Storytelling, Agency and Community-building through Playback Theatre in Palestine (original) (raw)
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Narrative power: Playback Theatre as cultural resistance in Occupied Palestine
Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, 2015
This paper describes The Freedom Theatre's Freedom Bus initiative and its use of Playback Theatre for community mobilisation and cultural activism within Occupied Palestine. Utilising a conflict transformation perspective, conventional dialogueoriented initiatives are contrasted against interventions that pursue concientisation and alliance building through participatory theatre and narrative-based processes. Playback Theatre is thus presented as one strategy that can be used within a broader framework of political action that seeks to address the asymmetrical power relations that characterise the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. November 2012: Israel is dropping bombs on Gazaagain. Riots are breaking out across the West Bank. Checkpoints are closed. Army jeeps are parked at every major intersection. Half of our theatre troupe is stopped from reaching the performance site. Those who can make it are gathered in Al Hadidiya, a small community located in the Jordan Valley, Occupied Palestine. The event has attracted local and international activists, Palestinian university students, a theatre director from London, a young Israeli activist and the former Vice President of the European Union, Luisa Morgantini. The majority of participants, however, are subsistence farmers and traditional herders from Al Hadidiya and neighbouring communities. The audience gains shade under a makeshift shelter of curved iron poles covered by sackcloth. The actors have levelled a space on the red, dusty ground. A small 'stage' is instantly prepared. Today, only two women are performing. Normally, four actors would be present. A 'Conductor' facilitates the event and two musicians sit to the side. The performance, 90 minutes in length, begins with a song but after that there is no script. All enactments will be improvised and based on real-life stories that are voluntarily shared by audience members. Nobody knows who will tell, or what stories will be shared. Uhm Zati 1 gets up to tell her story: My son, Quais was with the sheepover there, having his breakfastwhen suddenly a military jeep drove up from the settlement. A group of soldiers got out and handcuffed and blindfolded him. I was far away at that point but could see that they'd removed his
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2020
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Stories from under Occupation: Performing the Palestinian Experience
The complexity of the Palestinian struggle and experience resembles, as Edward Said describes it, the plot of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. 1 While addressing this complexity, traditional scholarship on Palestine and Israel has not paid sufficient attention to popular culture even though it is crucial to understanding Palestinian theatrical activity under occupation. 2 Progressive scholarship on the Middle East, such as the work of Swedenburg and Stein, argues that, in spite of new directions in the study of the region's popular culture, scholars remain focused on politics and power. 3 In this essay I propose to introduce Palestinian theatre in its historical context by addressing the following questions: What is unique about this theatre, and what makes it different from other Arab theatres? How does it work? Who and what are the main performers and troupes, and what kind of plays do they currently produce? How are they funded, and who is the audience? In addition to answering these questions, I argue that, by generating hybrid cultural productions under military Hala Kh. Nassar received her PhD from the Free University of Berlin and is currently Assistant Professor of Modern Arabic Culture and Literature in the departments of Near Eastern Languages and Civilization, and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. Her research focuses on contemporary cultural and literary production in the Arab world, especially in Palestine. In addition to several published articles, Nassar has two forthcoming books: one on Palestinian theatre and a coedited volume on the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.
In this dissertation, I study the processes of developing, performing and watching a political theatre play about Palestinians in London. My aim is to investigate the notion of social transformation in performance arts and analyse the political action in political theatre. To argue that political performance arts attempt to challenge, rather than mimic or merely invert, power relations in society. Throughout this dissertation, I juxtapose ethnographic analysis from my fieldwork with prominent performance theories. I demonstrate in this paper that Palestinian diaspora art spaces are platforms for political action. I follow a theatre play through different phases, from its creation to the night of the first show in front of an audience. First, I illustrate the playwright’s intention to affect social change by creating a theatre play. This intention is transferred to the performers during the rehearsals, a process that allows the performers to ‘embody’ the performance. On stage, this embodied performance creates a theatrical ‘reality’ that highlights a characteristic tension between what is ‘real’ and what is ‘fiction’. The result of from this tension is a ‘liminal’ space where spectators accept alternative ways of being. One can detect in this ‘liminal’ space a potential for a social transformation. By allowing the audience to reflect on their social reality, theatre catalyses a transformation of spectators’ understanding of society and their roles in it. What is more, artists and spectators engage in what I argue to be political action.
