...is one project ends as another begins.

Hey folks!

Lots of good news and goodbyes today. Let's start with the news:

New.Clear.Vision ran the last of my series of articles this morning, so click here to head over there and read about the peaceful demonstration at Nabi Saleh.

ALSO, This Week in Palestine, a major periodical published monthly in the West Bank, ran my two-page article about Midnight Raid! My first print article, woohoo! Click here to read it on their website.

As for the goodbyes...


I held my last class with the guys at The Freedom Theatre a few weeks ago. We scaled the performance down to a small, in-class showing, and invited the students professors to attend and intervene. Here's what happened:

- - -

Without much preamble, interventions begin.

“Was there a moment in the play when one of the characters could have done something different?” I ask.

Today I facilitate a small forum performance with the play we’ve created. The students’ primary instructors sit in the audience to participate.

Yes, yes, they mumble. I latch onto one of the mumblers:

“Which moment?” I ask him. He squirms.

“I don’t know,” he thinks. “Maybe in the house, when the brothers speak.”

“Okay, in the house. Actors—“ I turn to Saber and Anas, who wait, alert, onstage. “Let’s go to the scene in the house. Any particular moment, Nabil?”

The guys scurry into position. “Yeah, before the girl comes in, he could have been more strong—“

“Who?” I ask.

“The younger brother.”

“The younger brother—he could have done something different?”

“Yes, he could have—“

Before he finishes I hop downstage and extend a hand to him.

“Yalla, show us!” I beckon with my fingers, come come!

He’s reluctant. “Ah, come on Christine,” he says.

But I melt him. “Come on,” let’s play! I put my hand on his shoulder and he stands.

I direct him to the chair where the brother sits.

“Three, two, one, action!”

It’s a tremendously clear intervention. Nabil begins shouting almost immediately at Saber. Saber holds his ground. Nabil stands. Saber stands. They are screaming now, arguing in heated Arabic. After sixty seconds, Saber retreats to his character’s room in the back of the house.

Now. “Freeze!” I step into the center of the playing area from where I had been watching on the side.

“What changed?” I ask the audience.

We have a short dialogue about it—he stood up for her, he physically intimidated.

“Did it work?” I ask. Most think yes, it worked. I difficultate.

“He managed to chase his brother out of the room, but has the situation really changed for the woman? What happens when he calms down? Has he changed his mind?”

They are silent, registering it.

“No,” says Motaz.

We continue to forum. I use a variety of techniques: we look at the Cops in the Head of the antagonist; we bring someone onstage to enact the invisible woman. Somewhere in the middle of the exercises I lose myself in curiosity and begin to enjoy jokering. The currents of the room flow through me like a circuit board. I hold the space with my body and voice.

But the time is short. After a few interventions, Ben arrives to teach the next class. I thank the audience and clear the stage. I stack chairs leave, walking through the dust and sun back to the camp.

- - -

And a last piece of news:

Uri and I finished a preliminary edit of our film, Wall to Wall. It's a ten-minute survey of the work we've been up to in the last four months--from Belfast to Jenin and Jerusalem.

Thanks, you all, for keeping me company as I travelled! I look forward to future work, and thank you for your support.

In bocco al lupo, shabab. In peace,

Christine

... is it makes this body dance.

Photo by S.E.T.

The room is dark. 

Blue light streams in from a high window. Anas lies on the floor, sleeping. He writhes in nightmare. Behind him stand Motaz, Alaa and Aadel in the semidarkness. Aadel’s head is wrapped in a kuffia.

We are rehearsing the final scene of our forum play. A small audience sits silently on mats.

The three walk solemnly to Anas, singing a quiet melody together. They kneel beside him. His movements become more erratic, and suddenly, Aadel plunges an invisible knife into him. Anas recoils, and becomes still.

The main lights switch on. Aadel and Ala’ retreat back into the wall, and Motaz stays with the body. He weeps.

I am so moved. If we come from a place of healing, the work will heal everyone. I watch Motaz cry and it occurs to me that this might be the first time he’s publicly shared his grief. As he rocks Anas in his arms I see him holding himself, grieving the part of himself that died with his friend.

