread between Zuckerman's involuntarily trembling leg in the "other body", due to the difficulty in performing actions such as putting on pants resulting from the disability Hers, for a moment in the "Blueberry" where the underwear she is wearing - which she had previously soaked in red liquid - "bleeds" through the chair she is sitting on, while repeatedly shouting: "Get it off me!".
In both scenes, the actions take time, a long time, and feel like an eternity, and thus the experience of bodily extremes is translated into the duration of the stage, and the entire show - into an exposed flooding of the body's consciousness in its moments of rupture.
From the show.
When words fail - the body begins to speak, photo: Uri Rubinstein
In this way, Blueberry draws a choreography that distills waiting - such a central dimension in fertility treatments - into movement and relationships between bodies and objects in space and time.
In its framework, the time that advances chronologically because the years pass, and at the same time stands still because there is no pregnancy, is revealed through the images of female performers lying on chairs in the treatment room, an occurrence that freezes every time a "patient says..." is asked to enter, and a visual language (designed by Iris Mu'alem) that contrasts the white medical sterility with the intense green of the vegetation that is gradually introduced into the space and fills it.
In a similar way, these seedlings and pots - like the mounds of earth that the performers create or the seeds that they uproot from fruits - become a wounded illustration of the longed-for pregnancy that does not ripen, or is realized only in other couples, but also and despite everything - a root of hope and healing.
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