Only 11 days left of the Freedom Jatha crowdfunding campaign! http://igg.me/at/freedom-jatha
The Freedom Jatha, the first ever India-Palestine theatre collaboration, is in itself an extraordinary thing: what makes this whole initiative even more special is that it is entirely funded by people just like you!
If you have thought about contributing or have friends who may still want to be a part of this completely unique project, now is the time to act! Donate, spread the word – every contribution helps!
An update on the project so far:
The Freedom Jatha means that our Theatre School has literally shifted to India for three months, where our students Amir, Ibrahim, Ihab, Osama, Raneen and Samah are immersed in an intensive, diverse curriculum that includes workshops with Indian theatre practitioners; interactions with Indian students, artists and activists, field visits and rehearsals. The students are accompanied by Faisal, resident actor and faculty member of the Theatre School, Yousef, stage manager, and for shorter periods they are joined by our artistic director Nabil, multimedia coordinator and filmmaker Mohammed, and board member Bilal.
The Freedom Jatha team has spent the first weeks in India participating in talkbacks at universities, taking workshops in puppetry, voice, movement, imagination and magic (!), watching performances and rehearsing for the joint production by The Freedom Theatre and Jana Natya Manch. The team was also invited to a special reception at the Embassy of Palestine in India.
The Freedom Jatha has already resulted in one public performance of ‘Memory and History’, a workshop production created together with veteran theatre director Sunil Sanbag, focused on the personal narratives of our students.
“I shall carve the serial number
Of every stolen piece of land
The place of my village on the map
And the blown up houses,
And the uprooted trees
And every bloom that was crushed
And all the names of the experts in torture
The names of the prisons.
I shall carve dedications
To memories threading down to eternity
To the blooded soil of Deir Yasin
And the Kufur Qassem.
I shall carve the sun’s beckoning
And the moon’s whisperings
And what a skylark recalls
At a love deserted well.
For the sake of remembrance,
I shall continue to carve
All the chapters of my tragedy
And all the stages of Al-Nakbah
On the home yard olive tree!”
Read the whole script and see pictures from the performance.
Read more about the Freedom Jatha.