About this Event
What is the role of the arts in times of catastrophe? What might literature, theatre, music, and the visual arts reveal to us about our political present, and crucially, allow us to imagine of our shared future? How will they shape the world we are yet to inhabit? Simply, what can they tell us about being free?
Whenever and however this current siege on Gaza ends, having wrought epochal devastation in its wake, one thing is certain - we will all live in what Palestinian-American writer Sarah Aziza has called the “embodied aftermath.” With each passing day it becomes more urgent to imagine a Gaza that not just survives, but lives, breathes, and resurrects from the rubble.
We bring together Palestinian theatre makers, writers, musicians and artists to share how their art making practices have held together their memories of a collective past, provided means of navigating the present, and conjured, as refuge, a miraculous futurity. We also look at our own position in the United States - how consent has been manufactured for this genocidal war, how to minimize or undo our complicity in the global military order, and how to keep organizing and strengthening our cultural resistance.
“Working with children is really fun, you also learn how to forgive, how to imagine, what it truly means to have freedom in the place you are located.” — Ranin Odeh, The Freedom Theatre, Children and Youth Program Coordinator
“I would love to imagine with you about our potentiality as ‘embodied aftermaths’ who, along with other dispossessed, hum with hidden worlds, languages yet unknown. I want to talk about relationality, of the call for radical compassion in new forms we will invent.” — Sarah Aziza, “Letters for the Apocalypse,” October 12, 2023
Presenters:
Ranin Odeh, The Freedom Theatre, Children and Youth Program Coordinator
Faisal Abu Alhayjaa, actor/comedian, Red Noses Palestine
Sarah Aziza, writer
Thea Renda Abu El-Haj, visual artist and professor Department of Education, Barnard College
Serena Rasoul, ethnomusicologist and Columbia PhD candidate
Alia Haju, lead singer TakTouka Band
Radical Evolution, street theatre wing
Opening remarks:
Shayoni Mitra, Palestine Poetry Collective and Department of Theatre, Barnard College, “Imagine Otherwise: Insaniyat and Solidarities of the Third World”
Tables by:
Word Up Community Bookstore, Museum Museum, Librarians and Archivists for Palestine
The Freedom Theatre, a brief introduction:
A Little Theatre in a Refugee Camp
Set up in 2006 as a small community initiative in Jenin Refugee Camp, The Freedom Theatre has grown to become one of Palestine’s best-known professional theatres and cultural centres, garnering along the way, international acclaim. We have produced 25 original plays and performed all over the West Bank, in Jordan, and in countries as far apart as Brazil and India. We have trained a core of actors, stage managers, theatre technicians, photographers, filmmakers and instructors. We have held workshops and presentations in more than 15 countries, and reached out to over 50 communities in Occupied Palestine. Our work had made Jenin Refugee Camp recognized in Palestine and abroad for innovative, thought-provoking theatre and media productions. The Freedom Theatre has become a beacon of hope for many Palestinians as well as a source of inspiration for people around the world.
Does that sound like a success story?
Well, maybe. But equally, over our first decade we have been harassed, slandered, threatened, had our building physically attacked, our people imprisoned, one of our founders assassinated. Killed, in cold blood, on the street outside our theatre.
Throughout we have been our own strongest critics and sometimes found ourselves guilty of sidestepping the very values that we promote. We have felt disappointed, betrayed, divided, weak. We have rarely, if ever, felt complacent.
What is it about The Freedom Theatre that provokes so?
Perhaps this question has many answers. But what is certain is that we believe in turning the pyramid of power upside down. That makes those in power uncomfortable. We do not take a neutral position on the issue of Israel’s apartheid, colonization, occupation and military rule of Palestine. Nor do we turn a blind eye to the internal Palestinian violations of human rights in general and teh rights of women and children in particular. We challange oppression, be it on local, national or world level, by presenting alternate realities.
We operate within an unpredictable, volatile, even sometimes incomprehensible, context. Things change fast in Palestine. Everything is in flux. There are too many variable that are not in our control. All we can do is work hard to nourish a nucleus of alternative values and relationships. So that, brick by brick, we build the society that we want to live in. To create and nurture aspirations for a society of the future. A society based on justice, trust, equality.
— The Freedom Theatre, Rehearsing Freedom
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
James Room, 4th Floor Barnard Hall, Barnard College, New York, United States
USD 0.00