Academic literature on the topic 'Palestinian theatre'

This article explores the revival of Palestinian indigenous performance practices that were part of the Sufi Nabi Musa festival. Focusing on the 2018 and 2019 government-sponsored performances, it examines how the different sociopolitical changes that took place in Palestinian society, following the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their land in 1948, have led to the marginalization, politicization, and eventual revival of indigenous performance practices, which are an important part of Palestinian theatre history. Exploring Sufi rituals as indigenous performance practices shows that theatre forms not based on appropriations of European-style theatre existed in Palestine in the twentieth century. It also raises important questions as to why many of them have been neglected by Palestinian non-governmental theatre organizations (NGOs). Dia Barghouti is the Arab Council for the Social Sciences Postdoctoral Fellow at the Abdelmalek Essaadi University in Morocco. Her research focuses on indigenous performance traditions in the Levant and North Africa. Her work on theatre and Sufism has appeared in New Theatre Quarterly and Jadaliyya.

On 30 March 2018, protesters in the Gaza Strip engaged in a peaceful demonstration for “Land Day,” a Palestinian commemoration of the expropriation of lands for Israeli settlements in 1976. During the march, Palestinians approached the border with Israel where the Israeli army opened fire with live ammunition and tank shells, killing at least fifteen demonstrators. Dozens of others were wounded. In the weeks and months that followed, Palestinian protesters continued to protest at the Gaza border. As this issue goes to print, the International Committee of the Red Cross reports that at least 116 Palestinians have been killed in protests framed as the “Great March of Return” since 30 March 2018, and as many as thirteen thousand have been injured. This spring's events, coinciding with the seventieth anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel and the US decision to move its embassy to Jerusalem, offer yet another reminder of the violence and dispossession that for decades have characterized Palestinian life under Israeli occupation.

Three prominent Palestinian theatres use performance as a form of and forum for resistance to occupation. In the words of Juliano Mer Khamis, the murdered artistic director The Freedom Theatre, “We believe that the third intifada, the coming intifada, should be cultural, with poetry, music, theatre, cameras, and magazines.”

This essay explores how Kamel EL-Basha’s theatre production Following the Footsteps of Hamlet (2013) preaches unity and resistance in a post-2006 divided Palestine. After giving a brief historical account of the causes of the internal Palestinian political divisions that distract Palestinians from achieving liberation, the article traces how El-Basha uses theatrical devices such as the chorus and the ghost to materialise a sense of unification in the theatrical space. The analysis draws on other international theatrical practices like Einar Schleef’s (1980) ‘Choric Theatre’ and cites critical works such as Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1872) to locate El-Basha’s theatrical practice in a broader context regarding the significance of the chorus in dramatising unity. The essay also traces how the performance of traditional Palestinian songs, ululation, dances like dabke and other rituals in the play, help foster Palestinian identity and shape their sumud (steadfastness) in facing the occupation. Finally, the essay focuses on the role of the ghost in evoking nostalgia in the audience for the days of unity and collective resistance promoted by the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat before his death.

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.

How can a play go viral? Following its 2009 premiere at London's Royal Court Theatre, Caryl Churchill's Seven Jewish Children—a politically provocative mini-drama staging the contested history of Israeli-Palestinian relations—did just that, spawning counter-plays and performative revisions that proliferated worldwide, in physical theatres and in the internet's intangible arena.

In this article Shulamith Lev-Aladgem focuses on The Bride from the Sea, a community performance by three young Israeli-Palestinian mothers, presented in a sand box in a multi-functional kindergarten in Jaffa in 2008. From the beginning of the creative process, the Jewish facilitator and the performers had to struggle to overcome the various barriers erected by the intricate, oppressive daily life of the young Palestinian women. They eventually managed to perform a ‘short, thin performance’, which, despite resembling a misperformance, had an emotional and even exceptional effect on the audience. This performance is examined as a special kind of women-based community theatre, termed here ‘the bare theatre’, to indicate a form that articulates the bare daily life of women trapped between internal and external oppressive power regimes. Shulamith Lev-Aladgem is chair of the Theatre Arts Department at Tel Aviv University, a trained actress, and a community-based theatre practitioner. Her recent publications include Theatre in Co-Communities: Articulating Power (2010) and Standing Front Stage: Resistance, Celebration, and Subversion in Israeli Community-Based Theatre (2010), as well as articles in Research in Drama Education and Israeli Sociology.

