The Writing the Future workshop intended to create space where young Palestinian theatremakers’ could articulate their own precarity through monologue and solo performance. But its focus on futurity, Bayan Shbib writes, gave way to a harsher, clearer, and more necessary insistence on presence.
Ash Marinaccio and Ukrainian theatremaker Veronika Skliarova discuss how documentary theatre is preserving testimony, fostering resilience, and building community amid war.
Ash talks with Zoe Lafferty, founder of Artists on the Frontline, about artist-led citizen journalism in Palestine’s Jenin refugee camp and the role of political documentary theatre projects in the current political climate.
Neoliberal and colonial empires have devastated Muslim communities across the globe. Whether it is British imperialism in South Asia or the military adventurism of the United States in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, geopolitical violence has moved Muslims from homelands to colonizers’ lands. Throughout these migrations, theatre and the telling of stories have been sources of strength and solidarity, a legacy drawing on the origins of Muslim history. Indeed, the dates of today’s Islamic calendar bear the acronym “AH” or “After Hijrah,” a term that references the migration of early Muslims from the religious oppression they faced in Makkah to a more tolerant context in Medina. Drawing on this legacy of migration to escape subjugation, Transatlantic Muslim Voices examines the ways that contemporary British and US theatre artists have continued or drawn inspiration from this practice through their own work. The contributors to this series are diverse in their racial, ethnic, gender, linguistic, and sexual identities, but all of them meditate on what it means to be a Muslim on the move.