And it isn’t just Motaz. Every guy in the class is moved. The enactment has touched something in us.

When it ends, I step between the audience and the stage. As usual after a heavy enactment, the guys exhibit a strong impulse to leave the scene of the crime and scatter. I gently block the impulse by holding the space with my body and voice.

“Thank you, guys,” I say. I turn to the audience. “Very briefly, I’d like to ask what you all saw. We don’t usually have the pleasure of an audience, and it’s good for us to hear what’s communicating and what isn’t. So what did you see?”

The audience, composed of visitors to the Freedom Theatre and a few graduated acting students, share their thoughts: it looked like a dream, the light was important to the storytelling, all the characters felt emotional about the death.

The actors are getting antsy. I dismiss the audience and speak with them.

“Much clearer this time, guys, thanks for the adjustments.”

We break for a cigarette, and after the break we convene in the small cinema. They don’t want to return to the workshop room, and I decide not to push it. Something charged was created in there, and now I want to care for them.

“Let’s finish today in a new way,” I say. “I’m gonna teach you guys a song. It’s African.”

They look to me with frantic energy. They want to leave.

I begin to sing, and they soften.

“Bobo male, bobo male, chu chu maya…”

My voice is warm and sweet from my chest. It feels nice to sing. They join me.

Spirit, let this body dance. Bobo male…

By the final round everyone is smiling, laughing a little at the strange syllables we are singing together. We finish in a flourish, and I tap my legs in a drumroll.

“In boco lupo.”

Crepi lupo!

The class disperses, and I climb the stairs to my desk.

Now that the students are away, I check in with our artistic needs. For the forum to be most effective, we need to clean up the beginning; give the audience reason to love Motaz’s character. Who is he? Why is today special?

I wonder what the guys are avoiding by avoiding character exposition. If they are nameless guys, then they are not like me.

I click away on the keyboard, thinking, Who is this guy? Why is today special? The spirit makes my fingers dance.

... is New. Clear. Vision. gets it!

Photo courtesy: S.E.T.

SHABAB!


New. Clear. Vision. is a progressive newsblog committed to "highlighting positive actions and emerging visions, from local efforts to global initiaties"

Guess who wrote their cover story today?


I did!


Click here to read the article...


...and then share it: tweet, tumblr, reblog! By dispersing these accounts as widely as possible, we are sending a clear message to Israel that we are watching them, recording and publicizing their actions--all while maintaining our humanity through art.


Thanks, NCV!

... is it don't stop.

The door is locked shut.

 From the other side, I can hear the din of creation. I knock.

“Five more minutes, please, just!”

“Shabab, ya le!” I’m grinning from ear to ear. “Whatever you have is perfect!”

It’s been almost an hour since I’ve seen the guys. I left them with a simple task: finish the play.

“We’ve talked about many things, rehearsed many things. You have the idea, the whole story. You can keep the ideas I’ve suggested or throw them out, you can create new ones, but tell the story! Beginning, middle end, with transitions, with music—everything! One hour!”

They practically pushed me out of the door. “Okay! Okay! Go!” So I left them to their work.

It wasn’t easy. From the courtyard, I could hear them shouting, creating inside the rehearsal space. Just relax, give them space. I let go, and observed.

Anas began to gather props. “Do you have coffee cups?” he asked me. I obliged him, giving him cups and platters from the guesthouse kitchen. I watched Aadel and Saber cross back and forth, carrying chairs and lights and stools into the space. They barely stopped to smile at me. They were laser-focused.

After the hour elapsed, they still wanted more time.

“It’s alright, you guys, this is a test run, no worries.” A small group of visitors clumped behind me in the hall. I turned to them. “You guys are in for a treat.”

I was right. When the guys finally opened the door, I stepped into a transformed space. Two stage lights—one blue, one yellow—criss-crossed the playing area in dramatic diagonal lines. Stools and overturned chairs littered the groundplan. Baskets with roses hung on the walls. The atmosphere was at once warm and taught with potential energy.

Holy shit, this set looks brilliant.

I gave our audience some context: we have been working on this show for several weeks, it is entirely improvised, it is based on a true story from the group.

“Alright guys,” I call out the door. “Ready when you are.”

