| Victoria Hanna comes onstage. She is wearing a black dress, dark stockings braided with a blood-red ribbon, and leather boots. The light focuses on her dark face. Her eyes are prominent, as though in another moment they will pop out of their sockets. The audience that came last Thursday to the Inbal Center in Tel Aviv's Neve Tzedek neighborhood does not take their eyes off her. The bewitching performance begins. The sound of a viola is heard. From Hanna's full lips emerges a religious Sephardic tune. The sounds penetrate one's ears, bang on the chambers of one's heart, flow into the stomach and descend. A fire begins to burn.
(Click here to hear "Yonati" by Victoria Hanna)
Hanna ends the first part, thanks the audience in a bashful, childlike tone, as though apologizing, and in a moment begins to recite the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. She gorges herself on them, keeps repeating the same syllables. Now she is shouting. Jumping. Going wild. This is the point when the spectator either succumbs to her or flees.
Nobody leaves his seat. A scream is heard from the direction of the stage. It's impossible to move. Hanna continues to chew up the Hebrew letters, drooling from the mouth. She calls to God. Speaks to him, sings to him, longs for him. Another shout. The sound of the viola rises. And then silence.
At this point, the audience does not know her secret. God sent her into the world with a defect that changed her life drastically. Even as a child, the daughter of a Sephardic rabbi, who grew up in one of the religious neighborhoods in Jerusalem, she called this God to order.
"When I was a child, I had a speech problem, I used to stutter," she says. "It was hard for me to get words out of my mouth. I always had something to say, and in the end the words came out, although they sounded like a screech. Usually the children, who are very cruel, laughed at me. In such cases I used to climb a rock and sing to God with utter devotion. 'The Lord my God I am praying to you and you will heal me, God you have brought up my soul from the depths.' My feeling at those moments was as though I was sending up my voice like a siren. SOS help me, help me. I knew that only He could help me. I was so miserable because of my screeching. After the prayer, the children would keep quiet."
As a child, she sang for hours in front of the mirror in her parents' home - and when she sang and acted, she says, she didn't stutter. When she grew up, the prohibition against performing and singing in front of a male audience was intolerable to her. She left her parents' home, studied acting in Tel Aviv, and decided to conquer the stage. Her big part was that of Leah'le in the play "The Dybbuk," which was performed at the Habima National Theater in 1997. She didn't find her place there, either. At that point she returned to the ancient Hebrew texts, composed music to them.
The journey in search of her voice took her to various countries. She was trained by famous voice artists from India, Spain and Ukraine, and participated in dozens of festivals the world over. She sang with Japanese priests, performed for the Dalai Lama in India, played for remote tribes in Mongolia, and visited misty Jewish towns in Eastern Europe. In spite of her international success, only a few in Israel knew about her.
Musical editor Dubi Lenz, who specializes in world music, is full of compliments: "She has amazing charisma. There are few such singers. Her performance is total. She ranges from ancient music to contemporary music. Uses all the colors. She can sing the music of nuns in churches, and afterward a powerful and fiery song. There is something in her performance between verbal theater and song. It is difficult for me to define her music. It has no definition. It is astonishing."
Victoria Hanna's wide range of singing styles expresses the cultural stations she has passed through in her life; she performs Sephardic piyyutim (liturgical songs), participates in productions of modern classical music, tears the microphone with murderous rap, improvises on wild electronic bits, and recites sacred texts. Everything is accompanied by a sensual, tumultuous, enticing and unrestrained performance. "I am interested in being a part of several worlds, and at the same time knowing that my world is my kingdom," she says.
Living with questions
Victoria Hanna, "in her 30s," was born in Jerusalem to religious parents from Persia and Egypt. Her father was an influential rabbi, who hoped that his daughter - who sang and acted for hours in front of the mirror and with her friends - would continue the tradition and raise a Jewish family. She studied at ultra-Orthodox institutions, with girls only, and had no contact with the secular society in the city. She didn't even meet religious boys her own age. But even as a youngster she understood that she would not fulfill her parents' dreams. In spite of that, she did not give up her love of God. Hanna: "My God is not only a punishing God. He is not so foolish. If he has the tremendous power of purity, he doesn't sit with a notebook and write my name down. I didn't agree to give up this amazing thing called God."
The religious education she received left its mark on her, although it restricted her. "Religious education gives amazing tools, and a direct connection to a high and supreme power, of which we are an inseparable part," she says. "But this package deal contains totally destructive things. I always had questions and doubts. I said why do I have so many questions? What's wrong with me? It took me time to understand that I live with questions. Immersed in some kind of riddle. I feel that I am groping in the dark."
