Poalot Festival 2026

At Alfred gallery, TA Tarbut, Maya gallery, Nulobaz gallery and in public spaces in Kiryat Hamelacha

Artistic directors: Revital Michali & Roy Maayan

Graphic Design: Emi Sfard

Weekend at Alfred Gallery
Khnum Group | Settling Down to Earth | Exhibition and performances

Weekend 4.6-6.6 | Thursday 18:00, Friday 12:00, Saturday 11:30
Performances across Kiryat Hamelacha

Weekend 4.6-6.6 – Performances across Kiryat Hamelacha

Ayelet Zer Sheinboim | Rachel Ben David & Tamar Troudart | Efrat Goren | Carmel Ayal | Odeya Silber and Darya Efrat | Emi Sfard | Eden Kramer & Yael Ben Natan | Shay Persil | The Dancer Creators Training Ensemble | Oran Maestro Segal | Gabrielle Neuhaus & Laure Jubran-Cadoux | Maayan Liebman-Sharon | Dana Naim Hafouta & Ensemble | Elad Raphael Hamra | Gil Zirlin | Or Saadi & Itzhak Ventura | Khnum Group: Noa Almagor Ben Dor, Hilla Dror, Ronen Yamin, Amnon Amos

From the Artistic Directors

For the third consecutive year, Alfred Institute is holding a multidisciplinary festival featuring more than 20 artists from diverse fields, including dance, theater, music, voice, sound, ceramics, circus arts, and performance. The participating artists respond both to the annual exhibition theme for 2025–2026 and to the specific qualities of the site and its surrounding space.
The festival forms an additional layer within the exhibition year “How to get through it?”, aiming to expand modes of engagement with the annual theme — to give it visual, vocal, musical, and performative expression, with an emphasis on a new point of departure from which we can continue to dream, create, express, and exist.
The 2026 Po’alot Festival will take place this year under the title “Acting Now” (Poalot Achshav), aiming to strengthen the dialogue with diverse audiences and with the unique environment of Kiryat HaMelacha, in all its complexity. Despite attempts to diminish us, to silence us, and to discipline us — and despite the war imposed on all of us — we still see artistic creation as the answer.

In days marked by division, fragmentation, and a constant looming threat, we are Acting Now to make our voices heard and to meet you. We stand firm. We are not afraid to act. And we are trying to understand: How to get through it?

Performance Details

Ayelet Zer Sheinboim | Tresses | Durational performance

The performer sits on the brink of the street, engaged in a meticulous, domestic, gentle, and quiet action: weaving a strand of hair, rolling and twisting it, rubbing and moistening it. The strand is woven into her long braid while, in the background, the city’s sounds, the people in the street, and her layered voice—split across multiple sound channels—intermingle.

Rachel Ben David & Tamar Troudart | License to Kiss | Interval performance |  Total: 15 minutes

An absurd Wild‑West–style duel performance between two women on a “covert” mission. They lie in wait in different corners of Kiryat HaMelacha. In a reality where weapons are present on every corner, they seek to destabilize the illusion that they protect us, and—through playfulness—offer a choice of tenderness over violence.

 Carmel Ayal | Thousand years | 20 minutes

A work created for a woman, a sink, and a violin, describing the unending grapple with the experience of loss.

Performers: Shira Zohar and Alma Dalal; Design: Raz Zemach; Assistant Directors: Daniel Forkosh and Eitan Digmi; Support: Ido Shahak; Artistic Directors: Yehezkel Lazarov, Avi Gibson Bar-El, Amit Zarka, and Gabi Cohen.

The work was first performed at the Premieres Festival at Seminar HaKibbutzim in 2025, and at the 2025 Tmuna Festival.

 Efrat Goren | Make a Place for Me | 15 minutes

Welcome to my Torah‑reading ceremony — a personal, contemporary Torah that examines the boundaries of freedom, sanctity, and the everyday. A Torah reading that is also a call to action: to claim space, to give space, to dissolve boundaries.

