To read the headlines or watch the nightly news, it seems daily life in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict passes in a hail of bullets or the blast of a suicide bomb.
In their play “From Tel Aviv to Ramallah,” Yuri Lane and his wife, Rachel Havrelock, try to depict the hopeful youth culture that persists despite the region’s political reality.
Rachel, a religion scholar, studied in both cities and later traveled between the two with Yuri, an actor and hip-hop beat-box artist. Their experiences resulted in the moving parallel stories of two twentysomethings: Amir, a Tel Aviv DJ, and Khalid, the owner of a Ramallah Internet cafe.
How do you develop characters through sound?
Yuri: Artists paint pictures, and I paint a picture with sound. I look at a lot of people and think, “What’s their soundtrack?” For me, it’s kind of a mix tape for the world. I try to look at each character and really find their heartbeat, their rhythm, their song, their genre of music. It’s an internal monologue, speaking their thoughts through music.
How did this play develop?
Rachel: I lived between Tel Aviv and Ramallah between 1997 and 1999. I was a student for a year at Tel Aviv University on a study grant, and then I got a grant from the U.S. government to study spoken Arabic in Ramallah. Many of the characters in the show are based on people I knew and friends of mine both in Palestine and Israel. I had this really intimate experience of living in the two places, really being immersed in the youth culture and the ideas of the places.
What kind of culture?
Rachel: Tel Aviv, they call it the “24-hour city,” “the city that doesn’t see the day,” so when I was there, as well as being a student I went out to a lot of the clubs and saw the DJ culture and the electronic music. It was an amazing nightlife, very free and progressive and open, but it’s also kind of amazing to dance until dawn when 40 miles away there’s a low-scale war going on.
What was the mood?
Rachel: There’s a fragility to it, but it’s also all-out. The dance floors in Israel really are utopian. It’s a place where many different kinds of people come together through music and the different lines and borders everywhere else fall away.
And the mood in Ramallah?
Rachel: I spent a lot of time in Ramallah in an Internet cafe and people were always there, tons of debate, lots of coffee, cigarette smoking everywhere, lot of fast talking.
The mood was celebratory because the Internet was offering Palestinians a way out, communication with the rest of the world. People were excited. [It was] a new form of business, money was coming in.
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So you were able to contrast the two?
Rachel: I’m one of the few people I know who have lived in the two places back and forth. I learned how to get through the blockades because I speak both Hebrew and Arabic. So in the play, the Internet cafe and the dance floor are those utopian spaces that give young people an outlet for creative expression outside the political circumstances. It was going on in both places, but they weren’t connected.
How did this translate into a beat-box play?
Rachel: Yuri experiences places through sound, and so, for him, picking up on those parallels, it was really auditory. You can hear the traffic and the stress that’s in people’s language, but also the warmth that’s there.
What do people hear?
Yuri: Because I’m beat-boxing a lot during the show, one of the things people remember is the heartbeat, the silence and the heartbeat. It’s a human sound and keeps beating faster and faster. There’s the sound of a helicopter which is very memorable because it’s a great sound effect and also because everyone hears that helicopter. Palestinians hear it a lot more, but Israelis hear it as well.
How did you develop the sounds?
Yuri: We went to this great Middle Eastern Arabic music store in Brooklyn and we got CDs. Lebanese rap. Israeli hip-hop music.
Then I started to listen to traditional Palestinian music, like folk music, Egyptian music.
A lot of the [character] soundtracks came out of the songs, but I didn’t sample directly from those songs. George, Khalid’s friend, has American hip-hop, he’s got 50 Cent. Gil, Amir’s party friend, has a computerized rave beat, an Afrika Bambaataa beat mixed in with other new stuff. Interspersed with sound effects and sound is the hip-hop beat.
Why tell this story through hip-hop?
Yuri: Hip-hop is international. There are rappers in Egypt and beat-boxers in Israel. It’s this language that everyone understands. A lot of times it’s the voice of the street and the voice of dissent and the voice of everyday life. You hear hip-hop coming out of the speakers all over the world.
What will theatregoers see?
Yuri: Just me. All I need is my microphone combining beat box, mime, acting and dance, all at the same time. I am my own sound engineer, and there’s a little Robin Williams, there’s a little Bobby McFerrin … and then there’s Yuri. People really want me to take that drink of water because it’s a real workout. I’m bringing the Middle East with a hip-hop soundtrack, and the show is a message of peace. I want to make people rethink and listen to each other.
“From Tel Aviv to Ramallah” opens at the Viaduct Theatre on Friday and runs through Dec. 12.
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Edited by Lara Weber ([email protected]) and Joe Knowles ([email protected])