For Palestinian Theatremakers, the Future Is a Dangerous Question

Palestinian artists are navigating layers of trauma: the constant presence of news from Gaza, the ethical weight of witnessing suffering, and the tension between artistic expression and survival. As Gaza faces intense bombardment, mass displacement, and the targeting of civilian infrastructure, the psychological and social effects reverberate across Palestinian communities across Palestine and its diaspora.

In Palestine, theatre operates under a shadow of uncertainty. Artists continuously negotiate working against the backdrop of air raids, checkpoints, and closures. Many rehearsal spaces have been forced to close temporarily. Funding streams have dried up as international attention oscillated between fleeting sympathy and geopolitical indifference, and institutions have faced internal crises as staff and artists processed grief while trying to sustain programs. Still, the imperative to create persists.

In this climate, young theatremakers—those who grew up after the Oslo Accords and amid the illusion of incremental statehood—experience a profound sense of precarity. Playwrights and performers navigate not only the practical challenges of staging work under siege but also the moral and political questions of how to represent Palestinian life, pain, and imagination without falling into performative tropes that cater to external audiences or funders.

The workshop Writing the Future responded to this moment, offering a contained, protected space where artists could confront these pressures, articulate their perspectives, and explore the psychological impacts of living under continuous threat. The eight-hour workshop was held on 19 August 2025 at the theatre hall of the Arab Evangelical Episcopal School in Al- Tireh, Ramallah. It was co-conducted by Marina Johnson and myself, both doctoral researchers as well as playwrights and directors, and brought together eight Palestinian theatremakers aged twenty-eight to thirty-seven.

Playwrights and performers navigate not only the practical challenges of staging work under siege but also the moral and political questions of how to represent Palestinian life, pain, and imagination without falling into performative tropes that cater to external audiences or funders.

The arts in Palestine have historically been a vehicle for resistance and testimony. From works such as The Gaza Monologues by Ashtar Theater—which amplified the voices of youth living under siege—to initiatives like the Freedom Bus by The Freedom Theater, which uses interactive theatre to bear witness to lived realities across sites of oppression, theatre has functioned as a space for narrating trauma, asserting presence, and resisting erasure. Yet the intensity of the current conflict has shifted the stakes: Producing theatre is no longer merely a political act but also a form of personal endurance. Artists must balance the need to reflect reality through art with the ethical and emotional limits of what they can witness and perform. The psychosocial theatre lab offered a framework for navigating these tensions. Through creative exercises, participants engaged with the impossible question of the future while remaining grounded in the urgency of the present.

Situating Writing the Future within a broader context of cultural destabilization and collective trauma illuminates not only the creative strategies of Palestinian theatremakers, but also the resilience and vulnerability inherent in producing art under siege. Through monologues, devised scenes, and reflective writing, the lab explored how a generation of artists negotiates collapse, presence, and imagination simultaneously. Their work highlighted the fraught but persistent role of culture as a space for endurance and agency.

Context and Aim

This lab, Writing the Future, emerged from a moment of historical rupture. Amidst the ongoing catastrophe in Gaza, Palestinian cultural life has entered a state of profound destabilization. Theatres are underfunded, institutions fractured, and artists—especially those between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five—navigate an impossible terrain. Many are neither fully disillusioned by the failures of the Oslo Accord nor aligned with the nostalgic resistance narratives that defined their predecessors. They came of age amid the illusion of statehood and the expansion of securitized enclaves marketed as “development.” Yet they continue to create—to insist on art as a way of thinking, surviving, and reimagining collective life.

This generation’s choice to be artists is itself political: It is a decision to create in the ruins of institutions, to speak in a void of policies and protections. Few research frameworks capture how this cohort defines its own artistic and political vocabulary. Writing the Future sought to fill that gap by listening to these artists directly, without mediation by donor agendas, nonprofit logic, or inherited ideological scripts.

The workshop formed part of my doctoral research in social psychology, which investigates how contemporary Palestinian theatre navigates trauma, agency, and imagination. Marina Johnson, who co-conducted the workshop, is a doctoral researcher in theatre studies. Together, we designed it as a psychosocial theatre experiment—part playwriting, part performance—where creation itself became inquiry.

The participants—five women and three men, all emerging theatremakers and active members of the Palestinian theatre community—came from across the West Bank. Many had previously worked with me as director, playwright, or instructor, which created a safe and trusting environment for engaging with sensitive and highly political themes. Over one day, in a small Ramallah studio with blackout curtains drawn against the August heat, they wrote, performed, and improvised their answers to one impossible prompt: What does the future mean when the present is collapsing?

All texts and improvisations were written in Arabic and later translated into English by me for documentation and analysis. The workshop included playwriting exercises and devised scenes, allowing participants to respond both individually and collectively to the ongoing political and psychosocial pressures of life under occupation.

This generation’s choice to be artists is itself political: It is a decision to create in the ruins of institutions, to speak in a void of policies and protections. Few research frameworks capture how this cohort defines its own artistic and political vocabulary.

Why Monologue? Why Now?

We chose monologue writing and solo performance as both methodology and symbolic form. The monologue—an act of speaking alone, publicly—has long been a tool of confession, resistance, and reinvention. In Palestine, the solo voice carries a particular charge: It stands against collective erasure, asserting presence despite fragility.

Unlike ensemble work shaped by established dramaturgies, monologue writing allows for self-curated speech. It offers artists a space to articulate contradictions, name silences, and redefine political effect on their own terms.

Our writing prompts were simple yet volatile:

• Write a scene titled “The Day After the Future.”
• Write a letter to your future self.
• Stage a short monologue where your present self argues with your imagined self fifty years from now.

Each exercise became a site of confrontation between grief, exhaustion, irony, and defiance.

