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Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Back to Top Untitled Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages Volume 19 Visit Journal Homepage Download Issue Table of Contents Amir al-Azraki Reframing the Past: Situating Mesopotamian Theatrical Traditions Within a Cross‑Cultural Performance Continuum Deniz Başar Gen Z Theatre from Turkey Taps into Repertoires of Millennial Resistance: A Comparison of the Short Festival Plays 'Helezoni' and 'Orange' Marina Johnson Performance Review: THE CLOWN, by Mariam Basha. Directed by Kamal El Basha. El Hakawati Theatre, Jerusalem. August 28, 2025 in person, September 11, 2025 via WhatsApp video. Jovita Jacob Selwyn Performance Review: DODI AND DIANA, by Kareem Fahmy. Directed by Reginald L. Douglas. Mosaic Theater, DC. September 23, 2025. Marina Johnson Performance Review: ALMONDS BLOSSOM IN DEIR YASSIN, by Hanna Eady. Directed by Hanna Eady. Cherry Street Village, Seattle. October 25, 2025. Hadia Mousa Book Review: Samer Al-Saber. A Movement’s Promise: The Making of Contemporary Palestinian Theatre (Stanford University Press, 2025). Pp. 328. Hardcover, Paperback, E-book. Arab Stages Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Visit Journal Homepage

Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Robert Wilson Yearbook Volume 1 Visit Journal Homepage Robert Wilson and Norway Steve Earnest By Published on May 1, 2026 Download Article as PDF Robert Wilson and Norway Steve Earnest Figure 1 Robert Wilson’s Edda , featuring images of Texas Robert Wilson emerged as an important figure in European theatre in the 1970s, following his production of Deafman Glance in Paris that prompted Louis Aragon’s famous “Open Letter to André Breton” regarding Wilson’s realization of the style of Surrealism. As additional works with German playwright Heiner Müller also followed, theatre companies from Northern Europe and Scandinavia immediately showed interest, and commissions from major state theatre companies began to appear. The 1998 production of Strindberg’s Ett Drömspiel ( A Dream Play ) in Stockholm’s Stadsteatern, Sweden, was Wilson’s first work in Scandinavia. It also marked his first music/sound collaboration with Michael Gottlieb. As the Wilsonian aesthetic was already in a highly developed phase, the Swedish audiences and press were particularly enthralled by Wilson’s combination of the visual picture with a well-developed soundscape. Wilson’s realization of Strindberg’s visual work was lauded in Sweden as a groundbreaking effort—described as “Weirdly hypnotic; a series of painterly tableau evoking artists as different as Magritte and Andrew Wyeth.” [1] Several productions were commissioned in Denmark during the early 2000s, including Woyzeck and The Black Rider (originally commissioned by Thalia Theater Hamburg in 1990) both of which played at the Betty Nansen Teatret in Copenhagen in 2000. In 2002 a special production entitled White Town was commissioned by the Bellevue Teatret for the recognition of the life and career of Danish theatre artist Arne Jacobsen. The first production of a Wilson work to appear in Norway was the 2005 production of Peer Gynt , commissioned by Det Norske Teatret in Oslo. Originally planned for a world tour, the production transferred to co-producer Det Neue Scene in Bergen before touring to the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Three other productions by Robert Wilson have played in Norway: Edda Edda , produced by Det Norske Teatret in March 2017; Shakespeare’s Sonnets , produced by the Berliner Ensemble, later in May of that same year at the Bergen Theater Festival; and The Sandman , produced by Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus in 2019 at the Bergen Theater Festival. Since 2020 Wilson’s productions have been featured on occasion in major Scandinavian theatre companies. This essay will focus on productions in Norway and will explore Wilson’s aesthetic and its relationship to Norwegian society as well as to certain aspects of Norway’s social and cultural nature. The legacy of Ibsen and the tradition of both realistic and nonrealistic versions of his plays in Norway are well documented. Peer Gynt is the most often produced work by Ibsen, or anyone else, in Norway. The long history of production of the work includes ballets, operas, plays, children’s productions, films, and undoubtedly other types of performances not mentioned. As is noted in the extensive paper “Robert Wilson’s Staging of Peer Gynt and the Norwegian Tradition,” by Keld Hyldig, the work has maintained three basic characteristics throughout its long production history: 1) “an extensive use of spectacular Norwegian sceneries,” 2) lyrical, mood-creating music, and 3) recognizable and thus “natural” representations of Norwegian characters. [2] Throughout its lengthy history Peer Gynt gained the reputation as being representative of the Norwegian way of life and grew to represent “all things Norwegian” as it explores, in epic fashion, over fifty years of action that the epic work chronicles. As it predated strictly realistic staging, Peer Gynt was never bound to a particular approach nor was it relegated to a lower status as one of Ibsen’s “early plays.” The play’s exploration of Norwegian culture and society as well certain elements from the working class naturally led it to numerous Brecht-inspired productions in the 1970s, but most experts point to Ingmar Bergman’s staging in 1957 at Malmö City Theatre as being the via negativa of a new psycho-surreal approach whereby much of the play’s action occurred in Peer’s subconscious. Bergman’s approach realized the play as “an internal struggle where Peer seeks to find his own humanity” [3] and paved the way for numerous highly visual yet uniquely Norwegian productions that emphasized the music and folklore of Norway in the nineteenth century in addition to exploring various theatrical means as storytelling devices. Wilson’s later visionary staging certainly landed as a necessary sector in the trajectory of the work’s evolution. Wilson’s Peer Gynt began rehearsals in March 2003 at the Watermill Center on Long Island, New York. The Watermill workshop yielded an extensive set of drawings or a “Project Book” for Peer Gynt as well as a staged collection of physical images developed by participants in the Watermill Summer Program and set to music by composer Michael Galasso. Practical work began later that same year at Det Norske Teatret in Olso. Apparently, Wilson had conceived the work in typically massive scale and the initial drawings and other speculations had yielded a potential running time of eight hours or more. [4] As is the norm with commissioned productions of this nature, the extended rehearsal period was one year. Stage A, or table work, consisted of a few weeks and finished with a bauprobe (rough staging rehearsal) of several days. During the rehearsal time of Stages A and B, Von Arx developed scenography and discussed with Wilson and the other members of the production team numerous individuals like actors, dramaturgs and those involved in the process. From that table work a skeleton structure known as the “silent play” emerged and elements such as architecture, light, and other visual elements were contemplated and considered. Actors from both Det Norske Teatret in Oslo as well as Det Nationale Scene in Bergen were selected to supplement the skeleton cast, and the full cast was finalized some six months prior to the opening. The final stage, which lasted only around one month, consisted of the addition of the text to the work. For Peer Gynt , Det Norske Teatret had contracted Norwegian playwright Jon Fosse to create a new text for the work that was a greater reflection of Norway’s “new language” that emerged following Norway’s independence and breakaway from bokmål or the previous everyday Norwegian language that was highly influenced by the Danish language. [5] In its original form, Peer Gynt includes some forty scenes and locations all over the globe and includes both the conscious and subconscious worlds. Typical of most of Ibsen’s works Peer Gynt was written in old Norwegian, and Fosse’s goal was to write the text in a “new Norwegian,” a language that included dialects from four prominent regions of Norway. [6] Fosse noted “the original was written in an old-fashioned Norwegian, that in reality was Danish. It was quite a job to adapt the work, but it made the play fresher, and in my opinion made Ibsen’s greatness as a writer more visible” [7] The playwright also noted “Bob Wilson has a great ear for the music of language, so the actors delivered their lines in an almost perfect way. It was impressive.” [8] Critics, even those known for more traditional tastes noted that both Wilson and Fosse had preserved the text and the play’s overall meaning and impact with a strong measure of success. In discussing his collaboration with Wilson, Fosse noted that they never really did actually “collaborate.” Fosse noted “I delivered a text, and he [Wilson] cut it.” But Fosse stated that he deeply admired Wilson’s talent for understanding a language that he didn’t understand in “a normal way.” Most of the textual adaptation was done by dramaturg Monica Ohlsson, who had worked with Wilson previously in Sweden and Denmark. Fosse was impressed with Wilson’s ability to successfully substitute a deeply meaningful theatrical language for the written text. Additionally, it was noted that Wilson had emphasized the spoken elongation of vowels throughout the work, which added to both the musicality as well as the “strange beauty” of his staging. [9] Figure 2 Gertrude Jynge and Robert Wilson during Peer Gynt rehearsals After the success of Peer Gynt , Det Norske Teatret had the desire to present another work directed by Wilson with text by Fosse. For this work, Fosse was tasked with providing a version of the Eddic Poems, Icelandic manuscripts from the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Wide ranging in their subject matter, the Eddic poems are essentially pre-Christian literary works that deal with Norse gods and medieval legends from the Nordic countries, handling many crucial events such as the beginning of time and the naming of the gods. Fosse noted that he wrote the work, trying at the same to be “loyal to the originals but also making into a coherent play” [10] Edda had its world premiere in Oslo at Det Norske Teatret in March 2017. Music was provided by Arvo Pärt along with the duo Coco Rosie, costumes were designed by Jacques Reynaurd, and scenic and painterly elements designed by Swiss designer Serge von Arx. As is the case with all things Robert Wilson, all roads typically lead to Ann-Christin Rommen. Having worked as Wilson’s co-director for over three decades, Ms. Rommen has been a key figure in all performance and conceptual elements of Wilson’s performances since their initial collaboration in 1983 with The CIVIL warS . She noted that Wilson likes to consider works that are very close and important to particular societies and cultures. He then likes to examine them in different ways, to find humor in the works, to “unseat the works from their high place” and look at them in a more playful, yet introspective way. In considering Wilson’s work on Edda , Rommen noted: Bob has always been drawn to universal myths. For example, I La Galigo the creation myth of the people of Sulawesi, Wagner’s Ring Cycle and the story of Die Nibelungen, Homer’s The Odyssey , Goethe’s Faust , and, of course, Ibsen’s Peer Gynt. These works all include the themes of good versus evil, incest, weird creatures like trolls and the cyclops, and they all tell stories that are relevant for all mankind. [11] Figure 3 Henrik Rafaelsen as Odin and Gjertrud Jynge as Volva in Edda Certain elements of the Nordic myths were appealing to Wilson. A study of the scene breakdown with Rommen and Carl Morten Amundsen, dramaturg of Det Norske Teatret and a member of the Edda dramaturgical team, revealed several scenes when many of the Norse gods would come together for meetings and would need to remind Ovid, the “All Father and God of war and death” about some occurrence or event that he had forgotten. Wilson viewed Odin’s age-related conditions as being like those of humans who become more childlike and sillier as they grow older. A number of comic nonsense dances were given to Odin, and there was also a scene in which Odin tested death by hanging upside down and playing electric guitar. In early table work, Wilson had planned to realize the original Norse legend of Odin “hanging upside down” but added the action of his singing a rock song while playing an electric guitar. As the legend goes, Odin remained in that hanging position for nine days in order to do some inner soul searching. [12] Another important scene involved Odin’s son Tor and his meeting with Volva and the accidental severing of the Midgaardsorm, Volva’s companion and the snake who holds the world together. To connect these major events, Wilson created a number of “knee plays” as was the case with the CIVIL warS . These short works linked together the various stories and allowed for important scenic transitions to happen during the scenes. For Wilson, it was very important that they happened “in the clouds,” behind a transparent cyclorama that was backed by an aluminum metal wall—defining the place as the infinite clouds of time. This allowed the work to transcend the ordinary world and present the story of the world’s creation. Pioneered by von Arx and Wilson, the combination of the semi-transparent cyclorama backed by the steel wall had become a unique facet of Wilson’s stage aesthetic since his early work in Norway and remains as one of the unique elements developed during his work there. Figure 4 Ann-Christin Rommen with Robert Wilson Two additional works have appeared in Norway as of August 2024— Shakespeare’s Sonnets in May 2017 and The Sandman in 2019. Both works appeared as part of the Bergen Theatre Festival at the performance space Grieghallen, Norway’s largest combined cultural and congress venue. Shakespeare’s Sonnets toured to Bergen from Berliner Ensemble while The Sandman toured from Dusseldorf Schauspielhaus in what was billed as one of the festival’s most adventurous works and played for only two performances on June 1 and 2, 2019. The Sandman was Wilson’s first collaboration with British pop star and rock composer Anna Calvi, notorious for the often sinister, undergirding soundtracks of shows like Peaky Blinders and other dark film projects. The work was received as a “grusical,” a ghastly expressionist cabaret driven by the haunting dreamlike presence of the title character who steals the children’s eyeballs and feeds them to the monsters upstairs.The Norwegian theatre public and critics have apparently even fashioned the term uhygge , or uhyggelia (uncanny or weird) for this type of work. Considering the recent productions of theatre practitioners such as Vegard Vinge in Bergen, The Sandman was likely only darkly grim or weird to a relatively small portion of those who attended. Figure 5 Cast of EDDA, scenography by Robert Wilson and Serge von Arx Another aspect of Robert Wilson’s work in Norway is his association with the Norwegian Theatre Academy in Fredrikstad, about one hour from Oslo. Wilson has had a long-time association with Serge von Arx, a professor of scenography and practicing architect. Von Arx and Wilson began collaborating as early as 1989 on various stage, exhibition, and design projects all over the world, including the Berliner Ensemble, Teatro Alla Scala, Teatro Real, and many others as noted on von Arx’s website. Wilson and von Arx have long experimented with “performing architecture,” in which the elements of performance and architecture become permanently intertwined in performance. The idea is reminiscent of Russian artist and theorist Vslevold Meyerhold and several others who utilized constructivism and similar performance practices that involved the melding of humans and scenic elements in performance. In Wilson and von Arx’s work together, they have found it important to utilize specific materials unique to each work that are intrinsic to the world(s) of the play. For example, in Edda , von Arx notes that “The set is a partner in dialogue with everything else happening on stage.” [13] Wilson’s work has a long tradition of including visual quotes and references to pre-existing images and structures. In Edda one image was that of the Brion Tomb by Italian architect Carlo Scarpa. Von Arx noted that recognizable visual structures assist in communicating ideas; “if you have something that people know or they can recognize, it’s much easier to pull them into the performance” [14] (Picchi). Another Scandinavian or Norwegian element noted by von Arx was the use of “traditional building methods and materials such as native woods, paint textures and the superior craftsmanship that Norway is known for.” Scenic elements were developed in the same manner as all other elements of performance and were discussed on a daily basis. This would allow for changes in accordance with the evolution of the staging process and/or any additions to or subtractions from the text. Many world theatre companies are not able to manage the many changes that are inherent in a work by Wilson. The finished product would only be achieved after the work was fully rehearsed and all desired changes and stage artifacts were implemented to one hundred percent satisfaction. Figure 6 Cast of Edda , scenography by Robert Wilson and Serge von Arx Wilson’s works are well known for having many anachronistic and very personal references both within the spoken text as well as notable visual references. In Edda , there was a scene during which the character Tor had to make a quick getaway after making advances on Freya, who refuses to marry him because he is a troll. Tor makes his exit as a cowboy hat and a single cowboy boot appear in the sky—one of Wilson’s playful references to his home state of Texas,. It was noted by Rommen that “Bob’s life and work have always referenced Texas. For many of the first years that I knew him, he would only wear his signature cowboy boots.” [15] Rommen also noted that in many cases she could sense the majesty of the Texas sky in his landscape and lighting designs. In particular, the hues and textures of the Texas sunset had been etched in Wilson’s memory and thus became prevalent in his designs. This element was prevalent in Edda as the tints and hues of the landscapes were much more reminiscent of Texas than Norway or anywhere in Scandinavia. Edda also toured to Reykjavik City Theatre in Iceland and to the Aarhus Theater in Denmark. Edda was awarded the Norwegian Hedda Prize as the theatrical event of 2017, just as Peer Gynt had done in 2005. Figure 7 Wilson’s Moby Dick at Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus, Fall 2024 Unfortunately, a potential collaboration on Moby Dick with Det Norske Teatret did not materialize. The long-planned staging of Melville’s masterpiece, however, moved forward with a fall 2024 production at Dusseldorf Schauspielhaus. At the time of Wilson’s passing in July 2025, there were no known planned collaborations for Wilson in Norway or any other Scandinavian and Nordic countries. Endnotes [1] Michael Billington, “Review: A Dream Play ,” The Guardian , May 30, 2001. [2] Keld Hyldig, "Robert Wilson's Staging of PEER GYNT and the Norwegian Tradition." Nordic Theatre Studies 18 (2006): 46–57. [3] Ibid. [4] Maria Shevtsova, “Experiencing the Movement: Working with Robert Wilson,” New Theatre Quarterly 23, no. 1 (February 2007): 58‑66. [5] Serge von Arx, interview by author, July 29, 2024. [6] Jon Fosse, interview by author, June 10, 2024 [7] Ibid. [8] Ibid. [9] Marilyn Stasio, “ Peer Gynt ,” Variety , April 12, 2006. [10] Fosse interview. [11] Ann-Christin Rommen, interview by author, August 1, 2024. [12] Ibid. [13] Von Arx interview. [14] Picchi Giuliano, “Serge von Arx and Robert Wilson’s EDDA ,” Scenography Today , UNITA Online Platform, 2024. https://www.scenographytoday.com/robert-wilson-edda/ . [15] Rommen interview. About The Author(s) Steve Earnest is a Professor of Theatre at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, South Carolina. Robert Wilson Yearbook The Robert Wilson Yearbook, published annually by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, offers a dedicated platform for scholarly and creative engagement with the life, artistry, and enduring legacy of Robert Wilson (1941–2025), one of the most original visionaries in contemporary theatre and performance. The Yearbook seeks to explore and expand upon Wilson’s groundbreaking approaches to staging, lighting, movement, and visual composition. Each issue will feature a diverse range of content—including original essays, critical commentary, archival materials, artist reflections, and photography—examining facets of Wilson’s multifaceted practice across genres, eras, and geographies. The Robert Wilson Yearbook is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - This Issue “Going on a Journey”: Space, Time, and Experience in Robert Wilson’s Installations and Museum Interventions Re-Viewing Stefan Brecht’s The Theatre of Visions: Robert Wilson from a (B.) Brechtian Perspective Towards a Formalist Ritualistic Theatre: An Artaudian Reading of Robert Wilson’s Aesthetics The Theatre of Autobio-hetero-thanato-graphic: The Life and Death of Marina Abramović Time’s Shadows: Crisis of Subjectivity and Reconciled Concord in Robert Wilson’s Performative Reading of Shakespeare's Sonnets They Asked Me to Draw a City: Postdramatic Imaginings in Robert Wilson’s Direction of Strindberg’s A Dream Play Robert Wilson's Oedipus: The Postdramatic Journey of the Oedipus Story from Sophocles through Freud Robert Wilson and Norway Robert Wilson’s Art of Senses and Emotions Listening to Deafman Glance Robert Wilson's Production of Henrik Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken Thinking in Structures: Working as a Dramaturg with Robert Wilson Bertolt Brecht and Robert Wilson: The Dialectical Triad of Playwright, Director and Berliner Ensemble Actors in Wilson’s The Threepenny Opera Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Back to Top Untitled Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages Volume 18 Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Practicing Place: Site-Specific Performance and the Reinscription of Memory in Palestine Marina Johnson Resisting the Unleashed Evils of the US- Invasion of Iraq in Amir Al-Azraki’s The Widow (2017) Thamir Az-Zubaidy Dina Mousawi’s RETURN: a Compelling site of representing Women’s Status of Agency Under Occupation Hind Sabah Bilal Renewed Awareness Toward Salvation: The Journey of The Story of Zahra from Page to Stage Raeda Ghazaleh Site-Specific Performance and Theatrical Memorialization of the Nakba Hala Khamis Nassar Performance Review: WAILING SONGS OF THE PAST, MIGHT THEY GROW OUR RESILIENCE. By Maya al-Khaldi. Dia Barghouti Performance Review: DUMMY IN DIASPORA. By Esho Rasho. Suzi Elnaggar Performance Review: ENGLISH. Written by Sanaz Toossi Peyman Shams Performance Review: THE CAVE. By Sadieh Rifai Sami Ismat Performance Review: IRAQ, BUT FUNNY by Atra Asdou Suzi Elnaggar Performance Review: COSMOS/AWALEM by Ashtar Muallem and Emile Saba. Malek Najjar Arab Stages Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Visit Journal Homepage

European Stages, created in 2013 by merging Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance, serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. It explores the evolution of both Western and Eastern European theatrical scenes, offering insightful analyses, artist interviews, and comprehensive coverage of major festivals. Back to Top Untitled Keep Reading < Back European Stages Volume 18, Fall, 2024 Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Dan Venning Report from London (December 2022) Philippa Wehle Confessions, storytelling and worlds in which the impossible becomes possible. The 77th Avignon Festival, July 5-25, 2023 Ivan Medenica “Regietheater:” two cases Anton Pujol The Grec Festival 2023 Kalina Stefanova The Festival of the Youth Theatre of Piatra Neamt, Romania: A Festival for “Youth without Age” (notes on the occasion of the 34th edition) Marvin Carlson Report from Germany Ion M. Tomuș Poetry on Stage: Games, Words, Crickets..., Directed by Silviu Purcărete European Stages European Stages, created in 2013 by merging Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance, serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. It explores the evolution of both Western and Eastern European theatrical scenes, offering insightful analyses, artist interviews, and comprehensive coverage of major festivals. ISSN Number: 1050-199 Entries under this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. Visit Journal Homepage

European Stages, created in 2013 by merging Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance, serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. It explores the evolution of both Western and Eastern European theatrical scenes, offering insightful analyses, artist interviews, and comprehensive coverage of major festivals. Back to Top Untitled Keep Reading < Back European Stages Volume 19, Fall, 2024 Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Duncan Wheeler A Problematic Classic: Lorca’s Bernarda Alba, at Home and Abroad Tamás Jászay (W)here comes the sun? Philippa Wehle Avignon 78, 2024. Imagining Possible Worlds and Celebrating Multiple Languages and Cultures Kalina Stefanova SPIRITUAL, VISCERAL, VISUAL … SPIRITUAL, VISCERAL, VISUAL …SHAKESPEARE AS YOU LIKE IT. IN CRAIOVA, ROMANIA, FOR 30 YEARS NOW Klára Madunická International Theatre Festival in Pilsen 2024 or The Human Beings and Their Place in Society Gergana Traikova Between Dark Aesthetics and Repetition: Reflections on the Theatre of the Bulgarian Director Veselka Kuncheva and Her Two Newest Productions Marvin Carlson Report from Basel Steve Earnest Berlin’s “Ten Remarkable Productions” Take the Stage in the 61st Berliner Theatertreffen. Aljoscha Begrich and Christian Tschirner Fine art in confined spaces Dan Poston 2024 Report from London and Berlin Cindy Sibilsky Hecuba Provokes Catharsis and Compassion in the Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus European Stages European Stages, created in 2013 by merging Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance, serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. It explores the evolution of both Western and Eastern European theatrical scenes, offering insightful analyses, artist interviews, and comprehensive coverage of major festivals. ISSN Number: 1050-199 Entries under this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. Visit Journal Homepage