In spite of the suffering you went through there, you still have a respectful attitude toward Torah education.
"The claim that religious education imprisons, and secular education is open, is nonsense in my opinion. You look at secular girls who are the most open people in the world, at the age of nine they look like women, with high heels, their belly exposed, heavy makeup. And who are they imitating? Models who act in telenovelas. There is something about the innocence and purity in which I grew up that I really miss and appreciate. It sprouts inside me."
When she decided to go to Tel Aviv to study acting, she didn't tell her parents. ?My home and the religious world gave me a great deal of love, but I couldn't tell them everything. They can't contain it. It is very difficult for society to accept such dual behavior. On the other hand, the world which I ostensibly admired, the outside world, the world of self expression, is a very cruel world that didn't always have my best interests in mind, but rather wanted to use me for its own benefit."
Do your parents accept you now?
"When I return home from my trips, I understand that my parents won't understand what I did there. They don't come to my performances and they won't come. I don't belong anywhere. Not here, and not there. I simply do what my mouth wants to do. And I understand that all the books in my father's home are treasures. Today I don't live in the religious world, but I am present in it. It's like a dybbuk [being spiritually possessed]. It's impossible to escape. I'm in a constant dialogue with this world. But I still feel that things are unresolved."
Bitter disappointment
With the transition to Tel Aviv she adopted a stage name for herself, composed of the names of her two grandmothers, Victoria and Hanna, so that her parents wouldn't hear about the performances of their wayward daughter. She has continued to cling to this identity. During the course of her studies, she understood that even acting school was not the paradise lost she had longed for all through the years. "I recited monologues by Chekhov and Shakespeare, and I understood that I was capable of doing it. But I missed something in the language. My father has millions of sacred books in the house. I smelled them all those years. Father used to do a lot of things related to the letters. When I was sick he would write combinations of letters, erase them with water, and give it to me to drink. To grow up on this physical thing, this amazing language, and suddenly to work on translated monologues of Shakespeare. I felt that my mouth was missing something."
So why didn't you give up and return home, to the familiar world?
"I would go home to my beloved religious parents, but I felt imprisoned. They will never understand what I love. I played Leah'le in 'The Dybbuk' at Habima. I used to travel by bus from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv, and from there to the theater, and I told myself that I was living in worlds neither of which satisfied me. I fulfilled my childhood dream, I went on the stage, and I fell into bitter disappointment. I felt the divine potential on the stage, but the total thing didn't happen to me. I can understand the need of workers' committees to see plays, but my internal urge was not satisfied."
Perhaps you didn't try to experience the secular world completely, and that's why you were disappointed with it.
"I never allowed myself to go over entirely to the secular world, because I received a lot of contradictions. I saw that there was a lot of nonsense there, a tremendous amount of ego. A kind of bubble that exists inside itself, believes itself and is very self-satisfied. The marketing and selling were hard for me."
Her disappointment with the theater brought her back to the Hebrew texts. "When I turned to the Song of Songs and read, 'I sleep but my heart wakes. Hark, my beloved is knocking. Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled.' I said to myself, that's me exactly. My mouth spoke this text as a child, and suddenly on the stage it came out in the most natural way. I remember myself walking around the empty streets of Jerusalem on Shabbat and looking for my heart's desire, with my loneliness. And I get up, and the thing I was searching for eludes me."
At the same time, Hanna took voice lessons with singer Ruth Wieder-Magan, who identified her rare vocal ability. "I wrote and sang all the time," she says. "I walked around with a small executive tape recorder and I would record myself. That was my refuge. I used to walk around Ein Kerem, enter churches and halls, and sing to myself for hours. One day someone heard me and invited me to perform at the Israel Festival. I invited Ruth and we put on a performance at the Sisters of Zion convent.
"At the time I wasn't trained to work on my voice intensively. On the day of the performance, I discovered that I had no voice. I felt that God was testing me. I took an old Egyptian good luck charm and held it to me during the entire performance. Before I opened my mouth, I didn't know if any sound would come out at all. Sometimes it did, and sometimes it didn't. When it did, it was in much higher tones. When no voice emerged, I started to whisper. Because of the wonderful acoustics, they heard every sound. Nobody in the audience realized that I had a problem with my voice. That was one of my most important lessons on the stage - to understand that it doesn't matter what there is or isn't on the external level, such as ability or technique. It's not your voice, it's your energy, your essence."
