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Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 15 Spring 2024 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Five Arab American Plays Everyone Should Read By Roaa Ali Published: June 15, 2024 Download Article as PDF Mosque Alert by Jamil Khoury.Valparaiso University 2015. Photo courtesy of Aran Kessler Arab American drama has been a growing movement, urgently demanding to center Arab American representation and carving a unique space of its own in the American theatre institution. As a genre, Arab American drama often deals with negotiations of identity, ethnic, racial and religious Othering, and explores the gender and sexual discourses of its community. It is also situated at the intersection of family and community codes, politics, cultures of resistance, and the American theatre establishment. Within that establishment, Arab American drama contests the demarcation of who traditionally occupies the cultural center and who is kept at the margin. Despite not receiving the attention it deserves, Arab American drama and theatre existed long before 9/11, but it was arguably only then that it was afforded any demand or visibility, while simultaneously being pigeonholed as an expression of a minority-in-crisis. Amidst heightened xenophobic rhetoric and the resurgence of anti-Arab and Muslim sentiments that colored the Trump years—and which is often reactivated during Israeli aggressions on Palestinian territories and people--Arab American drama continues to offer alternative narratives that are both invigorating and transformative. Growing out of an existing, albeit small, Arab-American theatrical repertoire, which dates back to 1909, the expanding post 9/11 Arab American theatre has continued to disrupt a state of political and cultural marginalization, occupying the unique space where the political is unequivocally personal and the personal is inevitably political. It is an impossible task to pinpoint or confine a number of plays as representative of the genre, but I want to introduce here five Arab American plays that made a transformative impact on my understanding of theatre in general, and Arab American theatre specially. Yussef El Guindi’s Back of the Throat Of the many eloquent and innovative playwrights that Arab American drama boasts of, Yussef El Guindi is perhaps the genre’s most critically acclaimed with his thrilling skill of organically evoking the political as he dramatizes the personal. El Guindi’s Back of the Throat (2005) offers a deep and uncomfortable confrontation with paranoia and anti-Arab sentiments, that ensued after 9/11 as a state of affairs particularly for male Arab Americans. The play provides a parallel narrative exploring themes of surveillance, racial profiling, and the erosion of civil liberties in post-9/11 America. Originally stage-read in Chicago’s Silk Road Rising, the play garnered multiple accolades, including winning the 2004 Northwest Playwrights’ Competition, L.A. Weekly’s Excellence in Playwriting Award for 2006, a nomination for the 2006 American Theater Critics Association’s Steinberg/New Play Award, and being voted Best New Play of 2005 by the Seattle Times . The play shows examples of the institutional bias practiced in the US following 9/11, as well as giving the space for the narrative of a suspicious America after a tragedy. The play portrays Khaled, the Arab American male who emerged after 9/11 as an immediate suspect of a crime he did not commit in a gripping Kafkaesque atmosphere of paranoia and intrigue. Betty Shamieh’s The Black Eyed Describing her plays, Shamieh asserts: “they’re not about politics, but they’re inherently political. Because if you’ve never heard a perspective, it makes it political” (cited in Schillinger, 2004). At the beginning of her career, Shamieh wanted to escape a categorization that would pronounce her an Other, thrust in a marginalized artistic space. She was conscious that: “white, male writers are known as writers, while women and minorities [can] become very quickly pigeonholed; and theatres often times will accept certain types of plays from people with a certain ethnic identity” (Shamieh quoted in Alexander, 2005). However, 9/11 forced a spotlight on the Arabness of the Arab American in Shamieh. In The Black Eyed (2009), four Palestinian women from different historical periods find themselves in a hazy afterlife, discussing their life’s trials, choices, and decisions and celebrating their life experiences. As characters, Delilah, Tamam, the Architect, and Aiesha, symbolize different facets of womanhood, collectively representing a shared consciousness of womanhood while occasionally expressing individual trials and experiences. The play does not provide definitive answers to their questions but offers them a space to voice their experiences, struggles, and unyielding strengths. The Black Eyed had its world premiere at the Magic Theatre in May 2005, its European premiere in Athens at Fournos Theatre in 2006, and its American premiere in the Off-Broadway New York Theatre Workshop in 2007. There exists a well-documented history of external editorial pressures or self-imposed censorship imposed on productions depicting the Palestinian experience. This was evident in the development of The Black Eyed where Betty Shamieh’s initial script faced various forms of censorship. Initially, Shamieh’s submission advocating for non-violence and depicting the suffering of a sister of a suicide bomber was rejected by organizers of the Brave New World Festival in November 2001. To ensure Arab American representation at the festival, Shamieh compromised and created a new monologue featuring an Arab American woman on a hijacked plane. This monologue later evolved into the character Architect in The Black Eyed , although the story and monologues underwent significant changes. Heather Raffo’s 9 Parts of Desire Heather Raffo’s 9 Parts of Desire (2006) is a play that unapologetically centers Iraqi women characters on the American stage. 9 Parts of Desire weaves a narrative tapestry of nine Iraqi women from diverse backgrounds, ages, and locations. Through individual monologues, these women share their stories, revealing a history marked by resilience amidst oppressive regimes and wars, including the Gulf Wars and the American occupation. Inspired by a visit to the Baghdad Museum in 1993, Raffo’s play underscores the emotional depth, complexity, and resilience of these Iraqi women, whose stories intertwine to create a mosaic of a fractured Iraqi psyche. The play’s solo performance format enhances the authenticity of these voices, embodying them as an amplified collective narrative. The play initially premiered at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh in 2003. Subsequently, it found success at the Bush Theatre in London, where it consistently ranked among the ‘Five Best Plays’ in London, as recognized by The Independent . The play continued to evolve and was featured in the ‘New Work Now’ festival of readings at the Public Theatre in New York in May 2004. It then premiered at the Manhattan Ensemble Theatre in October 2004 where it ran for nine months and received five extensions. The play won numerous awards and was a critic’s pick of the New York Times , Time Out , and Village Voice . Lameece Issaq and Jacob Kader’s Food and Fadwa Written by Lamees Issaq and Jacob Kader, Food and Fadwa (2014) tells the story of Fadwa, a Palestinian woman who escapes her Palestinian trauma and domestic drama by starring in her own make-believe cooking show as she prepares the food for her sister’s wedding. The play’s dramatization of the internal and personal space of a Palestinian family shies away from the troubling politics of its outside reality and renders the play insistently a drama about family and not politics. The Israeli/Palestinian conflict is certainly not absent but rather delicately sandwiched in between Fadwa’s culinary talents, ambitions, and family dynamics. The playwrights aimed to direct the spotlight in Food and Fadwa towards the intricate, intimate, and everyday experiences of a Palestinian family, hoping this approach would be palatable to a theatre institution that is fundamentally resistant to Palestinian stories and voices. Food and Fadwa was the inaugural production of Noor Theatre, a New-York collective of Arab Americans fostering, nurturing, and showcasing the creativity of Middle Eastern Americans artists. It became a Company-In-Residence at New York Theatre Workshop (NYTW) and Food and Fadwa was the first play with a Palestinian setting to be staged in 2012 at NYTW after the much-criticised cancellation of My Name is Rachel Corrie . Food and Fadwa received positive reviews from theatre critics and enjoyed a very successful and extended run at NYTW. Jamil Khoury’s Precious Stones Precious Stones is the debut play for Chicago’s Silk Road Rising theatre company (SRR) in 2002 by playwright and SRR’s Artistic Director Jamil Khoury. The play queers the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and presents it through private negotiation of sexual and national identities mediated by dialogue and transgression of identity demarcation. The play presents the possibility of crossing over national and sexual borderlines to initiate a seemingly unimaginable dialogue between two women, whose national belonging is dividing, but whose sexual belonging is unifying. Set in Chicago in 1989, the play introduces two diasporic women; Andrea, a Jewish American woman, born and bought up in Chicago, and daughter of Holocaust survivors from Krakow, Poland; and Leila, a Palestinian American woman, born and raised in Beirut, Lebanon and daughter of refugees expelled from Jaffa, Palestine in 1948. The two women embark on an Arab-Jewish dialogue project for their communities, but they finally become its only participants with a lesbian love affair fostering their efforts. Precious Stones offers a glimpse of hope for a seemingly irreconcilable colonial conflict when Andrea and Leila invite the body and politics of gender and sexuality into their room of national conflict. By doing so, the play offers its hyphenated characters the chance to overstep the borders of their conflicting inherited national belongings and reach a compromise. Precious Stones moves in a quick tempo where Leila and Andrea are always dancing a dangerous tango, but one that might just lead to hope and resolution in an otherwise grim reality. Jamil Khoury’s Mosque Alert Jamil Khoury’s 2015 online play Mosque Alert is certainly worthy of an honourable mention. Mosque Alert addresses contemporary challenges confronting American Muslims, particularly the resistance to mosque construction. Inspired by real events like the Ground Zero mosque controversy and protests in Chicago, it portrays tensions among three families: the Muslim Khans and Qabbanis, and the Christian Bakers. Exploring themes of Islamophobia and identity, it aims to provoke dialogue on religious freedom and discrimination. The play employs a participatory model, utilizing digital spaces to engage with audiences and explore themes of civic engagement and access and representation for minority artists and audiences. These plays and Arab American drama in general offer fascinating narratives and employ intriguing dramatic devices while navigating their way into the American cultural mainstream, which often imposes restrictions on politically vocal or adjacent productions. In terms of content, Arab American drama has so much to offer. I argue that playwrights like Shamieh, Raffo, Issaq and others are part of a movement that I term ‘pragmatist feminism’ operating in a space where Arab American women find themselves both privileged and constrained by white liberal feminism while concurrently crafting their own form of feminism within the unique landscape of cultural production in the post-9/11. Furthermore, in Khoury’s work and glimpses in other Arab American plays, a new understanding of Arab American queerness is emerging. These two discourses of feminism and queerness are evolving as the playwrights problematize ethnic and religious Otherness, asserting their own representation against a problematic history of stereotypes and marginalization. Arab American drama is rich with negotiations of what it means to be in-between cultures constantly revisiting cultural heritage and redefining the self at a historical moment of crisis. The playwrights and theatre makers mentioned here have been instrumental in creating the Arab American theatre movement. This movement, though still young, is already proving to be dynamic, innovative and disruptive. Theatre stages and educational curriculum will undoubtedly be the richer for recognizing and celebrating the value of Arab American theatre and its artists – reading these plays becomes, certainly, a must. Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes Alexander, V. (2005) ‘Betty Shamieh: First-Generation American’, Harvard’s Diversity & Distinction . Available at: https://www.bettyshamieh.com/copy-of-the-new-arab-playwrights-1 . El Guindi, Y.E. (2006) ‘Back of the Throat’, TheatreForum , (29), pp. 25–50. Issaq, L. and Kader, J. (2014) ‘Food and Fadwa’, in M.M. Najjar (ed.) Four Arab American Plays . North Carolina: McFarland & Company. Khoury, J. (2015) ‘Mosque Alert’, Silk Road Rising . Available at: https://silkroadculturalcenter.org/digital-media/mosque-alert-collection/ . Raffo, H. (2006) 9 Parts of Desire . Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press. Schillinger, L. (2004) ‘The New “Arab” Playwrights’, The New York Times , 4 April. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/04/theater/theater-the-new-arab-playwrights.html (Accessed: 10 August 2023). Shamieh, B. (2009) ‘The Black Eyed’, in H. Hill and D. Amin (eds) Salaam. Peace: An Anthology of Middle Eastern-American Drama . New York: Theatre Communications Group. References About The Author(s) Roaa Ali is a Lecturer in Creative and Cultural Industries at the University of Manchester. She is an interdisciplinary researcher focusing on race and diversity in the cultural sector. Roaa has a PhD in Drama and Theatre Arts from the University of Birmingham and her thesis explored Arab American and ethnic minority art production within the American cultural and creative industries. She writes extensively on issues of inequality, anti-racism, and the politics of cultural production in the creative industries. Out in 2024, her forthcoming monograph titled The Cultural production of Otherness: Contemporary Arab American Drama focuses on Arab American drama and interrogates issues of cultural production in post 9/11 white neo-liberal neo-orientalist ‘benevolent’ America. Her recent publication includes a co-edited volume titled Arabs, Politics and Performance (co-edited with Samer Al Saber and George Potter). 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 17 Spring 2025 Volume Visit Journal Homepage The 31st Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre. September 1-11, 2024. By Najwa Kondakji Published: May 12, 2025 Download Article as PDF The 31st Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre. September 1-11, 2024. By Najwa Kondakji In its 31st edition, the Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre (CIFET) presented a rich and diverse array of theatrical activities. Over ten days, from September 1 to 11, 2024, audiences experienced 26 performances from nineteen Arab and non-Arab countries, alongside nine specialized training workshops in acting and playwriting, led by renowned Arab and international artists. The festival also included five days of seminars, with two sessions per day. The first three days focused on “Theatre and the Conflict of Centers,” where research papers explored the dynamic between Western aesthetic models and Arab theatrical experimentation. Other discussion forums celebrated the influential contributions of selected Arab theater practitioners, recognizing their great influence within and beyond their communities in the “Gratitude Symposium.” Consistent with previous iterations, the festival also published an important collection of books on theatrical arts, authored by Arab scholars and featuring translated works by European and American writers. The CIFET maintains a distinct identity, setting it apart from other theatre festivals in the Arab world. It attracts productions from a wide range of countries, bringing unique perspectives, standards, and experimental approaches to its stages. The Egyptian opening performance The Wall of Silence’s Echo, directed by the Lebanese Choreographer Walid Awni. Photo: Courtesy of CIFET. This spirit of artistic innovation was equally evident in Arab contributions as well, as demonstrated in the festival’s inaugural performance. On opening night at the Opera House, the Egyptian Modern Dance Theatre Company presented The Wall of Silence’s Echo , directed by acclaimed Lebanese choreographer Walid Awni and produced by the Egyptian Ministry of Culture. This evocative performance explores the tragic history of genocide faced by the Palestinian people, tracing events from the Nakba up to October 7, aiming to reexamine collective memory and affirm the significance of these historical events. The performance was marked by the dancers’ exceptional ability to convey powerful imagery through meticulously choreographed movements. Scenes ranged from the resurrection of the dead from their graves to portrayals of battles, celebrations, and attempts to leap over walls in desperate cries against an invisible enemy—a force capable of inflicting harm from any direction, at any time. Classical music by Richard Wagner and Antonio Vivaldi accompanied some scenes. At times, this was broken by modern techno rhythms, along with the voices of Fairuz, Mohammad Abdel Wahab, and Umm Kulthum. With this musical fusion, the performance not only highlighted the contemporary struggles of the Palestinian people but also captured Palestine’s historical and cultural depth. The production evocatively depicted significant moments, including a striking portrayal of the Last Supper, juxtaposed with the figure of Saladin standing before the Dome of the Rock. The production confronts how the mass killing of innocents has been orchestrated beyond these ideological biases. Tunisian performance L’ALBATROS, script and directed by Chedly Arfaoui, performed by Fatima Bin Saidan, Abdel Qader Bin Said, Ali Bin Said, Mariam Bin Hemida, and Malk Alzawaidi. Photo: Tunis Opera Theater. The Tunisian performance L’ALBATROS , directed by Al-Shadihi Al-Arfawi, explored the harrowing phenomenon of illegal migration through deadly boat journeys departing from the southern shores of the Mediterranean. The script is based on real-life testimonies, capturing the raw and human dimensions of these journeys, and the production follows the stories of three women and two men who set out from Tunisia towards the Italian coast. The characters revisit pivotal events from the Tunisian revolution, recalling the tragic incidents of 2011 and 2012, when countless young people and families perished in pursuit of the migration dream. The play dramatizes the response from authorities that was marked by apathy and indifference, which subsequently incited public anger and protest among the families affected. A vast projection of the sea spans the entire background, including actual documentary footage filmed on a mobile phone from inside a migrant boat at sea, accompanied by ambient ocean sounds, creating an immersive setting. These visuals blend seamlessly with the live performance, heightening the audience’s emotional connection to the unfolding tragedy. Despite the narrative-driven structure, the performance is brought to life through an impressive array of talents, with five performers engaging in acting, dance, song, and acrobatics, all executed with remarkable precision and professionalism. The productions from the Gulf countries reflect a growing theatrical movement, with some standing out for their distinctive approach and form. The Saudi play The Light , by the esteemed writer Fahad Radah Al-Harthy, explores the inner landscape of a lost individual navigating a turbulent reality. It examines the philosophical tension between light—as a metaphor for knowledge, awareness, and self-realization—and darkness, representing confusion, fear, and the vastness of the unknown. Director and scenographer Ahmed Mohammed Al-Ahmari from Bahrain embraced the principles of ‘poor theatre’, as articulated by Jerzy Grotowski using a single piece—the bed—as a versatile symbol representing the various spaces inhabited by the two characters, mirroring their conflicting and intense emotional states. The actors delivered outstanding performances, demonstrating remarkable skill and depth in their portrayals. Mohammed Al-Shahri’s Boswellia tree (Musca) , directed by Youssef Al-Balushi, performed by Omar Shmaki and Tunisian actress Nadia Obaid. Photo: Adel Sabri. The Omani production Boswellia Tree (Musca) adapted from the novel by Mohammed Al Shahri, was directed by Yousef Al Balushi and produced by the Mazoon Theatre Troupe. The show presents the ancient folk legend of the Boswellia tree (Musca), which, according to the tale, originates from a female genie who, after falling in love with a young Bedouin, is banished by her tribe. During the performance, the scent of burning incense spread, and its smoke filled the space, engaging the audience’s senses and reinforcing the production’s evocation of ancestral memory and cultural tradition. make history feel real and present. Al Balushi’s vision adds experimental depth to the genie’s world, notably through the expressive dance of lead actress Nadia Obaid from Tunisia, who portrays the character’s pain and love in sync with traditional Omani rhythms. The interplay of lighting, costumes, heavy makeup—associated with magic and the unknown—and a palette of warm and cool tones creates an atmosphere rich with mystery, suspense, and excitement, earning prolonged applause from the audience. Egyptian performance Where No One Sees Me , written and directed by Mahmoud Atteya. Photo: Nagham Adel. The Egyptian play Where No One Sees Me , produced by the Higher Institute of Theatrical Arts and written and directed by Mahmoud Salah Atteya, delves into the absurdity of life, capturing the struggles of young people trapped in cycles that prevent them from realizing their dreams. These individuals chase jobs that consume their lives, reducing them to mere components of a relentless, monstrous machine—the concept of ‘time’ itself. They become like clock hands in a vast, indifferent cosmic watch, moving mechanically within a rigid, absurd system that erodes their identities and renders them faceless, like the second hand of an old clock. The play opens with an elderly ‘second hand,’ worn down by twenty years of monotonous, circular routine. When he becomes conscious of his exhaustion, he decides to stop, only to be replaced without recognition or memory of his existence. A young, hopeful ‘second hand’ appears, filled with dreams and ambitions, oblivious to the crushed aspirations of his predecessor. The older hand seeks to awaken the younger from his career-induced haze, reminding him of meaningful memories, especially of a woman he loved, who appears symbolically with the rain. A connection forms between the two, bridging past and future, as the woman symbolizes the ideal of a joyful life that remains tantalizingly out of reach. As explained by the director in the festival bulletin, the play aims to inspire young audiences to confront the absurdity of this relentless cycle that entraps them, urging them to choose a more humane, authentic path and to reject the dehumanizing forces of objectification and alienation. [1] The actors delivered a mesmerizing blend of cold detachment and raw intensity, crafting a performance that was both haunting and deeply human. Their vocal rhythm, disciplined and unyielding like the ticking of a clock, reinforced the play’s relentless inevitability. Yet, within this mechanical precision, the undercurrents of tragedy pulsed with searing emotion, ensuring that every moment resonated with an unsettling, almost hypnotic power. The experimental style of Detained, a Palestinian performance directed and choreographed by Moatasem Abu Hassan, stands out for its impactful approach. Merging theatrical text with dance theatre, the piece delves into the harrowing experiences of a Palestinian woman imprisoned within Israeli detention cells. Unlike traditional prisoner narratives that glorify heroism, this performance presents suffering stripped of heroic grandeur, leading the audience on an intense journey through pain and oppression. The work challenges stereotypical portrayals to create a striking paradox between discourses on the imprisonment of women and their actual lived experiences—an immense tragedy that the performance critiques through the lenses of culture, politics, and media. Shatha Yassine wrote the script and played the detained woman, while the director himself assumed the role of the jailer. For any Palestinian actor, embodying an Israeli character involves profound inner confrontation and significant psychological strain, as they must confront the terror wielded by the occupation against their own psyche. This stark contrast is deliberate, highlighting the prisoner’s physical vulnerability and resilient spirit juxtaposed against the soldier’s oppressive force. Drawing from her lived experience in Palestine, Yassin confronts the daily struggle of resisting occupation. Through the character’s monologues, the performance captures the isolation of forced solitary confinement, where illusion, hope, and fear intertwine. Repetitive movement intensifies the psychological tension, exposing the crushing weight of reality and the erosion of identity. [2] In the realm of experimental theatre, two performances stand out for their shared elements and unique approaches. Both are monodramas that deeply engage with text and auditory scenography. The first piece, Wound , was written, directed, and performed by Egyptian Nora Amin who is based in Cairo and Berlin, in collaboration with the German Ringlokschuppen Ruhr Theatre. The second piece, Mute , is a Kuwaiti production performed by Hala Omran, with writing and direction by the Kuwaiti-British artist Suleiman Al-Bassam. Wound symbolizes a universal wound inflicted by all forms of destruction-- a wound humanity has endured throughout history. It portrays a singular, continuous wound that unites humanity in ongoing tragedy. This ritualistic performance relies heavily on the poetics of expression. Amin composed the music along with the text in English and designed the audio track with Ehab Abdellatif, centering around linguistic sounds associated with “wound” and its derivatives, as well as “healing” in the sense of recovery. This continuous audio track underscores the performance from beginning to end, seeking to return to a primal, ritualistic origin to evoke universal suffering and the collective human pursuit of healing and transcendence. Visually, English poetic text is projected in red color throughout the performance as a testament to those who have endured massacres and destruction. The work revisits the fundamental concepts of spectatorship and embodiment, undertaking a revolutionary exploration that required rigorous research and experimentation to reconstruct theatrical, auditory, and expressive elements rooted in ancient rituals. In her approach as an actress, dancer, and director, Amin seeks to reclaim the primal, ritualistic essence of performance, embodying suffering across ages and cultures. The performance ended with a deeply interactive moment, as Amin presented a glass bowl of water and invited the audience to dip their fingers into it. She repeatedly posed thought-provoking questions: ‘If I were water, what would your wishes be? What matters to you? What is your name? If I were water, what would you want to heal?’ Moving through the space with deliberate, slow gestures, she infused the act with a ceremonial quality, enhancing the ritualistic aspect of the performance. This symbolic act invited purification, bridging the healing of the soul and the heart, and fostering an intimate connection between the actress and the audience. [3] The second performance Mute addresses the Beirut Port explosion of August 2020. The director opens with a direct address, sharing his personal reaction to the tragedy and reflecting on its societal and political impact. The production drew on expert consultations with Dr. Russell Ogle, an American chemical engineer specializing in accident investigation and explosion risk assessment, and retired Lebanese Brigadier General Elias Farhat, a military and strategic researcher, to provide technical insights into the explosion. Their recorded interview is played as a voice-over at various points in this performance. On stage, Hala Omran performs in a fixed position, surrounded by microphones that fall one by one, save for a single mic she holds during the explosion, marking the start of the performance. Restricted to a confined space, Omran’s voice blends with a sound recording that interweaves expert commentary. Chairs on the side of the stage offer seating for audience members invited by the director. In the background, musicians Abed Kobeissi and Ali Hout perform from elevated platforms, lending a distinct auditory layer that has become a hallmark of Al-Bassam’s recent work. The piece adopts a narrative style that shifts from traditional drama to performing narrative, deconstructing meaning and presenting it through varied mechanisms. The script includes elements of dark satire, critiquing governmental shortcomings and their failure to implement preventative measures, reflecting the struggles experienced by the Lebanese. This approach to deconstructing meaning and favoring non-linear forms aligns with the principles of postdramatic theatre—a relatively new dramatic mode for Arab audiences, whose presence remains limited within the broader landscape of Arab theatre. Among the international performances, the festival provided its audience with the opportunity to experience two distinguished examples of dance theatre, each deserving admiration for their unique techniques and approaches. The first performance was the German production Ba(b)el , presented by the Ballet Company of Theatre Trier and directed by Fernando Melo and Roberto Scafati. In this piece, ten performers skillfully employed human-size movable panels to create barriers, walls, and cities, with the team precisely rearranging and reassembling the stage space to achieve complex timing in their movements. Melo and Scafati explore the fragility of understanding—what drives people apart and what pulls them back together? Their choreography reimagines the Tower of Babel as a visceral struggle between chaos and unity, where miscommunication fractures relationships before the dancers rebuild them in moments of profound, wordless reconciliation. The second performance was the Romanian work Elevator , choreographed by Feher Ferenic. This minimalist piece featured no set pieces and utilized just three dancers, who, illuminated by a limited spotlight, depicted the routines of life inside an elevator. The empty space accentuated the physicality and skills of the performers, blending dance with stylized physical action and incorporating a mix of acrobatics and repetitive movements in varying rhythms. One of the positive aspects of this edition of the festival was its ability to attract a new generation of young Arab theatre enthusiasts, particularly through seminars where the majority of participants were emerging researchers and academics. Additionally, some academics and researchers participated in one of the seminars but were unable to attend the Arabic-language sessions due to the lack of interpretation services. The Arabic performances also did not feature translated subtitles/supertitles, which could have been displayed alongside the performances to enable non-Arabic-speaking guests to engage more effectively with the content. Furthermore, the outcomes of the workshops were not disseminated widely and remained confined to the participating groups, despite addressing significant topics in theatre studies and practice. These observations serve as recommendations for the festival management to consider without undermining its essential role in advancing Arab experimental theatre through cultural exchange and interaction with contemporary global experiences, which this edition has successfully achieved. [1] Israa Al Sheikh , Dialogue with the director of the Egyptian performance “Where No One Sees Me” Mahmoud Salah Atteya: The show monitors the state of alienation and warns against losing oneself . The English Daily bulletin of The CIFET 31, Friday 6 Sep, 2024, Issue 6, p 4. [2] The crew encountered numerous obstacles on their journey to the festival, traveling via Amman Airport from the West Bank. The director and stage manager were from Nablus, while two technicians and an actress were from Jenin. Their departure coincided with an Israeli incursion into the Jenin camp. They resorted to boarding an ambulance, pretending to require medical assistance. This allowed them to bypass and reach a designated meeting point outside the combat zone, where the director waited for them in his car. From there, their journey continued, marked by long hours navigating numerous checkpoints and eventually crossing the border through the Rafah land crossing. [3] Rufaida Khalifa , Dialogue with the director of the German performance “Wunde-Wound” Nour Amin: The show responds to the global system of injustice and seeks healing . The Daily bulletin of The CIFET 31, Monday 9 Sep, 2024, Issue 9, p 6. Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes References About The Author(s) Najwa Kondakji holds a Master’s in Fine Arts (obtained in 1993), specializing in Directing for Drama, Theatre, and Film from the Russian Academy of Theatre Arts (GITIS) in Moscow. In 2021, she completed her Ph.D. in Fine Arts, specializing in Theatre, from the Lebanese University in Beirut. She is an accomplished actress and director with extensive experience in community centers and educational institutions. Her career spans various fields of art, including film, TV production, and other media forms. Since fall 2023, she has served as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Design, Cinema, TV, and Theatre at the Faculty of Architecture and Design, Al-Ahliyya Amman University. From 2016 to 2023, Najwa was the Program Manager at Karama Beirut Human Rights Film Festival, where she played a pivotal role in organizing events and programs. She also worked as an instructor in performing arts, theatre, and film studies at the Lebanese International University’s Communication Arts Department from 2014 to 2021. In television, Najwa was a producer for MBC’s “Studio Beirut” (2011-2013) and a coordinator for the Beirut Spring Festival with the Samir Kassir Foundation (2013-2015). She further expanded her media work as an assistant producer for BBC Arabic Radio’s “Al Maqha Souri” (2016-2017). 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 18 Winter 2025 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Renewed Awareness Toward Salvation: The Journey of The Story of Zahra from Page to Stage By Raeda Ghazaleh Published: December 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF INTRODUCTION Banned in many Middle Eastern countries after its publication due to the provocative nature of the text, Hanan al-Shaykh’s novel The Story of Zahra explores the life of Zahra, which spans multiple decades and continents. In 2019, I co-adapted the final chapter of the book with Matthew Spangler, which focuses on Zahra’s life during the Lebanese Civil War. This article examines the invigorating and boundary-pushing process of adapting and directing this challenging text at the Palestinian National Theatre El-Hakawati in 2020. While often mischaracterized as a Western import, Middle Eastern feminism, as practiced in my artistic work, emerges from local socio-political realities and cultural contexts. It is not a replica of Western feminist frameworks, but rather a situated and evolving praxis that responds to the lived experiences of women. In adapting The Story of Zahra , we drew upon feminist theory and Brecht’s alienation effect to create a critical distance that invited audiences to reflect on structures of gendered and political oppression. In this context, feminist theory foregrounds women's voices and insists on their centrality in cultural narratives and social transformation. Similarly, Brechtian theatre seeks to expose systems of power and challenge theatrical conventions. To this end, we employed three levels of narration that aimed to bring all these elements to the stage. Together, these approaches enabled a form of political theatre that confronts injustice and imagines possibilities for feminist expression in the Arab world. BACKGROUND INFORMATION The play The Story of Zahra premiered in Jerusalem at the Palestinian National Theatre El Hakawati in February 2020, just before the COVID-19 lockdown. It later toured Palestine in October 2021 and was performed at the Journées Théâtrales de Carthage in Tunisia in December of the same year. I first met Lebanese author Hanan al-Shaykh in 2000 while in London directing staged readings at the Royal Court Theatre. Katherine Viner of The Guardian , who interviewed me at the time, introduced us, sensing a shared sensibility. From that meeting, a long-standing friendship developed. I began reading al-Shaykh’s novels and discussing her early life in Beirut, including her decision to leave Lebanon at the outbreak of the civil war. Born in 1944 into a Shiite family in Beirut, al-Shaykh experienced a turbulent childhood marked by her mother’s departure and subsequent years in boarding school. At sixteen, she began writing for An-Nahar newspaper and later pursued her studies in literature at the American College for Girls in Cairo. After a brief return to Lebanon, she resumed work in journalism, but the onset of civil war in 1975 compelled her to flee to London with her two children. Her novel The Story of Zahra (1980) was a turning point in her career. Written in Arabic and met with widespread censorship across the Arab world, the novel was deemed controversial due to its unflinching depiction of sexuality, war, and patriarchal violence. The narrative centers on Zahra, a young woman whose experiences of abuse, political instability, and familial trauma expose the psychological toll of life within a patriarchal community. The novel’s raw critique of patriarchal structures led Arab publishers to reject it, prompting al-Shaykh to publish it independently. Since its English translation in 1986, The Story of Zahra has become a canonical work in Arab literature and is frequently taught in university courses across Europe and North America (Spangler, 3, 10). Al-Shaykh’s literary voice is marked by emotional honesty and feminist conviction rooted in her cultural and political context. As Edward Said remarked, she is “the premier woman writer in Arabic who has done more than any other to explore the misperception of Arab women's lives” (AUB). Her feminism, while distinct from Western frameworks, is deeply committed to giving voice to silenced and fractured female subjectivities. My connection to The Story of Zahra was immediate. After first reading it in 2000, I envisioned its potential as a stage adaptation. Nearly two decades later, I encountered playwright Matthew Spangler, known for his adaptation of The Kite Runner , and found in him a collaborator who shared my sensibility. When I proposed the adaptation to al-Shaykh, she expressed concern about how such a complex and interior novel could be staged. I assured her that the theatrical form I envisioned would honor the novel’s intensity and fragmentation. With that trust, she permitted us to begin the adaptation process. THE NOVEL The Story of Zahra Hanan al-Shaykh’s The Story of Zahra is structurally divided into two distinct books, each reflecting Zahra’s changing psychological state. The first book, comprising the majority of the novel, is primarily narrated from Zahra’s perspective. It recounts her traumatic childhood, marked by her mother’s instrumentalization of her in an extramarital affair and her fear of her abusive father. Seeking escape, Zahra travels to Africa to stay with her uncle, but instead of finding liberation, she is further subjected to sexual harassment and retraumatized by memories of earlier abuse, which included two abortions (Larson, 1991). Her experiences also include an emotionally hollow marriage to her uncle’s friend Majed and repeated returns between Africa and Beirut, underscoring her psychological dissociation and inability to find safety or belonging. Al-Shaykh complicates the narrative voice by including chapters from the perspectives of the uncle and Majed, men who are also portrayed as wounded figures, before returning to Zahra’s fragmented inner world. Through these shifting perspectives and nonlinear chronology, the novel resists classical narrative form. As Sirhan (2024) argues, al-Shaykh “breaks the time continuity” and constructs a plot composed of interwoven threads, reflecting Zahra’s psychological dislocation and aligning the novel with Brechtian techniques of fragmentation and estrangement (2024, 121–126). The second book, set during the Lebanese Civil War, marks a shift in Zahra’s agency. No longer isolated, she begins to engage with the world around her, questioning her past and present: “I am no longer Zahra. In short, my questions and inquiries do not stop” (al-Shaykh 1989, 153). The war serves as a catalyst, prompting Zahra to break free from patriarchal constraints (Sirhan 2024, 112). Her complex and morally ambiguous relationship with a sniper, at once violent, erotic, and psychologically charged, becomes a pivotal point of self-assertion. For the first time, Zahra chooses a relationship, believing she is both reconnecting with her body and preventing further violence. However, her pregnancy and fantasy of family are shattered when she is ultimately killed. As Sirhan notes, her death signifies the delusion of safety in wartime and encapsulates the cumulative violence she has endured (2024, 113). It was this second book that I chose to adapt for the stage, drawn to Zahra’s growing awareness and active engagement with her surroundings. I was particularly interested in how the war acts as a metaphorical rupture that propels Zahra toward self-reflection and confrontation with her trauma. Her wondering about the sniper in the neighbourhood leads her to have a sexual relationship with him. She fears the sniper, but she keeps going to him as she starts to connect with her body again. Zahra’s “relationship with the sniper [is an] embodiment of her deteriorating psychological state” (2024, 112). She realizes that her relationship with the sniper is the first time she is making her own choices. She rationalizes it by telling herself that, by being with the sniper, she is stopping him from killing people (al-Shaykh 1989, 189). However, she soon ends up dead. As Sirhan puts it, “Her death in the end is evidence that feeling safe in war is a delusion” (Sirhan 2024, 113). Zahra’s demise is a culmination of all kinds of violence that she experiences and witnesses. I aimed to create a performance that would allow the audience to hear Zahra’s voice without judgment, to understand her actions within a broader context of gendered violence and political collapse. Zahra’s story functions as a feminist critique of war and patriarchal society in Lebanon (2024, 125). Yasmin Shalaldeh as Zahra. Courtesy of El-Hakawati Theater. BRECHTIAN AND FEMINIST THEORIES IN ADAPTATION Feminist theory critiques patriarchy as a system in which women are historically oppressed, marginalized, and socially constructed to serve male interests. It interrogates how culture, especially literature and performance, has represented women through male fantasies rather than female realities. As Simone de Beauvoir famously said, “one is not born, but rather becomes a woman,” a statement Judith Butler expands on to show how gender is produced through repeated social behaviors rather than biological destiny. Gender can be understood as a patriarchal social given that is determined by the repetition of specific actions over time, “embodying certain cultural and historical possibilities...” (188) rather than leaving the existence of natural and instinctive actions that determine a person’s identity. This opens the door to exploring the possibility of a different kind of repetition, perhaps in the breaking or subversive repetition of that style that indicates to us the gender that is renewed in its identity (2007, 188). Women face many challenges in liberating their bodies from this patriarchal oppression. Still, they must also liberate themselves from their personal perspective, feelings, and opinions acquired through their experiences and backgrounds, which have shaped how they see themselves and their relationship with the world around them. As female subjectivity in general has been shaped within the patriarchal male vision, to be able to become free of it, there is a need for women “to escape the confines of the subjectivity patriarchy sets up for them” (Fortier 2002, 111). Judith Fetterley’s theory of the “resistance reader” was paramount to me throughout this process. Women throughout history adapted the vision of the dominant patriarchal culture. Even when women were allowed to participate in culture, they carried within themselves the male perspective; they wrote from a male point of view. Therefore, in order for women to liberate themselves from that, they must read against what they read, to be able to understand, realize, and criticize how literature has been written from a male perspective, even if women wrote it. Through this act of resistance reading, women can be liberated from patriarchal authoritarianism (Fortier 2002, 108). Theatre has long played a role in reproducing patriarchal narratives, but feminist theorists like Hélène Cixous insist on a woman-centered language and form that emerges from women’s embodied experience. The Story of Zahra employs feminist language techniques because it is a language whose characteristics are the opposite of those found in classical male language. It is free from all the rules of language or the rules of conventional theatre. Its content and form are based on female body characteristics. Just as the “phallocentric” male language takes its components from the male body from which it grows and expresses itself. Similarly, female language draws its components from the characteristics of the female body and sexuality. Just as the male body has created a theatrical form that serves the thinking of men, and this form is the one that is accepted in society, the linear and unidirectional. Feminist writing contrasts with this, the woman’s body is connected to forms that are “circular, cyclical, polyphonic, associative, repetitive, abstract, soft, and constantly changing” (2013, 139). The connection between the body and language is not only metaphorical, but it applies to both men and women, and Cixous explores this idea in depth. Cixous points out that the feminine metaphor that creates the form and manner of expression has a direct and literal connection to the woman's body as a source of creation, inspired by the characteristics and sexuality of women, and this, of course, affects the form of expression in female writing and productions. Through feminist writing, we come to understand that women must rewrite themselves; they must begin expressing themselves from their bodies and their rhythms, from their relationship with motherhood, and their spiritual, emotional, and intellectual development as females. They need to establish their history and rediscover their identity and voice. This differs significantly from the straight male line with a conventional plot. This feminist aesthetics opens up space for dramaturgies that reject the classical, male-oriented structure in favor of more fluid, experiential ones. Cixous’s call for women to “write themselves” has profoundly influenced contemporary feminist theatre, particularly as it intersects with Brecht’s epic theatre. While Brecht did not focus on gender, feminist practitioners appropriated his alienation techniques to critique gender as a constructed sign system. Materialist feminism, in particular, found in Brechtian theory a valuable toolkit for exposing systems of oppression, economic, social, and gendered, through performance. As Aston and Diamond argue, feminist-Brechtian theatre not only aims to represent women differently but to expose and dismantle the patriarchal mechanisms that shape representation itself. Brecht's technique helps to present women in a different way towards revolutionary and social change. As Brecht said: “The production took the subject matter and the incidents shown and put them through a process of alienation: the alienation that is necessary to all understanding” (Willett 1964, 71). Brecht himself did not focus on gender, but rather his work was about a political theatre based on the call for class liberation and a revolution for the oppressed working class. In this way, Brecht failed to recognize that gender discrimination is a crucial component of the working class's struggle. Therefore, the possibilities that could be applied through his theatre theory for the benefit of the materialist women’s movement originated from the feminist movement itself and were utilized to advance feminist projects. Brecht’s theory and his alienation effect technique for the performers “demonstrate systems of social oppression through the medium of performance” (Aston 1999, 13). Spangler and I focused on form: the novel’s nonlinear structure, psychological depth, and estranged timeline, working to align them with epic feminist strategies. Although, two major feminist performance strategies include “reading against the text” to subvert patriarchal narratives and “re-dressing,” which reframes characters to highlight and complicate gender constructions (Sue-Ellen Case; Alisa Solomon), we didn’t need to “read against” the original text because the feminist voice was already there. Nor did we re-dress the characters.The play centers on Zahra as the narrator of her own story, recounting the war in Beirut and the instability of her relationships, especially with her brother Ahmad, who joins a militia, and with the sniper. Initially, the play followed a linear narrative structure, with Zahra as storyteller and expanded roles for Ahmad and the sniper. Yet something essential was missing. We realized the audience lacked access to Zahra’s interiority and the reasons behind her actions. In response, we incorporated three monologues that draw on material from the first book of the novel. These monologues function as Zahra’s inner voice, offering insight into her trauma and charting a trajectory toward self-awareness and strength. We mirrored the novel’s temporal fragmentation, echoing its shifts between past and present. As al-Shaykh “removes the boundaries between times ... inside the character” (2024, 126), the novel’s structure becomes a map of Zahra’s fractured psyche. We followed suit onstage, echoing this disjointed timeline to reflect the character’s trauma and inner life. In the novel, as in our performance, memory and the present interweave. This dramaturgical approach resonated with what Aronson-Lehavi describes as “the interpretive process” of adapting a text for the stage (2013, 120). We developed the script through workshops with actors in May 2019 and a subsequent gathering with readers of the novel. These engagements made clear the importance of contextualizing Zahra’s actions for the audience, particularly in light of ongoing debates around gender-based violence and so-called “honour killings” in Palestinian society. The adaptation resonated deeply with Palestinian women, who recognized Zahra’s pain as reflective of their own experiences. As Spangler initially questioned the relevance of a Lebanese narrative to Palestinian audiences, I argued, and was later affirmed by the response, that Zahra’s story transcends national borders through its feminist lens on oppression, silence, and survival (Spangler, 7). Ultimately, adapting The Story of Zahra for the stage enabled us to amplify a silenced voice, offering a form of feminist resistance that challenges both patriarchy and war. The project not only brought Zahra’s journey into the public realm but also fostered dialogue with audiences about the entanglement of personal trauma and collective history. The stage adaptation traces the psychological and political journey of a young woman navigating a lifetime of patriarchal violence amid the chaos of the Lebanese Civil War. As Zahra gains momentary freedom from familial control, she seeks autonomy and meaning, only to confront forms of exploitation. The production, as noted in the programme, “explores how women are particularly brutalized in times of violence and oppression.” The performance unfolds across four dramaturgical stages, charting Zahra’s evolving consciousness and ultimate demise. Stage One introduces Zahra in wartime Beirut, recounting the fear she experienced in her childhood. Through direct address and domestic scenes, she speaks of the structural oppression she endured, particularly from her father. She provides glimpses into her complex relationship with war, trauma, and desire. In a moment of confronting all of this, a memory of her mother using Zahra as a child to cover up an extramarital affair, taking Zahra with her when meeting her lover, resurfaces in her mind. Her fear and the violence she experiences are what prompt her to leave, looking for a fresh start. Stage Two presents Zahra living independently for the first time. In an abandoned apartment, she initiates a hesitant relationship with the sniper, initially driven by fear, curiosity, and a longing for connection. The arrival of her brother Ahmed, a civil war combatant, reveals further layers of patriarchal aggression and ideological disillusionment. Yasmin Shalaldeh as Zahra (left) and Mohammad Basha as Ahmad (right). Courtesy of El-Hakawati Theater. Stage Three delves into Zahra’s past, particularly her abuse in Africa by a relative and a failed marriage that compounded her trauma. The deepening of her relationship with the sniper appears, to Zahra, as an act of volition, “the first thing she has chosen in her life.” Yet, as she challenges him about his past and observes her brother's further descent into brutality, the limits of her autonomy become increasingly visible. Stage Four sees Zahra confront the most harrowing episodes of her youth: sexual exploitation, forced abortion, and psychiatric abuse. These memories culminate in Zahra's pregnancy by the sniper. Her fantasy of a future rooted in choice and love unravels and, in the story’s final moments, Zahra walks through the streets only to be shot. The ambiguity of the final act underscores the impossibility of liberation within a society shaped by war and patriarchy. Her desire for a new life ends in silence, possibly at the hands of the very man she thought had offered her freedom. Milad Knebe as Sniper (left) and Yasmin Shalaldeh as Zahra (right). Courtesy of El-Hakawati Theater. This adaptation stages Zahra’s narrative not simply as a personal tragedy, but as a broader critique of the intersecting violences of patriarchy, war, and colonial modernity. Our approach drew upon Brechtian techniques to reject psychological realism in favor of critical distance. Zahra’s monologues, direct address, and the disrupted timeline invited audiences to reflect on structural violence rather than become absorbed in a singular character’s tragedy. By fragmenting time and foregrounding Zahra’s consciousness, we disrupted narrative closure, instead emphasizing the broader critique embedded in her story. By staging The Story of Zahra , we offered a feminist form of resistance, confronting the entangled violences of patriarchy, war, and colonial modernity. Our staging emphasized Zahra’s social entrapment not as her private trauma alone, but as a shared, political condition. I resisted Spangler’s initial idea of staging it as a monodrama, knowing that isolating Zahra would risk individualizing her struggle. The play stems from Zahra’s logic, and if we isolate her on stage with all her conflicts, the risk is that the audience will interpret her struggle as purely internal, absolving the public and political context of responsibility. However, if we surround her with other key characters, we can more clearly see the effects they have on her. This multiplicity aligns with Brechtian dramaturgy, where individual psychology is always presented in relation to historical and material conditions. Instead, I built an environment around her, soundscape, spatial design, and supporting characters, that demonstrated how society actively constructs her reality. Even the choice to use the Lebanese dialect, rather than the Palestinian one, created an intentional estrangement effect for local audiences, prompting them to analyze rather than empathize uncritically. The Story of Zahra on stage becomes an example of feminist epic theatre—disrupting traditional narratives, centering women’s experience, and provoking critical engagement with gendered violence as a structural, not merely personal, problem. THREE LEVELS OF NARRATION In the script, there are three levels of narration: storytelling, Zahra’s interactions with other characters, and her memory monologues. Zahra’s storytelling guides the audience toward what the character herself wants us to see and know. This level of narration spans the entire stage space. While this section addresses the levels of narration from a scriptwriting perspective, I find it impossible to separate the text from its theatrical realization. Accordingly, I interweave elements of the production into the discussion of each narrative level. The first drafts of the script were written in English, after which I began translating the text into Arabic, initially using the Palestinian dialect. I later decided to shift to the Lebanese dialect, finalizing the script in collaboration with al-Shaykh during a trip to London. This process contributed to the script’s alienation from Palestinian audiences from the outset. In Brechtian terms, this linguistic shift functioned as a distancing device, interrupting the potential for immediate identification with the character or setting. Rather than fostering emotional immersion, the language aimed to provoke critical observation. As previously mentioned, the novel posed significant challenges to patriarchal norms and was banned across much of the Arab world. My objective in adapting the novel for the stage was to add a critical dimension: to allow the audience not only to track Zahra’s actions but also to hear her internal commentary. It was essential that the audience listen to the play’s ideas, though this had to be handled with care. As Ayat Yaghmour observed in her review: “The play included many hints that were sometimes used to avoid the explicitness of the action and not to disturb the audience, and at other times the hints were used to attract the audience, awaken their imagination and provoke their intelligence” (2020). Her comments pertain to the performance, but also highlight the way the script strategically withholds emotional resolution to encourage reflection. Rather than passively judging Zahra, viewers are encouraged to consider the social structures that surround her. In this, the production pursues transformation through critical spectatorship rather than passive empathy. The second level of narration consists of Zahra’s interactions with other characters, situated in spaces such as the family home and the sniper’s rooftop. This layer introduces dialogic tension and reveals embedded social hierarchies. It aligns with Brecht’s principle that characters should not merely express psychological interiority, but instead represent broader social forces. From this perspective, Zahra is framed as a woman attempting to escape the constraints imposed upon her, even as she remains ensnared by the violence of war and patriarchal expectations. Spatial design played a central role in supporting this tension. At first, characters moved freely across the stage, which represented the family home. After the family departs Beirut and Zahra remains behind, the stage is divided, and the city’s streets and neighborhoods begin to emerge between these spaces. This spatial reconfiguration follows Zahra’s journey as she begins to step outside the home, yet remains trapped between the male authorities in her life, her brother and the sniper, and the larger social structures represented by the community. The non-naturalistic scenography and choreographed spatial divisions invite the audience to consider their own relationship to what unfolds before them. Rather than being lulled into empathetic identification, spectators are encouraged to question. Zahra’s direct address to the audience, breaking the fourth wall, serves as another Brechtian device that foregrounds theatricality and resists illusion. The third level of narration takes the form of Zahra’s memory monologues, which shift into a distinct aesthetic register. These moments occur at the front center of the stage, within a focused circle of light, where the character confronts herself and delivers unfiltered reflections that disrupt narrative continuity. In developing the soundscape for these scenes, I collaborated with musician John Handal. Rather than conventional music, we sought an ambient, environmental texture, something that would avoid manipulating emotions and instead cultivate a space for thought. Music appears only during these memory monologues, consisting of a single, recurring note: minimal and insistent. In these instances, as Zahra faces her past in order to move forward, the sound design compels concentrated attention. The final scene collapses all three levels of narration into a single dramatic moment. Zahra is shot, and as she falls, she reveals her thoughts in her dying breath: “I close my eyes. Eyes that were never truly open. I feel the rain” (Spangler and Ghazaleh, 56). Her past and present converge. The rain, descending from above, suggests a gesture of purification. Yet rather than allowing the audience to sink into sentimentality, the production exposes the theatrical mechanism, showing how the rain effect is produced on stage. There is no catharsis. Instead, the moment is designed to agitate, directing the audience’s attention toward the structural violence and patriarchal control that have governed Zahra’s life. Tahseen Yaqeen notes this effect in his review: “Here, we will find ourselves, as we watch this creative play, wondering about the historical moment, not of the civil war, which seems not to have ended yet, but about the place here and the time, Palestine 2020?” (2020). The epic theatre techniques employed in the production, disruption of illusion, direct address, stylized scenography, and fragmentation of narrative structure, were deployed in pursuit of the alienation effect, toward the broader goal of constructing an epic feminist theatre. Iman Aoun as Fatmé (left) and Yasmin Shalaldeh as Zahra (right). Courtesy of El-Hakawati Theater. CONCLUSION This experience marked an important moment of reflection for me as a Palestinian woman and theatre artist. It offered the space to reconsider the creative journey behind The Story of Zahra and to re-examine the Brechtian and feminist theoretical frameworks that have long shaped my artistic practice, whether consciously or not. Brecht’s theory of the alienation effect has always spoken to me; his insistence on breaking theatrical conventions to expose injustice aligns with my desire to make theatre a space for social critique and transformation. At the same time, feminist theory, though I did not always name it as such, has coexisted with me throughout my life. My rebellion against patriarchal structures was never about claiming rights for women alone, but about demanding the freedom for everyone, including men in my society, to live without oppressive expectations. In adapting The Story of Zahra for the stage, I found these two theoretical lineages converging. The performance not only retold Zahra’s personal tragedy but also offered a broader feminist critique of patriarchy, war, and colonial modernity. Using Brechtian techniques, we rejected psychological realism in favor of critical distance, inviting the audience to reflect rather than simply empathize. The process of bringing this controversial and groundbreaking novel to the stage was full of challenges, but ultimately created a space where Zahra could be heard, not judged. In retrospect, this work affirmed for me that feminist epic theatre is not only possible, but necessary: a form that disrupts dominant narratives, centers women’s voices, and invites audiences into active, critical engagement with structural violence. It is through this kind of theatre, rebellious, reflective, and deeply human, that we can begin to imagine possibilities for liberation. Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes Al-Shaykh, Hanan, The Story of Zahra , London: Pan Books, 1987. Aronson-Lehavi, Sharon, Gender and Feminism in Modern Theatre . Raanana: The Open University of Israel, 2013. Larson, Charles R., “The fiction of Hanan Al-Shaykh, reluctant feminist,” World Literature Today , Jan 01. 65:1 (1991); 14-17. Butler, Judith, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory”, in The Performance Studies Reader , second edition, Ed. Henry Bial. New York: Routledge, 2007;187-199. Diamond, Elin, “Brechtian Theory/Feminist Theory: Towards a Gestic Feminist Criticism,” in Unmaking Mimeses . New York: Routledge, 1996; 43-55. Fortier, Mark, Theory/Theatre: An Introduction , second edition, London: Routledge, 2002. Ghazaleh, Raeda, and Matthew Spangler, The Story of Zahra, unpublished script. Jerusalem: Palestinian National Theatre, 2020. Sirhan, Rabab, “The Feminist Narrative in the Lebanese War Novel: Hikayat Zahra and Bareed Beirut as a Model”, Al-Majma: Studies in Arabic language, literature and thought 19 (2024); 103-128. Spangler, Matthew. “Hanan al-Shaykh’s The Story of Zahra at the Palestinian National Theatre”, unpublished essay. Willett, John, ed. & trans., Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, London: Methuen, 1964. American University of Beirut, Hanan al-Shaykh, aub.edu.lb , 2019 https://www.aub.edu.lb/doctorates/recipients/Pages/Hanan-al-Shaykh.aspx The Story of Zahra programme, Palestinian National Theatre, 2021. https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=4654476531253574 يقين، تحسين. "مسرحية حكاية زهرة لرائدة غزالة: البحث عن المعنى عبر جماليات تعبيرية"، أمد للإعلام ١٤-٠٣-٢٠٢٠ https://www.alwatanvoice.com/arabic/news/2020/03/14/1321900.html يغمور، آيات. "حكاية زهرة في الحرب الأهلية.. من بيروت إلى مسرح العاصمة المقدسية"، الحدث ٢٦-٠٢-٢٠٢٠ https://www.alhadath.ps/article/115485/حكاية-زهرة-في-الحرب-الأهلية-من-بيروت-إلى-مسرح-العاصمة-المقدسية References About The Author(s) Raeda Ghazaleh is a theatre director and actress, co-founder of Inad Theatre and Al-Harah Theatre in Beit Jala, where she served as artistic director until 2016. She directed and acted in many plays in Palestine, Europe, and America. Her recent productions include acting in Artificial Heart , Bethlehem Calling at the Celtic Connection music festival in Glasgow as a co-director; the Palestinian National Theatre production of The Story of Zahra , a theatrical work she adapted with the American writer Matthew Spangler from Hanan Al-Shaykh’s novel; and Jihan's Smile with Al-Harah Theatre, where she also directed Confinement; Making Senses; Do You Still Love Me?; and Hanin Al Bahar. Her theatrical acting credits include David Hare’s Stuff Happens at the Royal National Theatre in London, and most recently Other Places with Khashabi Theatre. She directed the television series Joking Seriously in 2005 and acted in television and film productions. Ghazaleh received her MA in Theatre Directing from the Central School of Speech & Drama in London where she also worked with the Royal Court Theatre, with whom she had established a playwriting connection with Palestine. Ghazaleh recently established Masahati, an independent creative space offering a refuge for like-minded artists to express themselves freely without external interventions limiting creativity and art. 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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European Stages serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. 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. Current Issue About & Submission Guidelines People Past Issues Contact Curren Issue Current Issue: Volume 21, 2025 Editor's Statement - European Stages Volume 21 Steve Earnest Review of Samuel Barber’s Vanessa by Ópera do Castelo Timothy Koch Summer 2025 in London, England Amy Hamel Robert Wilson’s Moby Dick at Schauspielhaus Düsseldorf, Summer 2025 Steve Earnest Report from Berlin Marvin Carlson International Theatre Festival of Sibiu 32nd Edition Kalina Stefanova Polyphonies of the Present: The Pulse of the Almada Festival Savas Patsalidis Theatre in Poland, Fall 2025 Steve Earnest Radu Afrim and his House Between the Blocks Călin Ciobotari The Tragic Ideal of Eternal Youth: Folk Myth on the Modern Stage Ion Tomus Dramas of Separation at Festival d’Avignon 19th Edition Philippa Wehle About & Submission Guideline About The Journal For almost a quarter of a century, from 1969 until 2013 the journal Western European Stages provided one of the most detailed and comprehensive overviews of the season-by-season activities in this major part of the theatre world available anywhere in any language. From 1981 onward, parallel coverage of Eastern Europe was provided by its sister journal, Slavic and East European Performance, edited by the late Professor Daniel Gerould. This was an extremely exciting and innovative period, marked by the work of many of the greatest directors of the twentieth century, by actors and designers of equal achievement, and by remarkable changes in theatre design and technology. At the turn of the century WES offered two special issues that gave a complete survey of the current theatrical scene in every country, down to the smallest, in that part of the world, a kind of overview unavailable anywhere else. Many of the larger countries, such as Germany and Sweden, received special issues, as did certain aspects of the contemporary stage, such as the growth of women directors in Europe. Both journals have offered interviews with leading artists and detailed reports on most of the leading European theatre festivals. The European continent has undergone radical changes during this quarter century. When WES was founded, Eastern and Western Europe were two quite distinct political and theatrical spheres. With the disappearance of the Russian control in the East, the rise of the European Union, and the rapid increase of productions combining the artists from a variety of countries, east and west, this cold war division today is largely an historical memory politically and theatrically. Thus, in 2013, these two journals combined their activities to reflect this more integrated continent, and metamorphosed into European Stages. We hope that the new, merged resource will continue to provide English-language readers with the most comprehensive source available on current theatre in this most important area of such activity. ISSN number of European Stages: 1050-199 Submission Guidelines Manuscripts should normally fall between 1500 and 5000 words, the shorter contributions normally reporting on a single production and the longer several related productions or festival reports. All submissions must concern themselves with recent or contemporary work in the Eastern and Western European theatre and performances created and presented in Europe first. In some cases also European productions at US venues without extensive reviews will be considered. Strong preferences will be given to contributions reporting from Europe. Historical studies and literary analyses are not acceptable, although some such material may of course be incorporated into reviews when relevant. The reviews should be primarily descriptive, not judgmental, although reviewers may of course include their opinions of the work. In addition to reports on current productions or groups of productions, we welcome interviews with prominent European theatre figures – actors, directors, designers, and dramatists. Photos should be 300dpi, JPEG, preferably in color, ideally 6×9 inches (six inches wide, 9 inches high; 300dpi for the full size image.) It is the responsibility of the contributor to secure the copyright and permission for the use of the images for ES (European Stages). The photo credit has to be included in the JPEG file name and needs to be listed at the end of the manuscript. The photo credit and JPEG image file should be listed in the following format: The production name as it appears in the essay, in Italics, followed by a period. Then 'Photo' (not in Italics) followed by a colon, and the photographer's credit (not in Italics) ending with a period. For eg: " HAMLET. Photo: Arno Declair." For submissions, please send proposals or articles to our editors at EuropeanStages@gmail.com View Past Issues Curren Issue Past Issues Volume 21 Volume 17 - 1 Volume 20 Volume 19 Volume 18 Archive Search Article Name Article Author Publishing Date Article Name Article Author and Date Publishing Date Article Name Article Author and Date Publishing Date Article Name Article Author and Date Publishing Date Article Name Article Author and Date Publishing Date Article Name Article Author and Date Publishing Date Article Name Article Author and Date Publishing Date Article Name Article Author and Date Publishing Date Article Name Article Author and Date Publishing Date Article Name Article Author and Date Publishing Date Article Name Article Author and Date Publishing Date Article Name Article Author and Date Publishing Date People Editors Steve Earnest, Editor Kalina Stefanova, Co-Editor Dominica Laster, Co-Editor Krystyna Illakowicz, Co-Editor Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Marvin Carlson Director of Publications Frank Hentschker Executive Director Gaurav Singh Nijjer Digital and Web Coordinator Advisory Board Joshua Abrams Christopher Balme Maria Delgado Allen Kuharsky Bryce Lease Jennifer Parker-Starbuck Magda Romańska Laurence Senelick Daniele Vianello Phyllis Zatlin Contact Email EuropeanStages@gmail.com