The show begins, and I’m blown away. The five of them work in concert, creating an incredibly beautiful, naturalistic aesthetic. Stanislavski-esque, I feel I am looking through a fourth wall into the morning activity of a Palestinian coffee shop. The owner shuffles in, starts music. His coworker makes coffee. They light cigarettes. The clientele filter in and the show begins.

The guys have chosen to represent the female character in the play as an invisible character. They react to her accordingly—scooting chairs out, bringing her coffee, chatting with her. It is very clear throughout.

There are aspects that need tightening: the first scene drags, the following scenes need more meat, the ending is ominous but unclear.

The net effect of the performance, however, is dazzling. They are utterly committed to the enactment, connected to each other and the imaginary circumstances. They finish the play, and we applaud.

I invite the audience to share what they saw. As a group of five, we rarely have the opportunity to be our own audience, and I was curious to see what they understood.

The majority of the audience was Japanese. They spoke halting English and no Arabic. They loved the show.

“For me,” said one of them. “I felt I was the invisible man.” Wow. Motaz translated for Aadel and they smiled at him.

“Thank you, yes.”

Class time was almost over, so after a quick cigarette break we reconvened. I covered the basics with them—when we would perform, the general outline of the rehearsal schedule from here out, and some notes about what I saw.

“We need to be clear about the ending,” I say. In this rendition, the guys piled on top of one another in a beautiful fluid sculpture, reaching and pulling against each other.

“In order for the audience to feel motivated to intervene, we need to make a strong and tragic ending. What is the worst thing that could happen in this situation?”

Radea translates the question, and for the first time today, the guys are silent.

“They run away, the girl and boy, they escape and we never find them.”

Suddenly they seem hesitant to stage the reality of the situation. I gently turn up the heat.

“But, Motaz, in your real story, doesn’t the woman die?”

“Yes,” he says.

“So, this doesn’t have to be the same as your story, but it should be the worst-case scenario. What’s something even worse that could happen, then them escaping?”

Aadel suggests that the brothers kill her boyfriend.

“Okay,” I say. “Is this possible?” Yes, yes it is, they agree.

“What about the girl?” I ask.

“They lock her in her room, for one month—no food, nothing. She goes crazy,” says Ala’.

Again, in a play about honor killings, the group hesitates to kill the woman.

“Alright, that’s one option.” The guys are antsy. It’s almost four o’clock and they need to catch transportation home.

I decide to let the conversation hang with them overnight.

“So tomorrow we will work on cleaning up the story—the ending, the beginning, things like this. Thank you for your work today, guys.”

In bocco al lupo! Crepi lupo! And they’re off, scattering out the door with backpacks. I stay behind, tidying the rehearsal space.

As I scoot chairs to the wall, Motaz’s voice bubbles up to my mind.

“You know what was the best thing about this day, Christine?” he asked.

I bite. “What?”

“You didn’t stop us.”

The past five weeks flood back to my mind. Freeze! Freeze! Wakif! How much energy I spent pushing them around the stage! How much responsibility I felt for the entire artistic package! And ultimately, how little I really needed to do to coax beauty from them.

“The more freedom they have,” said Uri during our last conversation. “The more authentic the piece will be. Don’t imagine what they will say or do. Just ask them the questions, and listen to their response.”

As I close the door to the rehearsal space, the familiar sensation of humbling insight creeps over me. I stare into the eyes of my shadow, the dictatorial director that I conjured so many times in the space behind me.

No more, sir. I think of the beauty that poured out of the guys today, and how I didn’t stop it, and how I let it flow.

Goodnight, ghost. I blow it out like smoke and shut the door.

... is they wish you a merry Christmas.

Faisal, with the musicians, at Wednesday's performance.

We all stand, instinctively, when he enters.

“Faisal, ilhamdulidalla.” He wears a black T-shirt and a wide smile, but he looks tired. He shakes our hands.

“Sit, sit.” We sit on the couch, and Faisal begins to speak.

“What you want to know?” he starts, and we laugh a little.

Faisal has just returned from Jalame, an Israeli checkpoint near Jenin. He’s been there all night, arrested at gunpoint and abducted from his home for interrogation. He’s just now been released. It is nearly eleven AM.

