Ghosts and habitus: The lasting hegemony in Israeli theatre

A recent Israeli newscast described the retirement of a septuagenarian stage actor. His story, like those of his Ashkenazi (Western-origin) ‘founders’ generation’, harked to his youth in Israel’s first decade. One day, unemployed, he had visited a Tel Aviv repertory theatre and met a famous stage director, who asked him simple questions – How tall are you? Can you play the harmonica? – and hired him. The newsclip focused on his last job, directing a play in which he had once acted. With historical pictures in the background, the narrator described Jewish actors of Russian origin who had become world-famous and then proclaimed this group the ‘royalty’ of Israeli theatre. The anecdote underscored the stature that the actor-director’s lengthy career had given him. The actor’s biography and retirement festivities reflected a privilege reserved for such artists in determining taste, value, and status in the theatrical arts.

The commonness of ostensibly consensual anecdotes such as these, however, triggers an oppositionist reading of the message (Parkin, 1972: 17). One oddity here is the obviousness – the legitimacy – of lauding certain actors and their theatrical legacy in an Israeli cultural field that accommodates non-hegemonic theatres, ethnicities, and schools of thought (Urian, 2008). From a Gramscian perspective, which considers the mainstream bourgeois theatre a disseminator of hegemony (Oz, 1999) and, in popular culture, hegemony’s servant (Hall, 1986), this question may be considered naïve. It vindicates itself by subverting the consensus that surrounds dominant Israeli sociocultural values and structures and hosting a discourse, partly post-Zionist (Silberstein, 1999), that challenges the legitimacy of representational demarches such as the foregoing and refuses to succumb to an ‘open’ hegemony (Lears, 1985: 574). The second oddity is the media’s willingness to serve this particular group of seniors by lavishing coverage on their retirement although Israel’s Western society is typified elsewhere (unjustifiably) by exclusion and ageism (Palmore, 1991). These oddities sharpen in view of a recent play that centers on veteran actors’ retirement hardships. In a newspaper interview related to the play, one of its veteran leading actors describes his amazement upon encountering, at the theatre, a hardscrabble Mizrahi (originating in a Muslim country) woman whom he had ‘known from the souk’. Although she was a regular theatregoer, he wondered aloud, ‘What are you doing here’?!

The many oppositionist readings of these messages imply that the Israeli national theatre remains a ‘high culture’ arena by which the cultural elite distinguishes itself from the ‘masses’, non-Ashkenazi (non-Western-origin) Jews, non-Jewish minorities, and young aficionados of popular culture, and justifies its social privilege (Urian, 2004; Feder and Katz-Gerro, 2012). Ever since Israel was born, the repertory theatre has taken an Orientalist approach to Mizrahim and Arabs, displaying attraction and repulsion, stereotyping, and marginalization in scripts and on stage. ‘The Jewish-Israeli playwright does not want the Arab to assimilate into the Jewish majority culture’, whereas the pejorative labeling of the Mizrahi still persists on stage and even ‘penetrates television drama’ (Urian, 2004: 247; 2006).

Moving from theatre to media, the theatrical elite derives power from a visibility for which the disadvantaged pay in the coin of underrepresentation (Lev-Aladgem, 2010; Feder and Katz-Gerro, 2012) – in what Lash (2007: 75) might consider ‘leaking [out] politics’ in a post-hegemonic era.

Studying Israel’s two most important repertory theatres (2007–2012), I found that this institution, while trying to adjust to artistic changes, has been preserving and cultivating a cultural hegemony represented mainly by veteran Ashkenazi artists – an island of nostalgia and resistance to popular culture’s pluralism and discourse that derives its legitimacy from the pathos of nation-building and art. The deconstruction of the Israeli-Zionist hegemony into separate subcultures (Kimmerling, 1999) and the state’s subventioning of mainstream theatres (Feder and Katz-Gerro, 2012) underlie the persistence of these institutions’ national commitment and their perception of veteran actors as the last mediators between national consciousness and daily culture and life. Given this historical deconstruction, in which power changes hands amid multifaceted struggle, my research exposed the nature of a cultural subhegemony.

This article decodes the ostensibly irrational overlooking of ‘voicing hegemony’ practices in a lively public debate that favors cultural pluralism and pushes the limits of the seemingly politically incorrect. Against the background of a copious literature that challenges cultural hierarchies (Storey, 2000), the ethnography examines this hegemonic group from within and analyzes the deep contents of the theatrical culture that sustain the voices of veteran theatre artists, the self-designated representatives of ‘high culture’. What is it about the theatre that preserves the actors’ confidence in their cultural supremacy? The ethnography shows that the persistence of the hegemonic message in the media is supported by, and may owe its existence to, a theatrical habitus powerfully inherent to the theatrical art.

This Bourdieuian concept encourages investigation of the meanings and origins of class difference (Reay, 2004; Jenkins, 1992) – a valuable line of inquiry given the attacks on the ‘high culture’ that this hegemony represents. Such assaults reflect the (understandable) ignorance of the backstage theatrical world in view of Israel’s cultural discourse, dominated by a Foucaultian postmodernism that stresses power/oppression relations and discouraging dialogue and familiarity (Heilbronner, 2004).

This study favors Adkins and Emmison’s (1992: 339) approach, which faults the theatre for using artistic self-justification to serve hegemonic control. While linking theatrical practice with Bourdieu, it contends that, absent systematic analyses such as those in ethnographic case studies, Bourdieu’s explanation of class relations is essentially incomplete.

