A short video below that I put together very quickly on the last day of the festival - an overview of the experience minus the last performances which were amazing.

It's been only a few days since the festival ended but so much has happened since then it feels like another lifetime away. 

Yesterday we watched on TV the funeral of Mohammad Abu Khdair, all of 16 years old, abducted and killed in retaliation - allegedly - for the death of the 3 Israeli teenagers. It was the first Friday of Ramadan, after noon prayers, crowds followed the body wrapped in a Palestinian flag, fighting broke out, tear gas, burning of street signs, the anger and frustration boiling over, a sense of helplessness, just watching.

In Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper, Gideon Levy wrote an op-ed
about the death of peace.

The excellent, HowlRound, a Center for the Theater Commons has published the first of a two part series I've written about Ashtar Theatre's International Youth Festival. 
Read more...

A blog post on how the project began, posted on the website of
Theater Communications Group (TCG) as part of the National Conference Crossing Borders salon, curated by the Caridad Svich - a big thanks to Caridad for inviting me to submit.

To read it, click here 
or  if the link doesn't work, click below

Everyone is in the thick of workshops. Here are some photos below about Acrobatics in the Commedia dell'Arte sessions (masks and melodrama) + choosing silence in the live theatre/performance art session + friends posing during a break. 

We are thrilled to welcome you all in Ramallah. Despite the problematic political situation we have managed to prove that art is larger than borders and checkpoints…
- from the opening remarks of Emile Saba, one of the young organizers of Ashtar Theatre's International Youth Festival 

***

A lovely celebration to start it off - an evening of singing and dancing -  dimmed by reduced numbers because some groups did not receive permission from Israel to enter and one young participant, a UK resident who happened to be born in an Arab country, was kept at the airport for 10 hours, questioned, and finally told she did not pass security clearance. She is being sent back later today.  
 
But in the evening, over platters of humus and mini pizzas, Noor sang beautiful folks songs while Uday, who is half-Indian, accompanied her on tabla, a young guy whose band was meant to play, came solo and sang Stairway to Heaven, Massad sang Sway, a girl from the Norwegian group sang a trembling trill of a song, and then all the kids - from Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Ramallah - all ran up to the mic and sang the Palestinian national anthem.

Writing from the first workshop by Emile.

Emile

Why do I want to write?

In the deep darkness of my mind,
I breathe… 
clutching for an exit, for a lost child

I’ve tried to bury it, I tried very hard 
But there it’s back, stronger than ever
fierce as a wild horse
black as its hair
blind by light 
driven by ink

It could be a taste of freedom
a taste of death 
a willing death
so painful that you would beg for more

And as I fight through it
I bleed blood and salt
And I breathe out 
knowing that it has never disappeared 


***

I can count  the times I’ve seen my sea 
Their sea…
My sea…
blue and white
waving in silence
no seagulls
only sparrows gray
and a lot of concrete
dusty vehicles 
dusty pine trees and smiles

Time goes fast when we sit to eat
we do not pray before lunch
never did
and never will 

Rounded fried sweets
I’d like to call them “Submarines”
painted with a golden crust
my grandmother’s best

There is always a sense of waiting
waiting for more money
less shouting
more sleep
less hand gestures
more of nothing

Two houses 
one with a garden 
and one with a balcony

My mother wanted the balcony 
and then she missed the garden.

Gray, green 
and candle tales
tea and wine and later dinners 

Laughs
Bullets
Giggles
Bullets
Concrete…

Silence

***

My name is Emile. I write it in its French version with an “e” at the end. 

It comes from Greek “Amylous.” 

A “Great Fighter” it means, and I am not. At least in that sense. 

A black and white photograph hung on a blank wall. 
That’s all what I have of the man who I was named after, my grandfather.
I wonder if he ever asked himself about the meaning of his name. But, if he did, I bet that they told him: “It’s a Saint's name.”
 
Names: they possess, label us, shape us and we grow to fit into their letters, their vowels. 

The “Os” the “As” the  ح and the “eees” 

I can taste red apples in my “M” 
and smell black cats in my silent “e.” 

A foreign name in an Arabic country! 
What a cruelty! 

The tiredness of having to correct them. 
It’s not “Ameer” or “Ameen” or even “Email!”  

You know what! 
Never mind, 
Call me whatever you like 
You may even fancy a “Mustafa” for me
it will suit me, I dare, 
as long as you never meet the fighter in my name! 

Writing by Lamis from the first workshop.

Lamis

Why do I want to write?

Because I’ve written before, and I know I am good at it. I know I should start writing again to get that rustiness off of me, my mind, and my imagination. 

I am at a phase in my life where I do everything just to prove to myself that I am still me, I am still here and that I refuse to give up for whatever reason. 

I refuse to be bound by physical or mental checkpoints. 
I am not the checkpoint.
I am not my judgmental society.
I am not the stereotypical picture which people have of me.

