Important Dreams: Israeli Society Collected Through Children’s Eyes - Talia Katz, Johns Hopkins University

What can a collection of everyday objects – such as a broom, a mask, and a mannequin head
–reveal about contemporary Israeli society and politics? To answer this question, I turn to the
‘Actors from Birth,’ an elementary school group of the Lod Theater Center. The Lod Theater
Center is a hybrid site that brings psychodrama, a role-play-based form of psychotherapy, to bear on
Israel’s longstanding institution of the community theater. The talk explores what sentiments the
children expressed and how they did so when tasked with sharing ‘something important’. Using
ethnography to intervene in debates in performance theory, my talk shows how the children’s work
with objects reveals new ways of seeing and perceiving Israeli social worlds. First, I show how the
life of each object emerges in a complex interaction between self and world. I then reflect on how
the juxtapositional and discontinuous quality of the children’s play offers a powerful counterpoint to
narrative-based ways of explaining Israeli society and its conflicts. I argue that attuning to what
children perceive as ‘important’ offers an education for grown-ups in what it is to care for an
everyday life lived amidst ongoing violence.

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Lior Libman

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