Creator: Efrat Goren;  Artistic Director: Nofer Sela

Odeya Silber and Darya Efrat | Smoke Signal | 15 minutes

Smoke Signal is a live action performed in a public space transforming a street into a processional stage. Working with smoke, flowers, life buoys, and trumpeting, the figures mark out an imaginary world, in an attempt to suggest ways to break away into a different way of living — turning rawness into freedom and beauty.

It is a call to awaken: a visual, sonic, and emotional space in which the body yearns for an exit, a space of resistance, imagination, and hope.

Creators and performers: Darya Efrat and Odeya Silber; Participating creators: Doaa Bsis, Raghad Sawaed; Musician: Tal Avraham

Supported by the Givat Haviva AIR  program

 Emi Sfard | Gun Machine | 15 minutes

I wanted to bring to life a machine I had imagined: a system of weapons triggering one another in an endless chain reaction. A knife drops onto a rope and releases the safety latch of a short M16. The M16 fires and shatters a Molotov bottle, which strikes a stun grenade. Its blast ignites a burning kite that fires off a submachine gun burst—and so on. I embarked on a wild, fictional journey that exposes an entire world of arms trading, fake news, and conspiracy.

The performance was created and first presented at the 2023 “A‑Genre  Festival” at Tmuna Theater; Artistic Directors: Erez Maayan‑Shalev and Eti Doron.

 Eden Kramer and Yael Ben Natan | The Yellow Wallpaper | 16 minutes

 A visual theatre performance that combines text, movement, and Puppet Cinema. A stage adaptation of a short story written in 1892, depicting a woman’s psychological deterioration when her husband forces her into an isolation treatment that was customary at the time. She develops an obsession with the yellow wallpaper in the room and hallucinates a trapped figure within it.

Creation and performance: Eden Kramer and Yael Ben‑Natan; Music: Guy Moses; Recorded actor: Lotan Vollman; Artistic Director: Sharon Silver‑Meret

Shay Persil | The Gap | Excerpt from the full performance |  18 minutes

How to get in touch with you?
I’m trying to get there.
To fulfill human fantasies
by super‑human means.

Creation and performance: Shay Persil; Props and costume design: Shay Persil and Yasmin Steinmetz; Artistic Directors: Ariel Friedman and Ayala Frenkel; Consultants: Shani Tamari, Nir Vidan, Moran Duvshani, Yael Biegon‑Citron, Iris Erez

The work was developed in the residency program at the Kelim Center for Choreography under the artistic direction of Ayala Frenkel, with the support of the Pais Council for Culture and the Arts and the Rabinovich Foundation.

An early version premiered at the 2023  Intimadance Festival at Tmuna Theater, under the artistic direction of Niv Sheinfeld and Oren Laor.

 The Dancer‑Creators Training Ensemble | Let's run it | Interval performance | Total: 20 minutes

We cling to the rhythm and tempo that drive our lives in an endless race — most important is to keep going, not to stop. Perhaps chasing after the next achievement, or maybe  we are in fact running away — from reality or from ourselves. With not a moment of respite, there is also no time in which one can fall, get confused, or lose one’s way; and the more we persist in maintaining the pace, the easier it becomes to press on — no matter in which direction.

Dancer‑creators: Shira Osher, Alma Asael Shimansky, Neta Mor, Noa Friedland, Maya Nyman, Shoam Karev, Ruti Vax‑Tzuk, Ron Bar Ojalvo, Noa Tal, Yukka Michnik, Aviv Pomerantz, Alon Giladi;  Artistic Director: Anat Katz

Oran Maestro Segal | Form 243 | Pop-up Exhibition  & Performance

Alfred Gallery hosts artist Oren Maestro Segal for a two‑day exhibition, in collaboration with the National Institute for Testimony and Memory “N.T.Z.A.H” (New Public Formulation). The performance‑installation is constructed as an ostensibly office‑/clinic‑like situation, centered on a structured encounter between the artist and a single participant, who is invited to undergo a series of questions and exercises around memory and formulation. Monument and commemoration, in their familiar forms, are transformed into a human encounter in which what we remember, wish to remember, or prefer to forget continues to take shape.