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 19 Spring 2026 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Book Review: Samer Al-Saber. A Movement’s Promise: The Making of Contemporary Palestinian Theatre (Stanford University Press, 2025). Pp. 328. Hardcover, Paperback, E-book. By Hadia Mousa Published: May 11, 2026 Download Article as PDF Arab Stages ISSN: 2376-1148 Vol. 19 (Spring 2026), pp. 66-68 To preserve a certain memory and keep it alive, it's important to tell its story. This is what Samer Al-Saber accomplishes in his significant book, A Movement's Promise . He begins in a humorous tone to define the word "movement," aiming to avoid misunderstandings associated with its usual violent political connotations. After establishing this concept, Al-Saber provides justification for his selection of theatrical groups by detailing their histories. Focusing his research on Jerusalem and Ramallah, Al-Saber encountered difficulties in finding sufficient information about older groups. The challenges stem from the Nakba (the disaster) of Israel’s occupation and its consequences from 1948 to 1967. As a result, the author chooses to start his meticulous archival and ethnographic research from the year 1967, since the Palestinian theatrical movement was largely absent before this time. In the first two chapters, Al-Saber uses anecdotes and stories from artists to historicize the cultural Palestinian landscape and the political context from which the theatrical movement emerged after 1948. The early groups, which were short-lived, primarily targeted a Christian audience. One example is the Jerusalem Players Group, established by Haidar Al-Husseini, whose productions were mainly in English, although there was one performance of Eugene O'Neill in Arabic. George Ibrahim, who later founded Al-Kasaba Theatre—considered the largest group in Ramallah—was initially an actor and trainee in the Jerusalem Players Group. In chapter 3, covering the years from 1970 to 1973, Al-Saber highlights Ibrahim’s background as an actor in Israeli radio and television. Ibrahim eventually started his own group, The Theatrical Artistic Group, in the early 1970s, later renaming it Balalin (The Balloons) in 1972. This group became one of the longest-lived and most popular, primarily targeting children and young audiences. Due to the occupation, artists faced significant challenges in securing venues for theatrical and cultural events. As a Christian working for Israeli Radio and Television, Ibrahim was able to obtain the necessary permissions to perform in specific locations, such as Al-Omariyyeh School. Unfortunately, this new group eventually disbanded because they could not establish a stable financial position from which to produce plays. Additionally, the expanding control of Israeli military forces led to the dissolution of many Palestinian groups that had emerged during the 1970s and 1980s. Chapter 4 treats the following five years, 1973 to 1977, when several new theatre ensembles were formed, including Dababis, known for its theatre of resistance; the Palestinian Theatre Troupe (1973–1996); The Palestinian People’s Theatre (1979–1983); and Sanabel People’s Theatre (1983 to present). Each of these groups had its own unique style and attributes, but most presented realistic plays, whether comedic or tragic. They also incorporated al-dabkah, an indigenous Palestinian folkloric dance, into their productions. In 1973, several of these groups collaborated to organize the first theatrical festival in Ramallah. In addition, they established an artists' equity organization, the Association for Work and Development for the Arts, which served as an alternative to the absent Palestinian Ministry of Culture. They also published a theatrical magazine called Al-Masrah (The theatre), which helped document their movement and fostered a critical discourse in the 1970s. However, the situation for these groups worsened, as noted by Al-Saber, who documents artists getting arrested and expelled from Palestine. One such artist, Al-Kurd, was arrested twice before being forced into exile. Reaching a pivotal moment in this tragic narrative, chapter 5 focuses on El-Hakawati ensemble, one of the most renowned groups in the history of contemporary Palestinian theatre. Al-Saber details El-Hakawati’s prolific history from 1977 to 1987 under the leadership of François Abu Salem, discussing the historical context, the restrictions and obstacles they faced, as well as examples of their productions and themes based on interviews with the group's artists, including their critiques of the ensemble. This methodology is applied to many other groups as well. A crucial issue that arose alongside the external challenges faced by Palestinian artists was the deep divisions among them, which led to the disappearance of most ensembles formed in the 1970s, compounded by a lack of permanent theatrical spaces. Al-Saber addresses this issue in chapter 6, covering the years from 1981 to 1984. During this period, El-Hakawati experienced its golden era, successfully transforming a burnt cinema into a stable theatre space. With financial support from Europe and the United States, this building became a national cultural center, allowing Palestinian artists to take leadership of the venue and rename it the Palestinian National Theatre. One of El-Hakawati’s most significant achievements during this time was touring their productions in European countries and the United States. However, they faced new challenges, including biased reviews of their productions through an orientalist lens and the difficulties of performing in front of diverse audiences from various nationalities and backgrounds. Al-Saber returns to George Ibrahim in chapter 7, which focus on the years from 1984 to 1986, and documents the various groups Ibrahim collaborated with, including Masrah Al-Shoke, Firqat Al-Funoun El-Masrahiyyah, and, finally, Al-Kasaba Troupe. Unfortunately, during the Intifada from 1987 to 1990, the events unfolding in the streets had a profound impact on all theatrical groups. El-Hakawati, in particular, experienced significant internal conflict. As chronicled in chapter 8, it's noteworthy that two new groups emerged: Sanabel and El-Warsheh El-Fanniyeh. Besides the well-known companies, there were also smaller groups that struggled consistently to achieve financial stability and secure rehearsal and performance space. Finally, in chapter 9, Al-Saber compares the declining prominence of El-Hakawati Theatre with the rising success of Al-Kasaba Theatre, which Ibrahim was preparing to make his final destination in Jerusalem during the Intifada period. This new venue featured a co-production between Palestinian and Israeli artists of Romeo and Juliet , presented as a reflection of the Oslo Peace Accords. The challenges faced by the production led Ibrahim to remark, "Peace was just on paper and doesn’t exist in our reality," a sentiment supported by the events that followed in the years after the early 1990s up to the present day. In its conclusion, this book briefly mentions the emergent groups and theatre directors of the last twenty-five years. A comprehensive discussion about them would require another book. Al-Saber’s primary objective is to present information about the founding generations of Palestinian theatre, which is particularly significant given the limited number of publications on Palestinian theatre, in English or Arabic. He has succeeded in documenting and analyzing the productions of this earlier movement within its economic and political context, which is an ambitious goal given the considerable task of translating excerpts from journal reviews and conducting ethnographic research. Indeed, Al-Saber situates the Palestinian theatrical movement as authentic and impactful in this important work. Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes References About The Author(s) Hadia Mousa is an Egyptian Associate Professor of Performance Studies in the Faculty of Arts, Theatre Department, Acting and Directing Branch, at Capital University, Cairo, Egypt. She was a visiting scholar at NYU and CUNY from 2012 to 2013. In 2019, Mousa published her first book, Egyptian Women Directors from 1990 to 2010 (The Arab Theatre Institute). She has contributed to numerous publications including the Arab Stages online journal (United States); International Centre for Performance Studies Publications (Morocco); Sharjah, Arabic and Egyptian theatre magazines; and with the publisher Routledge. Arab Stages Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Reframing the Past: Situating Mesopotamian Theatrical Traditions Within a Cross‑Cultural Performance Continuum Gen Z Theatre from Turkey Taps into Repertoires of Millennial Resistance: A Comparison of the Short Festival Plays 'Helezoni' and 'Orange' Performance Review: THE CLOWN, by Mariam Basha. Directed by Kamal El Basha. El Hakawati Theatre, Jerusalem. August 28, 2025 in person, September 11, 2025 via WhatsApp video. Performance Review: DODI AND DIANA, by Kareem Fahmy. Directed by Reginald L. Douglas. Mosaic Theater, DC. September 23, 2025. Performance Review: ALMONDS BLOSSOM IN DEIR YASSIN, by Hanna Eady. Directed by Hanna Eady. Cherry Street Village, Seattle. October 25, 2025. Book Review: Samer Al-Saber. A Movement’s Promise: The Making of Contemporary Palestinian Theatre (Stanford University Press, 2025). Pp. 328. Hardcover, Paperback, E-book. Previous Next Attribution: Entries under this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

European Stages, created in 2013 by merging Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance, serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. It explores the evolution of both Western and Eastern European theatrical scenes, offering insightful analyses, artist interviews, and comprehensive coverage of major festivals. Back to Top Untitled Keep Reading < Back European Stages Volume 20, Spring 2025 Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Steve Earnest Editor's Statement - European Stages Volume 20 Adam Pelty Duende and Showbiz: A Theatrical Odyssey Through Spain’s Soul Steve Earnest Interview with Walter Bart (Artistic Leader, Wunderbaum Collective & Director, Die Hundekot-Attacke) from the 2024 Berliner Theatertreffen Steve Earnest The 62nd Berliner Theatertreffen: Stories and Theatrical Spaces That Realize the Past, Present and Future. Marvin Carlson Varna Summer International Theatre Festival Marvin Carlson Mary Said What She Said Alex Lefevre The Puzzle: A new musical in the Spoleto Festival, Italy presented by La MaMa Umbria Thomas Irmer Willem Dafoe in conversation with Theater der Zeit Dan Poston The 2025 Festival International New Drama (FIND) at Berlin Schaubühne European Stages European Stages, created in 2013 by merging Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance, serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. It explores the evolution of both Western and Eastern European theatrical scenes, offering insightful analyses, artist interviews, and comprehensive coverage of major festivals. ISSN Number: 1050-199 Entries under this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. Visit Journal Homepage

Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Back to Top Untitled Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages Volume 15 Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Five Arab American Plays Everyone Should Read Roaa Ali Interview with Nasser Rahmaninejad by Babak Rahimi Babak Rahimi MIDNIGHT IN CAIRO: THE DIVAS OF EGYPT'S ROARING '20S. By Raphael Cormack (REVIEW) Suzi Elnaggar Arab American Drama: Five Books that Inspired My Journey Malek Najjar Carving a Path: Desiring-Production in Displaced Syrian Theatre Bart Pitchford Arab Stages Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Visit Journal Homepage

European Stages, created in 2013 by merging Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance, serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. It explores the evolution of both Western and Eastern European theatrical scenes, offering insightful analyses, artist interviews, and comprehensive coverage of major festivals. Back to Top Untitled Keep Reading < Back European Stages Volume 21, Winter 2025 Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Steve Earnest Editor's Statement - European Stages Volume 21 Marvin Carlson Report from Berlin Călin Ciobotari Radu Afrim and his House Between the Blocks Timothy Koch Review of Samuel Barber’s Vanessa by Ópera do Castelo Kalina Stefanova International Theatre Festival of Sibiu 32nd Edition Ion Tomus The Tragic Ideal of Eternal Youth: Folk Myth on the Modern Stage Amy Hamel Summer 2025 in London, England Savas Patsalidis Polyphonies of the Present: The Pulse of the Almada Festival Philippa Wehle Dramas of Separation at Festival d’Avignon 19th Edition Steve Earnest Robert Wilson’s Moby Dick at Schauspielhaus Düsseldorf, Summer 2025 Steve Earnest Theatre in Poland, Fall 2025 European Stages European Stages, created in 2013 by merging Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance, serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. It explores the evolution of both Western and Eastern European theatrical scenes, offering insightful analyses, artist interviews, and comprehensive coverage of major festivals. ISSN Number: 1050-199 Entries under this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. Visit Journal Homepage

Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Back to Top Untitled Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages Volume 17 Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents O Lord! By Ali Abdel-Nabi Al-Zaidi Ali Abdel-Nabi Al-Zaidi, Amir Al-Azraki, Jeff Casey Mothers Challenging the Divine: Ali Al-Zaidi’s Ya Rab! Amir Al-Azraki The 31st Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre. September 1-11, 2024. Najwa Kondakji ARTIFICIAL HEART. By Mohammad Basha and Firas Farrah. Marina Johnson LEILI & MAJNUN. Written and directed by Torange Yeghiazarian Namrata Verghese SHAHADAT (THE TESTIMONIES) Adapted by Fouad Teymour Suzi Elnaggar Review: TO THE GOOD PEOPLE OF GAZA: THEATRE FOR YOUNG PEOPLE Marina Johnson Staging Revolutions and the Many Faces of Modernism: Performing Politics in Irish and Egyptian Theatre Tiran Manucharya Arab Stages Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Visit Journal Homepage

Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Back to Top Untitled Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages Volume 16 Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents An Interview with the Iraqi-born British playwright Hassan Abdulrazzak by Hadeel Abelhameed Hadeel Abelhameed Review: GUERNICA, GAZA: VISIONS FROM THE CENTER OF THE EARTH. By Naomi Wallace and Ismail Khalidi Marina Johnson Performance Review: The Tutor Hala Baki, California Polytechnic State University Review: OF KINGS AND CLOWNS: LEADERSHIP IN CONTEMPORARY EGYPTIAN THEATRE SINCE 1967 By Tiran Manucharyan. Areeg Ibrahim Review: PLAYS OF ARABIC HERITAGE. By Hannah Khalil Kari Barclay Arab Stages Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Visit Journal Homepage

Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Back to Top Untitled Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages Volume 14 Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents On Writing Egypt from the Diaspora: An Interview with Adam Ashraf Elsayigh Sonali Pahwa Book Review: MANSOUR, MONA. THE VAGRANT TRILOGY Zeina Salame Book Review: ACTING EGYPTIAN Marjan Moosavi Performance Review: LITTLE SYRIA Sami Ismat Performance Review: HOOTA. By Amer Hlehel Samer Al-Saber Performance Review: A FAMILY THAT HAS BEEN BLOCKED Areeg Ibrahim Performance Review: BETHLEHEM SITE-SPECIFIC THEATER FESTIVAL Marina Johnson Two Giants of Egyptian Theatre: Conversations with Mohamed Abul-ʿEla El-Salamouny and Lenin El-Ramly Tiran Manucharyan Crossing Borders: A Theatre Practitioner’s Odyssey, An Interview with Hassan El Geretly Iman Ezzeldin Review: Playwright Showcase, New Arab American Theater Works Katherine Hennessey Up There by Wael Kadour, Introduction Edward Ziter Review: Layalina written by Martin Yousif Zebari, directed by Sivan Battat Sami Ismat Review of Syrian Refugees, Applied Theater, Workshop Facilitation, and Stories: While They Were Waiting written by Fadi Skeiker Sonja Arsham Kuftinec Review of MUKHRIJĀT AL-MASRAḤ AL-MIṢRĪ (1990-2010): DIRĀSA SĪMIYŪṬĪQĪYAH [Female Egyptian Directors (1990-2010): A Semiotic Study], written by Hadia Abd El-Fattah Areeg Ibrahim Review: Baba written by Denmo Ibrahim, directed by Hamid Dehghani Suzi Elnaggar “Indigenous Avant-Gardes”: The Shiraz Arts Festival and Ritual Performance Theory in 1970s Iran Matthew Randle-Bent Review: Decolonizing Sarah: A Hurricane Play written and directed by Samer Al-Saber George Potter Review of Theaters of Citizenship: Aesthetics and Politics of Avant-Garde Performance in Egypt written by Sonali Pahwa Suzi Elnaggar Review: Mother Courage adapted and directed by Alison Shan Price Hassan Hajiyah Arab Stages Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Visit Journal Homepage

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 19 Spring 2026 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Performance Review: ALMONDS BLOSSOM IN DEIR YASSIN, by Hanna Eady. Directed by Hanna Eady. Cherry Street Village, Seattle. October 25, 2025. By Marina Johnson Published: May 11, 2026 Download Article as PDF Arab Stages ISSN: 2376-1148 Vol. 19 (Spring 2026), pp. 62-65 Hanna Eady’s Almonds Blossom in Deir Yassin is a haunting work of memory and moral reckoning, a four-character play that moves fluidly across time, psychic space, and geopolitical terrain. Rather than a straightforward historical drama, Eady constructs a piece that unfolds “in the Palestinian memory, in Gad’s head, in Israel, in Palestine, and on the site of Deir Yassin.” The result is a play that refuses temporal linearity and narrative comfort, embodying instead the fractured condition of a history too long repressed. In this production, the living and the dead share the stage as the massacre’s silenced testimony presses insistently against Gad, a former soldier who was present at the massacre, and his faltering attempts at justification and forgetting. Seattle-based Dunya Productions deepens the resonances inherent in the text by situating it in the former Cherry Street Mosque, a nearly century-old building that has served at different times as a Jewish school, an Islamic school, and now as the emerging Cherry Street Village—a joint endeavor among interfaith and arts organizations. As the city’s Central District undergoes rapid transformation, the effort to restore this building as a community hub becomes an act of preservation and imagination, resisting the erasures that urban development often produces. Set on the eve of the 70th anniversary of the 1948 Deir Yassin massacre, the work insists that memory is not past; it is a present tense, a haunting that continues to shape those who survive and those who inherit. At its center is Gad, an aging Israeli man tormented by visions and memories he cannot control. He is the last surviving member of his military unit, which had been involved in the Deir Yassin massacre. His psychiatrist, Dr. Levi, accompanies him to the site of the former village, now a mental institution, in an attempt at therapeutic exposure and in preparation for a celebration honoring him at that site. Instead of resolution, the visit collapses the fragile border between hallucination and haunting, seemingly summoning Amal and Zidan, a father-daughter duo who initially appear as ghosts, but gradually reveal themselves as embodiments of history and truth. Amal uses poetic and incantatory language to cut through Gad’s rationalizations as he denies his past acts. Her exhortation, “Come out of the darkness… show your bloody hands,” is both an accusation and an invitation to confess. As an audience member, I was not certain to what extent Amal was real; she seemed to always occupy a liminal space that defied categorization. Was Amal both a living 70-year-old woman and a ghost who haunted Gad? In my interpretation, she was simultaneously a ghost, a memory, a witness, and a child. To have the main Palestinian character occupy this opaque space seemed odd, as the Israeli characters seemed to occupy very specific characterizations. Dr. Levi, a representative of institutional authority, attempts to manage Gad and his deteriorating mental state, offering medication and rehearsing the script he is expected to recite at the ceremony honoring him and his military unit. But her own encounters with Amal destabilize her certainty. Her insistence that Gad focus on his own mental well-being, divorced from historical reality, reveals the limitations of psychological frameworks that avoid political truth. The past demands to be confronted, through the presence of Amal and Zidan. The script’s interplay between the psychological and political gives the play its charge. The dramaturgical structure slowly builds toward the play’s devastating reversal: Zidan, the elderly Palestinian man we think is Amal’s father, confesses that he is not what he seems. He reveals that he was once a Jewish Irgun fighter who participated in the massacre. Zidan was shot and abandoned by his fellow fighters, only to be rescued by Amal’s father, who placed a keffiyeh around his neck before being killed moments later. Mistaken for a Palestinian because of the keffiyeh, Zidan adopted a new identity, “Zidan Yassin,” raising the infant Amal as his daughter. Zidan’s confession thus resonates as both personal tragedy and collective indictment, exposing how violence reverberates across generations and identities. This revelation reframes the relationship between the two characters and transforms Amal’s presence onstage from that of a protected child into a living embodiment of the history Zidan carries. Amal’s final proclamation, “HOPE! That’s my name,” echoes through the theatre not as naïveté but as an insistence on memory and the continuity of Palestinian presence. Dramaturgically, this shifts the audience’s attention from the perpetrator’s confession to the persistence of Palestinian life, positioning Amal’s declaration as both a reclamation of narrative and a gesture toward the future. Eady, who grew up inside the Green Line, belongs to a lineage of Palestinian theatre that uses fractured temporality to counter attempts at erasure. [1] Yet Almonds Blossom in Deir Yassin is distinctive in its focus on interrogating the psychological architecture of denial among its Israeli characters. In the United States, there has been a necessary dialogue on the representational discourse of plays from and about the SWANA world. While essential, these frameworks sometimes sidestep deeper questions of historical responsibility, narrative control, and the ethics of staging political trauma. Eady’s play pushes these conversations further. It challenges audiences, particularly American ones accustomed to consuming stories about the Middle East through a humanitarian or apolitical lens, to confront the structural and historical specificity of Palestinian dispossession. Visually, this production was simple but striking. The stage was dominated by a single bare almond tree, its branches twisting upward like an arrested gesture. Leo Mayberry’s projections animated the tree in slow, subtle transformations; blossoms emerged, trembled, and fell. Mayberry expanded the visual field with images of Palestinian landscapes—terraces, stone walls, olive groves—and later with horrifying scenes from Gaza. These projections anchored the story within a broader continuum of violence. They reminded viewers that the ghosts of Deir Yassin are not relics of a distant past but part of ongoing dispossession and massacre. Image 1: Nabra Nelson as Amal and Tom Wiseley as Gad. Photo Credit: Samia El-Moslimany. The performances were uniformly strong, with Nabra Nelson’s Amal at the center. Nelson brought extraordinary depth to the role. Clad in a richly embroidered Palestinian thobe, she embodied Amal with paradoxical stillness and volatility: Her gestures were small but precise, her shifts between tenderness and accusation seamless (Image 1). Her voice, resonant and controlled, carried the weight of generations. She was not just a character; she embodied a lineage. Tom Wiseley’s portrayal of Gad was also compelling. He captured the character’s oscillation between rationalization and collapse, his voice revealing layers of denial, fear, and yearning for absolution. Wiseley also designed the lighting and served as production manager, a testament to Dunya Productions’ collaborative ethos. Alyssa Norling’s Dr. Levi brought sharpness and restraint to her role, making the character’s clinical rationality feel both chilling and heartbreakingly inadequate. Bradley Goodwill’s Zidan, with his quiet gravitas and understated emotionality, grounded the play’s final confession with devastating clarity. The sonic landscape, composed by renowned Palestinian musician Habib Shehadeh Hanna, enriched the production. The music was aching, ritualistic, and melodic, and it served as both emotional undercurrent and narrative guide. It marked shifts in time, underscored moments of confrontation, and imbued the performance with the weight of ceremony. Dramaturg Ed Mast provided accessible and essential context for audience members unfamiliar with Deir Yassin, available both in the program and in the lobby; this helped situate the play within a broader political and historical frame. On opening night, the post-show conversation led by organizers from No Tech for Apartheid extended the production’s reach, connecting the themes of historical complicity to contemporary technological infrastructures that enable state violence. The conversation echoed the play’s refusal of closure. It demanded that audiences remain unsettled, recognizing that the past is not dormant but animated, always insisting on return. In the end, Almonds Blossom in Deir Yassin offers no catharsis, nor does it attempt to redeem its characters through forgiveness. Instead, it insists on truth-telling as the precondition for healing. It invites audiences to bear witness not as passive observers but as participants in an unresolved story, one that continues to shape the present through its echoes, absences, and persistent calls for justice. Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes [1] “Inside the Green Line” refers to the territory that Israel took control of after the Nakba, demarcated by the 1949 Armistice Line, which was often drawn in green ink on maps. References About The Author(s) Marina Johnson ( Marina-Johnson.com ) is a PhD candidate in TAPS with PhD minors in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and the Certificate in Critical Consciousness and Anti-Oppressive Praxis. Prior to arriving at Stanford, Johnson received her MFA in Directing and taught at Beloit College for three years. Johnson continues to work as a director and dramaturg while also co-hosting Kunafa and Shay , a MENA/SWANA theatre podcast produced by HowlRound Theatre Commons. During her most recent fieldwork, she directed several productions with Al Harah Theatre and taught directing workshops at ASHTAR Theatre. Arab Stages Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Reframing the Past: Situating Mesopotamian Theatrical Traditions Within a Cross‑Cultural Performance Continuum Gen Z Theatre from Turkey Taps into Repertoires of Millennial Resistance: A Comparison of the Short Festival Plays 'Helezoni' and 'Orange' Performance Review: THE CLOWN, by Mariam Basha. Directed by Kamal El Basha. El Hakawati Theatre, Jerusalem. August 28, 2025 in person, September 11, 2025 via WhatsApp video. Performance Review: DODI AND DIANA, by Kareem Fahmy. Directed by Reginald L. Douglas. Mosaic Theater, DC. September 23, 2025. Performance Review: ALMONDS BLOSSOM IN DEIR YASSIN, by Hanna Eady. Directed by Hanna Eady. Cherry Street Village, Seattle. October 25, 2025. Book Review: Samer Al-Saber. A Movement’s Promise: The Making of Contemporary Palestinian Theatre (Stanford University Press, 2025). Pp. 328. Hardcover, Paperback, E-book. Previous Next Attribution: Entries under this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 19 Spring 2026 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Performance Review: THE CLOWN, by Mariam Basha. Directed by Kamal El Basha. El Hakawati Theatre, Jerusalem. August 28, 2025 in person, September 11, 2025 via WhatsApp video. By Marina Johnson Published: May 11, 2026 Download Article as PDF The clown paints his face to become someone else — to live in another reality. With white paint, a few colors, and a red nose, he can turn tragedy into comedy. He can walk into a hospital room, where someone lies dying, and turn him into a laughing child. He can enter a refugee camp and make it a festival .