Faisal has been awake since 2:30 AM. “They came into my house, the soldiers, and I don’t know how they knew, but they went directly to my room.”

“How many were there?” I ask.

He squints an eye closed to remember. “Eight. All with guns, also, pointed at me when I woke up. I thought, wow, Faisal, you are finished.”

The soldiers pulled him by the hair out of bed and threw him against the wall.

“They asked for my ID, so I show it to them. They look at it—okay, Faisal, good—come with us—and they take me out of the house.”

On the street, three more soldiers stood. They bound Faisal’s hands with plastic zip ties behind his back, pulling them so tight they leave burn marks on both wrists.

“And they put me in the jeep. But before the jeep—wow, they do a very special trick.”

Yesterday, Faisal acted in a public Playback Theatre performance in the refugee camp. He led the exercises, speaking to the audience and playing back their stories of recent arrests.

After binding Faisal’s wrists, the army marched him down the street and around the corner, to the site of the afternoon’s performance. They stood him there, with no explanation, to silently look over the area.

“This is where they blindfolded me,” he says. The soldiers slipped a blindfold over Faisal’s eyes and put him into a jeep, with other prisoners, bound for Jalame.

Once at Jalame, Faisal is removed from the jeep and walked into the building. The soldiers put him in a room with six other prisoners, still bound and blindfolded, where he stands for five hours.

“And when your hands are like this,” Faisal demonstrates, locking his hands behind his back. “For five hours, your back begins to really hurt.”

At around eight AM, an officer finally brings Faisal in for interrogation.

“’The actor,’ he says, calling me ‘the actor, the actor.’ He begins to tell me everything about my life, like we are very good friends. He tells me about my gunshot wound, from when I was a child. He tells me that my friend has told them ‘very interesting’ things about me. I ask him, ‘what? What did he tell you?’ and he says, ‘oh, you know.’”

The officer brings him coffee. He speaks excellent Arabic. He asks him some questions about the late Juliano Mer-Khamis, and the Freedom Theatre, and his recent trip to Germany.

“So you’ve seen the world,” he said. “What do you think of it, leaving the camp? You like it in Germany?”

They ask many questions, more than Faisal can recall in sequence. "They asked for my five closest friends, told me to give their names."

As a final insult, the officer tells Faisal that he’ll be the most famous actor in prison.

“They just want to intimidate you, you know.”

Then the officer disappeared for an hour and a half, leaving Faisal alone without explanation in the room.

“Then they sent the soldiers in.” A group of soldiers—very large soldiers, heavily muscled and carrying machine guns—enter the room and circle Faisal. The stand tightly together and look down on him, wordlessly, with their weapons.

“And now I begin to relax,” says Faisal. “When they do this, because I know they don’t have any wrong information against me, they just want to tease me, to make me scared.”

The soldiers stand for a few minutes before leaving as silently as they came. A new man, someone who looks more like the captain, joins Faisal shortly after.

“He spoke with me a little, he played on his phone a little. Then they let me go.”

“Were you scared?” I ask.

“Yes, of course,” says Faisal. “I know that many times the soldiers, they hit the people while they are with blindfold in the jeep. The whole drive to Jalame I am frightened, ready for the gun to hit my legs or my knees.”

Adnan, the location manager of the Freedom Theatre, was also arrested last night and released in the morning. He jokes about it in our meeting.

“They could have at least kept me for a week. Just one night—there is no respect in that.”

Everyone laughs.

“Really, though,” says Adnan. “They target the theatre. They want people to hate the theatre.  That’s why they arrest us.”

Adnan has been arrested more than once by Israeli soldiers. Aside from some dark circles under his eyes, he is unruffled.

“It is very normal, here,” says Rokh. “About once every year, the army likes to come in and arrest everybody, when they get a new general. It’s the general’s way of saying hello.” Hello with torture, I think. Hello with gunpoint alarm clocks and blindfolds and threats.

I invite Rokh to stay with us at the guesthouse for the night, as I’m sure he is the next to be arrested on their list. He declines.

“It’s not a big problem, really. If they wish to find me they will find me, no problem.”