To understand the theatrical habitus, I propose a sociological reading of a theory from the theatrical field. First, I introduce Carlson’s theory (The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as a Memory Machine, 2001) on the tendency of theatres to return to the past. Given its compatibility with the ‘institutional habitus’ concept, this tendency reflects a theoretical demarche that contrasts with Shevtsova’s (2002) remarks on the limited incidence of habitus and champ in the theatre. Below I offer three manifestations of the Israeli theatre’s habitus, each enhancing actors’ professional capital: ‘pioneering’, ‘ghosting’, and ‘classics’. The Conclusion branches into the larger theatrical habitus and its contribution to over-conservatism (continued voicing of veteran artists’ hegemony) within and without the theatre. Finally, I discuss the singular characteristics of time for the back-to-the-past proclivity relative to the Bourdieuian concept of habitus.

‘Ghosting’ in the theatre and the institutional habitus

The bourgeois theatre isolates itself from mass culture by marking itself as a current archaic. It resists postmodern discourses and trends that influence other arts and sciences (Sevänen, 2001) and the cultural struggle over images and values that shape and/or mediate our perceptions of reality (Fortier, 2002). From the artistic standpoint, some claim that its conservative image lies in its ‘back-to-the-past’ predisposition, a quality developed in the theatre research literature (Birringer, 1991; Rayner, 2006; Blau, 1990). Carlson (2001) in particular attributes to the theatre an obsessive, all-embracing characteristic called ‘ghosting’, the tendency to present the audience with something it previously encountered. The theatre reconstructs past events in imaginary ways and thereby reiterates cultural myths; it is ‘powerfully haunted by a sense of repetition and involve[s] the whole range of human activity and its context’ (p. 3). Even the postmodern stage, Carlson contends, is deeply committed to reconstructing previously-used physical and textual materials.

This theory has two political implications for our topic. First, ‘ghosting’ resembles the ‘aura’, by which Benjamin (1973) describes the isolation of the traditional visual arts in the technical-reproduction era. Ghosting is inseparable from the traditionalism, ritualism, and nonrecurrence of theatrical performance. Second, Carlson alludes to the theatre’s role in the preservation of hegemonic ideas:

The founding myths and legends of cultures [are] registered […] by theatrical repetition, and as modern nationalism arose to challenge the older religious faiths, national myths, legends, and historical stories again utilized the medium of theatre to present – or, rather, to represent, reinscribe, and reinforce – this new cultural construction. (2001: 3)

Since Carlson’s idea has sunk roots in the theatre literature and fits well with my findings, I propose that theatrical ‘ghosting’ – the ‘back-to-the past’ tendency – be explored under the term ‘institutional habitus’ in reference to the norms, practices, and internalized dispositions of particular social classes or groups (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977 ). Several analyses of the performing arts (Shevtsova, 2002; Wainwright et al., 2006) invoke this term to denote preferences and relations deeply and unconsciously rooted in institutional practice at multiple levels (Thomas, 2002). These institutional contents, which Bourdieu (1990a: 53) saw as ‘a world of already realized ends’, mediate the influence of a cultural group or social class on individuals’ behavior. Inclusive of symbols, artifacts, and knowledge that are perceived as more than legitimate, they determine personal and group immortalization. If so, habitus is key in understanding social class.

Below I show that ‘ghosting’ enhances the theatre’s status among the arts and serves veteran actors by linking them to the ghosts. In Carlson’s theory, the link is reflected in the actors’ difficulty in freeing themselves from the aura of previously played characters because ‘[their] new roles become, in a very real sense, ghosted by previous ones’ (Carlson, 2001: 67).

Mainly with veteran actors in mind, Carlson adds:

One of the most powerful and positive experiences in the theatre arises from seeing a series of creations by those great actors in every theatre generation who in addition to creating memorable roles gradually take on a special aura of achievement, becoming in a sense indexes of the art itself.

Turning to well-known actors such as John Gielgud or Sarah Bernard, Carlson continues:

When such actors have established themselves at the pinnacle of their profession, their appearance in each new role […] is ghosted not only by memories of specific past performances but, perhaps even more important, by a general audience awareness of the significance of the achievement represented by those performances. (2001: 92)

In this theory, theatrical ghosting is a form of nostalgia that elevates the performative achievements of a lengthy acting career into ‘indexes of the art itself’. As a back-to-the-past art form, the theatre not only needs veteran ‘cultural heroes’ but also allows them to determine what is art and what is not. Using ethnographic observations that I derive from Carlson’s theory, I will show that, unlike the mordant ageist connotations of ‘back-to-the-past’ and ‘spirits’, these archetypical characters may create a basis on which the actors may rest their ‘professional capital’– an outcome associated with the status of the historical dimension of the habitus (cf. Bourdieu, 1977: 82). Historically, a habitus is created in a process of ‘interiorization of the exterior’ (Bourdieu, 1980: 94), in which dispositions are transferred generationally as conventions. Like Shevtsova (2002), I find this conceptualization apt for the study of the theatrical subculture of a hegemonic group of artists. My interpretation, however, identifies history not only as a period of time in which internalization takes place (cf. Bourdieu) but as a value in itself – one that claims primacy in the theatrical habitus and structures the power of the hegemony.

I refer mainly to the archaic characteristic of the bourgeois theatre and the glorification of themes such as ‘pioneering’, ‘ghosting’, and ‘classics’ in its past-oriented discourse and practice. Such themes, generationally transferred, not only create a ‘space of possibilities’ (Bourdieu, 1992: 326) for artistic action (Shevtsova, 2002: 58) but equip the habitus with insidious invisible contents that outlast randomness and allow the habitus to institutionalize itself into a structure endowed with power and control (Shevtsova, 2002).

The ethnography below illuminates the link between unique practices in the theatrical institutional habitus and the professional capital that the actors dispense as their careers wind down. These processes are not foreign to the contemporary Western establishment theatrical tradition because various national and international elites have appropriated and de-nationalized them (Shevtsova, 2002: 49).

Methodology

My fieldwork spanned the theatrical arts from playwright training to post-premier performances – acting schools, academic departments of theatrical arts, and two repertory theatres. I gathered the findings via participant observation, 32 semi-structured interviews, and in-depth interviews with artists.

