Stones in Berlin: An Exclusive Interview with Ynon Tzafrir on Memory, Art, and the Invincible Human Spirit

Ahead of the highly anticipated performance of the internationally acclaimed physical theatre production “Stones” at the Jewish Culture Days in Berlin, we sat down for an in-depth conversation with Ynon Tzafrir, the artistic director of Orto-Da Theatre and the creator of the play. With ten international awards and approximately 700 performances across twenty countries, “Stones” offers a profound, wordless exploration of historical trauma, universal suffering, and the resilience of humanity.

Executive Summary: The Essence of “Stones”

The Orto-Da Theatre’s production of “Stones” transforms historical trauma into a universal, non-verbal theatrical experience. Key elements include:

• Historical Irony: The play is inspired by Nathan Rapoport’s Warsaw Ghetto monument, sculpted from Swedish granite originally ordered by the Nazis for a Third Reich victory monument.
• Universal Metaphor: Operating as a post-modern, wordless performance with a multilingual soundtrack, it elevates the Holocaust into a global symbol of suffering, resilience, and survival.
• Interactive Decoding: The audience is challenged to actively interpret surreal visual images—such as a barbed-wire harp—breaking the traditional aesthetic distance.
• Symbolic Venue: Performing at Berlin’s Rykestrasse Synagogue—a site that survived Nazi desecration—adds profound emotional and historical weight to the message of rebirth and optimism.

1. What is the central idea behind “Stones”, and what kind of experience would you like to create for the audience through this production?

Orto-Da Theatre group crafts an original, international physical language born from the deep observation of human movement and behavior.

The perspective of Stones arises from the vantage point of timeless, ancient eternity. These stones gaze with compassionate, forgiving eyes upon a cruel humanity who has continuously destroyed themselves across generations, ultimately these stones are wishing for a heart to beat within them so they may experience pure, human love.

Stones performance is a universal performance which performed all over the globe, It does not treat the Holocaust as an exclusive Jewish-Israeli capsule, but rather elevates it into an international metaphor for the universal human experience of suffering, resilience, and survival.

The genesis of Stones arrived during a visit to Warsaw, where I witnessed a group of Israeli students holding a memorial ceremony by Nathan Rapoport’s Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Monument. The young students were reading Jewish victims last lines before execution from notebooks. Standing before those monument massive figures, I felt a sudden surreal sensation that the stone characters themselves were alive looking at the students/victims examining the contemporary reality and state of mind of the Israeli society. Time seemed to be stopped… I traveled back to the era of World War 2….

Aesthetically and structurally, Stones operates as a post-modern, non-verbal performance. It explicitly rejects a conventional linear narrative or a single historical truth, Instead I decompose the myth of ‘Holocaust and Heroism’ into a fragmented tapestry of theatrical images, memories, and associations through anew theatre language We employ severe intertextuality-incorporating sound track and musical citations ranging from classic Richard Strauss, Nicola Piovani’s score for Life is Beautiful to snippets of Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, historical radio broadcasts, Bob Marely Exodos theme and even mutated rock anthems.

The performance is entirely wordless and features a multilingual soundtrack spanning German, English, Italian, Spanish and Hebrew-because the language of trauma and hope is universal.

Through this tragicomic and surrealistic lens, we aim to shatter the protective aesthetic distance the public usually maintains toward historical trauma. By blending high art with popular culture, deep sorrow with sharp humor, and the sublime with the ridiculous, we create a pluralistic, ‘carnivalesque’ experience. We don’t want to lecture the audience or provide easy answers;

we invite the audience to dynamically decode the symbols, like a motive of a child holding red balloon up to the sky or the transformation of electrified barbed wire into a harp.

We strongly want the audience use his all senses and imagination as Stones gives visual images, metaphors and reach sound track. The audience have freedom from regular theatre text to be “left” active and develop his/her own independed thoughts. by creating own thoughts and questions he can choose what to feel. This “demography” of thoughts is important for inner development of every human being.

One of Stones relevant Message is connected to these days as we witness “public figures” in across the world (and also Israel), who in their desperate pursuit of headlines, weaponize history by comparing their political rivals to the Nazis. There is a profound danger in this rhetoric. Not only does it dangerously trivialize the absolute human evil exposed during World War II, but it also creates a deeply polarizing, toxic extremism that fractures society.

The ghetto fighters and the figures immortalized in monuments did not sacrifice themselves for contemporary political spin, their true role is to guard the purity of the facts and the victory of human spirit, A spirit that utterly rejects extremism of any kind. human spirit possesses an extraordinary ability to rise above current political manipulations noise. Stones try to demonstrates that from darkest time The human spirit may survive to prosper.

2. What does it mean to you to present “Stones” in Berlin as part of the Jewish Culture Days, and what do you hope the Berlin audience will take away from the performance?

Bringing Stones to Berlin, particularly for the Jewish Culture Days, carries immense historical irony and profound emotional weight,

It is worth noting that Stones has been performed approximately 700 times across twenty different countries in major international theaters and festivals Winning ten international awards. Yet, performing it inside sacred walls of the walls of the Rykestrasse Synagogue, feels uniquely and profoundly symbolic, it is one of the very few synagogues in Germany that escaped total destruction by the third Reich but repurpose it as a stable for Wehrmacht horses-the venue itself embodies the tension between historical desecration and miraculous survival.

In addition to that the performance starts with an ironic real story of Warsaw Rapoport’s monument: The black granite stones used to sculpt the monument, were originally ordered from Sweden by Adolf Hitlers sculptor to build a victory monument to glorify the Reich’s victory, after the war ended, When the Nazis defeat, the stones were left waiting until Nathan Rapoport, the Jewish sculptured, found them and used them to commemorate the terrible Holocaust of the Jews in Europe.

We hope the Berlin international audience will take away an understanding that history is not static it is fluid, elastic and continuously shaped by how we choose to look at it today.

In a post -modern world overwhelmed by mass fake media and political manipulation – which we satirize in the play through a scene where a flock of sheep blindly worships a television screen – art remains a crucial tool for introspection. We hope the audience leaves the theater realizing that memory can be a foundation for rebirth, empathy, peace and absolute optimism for our shared future.

Ultimately, it is an experience aim to express that while the physical body can be vanished, the human imagination and spirit may be invincible and that theatre art may capable of painting even the darkest hour of humanity with the bright colors of hope.