Since the 1990s, Palestinian theatrical activities in the West Bank have expanded exponentially. As well as local productions, Palestinian theatre-makers have presented their work to international audiences on a scale unprecedented in Palestinian history. By tracing the history of the five major theatre companies (Al-Kasaba Theatre, Ashtar Theatre, Al-Harah Theatre, The Freedom Theatre and Al-Rowwad) currently working in the West Bank, this groundbreaking project examines the role of theatre-makers in the formation of ‘abject counterpublics’. By placing theories of abjection and counterpublic formation in conversation with each other, this dissertation argues that theatre in the West Bank has been regulated by processes of social abjection and, yet, it is an important site for counterpublic formation. In this way Palestinian theatre has played an integral role in the formation of an abject counterpublic, a discursive and performative space in which theatre-makers contest Zionist discourse and Israeli state practices. What tactics, I ask, do theatre-makers use to disrupt, subvert and/or bypass the Zionist public sphere? What counter-discourse emerges from this site? How is such a counter-discourse articulated in performance spaces? And how does Palestinian theatre, in the logistical sense, work against a dominant discourse of erasure as well as continue to operate under conditions of settler-colonialism? This dissertation is the first major account of Palestinian theatre covering the last thirty years. Taking the end of the first intifada (1993) as its point of departure, and using original field research and interviews, this project fills a major gap in our knowledge of contemporary Palestinian theatre in the West Bank up to the present. The original contribution of my research to the fields of theatre studies and Palestine studies are twofold. Firstly, Reuven Snir’s Palestinian Theatre (2005) is currently the only book-length study up to the end of the first intifada. Whereas Snir’s book is limited to archival sources, my arguments rest upon original fieldwork (interviews, participant observation, performance analysis and case studies) carried out in the West Bank in 2014 and 2015. As such, it provides a richer, bottom-up analysis of theatre-making. Secondly, by introducing the term abject counterpublics and by placing the voices of theatre-makers at the centre of its enquiry, this study broadens discussions on abjection and counterpublic formation in Palestine.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict dates back to 1917, when British Prime Minister Balfour declared Britain’s support for the establishment of a homeland for Jews in the land of Palestine. The conflict has had many political, social, and artistic implications. On the political level, a struggle that has not been solved until this day has evolved. On a social level, many lives have been crushed: thousands of native citizens of the land became refugees, mainly in Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, but also worldwide. Others, like the Arabs who stayed in what was in 1948 declared to be the state of Israel, have been suffering from an identity crisis; many of these Arabs face unlawful detention, demolition of houses, killing and racism. The Gaza strip has almost always been under siege by the Israeli military machine lately. Meanwhile, the Jewish society has never had a day of peace since the establishment of their state. On the artistic level, the conflict has always had implications for Arab/ Palestinian and Israeli writings., I seek to read the depiction of the conflict with its different violent confrontations from both Israeli and Palestinian perspectives starting with the Palestinian Nakba to the violent Israeli oppression of any Palestinian resistance in the Intifada. I also read literary texts about Palestinian resistance, actual material resistance of the first Palestinian Intifada as represented by both sides in postcolonial terms. In fact, I believe that both Palestinian and Israeli literature could be read in the context of postcolonial discourse. On the one hand, for Palestinian and Arab writers, Palestinian writing is and should be read as resistance literature, or ‘Adab al-muqawamah’, a term coined by Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani. Anna Ball’s study Palestinian Literature and Film in Postcolonial Feminist Perspective examines Palestinian literature and film in the light of postcolonial feminism. Ball places the conflict in the context of colonial/ postcolonial discourse and breaks the taboo against using the word colonialism when speaking about Zionism. In fact, the research problem is based on the idea of the inadequacy of ignoring Palestinian and Israeli literature as part of postcolonial studies simply for fear of revealing the colonial status quo of the land. According to Anna Bernard, who seeks to draw attention to what she calls ‘blind spots in postcolonial studies’, mainly Israel/ Palestine: ‘by dismissing a ‘postcolonial’ approach to Israel-Palestine studies outright, [critics like] Massad and Shohat overlook the value of a literary study that seeks to demonstrate the collective and cross-cultural impact of the various modern forms of colonialism and imperialism on artistic production across the globe’. Massad’s argument that there is difficulty in describing space, time and body in Israel/ Palestine as postcolonial is based on his interrogations: ‘Can one determine the coloniality of Palestine/ Israel without noting its ‘‘post-coloniality’’ for Ashkenazi Jews? Can one determine the post-coloniality of Palestine/Israel without noting its coloniality for Palestinians? Can one determine both or either without noting the simultaneous colonizer/colonized status of Mizrahi Jews? (Although one could debate the colonized status of Mizrahi Jews) How can all these people inhabit a colonial/postcolonial space in a world that declares itself living in a post-colonial time?’ Ella Shohat, likewise, is against what she calls the ‘ahistorical and universalizing deployments, and potentially [the] depoliticizing implications’ of the term ‘post-colonial,’ especially that, according to her, it is used instead of important terms like imperialism and neo-colonialism. In spite of the importance of paying attention to the correct description of states of imperialism and neo-colonialism, I still find it possible to read both Palestinian and Israeli texts in postcolonial perspective, agreeing with Bernard ‘that the tools that have been developed for reading these texts comparatively – including colonial discourse analysis, national allegory, minority discourse, and so on – can be usefully applied, tested, and revised in the analysis of Palestinian and Israeli literary and cultural production’. This view resonates with Ashcroft, Tiffin and Griffiths’s in their study The Postcolonial Studies Reader (1995), when they comment on this wide range of relevant fields that the term postcolonial suggests: ‘Postcolonial theory involves discussion about experience of various kinds: migration, slavery, suppression, resistance, representation, difference, race, gender, [and] place’ . In fact, the term ‘postcolonial’ is not necessarily restricted to a real colonial period; it could be used, according to Ashcroft, Tiffin and Griffiths in The Empire Writes Back: ‘to cover all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day. This is because there is continuity of preoccupations throughout the historical process initiated by European imperial aggression’. Between the view of the land of Palestine as a lawful possession of the Jews and that which sees Jewish presence as a settler or colonial one, a debate about reading the conflict and literary production tackling the conflict within theories of colonial and postcolonial studies arises. What makes reading the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and its literature and literary production within the paradigm of postcolonialism problematic is worth some further investigation. First, the preference and focus on the discursive practices of colonialism over the material practices has resulted in excluding the Israeli/ Palestinian conflict from the field of postcolonial studies by a number of critics like Ella Shohat and Joseph Massad, which is more elaborated on later. Second, the debate about the Zionist project as a settler colonial one could also problematize analysing the conflict within postcolonial theories. The first chapter explores the Israeli/ Palestinian and Arab writing of the conflict from a colonizer/colonized perspective. I mainly focus on the representation of violence as an essential element in a colonized society and the decolonization process, drawing on Frantz Fanon’s theory that violence is inevitable in any colonized community as the backbone of the analysis. For this purpose, I have chosen Syrian playwright Saad-Allah Wanous’s play Rape (1990), to compare with Israeli playwright Hanoch Levin’s play Murder (1997), since both plays represent violence as a vicious circle that does not lead anywhere in the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, even though it is an everyday act that has become a way of life for both sides. Crucial terms in the field of postcolonial studies such as resistance/terrorism are examined. Some similarities between the ways the two playwrights write the conflict are also highlighted, which supports the idea that literature can always find shared ground between any two conflicting parties. In Chapters Two and Three I write about the history of the conflict as a chain of endless violent confrontations; violence in this case is on the national level when the two nations fight each other. Chapter Two addresses some of the landmark events in the history of the Jewish and Palestinian peoples, mainly the Israeli War of Independence/Nakba as the same historical event seen from the two extremely different colonizer/colonized perspectives. The chapter also addresses what the Holocaust has to do with the two events and how the Holocaust was exploited by the Israeli state to silence any condemnation of the Israeli/Zionist settler colonial project in Palestine and later on to silence any international condemnation of the Israeli 1967 occupation of more Palestinian and Arab lands.