Twenty-two actors aged 62–95 (average: 77), two-thirds men, were interviewed. One theatre’s management helped to connect me with the first respondents, who referred me to others until the findings were saturated enough to support insights that yield a historical, artistic, and cultural picture of the theatre from the veteran actors’ personal perspective. The familiarity established with the respondents in the interviews steered me to this goal.

Most of the interviews took place in respondents’ homes and lasted two to three hours. Generally, the questions probed the actors’ attitudes and careers in a past-to-present-to-future manner. Before the interviews, I studied the actors’ biographies and used information from them in open-ended items such as ‘How did you become an actor/actress?’ ‘What image did the actor in Israel of the 1960s have?’ and ‘What is the meaning of play-acting in your life?’ The purpose, apart from soliciting information, was to establish rapport with the respondents and assure the trustworthiness of the data. The semi-structured nature of the interview allowed me to derive more specific questions from the respondents’ narratives.

Next, I observed one play for eight months, from rehearsal to the tenth public performance. The cast included five veteran actors, two of whom I had interviewed, and three much younger ones. I also watched the veterans participate in many theatrical rituals and events. The information that follows attests, by triangulation, to the validity of the findings and conclusions (Denzin and Lincoln, 2000 ).

A thematic analysis of the interviews and observations yielded primary and secondary categories patterned after the concept-indicator model (Strauss, 1987 ). Based on the primary categories, I sorted the data in accordance with aspects such as the actors’ biographies, the choice of acting as a career, actor–director relations, the actor’s social mission, etc. These secondary categories produced a map and differentiated among meanings in the primary categories.

Reviewing the transcripts and categories, I marked the one recurrent theme that pertained directly to a topic that the findings accentuated: the theatrical habitus. Key issues in this theme included the meaning of acting for the self, professional perceptions of acting, an elderly actor’s experiences on and off stage, attitudes toward the theatre as a cultural institution, criticism of young actors, and pioneering in the Israeli theatre. To validate the interpretation, I strictly controlled the choice of themes and extracted the information that which would best validate my main argument.

Back to the European founding fathers

One way the Israeli theatre’s back-to-the-past habitus sustains its hegemonic effect and helps to define veteran actors’ professional capital is by retelling biographical and historical accounts that confirm the early Zionist values of pioneering and Western modernism. The Zionist ideology retrospectively defines the veteran progenitors of the theatre as ‘founding fathers’ whose culture should be viewed as national and not ethnic (Ben-Rafael, 2000: 492). The intellectual element of this cultural hegemony relates to the link between Westernism and cultural elitism, a Eurocentrism that resides in the subconscious like a doxa, a principle of social order that functions subconsciously as common sense (Bourdieu, 1984). The pioneering myth abetted the construction and reconstruction of hegemony in Israel, blurred the state/society distinction, and circumscribed the potential ambitus of knowledge, action, or dissent (Ben-Eliezer, 1998 ). This cultural constraint, which dismissed anything unrepresentative of the progress of Western civilization, was so Orientalist that it may have reflected Zionism’s efforts to join the European family of nations (Khazzoom, 1999). Given the roles of modernism and European liberal humanism as ideological sources for the Israeli artistic milieu, the political establishment subventions theatres and requires them not only to meet high artistic standards but also to participate in social and national missions. Moreover, it supports only ‘high culture’ institutions such as orchestras and repertory theatres, considering them alone ‘pure art’ (Ben-Zvi, 1996: 103).

My veteran actors had lengthy careers – from 30 to 60 years – in the Israeli theatre. Most immigrated to Israel from Europe immediately after the Second World War, some having lost families in the Holocaust; about one-third were Israeli-born. Some were members of kibbutzim (collective communities in Israel that were traditionally based on agriculture); a few served in military performing troupes. Their biographies date from the dawn of Israeli statehood. They are inexhaustible sources of information about the theatres’ first days in the theatrical capital, Tel Aviv, their collective values, and their metamorphoses since then. It is from their Eurocentric, pioneering, back-to-the-past stories that they derive their identity.

One actor expressed this as follows:

Ours was a romantic generation […]. We established theatres […]. Do you know what it is to set up a cultural institution like a theatre in a place like 1973 Beersheva [the largest city in the Negev desert of southern Israel]?! When the trip from Tel Aviv to Beersheva took three and a half hours?! Do you know what it is to establish a theatre in a place where a theatre used to visit once a month?! It’s like when Ben-Gurion [the primary founder of the State of Israel and the first Prime Minister of Israel] established the state. […] You’re really creating something.

Another actress recounted:

We would go out to kibbutzim and perform in all kinds of places on impromptu stages […]. We acted in all the wars. It was a good atmosphere, of hope despite all the suffering. Of building […].

To better appreciate the hegemonic significance of this pioneer narrative, one may consider Project Telem, which in the early 1950s brought plays produced in Tel Aviv to temporary settlements countrywide in order to acquaint immigrants (mostly Mizrahim, originating in a Muslim country) with the local culture and lifestyle (Ben-Zvi, 1996). The puzzling thing is that much of its repertoire targeted East European Jews and was indirectly associated with the Yiddish theatre in the shtetl . An actress recalled:

I was raised in a home of Yiddish actors. Like in Sholom Aleichem’s novel Wandering Stars, there were itinerant troupes that went from shtetl to shtetl and put on plays […]. I connect with that because I’m related to my people.

Not only did Telem overlook the immigrant audience’s origins, its secular liberal contents clashed with the immigrants’ religious outlook and undermined their traditional family structure in an apt reflection of the repertory theatres’ Eurocentrism (Naor, 1986). Indeed, a veteran actor alluded to the nexus of cultural pioneerism and Eurocentrism by expanding his biography to the national theatre’s founding generation:

Habima Theatre was a group of lunatics who spoke Hebrew, a language spoken by no one on earth. Outside there’s gunfire from the Russian Revolution and they’re going to set up a theatre. In 1932, they started up a ‘penny opera’ in Berlin; two weeks later they were working on it here.