View the collection of books, plays and other literature on performing arts published and supported by the Martin E. Segal Theater Center at the Graduate Center CUNY. Books At The Martin E. Segal Center CUNY, we are dedicated to supporting the research, dissemination, and discourse of the performing arts through our extensive collection of books, publications, and journals. Our diverse collection covers a wide range of topics in the performing arts, from theater and dance to music and film. We are committed to providing a comprehensive resource for scholars, researchers, and artists alike. New Plays from the Caribbean Stéphanie Bérard, with Frank Hentschker An anthology of six contemporary Francophone Caribbean plays. BAiT: Buenos Aires in Translation Daniel Veronese, Lola Arias, Federico Leon, Rafael Spregelburd, Jean Graham-Jones This book brings US readers cutting-edge work from one of Latin America’s most vibrant theatrical scenes: Czech Plays: Seven New Works Marcy Arlin, Gwynn MacDonald, Daniel Gerould The first English-language anthology of Czech plays written after the 1989 “Velvet Revolution. Four Millennial Plays From Belgium David Willinger This anthology captures the tendencies of contemporary European playwriting at the beginning of the new millennium. Intermeddlers Sarah Stites, Frank Hentschker An examination of the censorship of LiIllian Hellman's The Children's Hour. New Plays from Italy Vol 2: Three Plays Daria Deflorian, Antonio Tagliarini, Maria Galante, Michele Santeramo, Allison Eikerenkoetter, Jane House, Frank Hentschker This collection features an anthology of three contemporary plays from Italy. Pixérécourt: Four Melodramas Daniel Gerould, Marvin Carlson A collection of dramas from French theatre director and playwright René-Charles Guilbert de Pixerécourt. Selected Essays: New Directions Nehad Selaiha, Marvin Carlson Nehad Selaiha chronicles the rise of the Free Theatre Movement in Egypt in the late 1980s. Szertelen Színdarabok New Yorkból (Riff Raff Plays from New York) Attila Szabó, Frank Hentschker Hungarian language anthology of five contemporary American theater plays. The Art of Assembly Florian Malzacher A survey of contemporary theatre to demonstrate its political potential in both form and content. Three Poems Liwaa Yazji A collection of poems from Syrian playwright and filmmaker Liwaa Yazji. Zeami and the Nô Theatre in the World Benito Ortolani, Samuel L. Leiter This volume contains the proceedings of the “Zeami and the Nô Theatre in the World” symposium, held in New York City in October 1997 Theatre Research Resources in New York City Marvin Carlson A comprehensive catalogue of New York City research facilities available to theatre scholars. Barcelona Plays Josep M. Benet i Jornet, Sergi Belbel, Lluisa Cunielle, Pau Miro, Marion Peter Holt, Sharon G. Feldman A Collection of New Works by Catalan Playwrights DANCE New York: Performed Manifestos Frank Hentschker A snapshot of the vibrant New York dance scene, through their manifestos. Four Plays from North Africa Abdelkader Alloula, Jalila Baccar, Fatima Gallaire, Tayeb Saddiki A collection of dramatic texts from the Maghreb region of Northwest Africa. Jan Fabre: I Am A Mistake Jan Fabre Seven works from the Flemish-Dutch theatre artist Jan Fabre. New Plays from Italy Volume 3 Valeria Orani, Frank Hentschker A collection of contemporary Italian plays presented in English. Playwrights Before the Fall Daniel Gerould A unique anthology playwrights from Poland, Slovenia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Romania in the backdrop of rebellion, war and revolution. Selected Essays: Perspectives Nehad Selaiha, Marvin Carlson Nehad Selaiha draws attention to important performers, directors, dramaturges, critics and managers of Egyptian Theatre. Ta’ziyeh - Ten Contemporary Indigenous Plays From Iran M.J. Yousefian Kenari, Marvin Carlson A collection of the Ta'ziyeh passion play of Iran, one of the world's most elaborate, wide-spread and long-lasting traditions of religious drama. The Heirs of Molière Marvin Carlson Four French Comedies of the 17th and 18th Centuries Timbre 4: Two Plays by Claudio Tolcachir Claudio Tolcachir, Jean Graham-Jones Collection of plays from Claudio Tolcachir’s Timbre 4 company based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. roMANIA after 2000 Saviana Stanescu, Daniel Gerould. The first anthology of new Romanian drama published in the United States A Permanent Parliament: Notes on Social Choreography Cory Tamler An experiment in writing about performance from the conviction that our entire beings (thoughtbodies) make theory and politics. Comedy: A Bibliography Meghan Duffy, Daniel Gerould A bibliography of critical studies in english on the theory and practice of comedy in drama, theatre, and performance. Decadent Histories: Four Plays by Amelia Hertz Amelia Hertz, Jadwiga Kosicka An innovative collection of plays based on bizarre and macabre episodes from history and legend. Four Plays from Syria: Sa‘dallah Wannous Marvin Carlson, Safi Mahfouz, Robert Myers, Nada Saab This collection contains four full-length works by Sa‘dallah Wannous, available in English for the first time. Jan Fabre: The Servant of Beauty Jan Fabre This volume of monologues is the second collection of works by Jan Fabre for the theatre in an English translation. New Plays from Italy Volume 4 Valeria Orani, Frank Hentschker A collection of contemporary Italian plays, presented in English. Quick Change Daniel Gerould A volume of previously uncollected writings by Daniel Gerould from Comparative Literature, Modern Drama, PAJ, TDR, SEEP, yale/theater and other journals. Selected Essays: Plays and Playwrights Nehad Selaiha, Marvin Carlson A stimulating eyewitness account of modern Egyptian drama by Nehad Selaiha. Ten Years PRELUDE Frank Hentschker, Yu Chien Liu Capturing 10 years of the contemporary performances and conversations of the Segal Center's PRELUDE festival. The Trilogy of Future Memory Jalila Baccar, Fadhel Jaïbi, Marvin Carlson, Nabil Cherni A collection of recent work by Tunisian playwright and actress Jalila Baccar and director co-author Fadhel Jaibi, capturing the complexity and depth of grand themes prevalent in Arab societies. Two Plays: Fleeting Stages Josep M. Benet i Jornet, Marion Peter Holt A collection of two plays by Catalan playwright Josep M. Benet i Jornet. An Incomprehensible Mother Tongue Valère Novarina, Frank Hentschker This volume contains two new American translations of works by Valère Novarina Contemporary Theatre in Egypt Alfred Farag, Gamal Maqsoud, Lenin El-Ramly, Marvin Carlson Contains the first English translation of short plays by leading Egyptian playwrights. Four Arab Hamlet Plays Nabyl Lahlou, Mamduh Adwan, Nader Omran, Jawad al-Assadi, Mahmoud Aboudoma, Marvin Carlson, Magaret Litvin, Joy Arab Jumping off from Shakespeare’s tragedy, the Arab Hamlet tradition has produced bitter and hilarious political satire, musical comedy, and farce. Four Works for the Theatre Hugo Claus, David Willinger, Luk Truyts, Luc Deneulin. A collection of dramatic texts from the Flemish writer and playwright Hugo Claus. New Plays from Italy Vol 1: The Origin of the World Frank Hentschker, Jane House A story of basic and perverse family dynamics, the play is an all-female human comedy in three acts. New Plays from Spain Ernesto Caballero, Guillem Clua, Cristina Colmena, Mar Gómez Glez, Borja Ortiz de Gondra, Alfredo Sanzol, Emilio Williams This selection of plays offers insight into the evolution of Spanish art and culture in the context of the country’s current situation. Selected Essays: Cultural Encounters 1 and 2 Nehad Selaiha, Marvin Carlson Volume 4 of Nehad Selaiha's analysis of Egyptian Theatre focuses on cultural relationships. Shakespeare Made French: Four Plays by Jean-François Ducis Jean-François Ducis, Marvin Carlson An exciting collection of Jean-François Ducis' radical reworkings of William Shakespeare's most famous tragedies, penned on the eve of the French Revolution. The Arab Oedipus: Four Plays Marvin Carlson, Tawfiq al-Hakim, Ali Ahmad Bakathir, Ali Salim, Walid Ikhlasi A varied collection of Arabic explorations of one of the central dramas of the European canon. Theatre from Medieval Cairo: The Ibn Dāniyāl Trilogy (Egypt) Marvin Carlson, Safi Mahfouz The first-ever English translation of three of Ibn Dāniyāl’s saucy puppet plays. Witkiewicz: Seven Plays Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Daniel Gerould An English-translation anthology of seven of Witkiewicz’s most important plays.

