Theater night at the Abba Chushi Center

This morning, Rachel texted me saying that Smadar (a women who works with new olim in Haifa) told her about some kind of concert near us that night. She said it was pretty cheap - 20 shek for both of us. Let's do it, I said.

The flyer she showed me later made some vague reference to music and art, but we really didn't know what to expect. Also, I was kind of skeptical about the address: 71 Abba Hillel Silver. Abba Hillel Silver is a street that bends both geographically and demographically away from the rest of Neve Sha'anan. During our August apartment hunt we looked at a place on this street. We were disconcerted by the way the street proceeded downhill away from the rest of the neighborhood, and seemed to only contain and endless row of huge, impersonal housing complexes. After looking at the apartment (which was kind of shabby), we passed by a group of men sitting around near the building entrance, eating pizza.

"You don't want to live here," they told us. "This neighborhood isn't for you, you should go live in Neve Sha'anan, on the other side of the hill.

Needless to say, I didn't think this was the kind of street that would house a concert venue. But I was wrong.

Tonight, we passed that apartment building and kept walking until we noticed signs for the "Abba Chushi Center", named after an early mayor of Haifa. We turned a corner and, lo and behold, there was an enormous open space with a relatively attractive looking public building in the middle. Once inside, it became clear that this is THE community center for this area of Haifa. Posters and signs and sheets were everywhere in sight, advertising countless activities and classes offered in the center. We proceeded to the auditorium.

As was to be expected at an event like this in Haifa, the crowd was noticeably a) old and b) Russian. These observations served to further amplify the bizarre hilarity of the performances that were to ensue.

It was a pretty big auditorium, and our seats were right in front, second row (score!). In the lobby, we met up with Rachel's ulpan friend, who had brought her boyfriend along, and they too sat in our row. Just before the performance, a whole crowd of young ulpan students also showed up, and as the MC gave his opening remarks, it became clear that the evening was specifically targeted at olim (hence the ulpan connection), and that all the performers were also olim themselves.

So I've set the stage: auditorium mostly full of old Russians, but two rows of young internationals in the front. The stage has got serious sound and lighting equipment, and a serious looking guy is sitting ready behind a serious looking computer screen. A 40-something blonde woman (dressed like a 20-something blonde woman) is hovering around, seemingly in charge of something. The lights dim.

Here's how it all went down:

Act I: Tortured Violin Genius

A tall man stepped onto the stage carrying a violin. He was wearing a white shirt tucked into jeans. Over this, he was wearing one of those long suit jackets that only Chassidim wear. He was definitely no Chassid, though. He was clean shaven and had bangs that remind me of John Linnell. His face looked dark and mysterious.

He began to fiddle, and he was really good. But it wasn't not your usual fiddling. In the background, the sound system pumped out drum-machine drumbeats and synthesized accompaniment music. It kind of felt like a club. The lights were neon and flashing all over the place.

He played about three or four songs. I could tell which parts were hardest because he screwed his face up in concentration and I thought his head was going to explode but then he collected himself. He looked like some kind of supervillain that is going to be thwarted one day by James Bond.

As the last song came to an end, the lights began flashing like crazy. Somehow they made the room look like it was shaking back and forth and I thought I was going to have a seizure. Also, a fog machine started spewing fog in the back of the stage. All this with a guy fiddling for his life. It was pretty trippy.

Act II: Pre-Teen Ballroom Dancers

As the two couples glided onto the stage, my first thought was "man, these people are really small". But after a couple seconds I realized that they were children.

Let me explain the confusion. They were very young (announced as 12, later corrected to 14), but they were dressed like adult dancers. That is to say, the boys were wearing fancy suit pants, one was wearing a vest and bow tie and the other was wearing a tie with some black dress shirt. The girls were wearing these weird dresses/costumes with crazy sleeves and skirts - all revealing way more skin than 14 year olds should be revealing.

Then they started to dance. Holy moly! These teeny boppers could dance! The pairs were waltzing and tango-ing and doing all kinds of moves I don't have words for. There was much fancy footwork, emotional head movements and dramatic gesticulation. These kids were shooting for "Dancing with the Stars". Or ice dancing.

