TJT’s Middle-East Project (working title): an Initial Report

 

from l: Naomi Newman, Ibrahim Miari, Joe Haj, Meirav Kupperberg, Eric Rhys Miller, Nora El Samahy, Aaron Davidman

Work on The Middle-East Project began on August 4, 2003. The day before, our guest artists had arrived.  Ibrahim Miari came from Acco, Israel by way of New York, Meirav Kupperberg flew directly from Haifa.  Joe Haj came up from Los Angeles. Nora El Samahy, our remaining guest, lives in the Bay Area. The full TJT ensemble, Aaron Davidman, Corey Fischer, Eric Rhys Miller and Naomi Newman completed the working group.

 We began our time together with a long walk through the fog to Marin’s majestic Tennessee Cove.  There, we sat in a circle on the sand and began to speak to each other about the feelings, impulses and hopes that had brought us together to do this work.

 click on photos for enlargements
  It soon became obvious that though our backgrounds were Arab, Jewish, American, Muslim, Israeli, Egyptian, Christian and Palestinian (with hyphens bristling ubiquitously within our various identities), we already shared a common language as makers of collaborative, ensemble theatre and a desire to speak, in that language, about our longing, pain, frustration and confusion around the encounter between Jew and Arab in Israel and Palestine.  Meirav, Ibrahim and Eric

Meirav, Ibrahim, Eric and Nora

Our time in the studio started with several days of physical and vocal improvisation, discussion and writing, rotating the leadership among us, sharing exercises and structures for exploration out of our individual backgrounds and experience. Aaron and Eric introduced the group to the Siti Company’s Viewpoints, which provided a basic theatrical vocabulary for much of our subsequent research. I led language-based physical improvisations, eliciting personal stories. Naomi guided the ensemble into examining how religious and national beliefs are absorbed—often unconsciously—into our lives.  Ibrahim taught us a challenging series of movement exercises based on sacred dance. 

  Soon, layers of story began to emerge: Meriav’s army experiences as a thoughtful eighteen year-old who wanted to serve her country confronting a dehumanized bureaucracy;  Ibrahim’s many images of living a dual identity as an Israeli and an Arab; Joe’s lost American innocence at the hands of brutal Israeli customs police; Aaron’s newly discovered connection with the 19th century Lithuanian rabbi who happened to be his great-grandfather; Nora’s memories of her childhood in Cairo; Eric’s struggle to find what meaning Israel has for an assimilated American Jew.

Nora and Meirav

 We read to each other from the Torah and the Koran. We discovered surprisingly prescient writings by early Zionists like Martin Buber. We spent time with members of a Bay Area Jewish-Palestinian dialogue group. We watched documentary films and listened to interviews of Israelis and Arabs that Aaron, Ibrahim and Meirav had conducted in Israel. 

 
Meirav True to the process that TJT has been following for its 25 years of creating theatre, we tried to avoid forming opinions, casting blame, taking sides or “answering” the questions that arose in conventional ways.  One day, after a particularly knotty discussion about the differences and similarities between the Torah’s and the Koran’s versions of the story of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac (or Ishmael, in the Koran) and about the relevance of  mythic discourse on contemporary sensibilities, Aaron suggested we work on our feet and respond the discussion bodily, by allowing gestures to emerge from the welter of feelings that the discussion had kicked up. Nora

The next day, we incorporated those gestures into the morning’s group movement exploration.  By the end of the week, we had developed a “score:”  a repeatable sequence of movement.  Not exactly “choreography” the score contained a number of encounters between different ensemble members, some recognizable gestures, some abstract movements.  Adding language to the mix, each performer/writer used narrative to discover more about their particular journey through the score.  From this exploration, a group of vivid and surprising characters came to life: a religious Israeli soldier who’d been born in the U.S. and had emigrated to Israel; a Palestinian garage mechanic with a burning ambition to become an actor; an Egyptian photographer working in the occupied territories; a popular Israeli singer with a troubled personal life; an American-Jewish medical student caught in the crossfire. 
Ibrahim We spent our last week together developing the “score” and several pieces of original writing by ensemble members into a short presentation for an invited audience drawn from TJT donors, subscribers, colleagues and members of a Jewish-Palestinian dialogue group that has been meeting for ten years. This gave us a chance to deepen the characters, discover possible relationship between them and experiment with form.   Eric

In the process of preparing for the presentation, we had heated and fruitful discussion about the potentially volatile nature of some of the material.  We wondered how work dealing with suicide bombings, anti-Arab discrimination in Israel, Jewish emigration would be received. We ultimately decided not to edit some of the more difficult moments.  We felt that we might learn a good deal from the response. 
Ibrahim and Aaron On August 28, 2003, a full house of just under a hundred people responded to our invitation and came top TJT with a sense of excited curiosity.  The generosity of this audience was apparent in their audible moment-to-moment responses to the work as well as in the dialogue after the presentation. Meirav, Ibrahim, Eric and Aaron

Some of the responses:

A young Palestinian man who had been born in Kuwait and did not enter the occupied territories until 2000, described how he had “smuggled” himself into Jerusalem (as a Palestinian living in the territories, he was prohibited from entering the city).  He visited the Al-Aqsa mosque (the dome of the rock), one of Islam’s holiest sites, and them was moved to visit the Jewish portion of the same structure—the Western Wall.  Watching the Jews pray with as much attachment and fervor as the Muslims, he was struck by how equally Jews and Arabs love the same land. “To love something,” he said, “it is impossible to love it alone.”
Aaron, Meirav, Eric and Nora  A Jewish woman said that the story of a father’s loss of his son in a suicide bombing and an account of  the conditions that might lead someone to become a bomber were “like two trains coming full speed at each other.”  Aaron and Nora

Other comments: 

“I was relieved, not saddened by your multifaceted approach.  In the news, we make everything so black and white.” 

“I was deeply offended [by a satirical portrayal of an Israeli character].”

 “It was like zooming in on individual lives instead of watching from far away with no detail.”

 “We’re all paralyzed by fear.  Your work was an example of what can happen when we don’t shut down.”

  During the next five months, research will continue.  The working group will meet again for six weeks in February and March, 2004 to complete a preliminary draft of a script.  Rewriting will happen between April and August, 2004 with final rehearsals beginning in September.
Ibrahim

 

   Eric and Ibrahim

Eric, Ibrahim and Aaron

 

All photos by Corey Fischer

 

   Nora