When the Future Becomes a Provocation

The immediate response to the first exercise was silence. Then one artist burst out, “You want me to imagine the future? When I can’t even sleep without the sound of bombs in my head? The only thing I can imagine is surviving tomorrow’s morning.”

Another added, “I can’t perform hope on demand. Every time I try, I feel like I’m betraying what’s happening now.”

Their refusal to imagine was not paralysis—it was lucidity. As one participant later wrote, “The obsession with the future is becoming a colonial trend. They want Palestinians in futuristic plays, futuristic settings, futuristic fantasies—because if we live in the future, we stop seeing the present, and we stop remembering the past.”

The rejection of “futurity” became the lab’s pulse. For these artists, imagining forward felt like denial. The present demanded testimony, not escape.

Museums of False Freedom

Other participants responded through satire. Several artists, without coordination, imagined dystopian “museums of Palestinian history,” where liberation had become a souvenir.

One performer announced, “Welcome to the Museum of False Freedoms! Please don’t touch the exhibits—they’re fragile, just like our peace agreements.”

Their satire had teeth—it exposed the grotesque, global tendency to archive Palestinian pain rather than end it. Humor became both a defense mechanism and an act of critique.

Another improvised a guided tour: “Here’s the final wall, preserved like a dragon’s skin. Here’s the Freedom Bar—beer for five shekels, revolution on the house. And here—look closely—are the theatre artists who once believed in change. They’re now historical figures, beautifully lit.”

The room erupted in uneasy laughter. Their satire had teeth—it exposed the grotesque, global tendency to archive Palestinian pain rather than end it. Humor became both a defense mechanism and an act of critique. “If I don’t laugh, I’ll break,” one participant later said. “The museum is my way of surviving what I can’t describe.”

Letters from the Edge of Endurance

In a later exercise, participants wrote letters to their imagined future selves. The results ranged from biting irony to quiet faith.

One letter declared, “I’m proud of the artist I’ve become—famous, free, adored. Funders beg for my projects. I tour the world. The safest place on Earth is my homeland.”

The laughter that followed was knowing, almost tender. The “safest homeland” was under siege. When the noise faded, the writer added, “Maybe that’s my way of saying I’m still alive. To write an impossible life, even if it’s a joke.”

Another letter was written in a single breath: “They might erase my name, but not my blood. I perform so I can endure. I write so memory won’t be erased.”

Between irony and conviction, the letters mapped the contours of a generation’s psychology—where despair and insistence coexist.

Critical Refusal: Decolonizing Time

At one point, an artist turned to me and said, “You academics love the future. But for us, it’s another checkpoint. You think it’s liberating, but it’s just another place we’re not allowed to reach.”

That sentence captured what the lab made palpable: Futurity, as framed by Western discourse, can be a colonial form of violence. It demands optimism from the oppressed while excusing global indifference.

Several participants noted that “Palestinian futurism” had become a new curatorial trend: “Every festival wants futuristic Palestine now—robots, artificial intelligence, Mars. It’s their way of saying, ‘Enough of your suffering, show us your imagination.’ But imagination is also being bombed.”

The lab thus transformed into something larger: a decolonial inquiry into time itself.  This decolonial approach to temporality was not merely discussed by participants—it was embedded in the very design of the lab. Rather than treating the future as a linear horizon of progress—a premise often assumed in Western dramaturgical and development frameworks—I structured exercises to disrupt this temporal logic. Participants were not tasked with producing coherent visions of what might come next. Instead, they were invited to confront, resist, and reimagine futurity on their own terms. What emerged was a refusal of linear inevitability: The present did not serve as a bridge to resolution, but as a densely overdetermined space, shaped by repetition, rupture, and the immediacy imposed under occupation. In this way, the lab became a site where time itself was contested. By embracing fragmentation, contradiction, and refusal, the process re-centered temporality as a lived experience, allowing participants to reclaim the ways in which past, present, and future are narrated, inhibited, and performed. Refusing the future became an act of reclaiming presence.

Post-Heroic Theatre

The generation of artists who took part in the Ramallah workshop belongs to a new moment in Palestinian theatre. They inherit the legacy of foundational companies such as El- Hakawati Palestinian National Theatre, Al- kasaba Theatre and Cinematheque, and Ashtar for Theatre Productions and Training, whose founders built their work around collective resistance, national identity, and heroic struggle. The younger theatremakers in this lab speak a new dramatic language—one shaped by irony, fatigue, and the daily practice of survival.

Their performances do not celebrate liberation myths; they inhabit the uncertainty of living through collapse.

“Theatre,” one artist said, “is a body kept alive on a ventilator—still breathing, not sure why.”

Another confessed, “I used to believe ‘the show must go on.’ But after the last bombing, I realized it doesn’t have to. If I’m not okay, the show stops. That’s political.”

Their theatre refuses the pressure to be inspirational. It offers something smaller and stranger: the right to remain present without pretending that presence is victory.

The Future as a Dangerous Question

By evening, the lab had shifted from exercise to exorcism. Some artists wept. Others smoked silently, their notebooks closed. The question of the future had become unbearable—and illuminating.

The day didn’t heal anyone. It wasn’t meant to. It revealed what survival looks like when imagination itself is besieged. It showed how laughter, silence, and refusal can function as languages of endurance.

One participant, before leaving, said quietly, “Maybe the bravest thing left is to stay here—in the present—and not lie about it.”

That sentence has followed me since. In their hands, theatre no longer decorates resistance; it documents survival. It rejects the command to be hopeful on demand. And in that refusal, something radical appears: a fragile agency, a defiant tenderness, a will to exist without redemption.

In a world that demands futures, these artists insist on presence. That insistence—quiet, unglamorous, and unyielding—may be the most revolutionary act left.