A letter from ASHTAR Theatre

Iman Aoun of ASHTAR Theatre in When Nobody Returns

The text below is an open letter from our friends and collaborators at ASHTAR Theatre in Palestine.  Iman Aoun (Artistic Director) and Bayan Shbib have been working with us for the last two months on PLAYS OF LOVE AND WAR: and the company as a whole has been engaged with this project since 2014, most importantly hosting the rehearsals and opening performances of THIS FLESH IS MINE at their Ramallah base.  This is an incredibly important theatre company - one of the most important in the world - and now they really need our support.  

Colleagues and Friends of ASHTAR Theatre
Friends and Supporters of Palestine throughout the World

Ever since its establishment as the first drama teaching institution in 1991, ASHTAR Theatre with both branches in the West Bank and Gaza, gave scores of artistic theatrical presentations that earned a number of local, regional and global prizes. It helped bring Palestine’s message to the whole world in a civilized, humane and refined artistic means. Starting in 2010 ASHTAR Theatre launched an artistic global program designed to bring the voice of Gaza’s children to world forums with a view to lift the siege laid to it entitled the “Gaza Monologues”. We were honored by the participation of a number of theatre companies around the world to this program that ASHTAR Theatre launched in the city of Ramallah and Gaza to tour the world, passing through the United Nations.

In addition, ASHTAR Theatre graduated hundreds of students who gained social and artistic stature. They established new theater companies in the country. ASHTAR Theatre was also active in the introduction of drama in governmental and private as well as UNRWA schools starting in 2002. At the onset of 2012 ASHTAR Theatre administers a long term national programme in collaboration with the Ministry of Culture and Higher Education and other bodies with a view to provide training to “drama teachers” in Palestinian elementary schools.

For the last four years, ASHTAR Theatre has been facing dire financial difficulties that bar it from carrying on with its artistic and national journey, unless it obtains material support to offset this financial predicament.

We, at ASHTAR Theatre, administrators, artists, students and graduates contact you, the friends of ASHTAR and of Palestine, beseeching your support to enable keeping our Theatre doors open for the service of our children, our youth and our audiences spread throughout the entire Palestinian Territories. Any financial support geared towards us helps that purpose. Our campaign, today, aims at securing US$ 150,000, the amount of an accumulated deficit represented by the rental of the Theatre premises for the last three years and the operational costs of the institution in both branches, in the West Bank and in Gaza.

Should this amount be secured, it will greatly assist ASHTAR to continue in its existence and proceed with its operations in embarking on new programmes and doubling its presence as an important drama forum in Palestine.

We sincerely appreciate any efforts and contributions made to save this institution from eclipsing and help it maintain alive its message for Palestine.

For those who wish to assist ASHTAR Theatre, please contact us at the following e-mail address to provide you with the means of contribution.

info@ashtar-theatre.org

Best regards to you.
ASHTAR Team and Students

Ramallah audience acclaims "This Flesh is Mine"

Here are a few responses from the audience in Palestine for our previews of This Flesh is Mine.

"Incredible.  I'm speechless in all honesty.  My heart was racing throughout the entire thing.  The emotion was overwhelming.  Tremendously inspiring."
"I loved this play.  It grasped my attention for every second."
"It had so many conflicts and the actors were more than perfect."
"It proves that mythology has been able to address human souls and dilemmas throughout time.  The performance was great."
"An astonishing mixing and understanding of both Israeli politics and the Palestinian mentality and behaviour."
"It is really great to see English and Palestinian actors work together with the source of the great Greek theatre.  We need more co-operation in the future."
"It was treasurable, modern and creative.  The actors were astonishing.  Actually, this is the first time I visit a theatre so I'm happy."
"I think that the play links with our situation in Palestine.  Particularly when it comes to fighting and power relations.  You bring an old story and tie it with the issues of the world nowadays."
"That was the craziest f***ing thing I've ever seen!  Loved the modern elements as the play went on.  Seriously you guys were amazing!"

An actor in Ramallah

The skyline of Jerusalem

This is a Guest Blog by actor Gerrard McArthur, who will be playing Priam and Phoenix in This Flesh is Mine.  Gerrard is currently rehearsing the play with Border Crossings and Ashtar Theatre in Ramallah, Palestine.