… He paints his face, puts on the nose — and for a moment, he’s allowed to dream again. [1] The Clown is a gripping one-man play that delivers far more than its simple title might suggest. At its center is Sobhi (Ezzat Al-Natsheh), a Palestinian clown performer whose painted smile conceals a churning inner world of joy, humiliation, pain, hope, and unrelenting self-doubt. The play follows Sobhi, who is haunted by the traumatic car crash that happened to him and his friend while they were driving to a birthday performance in the rain. Throughout the monologue, Sobhi argues with a second voice, “the Clown,” a manifestation of his inner critic, that alternately mocks, seduces, and confronts him about his lifelong need to please others, his humiliation and bullying, and his guilt over surviving when others did not. As Sobhi recounts memories of family violence, political repression, and the daily humiliations of life under occupation, the clown persona becomes both a survival strategy and a trap that feeds on others’ laughter while concealing his despair. By the end, Sobhi briefly removes the red nose in an attempt to reclaim himself, but ultimately puts it back on, acknowledging that the cycle of performance, masking pain with laughter, will continue. I first encountered this work in rehearsal on August 28, 2025, at El Hakawati Palestinian National Theatre while I was in Palestine. Two weeks later, on opening night, I was already back in the United States, so my friends helped me watch the performance via a WhatsApp video call, a surprisingly intimate way to witness the performance from afar. I could hear my friends laugh and cry throughout the performance as they sat in the red velvet seats of one of my favorite theatres, while I laughed and cried from my couch in the US. I was grateful for the solution that allowed me to witness a play I had been anxiously anticipating by a team I hold in high esteem. The play’s concept originates with Al-Natsheh himself and draws directly from his life story. He shared the material with Mariam Basha, who crafted the script and served as assistant director and choreographer alongside Kamel El Basha, who directed the production. I had previously collaborated with Al-Natsheh on El Manshiyyeh , which I co-directed with Samer Al-Saber, but I’ve also known him for years through his work with the famed Jerusalem clown duo Zaatar and Sim Sim (he is, of course, Sim Sim), as well as his collaborations with Red Noses Palestine. [2] A little-known fact about Al-Natsheh–he keeps a nose on him at all times because sometimes someone around him needs joy, and he is just the one to deliver it. Also, he is often recognized in public as Sim Sim, so the nose allows him to get in and stay in character with/for the kids who recognize him. Al-Natsheh is quick-witted, intellectually agile, and an extraordinarily funny performer. This piece, however, revealed a different register of his artistry. In the opening moments, he applies his makeup onstage, transforming himself into the clown before the audience’s eyes and setting the tone for the performance to come. The text of the play begins with Sobhi describing a fragmented memory of being in a car accident and the feeling of being trapped and unable to scream as the other person in the car dies. He asks: “Why was it me who stayed alive? … I’ll never know what he wanted to tell me.” [3] This tragic car accident serves as one of the play’s anchoring images, its rain-soaked violence symbolizing both literal and psychic rupture. Rain becomes a recurring motif that is at once cleansing and wounding, a metaphor for memory, endurance, and the cyclical nature of grief. Water washes over the narrative as Sobhi attempts to peel back the layers of performance that shield him from his own vulnerability. Interruptions are key to the play. Phone calls frequently interrupt the scenes with people calling Sobhi to offer clown jobs, and we see that he is constantly negotiating work under stressful conditions. In the series of phone conversations, the difficult circumstances of work as a clown are revealed: short notice, low pay, unsafe environments, and often unrealistically high expectations. Other memories also intrude, contributing to the play's fragmented nature. For instance, Sobhi recalls being eleven years old and living with his grandfather, who burned his belongings and constantly insulted him. This bullying carried over to other facets of his life, as he remembers being bullied by his peers for his height and appearance. Image 1: Ezzat Al-Natsheh on stage at El Hakawati Theatre in Jerusalem. Photo credit: Mohammad Basha. The crux of the play lies in the interruptions where Sobhi speaks with “the Clown,” a figure who interjects, comments, argues, and mocks him. They volley between dark humor, confession, and near-prayer, their exchanges revealing a fractured sense of self shaped by personal trauma and the suffocating pressures of social and political life. The Clown criticizes Sobhi for being too kind, for letting people walk over him, and for depending on others’ approval. Sobhi tries to defend himself, but the dialogue shows how entangled they are. At times, the Clown sounds like a bully; at other times, he praises Sobhi and even becomes affectionate. Their battlesome relationship is at the center of the play, and it was what I, as an audience member, wanted to know more about. In a quieter scene that reveals his inner turmoil, Sobhi prays aloud, asking God for relief and strength (Image 1). As he speaks, he reflects on what a clown can do, such as bringing laughter to hospitals and refugee camps, offering brief moments of joy amid hardship. These reflections frame the emotional spine of the play: memories of childhood humiliation, emotional neglect, and constant belittlement for failing to embody the expectations of masculinity. Those wounds follow him into the present, where he struggles as a clown who barely makes ends meet, trapped in a society that relies on him for laughter yet mocks the very profession that sustains him. The Clown, both tormentor and truth-teller, relentlessly probes Sobhi’s insecurities, accusing him of cowardice, failure, and complicity in his own suffering. Their confrontation builds toward the play’s central question: whether Sobhi’s clowning is an act of degradation or a source of purpose. Near the end, the Clown urges Sobhi to “take off the nose.” Sobhi removes it, and the Clown insists that without it, he cannot exist. Sobhi resists, declaring that he is “done performing,” and attempts to walk away. Yet in the moment of refusal, Sobhi recognizes what gives his life meaning. He chooses to put the red nose back on—not as submission, but as an affirmation of the role he has claimed for himself. Without this… who am I? Without the laughter… who remembers me? Maybe the clown is the only part of me that’s still alive. The stage’s visual composition echoes the play's themes. The scenography was deceptively minimal. At the center of the stage lay a patterned carpet that served as a grounding place for the story. Upstage right sat a mound of pastel balloons, eight or more in various soft colors, an oddly cheerful counterpoint to the psychological terrain of the piece. On the opposite side rested a wooden chair draped with a ukulele, topped with a rubber chicken, and accompanied by a red-and-blue striped stand for a computer. The center was left open, allowing the dueling figures, Sobhi and the Clown, ample room to spar, circle one another, and, in Sobhi’s case, to dance. Al-Natsheh transitioned between the two characters simply by sharply turning; when he faced stage right, we knew the Clown was talking in his aggressive and often belittling voice. When he faced stage left, Al-Natsheh was the one in the lead, responding and reasoning with the Clown. The production extended this sense of divided identity into the costume itself. The costume design sharpened the performance’s tonal dissonance: a one-piece clown suit with light blue sleeves and hip pockets, bisected into pink on one side and yellow on the other, its bowtie reversing the colors so that pink and yellow contrasted each other. The result was both whimsical and faintly disquieting, perfectly attuned to the play’s oscillation between humor and unease. Kamel El Basha’s direction provides a steady hand throughout the production, while Mariam Basha’s choreography introduces dances that offer moments of levity and deepen the play’s emotional texture. Al-Natsheh’s acting is remarkably agile, shifting seamlessly between characters—signaled subtly by whether his hair is tied back in a ponytail or left down. What makes The Clown so resonant as a production is the intimate character study at its core. Laughter emerges as both lifeline and trap: an act of resistance against despair, yet also a performance demanded by others that gradually erodes the self. Through the protagonist’s exchanges, the play exposes the gendered and political dimensions of his pain, revealing how patriarchal expectations of strength, the violence of occupation, and the indignities of precarity conspire to “castrate” him emotionally and spiritually. Ultimately, The Clown becomes a haunting meditation on what it means to continue performing joy in a world that constantly humiliates and silences. Blending absurdist comedy with piercing confession and poetic repetition, the play offers a powerful and unsettling portrait of identity under pressure—an unforgettable image of a man struggling to endure, create, and hope while caught between the demands of the world and the echoing chambers of his own mind. Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes [1] My translation, from Mariam Basha’s script. [2] Red Noses Palestine is a branch of Red Noses International, which employs local clown-doctors to perform in hospitals for sick patients. [3] My translation, from Mariam Basha’s script References About The Author(s) Marina Johnson ( Marina-Johnson.com ) is a PhD candidate in TAPS with PhD minors in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and the Certificate in Critical Consciousness and Anti-Oppressive Praxis. Prior to arriving at Stanford, Johnson received her MFA in Directing and taught at Beloit College for three years. Johnson continues to work as a director and dramaturg while also co-hosting Kunafa and Shay , a MENA/SWANA theatre podcast produced by HowlRound Theatre Commons. During her most recent fieldwork, she directed several productions with Al Harah Theatre and taught directing workshops at ASHTAR Theatre. Arab Stages Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Reframing the Past: Situating Mesopotamian Theatrical Traditions Within a Cross‑Cultural Performance Continuum Gen Z Theatre from Turkey Taps into Repertoires of Millennial Resistance: A Comparison of the Short Festival Plays 'Helezoni' and 'Orange' Performance Review: THE CLOWN, by Mariam Basha. Directed by Kamal El Basha. El Hakawati Theatre, Jerusalem. August 28, 2025 in person, September 11, 2025 via WhatsApp video. Performance Review: DODI AND DIANA, by Kareem Fahmy. Directed by Reginald L. Douglas. Mosaic Theater, DC. September 23, 2025. Performance Review: ALMONDS BLOSSOM IN DEIR YASSIN, by Hanna Eady. Directed by Hanna Eady. Cherry Street Village, Seattle. October 25, 2025. Book Review: Samer Al-Saber. A Movement’s Promise: The Making of Contemporary Palestinian Theatre (Stanford University Press, 2025). Pp. 328. Hardcover, Paperback, E-book. 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Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 19 Spring 2026 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Gen Z Theatre from Turkey Taps into Repertoires of Millennial Resistance: A Comparison of the Short Festival Plays 'Helezoni' and 'Orange' By Deniz Başar Published: May 11, 2026 Download Article as PDF Arab Stages ISSN: 2376-1148 Vol. 19 (Spring 2026), pp. 27-51 Gen Z Theatre from Turkey Taps into Repertoires of Millennial Resistance: A Comparison of the Short Festival Plays Helezoni and Orange Deniz Başar Abstract : This article traces the changes to the alternative theatre field in Turkey since the 2013 Gezi Park Resistance until today, documenting the reasons for and outcomes of the erosion of that field due to growing authoritarian neoliberalism. Through auto-ethnography, among other methods, the writer tries to meditate rhizomatically on the relationship between alternative theatre in Turkey and repertoires of resistance embodied in 2013, and re-embodied in protests triggered by the illegal imprisonment of elected İstanbul mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu on 19th of March 2025. Tracing the lineage of the 19th of March protests, a Gen Z-led movement, back to the millennial-led movement of Gezi, the article investigates the living heritages of the alternative theatre field in Gen Z theatre, which persist despite the strategic damage to the field which took place through the past decade. Arguing that these re-embodied, ever-growing repertoires of resistance are best archived in their sensibility by young people’s theatre works, the writer shares her insights into two short plays from 2025: Helezoni and Orange . Both plays were made by ensembles of emerging theatre practitioners, who were pushed into working in 2020s neoliberal spaces, due to the strategic and authoritarian erosion of the 2010s’ alternative theatre field, and both plays challenge the neoliberal authoritarianism policing their lives and censoring their work, in ways legible to people who have embodied knowledge of the local repertoires of resistance . Keywords : repertoires of resistance, Gezi Park Resistance, 19th of March 2025 protests in Turkey, alternative theatre, Gen Z theatre, queer theatre A Personal Introspection, in the Form of a Literature Review I have been teaching in various theatre conservatories in İstanbul, such as Bahçeşehir University and Maltepe University, as contract faculty, and as part of independent theatre workshops, such as Performance Ecologies , since 2022. Since 19 March 2025, I have encountered most of my students, and some of my own university professors from my BA degree in Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University’s (MSFAU) Urban and Regional Planning Department, through the on-going protests. I feel unnamable things in my chest when I think about the fact that I was my students’ age when the Gezi Park Protests [1] happened in 2013, as I was writing my MA thesis on the alternative theatre field of İstanbul (Başar, 2014), and how that whole experience changed who I am today. A fellow theatre scholar working on the performance field of contemporary Turkey, Zeynep Uğur, notes the ways in which the alternative theatre field that emerged in the late 2000s and early 2010s provided sociological foreshadowings of the Gezi Park Protests. Uğur then traces the aftereffects of Gezi on the alternative theatre field: [T]he Gezi movement can be traced back to the alternative theatre practice in Istanbul which was already in existence prior to the protests claiming autonomous spaces in the city for artistic creation and sociability. In other words, it provides an alternative history to analyse the sociopolitical transformation of citizens claiming their ownership in the city. Furthermore, alternative theatres become spaces of political resistance in the aftermath of Gezi (Uğur, 2022, 122). The logic of cause and effect is unapologetically ouroboros in contemporary Turkey. Gezi transformed my personal relationship to the city and independent theatres too, as a sense of urgency sneaked into all of my daily practices. The “here and now” of a revolutionary moment redefined the “here and now” of performance for me within my body as a “performing remains” (Schneider, 2011). It was the end of my first year in my master’s degree when Gezi happened, and I remember many things about June 2013 along with how I—miraculously—managed to write my graduate papers in between regularly being tear gassed in Taksim. Starting from late 2011 I was captivated by the alternative theatre scene which was introduced to me by a crush who was working as a volunteer dramaturg in this habitat. As life goes, this crush led to the other—the much, much bigger one—which redefined my life. I took it onto myself to make sure the world knew about it. I agree with Uğur’s reading above: alternative theatre—as a field—was a foreshadowing of Gezi (it was indeed one of the many [2] ). I underestimated the impacts of taking part in this kind of resistance, as many young people in their 20s do, but it caught up to me gradually: with immense waves of migraine and body pain (see Başar, 2022 for an academic reflection; [3] see Başar, 2025 for an artistic reflection), and in forms of chronic workaholism as I attempted to document, academically and artistically, what was happening (see Meerzon, 2024; and Ülgen, 2024 for semi-academic meditations on my artistic outputs). I wrote my MA thesis in Boğaziçi University (BU) between 2012 and 2014, a personal turning point in my career that made me the social scientist that I am today, if not the artist (for that, the real nod goes to MSFAU). BU, a historical, prestigious, landmark university, has been under heavy attack by the AKP government since 2021 (see Tekay, 2022; and, Altuğ et al., 2025), the year that I returned to Turkey to do my postdoc in BU through an FRQSC scholarship. My postdoctoral supervisor Emine Fişek was forced into quitting her tenure job after a long fight with AKP-enforced rectorate around the time my funding ended in 2023.[4] I produce most of my academic work in English, about the political performances and performativities of Turkey in the AKP era. I give into the colonial hegemony of Anglophone academia as strategic choice: I need other ESL scholars like me to learn about what has been happening here. [5] Yet I struggle about where to begin. How can I make the connections that are obvious for us—insiders—visible to outsiders? Here is my attempt. What Came Before and After 19 March 2025 On 19 March 2025, the elected mayor of İstanbul, Ekrem İmamoğlu, was taken from his home for multiple alleged crimes, including “threatening and targeting persons involved in anti-terrorism activities” (Tecimer, 2025). A wave of nationwide protests started in the subsequent months, as more and more elected mayors were taken from their homes across Turkey for belonging to opposition parties against the 23-year rule of the AKP and Prime-Minister-turned-into-President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The preview of this authoritarianism was particularly tested in the 2019 elections, when İmamoğlu became mayor for the first time (see Felix, 2019; and Demiralp & Balta, 2021). Surely this episode of the history of Turkey will be written in detail in the near future, and after less than a year, the first academic articles are already circulating. Here is a quote from one: When he was detained on March 19 (he would be formally arrested a few days later), İmamoğlu was the presidential frontrunner of the Republican People’s Party (CHP), which leads the political opposition to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. While the next presidential election is not for another three years, İmamoğlu had been leading Erdoğan in opinion surveys. Now the 55-year-old mayor sits behind bars, facing the possibility of a long prison term (Esen and Gümüşçü, 2025, 106). As I revised this article at the end of 2025, citizens of Turkey were updated on this infamous case by learning through various media outlets that the “prosecutor seeks 2,352-year jail term for Istanbul's mayor” (Tuncer and Blackburn, 11 November 2025). Just as the timing gap between journalism and academic response has rapidly decreased in contemporary Turkey, the timing between journalism and artistic response has shortened too. Perhaps this is because many intellectuals of the country, artists, journalists, and academics, collectively feel the responsibility (and burden) of documenting what has happened, increasingly and overwhelmingly, over the past two decades. We don’t have the time to digest, and we almost always have to respond urgently. Perhaps this should be kept in mind as one reads this piece too, that Zeitgeist in contemporary Turkey is of urgency and urgency only. Then how does this Zeitgeist inform our lives? It means that hundreds of thousands of people live in a constant state of being ready for mobilization. As generative modes of activism have been directly attacked by the government since the early 2010s, and as they have been eroded through the daily reality of social and economic crisis of the early 2020s, our mode of action today is becoming more reactive. Like a fraudulent chess game, when the government makes a move, the people counter-move, en masse in at least the hundreds of thousands, and face the consequences. As Amnesty International reported on the 19 March protests: Following the CHP rallies, law enforcement officials used unnecessary and excessive force to disperse the crowds and according to the authorities, detained 1879 people, either at the location of the protests or from their homes, between 19-26 March across the country. By the end of March, over 300 people—mainly university students from different provinces including Istanbul, Ankara and İzmir—were remanded in pre-trial detention while hundreds of others were subjected to judicial control measures, including house arrest, foreign travel bans and reporting requirements. In Istanbul, seven journalists covering the protests in Saraçhane Square were detained in raids of their homes on 24 March (Amnesty International, 2025, 1). In the days that followed 19 March, many lecturers and professors in the university where I now work were left helpless as their students were detained without any legal procedure. We reorganized, pushed the authorities to start the legal process, tried to stay in solidarity, of course. Yet the burnout remained. Amnesty International documented several instances of unlawful use of force by law enforcement officials against peaceful demonstrators between 19 and 26 March, including beating, kicking and dragging protesters on the ground and the unlawful use of water cannon, pepper spray, tear gas, kinetic impact projectiles, often at close range directly targeting individuals at the head and upper body that led to numerous injuries and hospitalizations. All the information collected was assessed in accordance with international standards and the pertinent legal obligations the Turkish state has under the treaties it is a party to (Amnesty International, 2025, 2). Perhaps it was the morning of 21 March when a friend, who is an expert Ottoman historian, came to our shared office and cried her heart out as some of her students were detained and the legal support hadn’t caught up yet. What does this do to you, really? To people who are dissidents but also mothers, fathers, friends, teachers, Ottoman historians, and theatre artists. What does it actually do to your nervous system, to your dreams, to your understanding of what it means to be alive? My focus is very rhizomatic these days, and it is not out of choice. I regularly google how long Salazar ruled Portugal (36 years), Franco ruled Spain (36 years), Mussolini ruled Italy (22 years), Pinochet ruled Chile (17 years). I google how many years have passed since the so-called Islamic Revolution in Iran (47 years). I do statistics. I want to find a logical future projection as an academic. We call fortune telling “statistics” in academia. Fast Forward to June 2025 I get two invitations from my former students, current colleagues, to attend two different short play festivals. One is DasDas Theatre’s, which took place between 12-15 June (Image 1); and the other is Zorlu PSM Studio Shorts Festival, 14-15 June (Image 2), which is the final result of a seven-month long residency for young playwrights and directors. DasDas is a multi-functional venue with multiple black box performance spaces created by a group of well-established stage artists (actors and musicians), running since 2017 in the Metropol İstanbul shopping mall, aiming to cultivate new audiences within a particular upper-middle class. Zorlu PSM, designed as the first “performance center” of Turkey, is located in a luxury shopping mall, Zorlu Center, which was designed by starchitect Emre Arolat and opened in 2013. It was built through well-documented labor abuse [6] and the direct support of the government, which allowed the illegal building of the colossal shopping mall in the center of one of the busiest districts of İstanbul. Image 1: Memory ticket, DasDas Shorts Festival. 12-15 June 2025. Image 2: Instagram post , PSM Studio Shorts End-of-Year Performances. 14-15 June 2025. The structures of the two festivals are quite different: DasDas invites theatre students and new graduates living in İstanbul to showcase their new experimental and devised works, whereas Zorlu PSM Studio selects artistic interns in the beginning of an academic year and works separately with directors and writers to make meaningful artistic pairs who create a series of short plays at the end of the year. On 14 June 2025, at 9:15pm, I am at DasDas to watch Helezoni (Image 3) , a short play by new graduates and current students of Bahçeşehir Conservatory, having been invited by my former student Seray Üstündağ; and on 15 June 2025, at 8:30 pm, I am at Zorlu PSM to watch Orange (Image 4) , invited by the playwright, Baroj Nejdet Babat, whom I met through the Performance Ecologies project. I want to talk about these two pieces together because they are both created by theatre artists in their early 20s living and working in Turkey, and struggling to form their artistic voice in an atmosphere that is becoming more and more dreadfully oppressive and monopolized with each passing day. Image 3: Helezoni (poster) Project Design and Performance: Buse İlker, Seray Üstündağ, Yağmur Başak Text: Collective Text Supervision: Doruk Öztürk, Diyar Çiler Assistant Director: Diyar Çiler Sound Design: Buğra Nayir Lights: Alp Özer Video Design: Eray Devrenk Poster Design: Doğa Erdağ Date & Time: 14 June 2025, 9:15 pm Place: DasDas Stage Image 4: Orange (poster) Playwright: Baroj Nejdet Babat Director: Yasemin Kır Producer: Riyana Tufanova & Ekinsu Köse Assistant Director: Teo Chapdelaine Assistant Producer: Orçun Ertaman Performers: İpek Sobutay, Mizgîn Özel, Tuğba Sorgun, Aylin Çelikçi, Begüm Önerler, Merve Bayus, Nezahat Arkun Stage Design (SD): Cem Yılmazer, Yasemin Kır SD Realization: Zekeriya Ece, Riyana Tufanova Costume Supervisor: Hilal Polat Costume Design & Realization: Riyana Tufanova Light Design & Application: Güray Doğru Sound Design: Aylin Çelikçi, Begüm Önerler, Merve Bayus, Nezahat Arkun Poster Design: Can Akşit Date & Time: 15 June, 2025, 8:30 pm Place: Zorlu PSM These shows took place almost back to back, in two completely different parts of İstanbul, yet both inside luxurious shopping malls. I remember how in early 2010s my generation was proud of the bohemian nature of found spaces being turned into little black box stages in Beyoğlu [7] . In a palimpsest, I quote my (earlier) self: A significant episode in the contemporary theatre scene of Turkey began around 2008 (Başar 2014), when a generation of emerging young artists started renting small flats around the Beyoğlu district of İstanbul, which is known to be one of the most cosmopolitan, historical, and, possibly, the liveliest part of the city. These artists were locked out of institutional theatre settings because of the lack of formal theatre education (most of them were trained in universities’ theatre clubs while studying other things) or because of their ideological differences with the theatre institutions (Başar 2014, 152). In Beyoğlu, they began to create ensembles and write in the small black-box stages that they collectively made together. Only on these alternative stages and through their new plays, a variety of characters from contemporary Turkey (such as Kurds, LGBTI characters, and urban women wearing headcloths) started to appear on stage. This was a breath of fresh air in the theatre field of Turkey, circumventing the Leviathan-like bureaucracy of state theatres and municipality theatres, and the cheap populism of commercial comedy theatres and other private establishment theatres (Başar, 2021, 196). I remember both the vibe and the hype: Many of us were in our 20s or early 30s, some of us were emerging theatre professionals, some were either bachelors or graduate students in the diverse academic ecosystem of İstanbul (before the brutal attacks on academia after 2016, which aimed and partially succeeded in creating a monoculture [8] ), and there was a smell in the air that blended theatre and activism, and in return redefined both of these categories as immediate life itself. Yet I don’t mean to romanticize this era; it was a precarious heterotopia, just as Gezi was. But heterotopias, “[a]s a sort of simultaneously mythic and real contestation[s] of the space[s] in which we live” (Foucault, 1986, 24), die hard. In parallel to my above reading of the era, Zeynep Uğur comments on the same phenomenon as