The hierarchic dichotomy of Western and Eastern Europe nourished the national theatre’s Orientalism. Thus, the theatre excluded not only Mizrahim but even, at times, old-time Ashkenazim whose artistic oeuvres it suspected of local provenance. An actor explained:

My father was one of the founders of the first ‘Hebrew theatre’ in 1919. When Habima reached this country, they didn’t want to accept it. They took the Jews living in Palestine for rubes, natives whose art was unworthy.

In a nutshell, this was the attitude of leading Zionist national hegemonists who associated the East with Levantine barbarism (Khazzoom, 1999).

If so, it is no surprise that most of the veteran actors in my study attended important European or American acting schools and elaborated on this with unconcealed pride. ‘I went to the academy in London for studies’, one actor said, describing how he had packed up after settling in Tel Aviv. Another actor related, ‘I [studied] with the greatest theatre teacher in the world after Stanislavsky, Lee Strasberg […]. He let me observe at his private school, too’.

These ‘present-at-the-creation’ accounts demonstrate that the Israeli theatre began long before it completed its professionalization. The actors’ stories relate mainly to two of the three mainstream theatres in Israel today – Habima, Cameri, and Beit Lessin – which still appeal primarily to Ashkenazim (Urian, 2004).

The theatre, its directors, and its younger cast take the veterans’ ageing into account not only by offering emoluments (special headsets for the hearing-impaired, driving the actors to performances, etc.), but also, and particularly, by treating rehearsals as a consensual venue for something more anecdotal and personal: the veterans’ heroic nostalgia. Behind the scenes, before an ‘audience’ of young actors, veterans are allowed to reconnect associatively with events such as the following:

[This famous American-Jewish director] was considered a serious rising force in theatre and cinema back then […]. He wanted me to star in Look Homeward, Angel, a play based on the biography of Thomas Wolfe […]. As young actors, we took him as a teacher because Israel didn’t have a drama school […]. We’re still in touch with his wife. His first wife was my mother in the play. The great star, together with [actresses’ names], are the three graces of the theatre.

Relating to such stories, a young actress said, ‘The [veteran] actors have things in common. They tell the best stories. They gossip about people who’re dead, but it’s tremendous’.

By implication, the veteran actors express the back-to-the-past inclination by leapfrogging-in-reverse over the birth of a new generation of actors and some abatement of the theatres’ Eurocentrism. Even so, in a ‘ghosty’ process, most have received symbolic gestures of appreciation and privilege in recent years, e.g., honorary doctorates and life-achievement awards that mark them as last hegemonic agents.

Back to the character: Acting the ‘possessed’

A central ideology in the professional theatre, especially for the veteran actors, is Stanislavsky’s Method acting. ‘The Method’, developed in New York by Lee Strasberg, became the ‘preeminent acting style of Americans’ in the 1950s (Vineberg, 1991: 5–6) and strongly influenced the development of the 20th-century global theatre. In 1920–21, the Habima center in Moscow hosted lessons in the Stanislavsky method for (among others) 34 of its Jewish actors. In Israel, the Method – considered a ‘Russian legacy’ – is still taught in acting schools (Tartakovsky, 2013).

Some credit ‘the Method’ with affording such creative freedom as to exclude it from the discussion of the habitus and the ‘objective relations’ to which Bourdieu pointed (Shevtsova, 2000: 48). I differ, viewing it as an applied component of the back-to-the-past habitus. By demanding that actors demonstrate their connection with their often historical and hegemonic characters, the Method reveals their dedication to the past and their professional belonging and capital. It also strongly values the expression of genuine emotion, identifies the actor’s personality as the source of all psychological truth, and prods actors to display almost religious devotion on the basis of the power of truth in acting (Bandelj, 2003). It values intuition and the subconscious highly (Tartakovsky, 2013) because these abet the experience of ‘possession’ – eliminating the distance between actor and character and subverting the masks of the role.

My respondents expressed this totalistic theory of the actor’s selfness in various ways:

‘I searched every character not only to identify with her but also to find my identity within her’; ‘When I act, I lend myself out. I shed my skin’; ‘It’s your inner soul that feeds the role. Ultimately, the character should always be you, even if he’s […] a monster’; ‘This character is me in my absolute honesty’. ‘To play the character, I take it all from myself. That’s the secret’; ‘You breathe living spirit [into the characters]’.

I found a link between the actors’ theatrical possession, which necessitates a return to the character’s past, and their professional capital. ‘Being’ the character is a theatrical feat of magic that accomplished actors are privileged to perform. One veteran actor explained how he acquired this ability:

I managed to separate my acting career into three periods. […] The first was ‘playing’, in the sense of child’s play. You play, you don’t know anything yet, you play as a child plays in the street, in the yard, at home. Then you enter the ‘performing’ period. To perform is to present something. By now you have tools, you know how to [play] a thief or a clerk, a person in any occupation. When the third period, ‘acting’, comes around, it’s not enough just to play or perform; you have to be there with yourself. It’s being. Being is a very high phase.

Among my intergenerational subjects, ‘possession work’ was done almost solely by veteran actors, suggesting the existence of an additional level of back-to-the-past acting: the exaltation of the historical Method per se. This work included lengthy discussions about the meaning of the character’s life, cultural context, personality, weaknesses, strengths, etc., description of the correspondence between the actor’s self and the demands of role-work, difficulty in obeying directors’ instructions, and the actors’ proposals to improve the role-work;. Taken together, these contributed to veteran actors’ ‘feel for the play’, ¹ suggesting that dramatic ‘possession’ is a supreme value. This was quintessentially expressed when the character of Solness in The Master Builder possessed the lead actor to the extent of a bitter set-to with the director about how Solness should die at the end of the play and a display of hostility toward a young actress who played a girl who, in the veteran’s eyes, did not love him enough. The actor again conflated himself with the character when he stopped the traffic in the middle of a pedestrian crossing next to the theatre and shouted, ‘I’m Solness’!

