YAGIL ELIRAZ  Director  

Israel Festival is an international festival of the performing arts, the biggest and oldest in Israel.  In 2006, I was invited by General Director Yossi Tal-Gan to plan and artistically direct a new festival for promising performance artists entitled "The Festival Arena."

The mission of “The Festival Arena” was to create an incubator for long-process work on new performances, culminating with a production in a special outdoor amphitheater. As Artistic Director, I assigned a committee to select shows and accompanied each work through a six month process leading to the festival premiere. “The Festival Arena” ran for a week, giving birth to ten new performances. These shows included a variety of genres and styles, such as: puppet theater, modern dance, textless tragedy, butoh dance, and more. In the years after the launch of “The Festival Arena,” five of these shows went on to perform many times in theaters across Israel.