 suicidal ideation of an Iraq war veteran in the Akra Falujah, a film shown on PBS in 2012, to the restless longings of an Iraqi refugee architect in Nura 2018, a film adaptation of nine parts released on PBS in 2023 is a radical reimagining of her groundbreaking play from the vantage point of 20 years after the war. Hamid Sino is a composer, writer, performer, and social justice advocate. They have been the lyricist and front person for Masjid Layla since 2008, engaging conversations around representation, free speech, gender justice, and sexual freedom in the Middle East. Hamid has a BFA from the Department of Architecture and Design at the American University of Beirut and an MA in digital music from Dartmouth College, where they analyzed the vocal organ and digital vocality as sites of political negotiation. Whoa. Their solo debut, Poems of Consumption, opened at London's Barbican Theatre Center in July 2023. Okay. Junaid Saria Din is a theater actor, director, dramaturg, and a founding member of Beirut based company, Zoukak Theater, and a member of the Sundance Board of Trustees since October 2019. He has directed several theater plays with Zoukak and other artists, such as Ray de Taha's 36 Abbas Street Haifa in 2017. As a dramaturg, Junaid worked on several theater and dance performances and performed in more than 20 productions in the past 14 years, touring in multiple cities and festivals around the world. Since 2016, he has been a fellow artist of the Sundance Theater Program where he took part in various theater labs, both as a director and as a dramaturg in the U.S. and in the MENA region. Welcome, everybody. It's so wonderful to see your beautiful faces. Thank you for taking part in this panel. Oh, yeah. Before we start our conversation, actually, I want to take a moment to welcome people who are joining us here in person in San Francisco and also in the Zoom room, but also those who are tuning into the live stream on HowlRound. Those here with us on Zoom, please feel free to utilize the chat function to post your comments and questions throughout the conversation. Okay, beautiful. Here we are. And I have some questions for y'all, so I'm going to get started. Here we go. Andrea, I would like to know, I'm wondering if you could talk about your relationship to your culture of origin and what that culture's impact has been on your work. Can you talk a little bit about that? Did you hear me, Andrea? You didn't hear me. I'll say that again. I would love to know a little about your culture of origin and its impact on your work, on your creative work. Okay, I will come back to you, Andrea. Okay, no worries. I will come back. All right. How about, let's talk to with Jeanette first. I'm going to just read something that refers back to your description of the work that you do. Establishing Zoukak has provided Jeanette a broad experience in art direction, curating cultural events and festivals, in addition to the knowledge in the management of non-governmental and cultural associations on the national, regional, and international contexts. He was a member of several initiatives focusing on cultural policies and other social and cultural issues in Lebanon, including censorship, public space, cultural heritage, and history. Can you talk a little about your experience addressing these concerns in either your work with Zoukak or your work with Sundance? And we want to hear how that came about, by the way, how you got involved with Sundance. But if you could talk about how your creative work has given you the opportunity to address these issues. Absolutely. Hello, everyone. It's an honor to be with you all. So my name is Jeanette Seridine. I'm from Zoukak Theatre Company. I'm speaking to you now from Beirut, from around 282 kilometers away from Gaza, or 176 miles from there. I would like to acknowledge first that Gaza tonight is under massive, massive, massive attack, and a lot of people are facing death and horror. So to answer your question, I would like to give just a bit of a short background because everything we do in life is because of our history. I was born in 1982 during a war in Lebanon and during an Israeli invasion. I was born a few days after the Israeli invasion in Lebanon. I survived twice when I was a kid, like once two strikes and bombings from the Israeli army. Once when I was three days old, and another when I was two months old, and then my mother left the country and followed my father to Saudi Arabia, where they raised us first as kids. And then we ran away from the Gulf War there, and we came back after the end of the war in Lebanon. So me and my colleagues in Zoukak, we were all born in the same area during the war, but our political consciousness and conscience was formed during the post-war era, which is the 90s and the early 2000s. So in that period, it was a period of amnesty, a period of reconstruction, a period of post-war era, that we had a lot of issues to deal with, like history, memory, and to fill the gaps in history and justice. So we formed Zoukak as a collective in order to survive as individuals as well, in order to build a body that can hold us as individuals for the continuity of our work and the accumulation of experiences. And because it was the only way to deal with our socio-political challenges in the world, we believe in theater as a political action, a political and a wider spectrum of understanding. And this is how we feel that as political beings, because we are beings that are facing, since we were born, we're facing threats on our lives. These threats come from different perspectives and different ideologies and different circumstances. And so we are political beings that we have no luxury to be working on any other thing, but essential questions that are about