It is Christmastime in other parts of the world, and I can’t help imagining the droves of last-minute shoppers combing through the malls of America, searching for the perfect gift. As the night descends on Palestine, I wonder if the same frantic enthusiasm will color soldiers’ cheeks as they comb through the camp, lifting refugees like rag dolls from the shelves of their sleeping homes.

There is moonlight on the olive tree outside my window. A breeze disturbs the leaves. As a child, I always slept eagerly on Christmas Eve—leaving Santa to his work beneath our tree.

But tonight, I don’t want any more gifts. There are no herald angels here. Only soldiers, giving presents to Palestinians with the butts of their guns.

... is we must watch.

"Khaleena enshouf,” Faisal calls. 

The crowd settles. Let’s watch!

I’m sitting in Jenin refugee camp, surrounded by Palestinians—men, women, children and adults. We are crowded together on blue mats, carried over from The Freedom Theatre down the street. It’s three in the afternoon. I bat a fly from my face and lean forward to watch the enactment.

To my left, Sarah snaps photos. Mustafa lies in the rubble, stretched out across the uneven ground and squinting down the barrel of a large video camera. He aims it at the actors, who stand in silence before us.

And suddenly the enactment begins. Faisal steps forward and begins to run, frantic, from one edge of the performance space to the other. Behind him, perched on a pile of crumbled architecture, three musicians rumble their drums ominously.

The crowd bursts into applause when the actors relax. To my left, Kais hides a smile behind his hand. He sits on a wooden stool, the Teller’s chair, at a slight remove from the rest of the audience.

Faisal clasps his hands together. “Kais,” he speaks in Arabic. “Did you see your story?”

Kais nods. “Yes, yes, amazing.” The crowd applauds again.

We have gathered today to listen to the stories of recent arrests in the refugee camp. We are honoring them with theatre. Playback Theatre is an interactive theatre approach used in over 50 countries as a tool for community building, conflict transformation, education and trauma recovery. In a Playback Theatre performance, audience members share personal stories and watch as a team of actors and musicians transform these experiences into improvised theatre using movement, ritual and spoken word.

“So who has a story?” Faisal conducts the performance. He stands tall and broad-shouldered, speaking to the audience from the stage. “A true story, that happened to you in the last few nights when the soldiers came into the camp.”

When Kais took the stage, moving into the teller’s chair to share his story, I didn’t need translation. I remembered it’s telling from last night.

The army came for him in the night. It was around 2 AM, and when Kais heard them approach he snapped to attention and ran.

Palestinians can face years of interment with no charges when arrested by Israeli officials—not to mention routine beatings and torture—so Kais took to his heels as fast as they could carry him. The army fired after him, but he didn’t look back. He ran through the spray of bullets in the night.

It took him three full-on sprints to escape their pursuit. I remember the sound of his footsteps pounding down the alleyway outside my bedroom window as he tore for the safety of Adnan’s house. I remember the banging on the door. Adnan is the location manager of the Freedom Theatre, and lives one floor below me. Kais shouted, frantic, until Adnan was roused and opened the door to him.

Kais had reason for his flight. His friend and fellow actor, 23-year-old Kamal, didn’t run. He was arrested, cuffed with thin plastic zip ties that burned into his wrists, and blindfolded. Sightless, the soldiers threw Kamal into the back of an army vehicle and beat him mercilessly with the butts of their guns.

“I wanted to cry,” he said, readjusting himself on the stool, his rear still tender from the beating. “But I didn’t. I didn’t make a sound—no shouting, nothing. This made them angry, I think. This was my resistance.”

There were others in the truck with Kamal. He couldn’t see them but he heard their cries as they were struck again and again. He recognized one.

“Mai,” he said. “I could tell it was Mai, by his voice.” Mai is one of two technicians here at the Theatre. He’s about my age, thin and shy, always carrying a wrench or a hand drill. He has a wife and a young child. The army plucked him from them in the night.

The truck carried its stolen goods to Jalame, the nearest Israeli checkpoint. “They gave us coffee,” said Kamal; a twisted pleasantry after the beatings.