In regard to classical or historical characters – the kind to which the theatre tends to return – ‘possessive’ behaviors such as these enhance actors’ reputations and confirm veterans’ self-concept. One actor demonstrated this by declaring, ‘We’re a generation of giants’.

While the theatre’s tendency to social realism rules out the possibility of, say, casting a young actor as King Lear, the veterans’ rehearsal patterns create a generation gap: they dictate the contents and pace of the rehearsals and demand the attentiveness and cooperation of young members, who admit that their work is more ‘technical’.

A young actress said: ‘I can’t stand Stanislavsky’s method […]. I fake emotion […]. For me, cracking a scene and a character is mathematics’. Another young actress explained:

We young people are very cynical. We do dream, but we’re terribly aware of everything and the older generation, not so much. They’re awfully romantic, D’s generation, how they work. I saw it in the rehearsals. It takes quite a serious effort to play yourself.

The young confirm the veterans’ professional capital by expressing amazement and respect or by daring backstage to complain about the elders’ challenge to their patience, professional outlooks, and self-esteem. Professional capital is defined, it seems, not by the performance per se but by control of the intellectual discourse and the impression of adhering to an ‘important’ character and displaying familiarity with his/her personal and historical characteristics. Here, as in the conclusion that Wainwright et al. (2006) reached about manifestations of institutional habitus in the ballet, the power to determine ‘what’s important’ illustrates the power struggles in the field.

Back to classics and the living ghosts

The bourgeois theatre’s tendency toward classical plays mirrors the nexus of the back-to-the-past habitus and ‘high culture’. Like a hierarchical comparison of classical music and jazz (Bourdieu, 1979: 95–6), classical plays enjoy primacy because they return to legacies such as those of Socrates, Aristotle, and Plato, who enriched Western culture with principles for the development of the psyche, wisdom, and ethics (Aloni, 2012). In the Israeli theatrical discourse, the ideal exalted life is strongly identified with ancient Greece and Western culture (and not with Judaism). Stakeholders express this axiomatically in their remarks to professional journals. In one such journal, we read that classical plays should become: ‘an inseparable part of [Israeli] society’s cultural repertoire […]; the true value of a creative artist is tested in how he copes with material that is considered fundamental to the medium […] such as Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex or Shakespeare’s Hamlet’ (Shifman, 1985: 38).

Artists old and young find in classical plays virtues, linguistic wealth, a challenge that elevates acting to art and transcendence. All actors concur that extracting a character from a text is an intellectual labor most saliently manifested in the classical plays, which, ‘though antiquated, […] possess a secret about the encounter between the living and the cosmos’. Among Israeli intellectuals, ‘classical’ is synonymous with ‘refined’; it is ‘the crux of the theatre’, ‘universal’, and ‘always current’. Due to its value contents, although rooted in the distant past it scoffs at the young Israeli culture as a ‘non-culture’ (Shifman, 1985: 40) and underlies its critique of the commercialization of the theatre and the incursion of ‘entertainment-like’ plays in today’s repertoire (cf. Bourdieu, 1979: 260–5, on the elites’ aggrandizement of the ‘serious’ theatre.)

Most veteran actors once played young characters in classical works; some continue to play elderly characters in the same plays today. Their ageing amid the timeless reality of the plays evokes the metaphor of the habitus as ‘fish in water’, which alludes to the power of the obvious (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 127) and makes them quintessential representatives of the classics in the Israeli theatre. The classics are material in the actors’ professional capital and honors. The President of Israel said as much in a letter to a veteran actor who had won a lifetime-achievement award: ‘You are one of the great actors […] responsible for the most important classics in the Israeli theatre’.

Theatre walls are festooned with photos of veterans playing classical characters, and veterans’ discourses in rehearsals and public forums repeatedly mention the experience of the self that these roles offer. Some veterans consider themselves ‘tribal elders’ whose duty it is decry ‘rating culture’ and television reality shows. They do this in Shakespearean terms: ‘Because we want to “to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time their form and pressure”‘ (Hamlet).

Before delivering his life-achievement-award speech, a veteran actor told me:

It’s a kulturkampf. The theatre has survived since prehistory. […]So I ask, do you need [TV reality shows?] No! Stage actors should be better than reality. We mustn’t give in, but it takes lots of [financial] support. I can demand it as a prizewinner. I say, let’s continue to demand of ourselves to fight […]. I feel the responsibility of the elder of the congregation. There’s a legacy here that connects with the past through the future.

When they die, veteran actors themselves are liable to ‘become classics’. The fact that they are the most identified with classical plays converges with the lack of a classical tradition in the Israeli theatre (Rokem, 2001). The back-to-the-past habitus stands out in the funeral rituals and memorialization practices that surround the demise of members of the ‘founders’ generation’. The masks of roles that they had played during their careers are enlarged and stationed in the theatre as a pantheon of titans of the spirit. A veteran actor’s eulogy for an even more veteran actor expressed one version of this habitus:

We meet at last, here on the stage, [with you] prostrate in the coffin. The real sanctuaries of an actor’s glory, however, are not in physical places. They are in our memory, our hearts, where the business attains power and size and its correct and true scope. In fact, it is when the curtain falls, as it does right now at the end of the show, that the immense impression starts to build. Only when an actor departs does the legend begin.