Voice lessons in India
While working on "The Dybbuk," Hanna made contact with the Spanish voice artist Fatima Miranda. "I heard her, and I felt that she was my teacher. I introduced myself, and she sent me to India to study voice with her teacher, Uday Bhawalker. I flew to Bombay and lived in his house with his wife for three months. Every day I took lessons with him. I accompanied him to his performances all over India. I visited his family in Ujin, which is a very religious city, and I heard prayers from all directions. Mentally I didn't feel foreign - holiness, prayers, female modesty. The blend was complete, and it hypnotized me, like the Pied Piper of Hamelin. But all the time I heard my father's voice: 'India is the epitome of impurity. Idol worship, idol worship.' My stay there caused a revolution in my voice, and enabled me to understand how physical sound is. For example, to sing one note for an hour."
The time in India with Bhawalker led her to the real thing - a meeting with the Dalai Lama. "They invited Ruth Wieder-Magan and me to perform in Delhi at the festival for sacred music. By chance, the performance fell on Yom Kippur. We hesitated as to whether to sing or not, and in the end we decided to treat it as prayer rather than a performance. We fasted, we wore white, we ate a meal before the fast. And when we arrived at the park, we saw thousands of Tibetans sitting and waiting for the Dalai Lama. And then he arrived, a rabbi blew the shofar, and we sang 'Adon Haselihot' and 'El Nora Alila' [songs from the Yom Kippur liturgy]."
It sounds like an impossible combination.
"In my childhood, Yom Kippur was not an easy thing. The order of the prayers is full of nationalist ideas that relate to politics and violence. A great deal of fear. I felt that they weren't letting me breathe. The words are heavy. And then, after the performance in Delhi, I felt that I had returned to my language, to all the complexities in which I found myself, and in which I live. My relationship with the texts changes all the time."
The next trip was to the Czech Republic, in the context of an international workshop of directors and actors in the Theresienstadt ghetto, at the end of which they were supposed to perform all over the ghetto. There she discovered the songs of Karl Schwenk - who with his songs, which mocked the Nazis, somewhat alleviated the suffering in the ghetto - and even participated in a film about him (directed by German director Sibylle Schoenemann). When the film was screened all over Europe, Hanna was invited to attend the premieres. As a result of the trip, she received invitations to perform at festivals all over the world. But her great success came when she landed in New York.
"I met so many languages and so many musicians there, and I felt completely at home," says Hanna. "From there things began to happen at an intensive pace. I worked with the drummer and musical producer Tamir Muskat, and with other players, and we performed in nightclubs. The cultural attache there, Rafi Gamzu, was very supportive."
In New York she performed together with a cabaret singer who not only sang hip-hop in Russian with her - while she did the same in Aramaic - but introduced her to the woman she calls her "spiritual sister," Marjana Sadovska, a Polish singer and actress. The two performed together, and even went on trips together, including to Ukraine and Poland.
"In Eastern Europe I became addicted to searching for Jews," says Victoria. "When we went to Poznan in Poland I asked where there were Jews. They sent us to the Jews' street, where there was a big building that had once been a synagogue. I entered and on the site of the holy sanctuary there was a pool in which women were swimming. I opened my mouth and began to sing. I felt that my voice was connecting the past and the present. At such moments, when you understand what God is, the sense of self expands, it's a kind of dream."
Victoria Hanna continued to travel the world. A year ago, she received an invitation from a German living in Israel to join a trip to Mongolia, in order to participate in a documentary film about a meeting of voices from three cultures, together with Wolfgang Saus, a voice scientist who can produce two notes simultaneously (overtones), and the Mongolian singer Hosoo (Dangaa Khosbayar).
Hanna: "Hosoo invited us to visit his childhood village. A place where instead of cans of Coca-Cola on the ground, you find animal bones. We lived in yurts from which the families had moved out. First thing in the morning when we were still sleeping in our beds, the entire village entered, turned on the black-and-white television and watched Sumo wrestling. Hosoo took us to a herd of two-humped camels, which also produce overtones. On Friday I sang to the villagers from the Song of Songs, all night long. They sang Mongolian songs to me, and only the Germans didn't know what to do with themselves." These three will meet on December 24 at the Music in the Desert festival, Kibbutz Sde Boker, and on December 29, for a joint performance at the Zionist Confederation House in Jerusalem.