They questioned Kamal about Juliano Mer-Khamis, the late Artistic Director of the Freedom Theatre. Juliano was murdered in April, and although the army makes excessive arrests and interrogations of the theatre staff, they’ve found no killer. His death remains a convenient reason for arresting them.

“And then they released us.” Kamal and Mai, in that respect, are exceptions to the rule for their short interment.

By the end of the performance, joy was palpable. The magic of watching personal experiences translated into the public language of theatre opened something in the community. They may take our eyes in the night, but we’ve still got our voices today.

Unfortunately, the story is always unfolding. As I write, Faisal is in custody. Israelian soldiers arrested him last night at 3 AM, along with Adnan and Bilal, a board member at the Theatre. If their treatment is anything like Kamal or Mai’s, it is likely that they will be beaten and abused.

The UN defines torture as “Any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person…. for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity."

The Israeli government is regularly torturing Palestinians. In the past 48 hours, there have been half a dozen arrests from The Freedom Theatre staff alone. They are almost exclusively conducted during post-midnight raids.

The news of Faisal’s arrest shocked me awake this morning. I ate dinner with him last night, browsing through the photos of the day’s performance, complimenting him on his acting. I wonder if he will be released this morning. I wonder if he will be hurt. I wonder how we will conduct future Playback exercises without him. I feel maddeningly helpless.

“Kaleena enshouf,” Faisal said yesterday. This is our charge as we look to Israel and it’s actions against Palestinians. Join The Freedom Theatre’s Facebook group for updates; if the staff is not released, we will post information on ways that you can help. Let’s remove our blindfolds; let’s open our eyes. Let’s watch.

...is it's scary.

“Do you believe in God?”

I stop drumming for a moment and look at Ala’. The guys watch me intently.

I buy some time. “Do I believe in God?”

“Yes! What, do you believe?”

I reach into my chest for warmth and breathe it out onto the boys. I smile.

“Of course. I’d have to believe in God to come into this classroom everyday—someone needs to protect me from you guys.”

Rabea translates and they laugh.

“Christine you is scared of us?” Motaz asks.

“No,” I shake my head. “Not at all, not even when Aadel is screaming. You guys don’t scare me.”

I wait for the translation.

“Do you want to be scared?” Motaz says. He levels his eyes at me and something in it heats the room—or maybe just me. No. I don’t.

And that’s the problem.

The workshop had been going swimmingly. I began after lunch at 1 PM, and as is often the case, the guys were electric with wild energy. Aadel burst into the rehearsal space and made straight for the pile of red foam balls in the corner. Two of the other guys were in hot pursuit, jumping over his back to get to them.

“Warm up!” yelled Aadel, right before whipping the ball into his classmate’s head. It ricocheted at an absurd angle. They laughed and chased it. Chaos ensued.

My time with the boys in Belfast bubbled up in my brain. Football.

“Does anyone have a soccer ball?”

“Me! Me!” Aadel said. “Me—at the home. I get?”

“Yes go, quick! Ya le, ya le, ya le!” He streaks out of the room.

I quickly assemble two goals at each end of the room, marking the posts with wooden stools.

“Motaz, Ala’: you are captains. Pick your teams.”

A heated game of three-on-three ensues. I am vaguely aware of the camera crew in the background, adjusting the large floodlight and floating in and out of the game. The foam ball bounces off the lens twice. We laugh.

It feels incredible—we are really competing, celebrating in loud raucous dances for each goal. At one point, Aadel sneaks behind me and slides one of the wooden stools out, over-enlarging the goal I’m tending.

“Hey!” I splutter and laugh, pulling the goal back to its normal size.

After about five minutes, we break a good sweat and my team wins. There is much shouting.

“Shabab! You guys! In in in!” I motion them all in to a small circle on the floor. We breathe heavily.

“Gooooooooooal!” screams Saber. Everyone joins in: Goooooooooal!!

I love the energy now: swirling, chaotic but connected. The room is a bit dim, lit only by the camera crew’s solitary light on its boom. It adds a bit of drama.

“Let’s use our voices,” I say. “Everyone, everyone: together, let’s make the sound of the girl character in the play.”

For the past two weeks, we’ve been crafting a forum play about honor killings inspired by a true story from Motaz’s village. Today I’d like to get us through a full run of the play for the first time.