Watch Respoken by Sidney Ken / Thai Phirun Hul at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2026. A visionary actor and his team working to revive Cambodia’s Lakhon Niyeay (Spoken Theatre) facing personal and professional challenges as he prepares for a show that hasn’t been staged in six years, amidst an uncertain future. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Respoken Sidney Ken / Thai Phirun Hul At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2026 Screening Information This film will be screened on May 30, at 1:40 PM, at The Segal Theatre Center RSVP Please note there is limited seating available for in-person screenings at The Segal Centre, which are offered on a first-come first-serve basis. Country Cambodia Language Khmer Running Time 26 minutes Year of Release 2024 About The Film A visionary actor and his team working to revive Cambodia’s Lakhon Niyeay (Spoken Theatre) facing personal and professional challenges as he prepares for a show that hasn’t been staged in six years, amidst an uncertain future. Producer KIMKAHAPTEI TANN Co-Directors SIDNEY KEN THAI PHIRUN HUL Extra Camera Work CHANDARA KOAM Assistant Camera KIMSRUN SOK Interviewees PHEARITH NEN SOPHEAK SOUNG PONRONG SENG SREYLEAK CHAN SINA CHHON Editors SIDNEY KEN CHANDARA KOAM Colorist CHANDARA KOAM Special Thanks to EsaiVoler's Media Team Department of Media & Communication CHHEANGMENG THAY CHANTHIDA HEM About The Artist(s) Sidney Ken is a Cambodian director and colorist working at the intersection of documentary and commercial filmmaking. His work blends cinematic storytelling with real-world narratives, often focusing on identity, youth, and cultural shifts. Sidney is the founder of Limelight, a vintage lens rental house based in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. He is best known as the director of Respoken (2024), an award-winning documentary on Cambodia’s spoken theater scene, and Cool Like Us: La Cima Series (2026), a 6-part branded documentary series spotlighting emerging hip-hop artists. Sidney has directed multiple digital commercials for Samsung’s Galaxy S25 Ultra launch in Cambodia. Sidney has also directed and color graded campaigns for international brands and organizations, including Starbucks, Prudential, Oppo, UNDP, and the European Union. Hul Thai Phirun is an award-winning Cambodian filmmaker working across documentary and cinematic storytelling. His practice centers on people-driven narratives, grounded in trust, observation, and emotional authenticity. As a cinematographer, his work includes Sbek Touch (2024) and A Taste of Tradition (2024), recognized at regional festivals. As an alumnus of Cambodia Film Lab, he has collaborated with NGOs and international organizations on socially driven projects, contributing to stories focused on reconciliation, culture, and community. Chandara Koam is a Phnom Penh–based filmmaker and photographer working across directing, editing, and visual storytelling. Since beginning his practice in 2017, he has developed his craft through independent projects and professional productions, with a focus on music videos and narrative-driven visuals, and recently graduated from Cambodia Film Lab training. Tann Kim Kahaptei (Kris) is a Cambodian filmmaker and producer with a background in Media and Communication. His work focuses on creating films that balance entertainment with cultural preservation, often aiming to spark meaningful conversation. Through his projects, Kris explores ways to connect contemporary storytelling with tradition, positioning his work within Cambodia’s evolving film landscape. Get in touch with the artist(s) sidneyken.dp@gmail.com and follow them on social media https://www.sidneyken.com/, https://www.imdb.com/name/nm13891739/, https://www.instagram.com/ken.sidney/, https://www.facebook.com/sidney.r3d/, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respoken, Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2026 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here