This study examines Palestinian theatre practices in the West Bank and East Jerusalem within their spatial contexts, analysing how theatre responds to its geopolitical environment as an act of cultural resistance. It argues that space in Palestine is not monolithic, and is subjected to three main structural forces – the Israeli military occupation, international neoliberal humanitarian regime and the Palestinian Authority – which influence Palestinian space at different levels depending on the specific location. As there are multiple spaces in Palestine, I use a number of complementary theories to explain each site, utilizing Sari Hanafi’s composite theoretical framework of ‘spacio-cide’ as an ‘umbrella’ theory, the different components of which are applied to the relevant space whilst bearing in mind its overall conceptualisation. I suggest that the ‘urbicidal’ policies of the Israeli military executed during the second intifada is no longer a relevant theoretical framework, particularly for the main urban sites; however, contentious areas exist in a ‘post-urbicidal’ state. I argue that Palestinian theatre practices respond to the particular spatial condition in which it is being performed. I analyse three particular spaces in Palestine: the mainstream non-refugee urban space which is under the international humanitarian regime; the refugee camp located within the ‘state of exception’; and the site of extreme contention, which is located at the peripheries of Palestine, and which is being subjected to ‘post-urbicidal’ actions by the Israelis. I examine a number of plays and theatre practices in relation to these spaces, to argue that Palestinian cultural resistance through theatre is a tactic through which Palestinians can challenge the conditions under which they live, whilst promoting the continuation of non-violent resistance and Palestinian culture.