the individual and collectives. So since then, we in Zoukak tackled a lot of topics through theater, like related to gender, death, gender, death, violence, history, and religion, and power, and all these questions were at the core of our practice. During that period also, like since the early 2000s, the political or the security troubles in Lebanon came back, because it seems that there was a deal in the region, and that deal came to an end. And the assassination of Prime Minister Hariri back then in 2005, like before it drove us into a new time of chaos. When we founded Zoukak in 2006, another Israeli war happened in Lebanon to place. It was also massive. We found ourselves going with our theater work to displaced people and working with all the displaced like offering theater as a space of connection. And that's how we developed also a big trajectory of work in the psychosocial field and drama therapy. And during that time after that, in parallel to all these external threats, we have our internal issues that we had to deal with, like all the sectarian politics in Lebanon and all the marginalization, marginalizing systems. And these were our main focus. So as an individual, in order to build also an understanding for the theater practice, I have to be aware of the context I'm living within the history, the system. And this is what drove me into understanding and researching and working with groups. And like sometimes political activism and sometimes only research groups in order to just build a kind of understanding to the context, the history of the context, and what are the possible alternatives that we could promote or work for from this place? That's a, yeah, so that all came from that trajectory of context. It's so important to have that background. Thank you so much, Ined. And I'll come back to you in a moment. But first, I'm hoping Andrea has a good connection now, is it? Are you good, Andrea? I think we're back. Yes, thank you. Excellent, excellent. So what I had asked and would love to know about is your relationship to your culture of origin and what that culture's impact has been on your creative work here in the States? Thank you. It's a great question. I also want to begin by acknowledging, you know, I'm here at Golden Thread at the Minatma convening that's happening. And we have been acknowledging both the Indigenous people of the lands here and also the genocide that's currently happening in Palestine. And we want to acknowledge the painful truth of settler colonialism in the United States, but also the parallel with what's going on in Palestine and Israel right now and even southern Lebanon. And we mourn the loss of all the all the innocent people being killed. But we condemn also the violence and terrorism in all forms as well as the apartheid system and the condemnation of Israel's illegal and military occupation since 1967 in Palestine. And we've been making a real commitment to keep saying that throughout our gathering. And so to honor that commitment, I wanted to read that part of the acknowledgement as well. But back to your question, I grew up actually quite isolated from any Arab community or identity here in the United States. My grandfather and his father came from Lebanon. And my father was born in Buffalo when I was born in Virginia and lived part of my life in rural Pennsylvania where there was no Arab community to speak of whatsoever. And so it's really been very much a part of my adult life as an artist, a very intentional investigation into cultural heritage and aesthetics that's really driven much of my work since 911. I was a New Yorker in 911 and experienced it as a New Yorker and then immediately experienced the anti-Arab and Islamophobic backlash that resulted literally overnight. And it's shaped my work. It's shaped my work for the rest of my life. That shift in how I experienced my own identity as an Arab American because I would say pre-911, particularly being Lebanese was quite cosmopolitan and maybe a little cool, exotic even. And then immediately became everyone who remotely looked Arab, whatever that means was public enemy number one of the United States as soon as we entered, certainly into the era of the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq. So it's been quite an intentional process of reclamation through collaboration, collaborating with artists from the region and also from the diaspora here and certainly have been influenced by Heather's work very deeply and the work of many of the artists who are here at the Monatma convening now online and in person. So maybe I'll stop there and we'll talk more. Yes, definitely. I'll come back to you. I have some specific questions based on what you just said. And by the way, I mostly grew up in Buffalo. Okay, so we'll talk later. Okay. Hamid, you know, you're the original leader, singer, songwriter for Makhshulela. And I have to tell you that having introduced the work of the band and your play to my students, they're all kind of madly in love with you. I thought you ought to know that. It's a burden, but you know, I'm sure you can deal with it. Now you're based in the US, you're a poet, you're a playwright. And I'm, I guess my first question and that there will be more are the challenge is about the challenge of being a high profile successful professional musician, who identified as when identifies as queer in Lebanon, how does life differ here for you? And what are the challenges now because I'm sure there are challenges to being who you are and living life the way you have done. But is it the same as in Lebanon or different? Right. So, I mean, because this actually ties into my answer, I would like to also start by acknowledging that there is an ongoing genocide in Palestine. It's been ongoing