Practicing Place: Site-Specific Performance and the Reinscription of Memory in Palestine

In Palestine, a landscape fractured by checkpoints, walls, and forced displacement, site-specific performance becomes a radical act of world-making. To stage art in public space under conditions of occupation is not merely to perform. It is to assert a material presence, to refuse erasure, and to mobilize bodies and spaces as archives of contested histories.^[1] There can be a clear danger in Palestinians asserting their identity across the constraints of the land. This article examines how site-specific performance in Palestine functions as a spatial practice that writes and rewrites dominant narratives of place, identity, and history. El Hakawati Theatre’s Salah and Basma and Nur Garabli and Studio Collective’s “Moving Visual and Performance Exhibition” transform everyday spaces into theatrical sites of remembrance by inviting audiences to navigate layered landscapes, challenge dominant narratives, and cultivate new relationships between memory and quotidian life.  These performances do not simply aim to put the past on stage. Instead, they actively engage in the making of memory. By analyzing these performances, I argue that Palestinian site-specific theatre does more than commemorate the past. It activates a radical memory practice that confronts colonial spatial regimes. These works exemplify how performance can inhabit and remake space by asserting presence and resisting erasure.

Salah and Basma           

I followed the audience down the gray stone stairs in Jerusalem’s Old City, but it became hard to differentiate between those at the site to watch the performance and those going about their lives. My heart raced, partially from excitement at finally seeing a play associated with the Palestinian National Theatre El Hakawati and partially because I was unsure what to expect in a city that feels as fraught as Jerusalem. Children ran around, adults occasionally stopped to listen to the performers, and the occasional motorcycle or cart passed by us, a disruption that made me jump while others more familiar with the sights and sounds of the Old City seemed to barely notice. In the Old City, all of the layers of Jerusalem seem to converge–religious sites, historical locales, popular cafes and bars, merchants selling spices and religious souvenirs. Would this Palestinian theatre troupe experience any problems talking about the specific Palestinian history in this play?

El Hakawati’s Salah and Basma is a landmark site-specific, promenade-style performance that transforms the Old City of Jerusalem into a living archive of Palestinian memory and presence. Set in 1966, just before the Six-Day War and Israel’s occupation of East Jerusalem, the play follows the love story of Salah, a young man returning home from university in Beirut, played by Mohammad Basha, and Basma, a spirited local nurse played by Fatima Abu Alul. They meet, fall in love, and prepare for marriage amidst a bustling, interwoven community full of humor and nostalgia. Audiences traverse the alleyways, courtyards, and springs of neighborhoods such as Harat al-Sa‘adiyya, Bab al-Hutta, and Bab al-Asbat, guided by two narrators who weave together historical commentary, personal anecdotes, and interactions with local characters.

Drawing on Doreen Massey’s conceptualization of space as relational, always under construction, and constituted through material and social practices, Salah and Basma can be read as an intervention in the spatial politics of Jerusalem. Massey reminds us that space is not a neutral container but “the product of interrelations” and “always in the process of being made”.^[2] In the Palestinian context, these interrelations include everyday acts of navigating fragmented geographies, telling stories, and performing identity. Through its site-specific form, Salah and Basma participates in what Massey describes as “practices of quotidian negotiation and contestation,” re-inscribing Palestinian presence in a landscape increasingly structured by surveillance, gentrification, and settler colonial displacement.^[3] The final scene, marked by panic and poetic reflection, culminates in a collective recitation of a line from Mahmoud Darwish’s poem “In Jerusalem,” inviting the audience to reflect on memories of Jerusalem and endurance.

Yet, Salah and Basma is more than a nostalgic narrative or a historical reenactment–it is a performative act of spatial reclamation. The production does not simply occur in the Old City; it is of the Old City. It activates space as a co-author, layering personal and historical narratives onto the built environment, and insisting on the presence of memory within contested geographies. As we walked with the performers through the streets of Jerusalem, passing signs in Arabic, English, and Hebrew, the fictional love story unfolded against the backdrop of lived Palestinian histories, some visible, others rendered nearly invisible by ongoing processes of erasure. The quotidian rhythms of the city, motorcycles honking, children returning home for dinner, an Israeli tour guide cutting through the scene with Hebrew narration, did not disrupt the performance but heightened its insistence that history is neither static nor past. It is layered, contested by different groups, and persistently present.           