Gabrielle Neuhaus &  Laure Jubran-Cadoux | Will you stay? A side view | 20 minutes

Two Swiss artists, living in Tel Aviv and in Kafr Raina following after love, attempt to bridge the gaps between places and languages in the hope of connecting the audience with those perceived as “the other.” A performance in movement, engraving, text, video, sound, and print.

Artistic Directors: Nava Zukerman, Dr. Erez Maayan Shalev, Itay Doron.

The work premiered at the 2025 Tmuna Festival.

Maayan Liebman-Sharon | Based on a true story | 16 minutes

A dance work moving between collective memory and personal present — about the pains of war and of daily life at home, on the possibility of loss, on the delicate threads woven between partners who have lived together for many years, unraveling and reweaving themselves, perhaps  in a slightly different form.

Choreography: Maayan Liebman Sharon; Co-Dancers: Yulia Mazhetskaya, Uri Dicker; Artistic Directors & artistic advisors: Maya Brinner and Ahat Katz; Vocal Consultant: Michal Oppenheim Landau; Vocal Accompaniment: Uri Dicker; Costume Designer: Rosie Canaan; Dramaturgical Support: Itzik Giuli; Outside Eye: Or Marin; Production: Irit Eilat

The piece was created as part of the Ministry of Culture's 2025 ‘Curtain-Up’ project.

 Dana Naim Hafouta & Ensemble |  Floaty Eyes | 17 minutes

A fantastical work for three dancers and a star map, celebrating an experience of liminality. Through celestial and sacred imagery, it channels the mental connection between sky and earth and the desire to create fantasies as a coping mechanism in an unstable reality.

Choreography and concept: Dana Naim Hafouta; Dancers: Shahar Hanin, Yasmen Gariv, Dana Naim Hafouta; Music editing: Dana Naim Hafouta and Shahar Hanin; Production: Irit Eilat

The piece premiered at the 2024 From Jaffa to Agripas Festival and was developed in the Residency program of the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance.

 Elad Raphael Hamra | A manly gesture after the Go-Go Dancing Platform | Durational performance

An act of homage based on an existing work: Go-Go Dancing Platform (1991) by Cuban‑American artist Félix González‑Torres. The piece is associated with processes of initiation, imitation, and absence. In the performance, a performer lies on the floor in a fallen posture, his body bridging the height difference between a display platform crowded with Superman dolls and the ground. With his face pressed to the floor and a photograph of a child and his father in an Israeli landscape before him, he sings The Man I Love.

 Gil Zirlin | My Friends

 A short clowning piece inspired by friends who once were and are no more. Through gentle manipulation of objects and audience, the creator sketches a touching portrait of a person trying to break free from the fate of their own loneliness.

Created and performed by: Gil Zirlin; Music: Creep / Radiohead; Artistic consultation: Jack Malone; Stage design: Mathilde d’Atout; Special thanks to Shahar and Eden Zirlin

 Or Saadi & Itzhak Ventura | Nasim | 20 minutes

“Ever since I was torn from the reed‑bed, the sound of my crying has been heard. Anyone who has parted from a beloved one understands my utterings; anyone severed from their source longs to return to it.”

A duet about a couple, inspired by the Sufi parable of the reed flute.

Creators: Or Saadi and Itzhak Ventura; Video art: Stanislav Glazov

 Khnum Group: Noa Almagor Ben Dor, Hilla Dror, Ronen Yamin, Amnon Amos

Settling Down to Earth | 30 minutes

As part of a pop‑up exhibition at the gallery, the Khnum collective will construct a living utopian world through a collective artistic action that generates an alternative reality of sharing, listening, and mutual acceptance. A vibrant procession by the Khnum group—from the bustle of Kiryat HaMelacha into the gallery space, where a potter’s wheel and blocks of clay await—will open the performance “Settling Down to Earth”. Khnum operates as a kind of roaming ceramics circus, creating an experience that is at the same time one‑off and yet leaves behind traces charged with memory and meaning. The act of “Settling Down to Earth” represents the healing force, the hope embedded in creation, and the possibility of continuing to shape and generate space even in times of fracture and uncertainty.