By classic-izing veteran actors, the theatre adopts two roles that, while external to it, are performative in terms of the characteristic of theatrical ghosting. First, the theatre, like a family, performs funeral ceremonies, pays to drive people to the cemetery, and participates in burial rituals and memorial convocations. Second, like a state, it commemorates the deceased by establishing foundations and naming its public spaces for them. After seven decades of the Hebrew theatre, such endeavors remain commonplace and are accompanied by a discourse wrapped in mystical theatre consciousness. ‘The dead run the theatre here’, a theatre director-general told his staff as they prepared to participate in one of these rituals. He said this to substantiate what everybody knows: the veteran actors’ status in the war between the living and the dead is so disproportionate as to allow them to determine the theatre’s priorities. In my view, this statement is a version of Rayner’s argument in Ghosts: Death’s Double and the Phenomena of Theatre (2006: xi): ‘[The theatre refuses] in a deep sense to consent to the idea that invisible, immaterial, or abstract forces are illusions, that the spirit of the dead are imaginary, or that the division between matter and spirit is absolute’. Another version is the ‘familial’ memorial ceremony, in which theatre people glorify deceased veterans and converse excitedly with their spirits. I observed this when I observed a master of ceremonies on stage ‘speaking’ with a huge poster photo of S., an artist who had died recently:

That’s S.! The room where you worked is already named for you. No one has to say, ‘I’m going for makeup’. You can say, ‘I’m going to S’. Whenever we enter your room and see your typical heartwarming posture, it helps us feel at home, in this home, where spirits that protect us are already hovering. Let’s begin with an interview with S., from the clip of the fiftieth anniversary [of the theatre]. S., you have the floor.

A theatrical dialogue of this kind connects artists with the veterans’ spirit in the manner described above; it molds reality into a disconnected theatrical performance that asserts the right to sanction the irrational. Furthermore, the exclusivity of ‘family’ ceremonies and the sorrow of parting with the deceased often provide a pretext for the unadulterated exaltation of the founders’ generation: ‘Really, he’ll be terribly missed. The theatre was full of luminaries that have been slowly extinguished, and gloom has taken over. It’s sad’. The ceremonies also gave free rein to storytelling that serves this exaltation. In this context, an uninhibitedly Orientalist hegemonic discourse takes place. One actor related: ‘I was privileged for years to have the company of a fascinating conversation partner […]. With her, everything was drenched in East European culture, of course’. The following was said about a veteran actor: ‘It’s sad for us because we remember you: charming, courteous, European affectations’. An actress recalled that L. had designed a curly wig for one of her performances; when a critic of the play claimed that the actress resembled a popular male Mizrahi singer, L. redesigned the wig in a European style. ‘She immediately switched to smooth hair and bought me more appropriate makeup’. A veteran woman artist reported about D.: ‘I saw him eating falafel [a Mizrahi delicacy] with his wife. It gave me a culture shock. They told me, ‘Yeah, sometimes we like to go slumming’. It gave me the legitimacy that I’d lacked until then [to eat falafel]’.

Reflexive remarks by a veteran stage director at a ceremony confirm the dissociation of these matters from social changes in Israel:

We take our acting so seriously that we don’t say ‘It’s just theatre’. One of the representative things in the architecture of the [theatre] building is the transparent ceiling. It says there’s a world outside. Anyone who goes out for coffee and looks up sees a clear summer day or a cloudy day, because sometimes when we enter the theatre we feel cloistered and forget that there’s a world beyond us, that we’re not the center of the world, its capital, and the only people here.

When the funeral at the theatre ends, the ‘familial’ audience customarily stands up and applauds in honor of the spirit of the deceased, whose coffin occupies the stage. This is a ‘new’ tradition, recently inaugurated by a veteran actor when he approached the coffin in mid-ceremony and spoke with the spirit. The custom of applauding, however, dates to ancient Greece, he reminded the audience, which responded by applauding effusively. With that, the actor turned back to the coffin and said, ‘You see, N., you’re being honored by artists’. The living actor profited from this initiative in that the tradition was named for him. This tradition, accepted willingly by the audience of artists, is a performative monument that confirms the back-to-the-past habitus in a powerful symbolic way.

Discussion and conclusions

Above I asked where the cultural hegemony in Israel’s bourgeois theatre finds its durability. My working hypothesis was that the persistence of voicing-hegemony practices in mass media and the mainstream theatre requires a cultural explanation in view of two phenomena in today’s Israel. First, cultural-pluralism discourses in the public sphere are increasingly legitimate, evidenced in the vigorous escalation of Israel’s kulturkampf at the present writing, drawing banner headlines in the media. In this kulturkampf, the implications of which are not yet clear and deserve separate research attention, the Minister of Culture protested what she termed the ‘appropriation of [high] culture by the Zionist Left’. Countering her, a representative of the veteran artists called those who voted for the minister’s party (largely Mizrahim) ‘beasts’, whereas the authors of a newspaper satire column expressed their support of government ministers ‘who’ve declared war on the theatre’, adding, ‘We were afraid that we’d have to put up with this art forever’. ²

The second phenomenon is the consistent trend toward the social marginalization of the aged, which is likely to accelerate as young people’s cultural dismissiveness of the founders’ values escalates. Given this disequilibrium in the array of cultural forces, I used grounded theory (Charmaz, 2006) to identify an infrastructure of values and material content that add up to a self-evident worldview for members and representatives of an artistic hegemony. Thus, the article may explain what it is, within the domain of theatrical meaning, that keeps veteran actors dominant despite the unpopularity of their hegemonic attitudes.