The narrative is framed as a guided walking tour, with characters Shaden and Hosam (played by Shaden Saleem and Hosam Abu Esheh) and blends archival memory and dramatic storytelling, with moments that blur time, space, and identity, asking the audience to “close your eyes and come back with us to a beautiful summer day in 1966.”^[4] This is especially meaningful as Hosam is a lifetime resident of Jerusalem’s Old City and a keeper of much of the oral history that was part of this piece; while I did not know Hosam personally when I participated in this site-specific experience, I knew his reputation and was aware that many in the audience attended because of this famed storyteller. Salah's journey takes him through familiar places infused with local color and personal memory: his old Qur’an school led by Sheikha Sanad; the bakery where ka‘k (sesame bread) is revered; and the ironer’s shop, where he first lays eyes on Basma. Their connection grows when they reunite at the Austrian Hospice Hospital, where Basma is working. Their flirtation is sweet and shy:

Salah: You’re kind.

Basma: No, [I’m] Basma. They laugh. And you’re respectful.

Salah: No, Salah. I’m Salah.

Basma: And I’m Basma… break time is over. I have to go.

Salah: Can I see you?

Basma: Every day during break.^[5]

As their relationship deepens, Salah faces pressure from his mother to marry someone within their social class. “Are we in the spice market?” he protests when she offers him a stack of women’s photos. Despite the social gap, Basma is the daughter of Abu Khaled, a wealthy livestock trader, and Salah’s father ultimately agrees to approach the mukhtar to arrange the engagement. A formal proposal follows, culminating in a traditional engagement scene. The wedding plans are laid with communal joy and contributions, someone brings the carpet, someone the tea cups, reflecting the spirit of solidarity: “It was mutual support in building, celebrations, and sorrows.” But just as the wedding zaffe begins, the joy is shattered as gunfire interrupts the celebration. “They bombed the city, folks! They bombed Harat al-Saadiyya—they bombed Bab Hutta!” cries Abu Salah.^[6] The war of 1967 has begun. The final moments of the piece are solemn and poetic, ending with a stirring recital of Mahmoud Darwish’s poem “In Jerusalem,” highlighting the beauty and historical burden of the city: “I walk. I fly. I become other than me in the epiphany.” In the end, the narrators thank the audience, having taken them “just a little” into the lived past of Jerusalem’s Old City.^[7]    

Salah and Basma enacts performative repetition through the very act of walking, narrating, and remembering. By guiding audiences through spaces both familiar and transformed, the production inscribes their bodies into a shared narrative, affirming collective claims to space and memory. In doing so, it foregrounds Arabic language, everyday Palestinian life, and the pluralistic character of Jerusalem prior to 1967. The site-specificity of the play is foundational as each location becomes both stage and character, saturated with meaning and history. Many sites served a different function in the history of the Old City than they did when we watched the piece, allowing the audience to piece together the layers of the city. As the narrators reflect on the past, the city itself bears witness, rendering visible the intimacy, plurality, and cultural continuity of Palestinian Jerusalem. The tour ends with the 1967 war beginning, a history that most watching the piece knew all too well. The closing invocation of Darwish’s poetry links this local story to a broader cultural consciousness, framing the city as both physical and metaphysical, a place where memory, identity, and resistance converge.       

Ultimately, Salah and Basma exemplifies how Palestinian site-specific theatre does more than commemorate the past; it asserts presence in the present, and transforms urban space into a performative act of cultural survival and belonging, where memory is not simply a record of loss, but a generative force shaping what endures. In a landscape marked by erasure, such performances are acts of defiance and hope.