Watch Robert Wilson In Situ by Pauline de Grunne at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2026. A few days before the opening of the Watermill Center, Robert Wilson is in a race against the clock. This documentary captures Wilson in the process of taking possession of a vacant building on Long Island — a former Western Union research facility on the edge of the Shinnecock Reservation — and transforming it into an art center that will become one of the most significant residency spaces for experimental performance in the world. The film moves between Wilson's relationship to this specific physical endeavor and a broader reflection on his artistic history: he looks back at the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds, the artistic community where his theatrical work began in the 1960s, and reflects on what it means to return to that spirit of collective creation and experimentation in a dedicated institutional form. Friends, collaborators, and artists Wilson has worked with over his career offer their perspectives on the man and his project — building a picture of Wilson not just as a theater director but as an educator, a gatherer of people, and a builder of community. As director Pauline de Grunne described it: "A few days before the opening of Watermill Center, Robert Wilson is in a race against the clock. After a decades-long international stage career, he looks back at the special laboratory that was the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds, the artistic community where he got his start, and decides to return to his roots." — International Festival of Films on Art The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Robert Wilson In Situ Pauline de Grunne At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2026 Screening Information This film will be screened on June 3 at 7:00 PM, at Anthology Film Archives RSVP Please note that these screenings are ticketed and require prior registration at the Anthology Film Archives website. Country Belgium / United States Language English Running Time 90 minutes Year of Release 2017 About The Film A few days before the opening of the Watermill Center, Robert Wilson is in a race against the clock. This documentary captures Wilson in the process of taking possession of a vacant building on Long Island — a former Western Union research facility on the edge of the Shinnecock Reservation — and transforming it into an art center that will become one of the most significant residency spaces for experimental performance in the world. The film moves between Wilson's relationship to this specific physical endeavor and a broader reflection on his artistic history: he looks back at the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds, the artistic community where his theatrical work began in the 1960s, and reflects on what it means to return to that spirit of collective creation and experimentation in a dedicated institutional form. Friends, collaborators, and artists Wilson has worked with over his career offer their perspectives on the man and his project — building a picture of Wilson not just as a theater director but as an educator, a gatherer of people, and a builder of community. As director Pauline de Grunne described it: "A few days before the opening of Watermill Center, Robert Wilson is in a race against the clock. After a decades-long international stage career, he looks back at the special laboratory that was the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds, the artistic community where he got his start, and decides to return to his roots." — International Festival of Films on Art Director: Pauline de Grunne Featuring: Robert Wilson About The Artist(s) Pauline de Grunne is a Belgian documentary filmmaker specializing in films about art and artists. Her work has screened at the International Festival of Films on Art (FIFA) and other international documentary festivals. Robert Wilson In Situ follows the theater director in the period around the opening of the Watermill Center on Long Island, weaving together personal testimony from Wilson's collaborators with footage of the Center's creation. Get in touch with the artist(s) and follow them on social media Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2026 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here