But first, some sound, to connect the wild energy of the game to the play.

Predictably, the first sound the guys make is very loud: some choking sobs, some high-pitched whinnying and keening. Hm. My mind whirs. They’re not really connecting to the heart of it.

We make the sound of two other characters in the play: the eldest brother (the primary antagonist) and the younger brother (an ally). Saber begins making fart noises with his mouth. It’s time to move on.

“Okay shabab, let’s do the whole play—the whole thing. I’ll play the girl.” Yesterday we had been experimenting with an aesthetic choice—excluding the woman from the action of the play entirely—but today, I liked the way we were gelling together. I wanted to stay in it with them.

Without leaving time for questions or hesitation, we begin.

~ ~ ~

It’s a wonderful run—everyone stays connected throughout. There are holes in the story, things that we’ll need to fill in later about character and motivation, but the heart of the play is thumping and there’s a solid collection of scenes ripe for intervention.

We finish the show on a haunting note: the brothers circle the girl in a wild tight dance as she sits, slowly, alone in the center. She begins to sing, and from outside of the circle, Motaz hums along with her. The play ends.

The guys immediately melt back to the edge of the room.

“Wow, great, nice work guys.” The cameramen begin packing up their equipment. The normal light is switched back on, and something shifts in the room.

“What did you guys notice about this run? What was there?”

“It was shit,” said Saber. “Boring.”

This is their language of the theatre, unfortunately. They repeat it to me in almost every single assessment of their own work.

I invite them to share what they did see, instead of what was missing. They don’t bite. I model.

“Okay, so for example, the way the taxi to the checkpoint became the people in line, the way that transition melted together—this was new. We should keep this.”

“Yeah but they was speaking Hebrew at the checkpoint, and it’s an Arabic checkpoint—to Jordan! ‘S fucking stupid.”

My heart breaks a little. These guys can’t see their own beauty.

“That’s okay, that’s a small thing. That’s the reason we did this run together—to figure out what we need to fix, to make sure we’re all on the same page about the story.”

“We can take a break now?” Anas asks.

I don’t want to take a break and kill the creativity we just drummed up. We should keep working.

But something tugs my chest. What would Hector do?

In a flash, I remember last night’s conversation with my colleague, Uri. “Sometimes after a really heavy or intense thing, it’s nice to process it, shake it off somehow. I’ve seen Hector do it with stories, or singing.”

I think of the boys’ startling inability to see their own gifts. Without thinking, I grab the drum from the corner of the room.

This should chill everyone out. I whip it into my lap and begin to tell a story about gifts.

But now, looking at Motaz, I feel uneasy. Who had I been chilling out? The boys, or myself?

~ ~ ~

After the story we take a break.

Do you want to be scared by us?

Their story scared me. When Aadel seared his eyes into mine onstage and told me, in a low voice, to go to my room and clean myself, that they would kill me to cleanse the family’s honor, my heart froze. I finished the play but something in me was disturbed. Despite all the beautiful work I had done to create heat in the room, I didn’t want to hold it. I let it cool. I “chilled everyone out” when I could have cooked with the embers.

The rest of the workshop is difficult. We return from the break, and I attempt to process the story with them.

“So, do you guys have gifts?” Rabea translates. The guys are lounging in languid poses in a messy circle around me. I hold the drum in my lap.

Rabea translates, and Aadel is the first to respond.

“Hreeay,” he says, gesturing to his chest. Freedom. “I have freedom.”

I think of the half-dozen times Aadel has stormed out of my classroom in a huff, or refused to participate in an activity. “The gift of freedom, the spirit of freedom, this is a wonderful gift. Do you guys see it in him?” No one responds. “I do. Aadel, he does what he wants—leaves, returns, doesn’t take shit. He is free. Wow. It’s nice. What else?”

We cycle through the guys and their gifts.

“My girlfriend, she is in Jordan, and I travel to see her,” says Ala’ of his gift. I clarify.

“So she is a gift, definitely, but what about your gifts, things you have inside?”

He repeats the story about his girlfriend, so I smile and accept it.