The findings indicate that the theatre’s conservative image still counts in art and abets the veteran artists’ status even though this image clashes with the self-renewing dynamics of popular culture. The preservation of this status appears to be a weapon in the struggle over the identity of the theatre and justification of its survival. I extend this conclusion to the modern theatre in Western societies at large, which has always manifested ‘a certain tension between a changing social reality and a lagging adjustment of ideology’ (Alter, 1990: 16 ). One way of resolving the change-vs.-conservatism paradox is by identifying the theatre with its mythical origins. The theatre’s refusal to participate in the postmodern technological and consumerist debate is a fact that, in itself, enchants (Birringer, 1991), meaning that the theatre is a source of inspiration for something additional: the theoretization of the archaic and the current. Like Carlson (2001) and Rayner (2006), Birringer approves of the spirits as agents of the theatre’s tendency to embrace characters in classical plays, suggesting that the back-to-the-past habitus, which also finds expression in scholars’ interpretation, is not exclusive to artists.

Above I analyzed theatrical configurations of the return-to-the-past mentality that nestles deeply in the theatrical culture. This habitus furthers our understanding of veteran actors’ status by demonstrating the explanatory inadequacy of two things – the requirement of a realistic attitude toward the playing of elderly characters by veteran actors, and the existence of a decades-old cultural hegemony. In a conservative institutional enclave that characteristically bestows cultural legitimacy on the fiction-as-reality illusion, the consciousness of the ghost takes shape almost by itself. In my view, the ghost is a prototypical model in the volte-face that the theatrical consciousness represents in regard to ‘progress’ and the ‘rational’. This volte-face approach, championed by a professionally exclusive group, is reminiscent of Turner’s (1969) functional and complementary contrast between communitas and structure. Thus, in the mirror-image of values that the theatre shows its society – which it also uses to appropriate power among the arts – the past and the agents who represent are social resources.

The theatre derives its social license to express hegemonic voices not only from its dependency on its veterans and their symbolic capital but also from the nature of the actors’ acting selves in old age – those of people who participate more than others in back-to-the-past projects. Elsewhere I have shown that the dramatic connection with ghosts yields an ageless selfness that transcends old-age labels because an actor who plays an older person on stage conceals h/her body with the mask of the role in a manner that negates h/her old-age identity (Author, 2012 ). As long as the veteran actor performs reasonably, h/her relevance in the theatrical space goes unchallenged. By applying Method acting, the actor also demands that s/he and others take the character’s portrayal seriously. If the character is part of a classical play, this dramatic involvement makes a special intrinsic contribution to a transcendence that occurs relative to the actor’s time frame. Consequently, ageing does not make a veteran actor feel inferior; indeed, because it represents the accumulation of symbolic capital, the actor reaps the ‘interest’. Thus the Method helps to reinforce veteran actors’ assertiveness and ability to influence the theatrical milieu.

Acting that conforms to the Method, as well as nostalgia for pioneering and rituals of parting with veteran actors, are practices that repeatedly confirm the theatrical hegemony’s confidence in the justness of the high-culture ideology, even though this ideology symbolically disaffirms worldviews that are characteristic of diverse subcultures in Israeli society. The Method is considered an exalted etiquette of acting. By clinging to a classic character, an actor projects onto him/herself, and on the rest of the cast, the work of Shakespeare or some other esteemed Western playwright. The perception is that only this high culture, a historical artistic legacy, can uplift the individual (Aloni, 2012). By telling pioneering stories, the actors assert, from backstage and through the media, their ongoing demand that their privileged ‘firstness’ be recognized. And when their stories inspire memories of the first Hebrew theatre in Russia, the borders among high culture, the West, and Zionism become blurry. In the farewell rituals, these messages are channeled in refined and unrefined forms to the words of the eulogy and the retelling of anecdotes from theatre life in a way that reinforces politically unsound attitudes. Obviously, this perception, self-evident to the veteran actors, clashes diametrically with scholars who avoid the contents of high culture in order to identify with low classes and defend the idea of cultural democratization (Heilbronner, 2004). Furthermore, the approach embodied in these practices is consistent with the finding that productions by artists in the Israeli repertory theatre, most of whom are European and scantily acquainted with migrant groups, treat Mizrahi and the Arab characters derisively and enslave them to a Western cultural ideology, regarding subcultures originating in the Arab world as backward and as deviations from the pioneering idea. The response – an Arab protest against the ‘high’ Hebrew culture’s cultural colonization of the theatre and the establishment political theatre – comes as no surprise (Urian, 2004, 2006).

The word ‘pantheon’, with its godly connotation, symbolizes the highest level of prestige in the back-to-the-past habitus. The obvious meaning of the Israeli theatre’s appreciation of Western classics is the exclusion from ‘high culture’ of Mizrahim and Arabs, those whose shared cultural and geographic background is not identified with this culture.

This cultural preference also dictates the way the contents and human representatives of the culture should be guarded, remembered, and memorialized. The symbolic practices that posthumously enroll veteran artists in the literal and figurative theatrical pantheon attest that their place there is assured. The symbolic honors (lifetime achievement prizes, honorary doctorates, etc.) that the artists receive while alive are additional sources for this assurance. The legacy-building back-to-the-past habitus in the theatre elevates veteran actors to the status of national cultural assets. Amid such appreciation, the stage often serves these artists as a behind-the-scenes arena where they can mock and stereotype ‘other’, i.e. non-European, Israelis, and are unlikely to indulge in skepticism or self-criticism.

In conclusion, the durability of this theatrical hegemony cannot be understood without a devoted commitment by actors and others artists to sanctifying the classics and preserving its messages in the form of plays and characters. I also contend that the back-to-the-past habitus, which essentially amounts to the glorification of nostalgia, abets the perception of a similarity between the value of the classic and that of national pioneering and promotes self-mythification by so doing. As observed above, this mythification is given structure by the awarding of prizes, in the media, and in the theatre’s own introspection.