Watch The Making of a Monologue: Robert Wilson's Hamlet by Marion Kessel at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2026. This behind-the-scenes documentary reveals how Robert Wilson created his extraordinary one-man production of Hamlet, drawing on rehearsal footage, performance documentation, and intimate access to Wilson's working process. Where the companion film Hamlet: A Monologue presents the finished production, The Making of a Monologue traces the path that led there — showing how Wilson approached the challenge of embodying every character in Shakespeare's play alone, how he developed the physical vocabulary for each figure, and how he structured the text to operate simultaneously as interior monologue and theatrical event. The film captures the rich, multi-dimensional texture of Wilson's creative process: the painstaking attention to gesture and movement, the interplay between visual composition and spoken text, and the way Wilson works backwards from spatial and visual problems rather than forward from psychological or narrative ones. For viewers who have seen the production itself, the film provides an invaluable counterpoint — a view into the work that lies behind the finished image. For those coming to Wilson's theater for the first time, it serves as a thoughtful and accessible guide to a distinctive way of making performance. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents The Making of a Monologue: Robert Wilson's Hamlet Marion Kessel At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2026 Screening Information This film will be screened on June 1 at 8:45 PM, at Anthology Film Archives RSVP Please note that these screenings are ticketed and require prior registration at the Anthology Film Archives website. Country Germany Language English Running Time 62 minutes Year of Release 1995 About The Film This behind-the-scenes documentary reveals how Robert Wilson created his extraordinary one-man production of Hamlet, drawing on rehearsal footage, performance documentation, and intimate access to Wilson's working process. Where the companion film Hamlet: A Monologue presents the finished production, The Making of a Monologue traces the path that led there — showing how Wilson approached the challenge of embodying every character in Shakespeare's play alone, how he developed the physical vocabulary for each figure, and how he structured the text to operate simultaneously as interior monologue and theatrical event. The film captures the rich, multi-dimensional texture of Wilson's creative process: the painstaking attention to gesture and movement, the interplay between visual composition and spoken text, and the way Wilson works backwards from spatial and visual problems rather than forward from psychological or narrative ones. For viewers who have seen the production itself, the film provides an invaluable counterpoint — a view into the work that lies behind the finished image. For those coming to Wilson's theater for the first time, it serves as a thoughtful and accessible guide to a distinctive way of making performance. Director: Marion Kessel Featuring: Robert Wilson About The Artist(s) Marion Kessel is a documentary filmmaker who has worked in the documentation of theater and performance. The Making of a Monologue, her behind-the-scenes account of the creation of Robert Wilson's solo Hamlet, draws on extensive rehearsal access to provide one of the most illuminating records of Wilson's working methods available on film. Get in touch with the artist(s) and follow them on social media Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2026 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here

Watch Obsessed with Light by Sabine Krayenbühl & Zeva Oelbaum at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2026. Obsessed with Light is a meditation on light and the enduring obsession to create. The film pulls back the curtain on Loïe Fuller, a wildly original performer who revolutionized the visual culture of the early 20th century. Creating a dialogue between the past and the present, the documentary delves into the astonishing influence Fuller's work has on contemporary artists including artists like Red Hot Chili Peppers, Taylor Swift, Bill T. Jones, Shakira and William Kentridge. In the process, the film uncovers commonalities that connect these creative luminaries to Fuller and to each other. The American creator of modern dance, Fuller (1862-1928) invented a completely new kind of spectacle which combined dance, fabric and movement. She also pioneered the ingenious use of electricity for the stage, even building a glass floor so that she could be lit from below. Anyone who has been to a rock concert has seen a modern version of her lighting designs. Fuller propelled herself into swirling abstractions that made audiences gasp and she immediately understood the importance of protecting her ownership of these innovations. Always struggling against a flood of imitators, Fuller was the first choreographer to attempt to copyright her dances and sued to protect her work as early as 1893. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Obsessed with Light Sabine Krayenbühl & Zeva Oelbaum At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2026 Screening Information This film will be screened on June 1, at 6:40 PM, at The Segal Theatre Center RSVP Please note there is limited seating available for in-person screenings at The Segal Centre, which are offered on a first-come first-serve basis. Country USA, Germany, France Language English, French, Spanish, Italian, Icelandic Running Time 90 minutes Year of Release 2025 About The Film Obsessed with Light is a meditation on light and the enduring obsession to create. The film pulls back the curtain on Loïe Fuller, a wildly original performer who revolutionized the visual culture of the early 20th century. Creating a dialogue between the past and the present, the documentary delves into the astonishing influence Fuller's work has on contemporary artists including artists like Red Hot Chili Peppers, Taylor Swift, Bill T. Jones, Shakira and William Kentridge. In the process, the film uncovers commonalities that connect these creative luminaries to Fuller and to each other. The American creator of modern dance, Fuller (1862-1928) invented a completely new kind of spectacle which combined dance, fabric and movement. She also pioneered the ingenious use of electricity for the stage, even building a glass floor so that she could be lit from below. Anyone who has been to a rock concert has seen a modern version of her lighting designs. Fuller propelled herself into swirling abstractions that made audiences gasp and she immediately understood the importance of protecting her ownership of these innovations. Always struggling against a flood of imitators, Fuller was the first choreographer to attempt to copyright her dances and sued to protect her work as early as 1893. Director: Sabine Krayenbühl, Zeva Oelbaum Producer: Zeva Oelbaum, Sabine Krayenbühl, Christian Popp Executive Producer: Susan Margolin, Elizabeth Rodriguez Chandler, Denise Benmosche, Ruedi Gerber Cinematographer: Bob Richman, Claudia Raschke Editor: Sabine Krayenbühl About The Artist(s) Sabine Krayenbühl is an award-winning filmmaker and editor known for acclaimed documentaries such as Letters from Baghdad and My Architect. Zeva Oelbaum is a filmmaker and producer whose work spans documentary and photography, including Letters from Baghdad and Ahead of Time. Christian Popp is an international producer whose films have screened at major festivals including Cannes, Berlinale, and IDFA. Susan Margolin is a pioneer in documentary distribution and founder of Docurama Films. Elizabeth Rodriguez Chandler is the founder of Crescent River Productions, focusing on socially engaged storytelling. Denise Benmosche is an arts patron and producer supporting projects in visual and performing arts. Ruedi Gerber is a filmmaker known for documentaries on performance and dance, including works on Anna Halprin. Bob Richman is an Emmy-nominated cinematographer known for An Inconvenient Truth and collaborations with the Maysles brothers. Claudia Raschke is an award-winning cinematographer whose work includes RBG, Boys State, and Fauci. Get in touch with the artist(s) https://www.obsessedwithlightdocumentary.com/ and follow them on social media https://www.obsessedwithlightdocumentary.com/ Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2026 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here

Watch Robert Wilson and the Civil Wars by Howard Brookner at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2026. Robert Wilson and the CIVIL warS would have been the great theater artist's magnum opus: a twelve-hour historical opera in six distinct parts, each rehearsed in a different country — Germany, France, Japan, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United States — for a unified performance at the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. The work, formally titled The Civil Wars: A Tree Is Best Measured When It Is Down, encompassed the American Civil War, the life and death of Frederick the Great, and the unification of Italy, drawing on imagery from L. Frank Baum, Jules Verne, and Civil War photographer Mathew Brady, with music by Philip Glass, David Byrne, and Gavin Bryars. Filmmaker Howard Brookner — a close friend of Wilson's — followed the director across six countries as he worked to bring this impossibly ambitious project to completion, documenting the dizzying complexity of coordinating multiple international theater companies, the relentless funding difficulties, the strikes by Italian theater unions, and the sheer physical and logistical exhaustion of the undertaking. The film traces not only the practical mechanics of creating an epic on this scale but also the history of Wilson's visual and theatrical approach more broadly, examining how his precisely painted stage images — drawing more from the traditions of visual art than from orthodox literary theater — are created and how they communicate meaning without relying on conventional language or psychology. The project ultimately collapsed: funding fell through, and the complete work was never performed. Brookner's film remains the definitive portrait of one of the great unrealized artistic visions of the 20th century. The original film materials were long unseen after being damaged in Hurricane Sandy in 2012; a twelve-year restoration by Aaron Brookner (Howard's nephew) premiered at the New York Film Festival in September 2025. A Janus Films release, restored in 2025 by Pinball London, Janus Films, and The Criterion Collection. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Robert Wilson and the Civil Wars Howard Brookner At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2026 Screening Information This film will be screened on May 30 at 8:30 PM, and June 5 at 8:45 PM, at Anthology Film Archives RSVP Please note that these screenings are ticketed and require prior registration at the Anthology Film Archives website. Country United States Language English Running Time 90 minutes Year of Release 1987 About The Film Robert Wilson and the CIVIL warS would have been the great theater artist's magnum opus: a twelve-hour historical opera in six distinct parts, each rehearsed in a different country — Germany, France, Japan, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United States — for a unified performance at the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. The work, formally titled The Civil Wars: A Tree Is Best Measured When It Is Down, encompassed the American Civil War, the life and death of Frederick the Great, and the unification of Italy, drawing on imagery from L. Frank Baum, Jules Verne, and Civil War photographer Mathew Brady, with music by Philip Glass, David Byrne, and Gavin Bryars. Filmmaker Howard Brookner — a close friend of Wilson's — followed the director across six countries as he worked to bring this impossibly ambitious project to completion, documenting the dizzying complexity of coordinating multiple international theater companies, the relentless funding difficulties, the strikes by Italian theater unions, and the sheer physical and logistical exhaustion of the undertaking. The film traces not only the practical mechanics of creating an epic on this scale but also the history of Wilson's visual and theatrical approach more broadly, examining how his precisely painted stage images — drawing more from the traditions of visual art than from orthodox literary theater — are created and how they communicate meaning without relying on conventional language or psychology. The project ultimately collapsed: funding fell through, and the complete work was never performed. Brookner's film remains the definitive portrait of one of the great unrealized artistic visions of the 20th century. The original film materials were long unseen after being damaged in Hurricane Sandy in 2012; a twelve-year restoration by Aaron Brookner (Howard's nephew) premiered at the New York Film Festival in September 2025. A Janus Films release, restored in 2025 by Pinball London, Janus Films, and The Criterion Collection. Director: Howard Brookner Restoration supervised by Aaron Brookner, Paula Vaccaro, and Carlos Morales/EPost A Janus Films release Restored by Pinball London – Janus Films – The Criterion Collection About The Artist(s) Howard Brookner (April 30, 1954 – April 27, 1989) was an American filmmaker whose short career produced three distinctive and celebrated documentary and narrative features. Born in New York City and raised in Great Neck, Long Island, he studied at Phillips Exeter Academy before earning a B.A. in political science from Columbia University and an M.A. in art history and film from New York University. At NYU, Brookner began his debut film as his senior thesis, assembling a crew that included classmates Tom DiCillo (camera) and Jim Jarmusch (sound). The resulting feature, Burroughs (1983), offered an unprecedented intimate portrait of writer William S. Burroughs and premiered at the New York Film Festival, later airing on BBC Arena. The film established Brookner as a documentarian with a gift for gaining genuine access to complex artistic figures. His second major documentary, Robert Wilson and the Civil Wars, followed the avant-garde theater director across six countries as Wilson struggled to mount his unrealized magnum opus for the 1984 Summer Olympics. Shot on 16mm in Minneapolis, Rome, Rotterdam, Cologne, Tokyo, and Marseille, the film features interviews with Philip Glass, Heiner Müller, Lucinda Childs, David Byrne, and others. It screened at avant-garde and cinema festivals and aired on public television in the US, on the BBC in the UK, and on ZDF in Germany. Several of the film's original elements were lost to Hurricane Sandy in 2012; a painstaking restoration, led by Brookner's nephew Aaron Brookner over twelve years, was unveiled at the New York Film Festival in September 2025. Brookner's final film, Bloodhounds of Broadway (1989), was a narrative feature he co-wrote and directed. He died on April 27, 1989, three days before his 35th birthday, of AIDS-related complications. His archive, discovered across multiple locations in the US and Europe in 2012, formed the basis for his nephew Aaron Brookner's documentary tribute Uncle Howard (2016), executive produced by Jim Jarmusch. Get in touch with the artist(s) and follow them on social media Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2026 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here

Watch Ewa – The Last Lesson by Andrea Mura / Federico Savonitto at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2026. After sixty years of theatrical and performative research, Ewa Benesz decides to leave Italy and return to Lublin, the city she fled in the 1980s during Polish martial law. The advancement of age forces her to discontinue her workshops, which involve people from all over the world. Ewa Benesz must say goodbye to her students, some of whom have maintained a relationship with her that has lasted for decades. Ewa's theatrical practice and research draw from a tradition and methodology that can only be transmitted personally, so there is a strong risk that her knowledge will be lost forever. In her return to Poland, Ewa confronts the silent weight of a life spent away from home, in a journey that is simultaneously an ending and a return to her origins. Polish actress, holds a BA from the University of Lublin and a diploma of the Academy of Dramatic Arts in Warsaw. She worked in the Instytut Aktora -Teatr Laboratorium managed by Jerzy Grotowski in Poland and she met Peter Brook. After fled the country due to the Martial Laws she collaborated with Rena Mirecka in the paratheatrical projects until 1996 – carried out in Europe, Israel and America. Since 1997 she has conducted her peculiar paratheatrical and theatrical workshops. She lives in the Sardinian mountains, where she conducts a practical research inspired by the ancient Sanskrit Vedic texts and cosmogonist myths. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Ewa – The Last Lesson Andrea Mura / Federico Savonitto At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2026 Screening Information This film will be screened on June 1, at 5:30 PM, at The Segal Theatre Center RSVP Please note there is limited seating available for in-person screenings at The Segal Centre, which are offered on a first-come first-serve basis. Country Italy, Poland Language Italian, Polish Running Time 67 minutes Year of Release 2025 About The Film After sixty years of theatrical and performative research, Ewa Benesz decides to leave Italy and return to Lublin, the city she fled in the 1980s during Polish martial law. The advancement of age forces her to discontinue her workshops, which involve people from all over the world. Ewa Benesz must say goodbye to her students, some of whom have maintained a relationship with her that has lasted for decades. Ewa's theatrical practice and research draw from a tradition and methodology that can only be transmitted personally, so there is a strong risk that her knowledge will be lost forever. In her return to Poland, Ewa confronts the silent weight of a life spent away from home, in a journey that is simultaneously an ending and a return to her origins. Polish actress, holds a BA from the University of Lublin and a diploma of the Academy of Dramatic Arts in Warsaw. She worked in the Instytut Aktora -Teatr Laboratorium managed by Jerzy Grotowski in Poland and she met Peter Brook. After fled the country due to the Martial Laws she collaborated with Rena Mirecka in the paratheatrical projects until 1996 – carried out in Europe, Israel and America. Since 1997 she has conducted her peculiar paratheatrical and theatrical workshops. She lives in the Sardinian mountains, where she conducts a practical research inspired by the ancient Sanskrit Vedic texts and cosmogonist myths. With Ewa Benesz Directed by Andrea Mura, Federico Savonitto Produced by Chiara Andrich, Andrea Mura, Federico Savonitto Cinematography Andrea Mura, Federico Savonitto, Chiara Andrich Editing Jacopo Quadri, Nicolò Tettamanti Sound engineer Camilla Iannetti Camera operator Camilla Iannetti Sound design and Music Francesco De Marco Color correction Giada Di Fonzo About The Artist(s) Andrea Mura Italian director and producer with a background in Philosophy and a diploma from the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. His documentary work, with works such as “Nodas” (2015) and “Transumanze” (2021), explores the dialogue between memory, popular traditions and contemporaneity. His films have gained recognition at numerous international festivals, including RAI Film Festival (Bristol), Primed (Marseille), See You Sound (Turin), Visioni Italiane (Bologna) and DocuMed (Tunis). As a producer, he has collaborated on Ginko Film projects, including François Xavier Destors and Alfonso Pinto's “Toxicily” (France-Italy, 2023) and Giulia Camba's “Oplà” (Italy, 2024). Since 2014, he has shared the artistic direction of the Sole Luna Doc Film Festival in Palermo with Chiara Andrich. Federico Savonitto Documentary director. A graduate of the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, he has long held the position of teaching tutor at the CSC - Sede Sicilia, taught filmmaking, and made several documentaries such as La fine che non ho fatto (2011), La città sconosciuta (2013), Pellegrino (2017), In un futuro aprile (2019), Not Available - It's about Yann Keller (2022), An Invisible Enemy (2022) The Secret Plan (2024) that participated and won awards at several international festivals, such as Biografilm Festival, Giornate degli Autori, DOK Leipzig, Locarno Film Festival, Listapad, DOC- Cévennes, Festival dei Popoli, Trieste Film Festival, Trento Film Festival, Ortigia Film Festival, Asolo Art Film Festival. Get in touch with the artist(s) info@ginkofilm.it and follow them on social media https://www.ginkofilm.it/en/film/the-last-lesson/ Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2026 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here