****


I live in that…. neighborhood 
near that city, and that other city
busy, noisy
burning all the time 
animals dying at 2:00 am in the morning
sitting in a corner by itself

I wish I can take it to that… big green village
near that now black greenish city
where we sit alone
fresh air, quietness, calmness

Animals living every day, all day
keeping our company

Maybe it should also shed its skin
and put a new skin on
a more authentic one
a closer one

***

I grew up hating my name. For my younger self it sounded silly, noisy, old, not to mention that it meant nothing to young me, or to young anybody. 

And then one day my auntie told me what it meant, and OH MY GOD… the horror. I hated it even more. 
“A flexible lady” 
Flexible how?? Physically? Mentally? Emotionally? 
And why am I flexible, 
and why am I a lady??

I wanted to be called “Yafa” or something.

But then she told me who called me “Lamis,” and why and how he chose that name. 

The fact that he chose it meant the world to me. 
I love it because he loves it, because it means so much to him, and because it made him present in front of young me, it makes him present now, present every time.

Writing by Iman from the first workshop.

Iman

Seven thousand years of known history and seven billion people on earth - that’s a fact.  

How many more facts I need to know the simple answers of my being?

Digging into, digging onward, digging at; not to stop digging is a fact.

***

I am from a land that gets very dry in the summer and scarcely wet in the winter
from an olive branch that taught me to pick and prick
from a neighborhood that smells donkey shit and fed me childhood

I am the daughter of a strong female lineage that sowed love and resistance
breast-fed milky-way dairy and backed faces of martyrs to feed my people

I am the happiness of a child finding a shekel on the ground and a rage of an old man not able to cross the road to his village because the road was hijacked by a settler

I am the carrier of a Canaanite bone and beauty and the daughter of the goddess of sacred marriage

I am the autumn leaf that keeps dying and resurrects in all your religions

***

Mary is a name that I always fancied. It was the name of my childhood friend, a name that I wanted to have, but how can I have a Mary name when my mother is called Marie, the French equivalent of the English Mary.

The same name in Arabic is Mariam, a name that people think  comes from the Virgin Mary, but it is the name of the northern part of Palestine during the Canaanite era.  

A name that grabs the strength of red soil, green land and the music of the waves of the Mediterranean Sea: Miriam, Mary, Marie.

Marie had another name - when she was young, she was called Alice. Every time, my great grandmother gave birth to a daughter she would call her Marie, and the child would die. 

She lost three Maries and insisted on calling my mother by the same name, a sadomasochist act that I never understood.  

Alice/Mary carried the burden of her dead aunts and kept a promise to her grandmother to fight death despite the many visits he attempted at her.

Mary though was never married. she is still the neighbor of the virgin Mary.

Writing by Rana from the first workshop

Rana 

What helps me write is depression, that feeling of being not able to answer the questions that you ask yourself.
Why the world is like that?
Why am I like that?
Why am I here?
And where am I going?
MY personal questions 
I started thinking about what I wrote…I stopped writing. 
I can't say more.
Who do I write for? 
Am I writing for myself or for the listeners? 
Do I write to impress or to reach the feeling of comfort?

***

I am from the trees
I am from the sound of water and wind 
I am from my parents and sister
I am from the corner where I smoke my cigarette so my parents won't smell the smoke while they're sleeping 
I am from the stage 
the wooded floor of the stage, the curtains the audience and the play 
I am every character that I played
I am every friend that passed by me or stayed until now 
I am from a land that you smell its history 
I am from the sea of that land, the mountains and the olive trees 
and above all, 
I am from the wind 
I want to  be THE wind. 
I'm not until now but I will be 
SOMETIME

***
My mom always says she named me after her best friend, but apparently this is not my own story. She named my sister after her other best friend also. I always felt jealous of my sister's name, Hiba, which means a gift. Above her being a gift for my parents and I am not, Kathem Al-Saher made a song for her.

Oh, the nights I spent crying after I heard that song.
 
My mom started collecting songs that have my name. 
She found only two. That didn’t satisfy me. 

Then the crisis of what my name means began. My mom says it means music. Well, that is not true. Rana is the past tense of the verb, Yarnow which means "looking." 

What? My name only means looking? That is not romantic. 
It doesn't mean anything spiritual. It's only looking.

But, don’t worry, whenever somebody asks me what my name means, I say "looking at the future." 

Yesterday was our first writing workshop. We were five - Emile, Iman, Lamis, Rana and me - sitting around two tables joined together in the multi-purpose room that adjoins the theater, with the curtains drawn just a breadth because the late afternoon light was so strong. I sat facing that narrow sliver of sun, listening to remarkable writers whose words and truths are so close to the surface, they came straight and fast onto the page.  
Excerpts above from: 
Rana
Lamis
Iman
Emile