They would dance to a song playing over the stereo, but the song would randomly fade out in the middle, and they would just stop dancing, and the crowd would applause. This usually resulted in some SERIOUS gesticulation, in the form of arms spread wide by the girls, as if to say "Yes! I am wonderful!" and one-arm gesturing, combined with an unsettling stare/smile by the boys, pointing to the girls as if to say "Get a load of THIS".

Somehow, the overall effect of really young kids dancing, dressing, moving, and gesticulating like adults was both unnerving and mesmerizing.

Act III: French Guy

First, they set up his props, which included a cafe table with a bottle of wine, two glasses, roses, and chairs, and a five foot tall model of the Eiffel Tower with a hat on top of it.

The guy himself was an Israeli who had lived in Paris for a while and is now a returning citizen. He was wearing a sparkly gold skinny tie over a mother-of-pearl shirt. He had curly long hair, and to be honest he looked a lot like Weird Al (thin version).

His act consisted of talking about different French musicians and then singing their songs. In French. I'm not sure why he thought anyone would be able to understand him, but that didn't stop him from singing his songs, and singing a lot of them.

Some of the songs were silly and some were sad. He was very committed to miming the emotions as he sang the song, as if to compensate for the fact that they were all in French, and no one could understand him (oh, except this one girl in the front row who we saw mouthing the words along with him).

Sometimes he used props, and for one or two songs he had some old guy in a cap and red sunglasses play accordion to accompany him. At another point he invited a couple from the audience (he took two of the young ulpan folk) to sit at his cafe table. He poured them glasses of wine and then took a swig directly from the bottle, and they stayed there for a little while while he sang more songs.

One of his songs, he said, he was going to sing in French, Russian, and English. For the record, we couldn't understand the English part. I think the song was about Moscow.

French guy took about 10 times longer than all the other acts. He would go on about French musicians to no end. The expression on his face showed that he was so happy because he knew how much you appreciated French music. Finally he was done.

Act IV: Return of the Pre-Teen Ballroom Dancers

This time, the girls were disturbingly skimpy dresses, and the boys were wearing black shirts with a thin v neck that went down to their navels. And the dancing involved a lot more hip movement and butt shaking from both genders.

The truth is, the whole act sort of made sense for the girls, but not for the boys. Girls do things like ballet and dance and figure skating and cheerleading and all that, so if you're a 14 year old girl it's not the craziest thing in the world to put on a dress and dance like that.

But the guys... how do these guys not get beaten up at school? Ok, maybe they do, who knows, but you'd expect boys that age to be just a LITTLE self conscious about doing the tango with a skimpy dressed girl while wearing an outfit reminiscent of Chris Kattan's "Mango" character on SNL.

But if these boys were embarrassed, it sure didn't show. Their faces were serious, only to be broken by a huge grin of pride and self-satisfaction. They looked liked the characters on Glee.

As I said, disturbing and mesmerizing.

Act V: Drums

This was a pretty normal act. Two guys came in playing large African drums. Then they switch to darbukas. Then they pulled out this big wall/net where they had hung up lots of buckets and pots and pans.

"These look like ordinary items," they said, "but we are going to show you how they can be turned into percussion instruments."

Wait, let me guess: by hitting them with drumsticks? Correct!

So they did a whole percussion piece with the stuff on the wall and it was amazingly awesome.

For the last bit, they called for volunteers, basically to bang on lots of stuff they had with lots of drumsticks. One parent sent up their cute 5 year old son and the guys were like awww. This, apparently, was the cue for all the REST of the parents to send up their kids as well and all of a sudden the guys were like wait, we need some adults for this to work also.

Ultimately one of the guys kind of forced a few ulpan people to come up and participate and then everyone banged on a bunch of stuff, but it sounded good because the guys were drumming cool rhythms over everyone.

Act VI: Finale

At some point during the end of the percussion, French Guy showed up out of nowhere and started banging some of the pots. Most of us in the audience felt that he was kind of hogging the stage, and were dismayed when, after the drum guys cleared off, he came back to the microphone, apparently ready to sing another song. Didn't he already get a turn?

This song turned out to be "גשר צר מאד", which he sang to end the performance on some kind of Jewish, Israeli note. To further the hackneyed Israeli quotient, he sang "הבאנו שלום עליכם", and then pushed it over the edge with "הנה מה טוב ומה נעים".