Watch Robert Wilson on Screen by Screenings at Anthology Film Archives at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2026. This summer, in collaboration with the Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance, The Robert Wilson Estate & Trust, and The Watermill Center, Anthology presents an extensive film series celebrating the work of the great theater artist Robert Wilson, who passed away in 2025 at the age of 83. SCREENING SCHEDULE: Einstein on the Beach: The Changing Image of Opera by Mark Obenhaus (1984, 58 min) Documents the 1984 BAM restaging of Einstein on the Beach, exploring the collaboration between Philip Glass and Robert Wilson through rehearsal footage and performance excerpts. Screening Details: May 29 at 6:45 PM; June 4 at 9:00 PM ––––––––––––––––––––– Overture for KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDenia TERRACE by Filmmaker Unknown (1972, 80 min) Archival record of a durational 1972 performance by Robert Wilson and collaborators. Preserved from original footage, the film captures a large ensemble work with no surviving soundtrack, emphasizing visual composition and theatrical scale. Screening Details: May 29 at 8:45 PM; June 5 at 6:45 PM ––––––––––––––––––––– Video 50 + Deafman Glance by Robert Wilson (1978/1981, ~85 min) A pairing of experimental video works: Video 50, a sequence of surreal, stylized vignettes, and Deafman Glance, an adaptation of Wilson’s silent opera exploring ritual, abstraction, and unsettling narrative imagery. Screening Details: May 30 at 6:15 PM; June 4 at 6:45 PM ––––––––––––––––––––– Robert Wilson and the Civil Wars by Howard Brookner (1987, 90 min) Follows the creation of Wilson’s ambitious, unfinished opera The CIVIL warS, tracing its international production process and the challenges of realizing a large-scale, multidisciplinary performance work. Screening Details: May 30 at 8:30 PM; June 5 at 8:45 PM ––––––––––––––––––––– Stations + La Femme à la Cafetière + La Mort de Molière by Robert Wilson (1982/1989/1995, ~90 min) Three experimental works exploring childhood imagination, painterly performance, and theatrical death. Combining visual composition and minimal dialogue, these films reflect Wilson’s signature approach to time, image, and abstraction. Screening Details: May 31 at 5:30 PM; June 2 at 6:30 PM ––––––––––––––––––––– The Black Rider by Theo Janssen & Ralph Quinke (1990, 120 min) A documentary on the making of The Black Rider, Wilson’s collaboration with Tom Waits and William S. Burroughs, featuring rehearsal footage, interviews, and scenes from the Hamburg premiere. Screening Details: May 31 at 8:00 PM ––––––––––––––––––––– Hamlet: A Monologue by Franco Laera (1997–2000, 95 min) Documents Robert Wilson’s solo performance of Hamlet, in which he plays all characters in a restructured, dreamlike interpretation of Shakespeare’s text. Screening Details: June 1 at 6:30 PM ––––––––––––––––––––– The Making of a Monologue: Robert Wilson’s Hamlet by Marion Kessel (1995, 62 min) Behind-the-scenes look at Wilson’s creative process, using rehearsal and performance footage to reveal the development of his one-man Hamlet. Screening Details: June 1 at 8:45 PM ––––––––––––––––––––– Bob Wilson’s Life & Death of Marina Abramovic by Giada Colagrande (2012, 57 min) Documents the creation of an experimental opera on Marina Abramović, capturing the collaboration between Wilson and fellow artists through rehearsal footage and interviews. Screening Details: June 2 at 8:45 PM ––––––––––––––––––––– Robert Wilson In Situ by Pauline de Grunne (2017, 90 min) Explores Wilson’s creation of The Watermill Center, combining archival material and interviews to examine his artistic philosophy and collaborative practice. Screening Details: June 3 at 7:00 PM ––––––––––––––––––––– Watermill 1993 + Watermill Center Summer Program 2009 by Stefan Kurt & Tomek Jeziorski (1993/2010, ~65 min) Two films documenting the evolution of The Watermill Center as a space for interdisciplinary artistic experimentation and residency-based creation. Screening Details: June 3 at 8:45 PM The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Robert Wilson on Screen Screenings at Anthology Film Archives At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2026 Screening Information These films will be screened at the Anthology Film Archives from May 29 to June 5. For more information and tickets, visit AFA website. RSVP Please note that these screenings are ticketed and require prior registration at the Anthology Film Archives website. Country Multiple Language Multiple Running Time - minutes Year of Release Multiple About The Film This summer, in collaboration with the Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance, The Robert Wilson Estate & Trust, and The Watermill Center, Anthology presents an extensive film series celebrating the work of the great theater artist Robert Wilson, who passed away in 2025 at the age of 83. SCREENING SCHEDULE: Einstein on the Beach: The Changing Image of Opera by Mark Obenhaus (1984, 58 min) Documents the 1984 BAM restaging of Einstein on the Beach, exploring the collaboration between Philip Glass and Robert Wilson through rehearsal footage and performance excerpts. Screening Details: May 29 at 6:45 PM; June 4 at 9:00 PM ––––––––––––––––––––– Overture for KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDenia TERRACE by Filmmaker Unknown (1972, 80 min) Archival record of a durational 1972 performance by Robert Wilson and collaborators. Preserved from original footage, the film captures a large ensemble work with no surviving soundtrack, emphasizing visual composition and theatrical scale. Screening Details: May 29 at 8:45 PM; June 5 at 6:45 PM ––––––––––––––––––––– Video 50 + Deafman Glance by Robert Wilson (1978/1981, ~85 min) A pairing of experimental video works: Video 50, a sequence of surreal, stylized vignettes, and Deafman Glance, an adaptation of Wilson’s silent opera exploring ritual, abstraction, and unsettling narrative imagery. Screening Details: May 30 at 6:15 PM; June 4 at 6:45 PM ––––––––––––––––––––– Robert Wilson and the Civil Wars by Howard Brookner (1987, 90 min) Follows the creation of Wilson’s ambitious, unfinished opera The CIVIL warS, tracing its international production process and the challenges of realizing a large-scale, multidisciplinary performance work. Screening Details: May 30 at 8:30 PM; June 5 at 8:45 PM ––––––––––––––––––––– Stations + La Femme à la Cafetière + La Mort de Molière by Robert Wilson (1982/1989/1995, ~90 min) Three experimental works exploring childhood imagination, painterly performance, and theatrical death. Combining visual composition and minimal dialogue, these films reflect Wilson’s signature approach to time, image, and abstraction. Screening Details: May 31 at 5:30 PM; June 2 at 6:30 PM ––––––––––––––––––––– The Black Rider by Theo Janssen & Ralph Quinke (1990, 120 min) A documentary on the making of The Black Rider, Wilson’s collaboration with Tom Waits and William S. Burroughs, featuring rehearsal footage, interviews, and scenes from the Hamburg premiere. Screening Details: May 31 at 8:00 PM ––––––––––––––––––––– Hamlet: A Monologue by Franco Laera (1997–2000, 95 min) Documents Robert Wilson’s solo performance of Hamlet, in which he plays all characters in a restructured, dreamlike interpretation of Shakespeare’s text. Screening Details: June 1 at 6:30 PM ––––––––––––––––––––– The Making of a Monologue: Robert Wilson’s Hamlet by Marion Kessel (1995, 62 min) Behind-the-scenes look at Wilson’s creative process, using rehearsal and performance footage to reveal the development of his one-man Hamlet. Screening Details: June 1 at 8:45 PM ––––––––––––––––––––– Bob Wilson’s Life & Death of Marina Abramovic by Giada Colagrande (2012, 57 min) Documents the creation of an experimental opera on Marina Abramović, capturing the collaboration between Wilson and fellow artists through rehearsal footage and interviews. Screening Details: June 2 at 8:45 PM ––––––––––––––––––––– Robert Wilson In Situ by Pauline de Grunne (2017, 90 min) Explores Wilson’s creation of The Watermill Center, combining archival material and interviews to examine his artistic philosophy and collaborative practice. Screening Details: June 3 at 7:00 PM ––––––––––––––––––––– Watermill 1993 + Watermill Center Summer Program 2009 by Stefan Kurt & Tomek Jeziorski (1993/2010, ~65 min) Two films documenting the evolution of The Watermill Center as a space for interdisciplinary artistic experimentation and residency-based creation. Screening Details: June 3 at 8:45 PM Schedule: Friday, May 29 6:45 pm Einstein on the Beach: The Changing Image of Opera — Mark Obenhaus (1984, 58’) 8:45 pm Overture for KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDenia TERRACE — Filmmaker Unknown (1972, 80’, Silent) Saturday, May 30 6:15 pm Video 50 + Deafman Glance — Robert Wilson (1978 / 1981, ~85’) 8:30 pm Robert Wilson and the Civil Wars — Howard Brookner (1987, 90’) Sunday, May 31 5:30 pm Stations + La Femme à la Cafetière + La Mort de Molière — Robert Wilson (1982 / 1989 / 1995, ~90’) 8:00 pm The Black Rider — Theo Janssen & Ralph Quinke (1990, 120’) Monday, June 1 6:30 pm Hamlet: A Monologue — Franco Laera (1997–2000, 95’) 8:45 pm The Making of a Monologue: Robert Wilson's Hamlet — Marion Kessel (1995, 62’) Tuesday, June 2 6:30 pm Stations + La Femme à la Cafetière + La Mort de Molière — Robert Wilson (1982 / 1989 / 1995, ~90’) 8:45 pm Bob Wilson’s Life & Death of Marina Abramovic — Giada Colagrande (2012, 57’) Wednesday, June 3 7:00 pm Robert Wilson In Situ — Pauline de Grunne (2017, 90’) 8:45 pm Watermill 1993 + Watermill Center Summer Program 2009 — Stefan Kurt / Tomek Jeziorski (1993 / 2010, ~65’) Thursday, June 4 6:45 pm Video 50 + Deafman Glance — Robert Wilson (1978 / 1981, ~85’) 9:00 pm Einstein on the Beach: The Changing Image of Opera — Mark Obenhaus (1984, 58’) Friday, June 5 6:45 pm Overture for KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDenia TERRACE — Filmmaker Unknown (1972, 80’, Silent) 8:45 pm Robert Wilson and the Civil Wars — Howard Brookner (1987, 90’) About The Artist(s) Robert Wilson Robert Wilson (1941–2025) was a pioneering American theatre director and visual artist known for his highly stylized, interdisciplinary works. His collaborations with artists like Philip Glass and Tom Waits reshaped experimental performance and opera worldwide. Mark Obenhaus Mark Obenhaus is an American documentary filmmaker known for arts and cultural films. His work often explores music and performance, including the definitive film on Einstein on the Beach. Howard Brookner Howard Brookner (1954–1989) was an American filmmaker known for intimate portraits of artists and cultural figures. His work includes Burroughs and Robert Wilson and the Civil Wars, capturing ambitious creative processes. Theo Janssen & Ralph Quinke German filmmakers known for documenting theatre and performance, including The Black Rider, offering rare insight into Robert Wilson’s rehearsal processes and collaborations. Franco Laera Franco Laera is a theatre director and filmmaker whose work bridges stage and screen. His film on Hamlet: A Monologue captures Robert Wilson’s minimalist and performative reinterpretation of Shakespeare. Marion Kessel Marion Kessel is a filmmaker focused on documenting theatre-making processes. Her work provides behind-the-scenes insight into Robert Wilson’s rehearsal methods and visual dramaturgy. Giada Colagrande Giada Colagrande is an Italian filmmaker and video artist known for experimental and biographical works. She collaborates frequently with major artists, including Willem Dafoe and Marina Abramović. Pauline de Grunne Pauline de Grunne is a Belgian filmmaker whose documentaries explore contemporary art and performance. Her work often focuses on creative processes and artist-led spaces. Stefan Kurt Stefan Kurt is a Swiss filmmaker and actor whose work includes documentary projects on artistic communities and performance environments. Tomek Jeziorski Tomek Jeziorski is a filmmaker and cultural producer working across documentary and performance. His work often engages with theatre archives and international artistic networks. Get in touch with the artist(s) and follow them on social media Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2026 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here

Watch STATIONS + LA FEMME À LA CAFETIÈRE + LA MORT DE MOLIÈRE by Robert Wilson at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2026. A triple program of video works by Robert Wilson, spanning three distinct creative phases. STATIONS (1982, 56 min) An enigmatic and hauntingly vivid work in which Wilson envisions the inner life of an eleven-year-old boy — his daydreams and fantasies rendered as a universe both magical and sinister. The tape's pivotal image is a young boy looking through a large kitchen window, which becomes the portal for a series of dramatic, often startling inner visions. Fire, metal, wind, glass, and water serve as points of departure for elegant pictorial compositions and evocative metaphors. Unfolding without dialogue or spoken language, STATIONS articulates the fear and mystery of a child's interior world and his relation to the outside world beyond. A characteristic Wilson work: precise, controlled, deeply strange. LA FEMME À LA CAFETIÈRE (1989, 7 min) In this brief and exquisite collaboration, Robert Wilson and dancer Suzushi Hanayagi bring to life Paul Cézanne's painting La Femme à la Cafetière. The work exemplifies Wilson's ability to translate a static visual image into living tableau — a transformation of painting into performance, flattening time and depth into a new kind of presence. LA MORT DE MOLIÈRE (1995, 24 min) A collaboration between Robert Wilson and playwright Heiner Müller in which they imagine the death of Molière — representing it as a series of tableaux, with text passages recited by Müller himself. "Cinema watches Death at work," wrote Wilson of the piece. Müller's commentary adds another layer: "The poem watches a dying man at work, his name is Molière. The poem is not a film. The film watches an actor playing a dying man called Molière." The piece sits at the intersection of theater, film, and literary elegy — a meditation on mortality and artistic legacy made by two of the defining figures of 20th-century avant-garde performance. Total running time: approximately 90 minutes. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents STATIONS + LA FEMME À LA CAFETIÈRE + LA MORT DE MOLIÈRE Robert Wilson At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2026 Screening Information This program will be screened on May 31 at 5:30 PM, and June 2 at 6:30 PM, at Anthology Film Archives RSVP Please note that these screenings are ticketed and require prior registration at the Anthology Film Archives website. Country United States / Germany Language English, French, German Running Time 90 minutes Year of Release 1982 / 1989 / 1995 About The Film A triple program of video works by Robert Wilson, spanning three distinct creative phases. STATIONS (1982, 56 min) An enigmatic and hauntingly vivid work in which Wilson envisions the inner life of an eleven-year-old boy — his daydreams and fantasies rendered as a universe both magical and sinister. The tape's pivotal image is a young boy looking through a large kitchen window, which becomes the portal for a series of dramatic, often startling inner visions. Fire, metal, wind, glass, and water serve as points of departure for elegant pictorial compositions and evocative metaphors. Unfolding without dialogue or spoken language, STATIONS articulates the fear and mystery of a child's interior world and his relation to the outside world beyond. A characteristic Wilson work: precise, controlled, deeply strange. LA FEMME À LA CAFETIÈRE (1989, 7 min) In this brief and exquisite collaboration, Robert Wilson and dancer Suzushi Hanayagi bring to life Paul Cézanne's painting La Femme à la Cafetière. The work exemplifies Wilson's ability to translate a static visual image into living tableau — a transformation of painting into performance, flattening time and depth into a new kind of presence. LA MORT DE MOLIÈRE (1995, 24 min) A collaboration between Robert Wilson and playwright Heiner Müller in which they imagine the death of Molière — representing it as a series of tableaux, with text passages recited by Müller himself. "Cinema watches Death at work," wrote Wilson of the piece. Müller's commentary adds another layer: "The poem watches a dying man at work, his name is Molière. The poem is not a film. The film watches an actor playing a dying man called Molière." The piece sits at the intersection of theater, film, and literary elegy — a meditation on mortality and artistic legacy made by two of the defining figures of 20th-century avant-garde performance. Total running time: approximately 90 minutes. Director / Artist: Robert Wilson LA MORT DE MOLIÈRE: In collaboration with Heiner Müller Distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) About The Artist(s) Robert Wilson (October 4, 1941 – July 31, 2025) was an American director, playwright, and visual artist who fundamentally reshaped experimental theater over more than five decades. Born in Waco, Texas, he studied at the University of Texas before moving to New York, where he trained at Brooklyn's Pratt Institute and founded the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds, a performance collective that became the incubator for his early landmark works. Wilson's theater — often described as a "theater of imagery" — is distinguished by its radical reimagining of theatrical time and space, its use of exquisitely composed light and movement in place of conventional narrative, and its synthesis of visual art, music, dance, and text into unified stage pictures. His work sits at a radical distance from naturalism: performers move with ritualized, slow precision, language is treated as sound as much as meaning, and the stage itself functions as a living painting. His breakthrough came with Deafman Glance (1970), a six-hour silent opera that electrified Paris audiences and prompted the Surrealist poet Louis Aragon to describe Wilson as the fulfillment of Surrealism's deepest aspirations. Throughout the 1970s Wilson created a series of epic-scale works that redefined theatrical duration, culminating in his collaboration with composer Philip Glass on Einstein on the Beach (1976), a five-hour opera that premiered at the Avignon Festival and later played the Metropolitan Opera. It is widely regarded as one of the defining works of 20th-century performance. Over the following decades Wilson collaborated with an extraordinary range of artists — Tom Waits, William S. Burroughs, Heiner Müller, Lou Reed, Susan Sontag, Laurie Anderson, Willem Dafoe, and Marina Abramovic, among many others — while also directing canonical texts by Shakespeare, Beckett, Wagner, Ibsen, and Ionesco. He staged productions at the world's leading theaters and opera houses, including the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Berliner Ensemble, the Thalia Theater Hamburg, La Scala, and the Salzburg Festival. Alongside his theater work, Wilson was a prolific maker of video art. Beginning in 1978 he produced a series of innovative television works including VIDEO 50, DEAFMAN GLANCE, and STATIONS, transposing his theatrical visual language into the moving image. He also created an extensive series of Video Portraits of figures including Lady Gaga, Brad Pitt, and Mikhail Baryshnikov. In 1991 Wilson founded The Watermill Center on Long Island, a "laboratory for performance" housed in a former Western Union research facility on the edge of the Shinnecock Reservation, which continues to host residencies, exhibitions, and productions. His drawings, sculptures, and installations are held in major collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, the Whitney Museum, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Wilson received numerous honors throughout his life, including Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships, the Drama Desk Award, Obie Awards, and a 1986 Pulitzer Prize nomination. He died on July 31, 2025, at the age of 83. Get in touch with the artist(s) and follow them on social media Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2026 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here