 

A blazing day in Palestine, green tea with mint, goats bleating on the roof blending with the call to prayer, a sustained, graceful, wandering colour in the white heat.

 

Just snatching a coffee outside rehearsal in the shade - it's remarkable here, to live among the oppressed & to live in a no place; very Augusto Boal... Kindness & life exude from these people like the blooming violet flowers that sprout along the roadside rubble, articulate survivalists, with angry grace.  

 

Traffic more alarming than Rome, a hooting gallery, just about keeping to the roads; pedestrians walking at will as if the raging cars were pesky gnats.  

 

Was in Jerusalem at Easter. Black & white into COLOUR, and frenzy and fervour and focused chaos: a sense of Holy Rock (Gig) about it, packed into the small square of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, as each religion processes around it and in and out again, in a rough-theatre rotation sounding to the deepest of the Sepulchre's sacred tolling bell, people reaching out to passing sacred objects and then a laughing out to passing processing friends; inside, weeping women at the site of the washing of Jesus' body, a short step away from the crack in the stone of Golgotha, a short step away from the kissing of the true remains of the Holy Cross, a short step away from Jesus' tomb - these biggest events of the Christian story so compressed together in the stone tunnels and broadening archways, it seems like an extraordinary Christian convenience store, like Christo Metro... 

 

In burning daylight the next day back into the narrow confining tunnel-like stone streets of Jerusalem, part bazaar, sometimes walking on shiny rubbed levels of the seven layers of destroyed Jerusalems that are like emerging ribs of the corpse of lost cities, 2000 years old.  

At the top of the narrow walled way that is the Via Dolorosa, we spy a vantage point above us atop the Austrian Hospice, enter in the coolness and climb the stairs of the hushed sanatorium to come out again into the white light on to a wide, flat terrace with a breathtaking David Lean CinemaScope vision of the entire Holy City, astonishingly cramped and crammed, a pressed piling of small rounded cupolas on ancient houses to the dominating Gold of the Dome of the Rock....

Approach to Ramallah

The wall outside Ramallah

For a week now, I've been in Ramallah, rehearsing our new production of This Flesh is Mine with our friends at Ashtar Theatre.  The collaboration has been in the wind for some time, and it's very exciting for us all that it is finally happening.  The play is loosely based on Homer's Iliad - and has very powerful resonance here, where people know very well what it feels like to live through a prolonged siege.

I'm here with three UK actors - Andrew French, Gerrard McArthur and David Broughton-Davies - and we are working closely with three actors from the Ashtar Company - Iman Aoun, Razan Alazzeh and Emile André - plus an assistant director, Rana Burqan.  Iman is also the Artistic Director of Ashtar, and it was she, with her husband Edward Muallem, who met us from the plane in Tel Aviv last week.  The drive was an education in itself.  The further we moved from Tel Aviv, the more barbed wire started to appear by the sides of the road.  As we got closer to the Palestinian Territories, the famous wall, erected by Israel to segregate the West Bank, came into view.  Ramallah, which is the de facto capital of Palestine, is entered through the Qalandia checkpoint - a mass of concrete, barbed wire and heavily armed Israeli soldiers, with very narrow lanes for the vast amount of traffic that needs to pass.  They don't check your papers as you go in - they really check them as you go out.  Because, I suppose, you might want to attack Israel....

Once past the checkpoint, the first area of Ramallah you see is the Qalandia refugee camp.  It's not the usual image of a refugee camp - there are no tents.  The camp has been there since the Nakbar of 1948, and is, in its own way, established.  It is also incredibly cramped and deprived.  In a way, the people living there would not want it to become too like the rest of the city: its temporary, provisional nature is part of their identity, and that is what they need to cling onto.

By contrast, the city itself, while hardly plush, is friendly, lively and very cultured.  In fact, it is one of the most cultured spaces I have ever been to.  Everyone, including young people, is very aware of the details of their history, and the need to assert their clear, separate cultural identity in the world.  They are also very aware that the dominant narrative subverts that identity, labelling them as radical Islamists and nurturers of terrorism.  As the great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish said, there is no-one to speak for the Trojans in this war. 

Iman knew Darwish: he used to come to Ashtar before his death in 2008.  On the first day, she took me to his tomb, and the little museum where his study is preserved.  It is very moving.  The grave sits high above the city, looking across the work in progress that is Ramallah.  And a Palestinian flag flutters in the breeze.