Musrara Mix is an apt moniker for the annual multidisciplinary arts event in the titular Jerusalem neighborhood, for all sorts of reasons. For starters, the participants cover an eclectic spread of arts fields, styles, and cultural baggage.
The festival has been taking place at Musrara – The Naggar Multidisciplinary School of Art and Society for the past 25 years, under the learned stewardship of school founder Avi Sabag Sharvit, who also serves as the festival’s director. In terms of the programmatic content, the main man this year is Roy Menachem Markovich, who devised the lineup that takes place over three days, starting on May 6.
The broadly sweeping agenda incorporates all manner of art output, music, and performance at the Canada House community center, which provides a range of facilities for members of the local community and people from all over Jerusalem. All events are free, with some requiring prior registration.
Markovich believes it is interface, and the subsequent coalescence, that generate mutually beneficial cross-pollination – on all sorts of levels. That, he says, provides the spark for exploration that can lead to new avenues of thought and behavior that can enrich our lives. It also references the base theme of this year’s program, and informs the school curriculum.
“Each year, there is an umbrella topic which impacts on the studies, as well as all the departments and exhibitions they have,” he explains. “This year, it is ‘wandering.’ I connected with that well. It suits this passage of time and this place.”
The artistic director had carte blanche to follow his measured take on the field of creativity in general. “I ran with it to a more poetic emotional place, as well as in looking at the media involved.”
What is the 2025 Musrara mix about?
The latter is evident right across the three-day itinerary, which includes scores of works in the plastic arts, video, and performance, in addition to live shows, by both students and established members of the local entertainment scene such as celebrated avant-garde jazz pianist, vocalist, and sound artist Maya Dunietz. The last day of the festival sees her join forces with lighting artist Yan Bolotov in a sound and light piece called Refuge. The title alone suggests the existence of a curative element to the venture, which feeds off the event’s thematic anchor as it dovetails between light and darkness, with sonic responses, as the tempo undulates and meanders in ever-changing eddies.
AS ONE would expect of a seasoned multidisciplinary artist and educator, Markovich attaches great importance to the risk-taking artistic ethos and sees the Dunietz-Bolotov synergy as a prime example of that.
“Almost all the musicians [in Musrara Mix] were chosen based on the idea of this quest, looking for the sound, and the deconstruction of the familiar structures. Maya Dunietz’s work is something she and Bolotov put together specifically for the festival. They create light composition and sound composition, together. It is a wonderful work.”
There’s more where that came from, not only vis-à-vis cutting-edge exploratory endeavor but also in relation to the artistic and street-level value of marrying different, sometimes ostensibly disparate approaches and means in pursuit of a worthy bottom line.
Markovich cites an intriguing slot with Berlin-based Israeli electronic musician Adi Gelbart. Poems by Alpha opens the festival (May 6, 9 p.m.) and takes place in collaboration with Goethe Institut Israel. It is described as “a piece for a computer, synth, and a string quartet.”
The concise description infers generous input from advanced technological apparatus, alongside the human instrumental foursome. But Markovich is quick to allay any foreboding that may come the way of folk of a technophobic ilk. “This is the only example of the use of AI in the festival. It doesn’t exactly criticize AI, but it considers the presence of artificial intelligence. This is a very warm show with Gelbart on synthesizer with a chamber ensemble. It is not as technological as it appears.”
THE TECHNOLOGICAL input is definitely there, but it is largely of the old-school kind. There are no state-of-the art computer shenanigans in harness here. In pure computer realms, Alpha technology, which was introduced in 1992, hails from primordial climes and thinking.
“Before ChatGPT, Adi programmed some kind of algorithm and created his own kind of artificial intelligence. He created a computer he called Alpha after the technology, and taught it to write poetry, which Gelbart set to music.”
The idea was to humanize, or animate, the “golem” and enable it to work alongside the corporeal musicians. “In the show, alongside the quartet, the computer in fact sings Gelbart’s poetry.” Hence the performance moniker.
Markovich, who utilizes a fair bit of advanced technological devices in his own work, is clearly enamored with the artistic and existential possibilities offered by intersections between the human and the virtual domains. “This creation, and the text itself, bring the human into the work, and also the computer, the virtual, and the adulation for artificial intelligence. The poems the computer wrote are primitive. They are not very sophisticated and don’t work too well,” he chuckles.
The artistic director harks back to a time when computers were generally confined to big corporations and academic and state institutions, were of elephantine proportions, and produced punch cards, which then had to be deciphered by trained personnel. Markovich clearly appreciates the more tangible side of technological spheres.
“There is well-known TV footage of [Israel Prize-winning poet and translator] Avraham Shlonsky, from 1968, when he says that man invented the machine and thinks he can play God,” the festival’s program director says. “He gives an example that a computer will never be able to translate the [first] word [in the Bible] ‘bereshit’ with the Hebrew meaning as it appears in the Torah.” That comes through in Poems by Alpha.
“Gelbart plays around with that. He keeps close tabs on the human side and human expression.”
THERE IS, indeed, an abundance of actual, living and breathing – one might even go far as to say fallible – human presence right across the festival program, as well as in the choice of the home base and what it represents. Canada House is intrinsic to the rollout, not only in hosting the exhibitions and other events but also with regard to its role within the community as a whole.