Watch Monk in Pieces by Billy Shebar at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2026. Meredith Monk – composer, performer, and interdisciplinary artist – is one of the great artistic pioneers of our time, yet her profound cultural influence is largely unrecognized. With Monk’s music at its center, and featuring interviews with Björk and David Byrne, Monk in Pieces is a mosaic that mirrors the structure of Monk’s own work, and illuminates her wildly original vocabulary of sound and imagery. As a female artist in the male-dominated downtown arts scene of the 1960s and ‘70s, Monk had to fight for recognition and resources. Early reviews in The New York Times were vicious and sexist: “A disgrace to the name of dancing,” wrote one critic, and “so earnestly strange in a talented little-girl way,” wrote another. Yet as her celebrated contemporary, Philip Glass, says, “she, among all of us, was – and still is – the uniquely gifted one.” In the film’s final chapters, Monk faces mortality. We see her warily entrust her masterpiece, ATLAS, to director Yuval Sharon and singer Joanna Lynn-Jacobs for a new production at the Los Angeles Philharmonic. For 60 years, Monk has directed and performed in all of her music theater works; now she must learn to let go. What will happen to such singular work after she is gone? The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Monk in Pieces Billy Shebar At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2026 Screening Information This film will be screened on May 28, at 6:10 PM, at The Segal Theatre Center RSVP Please note there is limited seating available for in-person screenings at The Segal Centre, which are offered on a first-come first-serve basis. Country USA, Germany, France Language English Running Time 95 minutes Year of Release 2025 About The Film Meredith Monk – composer, performer, and interdisciplinary artist – is one of the great artistic pioneers of our time, yet her profound cultural influence is largely unrecognized. With Monk’s music at its center, and featuring interviews with Björk and David Byrne, Monk in Pieces is a mosaic that mirrors the structure of Monk’s own work, and illuminates her wildly original vocabulary of sound and imagery. As a female artist in the male-dominated downtown arts scene of the 1960s and ‘70s, Monk had to fight for recognition and resources. Early reviews in The New York Times were vicious and sexist: “A disgrace to the name of dancing,” wrote one critic, and “so earnestly strange in a talented little-girl way,” wrote another. Yet as her celebrated contemporary, Philip Glass, says, “she, among all of us, was – and still is – the uniquely gifted one.” In the film’s final chapters, Monk faces mortality. We see her warily entrust her masterpiece, ATLAS, to director Yuval Sharon and singer Joanna Lynn-Jacobs for a new production at the Los Angeles Philharmonic. For 60 years, Monk has directed and performed in all of her music theater works; now she must learn to let go. What will happen to such singular work after she is gone? A Zeitgeist Films Release in Association with Kino Lorber About The Artist(s) Billy Shebar is an Emmy-nominated filmmaker known for High Noon on the Waterfront (2022), with John Turturro and Edward Norton, which premiered at the Telluride Film Festival and was broadcast on TCM and HBO; and Dark Matter (2007), starring Meryl Streep, which won the Alfred P. Sloan Prize at Sundance. He collaborated with animator Bill Plympton on The New York Times viral web series Trump Bites (2018-2020) and with animator Yoni Goodman on the three-part crime series Doctor’s Orders (2021). Get in touch with the artist(s) info@110thstreet.com and follow them on social media https://zeitgeistfilms.com/film/monk-in-pieces,https://monkinpieces.com/ Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2026 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here

Watch In-I In Motion by Juliette Binoche at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2026. In 2007, French actress Juliette Binoche and British dancer-choreographer Akram Khan stepped away from their established careers to embark on a bold artistic experiment. Over six months, they co-created In-I, an intense, boundary-pushing performance they would go on to stage 100 times around the world. Today, Juliette Binoche returns to that intimate journey. From the first spark of inspiration to the final applause, she retraces the emotional and creative arc of a singular collaboration. Drawing on dozens of hours of previously unseen footage, she reflects, as a filmmaker, on the nature of artistic creation, the vulnerability and exhilaration of taking risks, and the personal transformation they demand. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents In-I In Motion Juliette Binoche At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2026 Screening Information This film will be screened on May 30, at 5:45 PM, at The Segal Theatre Center RSVP Please note there is limited seating available for in-person screenings at The Segal Centre, which are offered on a first-come first-serve basis. Country France Language French, English Running Time 125 minutes Year of Release 2026 About The Film In 2007, French actress Juliette Binoche and British dancer-choreographer Akram Khan stepped away from their established careers to embark on a bold artistic experiment. Over six months, they co-created In-I, an intense, boundary-pushing performance they would go on to stage 100 times around the world. Today, Juliette Binoche returns to that intimate journey. From the first spark of inspiration to the final applause, she retraces the emotional and creative arc of a singular collaboration. Drawing on dozens of hours of previously unseen footage, she reflects, as a filmmaker, on the nature of artistic creation, the vulnerability and exhilaration of taking risks, and the personal transformation they demand. CAST Juliette Binoche Actress Akram Kahn Dancer CREW A film by Juliette Binoche Cinematography Marion Stalens Production Sébastien de Fonseca Music Philip Sheppard Editing Sophie Brunet, Sophie Mandonnet Sound Mix Éric Tisserand Sound Editor Arnaud Rolland, Emmanuel Angrand Colour-grading Yov Moor, Elie Akoka Post Production Eugénie Deplus, Thomas Jaubert Production MIAO PRODUCTIONS In coproduction with YGGDRASIL Ola Strøm LÉGER PRODUCTION Solène Léger In collaboration with BABEL LABEL Co., Ltd. MEGUMI With the support of KERING TEMPIO FONDATION BNP PARIBAS International Sales mk2 Films © 2025 MIAO PRODUCTIONS About The Artist(s) Juliette Binoche was born in Paris. She loves travelling like someone who might have come from the four corners of the earth. In her blood run Polish, Brazilian and Flemish platelets. As a child, she loved making things, crafting, tinkering even. She brought her hands together, believed in the happiness of living, in saving snails, in warming up cold dolls. And then, to play was to escape. Escape from the loneliness of boarding schools, from recurring nightmares, creating moments of joy in playgrounds, in the pitch-black night of dormitories. At the age of four, she preferred whispering games to sleep. Her fragmented family brought her closer to angels. High up in the sky, like Dumbo, she no doubt chose her father and mother, who bathed in the world of the arts. With them, she lived at the heart of creative love. Her father’s theatrical tours awakened in her the desire for itinerant sharing. As a teenager, her cheeks aflame, Juliette had a band of friends with whom she performed theatre in the countryside with her mother: Jean-Philippe, Francine, Florence and Isabelle. But life meant she had to leave behind the valleys of Loir-et-Cher, the fruit trees, and the long evenings under immense sunsets. The nostalgia of that countryside, with its nourishing quality, became a touchstone throughout her life. Moving to Paris, baccalauréat in hand, she began theatre classes with Jean-Pierre Martino at 17 and Véra Gregh at 18. They helped her break down her will, to make room for silence, for another kind of openness. Casting after casting, hoping to fulfil her dream of becoming an actress, she was chosen to play her first major role in Rendez-vous by André Téchiné — a provocative, solitary film. The Cannes Festival became the palace of her public consecration, where the spiral of her life took flight. Her instinctive path through global creation has given Juliette Binoche a singular aura among filmmakers of a borderless constellation: Michael Haneke (Austria), David Cronenberg and Abel Ferrara (United States), Olivier Assayas, Leos Carax and Claire Denis (France), Amos Gitaï (Israel), Naomi Kawase and Hirokazu Kore-eda (Japan), Krzysztof Kieślowski (Poland), Hou Hsiao-hsien (Taiwan), Trân Anh Hùng (Vietnam), Abbas Kiarostami (Iran)… Crowned with the most prestigious awards (Academy Awards, BAFTA, César, Best Actress prizes at Cannes, Berlin and Venice…), Juliette Binoche does not, however, seek virtuosity. She prefers a mysterious link between her inner world and the desire to give of herself, perhaps encouraged, as Louis Malle noted after Damage, by “the love affair between her and the camera, a presence and an intensity that are staggering.” The great range of her performances in Bruno Dumont’s films — from austerity (Camille Claudel, 1915) to burlesque (Slack Bay) — illustrates her taste for freedom and her courage in constantly questioning herself in the fire of her performances. She seemed destined for an uncompromising auteur cinema when Jean-Luc Godard spotted her in 1984 for Hail Mary, but Juliette Binoche was unafraid to venture elsewhere: Godzilla by Gareth Edwards or Ghost in the Shell by Rupert Sanders, which she says she chose as a wink to her children. The success of Anthony Minghella’s nine-Oscar-winning The English Patient, along with Philip Kaufman’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Lasse Hallström’s Chocolat, established Juliette Binoche as a truly international actress, recognised worldwide. Yet her need for renewal in her creations always drives her further towards freedom. Her shifts and turns make her elusive. She takes her destiny into her own hands in cinema as well as theatre (Andrei Konchalovsky, Ivo Van Hove, Wajdi Mouawad), devotes herself to music (It’s Worth Living with Alexandre Tharaud), to poetry as to painting (Portraits In-Eyes, published by Place des Victoires), to dance (In-I with Akram Khan) and, most recently, to directing her first documentary film In-I In Motion (2025). Get in touch with the artist(s) tiphaine@miaoproductions.fr and follow them on social media Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2026 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here

Watch Overture for KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDenia TERRACE by Robert Wilson / Filmmaker Unknown at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2026. This film documents the Overture for KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDenia TERRACE: A STORY ABOUT A FAMILY AND SOME PEOPLE CHANGING, performed live by Robert Wilson and the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds at 147 Spring Street, New York City, in April 1972. The production was performed for six hours each day — from 6 to 9 AM and 6 to 9 PM — across seven days between April 24 and 30. The full work, KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDenia TERRACE, was subsequently performed as a seven-day, 168-hour event in Shiraz, Iran, and stands as one of the most ambitious durational theater works ever staged. The sizeable cast featured an exceptional range of downtown luminaries, including dance critic and poet Edwin Denby, dancer Andy De Groat, theater critic Stefan Brecht, and Wilson's own grandmother, Alma Hamilton. This preservation print was made directly from the 16mm camera original, which was discovered in Anthology Film Archives' basement alongside a group of empty film cans. Archivists at Anthology and the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts — the repository of the Robert Wilson Audio/Visual Collection — were able to salvage the film and identified it as the most extensive extant documentation of the Overture. No soundtrack has surfaced, but the film's majestic images and wild visual inventiveness carry a power that renders dialogue unnecessary. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives and the New York Public Library. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Overture for KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDenia TERRACE Robert Wilson / Filmmaker Unknown At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2026 Screening Information This film will be screened on May 29 at 8:45 PM, and June 5 at 6:45 PM, at Anthology Film Archives RSVP Please note that these screenings are ticketed and require prior registration at the Anthology Film Archives website. Country United States Language Silent Running Time 80 minutes Year of Release 1972 About The Film This film documents the Overture for KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDenia TERRACE: A STORY ABOUT A FAMILY AND SOME PEOPLE CHANGING, performed live by Robert Wilson and the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds at 147 Spring Street, New York City, in April 1972. The production was performed for six hours each day — from 6 to 9 AM and 6 to 9 PM — across seven days between April 24 and 30. The full work, KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDenia TERRACE, was subsequently performed as a seven-day, 168-hour event in Shiraz, Iran, and stands as one of the most ambitious durational theater works ever staged. The sizeable cast featured an exceptional range of downtown luminaries, including dance critic and poet Edwin Denby, dancer Andy De Groat, theater critic Stefan Brecht, and Wilson's own grandmother, Alma Hamilton. This preservation print was made directly from the 16mm camera original, which was discovered in Anthology Film Archives' basement alongside a group of empty film cans. Archivists at Anthology and the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts — the repository of the Robert Wilson Audio/Visual Collection — were able to salvage the film and identified it as the most extensive extant documentation of the Overture. No soundtrack has surfaced, but the film's majestic images and wild visual inventiveness carry a power that renders dialogue unnecessary. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives and the New York Public Library. Performed by Robert Wilson and the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds Preserved by Anthology Film Archives and the New York Public Library About The Artist(s) Robert Wilson (October 4, 1941 – July 31, 2025) was an American director, playwright, and visual artist who fundamentally reshaped experimental theater over more than five decades. Born in Waco, Texas, he studied at the University of Texas before moving to New York, where he trained at Brooklyn's Pratt Institute and founded the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds, a performance collective that became the incubator for his early landmark works. Wilson's theater — often described as a "theater of imagery" — is distinguished by its radical reimagining of theatrical time and space, its use of exquisitely composed light and movement in place of conventional narrative, and its synthesis of visual art, music, dance, and text into unified stage pictures. His work sits at a radical distance from naturalism: performers move with ritualized, slow precision, language is treated as sound as much as meaning, and the stage itself functions as a living painting. His breakthrough came with Deafman Glance (1970), a six-hour silent opera that electrified Paris audiences and prompted the Surrealist poet Louis Aragon to describe Wilson as the fulfillment of Surrealism's deepest aspirations. Throughout the 1970s Wilson created a series of epic-scale works that redefined theatrical duration, culminating in his collaboration with composer Philip Glass on Einstein on the Beach (1976), a five-hour opera that premiered at the Avignon Festival and later played the Metropolitan Opera. It is widely regarded as one of the defining works of 20th-century performance. Over the following decades Wilson collaborated with an extraordinary range of artists — Tom Waits, William S. Burroughs, Heiner Müller, Lou Reed, Susan Sontag, Laurie Anderson, Willem Dafoe, and Marina Abramovic, among many others — while also directing canonical texts by Shakespeare, Beckett, Wagner, Ibsen, and Ionesco. He staged productions at the world's leading theaters and opera houses, including the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Berliner Ensemble, the Thalia Theater Hamburg, La Scala, and the Salzburg Festival. Alongside his theater work, Wilson was a prolific maker of video art. Beginning in 1978 he produced a series of innovative television works including VIDEO 50, DEAFMAN GLANCE, and STATIONS, transposing his theatrical visual language into the moving image. He also created an extensive series of Video Portraits of figures including Lady Gaga, Brad Pitt, and Mikhail Baryshnikov. In 1991 Wilson founded The Watermill Center on Long Island, a "laboratory for performance" housed in a former Western Union research facility on the edge of the Shinnecock Reservation, which continues to host residencies, exhibitions, and productions. His drawings, sculptures, and installations are held in major collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, the Whitney Museum, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Wilson received numerous honors throughout his life, including Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships, the Drama Desk Award, Obie Awards, and a 1986 Pulitzer Prize nomination. He died on July 31, 2025, at the age of 83. Get in touch with the artist(s) and follow them on social media Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2026 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here