follows: In the early 2000s, the alternative theatre scene gained a new momentum with the increasing number of theatres spreading around Taksim. The founders of these theatres are commonly inspired by the avant-garde of the 1990s; however, their own personal trajectories are different. Almost all of them take their roots from university theatre clubs instead of conservatoires or theatre departments. Thus, socialisation emerges as a mobilising motor. To ‘create their own space to be able to make theatre as they want’ is an often-repeated phrase in the interviews that I conducted in Istanbul. A young audience profile, mostly college students, adhered to this emerging theatre (Uğur, 2022, 137). We used to look down upon the idea of moving into shopping malls (also see Aydoğan and Ayhan, 2026, to trace the sentiment). In a little more than ten years so much has changed, with so much trauma. [9] The bohemian and underground theatre infrastructure—built outside of state-governed institutional theatres and profit-oriented commercial theatres [10] —to which many people contributed with sweat, blood and tears has (mostly) collapsed under a regime that has become increasingly authoritarian. This regime has been very strategically targeting Beyoğlu, particularly since 2011, but the scale and insidiousness of the attacks has multiplied exponentially every year, as Asu Aksoy and Kevin Robbins, among others, point out: At first glance, the Beyoğlu Cultural Route (Beyoğlu Kültür Yolu Projesi) [a large-scale re-development project launched in 2020 by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism] may appear to be a good investment of resources, with the potential to enhance the cultural life of the city. […] What it represents is, in fact, an intervention on the part of the central state, intended to impose its own ideological priorities, both economic and political, on the cultural life of the city (Aksoy and Robbins 2023, 40). Meanwhile, hand-in-hand with the current regime, large corporations such as Zorlu Holding have started to invest in the performing arts in İstanbul, and as a miniscule compensation for this exploitative capitalist shift, these new organizations started creating spaces (extremely limited ones) for up-and-coming theatre artists. Yet, quite obviously, these spaces fail to make up for loss of the grassroots independent theatre scene of 2010s. That’s why I am burdened by history at age 36, when I come to see the shows of my former students in their early 20s; yet I also feel a complicated brew of emotions, knowing what they might be feeling since 19 March 2025. My internal compass oscillates between the joy of solidarity and mourning of the loss of innocence. But being in one’s early 20s means having hope, because that age group does not yet have the luxury of the 30s and 40s for being comfortably hopeless. A Brief Cross-Tracing of Repertoires of Dissident Performance and Protest Culture The two works that I watched back-to-back are stylistically and dramaturgically very different from each other. Helezoni , which is a made-up word based on the Turkish appropriation (‘helezon’) of the Latin word helix , is a devised work, fragmented in a 1990s-postmodern fashion, comfortable with being misunderstood. Orange , on the other hand, is much more structured: there is a text, there is a story, and there is even an invented folk tradition and ritual embedded into the performance. I go through my private mind-library of rhizomatic references, to see where I attach these performances in the global network of everything I know about theatre. Helezoni —interestingly, despite having an American gloss to it (à la Wooster Group and Tim Burton)—strictly lands in the German, especially Berlin-based, realm of theatre making: I reach and grab Robert Wilson’s Berliner Ensemble productions, Rimini Protokoll’s fragmented dramaturgies, and of course Bertolt Brecht’s pre-Second World War take on cabaret. In the realm of Turkish theatre, the only distant relative I can think of for Helezoni is Şahika Tekand’s body of works, which are also rooted in 1990s İstanbul (see Dinçel, 2023). A day later, Orange takes me to references from across Europe, and strictly avoids any feel of Americanness. I grab Yorgos Lanthimos’ 2009 movie Dogtooth , the 2023 book She That Lay Silent-Like Upon Our Shore by Brendan Casey, and–of course–García Lorca's last play before his assassination in 1936 during Spanish Civil War, The House of Bernarda Alba . The world that playwright Baroj Nejdet Babat and director Yasemin Kır created also reminds me of the aura of early 2010s in İstanbul; I am reminded of Şamil Yılmaz and Pelin Temur’s plays from Mek’an Sahne (see Onat, 2025) and M î rza Met î n and Berfin Zenderlioğlu’s works, performed in Kurdish with Turkish surtitles, from Şermola Performans. [11] Both pieces want to speak to the world they live in, and to the state of contemporary Turkey, but where Helezoni uses metatheatricality through 1990s-postmodern fragmentation to do that, Orange goes back to ritual to seek metatheatricality as a form of the sublime. These are both strategic dramaturgical choices to tap into the repertoires of resistance of Gezi, which was actually both a palimpsest and a transcendence of all previous left-wing resistance movements in Turkey (see Verstraete, 2019 & Başar, 2022); which is why the main title of this piece is “Gen Z Theatre from Turkey Taps into Repertoires of Millennial Resistance.” Helezoni Helezoni has four parts to it, strictly separated by a male voiceover that introduces the numbered sections, which are loosely connected. All sections are devised by the woman-majority team, which includes many queer collaborators, and the only prior information the audiences have about the show is that it is devised from the premise “fascism everywhere”. The first section is a Grimm-style tale, written mostly by Diyar Çiler, within the parameters the group decided on, a tale about a group of animals living happily in a forest, accompanied by AI-generated images which straightforwardly aim to tickle the cognitive response of the uncanny valley (reminding me of Rimini Protocol). The wording of the tale is tethered to the taboo themes of the repertoires of resistance of Gezi, which was partially reenacted in the 19 March protests. [12] For instance, the tale uses ‘pepper’ to stand in for ‘tear gas’, and the phrase ‘factory of emotions that produce hope,’ which can mean both ‘state propaganda’ or ‘revolution’, almost-alluding to many things, almost gesturing towards a creeping danger, but all in a purposefully ambiguous manner. As the tale goes on, stage creatures in the form of acting bodies start to occupy the stage, filling it with mundane acts of prepping for the performance, such as putting tape down to mark the exact boundaries of where the performance will take place. Their physicalities range from fairies to witches. Defining the boundaries is important, to be able to cross over them later. The second section starts with three Tim Burton-esque (or Robert Wilson’s take on the Faustian theme) stage creatures taking over the stage fully (Image 5), after listening to the same tale with us, while working and commenting on the tale, their sudden and explosive laughter echoing around us. These stage creatures move in a stylized manner and have choreographed movements and fragments of speech that they throw at us. In the darkness we hear a witchy voice yelling “catastrophe! nein!” which marks the beginning of this second part while introducing the linguistic heteroglossia of the piece. Adding German into the mix perhaps alludes to both the Brechtian aesthetic and the horrors of fascist propaganda’s aesthetic (such as Triumph des Willens [1935]). The vocabulary they break apart is embedded in our own political moment, and their gestures showcase a repertoire of the streets, of the military training that we all received as part of our compulsory physical education classes in Turkey, and of the acting education they all received, creating counterpoints. Then they locate us in an urban square through their scattered descriptions. Is it Taksim Square where the 2013 protests happened, located next to Gezi Park? Or is it Saraçhane Square where 29 March 2025 protests took place [13] ? Is it Tiananmen Square in 1989? Is it Tahrir Square in 2011? Is it Vali Asr Square in 2022? Where is this square? Why are they there? And more importantly, why are we here, with them? But we don’t stay in the square: a video is projected alluding to the now aged practice of zapping amongst TV channels, which always censor what happens in squares.[14] The TV glitches, and a quote from early 2010s leftist band Bandista intervenes with the commercials. After this oscillation between the lived reality of urban squares and censored TV, the third section reaches towards the internet as a public sphere, immediately interconnected to urban squares, which speak a different tune than the commercials on TV (because “the revolution will not be televised,” as Gil Scott-Heron once said). Image 5: Helezoni. Photo credit: Volkan Aykaç. The third section opens with video which showcases this realm of the internet, which is completely different from the AI-generated video in the first section. This video was made by Film and TV undergraduate student Eray Devrenk, with clear care and passion. It was interesting for me because this video, less than four minutes long, pulled out so much of my personal history—the burden of history I tried to unpack in the beginning of this article—along with other things that I didn’t know yet, but immediately recognized their meaning through the overlap of images. Banned LGBTQ pride walks in İstanbul, highlighted with police clashes; conservative Islamic ‘family’ protests, backed by the government, against LGBTQ pride walks; the suicide videos from 2014 and 2015 of kind individuals (like Mehmet Pişkin—see Başar, 2022, 181, n.10) and trans activists like Mehtap Zengin, who just said that they could not take it any longer; the 2016 military coup attempt which paved the way for the three-year-long state of emergency and legitimi-zation of human rights abuses; wild-fires; wars; more wars; the 6 February 2023 earthquake that turned into a massacre, due to corrupt planning decisions; world leaders lecturing cameras on their borders, their wars, their hierarchy of people, and all the things that I can’t, and perhaps don’t want to, remember, to be able to stay functional. The video ends with a pop culture twist, a short scene from The Hunger Games , where Jennifer Lawrence yells at us “if we burn, you burn with us.” The actors don and doff a variety of accessories—ropes, hair pins, etc.—at the front of the stage as this video rolls behind them (Image 6). We don’t hear most of the sounds of these videos, à la Thomas Ostermeier; a solo drummer playing from a recording keeps the beat of the performance going. The final section makes yet another metatheatrical move. The actors change their acting style completely: they are actors now in a rehearsal room, they play, and then they wash their makeup in front of the audience (Image 7), and conclude with movement choreography. Image 6: Helezoni. Photo credit: Volkan Aykaç. The stylistic break comes when Seray Üstündağ comments on the fact that her taping work in section 1 of the performance was indeed not a good job, as the tape is laid in a wavey nature. People laugh here; the gesture of this stylistic shift is a powerful one. Seray Üstündağ untapes the stage. Now the entire stage, even perhaps the back stage, even perhaps the foyer, and beyond the shopping mall, the streets and the squares, belongs to the actors. They perform a series of trust falls, an act of catching each other at the exact moment of falling, which is an acting practice, and a very necessary skill in a revolutionary moment. (We have learned very well in Turkey exactly what happens when no one catches you in a trust fall.) When they wash their makeup together, almost in a ritualistic manner, it is a moment of catharsis. Yet it is also an uncanny catharsis in this postmodern show with no conclusion, no predefined faith hovering over the characters, and/or the actors. The final choreography is of exhausted bodies, going through choreographed stage actions as they fall apart, and fall down in a lump on the ground, to—maybe—rest a little. In the talkback session after the performance of Helezoni , the group talks about what made them devise this play. I am humbled by the experiences they have survived in their young age, and especially shaken by learning that assistant director Diyar Çiler is a survivor of the 6 February 2023 earthquake. What they choose to tell, I am here to listen. I also think about how the name of the play gestures towards the psychedelic nature of living in this global Zeitgeist, how violence is so close, but how much we are alienated from the impact of it unless it hits us directly and immediately. Orange The day after Helezoni , Orange tells another story of our times. Playwright Baroj Nejdet Babat is a very young queer and Kurdish artist from Şırnak [15] , who received their BA in Munzur University, and was introduced to the Performance Ecologies team by our colleague Asst. Prof. Duygu Çelik. [16] They have a soft voice and gentle manner always accompanied with a kind smile, which might at first sight hide their deep theoretical knowledge on gender and queer studies, exceeding many of the theatre scholars I encounter regularly. Director Yasemin Kır does justice to this nuanced gem of a text, with all the performative areas she explores with the design team and performers. Image 7: Orange. Photo credit: Cem Gültepe. Orange takes place in an imaginary village that only grows oranges and nothing else (Image 8). No other fruits are allowed to grow in the village, and villagers (especially women and children, who are not allowed to leave) can only eat oranges. Only adult men are allowed to leave the village, and when they are gone, the village is ruled by a deep-cutting matriarchy that leans on a much deeper-cutting patriarchy. Mothers are the gatekeepers of the community; they indoctrinate their children about the importance and singularity of oranges, and tell fearful stories of wild boars that roam around the village [17] to make sure the children won’t go out, seeking a different fruit—or a different life (Image 9). The ecologically problematic idea of monocultures—i.e. growing a single crop in a large piece of land—as represented through the intense singularity of oranges in the play, also serves as a metaphor for fascism. Image 8: Orange . Photo credit: Cem Gültepe. Babat’s text is unapologetic when it comes to using ancient tools of theatre, such as the chorus. In Orange , the chorus is composed of the village women, who give life to land, who protect, who harvest oranges, but who also oppress through their gazes and exert intense control through shaming, gossip, and their collective power to break the will of young people. In this village of oranges lives a young girl whose name is Cennet (a real name in Turkish which means both Paradise and Heaven ). Cennet wants to break free from both the monoculture of oranges and from her oppressive mother, who forbids her from ever being curious about the outside world. This mother figure seems to have walked in from the world of Gabriel Garcia Lorca. She casts heavy curses upon women who dare to disobey the monoculture, and tells gruesome stories about what has happened to them outside the village. Supposedly, the wild boars that roam right outside the limits of the village do not necessarily kill young women; rather, the violence described by the mother sounds much more like kidnapping, rape, and forced marriage. The choice of animal is loaded too: pigs are haram /sinful in Islam. The mother acts like the head of the chorus in Greek tragedies, and the chorus sings with her, collectively cursing the unnamed and mythologized women who disobeyed once upon a time, and were doomed to unspeakable fates. All the while, their songs cherish the monoculture of oranges. Image 9: Merve offers Cennet an apple. Orange . Photo credit: Cem Gültepe. Just when Cennet is toying in her loneliness with the idea of escaping, an outsider comes, another young girl, from a neighboring village which only grows apples. This new friend, Merve, secretly sneaked out to take a long walk in the forest and discovered Cennet’s village of oranges, and she is curious to taste this new fruit. Merve starts visiting Cennet secretly and regularly after that first contact, and their friendship knowingly hints to the audience that a homoerotic romance develops between them. (I wonder how much more openly queer this performance could have been if we had been in an independent space, outside of this shopping mall, deep into Beyoğlu, surrounded by the dirty walls of found spaces turned into black box theatres, surrounded with will power and solidarity, maybe a decade earlier. Sure, the performance might have been less clean, less polished, but it would have not pulled back from naming things, as they should be named in honesty.) Merve also tells Cennet that the boars in the forest are not dangerous—it is the humans that are dangerous, and that she is particularly scared of orange-trading men. (Isn’t it always one of the most difficult confrontations to realize your community can be the big bad wolf in someone else’s story, and that they might be right to see you that way?) When Merve offers Cennet an apple (Image 10), she finally eats it—which is a direct allusion to the apple of Adam and Eve, which according to the three major monotheistic religions leads to the famous couple’s exile from heaven. Image 10: Orange . Photo credit: Cem Gültepe. From here on, there is a dramatic twist, one that is welcomed by the foreshadowing of the allusion of Adam and Eve’s apple—a twist that only early twentysomething artists can do, who are not beaten down by the dramatic structure, the dramatic canon and the conventional beauties of tragedy. After eating the apple Cennet goes back to her mother and village women and confronts them about their oppression, about their chosen and insistent ignorance, about their own evil (Image 11). She sings the prayer of the apple that she learned from Merve as she does this, and the chorus along with the mother try to silence her with the prayer of the orange village. Cennet sings longer and louder than them, and eventually leaves the monoculture of oranges with Merve, hand in hand, to find other fruits, together. Conclusion: An Interdisciplinary Introspection What does it mean to be in your early twenties in Turkey today? How does it differ from my early twenties? What is lost, what is gained in time? Below I quote my younger self, from a point in time when I was doing a first round of calculations for answering this question. I agree with Uruguayan political scientist Paulo Ravecca who claims that ‘situating disciplinary introspection through personal introspection may open fruitful paths to interrogate and unravel knots of experience made of knowledge, power, and politics’ (2019: 166). My own history is entangled in the history of contemporary Turkey: I was one of the protestors in the Gezi Park during June 2013 like many people I know, and the experience influenced—and perhaps shaped—me in multiple ways (Başar, 2022, 192). 19 March 2025 and its aftermath has shaped this generation of theatre makers. Many gestures of dissidence remained little-changed, yet meanings of these gestures shifted considerably over a dozen years: while we covered our faces in Gezi primarily to protect ourselves from the tear gas, this generation went to Saraçhane covering their faces primarily to protect themselves from government profiling. GenZ’s experience is different from ours as they try to fit their artistic and political perspective into a corporate institutional system that we managed to escape to some extent fifteen years ago, but that ecosystem is gone (for now). Today, answers escape me. Yet I stay with the questions as they grow and multiply like rhizomes, and wait for the right time, alongside my young colleagues. Because who knows? Formulating the right question could be the right answer to our times, by triggering the tsunami wave of a paradigm shift. Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes Endnotes [1] For an overview of and commentary on the 2013 Gezi Park protests, see Özkırımlı, 2014; David & Toktamış, 2015; Gürcan & Peker, 2015; Koç & Aksu, 2015; Yücesan-Özdemir, 2016; Hemer & Persson, 2017; Tüfekçi, 2017; Ağartan, 2024 . [2] See Yücesan-Özdemir, 2016, for a survey of other events that foreshadowed the Gezi Park protests. [3] Also see Christina Banalopoulou's discussion of the government's "suffocation policies" and "politics of asphyxiation" (2024). [4] Emine Fişek has been the Research Associate and Project Leader of ERC Project: THEAGENT - Theatre and Gentrification in the European City in Austria since 2023. See Fişek, 2026. [5] The limitedness of translations of Turkish plays into English makes it a challenge to start a larger scale discussion in Anglophone academia about the theatre field in Turkey; this has directly impacted my career trajectory, developing me as a translator and a translation editor. For a survey of Turkish play anthologies available in English, see Ergil and Yanıkkaya, 2026. [6] Curiously, these Zorlu Center cases, well known to the Turkish-speaking public, are not translated into English. Let me offer a translation of a short news clipping from 2012: “At the Zorlu Center construction site, which has turned the Beşiktaş district into a massive construction zone, a tragic worker death occurred. According to eyewitness accounts, the worker fell from the 22nd floor of the building and was killed. The Zorlu Center, which was sealed off when the construction reached the 4th floor, and then obtained a permit in one day without the approval of the Beşiktaş Municipal Council and the Chamber of Architects, continues to be the scene of tragic events. […] It is unknown whether Zorlu Center officials obtained a work permit for working on Sunday [the day that worker’s death happened]. The Beşiktaş Municipality is also maintaining silence on the matter. According to claims by local shopkeepers and eyewitnesses, this tragic death is not the first at Zorlu Center. Local residents claim that there have been fatal work accidents at Zorlu Center before, but all of them were kept from the press.” Translated from the source: "Zorlu Center'da işçi ölümü!" [Worker death in Zorlu Center], Beşiktaş Postası, last modified May 14, 2012. For readers who know Turkish, see İş Cinayetleri Almanağı 2012 [Almanac of Worker Murders], BirUmut Yayıncılık, 2013. This book and its serials from the same activist publication house will allow readers to see what a large-scale issue this is in the construction-dependent economic development model of the AKP, where workers are seen as disposable, work safety measurements are consistently lacking, and the construction companies where work accidents repeatedly happen face no disincentivizing punishments. [7] See Şeyben, 2021 (especially “ Section III: Decentralized Theatres”) for a good discussion of the relationship between authoritarian urban transformation and alternative theatres. Also see Fişek 2018 on the representation of gentrification and capitalist investment on the stages of alternative theatres during the 2010s. Ironically, the venue discussed in this 2018 article, GalataPerform, was closed during the pandemic, though the ensemble continues to work. Additionally, see Fişek et al., 2026. [8] See Akıncı, 2018 to follow the reasoning of this claim. [9] For more on this claim, see Ejder, 2019. [10] See Şeyben, 2021 (especially “ Section II: Subsidized Theatres” ) to understand the impact of AKP on institutional theatres of Turkey. Also see Adak and Altınay, 2018, to have a sense of the historical cultivation of the current day theatre ecosystem of Turkey. [11] See Baş, 2015; Akar, 2018; Metîn, 2019; and Şeyben, 2021 (especially “ Chapter 6: Battle on Many Fronts: The Case of Şermola Performans ”) for an analysis of the Kurdish theatre scene in İstanbul during the 2010s. Beyond these works, to understand the general state of Kurdish theatre in Turkey, see the body of publications of Duygu Çelik, which are listed below. [12] It is telling that many of the banners in 19 March protests referred to Gezi. Here are some examples: “Biz Çapulcular Yeni Gelmedik Geri Geldik” [“Us Chapullers Didn’t Arrive Just Now, We Only Came Back”], “Gezi_2.0”, “Çapulcuların Çocukları Büyüdü” [“The Children of Chapullers Grew Up”] (Peker, 2025). “Chapullers” ( Çapulcular ) means “looters” in Turkish. Initially a pejorative that the government applied to the Gezi protesters, it was later adopted by protesters as a badge of honor. [13] See Akgöz, 2026 for a history of protests at Saraçhane Square. [14] Such as the infamous penguin documentary, broadcast on CNN Turk during the first days of the Gezi Protests, while people were being brutalized by the police almost immediately outside CNN Turk’s own corporate building (David & Toktamış, 2015, 19). [15] Another point of introspection: The main character (Toprak) of my first award winning play in Turkey, The Itch , was also from Şırnak. See Başar, 2024 for more on this play; and see Onat and Başar, 2025 for more insight on the nature the contest. [16] See works cited for a list of Duygu Çelik’s works on Kurdish theatre in English and Turkish. [17] The imagery here is reminiscent of the 2019 Turkish movie, Sibel, and its use of the wolf mythologies of the Black Sea region. ___________________ Works Cited Adak, Hülya, and Rüstem Ertuğ Altınay. "Introduction: Theatre and Politics in Turkey and Its Diasporas." In "Performing Turkishness," special issue, Comparative Drama 52, no. 3/4 (2018): 185-214. Ağartan, Kaan. Gezi: The Making of a New Political Community in Turkey . Edinburgh University Press, 2024. Akar, Bilal. "Transformation of the Kurdish Theater Field in Turkey between 1991 and 2017." Master's thesis, Koç University, 2018. Akgöz, Görkem. "LMT #142 : Saraçhane Square, Istanbul, Turkey." Laboratório de Estudos de História dos Mundos do Trabalho. Last modified March 5, 2026. Accessed March 7, 2026. https://lehmt.org/lmt-142-praca-sarachane-istambul-turquia-gorkem-akgoz/ . For the English version of the article: https://www.academia.edu/164967991/Saraçhane_Square_Istanbul_Turkey Akıncı, Özgül. "Performing Academia in Public Space in Turkey." Performance Research 23, no. 2 (2018): 44-48. Accessed 13 November, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2018.1464753 . Aksoy, Asu, and Kevin Robbins. "Beyoğlu in Istanbul: Whose Story is It?" In Culture in the Cities - Present and Future , edited by Franco Bianchini and Guy Saez, 40-53. İletişim Yayınları, 2023. Altuğ, Seda, Mert Arslanalp, Volkan Çidam, and Saygun Gökarıksel. "Repression and Resistance at Boğaziçi University: The Making of Counterpublic under Authoritarian Offensive." In Fragments of Repression and Resistance: A.K.P. Rule in Turkey , edited by Kumru F. Toktamış and Isabel David, 119-42. Peter Lang, 2025. Aydoğan, Kemal, and Emine Ayhan. "'Büyük PSM'lerin Önünde Garipsiyorduk'" ["We were finding ourselves weird in front of big PACs (Performance Arts Centers)"]. In "Bugün, Sahne Nedir? [What is the stage today?]," special issue, Cogito , no. 119 (2026): 139-57. Banalopoulou, Christina. "'Doesn't Every Dying Person's Last Breath Touch the Living?'" Performance Research 29, nos. 4-5 (2024): 49-55. https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2024.2510855 . Baş, Elif. "The Rise of Kurdish Theatre in Istanbul." Theatre Survey 56, no. 3 (2015): 314-35. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0040557415000289 . Başar, Deniz. "Constructing A Fictional Skin Disease Pandemic as Political Allegory Based on First-Hand Experience: An Auto-Ethnography Trial on How I Wrote The Itch ." In The Routledge Companion to Performance and Medicine , edited by Gianna Bouchard and Alex Mermikides. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2024. Başar, Deniz. "Faces of a Long Unspoken Collective Trauma: Theatrical Representations of Friendship, Love, Betrayal, and Pain in the Landscape of War in Contemporary Turkey." In The Palgrave Handbook of Theatre and Race , edited by Osita Okagbue and Tiziana Morosetti, 195-217. Palgrave, 2021. Başar, Deniz. "From Repertoires of Resistance to Monuments of Absence." European Journal of Theatre and Performance 4 (June 2022): 160-97. https://doi.org/10.21827/ejtp.4.41720 . Başar, Deniz. "Kaşıntı [The Itch]." In Mitos-Boyut 6. Oyun Yazma Yarışması, 2014 . Mitos Boyut, 2015. Başar, Deniz. "Performative Publicness: Alternative Theater in Turkey After 2000s." Master's thesis, Boğaziçi University, 2014. Başar, Deniz. Tsunami . Edited by Mina Çakmak. Istanbul: Onagöre, 2025. Poetry. Çelik, Duygu. "Dengbejlik geleneği ve Türkiye'deki Kürt tiyatrosuna etkileri [Dengbêjî tradition and its effects on Kurdish theatre in Turkey]." PhD diss., İstanbul University, 2017. Çelik, Duygu. "The Impact of the Dengbêjî Tradition on Kurdish Theater in Turkey." In Kurdish Art and Identity: Verbal Art, Self-definition and Recent History , edited by Alireza Korangy and Philip G. Kreyenbroek. Walter De Gruyter, 2020. Çelik, Duygu. "Kilam as Theatre Music in Kurdish Theatre in Turkey." In Music and Sound in European Theatre: Practices, Performances, Perspectives , edited by David Roesner and Tamara Yasmin Quick. Routledge, 2025. Çelik, Duygu. "The 'Other' Karagöz: The Kurdish Qeregoz." In Race, Gender and Disability in Puppetry and Material Performance , by Laura Purcell-Gates, edited by Paulette Richards, Hazel Briar, and Alissa Mello. Routledge, 2026. Çelik, Duygu. "Otherness and Censorship in the Theatre of Turkey (1960s–70s)." In The Palgrave Handbook of Theatre Censorship , edited by Anne Etienne and Graham Saunders. Palgrave Macmillan, 2025. David, Isabel, and Kumru F. Toktamış, eds. 'Everywhere Taksim' : Sowing the Seeds for a New Turkey at Gezi . Amsterdam University Press, 2015. Demiralp, Seda, and Evren Balta. "Defeating Populists: The Case of 2019 Istanbul Elections." South European Society and Politics 26, no. 1 (2021): 1-26. https://doi.org/10.1080/13608746.2021.1923639 . Dinçel, Burç İdem. "Biomechanical Resonances in Turkey: The Working Method of Studio Oyuncuları." In The Routledge Companion to Vsevolod Meyerhold , edited by Jonathan Pitches and Stefan Aquilina. Routledge, 2023. Ejder, Eylem. "Reports from the Field: Contemporary Performance Criticism in Turkey— Critical Endeavours: Experimental Searches in Contemporary Performance Criticism in Turkey." Platform 13, no. 1 (2019): 103-15. Accessed 13 November 2025. https://www.royalholloway.ac.uk/media/11708/09_eylemejder.pdf.pdf . Ergil, Başak, and Zerrin Yanıkkaya. "Towards New Perspectives on Anthologizing and Representing Turkish Theater in the Anglosphere." Middle Eastern Literatures , March 13, 2026, 1-21. https://doi.org/10.1080/1475262x.2026.2629937 . Esen, Berk, and Şebnem Gümüşçü. "How to Fight Turkey's Authoritarian Turn." Journal of Democracy 36, no. 3 (2025): 106-20. Fişek, Emine, Aurélien Bellucci, Regina Lissowska-Postaremczak, Joseph Prestwich, and Clio Unger. "Stages of Gentrification: An International Roundtable." Theatre Research International, March 4, 2026, 1-13. Accessed March 7, 2026. https://doi.org/10.1080/03078833.2026.2634146 . Fişek, Emine. "Palimpsests of Violence: Urban Dispossession and Political Theatre in Istanbul." In "Performing Turkishness," special issue, Comparative Drama 52, nos. 3-4 (2018): 349-71. https://doi.org/10.1353/cdr.2018.0015 . Fişek, Emine. "THEAGENT ÖAW." Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften [Austrian Academy of Sciences]. Accessed April 14, 2026. https://www.oeaw.ac.at/projects/theagent . Foucault, Michel. "Of Other Spaces." Trans. Jay Miskowiec. Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 22-27. https://doi.org/10.2307/464648 . Gürcan, Efe Can, and Efe Peker. Challenging Neoliberalism at Turkey's Gezi Park: from Private Discontent to Collective Class Action . Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Hemer, Oscar, and Hans-Åke Persson, eds. In the Aftermath of Gezi: From Social Movement to Social Change? Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. İş Cinayetleri Almanağı. 2012 [Almanac of Worker Murders] . 2013 ed. BirUmut Yayıncılık, 2013. Koç, Güneş, and Harun Aksu, eds. Another Brick in the Barricade: the Gezi Resistance and Its Aftermath . Wiener Verlag für Sozialforschung, 2015. Meerzon, Yana, Art Babayants, and Deniz Başar. "Ethos of New Stockholm: A City Invented to be Staged." Critical Stages . Last modified December 2024. Accessed February 4, 2026. https://www.critical-stages.org/30/ethos-of-new-stockholm-a-city-invented-to-be-staged/ . Metîn, Mîrza. "Kurdish Resistance and the Dramaturgy of Fire." Theatre Research International 44, no. 3 (2019): 314-17. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0307883319000397 . Onat, Fatma. "Traces of a Lost Archive: Four Selected Theatre Criticisms by Fatma Onat from 2010s' İstanbul." Edited by Deniz Başar. Critical Stages . Last modified December 2025. Accessed February 4, 2026. https://www.critical-stages.org/32/traces-of-a-lost-archive-four-selected-theatre-criticisms-by-fatma-onat-from-2010s-istanbul/ . Onat, Fatma, and Deniz Başar. "In A State of Constant Migration: Conversation with Fatma Onat." Critical Stages . Last modified December 2025. Accessed 4 February 2026. https://www.critical-stages.org/32/in-a-state-of-constant-migration-conversation-with-fatma-onat/ . Onat, Fatma, Deniz Başar, and Ayşe Bayramoğlu. New Stockholm'de Sonbahar = Payîza New Stockholmê = Autumn in New Stockholm . Mitos-Boyut, 2023. Özkırımlı, Umut, ed. The Making of a Protest Movement in Turkey: #occupygezi . Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Peker, Dilara Bağcı. "Gözaltına Alınan Ekrem İmamoğlu'na Destek İçin Saraçhane'ye Akın Eden Halkın Açtığı Pankartlar" [Banners Unfurled by People Flocking to Saraçhane in Support of Ekrem İmamoğlu, Who Was Taken into Custody]. Onedio. Last modified March 19, 2025. Accessed 29 January 2026. https://onedio.com/haber/gozaltina-alinan-ekrem-imamoglu-na-destek-icin-sarachane-ye-akin-eden-halkin-actigi-pankartlar-1280979 . Ravecca, Paulo. The Politics of Political Science: Re-writing Latin American Experiences . Routledge, 2019. Schmidt, Felix. "'The aura of invincibility is gone.'" IPS. Last modified 25 June 2019. Accessed 29 January 2026. https://www.ips-journal.eu/interviews/the-aura-of-invincibility-is-gone-3562/ . Schneider, Rebecca. Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment . Routledge, 2011. Şeyben, Burcu Yasemin. Struggle and Survival under Authoritarianism in Turkey: Theatre under Threat . Lexington Books, 2021. Tecimer, Cem. "The Arrest of Istanbul's Mayor is Textbook Lawfare." Verfassungsblog - On Matters Constitutional. Last modified March 28, 2025. Accessed 29 January 2026. https://verfassungsblog.de/the-arrest-of-istanbuls-mayor-is-textbook-lawfare/ . Tekay, Cihan. "#AşağıBakmayacağız ('We Will Not Look Down')." South Atlantic Quarterly 121, no. 1 (2022): 210-19. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-9561671 . Tuncer, Anıl Can, and Gavin Blackburn. "Prosecutor seeks 2,352-year jail term for Istanbul's mayor over alleged corruption." Euronews. Last modified 11 November 2025. Accessed 12 November 2025. https://www.euronews.com/2025/11/11/prosecutor-seeks-2352-year-jail-term-for-istanbuls-mayor-over-alleged-corruption . "Turkey: 'I Cannot Breathe' Allegations of torture and other ill-treatment in the context of mass protests between 19—26 March must be investigated" [Index Number: EUR 44/9471/2025]. Amnesty International. Last modified 19 June 2025. Accessed 12 November 2025. https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/eur44/9471/2025/en/ . Tüfekçi, Zeynep. Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest . Yale University Press, 2017. Uğur, Zeynep. "Reappropriation of Public Space Autonomous Space Making from Istanbul's Alternative Theatre Scene to the Gezi Movement." In "Activism and Spectatorship," ed. Pieter Verstraete and Agata Łuksza, special issue, European Journal of Theatre and Performance , no. 4 (May 2022): 114-59. Ülgen, Övgü. "'Wine & Halva:' Post-Migration and The Limits of Western Liberalism." The Theatre Times. Last modified July 26, 2024. Accessed 4 February 2026. https://thetheatretimes.com/wine-halva-post-migration-and-the-limits-of-western-liberalism/ . Verstraete, Pieter. "In Search of a New Performativity after Gezi: On Symbolic Politics and New Dramaturgies in Turkey." Theatre Research International 44, no. 3 (2019): 273-90. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0307883319000312 . Yücesan-Özdemir, Gamze, ed. The Road to Gezi: Resistance and Counter-publics in 21st Century Turkey . Red Quill Books, 2016. "Zorlu Center'da işçi ölümü!" [Worker death in Zorlu Center]. Beşiktaş Postası. Last modified 14 May 2012. Accessed 29 January 2026. https://www.besiktaspostasi.com/zorlu-centerda-isci-olumu-29556/ . References About The Author(s) Deniz Başar (PhD Concordia University ‘21) is a theatre researcher and playwright from Turkey, and a 2021-2023 FRQSC post-doctoral fellow in Boğaziçi University. She has published multiple articles on puppetry and political performativity. Her play Wine and Halva was staged in Montreal (2024) and remounted by Teesri Duniya Theatre (2026-27). Autumn in New Stockholm (2023), a play she co-wrote with Fatma Onat and Ayşe Bayramoğlu, was published in a trilingual edition (Turkish, Kurdish, and English), and a French translation was staged in Montreal in 2026. She currently works at the Foundations Development Directorate of Sabancı University. Arab Stages Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Reframing the Past: Situating Mesopotamian Theatrical Traditions Within a Cross‑Cultural Performance Continuum Gen Z Theatre from Turkey Taps into Repertoires of Millennial Resistance: A Comparison of the Short Festival Plays 'Helezoni' and 'Orange' Performance Review: THE CLOWN, by Mariam Basha. Directed by Kamal El Basha. El Hakawati Theatre, Jerusalem. August 28, 2025 in person, September 11, 2025 via WhatsApp video. Performance Review: DODI AND DIANA, by Kareem Fahmy. Directed by Reginald L. Douglas. Mosaic Theater, DC. September 23, 2025. Performance Review: ALMONDS BLOSSOM IN DEIR YASSIN, by Hanna Eady. Directed by Hanna Eady. Cherry Street Village, Seattle. October 25, 2025. Book Review: Samer Al-Saber. A Movement’s Promise: The Making of Contemporary Palestinian Theatre (Stanford University Press, 2025). Pp. 328. Hardcover, Paperback, E-book. Previous Next Attribution: Entries under this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 18 Winter 2025 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Performance Review: COSMOS/AWALEM by Ashtar Muallem and Emile Saba. By Malek Najjar Published: December 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF Ashtar Muallem’s Awalem/Cosmos is a one-woman performance infused with text, music, and aerial arts performance, co-written by Ashtar Muallem, and co-written and directed by Clément Dazin and Emile Saba. Muallem, who has toured the production around the world, performs the work in Arabic, English, and French. I attended this production in Portland, Oregon, at the AWOL Dance Collective, produced by BOOM Arts on Saturday, March 1 st , 2025, after attending a movement workshop with Muallem earlier that day. A self-described Jerusalemite artist who navigates life between Palestine and France, Muallem bills Awalem/Cosmos as “a one-woman theatrical performance” ( Cosmos English). In the press materials, she describes the show thus, Ashtar practices yoga, and meditation, and explores tarot reading and hypnosis on the internet. Her elastic body mirrors her dual life, between two countries, cultures, and languages, between solitude and togetherness. In a satirical manner, she presents her beliefs, inviting us to participate in a ceremony where poetry blends with humour and subjectivity merges with the universal. Through Ashtar’s art, we embark on a journey of balance, contradictions, and the beauty of interconnectedness. ( Cosmos English) The audience enters to Muallem sitting in the lotus position wearing a white blouse tied at the waist and black yoga pants on a large white cloth pooled on the stage, which also ascends high above her to the rafters. She performs several actor vocal exercises and speaks casually to the audience as they take their seats, asking if they are comfortable and whether anyone has practiced yoga or meditation. She then asks everyone to inhale and exhale together, “to get into the group’s atmosphere” (YouTube). This metaphor of “inhale, exhale” becomes central to the piece as it progresses. Muallem begins the actual performance with a Tibetan singing bowl, which she rings and circles with a mallet while laying on her side. Ashtar Muallem performs in Cosmos/Awalem by Ashtar Muallem and Emile Saba, . Directed by Clément Dazin and Emile Saba. Photo by Christophe Raynaud de Lage. She tells the audience she is neither Christian, nor Jewish, nor Muslim, nor from the East or West. “I abdicated duality and saw that the two worlds aren’t but one. Everything is one,” she states. She then begins a series of exercises with a yoga stretching strap while she speaks about the primacy of the body and the need for harmony between the body, soul, and spirit. She tells the audience of her grandmother, a religious woman who wanted Muallem to be like her, a “prayer addict” living in Jerusalem, a city of peace with a market filled with the smells of za’atar, sumac, sesame, and curry. However, despite the beauty of the city, there was a tension that convinced her at the age of eighteen to leave her country to study circus in France. She spends months in the new country, unable to speak the language until she attends a pro-Palestine rally where she hears the shouts “Free Palestine! Victory to Palestine!” There, she is asked about the history of her country and explains the 1948 War, the 1967 War, the division of Jerusalem into quarters, and the occupation zones that dictate where Palestinians are allowed to live or travel under occupation. When asked by foreigners what the solution is to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, she says: “The solution is simple. It is within us.” (YouTube) Although never mentioned, her tenure in France seemed to coincide with the COVID-19 lockdown, leaving her with a hopeless feeling that she would never be allowed to perform theatre again. She flirted with the idea of becoming a YouTube influencer but found little success. With her vanishing hope, she came to study Zen and its koan “You cannot control external circumstances. Pain is a part of life” (YouTube). She learns that everything happens for a reason and that there is a predestiny at work. Music begins, and she performs a beautifully choreographed aerial sequence as she ascends the silk and performs gravity-defying maneuvers. Suddenly, she stops, pulls out a cigarette, lights it, and smokes high above the stage floor. “Are you surprised that I’m smoking?” she asks. “I have plenty of time to burn” (YouTube). She says that her true lover, solitude, complements her as she cooks, reads, dances, and repeats affirmations in her lockdown. She realizes she is a vortex of creativity and creates rituals where she hugs and kisses herself, sometimes cradling and speaking baby talk to her own leg as she would an actual baby. She watches a tarot reader named Estelle online who always predicts correctly. She also learns to read the aura surrounding people by crossing her eyes and looking directly at them; a technique she employs on the actual audience watching the production. Ashtar Muallem performs in Cosmos/Awalem by Ashtar Muallem and Emile Saba, . Directed by Clément Dazin and Emile Saba. Photo by Christophe Raynaud de Lage. She then tells us that she finds that some people have blockages, and that men are told not to cry and they, in turn, tell their children not to cry either. To remedy this, she pulls a male audience member from the audience and leads them upstage right to a table with a chopping block and a chef knife, where they sit on a chair facing the audience. She produces a basket of onions and tells the participant to cut them until they are done. “You will cry freely and I will move freely” she says. As a mournful Arabic song plays, she dances, returns to the aerial silk, ascends, and performs a balletic dance high above the stage with unbelievable accuracy and speed. When she descends and escorts the man from the stage, she tells us how we, like the onion, are constituted of many layers, with each layer representing an identity we have assigned ourselves. “For us to access our truths,” she states, “we need to peel off these layers.” (YouTube) [1] She repeats a mantra, “Those who never cry are full of tears” (YouTube). She says she has seen too many men carrying weapons, but too few who cry. “I wonder if men let their tears fall then perhaps our world would be washed from all the wars?” she asks. She then breaks into a humorous infomercial voice as “Ashtar the Influencer,” urging audiences to purchase onions in the lobby. Her last words are “May peace be upon you. Namaste.” Muallem’s embodied performance of physical and vocal mastery, her congenial tone, her direct address, and her spiritual quandaries combine to make Cosmos/Awalem an enjoyable and thoughtful evening of performance. It is clear that she is exploring her role as an artist in the world and her life as a woman, as a Palestinian, and as a spiritual seeker in the hopes of unravelling her complicated emotions regarding the patriarchy, toxic masculinity, war, and occupation. Perhaps, instead of an onion, a more apt metaphor might be the artichoke. One may not cry while peeling an artichoke, but each layer peeled leads not to tears, but to the heart. After all is said and done, isn’t that the journey Muallem has asked us to take during this poignant evening of performance? Ashtar Muallem performs in Cosmos/Awalem by Ashtar Muallem and Emile Saba, . Directed by Clément Dazin and Emile Saba. Photo by Christophe Raynaud de Lage. Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes SOURCES: Cosmos: A One-Woman Theatrical Performance, Co-written and Performed by Ashtar Muallem. Co-written and directed by Clément Dazin and Emile Saba.” ASHTAR Theatre, 11 September, 2003. Media kit. Muallem, Ashtar. “AWALEM with English sub.” YouTube, uploaded by ASHTAR Theatre 7 January, 2024. https://youtu.be/HUhNyBJnASU?si=sHnGUAGOPOKxj0Vx . [1] On this particular evening of performance, I was unexpectedly the one asked onstage to chop the onions. As I sat there cutting the onions I found myself much less interested in the task as I was in the mesmerizing aerial performance unfolding before me. References About The Author(s) Malek Najjar is a Full Professor of Theatre Arts with the University of Oregon. He holds a PhD in Theater and Performance Studies (UCLA) and his Master of Fine Arts in Directing (York University). He is the author of Middle Eastern American Theatre: Communities, Cultures and Creators and Arab American Drama, Film and Performance: A Critical Study, 1908 to the Present. He edited Heather Raffo’s Iraq Plays: The Things That Can’t Be Said and The Selected Works of Yussef El Guindi ; Four Arab American Plays: Works by Leila Buck, Jamil Khoury, Yussef El Guindi, and Lameece Issaq & Jacob Kader . He is co-editor of Until I Return: The Selected Plays of Ismail Khalidi and Mona Mansour: The Vagrant Trilogy (with Hala Baki) and Six Plays of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (with Jamil Khoury and Corey Pond). Malek has directed with Silk Road Rising, Golden Thread Productions, New Arab American Theatre Works. Malek is a performance editor for Arab Stages and a board member of the Middle East North African Theater Makers Alliance. Arab Stages Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Practicing Place: Site-Specific Performance and the Reinscription of Memory in Palestine Resisting the Unleashed Evils of the US- Invasion of Iraq in Amir Al-Azraki’s The Widow (2017) Dina Mousawi’s RETURN: a Compelling site of representing Women’s Status of Agency Under Occupation Renewed Awareness Toward Salvation: The Journey of The Story of Zahra from Page to Stage Site-Specific Performance and Theatrical Memorialization of the Nakba Performance Review: WAILING SONGS OF THE PAST, MIGHT THEY GROW OUR RESILIENCE. By Maya al-Khaldi. Performance Review: DUMMY IN DIASPORA. By Esho Rasho. Performance Review: ENGLISH. Written by Sanaz Toossi Performance Review: THE CAVE. By Sadieh Rifai Performance Review: IRAQ, BUT FUNNY by Atra Asdou Performance Review: COSMOS/AWALEM by Ashtar Muallem and Emile Saba. Previous Next Attribution: Entries under this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 18 Winter 2025 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Performance Review: WAILING SONGS OF THE PAST, MIGHT THEY GROW OUR RESILIENCE. By Maya al-Khaldi. By Dia Barghouti Published: December 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF The air rose against the door And I thought the wind carried news Oh heart have patience [to endure] the separation From our loved one s [ 1 ] Since Israel began its violent attacks on Gaza and the West Bank over a year ago, Palestinian musicians and performers have been faced with the difficult question of what the role of art is in the midst of a genocide. This was the question with which Palestinian musician and composer Maya al-Khaldi began her performance, titled Wailing Songs of the Past, Might they Grow our Resilience . She explained that the question of how artists can help their communities survive in the face of such extreme violence was at the heart of her research on Palestinian wailing songs, on which her performance was based. Al-Khaldi’s performance draws on written sources, the sound archives at the Popular Art Center ( Markaz al-Fan al-Sha‘bi, مركز الفن الشعبي) , and her own interviews with women . Based on this research, al-Khaldi composed the music for a collection of songs , the lyrics of which were derived from extinct Palestinian rituals of mourning. In her introduction, she explained that many of these songs disappeared due to the cultural loss incurred with the mass displacement of Palestinians by Zionist forces in the 1948 Nakba ( Catastrophe) and the rise of Wahhabism, which considered such practices to be sacrilegious. Indeed, even during interviews, several of the women reciting the lyrics of these songs would pause for a moment to ask God for forgiveness. Yet the loss, pain, and feelings of longing embedded in these songs are more relevant to Palestinians than ever. By returning to these extinct practices, al-Khaldi is creating a space for Palestinians to come together to mourn the loss and grapple with the immense pain they are enduring. These songs of mourning, and Palestinian wailing practices more generally, used to be performed by women. Citing the lyrics of a song that says “I cry for my soul and most of my wailing is for my wounds,” al-Khaldi explained that such songs can only be performed by those who have endured the pain of loss and that these mourning rituals were a means for people to guide others through the process of grieving. According to al-Khaldi, this is the part played by the nawa ḥ a ( نواحة , the woman who performs mourning songs) in society, a feminist role that continues to have revolutionary potential in the present. During her performance, al-Khaldi explained that the significance of the nawa ḥ a is that they create the space for us to collectively feel our pain as a community, pain we are often denied because of the urgency of needing to find a way to survive. Photo by Soraya El Kahlaoui Wailing Songs of the Past, Might they Grow our Resilience is part of a series of performances organized by Gradus-العتبة , an initiative started by musician and composer Dina Shilleh to create space for musicians to artistically innovate and collaborate. It was performed twice on the 2nd and 3rd of February 2025 at the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center in Ramallah and Wonder Cabinet in Bethlehem. Accompanying Maya in her performance were Sarouna on the Qanun, Faris Amin on the cello, and Zeina Amro as a vocalist. The performance began with a song about a host asking visitors for forgiveness as she is unable to celebrate the Eid (the Muslim feast) because she is in mourning. In a culture that places so much emphasis on hospitality, not being able to celebrate or properly host a guest during the feast represents an immense state of sadness. But it is perhaps also worth mentioning that Eid is also a time of remembering the deceased as it is customary for family members to visit the graves of their loved ones during these times. By the time the first song had finished, an atmosphere of sadness had already overtaken the room. I wondered who the other audience members were thinking of, those who had been martyred in Gaza? Did they have family in Gaza? I thought of a close friend who lost twenty-two family members on the same day as a result of Israeli bombing. Or were they thinking of those who have been killed by Israeli settlers and soldiers in the West Bank? Or those murdered by the Palestinian Authority in Jenin? Perhaps others remembered those who have passed from disease, but is stress and grief not the cause of disease? The second song, an adaptation from a poem from the Ottoman era, then began. [ 2 ] Its slow pace and the repetitive melodies of the cello and qanun were a meditation of the tragedy of loss. Yet it also emphasised Palestinian agency with the alteration of the lyrics to include a verse about a clementine that ‘heals sadness,’ the clementine here being a symbol of resistance. And although there was an element of otherworldliness in the first, it was this second song that made me feel we were on a journey to another time and space. The qanun, cello, singing, and repetition had a mesmerising effect. Along with the surreal aspect of this song, there was almost a hint of the beautiful, as if Khaldi was trying to remind us that there is beauty even in grief. The third song was a supplication to the grave, written in the voice of the deceased. It was mainly composed of repetitions of the verse “oh grave, feel my mother calling, open for her an opening so that she may come and go,” with a deep sense of pain and anguish. It is difficult to describe what occurred with al-Khaldi and her collaborators during this song. It was not only that I felt them feeling their grief in that moment, not only that I saw four individuals come together in a unison that all great performers aspire to, but it was that I felt the room being overtaken by the power of the sound. It was a grief intertwined with anger, as if it were a defiance of death itself. It was at that point that I began to cry. I thought I glimpsed the qanun player tearing up, and then I noticed several members of the audience were also crying. This song embodied the power of grief ; it was simultaneously mourning the dead and challenging the injustice that took them away from their loved ones. The following song began with equal intensity, protesting against the injustice with a demand to be heard: “I yell with a sound with which they will hear me.” It ended with the following verses: You ask for your rights And you are told they are lost My rights have been lost And the one who has wronged me walked away Where are my loved ones? Oh my loved ones, where am I? I wandered in the night With moon and light absent We crossed the flowing sea With no water Gardens in bloom With no fruit Oh people of knowledge Give me an answer The song is not only a poetic commentary on the injustice in which Palestinians live and the pain they are forced to endure but also an act of protest. This sense of defiance permeated the entire performance as if crying were an act of rebellion in itself, for we, too, have the right to feel pain. Perhaps al-Khaldi is right ; perhaps we cannot continue our struggle to survive without taking a moment to mourn the loss. The final song was about a woman’s longing for her martyred son, describing death as “ ghurbih , غربة” or a prolonged journey. And I wondered how many audience members were coming to terms with the reality of never being able to see their loved ones again. The term ghurbih is also used to describe exile and evokes the experiences of Palestinians displaced in the 1948 Nakba as well as Gazans fleeing the genocide. Al-Khaldi’s work is a pertinent reminder of the power of extinct indigenous performance traditions, such as wailing rituals, and their ability to create spaces for people to come together and heal from the ongoing traumas inflicted by Israel’s genocide. However, this return to the past is not about creating static versions of lost forms, for the power of al-Khaldi’s work is her ability to innovate to defy Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid in the present. And as these wailing women guided mourners in the past, al-Khaldi too guides us through an overwhelming pain in a sonic journey that implores us to survive. Research for this article was supported by the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities and the Palestinian American Research Center. The views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this article are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment for the Humanities or the Palestinian American Research Center. Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes [ 1] Quotation from the second song performed at Maya al-Khaldi’s Wailing Songs of the Past, Might they Grow our Resilience. [ 2 ] The original song can be found in ‘Ali Hasan Bawab, Mawsu‘at Haifa al-Karmaliya (Amman: Al-Matba‘a al-Wataniyya, 2009), p. 112. The adaptation is from the play Journey to the Third Dimension of a Clementine (Tunis: Dar al-Kitab, 2025), p.79. The song is a collaboration between al-Khaldi and the author. References About The Author(s) Dia Barghouti is a Palestinian playwright and researcher. She holds a PhD in Drama and Theatre Arts from Goldsmiths, University of London (2021) and is currently a Research Fellow at the European University Institute. Her research explores indigenous performance traditions in Tunisia and Palestine, with a special focus on Sufi rituals. Her writings have appeared in New Theatre Quarterly, Performance Research, Theatre Research International, Jadaliyya, Bab el-Wad (Arabic), The Markaz Review, among other academic and cultural journals. She is also the author of several plays, her most recently completed work, Journey to the Third Dimension of a Clementine (Arabic, رحلة للبعد الثالث لكلمنتينا), was published by Dar al-Kitab in Tunis (Maison du Livre, 2025). Arab Stages Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Practicing Place: Site-Specific Performance and the Reinscription of Memory in Palestine Resisting the Unleashed Evils of the US- Invasion of Iraq in Amir Al-Azraki’s The Widow (2017) Dina Mousawi’s RETURN: a Compelling site of representing Women’s Status of Agency Under Occupation Renewed Awareness Toward Salvation: The Journey of The Story of Zahra from Page to Stage Site-Specific Performance and Theatrical Memorialization of the Nakba Performance Review: WAILING SONGS OF THE PAST, MIGHT THEY GROW OUR RESILIENCE. By Maya al-Khaldi. Performance Review: DUMMY IN DIASPORA. By Esho Rasho. Performance Review: ENGLISH. Written by Sanaz Toossi Performance Review: THE CAVE. By Sadieh Rifai Performance Review: IRAQ, BUT FUNNY by Atra Asdou Performance Review: COSMOS/AWALEM by Ashtar Muallem and Emile Saba. Previous Next Attribution: Entries under this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 15 Spring 2024 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Carving a Path: Desiring-Production in Displaced Syrian Theatre By Bart Pitchford Published: June 15, 2024 Download Article as PDF In May 2016 the town of Saraqb, Syria lay in ruins from constant bombing by the Syrian regime. Buildings toppled and reduced to rocks were unrecognizable for the structures they once were. This town which lay about an hour south of Aleppo and twenty minutes east of Idlib was caught in between factions of ISIS and Jabat al Nusra (1) who fought for superiority of the region. From the top of one building that still stood, Mohammed from amateur theatre makers Youth Group of Saraqb gave me a tour of the area over Skype (2). He pointed out the building where he and his family lived before the war and each building they moved to throughout the violent conflict. From the mediated perspective it seemed like the building Mohammed was broadcasting from was the only building standing in the entire neighborhood. As he stood on the roof talking about the progression of Assad’s bombing campaign on Saraqb, regime planes flew overhead. Mohammed did not flinch because he knew the planes were on the way to Aleppo. At this point Mohammed was able to distinguish between bombing raids meant for Saraqb and those meant for another city. Amid so much trauma and destruction, resilience and survival are tightly bound to the present. The ability to continue existence in such a perilous and uncertain environment relies heavily on desire. For Youth Group of Saraqb, to move from moment to moment in their city required them to develop tactics for existence that responded to the fluidity of the situation. Rather than simply reacting to anything lacking in their lives like security or food, The Youth Group of Saraqb interacted with their current social and political environment to create unexpected modes of resistance that inverted the climate of violence and poverty in which they lived. Instead of feeding the endless war the Youth Group of Saraqb created theatre. While their will to live may speak to a larger hope at play, the tactics of simply making it through each day were produced through desire. Play from Saraqb Youth Group, 2015. Printed with permission of photographer. In this article I explore two case studies where desire produces and is produced by the theatrical moments in the work of displaced Syrians—theatre in education practice in a refugee camp and an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet with a cast of Syrian children both in and outside Syria. Using Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of desiring-production as a positive and primordial drive necessary for the survival of humans, I contend that amid unspeakable violence and trauma the artists discussed below carved alternative paths or ‘desire lines’ to their own survival through the act of theatrical creation. Countering an epistemological regime from Plato to Lacan that viewed desire as a “lack of the real object,” Deleuze and Guattari understood desire as a drive whose subject is real but not fixed. Desire does not develop because of the object that is missing. Rather, the object is a by-product of the flights of desire. Put simply, desire in humans exists, not because of unfulfilled needs, but rather because of human existence. Taken this way, it is desire that generates needs and not the converse. In addition to desiring-production, I intertwine a concept that arose from the physical geography field of study. French philosopher, Gaston Bachelard, in his 1959 work “The Poetics of Space” spoke of “ Les chemins du désir ,” (desire paths). Over time, scholars in in the world of landscape architecture have morphed the terminology into desire lines. According to Urban Studies scholars, Naomi Smith and Peter Walters, desire lines are literally, “the grassy or muddy path inscribed in space where people have created their own route outside of those prescribed by abstract place makers” (Smith 8). Desire lines occur when people improvise movement from point A to point B ignoring, or in some cases subverting sanctioned pathways. Throughout this paper I refer to the tactics used by the artists as improvisatory because they are reacting to conditions by developing new and unsanctioned paths around official rules or obstacles. Like the Youth Group of Saraqb, the other examples I cite in this article inverted their circumstances to enact resilience, resistance, or joy in the present moment with little regard for any future impact. The first of the two case studies concerns the brave work of a camp resident using theatre to teach feminist thought in a Syrian camp in Jordan named Azraq. This teacher, Zabeida, constructs dramatic scenes based on internationally renowned women leaders from around the world throughout history, to provide alternative visions of womanhood that rival the early marriage model prevalent throughout the displaced population. She asked that I not use her name out of concern that camp officials would remove her from working if they discovered the lessons she taught. For that reason, I am using the pseudonym “Zabeida” in this article. Zabeida’s desire to teach combined with the Jordanian government’s refusal to allow displaced Syrians employment in the formal education system created the conditions which allowed Zabeida to design her own curriculum. By diagnosing her circumstances, Zabeida realized that her position in the informal NGO education system gave her freedom that was not possible in the state-run system which maintained a strict curriculum and did not allow displaced Syrians to teach. Working through the more liberal development system allowed Zabeida to address topics considered too controversial for Jordanian schools like sexual assault and female empowerment. For the second case study, I enter the digital space between Amman, Jordan and Homs, Syria where I examine an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet that made use of unregulated video conferencing in order to perform a play with children on both sides of the border. Young actors at a recovery facility in Amman and in sieged area outside Homs used Skype to connect two locations through a single performance, while evading detection by the Syrian authorities. The lines of communication that enabled this production transgressed space regulated by the Syrian government. Desire, as a reaction force does not adhere to established pathways. It creates shortcuts outside, and often counter to, regulations governing private and public space. Romeo and Juliet Separated by War used satellite connections secured illegally by Free Syrian Army forces to house the video feed. This performance, which placed the actors in Syria at risk, also allowed them to reconnect with the world outside of Homs. Both programs discussed in these case studies formed through improvisation based on the desire to reestablish a sense of stability and belonging. Desire is fluid and unstable. It operates as a tactic from points of opportunity and then moves as quickly as it arrived. Neither Zubeida’s program nor the production of Romeo and Juliet were sanctioned or connected to official systems. They both grew organically from momentary conditions. The characteristics of desire open possibilities for the contestation of power precisely because it appears in unpredictable ways and spaces. Desire leaves traces that can point the way toward new forms of social interaction. The artists in this chapter answer to and produce new circumstances. Finding Crevices in the Map to Teach Feminism The ability to “make do” by finding the small tactical spaces in which to operate is driven by desire. As an affect, desire has a powerful potential to focus our attention on an immediate object. While the object of a specific desire may simply be a target of opportunity that produces desire by its presence and accessibility, sometimes the object of desire has been long sought and remained dormant only because there was no possibility for fulfilling it. 43-year-old teacher, Zabeida had long wanted to change the power dynamics between men and women in rural Syria. Zabeida fled from Dara’a with her husband and children during the war. First, she lived in Za’atari camp, but after two years her family was resettled into the desert camp in Azraq. Once in Azraq, Zabeida used her experience as an English teacher prior to the war to secure employment with Relief International’s remedial education program. Through her work as a teaching assistant in the camp, Zabeida drew from her experiences as a child bride to encourage her female teenage students to find their own power. The desire for independence and equality Zabeida had buried for decades now fueled her class curriculum. I met Zabeida in 2016 while conducting field research for my dissertation, Hela L’Wein: Performing Nationalisms, Citizenship, and Belonging in Displaced Syrian Communities . During the five-month period that I was in Jordan, I had the opportunity to meet and work with several different organizations and individuals working with displaced Syrians in Amman, Za’atari, Zarqa, and Azraq. Although I was only able to travel to Azraq for one day, it was incredibly instructive to see the stark differences between the camps in Za’atari and Azraq. Za’atari formed organically with little government oversight initially. By the time I went to Za’atari it was Jordan’s 4th largest city complete with a shopping area jokingly named Sham Elysees. Azraq, on the other hand, was conceptualized by UNHCR and the Jordanian government. It was a sprawling camp laid in grid squares with fences dividing sectors. In comparison to the frenetic energy of Za’atari, Azraq felt like a sterile suburban town. Prior to my visit in 2016 some of the key issues facing the residents of the camps were sanitation, education, and early marriage. While there were organizations working with the Jordanian government to teach traditional school curricula, many children were ineligible for these programs. According to Ministry of Education law, any child who had not attended school for three or more years, was not allowed to return. The ministry was concerned that children this far behind would not be at the same level as children their age. Additionally, the age discrepancy for children in this situation would be too great for them to be in class with children on their academic level. In other words, the ministry worried about putting thirteen-year-old children in the same class as ten-year-old children. To provide some form of curriculum to children unable to attend school, several international NGOs created a “life skills” curriculum to address areas of concern. Life skills, according to UNHCR, consisted of teaching proper hygiene with a strong focus on hand washing and personal cleanliness, conflict mitigation, professional development, and strategies to combat sexual violence. This last subject, sexual violence, was perhaps the most contentious because part of the curriculum addressed early marriage. Life skills instruction fell underneath UNICEF’s “Makani” program. Makani, which is Arabic for “my space,” provided a comprehensive learning space for children and teenagers. In the varied areas of the Makani program, students had access to support services, skills building programs, psychosocial support, on-site water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH), and educational support ( UNICEF ). One of the primary organizations UNICEF tasked with maintaining Makani sites in Azraq and Zaatari was Relief International. Part of Relief International’s mandate was to provide “non-formal” education classes to students who were not allowed to attend the official Jordanian schools because of the amount of time they had been out of school. The “Drop Out” programs led by UNICEF aimed to prevent Syrian children from falling out of the educational system entirely. In coordination with the Ministry of Education, the non-formal education programs conducted by Relief International and other similar organizations, would allow graduating students to receive a tenth-grade equivalency rating in Jordan. This at least allowed the student to participate in vocational training and enter the work force. Additionally, Relief International operated a remedial education curriculum that provided extra education opportunities to students who were allowed to attend official Jordanian schools but struggled maintaining grade level standards. Relief International’s responsibilities primarily included space administration, program assessment, and training teachers in the specific curriculum (3). Neither Relief International, nor the other organizations administering remedial or non-formal education programs, were allowed to determine the specific curriculum or provide the teachers. The Ministry of Education in Jordan demanded that all classroom instruction level decisions remain in their purview. While there were likely other factors influencing the ministry’s control over traditional school curriculum, fear of job loss amongst Jordanian teachers was a primary driver. Like the anti-immigrant rhetoric seen in the United States, many Jordanian employment sectors, including education, worried that Syrian immigrants would displace Jordanian workers. In response to populist anger by Jordanian citizens over the influx of displaced Syrians and Iraqis, the government established migrant work laws that prevented noncitizens from holding certain employment positions. The “Closed Professions List” limited the ability of both migrants and Palestinian permanent residents from obtaining employment in jobs where Jordanian citizens preferred to work. The list, which the Ministry of Labor published in October 2016, named teaching amongst other high skilled professions such as banking, engineering, and business professional ( Briggs 14 ). This meant that no Syrian teacher residing in Jordan could teach without receiving express permission from the Ministry of Labor, which was only given in extreme circumstances. No matter how desperate the need or qualified the teacher, Syrians were not to be employed in this capacity, even in the camps. The inability to employ Syrian teachers in camp education programs weighed heavily on the international NGOs working in the education field. Although the Ministry of Education claimed to hire enough teachers, with enrollment sizes reaching 1000 students per space for primary and secondary levels, classrooms often went long periods without official instructors. According to Danijel Cuturic, Relief International’s Jordanian country office director, while there were many dedicated teachers working at the schools, it was common for several teachers to simply not show up at all. In order to ensure that the classroom had at least one instructor present, Relief International paied qualified Syrian teachers a small stipend to work as “volunteers.” While this circumvention allowed Relief International to place Syrian teachers in the classrooms, they were not allowed to pay the same salary to the volunteers as the Jordanian teachers received. Furthermore, Relief International could not remove any Jordanian teacher for failure to attend or accomplish educational benchmarks. This task, like hiring, fell exclusively to the Ministry of Education. Despite the inequality in pay, many of the volunteers appreciated the opportunity to teach the Syrian children. Not only did their positions allow them to earn a small amount of money, but they enjoyed feeling productive and needed. In some situations, the volunteers filling in for ghost teachers were able to treat the classroom as their own, adjusting the curriculum delivery method to suit their personal style of instruction (4). This was the situation for Zabeida. Her experience as an English teacher prior to the war qualified her to volunteer for Relief International as a remedial education assistant. According to several staff members at the Relief International Makani, Zabeida was one of their most successful teachers. As an English and History teacher, she regularly used theatre as an integral part of her pedagogy. For example, Zabeida recalled to me that back in Dara’a she regularly taught Shakespeare’s history plays as a way access European history and create links to Syrian history. In some class exercises she had students take on the characters of Henry V or Richard III to explore ideas of patriotism or political corruption. Zabeida intersected her belief in the tenets of Islam with a quiet fierce feminism that grew from her life experiences. At the age of 14, Zabeida’s father arranged for her to marry an older man in neighboring town. Although she dreamed of attending university and becoming a teacher, she followed her father’s instruction to marry. Early marriage in the southern province of Dara’a, was a common practice. Zabeida’s options, therefore, were limited both by the culture in which she grew up and her belief in the importance of respecting her family at all costs. Nevertheless, Zabeida successfully pleaded with her husband to let her finish school. In the first several years of marriage, while finishing school, Zabeida also gave birth to their first two children. In all, Zabeida and her husband eventually had seven children, all of whom fled to Jordan with them. Despite maintaining her duties as a wife in a conservative Syrian family, Zabeida continued her education eventually earning her bachelor’s and teaching certificate before becoming an English literature teacher at secondary level in Dara’a. Shakespeare, Zabeida insists, was her inspiration for continuing to teach and for incorporating theatre into her pedagogy. Due to her experience as a young mother, Zabeida makes women’s issues, particularly early marriage a primary focus in her classes with teenage girls. Despite being allowed to continue her education and eventually work as a teacher, Zabeida’s marriage, especially in earlier years was difficult. “At fourteen,” Zabeida offers, “I was not old enough to be a mother. No young girl is. She should be allowed to finish her education” ( Zabeida ). In fact, part of the reason that Zabeida believes she was able to complete her school was that her husband had another wife, and so he was not at the house much of the time. Zabeida’s theatre in education practice, I contend, is indeed a tactical strategy that uses the map of humanitarian assistance to empower a new generation of Syrian women with values that extend beyond the duties of motherhood. In one exercise, Zabeida assigns her students powerful historical women to research. Examples of figures Zabeida mentioned are: Oprah, Cleopatra, Queen Elizabeth II, and Queen Zenobia (5). After a period of research, her students must craft a monologue or scene where the historical person is interviewed on camera by other girls in the class. Dressed in costumes that draw form their research, the girls answer questions related the history of the character. For instance, in one video, the student playing Queen Zenobia sits in a chair that has been decorated to look like a throne. Wearing flowing fabric covered with a layer of green chiffon, the student assumes an air of confidence and authority. Out of the frame, a person posing as a reporter asks her questions about her life as the queen of Palmyra: “How did you feel when your husband Odaenathus was murdered,” and “How did it feel to be in charge of everyone, even the men?” ( Zabeida ). Through this exercise, Zabeida hoped that her students would learn that women can have power and accomplish similar goals as men. Historical knowledge and generalized empowerment were not the only messages that Zabeida included in this lesson, however. In addition to the historically based questions, she also encouraged the students to ask the characters about more personal quotidian issues. For example, in the same scene where the student acted as Queen Zenobia, one question the reporter posed was about how the Palmyrenes viewed menstruation and how did they maintain hygiene during this time every month. In the Cleopatra scene, the student playing Cleopatra talked about how using make-up helped her feel powerful. Many of these questions would be considered taboo to discuss in public areas such as a school. Indeed, Zabeida claimed that many of the girls in the camp were not being taught about these issues at home. Perhaps the most daring scene that Zabeida shared with me was a video of a student who researched Oprah Winfrey. Zabeida explained that she and her students admire Oprah for her independence, intelligence, and charitable works. Many of the questions the reporter asked Oprah centered on questions about creating her own show, acting, living as a single woman without children. The most revealing moment occurred, however, when the reporter asked the student playing Oprah about her life before becoming a talk show host. Without trepidation, the young student playing Oprah recounted the poverty that Winfrey endured as a child, including having to wear burlap sacks for clothing. She also discussed, in character, being raped by men from her family and being pregnant at a young age but losing the child. She completed her scene by recognizing that even in the worst circumstances, a woman can use her intelligence and education to improve her life without the need for a husband. As theatrical practice in general, the scenes Zabeida asks her students to play seem tame. Theatre in Education texts are filled with examples of this type, where scene work intersects with history to open up previously unexplored questions about historical figures. When placed in the cautious camp environment, however, Zabeida’s pedagogy is not only tactical, it is subversive. While she recognized the danger of teaching material that questioned societal norms, Zabeida also understood that the change she sought for young Syrian women required a high level of risk. Because of the anxious nature of a refugee camp, organizations providing support services to the residents often refrain from approaching any subject that may seem sensitive or political in nature. While this sort of careful posture is prudent in many cases, it can also inadvertently strengthen certain forms of oppression. In both Zaatari and Azraq, discussions around normative gender roles was certainly one area that required organizations to be hyperattentive to cultural sensitivities. To their credit, organizations such as Relief International certainly did attempt repeatedly to open the debate over early marriage. In fact, the same day that I interviewed Zabeida, Relief International held a family day that included a skit about the danger of early marriage followed by testimony of several Syrian women who were married early. At the same time, discussions about feminine hygiene, sex before marriage, and rape were anathema to the patriarchal ethos and thus considered appropriate only between a mother and her daughters. For Zabeida to tackle such issues in the confines of the classroom, stretched the limits of propriety in Azraq. If officials outside of Relief International discovered the content of some of her lessons, she could have been forbidden from teaching in the future. Even worse, she may have been threatened from more socially conservative figures within the camp. Taken as a subversive action, Zabeida’s classroom scene exercise reconfigures the geography of patriarchy at play in the camp space of Azraq. The map of propriety for Azraq consists primarily of structures conceived, built, and institutionalized by the male dominated culture of southern Syria negotiating its own marginalization with the neoliberal powers of Western development organizations. Men must first approve any space displaced women might claim for security or growth. That does not mean that Syrian women in the camp are resigning themselves to the control of either the patriarchal or neoliberal forces. It is to say that women who wish to push against these boundaries must do so from temporary niches recessed within the corners and shadows of Azraq. Even as Zabeida uses a space provided by a Western organization, controlled by the Government of Jordan, and only with the permission of her husband, she inscribes in that space a politics of desire that generates a new understanding of gender roles in a traditionally conservative society. She plants seeds of feminist empowerment in a patriarchal landscape that will trace her presence and make visible a path for young Syrian women to follow. Virtual Desire Lines In Azraq, Zabeida marked a space in between the cultural patriarchy, governmental authority, and international development regime where young women could explore feminist topics in safety. Her use of theatre in education relies on the immediacy and instability of desire. Zabeida created lines of desire through her physical presence interacting with feminist tactical opportunities. Similarly, the second case study, Romeo and Juliet Separated By War , relies on the improvisatory nature of desire, but