Sivan Ben Yishai

Works

Oder: Du verdienst deinen Krieg (Eight Soldiers Moonsick)
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Theaterstück, 2019

Eight young female bodies are lying in a tent, breathing in unison and protecting the rifles under their mattresses, waiting for the next mission. Their nightmares during the night and the daydreams of army’s everyday life are experienced together.
They learn to survive, they salute their dead comrades, and also learn that the mattresses belonging to soldiers who commited suicide will be thrown away. Still the eight young soldiers will be among the martyrs who fell for their country. Again and again the soldiers circle the multiple possibility of their own death. What dies in a person when they operate the trigger of a loaded gun? When does the dispossession of your own body begin?
Memories of childhood weave themselves into the spiral-shaped experience of the loss of self: when the father drummed on the steering wheel as the small family drove through the country safely in a camper van: »And the family is carried in this camper as in a belly of an animal that runs through a burning land. Why does the animal run towards the fire?«
In the fourth part of her tetralogy, Let The Blood Come Out To Show Them, writer Sivan Ben Yishai holds a ceremony of memory. Which visible and invisible traces does serving the so-called fatherland leave in a person?

I wanted to ask,
I really wanted to ask,
who was the one who said:
»Honey, it’s just a dream, go back to sleep«,
and deported me back to my war.

Die Geschichte vom Leben und Sterben des neuen Juppi Ja Jey Juden
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Play, 2018

Clear the stage for the thank-you speech, the monologue, the embrace of an Israeli artist who takes a stranglehold of her German audience with her gratitude. She talks about leaving her country, the friendly reception in Germany, language courses, the jungle of funding that she had to fight through to get where she is today – the new Jewish-Israeli star in the heavens of the German (art)world. Later it becomes clear that it’s only possible to escape from the vicious attack of her love in the diaspora garden of the Jewish Museum. And that’s where the tigers are waiting.
With elements from Moran Sanderovich´s performance Gog and Magog.

Sivan Ben Yishai, born 1978, lives in Berlin. Yishai works as an author and theatre director. At Gorki her plays Die Geschichte vom Leben und Sterben des neuen Juppi Ja Jey Juden and Papa Liebt Dich were staged. Her work Oder: Du Verdienst Deinen Krieg (Eight Soldiers Moonsick) will premiere during the 4. Berliner Herbstsalon.