Watch Museum of the Night by Fermín Eloy Acosta at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2026. At the end of the 1960s, Argentine artist Leandro Katz participated in Theatre of the Ridiculous, an eccentric group linked to New York's queer underground. This film-essay moves between archives, testimonies, and specters of the past that question the present. Photography, film, video, and sound intertwine to approach, if only in brief flashes, that mythical past and raise questions about time, art, sexuality, death, and cinema. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Museum of the Night Fermín Eloy Acosta At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2026 Screening Information This film will be screened on May 30, at 4:00 PM, at The Segal Theatre Center RSVP Please note there is limited seating available for in-person screenings at The Segal Centre, which are offered on a first-come first-serve basis. Country Argentina Language Spanish, English Running Time 88 minutes Year of Release 2025 About The Film At the end of the 1960s, Argentine artist Leandro Katz participated in Theatre of the Ridiculous, an eccentric group linked to New York's queer underground. This film-essay moves between archives, testimonies, and specters of the past that question the present. Photography, film, video, and sound intertwine to approach, if only in brief flashes, that mythical past and raise questions about time, art, sexuality, death, and cinema. Fermín Eloy Acosta About The Artist(s) Fermín Eloy Acosta (Argentina, 1990) is a screenwriter, writer, and audiovisual director. He directed the film Implantación (2016), alongside Sol Bolloqui and Lucía Salas. In 2023, he participated in the Berlinale Talent Campus Buenos Aires. He has received the Alec Oxenford Foundation Scholarship and the National Arts Fund Grant. In 2019, he won the Bienal de Arte Joven with the novel Bajo lluvia, relámpago o trueno (2019), which was translated into Portuguese by Editorial Peabirú. In 2024, he won the Hebe Uhart Novel Prize for Las visiones venenosas (2024). Museo de la Noche is his first solo film. Get in touch with the artist(s) fermineloyacosta@gmail.com and follow them on social media @fermin.eloy Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2026 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here

Watch VIDEO 50 + DEAFMAN GLANCE by Robert Wilson at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2026. A double program of two essential early video works by Robert Wilson, screened together. VIDEO 50 (1978, 52 min) VIDEO 50 is an extraordinary video sketchbook — a highly original, visually dramatic, and frequently humorous collection of one hundred abbreviated episodes produced for television. Unfolding as an uninterrupted series of thirty-second vignettes, the work is characterized by deadpan theatricality, symbolist imagery, surrealist juxtapositions, and the repetition of key visual motifs. Indelible images, precisely composed — a man teetering above a waterfall, a floating chair, a winking eye, a parrot against the New York skyline — are accompanied by an architectural sound score that uses spoken phonetic patterns in place of recognizable words. Fusing his surprising visual logic and sense of temporal manipulation, Wilson creates a work of startling wit and poetry. The film anticipates both the aesthetics of music video and the rhythms of contemporary short-form visual media, while remaining entirely its own singular creation. DEAFMAN GLANCE (1981, 27 min) This haunting work for television has been excerpted and adapted from Wilson's five-hour silent opera of the same title, which premiered in Iowa City in 1970 and became an international sensation at its 1971 Paris run. The video tells a stark and stylized story of murder, using time and space, light and movement, and isolated sound in place of spoken words. A somber, menacing woman washes white dishes and a gleaming carving knife, pours milk into a glass, and then slowly attacks two young boys — not a word of dialogue uttered throughout. The ritualistic action moves from a spartan kitchen through the silent halls and stairways of a lonely house, existing in a space between ancient Greek tragedy and contemporary tabloid headline. Terrifying yet not violent, real yet symbolic, the work harbors deep paradox: pacing reduces action to abstraction; morality and mortality remain deliberately ambiguous. Total running time: approximately 85 minutes. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents VIDEO 50 + DEAFMAN GLANCE Robert Wilson At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2026 Screening Information This program will be screened on May 30 at 6:15 PM, and June 4 at 6:45 PM, at Anthology Film Archives RSVP Please note that these screenings are ticketed and require prior registration at the Anthology Film Archives website. Country United States Language English Running Time 85 minutes Year of Release 1978 / 1981 About The Film A double program of two essential early video works by Robert Wilson, screened together. VIDEO 50 (1978, 52 min) VIDEO 50 is an extraordinary video sketchbook — a highly original, visually dramatic, and frequently humorous collection of one hundred abbreviated episodes produced for television. Unfolding as an uninterrupted series of thirty-second vignettes, the work is characterized by deadpan theatricality, symbolist imagery, surrealist juxtapositions, and the repetition of key visual motifs. Indelible images, precisely composed — a man teetering above a waterfall, a floating chair, a winking eye, a parrot against the New York skyline — are accompanied by an architectural sound score that uses spoken phonetic patterns in place of recognizable words. Fusing his surprising visual logic and sense of temporal manipulation, Wilson creates a work of startling wit and poetry. The film anticipates both the aesthetics of music video and the rhythms of contemporary short-form visual media, while remaining entirely its own singular creation. DEAFMAN GLANCE (1981, 27 min) This haunting work for television has been excerpted and adapted from Wilson's five-hour silent opera of the same title, which premiered in Iowa City in 1970 and became an international sensation at its 1971 Paris run. The video tells a stark and stylized story of murder, using time and space, light and movement, and isolated sound in place of spoken words. A somber, menacing woman washes white dishes and a gleaming carving knife, pours milk into a glass, and then slowly attacks two young boys — not a word of dialogue uttered throughout. The ritualistic action moves from a spartan kitchen through the silent halls and stairways of a lonely house, existing in a space between ancient Greek tragedy and contemporary tabloid headline. Terrifying yet not violent, real yet symbolic, the work harbors deep paradox: pacing reduces action to abstraction; morality and mortality remain deliberately ambiguous. Total running time: approximately 85 minutes. Director / Artist: Robert Wilson Distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) About The Artist(s) Robert Wilson (October 4, 1941 – July 31, 2025) was an American director, playwright, and visual artist who fundamentally reshaped experimental theater over more than five decades. Born in Waco, Texas, he studied at the University of Texas before moving to New York, where he trained at Brooklyn's Pratt Institute and founded the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds, a performance collective that became the incubator for his early landmark works. Wilson's theater — often described as a "theater of imagery" — is distinguished by its radical reimagining of theatrical time and space, its use of exquisitely composed light and movement in place of conventional narrative, and its synthesis of visual art, music, dance, and text into unified stage pictures. His work sits at a radical distance from naturalism: performers move with ritualized, slow precision, language is treated as sound as much as meaning, and the stage itself functions as a living painting. His breakthrough came with Deafman Glance (1970), a six-hour silent opera that electrified Paris audiences and prompted the Surrealist poet Louis Aragon to describe Wilson as the fulfillment of Surrealism's deepest aspirations. Throughout the 1970s Wilson created a series of epic-scale works that redefined theatrical duration, culminating in his collaboration with composer Philip Glass on Einstein on the Beach (1976), a five-hour opera that premiered at the Avignon Festival and later played the Metropolitan Opera. It is widely regarded as one of the defining works of 20th-century performance. Over the following decades Wilson collaborated with an extraordinary range of artists — Tom Waits, William S. Burroughs, Heiner Müller, Lou Reed, Susan Sontag, Laurie Anderson, Willem Dafoe, and Marina Abramovic, among many others — while also directing canonical texts by Shakespeare, Beckett, Wagner, Ibsen, and Ionesco. He staged productions at the world's leading theaters and opera houses, including the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Berliner Ensemble, the Thalia Theater Hamburg, La Scala, and the Salzburg Festival. Alongside his theater work, Wilson was a prolific maker of video art. Beginning in 1978 he produced a series of innovative television works including VIDEO 50, DEAFMAN GLANCE, and STATIONS, transposing his theatrical visual language into the moving image. He also created an extensive series of Video Portraits of figures including Lady Gaga, Brad Pitt, and Mikhail Baryshnikov. In 1991 Wilson founded The Watermill Center on Long Island, a "laboratory for performance" housed in a former Western Union research facility on the edge of the Shinnecock Reservation, which continues to host residencies, exhibitions, and productions. His drawings, sculptures, and installations are held in major collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, the Whitney Museum, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Wilson received numerous honors throughout his life, including Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships, the Drama Desk Award, Obie Awards, and a 1986 Pulitzer Prize nomination. He died on July 31, 2025, at the age of 83. Get in touch with the artist(s) and follow them on social media Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2026 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here

Watch Bob Wilson's Life & Death of Marina Abramovic by Giada Colagrande at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2026. This documentary film captures the creation of an experimental opera based on the biography of legendary performance artist Marina Abramovic, directed by Robert Wilson with music and performance by singer and composer Anohni, and featuring actor Willem Dafoe as a central figure. Director Giada Colagrande provides access to the process of making the piece through rehearsal footage and interviews with the artists as they work — revealing the complex dynamics, creative tensions, and moments of genuine discovery that accompany the development of a performance of this kind. The result is an intimate portrait of four major artists in collaboration: Wilson's exacting visual sensibility in dialogue with Abramovic's biography of radical durational endurance, Anohni's vocal presence, and Dafoe's physical precision. The film documents both the content of the piece — which treats Abramovic's life, her Serbian childhood, her decades of physical and conceptual performance, and the mythology that has grown around her — and the process of translating that biography into Wilson's distinctive theatrical language of image, light, and formalized movement. Rather than serving simply as a record of a production, the film functions as its own kind of portrait: of the making of art, the trust required between artists, and the particular vulnerability of creating something large and strange together. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Bob Wilson's Life & Death of Marina Abramovic Giada Colagrande At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2026 Screening Information This film will be screened on June 2 at 8:45 PM, at Anthology Film Archives RSVP Please note that these screenings are ticketed and require prior registration at the Anthology Film Archives website. Country Germany / Switzerland Language English Running Time 57 minutes Year of Release 2012 About The Film This documentary film captures the creation of an experimental opera based on the biography of legendary performance artist Marina Abramovic, directed by Robert Wilson with music and performance by singer and composer Anohni, and featuring actor Willem Dafoe as a central figure. Director Giada Colagrande provides access to the process of making the piece through rehearsal footage and interviews with the artists as they work — revealing the complex dynamics, creative tensions, and moments of genuine discovery that accompany the development of a performance of this kind. The result is an intimate portrait of four major artists in collaboration: Wilson's exacting visual sensibility in dialogue with Abramovic's biography of radical durational endurance, Anohni's vocal presence, and Dafoe's physical precision. The film documents both the content of the piece — which treats Abramovic's life, her Serbian childhood, her decades of physical and conceptual performance, and the mythology that has grown around her — and the process of translating that biography into Wilson's distinctive theatrical language of image, light, and formalized movement. Rather than serving simply as a record of a production, the film functions as its own kind of portrait: of the making of art, the trust required between artists, and the particular vulnerability of creating something large and strange together. Director: Giada Colagrande Featuring: Robert Wilson, Marina Abramovic, Willem Dafoe, Anohni About The Artist(s) Giada Colagrande is an Italian filmmaker and actress based in New York. She has directed several feature films including Febbre (2006) and A Woman (2010), as well as documentary projects focused on the intersection of performance and visual art. Her film Bob Wilson's Life & Death of Marina Abramovic offers an intimate account of the creation of an experimental opera bringing together four of the leading figures of contemporary performance: Robert Wilson, Marina Abramovic, Willem Dafoe, and Anohni. Get in touch with the artist(s) and follow them on social media Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2026 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here

Watch Firebird by Irina Patkanian / Marion Schoevaert at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2026. FAIRY-DOC, in stop motion animation Once upon a time, there was a Firebird, who was caught and caged by the Father of the Motherland. To free herself, she laid him the egg of immortality from his seed. She lost her feathers and hid deep in the woods, weaving lace from snowflakes. Once upon today, the Father of the Motherland saw her lace on TikTok and waged a war to find and marry her. Dancing at the wedding, Lacemaker turned back into the firebird and burned the citadel down. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Firebird Irina Patkanian / Marion Schoevaert At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2026 Screening Information This film will be screened on June 1, at 5:00 PM, at The Segal Theatre Center RSVP Please note there is limited seating available for in-person screenings at The Segal Centre, which are offered on a first-come first-serve basis. Country USA, Ukraine Language English Running Time 23 minutes Year of Release 2026 About The Film FAIRY-DOC, in stop motion animation Once upon a time, there was a Firebird, who was caught and caged by the Father of the Motherland. To free herself, she laid him the egg of immortality from his seed. She lost her feathers and hid deep in the woods, weaving lace from snowflakes. Once upon today, the Father of the Motherland saw her lace on TikTok and waged a war to find and marry her. Dancing at the wedding, Lacemaker turned back into the firebird and burned the citadel down. Irina Patkanian Director, Marion Schoevaert Director, Irina Patkanian Writer, Ksena Samborska Key Cast "Firebird", Michael Kaplan Key Casy "Colonel", Yevgenia Nayberg Lead Artist, Maxim Dondyuk War Photography, Marion Schoevaert Production Designer, Masha Yukhananov Animator, Jennah Camara Animator, Anna Carolina Bastos Sound Design, Vlada Tomova Composer, Elena Kalkova Visual Editing About The Artist(s) Irina Patkanian is an award-winning filmmaker, a Fulbright scholar, Professor of Film and Media Arts at Brooklyn College/CUNY, and the co-founder of In Parentheses, Inc. Irina Patkanian makes hybrid (fiction/nonfiction) films questioning history with poetry, memory with animation, performance with behavior. Irina’s films have screened at 150+ film festivals worldwide, incl. DOC NYC, Ann Arbor, STARZ Denver, Palm Springs, Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival and many others, winning 20+ awards. Her work has been supported by fellowships and grants from NYSCA, NYFA, Made in New York, Tow, Blaustein, Troy and Jerome Foundations; as well as artist residencies at the Obermann Center, MacDowell, the Millay Arts, Ucross Foundation and the Art Studios of Key West. Marion Schoevaert has been developing her own style of physical theater for 25 years in New York, Seoul and France. She has directed, produced and choreographed more than twenty theater shows, operas and shadow plays, blending dance-theater, rhythmic text and live music. She works with artists from all disciplines and genres: painting, video, jazz, tango, hip hop, sports, martial arts, propaganda, graffiti, etc. to create visceral and raw emotional response from both actors and audiences. Marion Schoevaert has created illustrations for 33 Young People’s Concerts with the New York Philharmonic. She has produced the successful Koltès New York Festival (7 plays) in New York and has directed a North Korean mass dance propaganda play with 2 orchestras and 100 actors, blending North and South Korean texts, music and style together. She has created 3 theatre companies in New York, Seoul and France. Get in touch with the artist(s) irinapatkanian@gmail.com and follow them on social media www.inparentheses.org/firebird Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2026 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here

Watch WATERMILL 1993 + WATERMILL CENTER BYRD HOFFMAN SUMMER PROGRAM 2009 by Stefan Kurt / Tomek Jeziorski at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2026. A double program of short documentaries on The Watermill Center, the institution Robert Wilson founded on Long Island in 1991. WATERMILL 1993 (1993, 20 min) — directed by Stefan Kurt Shot in the Center's earliest years, this film documents The Watermill Center in its founding period, capturing the spirit and working methods of the institution as it established itself. Wilson founded the Center in a former Western Union research facility on the edge of the Shinnecock Reservation, and from the beginning conceived of it as a space distinct from conventional theater institutions — a "laboratory for creative experimentation, where artists can work at the intersection of disciplines, drawing inspiration from nature and Wilson's extensive collection of art and artifacts." This film preserves a record of the Center in its first phase, before it grew into the year-round residency space it would become. WATERMILL CENTER BYRD HOFFMAN SUMMER PROGRAM 2009 (2010, 38 min) — directed by Tomek Jeziorski Filmed during the 2009 summer program, this documentary captures the Center at a later stage of its development — by which point it had in 2006 become a year-round space for artists-in-residence. The summer program, named for the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds (Wilson's original performance collective), brings together students and established artists from across disciplines in a collaborative, multi-disciplinary environment. The film documents the work and energy of this gathering, conveying the ethos of exchange and experimentation that Wilson intended the Center to embody. Total running time: approximately 65 minutes. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents WATERMILL 1993 + WATERMILL CENTER BYRD HOFFMAN SUMMER PROGRAM 2009 Stefan Kurt / Tomek Jeziorski At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2026 Screening Information This program will be screened on June 3 at 8:45 PM, at Anthology Film Archives. RSVP Please note that these screenings are ticketed and require prior registration at the Anthology Film Archives website. Country United States Language English Running Time 65 minutes Year of Release 1993 / 2010 About The Film A double program of short documentaries on The Watermill Center, the institution Robert Wilson founded on Long Island in 1991. WATERMILL 1993 (1993, 20 min) — directed by Stefan Kurt Shot in the Center's earliest years, this film documents The Watermill Center in its founding period, capturing the spirit and working methods of the institution as it established itself. Wilson founded the Center in a former Western Union research facility on the edge of the Shinnecock Reservation, and from the beginning conceived of it as a space distinct from conventional theater institutions — a "laboratory for creative experimentation, where artists can work at the intersection of disciplines, drawing inspiration from nature and Wilson's extensive collection of art and artifacts." This film preserves a record of the Center in its first phase, before it grew into the year-round residency space it would become. WATERMILL CENTER BYRD HOFFMAN SUMMER PROGRAM 2009 (2010, 38 min) — directed by Tomek Jeziorski Filmed during the 2009 summer program, this documentary captures the Center at a later stage of its development — by which point it had in 2006 become a year-round space for artists-in-residence. The summer program, named for the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds (Wilson's original performance collective), brings together students and established artists from across disciplines in a collaborative, multi-disciplinary environment. The film documents the work and energy of this gathering, conveying the ethos of exchange and experimentation that Wilson intended the Center to embody. Total running time: approximately 65 minutes. WATERMILL 1993 directed by Stefan Kurt WATERMILL CENTER BYRD HOFFMAN SUMMER PROGRAM 2009 directed by Tomek Jeziorski About The Artist(s) Stefan Kurt is a Swiss actor and filmmaker who has worked extensively in theater and cinema, including as a performer in Wilson's productions. His short film Watermill 1993 documents The Watermill Center in its founding years. Tomek Jeziorski is a Polish filmmaker and photographer who has documented The Watermill Center's summer programs. His 2010 film capturing the 2009 Byrd Hoffman Summer Program provides a record of one of the Center's core annual events. Get in touch with the artist(s) and follow them on social media Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2026 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here