In Performance: Undeniable Voices, Palestinian Agency and Marginalized Narratives
Jadaliyya, 2014
Performance review of Diary of Anne Frank at Raleigh’s Burning Coal Theatre, directed by the Artistic Director of Bethlehem’s Alrowwad Cultural and Theatre Society Abdelfattah Abusrour; a workshop production of The Admission by the Israeli playwright Motti Lerner at Washington D.C.’s Jewish Cultural Center; and a private reading of Peace, a new one-act play by the Palestinian playwright Hanna Eady and the Seattle- based playwright Ed Mast.
This article focuses on the Freedom Theatre in Jenin, Palestine, to consider the Theatre’s project and performances as practices of creative resistance. It theorizes creative resistance to examine the Theatre as a mode of narrative performance against the logics and materiality of settler colonialism. In exploring this reative project, this study conceives of narratives as sites of struggle that are significant in the contestation and transformation of dominant settler colonial myths.
Performance Research Vol.19, Issue 6, 2014
This essay examines three performances which were the outcome of personal dialogues between Israeli performance artists and Palestinian women, and that critically engage the complexity of this (non-)encounter. The three performances I discuss are Umm Muhammad (2011) by Smadar Yaaron; She Has a Headache in Her Stomach (2002), by Tamar Raban; and You Are Not Here—A dislocative tourism agency (2006), an audio-walk created by Mushon Zer-Aviv, an Israeli open-source designer, and Laila El-Haddad, a blogger and journalist from Gaza. Although created in different historical contexts and deal with different phases of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, these performances share the rendering of the Palestinian woman as a presence that is confined to her aural performance; in these performances, the voices of the Palestinian women are imprisoned within the technological apparatus and subjected to operation by the mediation of the Israeli spatial presence. This essay traces the trajectory of the Palestinian voice from the speaker’s body, through its channeling via the mediation of the Israeli performer, to its embodiment by the Israeli spectators. In each of these phases I analyse the separation of the Palestinian feminine voice from the spatial performance as a manifestation of territorial and cultural notions of discontinuity and disruption. I identify the audio-spatial dissociation as a strategy by which these artists imagine and conceptualize the possibility of a shared space. The notion of ‘rupture’ therefore operates as a mode of representation applied to negotiate the imaginative perception of the Israeli–Palestinian encounters. I argue that by centring on the personal experiences of the performers, these works challenge the disturbing imaginings that such spatial separations elicit, and offer the possibility of re-experiencing the Palestinian voice as an integral part of the Israeli public sphere.
Using Playback Theater with Adolescents in Refugee Camps in Palestine to Tell Their Stories
2020
This research aimed at examining the aspects of Playback Theater and how it was experienced by Palestinian adolescents living under the Israeli occupation. Sixteen Palestinian adolescents between the ages of 15 and 16 participated in this study and came from the same school and the same refugee camp although many did not know each other. A Palestinian trainer/conductor who specialized in Playback Theater and who had work experience with adolescents and conducted a 16 session training program designed to teach adolescents about this interactive theatre form. Data collected included the researcher’s observation notes, video tapes that documented the details of all sessions, including a final performance for the adolescents’ mothers and friends. Personal one-to-one evaluation meetings with the participants were conducted, a phone call evaluation with the mothers, and a mid-term and final evaluation meeting with the trainer were other sources of data. All materials collected and recorde...
On the (Im)possibilities of a Free Theatre: Theatre Against Development in Palestine
Theatre Research International, 2021
The focus of this article is a critical evaluation of the impact of international development and conflict-resolution funding on theatre in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The article complicates the predominant narrative of theatre as 'cultural resistance' in conflict zones by historicizing the Ford Foundation's role in the institutionalization of Palestinian drama; delineating the effects of neo-liberal state building and development on Palestinian modes of performance; and subsequently, analysing the Freedom Theatre's imbrication in a normative, humanitarian logic. Aid, while ensuring the material conditions for the growth of the Palestinian performing arts, promoted a structural dependency that emptied the language of anti-colonial resistance of emancipatory potential, generating a soft, phantom sovereignty for the audience of the international community. By reimagining 'freedom' as liberation from a backward, conservative society, the language of the human rights industry and its attendant cultural economy spawns a spectral 'cultural resistance' where freedom and nationhood appear real and unreal-visions refracting, but not existing in, reality.