It was in New York of all places that she rediscovered the sacred letters . "When I was in New York, I found a book for teaching Hebrew to religious children. It was all letters. I began to study the letters, the syllables, the cantillation marks, for hours. As a stuttering child, I was always afraid to utter the letter 'bet.' I was really in a panic. Suddenly this mouth, this defect that God brought me - turned into the greatest research tool in my life. I would record myself. Then I would drive around and hear the sounds of all the languages in the world. Chinese, Portuguese. I would repeat it and swallow the sounds, like a ballet dancer. A choreography of the mouth."
What did you do with it?
"I put on a performance in the Kitchen nightclub, in which I sing reading exercises from the book. They didn't understand Hebrew. They only heard the sounds. Aleph, heh, het, ayin. Music. I emphasized all the nuances that I had hidden as a Mizrahi [of North African or Middle Eastern origin] child who was ashamed of a father who spoke with a 'het' and an 'ayin.' [Mizrahi Jews pronounce these letters differently from European Jews]. It became magical. When I was there on the stage in New York, I understood that from now on I would sing my language. I wouldn't let my acting teachers decide what to perform on stage. Chinese and Japanese people saw me, and they understood what I was talking about."
How did that happen?
"I take apart the language in order to get it back. What happened before the world was created is exactly what happens before the words leave your mouth. Chaos becomes real. Before the words come out, they are like air that cannot be understood. Ruth, my admired teacher, said: 'Every time you open your mouth, you should not really know what will emerge.' There are so many surprises, secrets that we carry with us all the time. I don't know what my voice is. I treat it as a miracle, a wonder."
Above the words
Hanna's many styles are deceiving. One moment she is singing hip-hop in a crowded nightclub, and the next she is spitting out letters. The locations of the performances are not easy to digest, either. In Jerusalem, for example, she performed in a water cistern in the basement of an Ottoman house in the Musrara neighborhood. It didn't seem at all strange to her.
"My genre is me," she testifies. "I am at the crossroads of many worlds. I listen endlessly to electronic music. But I also wander among tribes the world over. When I'm in nature, ancient song comes out. When I talk on cell phones I get addicted to those sounds. As much as they disturb me, they fascinate me, like toys. More and more bits."
Composer Michael Wolpe, the artistic director of the Music of the Desert festival in Sde Boker, in which Hanna will perform on December 24, tries to figure her out: "She reminds me of Bracha Zefira and Sara Levi-Tanai, the high priestesses of the beginning of dance and music in Israel. A combination of East-West, religious-secular, which is hard to define. She belongs to the pantheon of great Israeli singers who do not succeed in breaking into public awareness because of their depth and seriousness. Her voice is deep and primeval. Her range of voice work is exceptionally broad."
Artist Yaacov Agam, who met her in New York and gave her a grant: "She is one of the great artists in Israel. There is innovation and clarity of sound. She is capable of giving song without words. The quiet in the soul. For her, the word loses its concrete meaning. I met with her father. He invited me for a Shabbat meal in their home. He is a very pleasant rabbi. At first he was opposed to her art, but today he treats it with respect. I only hope that like every other delicate thing, she won't become spoiled, and use words because of public pressure. She has to be above the words. That's where holiness lies."
Hanna is not very well known in Israel, and is not played on the radio. She is considered a name for people of refined tastes. "I have no real professional dialogue with most of the things I encounter here," she says, explaining why she rarely cooperates with local musicians.
How do you explain that the public in Israel barely knows you?
"Once a Chabad member saw me in a plane reading from a book by [kabbalist Avraham] Abulafia. He was interested, and I showed him a poster of my performances. He asked who advertises you. I said God. I transmit his texts, and he helps me. My mouth is my home. I try to make peace with all the complexity in which I grew up."
Half a year ago, she landed in Israel. For the first time in many years, she has a room of her own. The physical closeness to her parents' home has still not led to breaking down the walls, and they still don't attend her performances. Today Hanna does not give in to them. She participates regularly in the Shabbat meal in their home.
"In recent years," she says, summing up the swift pace of her life, "I became dizzy because of my voice. They invite me here, they invite me there - and I go. Now that I have met my beloved, we live in Ein Kerem. That introduces me to a new phase in life, like learning how to cook soups and composing texts together on the paths of the forest."
What's next?
"I have a performance in Mali soon. Afterward there are performances planned in Brazil, Mexico, Singapore and Morocco. I also plan to put out a hip-hop disk of sacred Hebrew texts. But what excites me is that since I settled in Israel, I am invited to teach voice and to give workshops in acting schools. I, a girl with speech problems, who underwent an experience of healing through my sounds and my tradition, am teaching voice." |
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