explores the transgression of authorized space through virtual lines of desire. With the help of satellite equipment stolen from the regime by the Free Syrian Army providing bandwidth for Skype communications, young actors under siege in the suburban area, al-Waer, that lies just to the east of Homs, Syria were able to perform a play with young actors displaced in Amman, Jordan. Driven by the desire to touch even if digitally, their homeland, several children living in a recovery facility in Amman rehearsed an adapted version of Romeo and Juliet. At the same time, another group of children, driven by the desire to imagine an existence outside of the violence and war surrounding them, secretly rehearsed in an apartment in al-Waer. Eventually the two casts met through a combination of computers, cameras, and screens. Their rehearsals and performances opened momentary pathways through borders and conflict zones allowing the children to make a unified plea for the violence and killing to stop. Souriyat Across Borders is a hospice for war wounded Syrians who are recovering from severe injuries suffered as a result of the war. The nonprofit center was founded and continues to be run exclusively by Syrian women who were themselves displaced to Jordan. Located near the University of Jordan in Amman, Souriyat houses Syrians of all ages with physically debilitating injuries. The older residents staying in the hospice have a decidedly pro-revolution political affiliation. In fact, many of the audience members present for the performances of Romeo and Juliet arrived at Souriyat after being injured in skirmishes with the Syrian Army or al-Dawlah al-Islamïyah (Islamic State). At the same time there were children living in Souriyat who fell victim to the barrage of barrel bombs dropped from the Syrian and Russian planes. For example, the eleven-year-old boy who played Romeo lost the full use of his right leg when he ran to escape a falling bomb. Image of children in Homs performing Romeo and Juliet Separated by War with children in Amman over Skype, 2015. Still taken from video by Nawar Bulbul. Syrian actor and director Nawar Bulbul, who is more widely known for his work in Middle Eastern Ramadan dramas like Bab al Hara or films like Demashq Tatakallam developed the idea in 2013 after completing his notable project Shakespeare in Zaatari (6). Bulbul, who is from a notable theatre and opera family in Homs, Syria (7), chose to work at Souriyat for this production because UNHCR and the Jordanian government prohibited him from continuing to work with the children in Zaatari because he was not a licensed NGO. Still wanting to work with Syrian children, Bulbul approached Souriyat with his idea for producing Romeo and Juliet over Skype with children in Homs. Considering that one of Souriyat’s primary focuses is on the children wounded in the Syrian war, the board allowed Bulbul and the actors to use the roof of the facility which had a large empty storage room. Bulbul worked to secure a performance space and adapt the script while Abu Ameen, a drama teacher and pro-revolution activist, worked with his teenaged students to make masks and develop rules to maintain their anonymity. Most of the young cast lived in Homs, but Abu Ameen fled Homs which was under the occupation of the governmental forces to the Free Syrian controlled suburban enclave al-Waer. By January of 2015, the regime forces in Syria had taken control of the entire city of Homs. Serving as the heart of the revolution, Homs had initially resisted attempts by the military to quell the 2011 marches. Because of their resiliency, citizens in Homs gave life to the revolution after the protests temporarily died out in Dara’a. But with Hezbollah reinforcing the Syrian military, the Free Syrian Army were forced to evacuate Homs in May 2014 ( Zuhur ; Sherlock and Samman ). While the most vocal and known activists moved with the Free Syrian army to al-Waer, other anti-Regime citizens remained in Homs living under a cloud of suspicion from Syrian intelligence. The Syrian regime forced people remaining in the city to sign a declaration of loyalty to President Bashar al Assad. Although many people signed it, they remained silently hopeful that the revolution would succeed. This included the parents of the children participating in Romeo and Juliet. Any activity deemed subversive likely would be met with prison, torture, and possibly death. The regime intelligence apparatus likely would have considered any theatre potentially subversive. But performing theatre over the internet in collaboration with Ameen and Bulbul, who were considered dissidents, would certainly have registered as an act of treason against the regime. Nevertheless, the parents allowed their children to make the treacherous journey from Homs across oppositional lines to al-Waer five times per week for four months ( Ameen ). Over those four months, Ameen and Bulbul rehearsed Romeo and Juliet with both groups of children. In the mornings, Bulbul traveled to the Souriyat building and rehearsed with the Amman group for three hours. Working in a small activity room with speckled brown concrete floors and white walls lined with the children’s artwork, the cast in Amman traded positions reading the lines played by the actors in al-Waer. Then between noon and three in the afternoon, Ameen brought the children to his temporary apartment for rehearsal. The timing varied daily in order to avoid creating a predictable pattern of movement that could make capturing them easier. Returning home from Souriyat, Bulbul waited for an email from Ameem to say that the children were ready. Then Bulbul would call Ameen on Skype for the group to begin rehearsal. While Bulbul directed, Ameen took notes and read the Amman casts’ roles. After two months of meeting in this way, Bulbul and French scenographer, Jean Yves Bizien, cleared the rooftop of Souriyat, and multimedia designer, Hassan Muhra, completed the Skype projection installment. This allowed the two casts to rehearse together for the first time. Until this point, the children in Amman and Homs had not met each other. The first meeting, which Muhra captured on video, was a moment of joy for both those in Amman and al-Waer. Bulbul had the children standing in a group behind him in Amman, while in al-Waer Ameen kept the children out of camera frame. After a few minutes of adjusting the camera image so that it was clear, and ensuring that the sound preferences were all correct, Ameen instructed the children in al-Waer to enter the frame. As soon as the two groups saw each other they both giggled coyly. Ameen noted that the children in Syria desperately wanted to make this connection with other Syrian children living outside of the war. At the same time, Bulbul explained that seeing the children in Syria for the first time, reminded the children in Amman that they were still connected to the country. The giggling, Bulbul speculated, was a combination of the children processing these complex emotions bound up with the romantic connotations at play in Romeo and Juliet. After a few moments of feigned embarrassment, the children composed themselves and Bulbul introduced the actors from Amman. Ameen followed by introducing the actors in the al Waer apartment. For two months following this initial introduction, the children forged a virtual bond necessary for the performance and psychological benefit of each. The ability for the children to meet and perform Romeo and Juliet relied on a confluence of tactics and technologies that created enough space for the project to exist temporarily and then leave traces in the act of its disappearance. In a physical way, the Syrians involved in creating Romeo and Juliet located pockets in the crevices of the map, from which they could contest power. In al-Waer, just outside of Homs, under the protection of the Free Syrian Army, Ameen and the children worked from a private apartment. The regime, however, continued advancing towards this suburban enclave from its regained position in Homs. This meant that during rehearsals and performances the group endured regular shelling from mortar rounds and barrel bombs. In a particularly tense moment during the first performance, when the siege was audible in the background, the internet connection severed leaving the audience in Amman to wonder if the apartment in al-Waer had been struck. Adding to the already perilous situation of producing a play while under bombardment, the four children participating lived in a regime held neighborhood in Homs. As mentioned earlier, regime forces captured Homs a few months prior to the beginning of rehearsals. For four months, five days per week, Ameen drove through the front line between opposition and regime forces in order to pick the children up for rehearsals. Describing his drive back from Homs, Ameen noted that there was one road on which he had to travel where the regime forces positioned snipers on the rooftops. Both entering and exiting the area on this road, Ameen recalls having to drive quickly in a specific lane because it created a difficult angle for the snipers attempting to shoot. Additionally, he varied the days and times of the rehearsals, some days picking the children up at 2pm, then the next day at 5pm. In this manner he avoided predictability making it more difficult to become a target ( Ameen ). During a documentary produced by Arte TV called Jordan: Romeo and Juliet, Love at War , Ameen drove a reporter through the streets of al-Waer after dropping the children off following rehearsal. The landscape was littered with debris from the war, crumbling buildings that the Syrian forces destroyed, and charred automobiles parked wherever they had been when the fighting began. Ameen, acknowledged the risk he and the children took by performing this play on the internet. At the same time, he argues that to be silent in the face of oppression would be the same as agreeing with Assad’s brutality. The children’s parents, according to Ameen, agreed and were excited that their children were working with him and Bulbul. Of course, both Bulbul and Ameen admit that at the time of the play, all involved still believed that the revolution would be successful. Russia had not yet committed its full presence and the Free Syrian Army still held major areas in the south and east including Dara’a, Idlib, and Aleppo ( ARTE GEIE ). The apartment they rehearsed and performed in did not belong to Ameen, nor anyone else involved in the play. Its owner had allowed Ameen to live there with his family so that he could escape Homs when the regime took control. Prior to living in the apartment, Ameen moved seven other times to escape the regime forces who actively looked for him. In the camera frame, two rooms were visible. The room where the actors performed looked to be a small living room. In some of the videos and images a couch and other furniture was visible. The room in the background, which was separated from the living room by standard double door frame passage, was an office. During the performance, however, Ameen converted this room into audience seating. On the frame over the doorway, he and the children crafted a brick façade that mimicked Bizien’s scenography in Amman. Meanwhile, in Jordan, Bulbul and the children carved out space on the roof of a private building so that they would not have to worry about being censored by Jordanian authorities for presenting potentially political material. When Bulbul began working on the adaptation for Romeo and Juliet , he intended for it to be performed in Zaatari. When those plans were scuttled by UNHCR and camp authorities, he searched for another space. There are performance spaces in Amman belonging to the Ministry of Culture that Bulbul could have used. In fact, a friend of Bulbul’s from the High Institute of Dramatic Art in Damascus, managed one of these spaces. But using a government owned space meant exposing the show to the eye of the Jordanian censors. While the play was not explicitly political, at least not in a manner that would cause concern to the government, Bulbul’s experience with censors in Syria followed by his recent run in with Jordanian authorities in Zaatari meant that he was overly cautious in the way he viewed access to the work. Moreover, even if the Jordanian authorities did not attempt to censor the play, there was always the risk that Syrian intelligence would create problems for the production if it were held in a public location. According to Bulbul, following the media coverage of Shakespeare in Zaatari he felt certain that Syrian intelligence was surveilling him in Amman. He did not want to risk them creating a conflict that would derail the performance or harm the children. For that reason, he sought a place that had controlled access. This would be a tactic Bulbul repeated for his next play Love Boat (2016) which was performed in the French Institute in Amman. The spatial tactics Bulbul and Ameen employed linked separate spaces while evading the official flow of power. For Bulbul and the cast in Amman, the ability to operate in a space outside Jordanian authority meant that a performance absent government intrusion was possible. For Ameen and the cast in Homs, moving in the shadows and working from the apartment reduced their risk of imprisonment, torture, or death. In Syria’s current state of exception, the regime heavily regulates the landscape. Even though the group was in al-Waer this space was not entirely safe from the state. As Giorgio Agamben notes, in the state of exception there is no space free from government intrusion ( Agamben ). It is quite literally a matter of one’s life that under the suspension of the rule of law, those seeking to subvert an oppressive state create their own map of shadows with trajectories that travelled in between them. Ameen’s use of satellite communications in order to generate anti-regime theatre is, by itself a production of desire that uses the structures and geographies of the powerful tactically to reach beyond the map of the Syrian revolution into the international sphere. Ameen, operated from space within the Syrian borders. Although the Free Syrian Army defended this position from the Syrian regime, under the logic of the nation-state, it still belonged to the government. Using defense terminology, the land under Free Syrian Army Control was occupied by illegal opposition forces. Al-Waer, the area from where Ameen broadcast Romeo and Juliet was cordoned off on all sides by regime forces (ACAPS). The only option for the children in Homs and Ameen to connect with anyone outside of the nation’s border, was through the internet. Even with proxy servers, using the regime’s infrastructure to propagate anti-regime material meant both being in regime-controlled areas and risking detection due to the surveillance of online traffic by the Ministry of Information. Using satellite communications, therefore, was the group’s only alternative. Furthermore, the technology required for this communication, although currently in the possession of the Free Syrian Army, originally belonged to the regime. Members of the Syrian Army took the equipment when they defected to the Free Syrian Army once Assad began assaulting civilians. Romeo and Juliet , therefore, relied on equipment purchased by the regime in order to cross regime-controlled territory into Jordanian communication space. This re-appropriation of equipment is commonplace in insurgency situations where the oppositional forces requisition regime equipment for operational communication. What is most extraordinary about this tactical use of regime technology is that it was employed in service of theatre as a revolutionary apparatus. In insurgencies communications are an essential element to the success of operations. The Free Syrian Army, as the primary insurgency force in this area, recognized the political value in this theatrical project, and enabled it through use of critical satellite resources. The Tactics of Desire Beyond its own cartographic inversion, Romeo and Juliet Separated by War circulates within a larger milieu of work that argues effectively for the revolutionary value of theatre. That the Free Syrian Army in al-Waer saw it as important, underscores the ability theatre has in crafting scenarios that imagine life inside and beyond the revolution. One production alone did not create this understanding though. Romeo and Juliet Separated by War must be viewed in concert with other anti-regime productions such as Shakespeare in Zaatari and Love Boat. These works must also be coupled with the activist performances by artists such as the late May Skaff who helped lead the effort to collect over 300 artist and scholar signatures on the “Milk Statement,” which responded to the initial crisis in Dara’a by demanding that humanitarian aid supplies be delivered to those under siege in the southern Syrian province ( Ziter "Clowns" 140, 45 ). Even more important is to place these performances besides others that have yet to be told. All these individual performers and groups are led by desire to produce. In one example, Zabeida’s revolution applied broadly to an oppressive patriarchy rather than to a dictatorial regime or failed international humanitarian response. Zabeida working in Azraq wanted to show the teenage girls in her class that they did not have to accept the role of caretaker assigned to them by the male dominated culture. Through performance she created a vocabulary for the girls to find value in their intellectual capacity. In the other example, the children in Homs and Amman, along with Ameen and Bulbul, operated within and counter to physical and technological limitations. Both groups needed to connect—Homs with those outside Syria and Amman, those within. Furthermore, they had a drive to scream to the world about the violence occurring in Syria. The desire to produce for both groups mentioned in this article worked instinctually to push life forward despite desperate circumstances. Although each of their desires manifested in some sort of cultural product, neither the product, nor accumulation of any object, was the focus of their desires. For Zabeida, desire produced an opportunity to teach young women about their value. This need to teach for Zabeida recurrently appeared in her life as a displaced Syrian in both Azraq and Zaatari. Of course, in Azraq it led her to seek a volunteer position in teaching with Relief International. Prior to this experience, however, Zabeida lived in Zaatari with her family. While there she adopted five siblings whose parents were killed during the war in Syria ( IRC ). Likewise, Bulbul, Ameen, and the children of Romeo and Juliet Separated By War wanted to connect with each other and remember what it was like to play and enjoy life as Syrians. The children in Homs needed to imagine a life outside of the daily bombardments and violence. The children in Amman needed to know that Syria still existed. Neither Zabeida’s theatre in education practice nor Romeo and Juliet Separated By War originated in a desire aimed at an object or accumulation. These moments of performance were born from desire. Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes Jabhat al Nusra was the name for an Al Qaeda affiliated militia in Syria that was active in the war. In late 2016 this militia changed in name to As Jabhat Fatah al Sham. Although Mohammed publicly posts anti-regime skits on Facebook regularly, I am using only his first name out of respect for his safety. According to the 2017 Terms of Reference for Service Contracting, the NGO Questscope was given sole teacher training responsibility for the Drop Out program. A ghost teacher is a teacher that is on the official record for the Ministry of Education as teaching at a specific school, is being paid for this position, but does not actually report to work. This is often used as a method for ministry officials to provide a salary to relatives or friends. Palmyrene queen in from 240 – 274 AD. Shakespeare in Zaatari was Nawar Bulbul’s first creation with displaced Syrian children in Jordan. This play included over 100 children in Zaatari Refugee Camp performing an altered version of King Lear . It was first performed on March 27, 2014. See: Pitchford, Gerald Barton. 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Jordan - Al Za'atari Refugee Camp General Infrastructure Map . UNHCR and UNICEF, 2016. Van Aken, Mauro. "Dancing Belonging: Contesting Dabkeh in the Jordan Valley, Jordan." Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 32.2 (2006): 203. Print. Van Esveld, Bill. “We’re Afraid for Their Future” : Barriers to Education for Syrian Refugee Children in Jordan . www.hrw.org : Human Rights Watch, 2016. Print. Wilkes, Sybella. Jordan Opens New Camp for Syrian Refugees Amid Funding Gaps. www.unhcr.org : United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Print. Wolf, Diane L. "Postmemories of Joy? Children of Holocaust Survivors and Alternative Family Memories." Memory Studies 12.1 (2019): 74. Print. Wolfe, Lauren. "'Take Your Portion': A Victim Speaks out About Rape in Syria - Women’s Media Center." Women Under Siege (2013). Web. 9/3/2017. Zabeida, Iman. Interview by Pitchford, Bart. "Interview with Iman Zabeida May 17, 2016." 2016. Zapkin, Phillip. "Reading Two Greek Refugee Plays in the Season of the Syrian Refugee Crisis." Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 33.1 (2018): 9-29. Print. Ziter, Edward. "Clowns of the Revolution: The Malas Twins and Syrian Oppositional Performance." Theatre Research International 38.2 (2013): 137. Print. Ziter, Edward Blaise. "The Syria Trojan Women: Rethinking the Public with Therapeutic Theater." Communication and the Public 2.2 (2017): 177-90. Print. Zuhur, Sherifa. "The Syrian Opposition: Salafi and Nationalist Jihadism and Populist Idealism." Contemporary Review of the Middle East 2.1-2 (2015): 143-63. Print. References About The Author(s) Bart Pitchford is an Assistant Professor of Theatre History and Directing at the University of Montevallo. In 2019, He graduated with his PhD in Performance as Public Practice from the University of Texas at Austin. Bart’s scholarly focus is on Syrian theatre after the 2011 revolution, particularly the work of Nawar Bulbul. Bart also writes about the intersection of theatre, war, and the military. Some of Bart’s invited speaker engagements include Howlround Military and the Arts Convergence, Great River Shakespeare Theatre Festival, and Texas Creative Forces Arts and Military Conference. Bart’s publications include multiple essays and articles in American Theatre Magazine, Theatre Topics, and chapters in the books Performance in Militarized Cultures (2017) and Arabs, Politics, and Performance (Expected Publication in 2022) . Bart is also a cofounding member of the Middle Eastern Theatre focus group at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. Arab Stages Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Carving a Path: Desiring-Production in Displaced Syrian Theatre Interview with Nasser Rahmaninejad by Babak Rahimi Arab American Drama: Five Books that Inspired My Journey Five Arab American Plays Everyone Should Read MIDNIGHT IN CAIRO: THE DIVAS OF EGYPT'S ROARING '20S. By Raphael Cormack (REVIEW) Previous Next Attribution:

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 18 Winter 2025 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Practicing Place: Site-Specific Performance and the Reinscription of Memory in Palestine By Marina Johnson Published: December 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF 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. Hosam Abu Esheh (far right), as the character Hosam, leading the audience through the Old City of Jerusalem. Photo courtesy of El-Hakawati Theatre 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] The cast of Salah and Basma in the Old City of Jerusalem in the final moments of the performance, 2023. Cast from L to R: Nidal Jubeh, Shaden Saleem, Mohammad Basha, Fatima Abu Alul, and Hosam Abu Esheh. Photo courtesy of El-Hakawati Theatre 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.” Nur Garabli performing in Moving Visual and Performance Exhibition in Yafa, 2025. Photo taken by author. 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. Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Al-Harah Theatre. I Was There. Written and directed by Motasem Abu Hasan. Site-specific performance at Bethlehem Site-Specific Theatre Festival, Bethlehem, Palestine, 2023. Darwish, Mahmoud. “In Jerusalem.” In The Butterfly’s Burden , translated by Fady Joudah, 211. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2007. El Hakawati (Palestinian National Theatre). Salah and Basma. Site-specific promenade performance in the Old City of Jerusalem, 2023. El-Hakawati Theatre. Salah and Basma Unpublished Script . Jerusalem: El-Hakawati Theatre, 2023 Féral, Josette. “Performance and Theatricality: The Subject Demystified.” Modern Drama 25, no. 1 (1982): 170–181. Garabli, Nur. Interview by the author. Zoom, May 2025. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Massey, Doreen. For Space. London: SAGE Publications, 2005. Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Translated by Gabriel Rockhill. London: Continuum, 2004. Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993. Studio Collective (Nur Garabli et al.). Moving Visual and Performance Exhibition. Site-specific performance tour, Yafa Week Festival, Yafa, May 9, 2025. Taha, Rand. Interview by the author. Ramallah, May 2025. Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. [1] Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.; Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. [2] Massey, Doreen. For Space. London: SAGE Publications, 2005, pp. 9, 130 [3] Ibid., pp. 154 [4] El-Hakawati Theatre. Salah and Basma Unpublished Script . Jerusalem: El-Hakawati Theatre, 2023 [5] El-Hakawati Theatre. Salah and Basma Unpublished Script . Jerusalem: El-Hakawati Theatre, 2023 [6] El-Hakawati Theatre. Salah and Basma Unpublished Script . Jerusalem: El-Hakawati Theatre, 2023 [7] Mahmoud Darwish, “In Jerusalem,” in The Butterfly’s Burden , trans. Fady Joudah (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2007), 211. [8] Garabli, Nur. Interview by the author. Zoom, May 2025. [9] Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. [10] Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993. [11] Garabli, Nur. Interview by the author. Zoom, May 2025. [12] Garabli, Nur. Interview by the author. Zoom, May 2025. [13] Garabli, Nur. Interview by the author. Zoom, May 2025. [14] Taha, Rand. Interview by the author. Ramallah, May 2025. References About The Author(s) Marina Johnson is a PhD candidate at Stanford University in Theatre and Performance Studies. Prior to Stanford, Johnson received her MFA in Directing and taught at Beloit College. In Palestine she has directed at Al Harah and El Hakawati Theatres and taught directing workshops at ASHTAR Theatre. Johnson’s scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in The Jerusalem Quarterly, Theatre/Practice , TDR , Theatre Topics , Arab Stages , Milestones in Staging Contemporary Genders and Sexualities , Women’s Innovations in Theatre, Dance, and Performance, Volume I. Arab Stages Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Practicing Place: Site-Specific Performance and the Reinscription of Memory in Palestine Resisting the Unleashed Evils of the US- Invasion of Iraq in Amir Al-Azraki’s The Widow (2017) Dina Mousawi’s RETURN: a Compelling site of representing Women’s Status of Agency Under Occupation Renewed Awareness Toward Salvation: The Journey of The Story of Zahra from Page to Stage Site-Specific Performance and Theatrical Memorialization of the Nakba Performance Review: WAILING SONGS OF THE PAST, MIGHT THEY GROW OUR RESILIENCE. By Maya al-Khaldi. Performance Review: DUMMY IN DIASPORA. By Esho Rasho. Performance Review: ENGLISH. Written by Sanaz Toossi Performance Review: THE CAVE. By Sadieh Rifai Performance Review: IRAQ, BUT FUNNY by Atra Asdou Performance Review: COSMOS/AWALEM by Ashtar Muallem and Emile Saba. 