Does this mythification derive all its strength from the back-to-the-past habitus? I speculate that the answer may be yes, despite a factor external to the theatre that, paradoxically, may expose this habitus to censure on grounds of selectivity. I am referring to the post-Zionist discourse, which, while dealing with the hegemonic discrimination that Mizrahi Jews face, is perceived mainly as an appeal for balanced representation of the historical narrative of Israel’s Palestinian Arab citizens and the awarding of equal and full rights to them (Silberstein, 1999). In other words, the theatrical mythification of pioneering and of its constituent national narrative is a counter-practice that fuels the resistance, common among Israelis, to challenging the legitimacy of Zionism – a challenge that they consider an existential threat and, therefore, a factor that surmounts all internal Jewish schisms. In this manner, the back-to-the-past habitus supports Israelis’ ideological justification of Zionism. I support this hypothesis by noting the consistent pattern of the ostensibly left-leaning Israeli theatre of retreating from concern for the Arab issue at times of crisis, terrorism, and wars (Urian, 2006). This interpretation may point to the fusion of a two approaches, one theoretical and one political, toward the theatrical art.

I conclude with two remarks about the theoretical significance of the back-to-the-past habitus in terms of time. First, this habitus takes a twofold approach to the historical. Every habitus is by definition an ‘embodied history, internalized as a second nature and so forgotten as history, […] the active presence of the whole past of which it is the product’ (Bourdieu, 1990a: 56). When the habitus itself constitutes an inclination historically based on the preference of history, practices that reflect this inclination acquire totalistic influence ‘with respect to external determinations of the immediate present’ (p. 56). Such a habitus is also more likely to credit its social agents’ accumulated capital with immense value. As such, the theatre’s back-to-the-past habitus is a synonym for mythification; its artists’ campaign of dispositions positions itself in a timeless sphere in the artistic field.

An additional remark about timelessness: the strength of the habitus in relation to time is insinuated differently in the order of its themes in the ethnography – ‘pioneering’, ‘theatrical ghosting’, and ‘classics’. The significance of the back-to-the-past habitus in terms of professional capital, as shown above, is divided into past, present, and future. Namely, the value of the veteran actors’ acting selves rests on the memory of pioneering and founding (past), a dispossession experience that is fundamentally disconnected and circular during the liminal period of rehearsals for the play (present), and the testimony, expressed in ritual form, that their names will be memorialized in due course (future). Thus, unlike its names, the back-to-the-past habitus reinforces the hegemonic generations’ perception of class from all directions of time. These properties explain why veteran actors experience their identity as permanent ‘cultural heroes’ and consider themselves above cultural negotiation.

The back-to-the-past habitus is so obvious, and so laudatory toward the veteran actors, that the actors reflect on it only when the theatre faces external threats, i.e. competition and economic pressure that force them to put on plays of an ‘entertainment’ nature that appeal, inter alia, to peripheral population groups and works committees (most of which are Mizrahi) and about accusations against them within the frame of Israel’s recently escalating kulturkampf. Then they feel it their ‘moral duty’ to protest. One veteran actor expressed this at the ceremony where a theatre prize was awarded:

Our way to win the struggle for the face of our nation that has art is not to lower it into ‘reality’. […] We’ve got to be whores, pardon my choice of words; we’ve got to perform plays that I want no part of. […] Then this audience sees cheap comedies. The theatre should apply pressure to keep the level high. […] If we want to look good in our own eyes, it’s important for [people] to have good reason to go the theatre. I belong to a generation for which all work on a role is a stay within a sanctuary-like bubble.

At another ceremony, the Minister of Culture spoke accusingly about ‘theatre people’ (a charge easily attributable to veteran artists): ‘That clique speaks in the name of freedom of expression in order to gag population groups that think differently’. This handful, she continued, ‘never stood up and expressed the outcry of the weak and those on the periphery’ [most of whom trace their ethnicity to Muslim countries]. One of the veteran actresses protested the minister’s remarks. ‘For years’, she shouted, ‘we’ve been dragging ourselves to the periphery and doing everything we can. You don’t know a thing about Israeli culture; you put us us down’. With that, she left the hall’.³

Transported into the media, the theatre reinforces conservatism as a value and as artistic capital. That many Israeli media people share the same cultural hegemony abets this (Kimmerling, 1999) by enlisting them into an outer circle of agents of preservation. In the media, as in the theatre, veteran actors play the role of ‘traditional intellectuals’, whom Gramsci (1988) describes as having a monopoly on translating the world for small social elite populations. Old age that usually translates into an absolute advantage in professional capital reinforces these agents’ ‘educative’ identity and frees them to say and do more of the same thing. Despite ‘emergent practices’ that originate in the declining fortunes of ‘high culture’ in contemporaneous Western societies (Gans, 1999), this generation’s ‘residual practices’ remain dominant (Williams, 1977) and seem poised to endure as long as the generation itself does. The habitus, historically redundant, proves to be a justification-disseminating mechanism that repeatedly validates not only traditional artistic endeavor but also its representatives, including their worldviews. It is a habitus that revives what used to be and may continue to be until a stronger force countervails.

This article makes its main contributions by (a) analyzing the confluence of the artistic theory that lies at the core of the theatrical practice and dominant conceptualizations in the sociology of power, and (b) providing an empathetic ethnographic investigation of the contents behind the rhetoric of high culture. My analysis, which confirms theoretical conceptualizations and insights of Bourdieu and Gramsci, blurs the particularism of the Israeli repertory theater and adds it to the frame of discussion of institutional habitus in other fields of art and culture (Wainwright et al., 2006; Doane, 2006). The novelty of the dual historical orientation of the back-to-the-past habitus, however, shows clearly how art can derive power from national values and politics. Given the experience of theatres in other countries, e.g. Indonesia, Malaysia, and Algeria (Bodden, 2007; Yaapar, 2005; Kamal, 1999), plainly one should expect an elitist subculture to continue expressing itself vehemently and to balk at cultural negotiation in a pluralistic society as long as homology (Bourdieu, 1979) persists between its interests and broader contexts such as the state of the nation that circumscribes the cultural field in which it acts.