Foreign ‘invasions’: Israeli playwrights, Mexican painter due

There is a dearth of women playwrights in our country, and for this reason, they, as well as their male peers, will be looking forward to meeting three of Israeli’s top women playwrights, namely, Tzippi Pines, Miriam Kainy and Goran Agmon. They are here to attend the 6th Women Playwrights Conference (from Nov. 14 to 20) which has been organized by the Women Playwrights International, Philippines.

Pines, a graduate of Tel Aviv U., with an AB degree in theater arts, pursued graduate studies in the same university. She has gone around the world, visiting Cuba, Russia, France, German, England and the US in pursuit of her art through a 25-year career.

She has been involved with various theater groups. In 1993, as general manager and artistic director of the Beit Lessin Theater in Tel Aviv, she built into one of Israeli’s three major theaters today.

Kainy, a prolific writer, is involved in theater, TV and radio productions. Her 45-minute radio drama The Visit of the Queen of Sheeba won a special award at the Berlin Festival of 1985. She has likewise worked with several theater groups and for ten years was the chairperson of the Israeli Playwrights Association; as such she has consistently represented Israel at international conventions.

Agmon, a graduate of Tel Aviv U., has been writing and directing plays in Israel ever since her graduation in 1978. In 1993, her work The Gang won the "Best Play" award at the Haifa Festival for Children. In 2001, she was voted "Playwright of the Year" for her play A Letter to Noa. She wrote and directed the TV series Ashkara which is about relationships between Arabs and Jews in Tel Aviv.

Israeli Ambassador-Designate and Mme. Yehoshua Sagi will be honoring the three leading playwrights at a reception during which they will discuss the role of women playwrights in Israeli Theater.

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The Mexican Embassy headed by Ambassador Enrique Hubbard takes immense pride in presenting the one-man exhibition American Gold by the dynamic Mexican painter Jorge Alberto Palacios at the lobby of the Inter-Con on Friday, Nov. 21.

The following are excerpts from what art critics say of Palacios and his work:

Palacios’s art revives the detail of seventeenth century Italian painters, and being young, he manages to capture with great sensibility the colors of the field portrayed in harmonious form and elegance, pretending to enchant the spectator, for in his works love and respect are perceived towards nature, inviting the spectator to rest and value what the planet has gifted, and what man with his eagerness for conquest has forgotten." – Anne Mathews, NY Times.

Jorge Palacios, of a very peculiar gender of decorative figurativism and a meticulous realist, has passed on to post-modernism owing to the use of the traditional expressive means, the peculiar sources that inspire his themes, and even the painter’s attitude in being the most successful representative in propelling his work.

His painting is precise and often detailed, the compositions rigorously planned, whose symbolic sense conveys fantastic visions that frequently portray magic realism.

It is mainly in the color where Palacios shows his technical domain, highlighting the delicate and effective colors, the violent contrasts or the emphasized notes by the luminous touches.

"Experience has defined the style, tuned his brush with great precision and has granted him the opportunity to represent his vision to the world in an eloquent manner that communicates and moves." – Prof. Giancarlo Von Nacher Malvaioli, Italian art critic, May, 1995.

"Palacios, an artist of extraordinary talent, expresses in his work a spiritual sense of seeing the world that connects the mystique that distinguishes the design, finds a certain dimension that is transmitted to the spectator." – Periodico Novedades, Mexico City.

What does Palacios himself say of his art? He avers: "To paint is to touch the sky through a white canvas. To harmonize colors in a spiritual world is to abandon the soul and mold a feeling turning it into fantasy. A touch of magic inviting the spectator to dream in harmony."

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Renowned Austrian pianist Franz Langer will perform with Filipino artists at a classical Christmas concert in the Captain’s bar of Mandarin Oriental on Nov. 20.