"The Muse of Censorship: Jewish-Arab Theater," a talk by Miriam Yahil-Wax

The Stanford Department of Drama's Guest Lecture Series Presents:

"The Muse of Censorship: Jewish-Arab Theater" (Theatre at War With Itself, The Arab Actor's Dilemma)
A talk by Miriam Yahil-Wax, about her experiences working in the multicultural environment that is the Israeli theater community.

Theatre, sometimes defined as the art of opposition, likes to do the unexpected. In Israel, when war rages and terrorism strikes, theatre is expected to keep a low profile. But it does not. On the contrary, it increases its multi-cultural activity, which inevitably leads to

self-examination. In Israel, a bi-national (Jewish-Arab) and multi-lingual immigrant society, this kind of theatre functions as a laboratory of language and culture: The different national and immigrant groups mix onstage, and produce multi-cultural performance. In the process, minority theatrical traditions successfully filter into the main culture, re-shaping and enriching it as well as assimilating in it.

DR. YAHIL-WAX is a dramaturg, writer, translater and expert in multi-cultural theatre. One of her plays, The Shit Path, about

Israeli-Palestinean conflict, was nominated for the Mobil Playwriting Competition (1988); The First Stone, the tragedy of an abused Arab woman, won second place at Theaternetto Festival (1992). Her book of poems, Without Premeditation, was published in 1977. She is an award-winning

translator of some 50 plays and novels, and received her Ph. D. in Drama from Stanford University.