The Persian Deer Lift
An Imaginary Middle Eastern Opera That Really Happened
Tuesday, 14.07.26, 20:00
Hall 4, Machol Shalem Dance House, Rami Levy Plus House (former Rav-Chen Cinema), HaParsa 3, Jerusalem
A performance of original music, storytelling, and epic poetry in which the performers play, sing and tell an imaginative tale that really happened – the journey to return the Persian fallow deer to the wild in Israel, on the last El Al plane that flew from Tehran to Tel Aviv during the revolution. The piece combines a Persian music ensemble (kamancheh, oud, daf, and tar) and a storyteller.
The fallow deer is a type of deer, with magnificent horns and wine-colored fur. The original work, ‘The Persian Deer Poem,’ is based on a strange and forgotten episode of Israel-Iran relations – the story of returning the fallow deer to nature in the Carmel – which, if it hadn’t been told, might have been forgotten by the public. It’s a story about El Al’s last flight from Tehran to Israel in 1979. It’s told in the tradition of the nomadic poets of Central Asia and the Middle East: in epic and heroic poetry, with music on traditional and ancient instruments, in metric rhythm, similar to the Iliad and the Odyssey in ancient Greece, and to Layla and Majnun in ancient Persia. It’s a bold, funny, and wondrous tale of spectacular hunting adventures, failed diplomatic relations, and unexpected heroism, involving an Iranian prince, Israeli generals, a Dutch volunteer from the Hai-Bar Nature Reserve at Yotveta, an old ibex from Mitzpe Ramon, and a fallow deer from the Shah’s palace. Director Yonatan Levy (‘Saddam Hussein,’ ‘Malchitavas,’ ‘Raful and the Sea’) accompanied the creation of the show.
