Affinity between Urban Life and the Theater

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Abstract

This research focuses on the presence of cityscapes in contemporaneous theatre. Cityscapes are defined as urban surroundings, urban landscapes, urban cultural landscapes, and their hermeneutic cycles of meaning. The article suggests that the urban surroundings are reflected in the entirety of the theatre (play, plot, stage design, etc), and that this reflection is of utmost importance for the understanding of urban culture in its specificity and a potential precursor of critical contemplation of architecture and its socio-political function. Through an in-depth examination of the affinities between the city of Tel-Aviv and the play “The Bride and the Butterfly Hunter” by Nissim Aloni, the article will show how meta-theatrical tools, together with elements from the contemporanean sociocultural and sociopolitical reality were used to create a complex, stratified, and intertextual space. This approach was unique to the Israeli Theater of the time. Furthermore, the article will reveal how the stratified feature of the theatrical event challenged the dominant ideology in a time when it seemed unquestionable.