“Ordinarily, Canada House ‘drifts’ between its various functions as a community center that accommodates afternoon and evening classes, an adult day center, a youth center, offices, and an art school,” Markovich notes in his program text. That, he adds, colors the nature of the artistic offerings. “Each of the communities that use the building has its own sound, rhythm, and scale, creating a complex harmony. Evidence of these different uses can be found in every corner: office, classroom, meeting room, studio, reception desk, and recording studio.”
All of the above take on new temporary purviews next week. “During the festival, the building’s spaces are taken over and transformed into temporary exhibition venues,” Markovich continues. “The meeting room has turned into a breathing workshop boutique, and the classrooms are now noise pavilions and an opera hall. The hallway, corridors, stairs, and elevator, which usually serve as generators of transition from place to place, are reformulated as a ‘non-place,’ a place of lingering and pause.
“The works featured in the festival are a type of traveling shows: rest stops that provide solace and allow one to continue. They are fleeting in nature, like a melancholy tourist spectacle; a traveling circus tent.”
There is clearly a much-needed restorative element in there somewhere – which, Markovich believes, is central to the festival theme and the location. “Every artistic act involves setting out for some kind of ‘wandering.’ You venture into the unknown, and you blur and examine boundaries. But I felt that was too general in nature, so I brought it back down to earth and I looked at the physical place where this year’s festival takes place – Canada House in Musrara. It is a place of healing that combines many different forms of life which exist in tandem. Groups go there from all sectors of the population, which is wonderful.”
That leaves its imprint on the physical surroundings. “There is a room which is a bit like a WeWork, hi-tech-oriented space. Another room looks like an avant-garde music studio.”
There are also photographs of members of the Black Panther political activist group from the 1970s that serve as a reminder of some of the stormy goings-on of those days which sparked a sociopolitical earthquake whose tremors continue to resound across Israeli society. “That resonates the heart of the neighborhood and its history. I endeavored to work with the architecture of the building, the aesthetics of the spaces there.” Which, of course, makes Musrara Mix a definitively site-specific creation.
FESTIVALGOERS ARE encouraged to join in the exploratory fun, particularly by participating in the Take It from Here interactive performance devised by Maya Sharabani. Visitors are invited to assume the guise of a “nameless nomad” by shedding “the burden of identifying objects,” such as their smartphones, house keys, and wallets.
The Canada House cafeteria area will be transformed into a check-in kiosk, where a faux flight attendant will conduct a brief compatibility interview as you arrive, whereupon the personal effects are screened and packed into a bundle, à la Charlie Chaplin’s The Little Tramp. We then set off and make our way in and around the various festival spots, hopefully unfettered by the physical and emotional weight of everyday concerns. The event takes place daily between 8 p.m. and 11 p.m.
Markovich returns to the real physical world thread, citing another participatory berth. “There is a sort of guided show by a puppeteer named Moti Brecher, called Guidance. He takes you into a guided lesson with his puppets and characters. His characters always have a kind of pedagogue, psychologist side to them.” That proffers a different slant on the content. “You have the option of experiencing the exhibitions through Moti’s puppets. That is also connected to the desire to introduce real life, the concrete, to the festival.”
In fact, Brecher and his creations will be hard to miss. He will summarily schlep the human-sized puppets, as if they are weighing him down; and should they so desire, visitors will be able to view the items on show through the eyes of a sociologist, a psychologist, or even an art critic. And all to good user-friendly ends, says Markovich. “They reflect the thoughts, fears, and dreams of a viewer who is trying to make his way through the maze of consciousness created by the festival.”
Presumably, that may well leave the ordinary woman or man on the street with a more comfortable and easily digestible multidisciplinary art experience. “Brecher looks at the format of the guided tour-museum walk,” the artistic director adds. “The tour, meant to provide information and background about the artworks, is reimagined as a work of art in its own right.” Sounds spot-on.
THERE ARE intriguing confluences everywhere you look across the three days. Some feature artists from differing areas of pursuit, while others dip into numerous seams on their own. Virtuoso drummer Gal Lazer pertains to the latter category as he takes off on all manner of rhythmic and musical departures with his new band on May 7 (9:15 p.m.). Lazer’s music is described as “an exploration of minimalism and virtuosity, combining elements of jazz, experimental electronica, krautrock, obscure garage and raw acoustic performance.” That should get the pulse going and the juices duly flowing.
The compelling left-field live offerings just keep on coming, particularly in the shape of the Sunflower Seeds show (May 7, 9 p.m.), when Ran Nahmias performs a piece for loudspeaker, cello, theremin, and the eponymous edibles. On the video side, there is a gripping work by Tamar Hirschfeld, while Elevator by Esther Biberfeld and Lilach Moskovitz examines the titular cramped confines as the scene of everyday events.
It goes without saying that Markovich is not oblivious to the regional political developments and ongoing existential challenges, and that informs the spirit and physical layout of Musrara Mix. He uses the term “defamiliarization” on several occasions. “That is meant to shake things up, to allow us to step out of the comfort zone, and gain a fresh perspective on life,” he declares. “It helps us to see the bigger picture.”
And that underlines art’s crucial role in our lives.
For more information: musraramix.com/2025/en/event/173/