Quelques critiques universitaires ont été écrites sur des spectacles récents prenant pour thématique le conflit israélo-palestinien, mais il n’existe pas d’étude d’ensemble à ce sujet. Par ailleurs, depuis le début des années 2000, plusieurs recherches se sont attachées à préciser les relations qu’entretiennent le théâtre et la politique. Cette thèse vise à approfondir cette réflexion à partir des transferts culturels d’œuvres israéliennes et palestiniennes vers la France, des années 1970 à nos jours.Pour ce faire la méthodologie mise en œuvre articule historiographie du théâtre, histoire des représentations théâtrales et étude du champ de production culturelle en diachronie. Elle a permis de mettre en évidence la persistance de l’Orientalisme renforcé par le déphasage historique entre la France et Israël et l’inégal développement entre la France et la Palestine. La représentation théâtrale peut offrir un espace de résistance aux assignations identitaires subies par les artistes d’Israël et de Palestine, ou bien reproduire les rapports de domination lisibles à travers le degré de légitimité des dramaturg(i)es. La thèse rappelle la complexité des rapports de domination qui ne sont pas réductibles au racisme ou à un « choc de civilisations » mais relèvent d’une hégémonie culturelle entretenue par les institutions théâtrales et universitaires, et critiques dramatiques. Ces instances de légitimation sont analysées ici en tant que productrices d’un discours idéologique dont l’étude remet en question la posture de neutralité qui accompagne l’autonomie de l’art
In a limited scope, academic critiques have been written on recent productions on the theme of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, still there exists no comprehensive study on the subject. Additionally, several studies have focused on clarifying the relationship between theatre and politics since the early 2000s. The thesis aims to expand on this line of thought, deriving from cultural transfers of Israeli and Palestinian works to France, from the 1970s to the present day.The methodology implemented articulates theatre historiography, history of theatrical performances and the study of the cultural production field in diachrony. The methodology allowed for the highlighting of the persistence of Orientalism, reinforced by the historic phase-shift between France and Israel and the unequal development between France and Palestine. The theatrical performance can either offer a space of resistance to the identity assignements suffered by artists from Israel and Palestine, or can reproduce domination relations that are legible through the degree of legitimacy of the theatre performances and performers. The thesis evokes the complexity of relations of dominance that are not reducible to racism or a "clash of civilizations" but are a cultural hegemony maintained by theatrical and academic institutions, and drama reviewer. These instances of legitimation are analyzed here as producers of an ideological discourse, the study of which challenges the posture of neutrality that accompanies the autonomy of art

Cette recherche porte sur l’analyse des problématiques des langues et des identités dans le roman composé en hébreu par des membres de la minorité palestinienne d’Israël – (Texte hybride selon Yassir Suleiman, 2013). Elle combine deux volets, l’un diachronique et l’autre analytique. D’une part, elle examine l’histoire du roman palestinien en hébreu, et les différents lieux dans lesquels l’hébreu et l’arabe, le Palestinien et le Juif israélien, minorité et majorité se rencontrent. D’autre part, l’approche comparative des œuvres d’Atallah Mansour (1935), d’Anton Shammas (1950) et de Sayed Kashua (1975) est proposée à partir de leur double appartenance, hébraïque et palestinienne. Elle envisage ces œuvres dans le cadre de la littérature mineure, de l’identité hybride postcoloniale et de l’espace tiers formulé par Mahmoud Darwich. L’enjeu est d’étudier les contours d’une narration palestinienne minoritaire engagée par des écrivains dans un processus de déconstruction, de reconfiguration et de correction de la représentation du personnage Palestinien dans la littérature hébraïque
This research focuses on the analysis of the issues of language and identity in novels written in Hebrew by members of the Palestinian minority in Israel ("hybrid texts" according to Yassir Suleiman). It combines two components, one diachronic and one analytical. First, it examines the history of the Palestinian novel in Hebrew and the different fields where Hebrew and Arabic, Palestinian and Israeli Jew as well as minority and majority meet. Second, the analytical, comparative approach of the works of Atallah Mansour (1935), Anton Shammas (1950) and Sayed Kashua (1975) is examined from their dual, Israeli and Palestinian, affiliation. It sets these works in the context of Minor Literature, post-colonial hybrid identity and Mahmoud Darwich’s third space. The aim is to outline the Palestinian narrative initiated by minority writers as a process of deconstruction, reconfiguration and correction of the representation of the Palestinian character in Hebrew literature