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Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 17 Spring 2025 Volume Visit Journal Homepage LEILI & MAJNUN. Written and directed by Torange Yeghiazarian By Namrata Verghese Published: May 12, 2025 Download Article as PDF REVIEW: LEILI & MAJNUN. Written and directed by Torange Yeghiazarian. Central Stage, Richmond. December 7, 2024. By Namrata Verghese “For this being is yours, my love, it is no longer me / In giving myself to you, my love, I am at last free.” — Majnun, Leili & Majnun Torange Yeghiazarian’s lush reimagining of Leili & Majnun injects the ancient Persian epic with new life. From the soundscape that marries the rhythms of Iranian, Arabic, Kurdish, and western music to the visual language of graffiti art and Persian miniature painting, the production celebrates the hybridity of Iranian diasporic storytelling. Produced by Central Stage, the Bay Area’s only production company founded and operated by Iranian artists, Yeghiazarian’s Leili & Majnun updates the twelfth-century epic for a globalized audience. It also spotlights its enduring resonance: although separated from Nizami by many millennia and miles, those temporal and spatial coordinates collapse when Leili & Majnun opens, and we are simply another audience, like the thousands that came before us, listening to Nizami’s poetry with bated breath. Like many people of Middle Eastern and South Asian heritage, I grew up with the story of Leila [1] and Majnun. It is, as Yeghiazarian notes in her program note, “the most popular love story in the Middle East and the many cultures influenced by the region’s literary treasures.” It is even rumored to have inspired Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet , a similarly tragic tale of star-crossed lovers. Yeghiazarian’s adaptation is based on Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi’s epic, which itself is based on the fabled love story between seventh century Arabic poet Qays ibn al-Mulawwah and his lover, Layla bint Mahdi. Still, even within the parameters of the well-known story, Yeghiazarian’s voice shines through in the play’s balancing of old and new, tradition and innovation. As an audience member, part of the thrill of the genre of the adaptation is tracking the director’s negotiation between familiar and novel elements. Yeghiazarian keeps us guessing as to which elements of the story remain the same and which she tweaks, delivering both nostalgia and freshness in equal measure. Leili & Majnun opens with the naqqal , or narrator, reciting Persian poetry, while a taut drumroll thrums in the background. In keeping with the play’s overarching theme of blending the old with the new, Yeghiazarian casts a woman in the role of naqqal , which is traditionally performed by a man, putting a fresh, feminist twist on an ancient tradition. The directorial decision to begin with Persian, without English translation, is striking. The play does not cater to a western audience; rather, we sit with the Persian, transported to another world. Soon, the ensemble chimes in, moving us into English with the lines: “We open our story in your name, the greatest name of all, never would I begin, without your name in my call / Your name is the key to all that’s locked, the solution to whatever is blocked / O maker of our thoughts and origin of our soul, being and nothingness are equally in your control.” The choice to blend Persian poetry with an English invocation is emblematic of Yeghiazarian’s embrace of diasporic hybridity. It did not seem to alienate the audience; rather, I watched many audience members, some of whom may be familiar with Nizami’s poetry and some who certainly were not, sit up, lean forward and catch their breath. The poem’s affective power transcended language. Image 1: The Naghal (Dina Zarif); photograph by Diaspora Arts Connection In a cheeky tribute to the original epic, once again demonstrating her deftness in drawing together the ancient and the contemporary, Yeghiazarian casts Nizami as a character in his own epic. The poet walks onstage, brandishing a comically large feather pen, sparking hoots and hollers from the crowd. At the behest of his son and the king, Nizami begins to recite the “cherished Arab love poem,” that “tasty Arab tale … made even more delicious when you tell it,” as his son tells him. The following tale melds the naqqal tradition of Persian storytelling with the contemporary form of musical theater. The first song, “It Is a Celebration,” which spotlights the community’s exuberance at Qays’s birth, beautifully captures the hybridity of this reimagining. “It is a celebration / a joyful congregation / The nobleman of the Aumerian clan / has a son,” the ensemble sings, palpable delight in their voices. “At last, at last, at last!” Each “at last” is accompanied by a clap, lending the song a folksy sound. The piece brings together Arabic rhythms and English lyrics in a way that does not require translation. Even the costuming feels like a nod to this hybridity—the actor who plays Leili, for instance, wore shalvar trousers with white tennis shoes. Image 2: The ensemble (right to left: Ameen Safi, Roeen Nooran, Dina Zarif, Behzad Golemohammadi, Yasaman Asgari, Adrienne Shamszad, and Brandon DiPaula) celebrating the birth of Qays; photograph by Diaspora Arts Connection Yeghiazarian’s adaptation hits many of the canonical notes: the staging is set in the “ancient Najd Desert of Arabia,” where Leili, the “moon-faced beauty,” and Qays, pride of his father’s Bedouin clan and poet whose “ruby lips … spread pearls,” meet in school. They’re immediately smitten with each other: “Do you ever feel like your heart is about to burst?” Qays asks Leila, to which she responds, “Like a pomegranate?” The actors do a wonderful job of portraying the shy glances and nervous smiles of a burgeoning crush. The two soon fall in love— “With one sweet smile from Qays,” the ensemble narrates, “Leili was lost”—but are forcibly separated. The separation is staged poignantly: Leili tells Qays, “They’re going to take me out of school.” The light, romantic music turns darker, more dissonant. The two protest; Qays cries out, “She has a thousand curls in her hair; how could I not get tangled up?” Leili responds, “His eyes are full of poetry; I need a thousand more days to read them.” [2] As the two recite poetry professing their love, the other cast members circle the pair, stomping their feet, hissing, “Shame. Shame. Shame.” Sharp staccato notes accompany the words, filling the atmosphere with dread. Unable to bear their separation, Qays unravels. The staging of this moment adds to its affective intensity: Qays, clad in a plain white tunic, pulls the cloth from his chest. The entire garment falls apart into tattered rags that represent the character’s unraveling mental state. Qays runs into the audience, wandering up and down the stairs, searching for his lover—a particularly effective directorial choice, as audience members get to witness, up close, his visceral devastation. Eventually, Qays flees to the desert. “He wandered the dusty pathways among the tribal tents,” the ensemble laments, “Longing for Leili. Searching for Leili. Every day. Everywhere.” Because Central Stage is a volunteer-run theater, the set design is sparse, but extremely thoughtful: we transition from the community into the desert through the simple addition of a large tree in the corner of the stage, under which Qays rests during his self-imposed exile. The tree’s long, wispy tendrils simultaneously shade him and obscure him from our gaze. Here, in the desert, Qays becomes “Majnun,” the eponymous “mad” lover of the original epic. The ensemble narrates, “The clan folk were unkind … To them, he was but a cad / And so, they declared him mad: Majnun! Majnun!” He spends his days writing love poetry on scraps of paper that he throws into the wind. When travelers encounter them, they are so moved by the beautiful verse that they spread the tale of Leili and Qays far and wide. From here, the play progresses to its canonical end: the lovers, separated for decades, reunite just once more before they die, heartbroken and alone. The play ends on a bittersweet note of hope: “This earthy world is ephemeral, the other eternal and pure,” the ensemble recites, “Leili and Majnun were unified in heaven, we are assured / Their love story immortalized and spread across the world.” Image 3: Majnoon (Roeen Nooran) praying to the starry night; photograph by Diaspora Arts Connection Despite its adherence to the narrative contours of the epic, Yeghiazarian’s reimagining nevertheless bears her authorial stamp. The play is distinctive in its diasporic hybridity, both in form, as the discussion of language and music above indicates, and its content. With wry humor, Yeghiazarian often references contemporary events and locations. For instance, when describing Leili’s beauty, a cast member translates: “In the Bay Area, one might say ‘her Middle Eastern good looks swooned American hearts.’” During an intense battle scene, the stage glowing with ominous red light, a cast member pauses, stands up, and says, in the highfalutin style of a BBC reporter, “The death toll was unexpectedly high,” parodying media approaches to conflicts in the Middle East. When the battle ends, the ensemble describes it as a “triumph,” and then quips, “Although, given the description of the massive death and destruction, one wonders if Master Nizami is being facetious in describing this as a triumph.” These surprising bursts of humor are striking in their playfulness. Because the poem is, famously, a tragic love story, most of its adaptations come off somber and heavy. But the lighter moments of levity in Yeghiazarian’s adaptation distinguishes the play’s tone from other tellings and break up the gravity of the narrative. Such choices allow the audience to catch their breath and eventually make the more difficult moments hit even harder. They also underscore the play’s relevance to a contemporary audience, as these direct ties to ongoing events make the romantic epic feel current and urgent. Connecting the past and present was part of Yeghiazarian’s goal for the play; she writes in a press release that celebrating “one of the most beloved Middle Eastern love stories” felt particularly prescient “as we face heightened political volatility in the Middle East.” Ultimately, Leili & Majnun is a luminous tribute to the Nizami epic. The care invested into the production from every angle, from the cast to the creative team, feels tangible. It is a true celebration of centuries of Iranian storytelling, from the ancient to the modern. At the same time, Yeghiazarian reimagines the epic for a globalized audience, attending, in particular, to the generative creative possibilities of hybridity. In its deft braiding of traditional and unconventional elements, Leili & Majnun accomplishes what the form of the adaptation can do, at its best: make the old feel new again. [1] I use “Leili” to refer to the protagonist of Yeghiazarian’s play, entitled Leili & Majnun , and “Leila” to refer to the character in the epic. [2] As anchored in the tradition of orality as this play is, the repetition of the word “thousand” in these lines reads as an intertextual gesture to another folktale from the region that began as an oral story cycle: One Thousand and One Nights . Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes References About The Author(s) Namrata Verghese is a PhD candidate in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford University, and a JD candidate at Stanford Law School. Her research spans postcolonial studies, queer and trans theory, and the legal humanities; her dissertation project, Litigating Desire: Queer Literature on Trial in Twentieth Century India , locates encounters between British colonial law and queer literary production in the decades bookending Indian Independence. She was the winner of the Postcolonial Studies Association’s Postgraduate Essay Competition , and the Jeffrey S. Haber Award Prize for Student Scholarship . Her writing appears or is forthcoming in Law & Literature ; the Journal of Postcolonial Writing ; Law, Culture, and the Humanities ; the Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities ; the Dukeminier Awards Journal of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Law ; and the Routledge Companion to Cultural Text and the Nation . Her public scholarship has appeared in Teen Vogue , The Los Angeles Review of Books , The Millions , and elsewhere. Her work is supported by the Ric Weiland Graduate Fellowship in the Humanities and Sciences, the Stanford Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis Digital Humanities Fellowship, the McCoy Center for Ethics Fellowship, the Stanford Center for South Asia Graduate Student Research Fellowship, and the Mellon Centering Race Consortium Graduate Fellowship. Arab Stages Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents O Lord! By Ali Abdel-Nabi Al-Zaidi Mothers Challenging the Divine: Ali Al-Zaidi’s Ya Rab! The 31st Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre. September 1-11, 2024. ARTIFICIAL HEART. By Mohammad Basha and Firas Farrah. LEILI & MAJNUN. Written and directed by Torange Yeghiazarian SHAHADAT (THE TESTIMONIES) Adapted by Fouad Teymour Review: TO THE GOOD PEOPLE OF GAZA: THEATRE FOR YOUNG PEOPLE Staging Revolutions and the Many Faces of Modernism: Performing Politics in Irish and Egyptian Theatre Previous Next Attribution: Entries under this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 16 Fall 2024 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Review: GUERNICA, GAZA: VISIONS FROM THE CENTER OF THE EARTH. By Naomi Wallace and Ismail Khalidi By Marina Johnson Published: November 1, 2024 Download Article as PDF GUERNICA, GAZA: VISIONS FROM THE CENTER OF THE EARTH. By Naomi Wallace and Ismail Khalidi. Directed by Emile Saba. Ashtar Theatre, Ramallah. 10 October 2024 Guernica, Gaza : A Surreal Exploration of Resilience and Humanity Amidst War at Ashtar Theatre in Palestine مش مفروض الطير يكون مقيّد، مثل ما الإنسان مش مفروض يكون محاصر -حمزه, غويرنيكا، غزة (١٧) A bird is not meant to be grounded, just like a human is not meant to be besieged. -Hamza, Guernica Gaza (17) What does it mean to make theatre in times of genocide? As the ongoing genocide in Gaza has persisted since October 2023, this question has weighed heavily on the minds of many artists. While some international artists make the choice in their artistic praxis to engage with or distance themselves from what is happening in Gaza, theaters within Palestine face a starkly different reality. For them, the question is not whether to respond, but how and when to continue their artistic practice—and what message that work must convey in the face of such devastation. Ashtar Theatre Board Member and playwright Naomi Wallace reunited with her long-time collaborator, Palestinian playwright Ismail Khalidi to write a play specifically about Gaza for Ashtar Theatre in Ramallah in the Occupied West Bank Guernica, Gaza: Visions from the Center of the Earth was directed by Ashtar Theatre’s Artistic Director Emile Saba and premiered on 13 July 2024, with five initial performances. I attended its second series of productions, which began on 10 October 2024, in their Ramallah space. Though Khalidi and Wallace wrote the original text in English, Alice S. Yousef translated it into Arabic for Ashtar Theatre, and all performances have been staged in Arabic. As the performance began, ominous music filled the intimate seventy seat theatre. At the same time, a striking video projection of a human eye spanned three strips of screens, overlaid with shifting faces—presumably those of the characters. The three projection screens formed a fragmented visual space: stage left featured a short and torn panel about two to three feet long, while the center screen, positioned slightly upstage, stretched from the ceiling to the floor. On stage right, another screen extended from the ceiling and draped onto the floor. Throughout the performance, abstract images filled these surfaces, layered and overlapping, creating a dynamic collage that echoed the fragmented, multi-layered imagery emerging from the play’s text. The visuals and projections added a haunting, surreal dimension to the performance, deepening the emotional and symbolic impact. The play tells the stories of five characters from Gaza: Yara, a young surfer and her father, Antar; Yamen, a young man with PTSD and his older brother Hamza, a resistance fighter; and Bilal, a beekeeper. While the brothers occasionally talk to each other, all of the characters appear to exist more in each other's memory than in the present moment. However, Saba’s staging made it clear that they sense each other's presence. Throughout the play, the audience experiences fragments of the characters’ lives that create a kaleidoscopic view of life in Gaza during the genocide. Wallace and Khalidi were inspired by the Picasso painting Guernica (1937), which was created after the small Basque town of Gernika in northern Spain was bombed by Nazi Germany and Italian Fascist air forces during the Spanish Civil War on 26 April 1937. The attack on Gernika was one of the first aerial attacks of its kind and was used as a testing ground for death and destruction from the air, in much the same way new weapons of war are being tested in Gaza. Piccaso’s Guernica “articulated the terror of it so potently that the picture has become almost synonymous with a sense of outrage and condemnation. Merely possessing a reproduction of it in Spain during the Franco era was an imprisonable offense.” [1] Guernica scholar, Anthony Blunt, divides the painting into two groups, one made of humans and one of animals. The latter group consists of the bull, wounded horse, and bird. The group of humans consists of a dead soldier and several women, one of whom holds her dead child. [2] Many of these images were brought to life in indirect ways in the play penned by Wallace and Khalidi. Like the painting from which it takes its name, Guernica, Gaza illustrates the importance of the interspecies relationship between humans and animals. Through juxtaposing human and animal figures, both pieces vividly convey the violence and destruction from which no one, human and animal alike, can escape. Both art objects reflect on the fragility of life and the senselessness of conflict, emphasizing that violence spares no one. The human-animal connection immediately recalls Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant's dehumanizing remark on October 9, 2023, when he said, "We are fighting human animals and we will act accordingly." [3] While Gallant's rhetoric toward Palestinians is not new, Guernica, Gaza challenges this narrative by highlighting how Palestinians extend their compassion to all forms of life around them, including animals: YAMEN: When I first heard those two words, ‘human animals,’ I couldn’t get them out of my mind. Do they mean that we are animals that are human? Or humans that are animals? HAMZA: Animals and humans are two separate things. YAMEN: But they’re afraid of the bombs like we are. The dogs hear the drones and wet themselves. They whimper. A ‘human animal.’ Maybe it means we are inside the animals and they are inside us. يامن: اول مرة سمعت كلمة "حيوانات بشرية" ضليت افكر فيها. هم مفكريننا حيوانات اصلها بشري؟ ولا بشر اصلهم حيواني؟ حمزه: الحيوانات والبشر اشيين منفصلين. يامن: بس الحيوانات بخافوا من القنابل مثلنا. بشخوا تحتهم لما يسمعوا الزنانات، بيرجوا…حيوانات بشرية معناها انه الحيوانات عايشة فينا واحنا عايشين فيهم كمان. This exchange with Yamen (Fadi Murad), a character who appears to have PTSD (though it is never directly stated), and his resistance fighter brother Hamza (Norsan Qwasmeh) suggests that the struggle for survival for both groups is interconnected. Yamen is obsessed with sewing other animal parts back onto injured animals, even contemplating attaching animal limbs to himself if he becomes injured. Compassionately played by Murad, Yamen’s mind blurs the lines between human and animal suffering, viewing their fate as intertwined. Image 1: Yamen (Fadi Murad) with his brother Hamza (Norsan Qwasmeh) behind him; Photograph by: Yasmine Omari, Courtesy of Ashtar Theatre The play also uses insects as metaphors for the endurance and the fragility of life. Bilal, the beekeeper, played with nuanced care by Tamer Tafesh, shows deep consideration for the lives of his bees. He exhibits empathy over the destruction of their hives and fears for their future; so many farmers have been killed, their land destroyed, which means that there is less pollen for the bees, and the hive count has dropped to its lowest point ever. The destruction of the bees’ hives parallels the bombing of human homes, underscoring the shared suffering of all living creatures in conflict. Despite the devastation, the bees and other animals symbolize resilience. Bilal clings to the hope that he can protect his last hive, moving it to safety, even considering building an underground refuge for the bees, away from the drones. Even though he is hungry, he refrains from harvesting the honey so as not to deplete the hive. Bilal emphasizes their role in pollination, without which humanity would struggle to survive, and contrasts their harmony with the violence around them: Did you know the buzzing of the wings of a hive is in the note of C? Science suggests that this note melts away your worries, eases tensions, fights stress, and treats trauma. That’s why beekeepers have the highest quality of life and lifespan of any profession. A drone buzzes overhead. He ducks. The drone makes an ugly barking noise. That buzzing and barking is definitely not in the key of C! بتعرف يا غالي، إزا بتعمل موسيقى على زنّار الخلية، رح تلاقي الأزيز على نوته ال دو؟ العلم بيقول إنه هالصوت بيخفّف التوتر، وبيعالج الصدمات وبيهدي الأعصاب. عشان هيك مربي النحل عندهم أجمل حياة وأطول عمر، بتتخيل؟ نحن مبسوطين كثير بهالسيمفونية اللي بتطلع من أوركسترا الفليهارومنية تبعت النحلة على نغمة ال دو. هالزن والجعار اكيد مش ع ايقاع ال دو. In the above excerpt, Bilal describes the sound of the drones or "zenanas” as barking, while Yara later describes them as mosquitos from hell. The drones burn their unnatural buzz into the ears of Gazans, reminding the audience of the inescapable presence of surveillance and fear that they face when they’re overhead. Months ago, several commentators noted that the aerial images coming out of Gaza made the Palestinians there look like insects. By contrast, in Guernica, Gaza it is the military weaponry that becomes the insect reference. The stark contrast between the natural world and the unnatural elements of war is also evident in how water appears in the play. Water, typically a source of life, has long been a contested element in Gaza, with Palestinians receiving limited amounts of running water. While the Mediterranean offers Palestinians a glimpse of freedom, Isreal limits Palestinian access to the ocean to a narrow zone. This creates a paradox where the natural landscape, instead of nurturing, mirrors the captivity imposed on Gazans. Despite these circumstances, Yara (Sasha Asbah) is a young surfer, initially taught by her father Antar (David Tannous), though she eventually surpasses his surfing ability, fearlessly facing rip currents with a deep knowledge and respect for the power of the ocean. Yara was killed in the war; at the beginning of the play, her father enters the stage carrying Yara, much like the mother carries the body of her murdered child in Picasso’s Guernica . We see her reminisce (from beyond the grave) about her short life. Surfing provided her with a sense of freedom, her sole opportunity to experience childhood. She powerfully reenacts these memories for the audience. Image 2: Antar (David Tannous) carrying Yara (Sasha Asbah), an image that is mirrored in Picasso’s painting Guernica ; Photograph by: Yasmine Omari, Courtesy of Ashtar Theatre Even after her death, Antar imagines her still alive, surfing the waves, suggesting that water and surfing represent an enduring spirit that cannot be easily destroyed. He clings to her memory, imagining that if he can call out to her, she might return, bringing to the forefront the hope that love and memory can bring someone back, even if only in spirit. Despite the fact that she has died, Yara addresses the audience, her vigor for life haunting the viewers who have seen too many young children like Yara lose their lives before they have even really begun. Through his staging, director Emile Saba skillfully blended the real and the surreal, creating a space where the beauty and pain of the characters are experienced for 80 minutes, and where the characters haunt the viewers, as witnessing a genocide should haunt us all. The actors break the fourth wall, directly addressing the viewers as they move fluidly from scene to scene, drawing the audience into a surreal world, created by Yasmine Omari’s video and lighting design, that is both familiar—the Gaza seen in daily news—and abstract. The production relies on the ensemble's ability to tell their stories with sincerity and truth, without succumbing to intense emotions these stories elicit from the audience. Guernica, Gaza , the creative collaboration between Naomi Wallace and Ismail Khalidi, delivers a powerful and moving portrayal of the cost of war. Through compelling characters, vivid imagery, and a unique fusion of the real and surreal, the play draws attention to the devastating impacts of genocide that stand out from the media we consume daily. With poignant performances and a visually arresting production, Guernica, Gaza challenges dehumanizing rhetoric and offers a profound reflection on resilience, memory, and the shared vulnerability of all living beings, humans and animals alike, amidst violence. This play serves as a timely and necessary artistic response to the ongoing genocide in Gaza, urging audiences to confront the horrors of war while holding onto the enduring hope that Gaza will, sometime soon, see peace. Bibliography Blunt, Anthony. Picasso’s Guernica’ . New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1969. Khalidi, Ismail and Naomi Wallace. Guernica, Gaza . Unpublished script in both Arabic and English (translated by Alice S. Yousef). 2024. Patterson, Ian. Guernica and Total War. London: Profile Books, 2007. [1] Patterson, Ian. Guernica and Total War. London: Profile Books, 2007, 2. [2] Blunt, Anthony. Picasso’s Guernica’. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1969. [3] Middle East Eye Staff. “Israel-Palestine War: ‘We Are Fighting Human Animals’, Israeli Defence Minister Says.” Middle East Eye, October 9, 2023. https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-palestine-war-fighting-human-animals-defence-minister . Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes References About The Author(s) Marina Johnson is a Ph.D. candidate in TAPS at Stanford University (M.F.A in Directing, University of Iowa). Her dissertation research focuses on Palestinian performance from 2015 to the present. Johnson is the co-host of Kunafa and Shay, a MENA theatre podcast produced by HowlRound Theatre Commons, and they are also a member of Silk Road Rising’s Polycultural Institute. Johnson’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Theatre/Practice , Arab Stages , Decolonizing Dramaturgy in a Global Context (Bloomsbury) , Milestones in Staging Contemporary Genders and Sexualities (Routledge), Women’s Innovations in Theatre, Dance, and Performance, Volume I: Performers (Bloomsbury). Prior to her Ph.D., she was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Beloit College for three years. Select recent directing credits include: The Wolves (Stanford) The Shroud Maker (International Voices Project), Shakespeare’s Sisters (Stanford), The Palestinian Youth Monologues (Stanford), Five Lesbians Eating a Quiche (Beloit College), and In the Next Room (Beloit College). www.marina-johnson.com Arab Stages Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents An Interview with the Iraqi-born British playwright Hassan Abdulrazzak by Hadeel Abelhameed Review: GUERNICA, GAZA: VISIONS FROM THE CENTER OF THE EARTH. By Naomi Wallace and Ismail Khalidi Performance Review: The Tutor Review: OF KINGS AND CLOWNS: LEADERSHIP IN CONTEMPORARY EGYPTIAN THEATRE SINCE 1967 By Tiran Manucharyan. Review: PLAYS OF ARABIC HERITAGE. By Hannah Khalil Previous Next Attribution: Entries under this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.