Nur Garabli and Studio Collective

            On Friday, May 9, 2025, I arrived at Queen Cafe in Yafa at 10:00 AM for the “Moving Visual and Performance Exhibition,” an event I had heard about the night before at Saraya Theatre during other Yafa Week Festival programs. Though the website promised a “visual performance art tour that moves between Yafa cafes,” the details were sparse. While my expectations were limited, I was excited for a new performance experience.

As we approached Queen Cafe, the Palestinian-American friend I was with pointed out a dark blue sign bearing the double name of the street, an intervention by local Palestinians seeking to reclaim the original Arabic street names that have been replaced by official Hebrew designations. Inside the cafe, the owner, herself a Palestinian, began to speak to us about her experience in Yafa. To my surprise, she spoke in Hebrew, which the audience, seemingly composed entirely of Palestinians who lived within the 1948 borders, understood. Nur Garabli, one of the performers whose work we would be seeing that day, created performances that were also shaped by affective and linguistic tensions. Outside the café, the use of Hebrew evoked personal and intergenerational trauma. Raised in Arabic but needing to speak Hebrew as her primary language outside of the home, Garabli undertook a process of linguistic decolonization at age sixteen, choosing to speak Arabic as much as possible despite the internal and external resistance. “It’s really hard doing this decolonization shift… you have to face your demons.”^[8] Her grandmother, nearing ninety, still speaks partial Hebrew, a sign of how deeply linguistic assimilation has shaped Palestinians across generations.

After leaving the cafe, our group began walking. We stopped on a platform flanked by roads and located near the light rail and a bike path. There, dancer Nur Garabli began a solo performance, emerging from stillness to claim the space with powerful movement, as her arms opened      wide. Her opening shouts in Arabic felt like a direct response to the Hebrew we had just heard, a connection she later confirmed in an interview. Knowing the history of the dual street names helped me attune more fully to how Garabli’s performance reclaimed the Palestinian narrative of the area.

This performative walking tour exemplified the ways performers in Palestine are deeply attuned to the specifics of the places where they create performances. This performance tour exemplifies Lefebvre's concept of the “production of space,” a social process shaped by ideology, memory, and materiality.^[9] It also aligns with Edward Said’s “counterpointed geographies,” where suppressed histories press against official narratives.^[10] Through their movement, the performers disrupted dominant spatial orders of quotidian spaces, where all things Palestinian are usually kept figuratively out of the streets. Garabli, drawing on the Studio collective’s method of improvisation, rooted her performance in a deeply personal and political presence: “We are still here. We are still in the streets, and we do art, and we want people to know more about the city.” Her work drew from and into the city’s multiple histories, personal and collective, through an embodied vocabulary developed over years of collaborative improvisation with the site as a co-author. “We just felt the moment, the connections there,” she told me. “We focused on specific feelings… and let the space guide us.”       

The second solo by Garabli was performed in a sunlit, open plaza near the sea, framed by Yafa’s cityscape. Her movement–precise, expansive, and deliberate–was deeply grounded. Dressed in black with her hair in a loose braid, she began in stillness, arms slowly rising as if conjuring the invisible. She turned gently in place like a compass, then traveled through the space with soft, decisive steps. At moments, she folded inward, then rose again, echoing the rhythm of waves. Her gestures felt like they were for the land, and not the audience. When she placed her hand on her chest and then the ground, the meaning was clear: “I am here.”                

In this same piece, Garabli balanced a woven basket on her head, an evocative gesture of harvest. Eventually, she reached a line of oranges arranged across the performance space. Glowing under the Palestinian sun, the oranges symbolized not just Jaffa’s famed citrus groves, but a history of erasure and resilience. As she threw them one by one, not violently, but with resolve, the act took on symbolic power that grew with repetition.  Garabli inscribed an alternative archive into public space. “This is reclaiming the streets,” she said. “I wanted to use [the oranges] as something else… to give them different layers and hues.”^[11] By expanding the idea of the orange beyond just a fruit to eat or a symbol of Yafa that people take for granted, Garabli raised the stakes. The stakes of throwing oranges may seem low, but in that the gesture mimics that of stone throwing, this act felt like defiance in a city that requires its Palestinian citizens to navigate a multiplicity of identities.