“So, Ala’—he is willing to travel a long way to get what he loves, to be patient. Do you guys see this?” They nod and Ala’ glows a little. “Absolutely. I see him at lunch, being very calm, always working and quiet. This is an amazing gift, to live patiently for something you love.”

We continue. Anas is forgiving. Motaz is spiritual. Saber finds joy in cruddy situations.

I slap the drum one last time, to close the story. Motaz is lying facedown on a mat, completely prone and disengaged. Ala’ almost sleeps. The enactment of the afternoon really sucked something out of them. How to re-engage?

And then Ala’ asks the question: do you believe in God?

I am happy to be speaking so candidly with them; I am happy we are connected, but I feel guilty for steering us out of the play. I don’t know how to get back in. I ask them which scene they’d like to work on.

“Every scene. Every scene is shit.”

Ala’ approaches me. “Maybe we can have homework, rehearse together for the play, and show it to you, and then you can adjust it however you want.”

I hesitate. I don’t want to waste the time that we have together; I want to give them rehearsal techniques.

But I’m exhausted. We attempt to work on a few scenes together, but they are flat as cardboard, stiff and bankrupt in aesthetics. I’m too tired to doctor them. We take another break, have a short meeting before we disperse, and the day is over.

Before they go, however, I give them a final gift.

~ ~ ~

“One last thing, shabab,” I say. “I want you to think of the perfect performance—imagine that you just gave a successful show.”

We are gathered in a loose clump on the stairs outside of the rehearsal space. Motaz is disconnected, clicking away on his computer, but I don’t push him. He’s participating in his own way, I think. The day was probably most hard on him—the story is from his life, he plays the protagonist. I am glad to see him taking care of himself.

“What do you feel?” I ask them. Rabea translates, and they roll their eyes.

“I feel,” says Ala’. “Like, okay, the work was good, and I have to do more soon.”

“Yes, but this is not specific. How do you feel? Happy? Excited? Tired? What?”

Yes, yes, we feel happy, yes.

“Anything else?”

“Like to fly,” says Aadel. He spreads his arms.

“Ah, you feel like you can fly,” I say. He nods. “Great. So, guys, find these feelings in your body. Where are they in your body?” I put my hand to my chest to demonstrate, and several of them copy me.

“No, well, it doesn’t have to be here—this is where mine is,” I clarify. Ah. A few of them move their hands.

“Great.” I say. “Now, really connect to this feeling, make a physical memory of it, how do you feel.” We breathe together.

“So shabab, this feeling is your secret weapon, this happiness, this feeling of flight. Keep it in your body. Maybe lock it up, if you want to, to keep it safe—but don’t forget where you put the key.”

Rabea translates and they understand.

“So when you need it, you can touch this feeling. Maybe you use it before going onstage, or maybe when something goes wrong—I don’t know. But use it wisely.”

They smile. Recognition. Appreciation.

“Shukran, shabab, for your work. Thank you.”

“Shukran Christine, thank you,” says Ala’.

“When I say ‘in boco lupo—‘ “

“Crepi lupo!” yells Aadel, enthusiastic for our goodbye ritual.

I smile. “All together!” All eyes on me. “In boco lupo.”

“Crepi lupo.” The sound echoes in the hall.

“Thanks guys.”

And they’re gone, wheeling their bikes into the street, packing their bags, changing from warm-ups back into jeans or trousers.

It’s twilight now, dimming. I grab Ala’ before he leaves by the sleeve.

“I know you were frustrated today,” I said. I remembered his face in his hands as the improvisations dragged on this afternoon. “But I want to thank you for staying with me—and for voicing it when you were frustrated and bored. Sometimes I don’t always know the right way to go, and when you voice your thoughts, it’s a gift to me, so I can move us in another way. Thank you for that.”

He beams but tucks it to the ground, modest, nodding, pulling his backpack straps close. “It’s no problem Christine. Thank you.”

And he’s gone, out into the tunnel of the gathering night, to catch the last transport service to his village before dark.

I thank Rabea for his work, and excuse myself for tea. It’s hot and red in my cup—hibiscus and rose. Steam curls up from it onto my face.

Do you want to be scared by us?

I take a sip. Maybe. Maybe next time I will wield the fear—reflect it, direct it—instead of letting it wield me.