OCCUPIED JERUSALEM: Cancelled concerts, arrested organizers, interrogated participants: Israeli authorities have put the dampener on East Jerusalem’s year as cultural capital of the Arab world.
Some, however, are managing to avoid the Israeli clampdown. Merlijn Twaalfhoven, a young Dutch composer, is organizing more than 150 secret musical and theatrical events, under the umbrella title of “Al Quds Underground.” Using local stories as inspiration, performances are held in secret locations, from living rooms to courtyards to rooftops.
Twaalfhoven hopes that Al Quds Underground will foster exchange between people of different cultural backgrounds within Jerusalem, far from the “hubbub” of politicians, journalists, ideologues and fanatics.
Ten Dutch artists are contributing their talents to “Al-Quds Underground,” including theatre director Laura van Dolron, the actress Adelheid Roosen and the Netherlands-based Palestinian musician Haytham Safia.
A cohort of 50 Palestinians are taking part, including actors from the Palestinian National Theater, musicians from the Sabreen group, Sufi singers and young participants from the Jerusalem-based Spafford Children’s Center and the Burj al-Laqlaq Community Society.
Twallfhoven had originally hoped to foster exchange and collaboration between Israeli and Palestinian musicians. But the composer changed his mind upon speaking to Palestinian artists who had frequently taken part in such projects.
“Just to put Palestinians and Israelis together can create a false hope for peace,” he says. “When nothing changes in their current situation, it has no meaning to make an art project together.”
The composer has found that the Palestinians involved in Al Quds Underground were reluctant to have it described as part of a peace process. “I learned that the people who live there are like you and me: people who refuse to be used as symbols,” he wrote earlier this fall. “So my project will not be a statement or a metaphor, but merely a piece of reality: an encounter with the dreary truth in a city on the verge of [collapse] under an overdose of history.”
Twaalfhoven’s efforts are a project of his foundation, “La Vie sur Terre” (Life on Earth)
“By creating a natural setting we want obtain art of its pedestal,” explains the “La Vie sur Terre” website, “melt art with its surroundings and by doing this immerse a broad (and mostly inexperienced) public in an experience of the senses.”
Twaalfhoven is funded by a variety of public and private foundations such as SICA, the Dutch institute for international cultural policy, Cordaid, a Dutch international development organization, and the Anna Lindh Euro-Mediterranean Foundation.
This is not the first time Twaalfhoven has worked in Palestine. In 2008 he organized two concerts in Ramallah and Bethlehem with international musicians and children from the Amari and Aida camps. In Bethlehem, musicians were assembled on each side of the Israeli separation wall for a project called “Carried by the Wind,” involving an exchange of music that ignored the confines of the wall.
The Al Quds Underground project will be a more intimate affair, small audiences attending by invitation only. Performances are projected to be a forum where artists can express their cultural richness and diversity. From October 30, local networks have been deployed to spread the times and locations of performances. Such are the methods of culture under siege.
For further information, visit www.alqudsunderground.net