Garabli’s performance was shaped as much by the city as by her body. “The space has the upper hand on the dance,” she reflected.^[12] This responsiveness to space–architectural, social, political–echoes Massey’s notion of space as a relational construct. Her actions also created a repertoire of their own: a live, embodied transmission of memory that stands in contrast to written archives. In a context where Palestinian archival material is often inaccessible or destroyed, these performances become repositories of knowledge.

Yafa is relatively open to public performance. Unlike Jerusalem, where “people are less ready to see these things happen in the street,” Yafa allowed for a degree of artistic visibility, though never without risk. “We understand how each city works,” Garabli explained. “But also, you can never fully predict how people will react.”^[13] Performing in Arabic in public remains politically charged, and Garabli’s gesture of shouting in her native tongue was both intimate and defiant.

The tour’s third movement brought us through an ancient corridor of Yafa, past stairs, facades, and sea-facing courtyards, led by three dancers from Studio Collective. I had seen them perform before, but was surprised to encounter them here, moving deliberately through a landscape I had never entered. This unfamiliar pathway ran alongside Israeli residential and museum buildings, places I would not have approached on my own. Yet the dancers moved through it as deliberate presences, claiming the space with repetition and grace.

There was no music, no speech, just movement. Dressed simply, the dancers did not dramatize themselves but let their gestures activate the space. Oranges were placed on the ground, but this time, none were thrown. They existed as quiet reminders of suppressed narratives. The stone steps, blue-painted doors, and layered architecture bore the traces of colonialism and survival. The performers led us upward, ultimately arriving at Hilweh, a Palestinian café and market in the Old City. I had not realized this path even led to Hilweh, a cafe I frequent when in Yafa. Had the dancers not led me there, I may never have found an alternate path to the cafe that many Palestinians consider a refuge, and certainly one of the few Palestinian leisure sites in the city.

The tour culminated near Saraya Theatre, where Studio Collective once again danced, this time on a grassy patch near trees. In an interview, dancer Rand Taha explained how their improvisation developed in real time.^[14] While not all performers were from Yafa, they carried a shared awareness of its affective topography, particularly for those with ancestral ties. The dancers’ improvisational approach, honed over years of trust, enabled them to co-create a site-responsive work with minimal rehearsal. They used simple compositional tools, lines, touch, attunement, to develop a choreographic structure driven not by spectacle but by embodied presence.

In the end, “Moving Visual and Performance Exhibition” was not just an aesthetic experience but a political and pedagogical one. Through their bodies, these dancers made visible what has been erased and made felt the Palestinian presence in a city that had been home to their families for generations.

Conclusion

            Site-specific performance in Palestine emerges as a generative mode of cultural resistance, one that mobilizes space, memory, and embodiment to challenge the spatial logics of occupation. By drawing on feminist, postcolonial, and spatial theory, this article demonstrates how performances such as Salah and Basma and “Moving Visual and Performance Exhibition” reconfigure place not as a static backdrop but as a living palimpsest of histories and relationships. These performances animate space as both archive and repertoire, staging memory not only as a recollection of the past but as a practice of presence. In doing so, they contest the settler colonial impulse to fix, erase, or dominate space, and instead assert Palestinian geography as plural, affective, and alive.            This work matters because it insists that performance is not ancillary to political struggle but central to how people live through, make sense of, and resist the spatial violence of occupation. The ephemeral nature of these performances, often overlooked by traditional modes of documentation or analysis, does not diminish their impact. Rather, their very impermanence underscores their urgency. They appear in fleeting moments, in everyday streets and homes, asking audiences to look again, to remember differently, to stay with the trouble of place. In a landscape fractured by checkpoints, walls, and forced displacement, site-specific performance becomes a radical act of world-making. These performances remind us that space is never neutral, and that in the Palestinian context, to perform in space is to perform the right to exist, to remember, and to return.