since 1948. And that we are currently on Lenape land, I'm currently on Lenape land and would typically like to grovel for Lenape's future mercy when this land inevitably is returned to its rightful stewards because all empire will end. But otherwise, I mean, look, I don't particularly sort of identify as a playwright. I think I'm someone who just falls into things quite often. I read your play. Okay. So, I mean, I'm not I'm not trashing the play, right? I just I wouldn't necessarily say that this is my vocation in life, right? I'm currently working on an opera. I just released a song cycle, like, you know, I'm just I'm good. I'm okay at doing a lot of things and not great at doing any one thing at any one time. But I think I think part of what happens when when you are identifiably queer and from the Middle East is that a lot of people from this region, unfortunately, take interest in your work in a way that that goes sort of past tokenization and becomes more about being able to levy your work against your own sort of political intentions, right? So suddenly, your victimization as a queer person becomes a justification for empire. And I've seen this kind of pinkwashing discourse suffocatingly sort of on the present in in online discourse around Palestine over the last three weeks in particular, for example, and it's, you know, that was that was always there when I was touring the U of S as a musician. And so I do feel this weird sort of tension here, where as someone who is not a proponent of cultural relativism, I find it very difficult to to sort of try to negotiate between wanting to be explicitly critical of sort of the institutional homophobia where I was raised, but also wanting to be able to speak of that here in English without without providing imperialism with language, if that makes sense. And, and it's really tricky this this this constant feeling of like having feeling like you're being watched, right, by someone who wants to tag on to anything that you say that isn't perfectly seasoned and balanced, and use that to skew a narrative. And I'm not I'm not fully sure that I've resolved that yet. I think the play that has been showing with golden thread is actually very much just about that. It's really like me hiding behind my thumb going No, no, this character isn't mine. They're a dancer. It's on me. And very much just me thinking out loud about political questions that have been sort of haunting me since I started performing here. And I can't answer that yet. I don't know what the right answer is. I think there is a world in which there is value to ignoring the question of audience for a bit, or particularly ignoring the question of the white gaze, to be honest, and sort of just saying your part and not feeling responsible for other people's racism. Sorry, that was a very long winded answer. But not at all. That makes perfect sense. Thank you so much. Wow. Okay, I'll come back to you in a minute. But first, I would like to ask, well, Heather, okay, so the stories that led to the creation of Nora emerged in a series of workshops for Arab American women that you led in New York. The workshops inspired you to write and star in Nora a 90 minute piece about lost displacement and the breakdown of communities. For me, I think one of the most effective plays about immigrant life that I have ever experienced. So thank you for that. And also, I have a quote here from you for the part of an interview that you gave, we as Americans have the potential to make the people living next door, whether they are, whether they have been here for generations or a new immigrants or refugees feel like they fundamentally belong to the fabric of this nation, both in our policy and in our personal interactions. And I that's your quote. And I would just love you to just expand on that a little bit and talk about your passion for illuminating the immigrant experience. And I mean, you know, we're starting with the communities that we come from, but I can't help but feel that especially you and Jeanette and Andrea are also working intersectionality, intersectionally with other communities. And that's fascinating to me. And I just would love to hear a little bit about what got you started on putting those immigrant stories together and how they inspired you to write Nura. Hi all. I'm Heather. I'm really grateful to be here today. And I also want to start with an acknowledgement on behalf of the violence that's being perpetrated in our name, I would say that particularly as Americans, but also because this room is just so special and this community is so special. And I know I just want to acknowledge what we're holding. I offer that because I've had some like I've had health issues this year and I've realized maybe for the first time like how how heavy it is on our bodies, our psyches, our souls to be harrying and trying to rectify and trying to speak and trying to champion and trying to bridge as artists as humans all the ways that we do and how much even just gathering in community is is both healing for that but also the place we can finally come and lay down our baggage for a second, right? So I just I feel that really profoundly in this moment how how great that is and I'll start by saying that I'm Iraqi American. My dad was an immigrant. I was brought up in Michigan and I I think I didn't much know what my sense of belonging or identity really was until the first Iraq war in the nineties hit and I was 20 at the time and I'm 53 now. So I would say that since since that awakening at 20, it's been 30 years of of nonstop war really, right? And it would be I was in also New York when 9 11 happened. It's it would be it would be nice every time I think as an artist I'm going to move into some other territory. Something else comes, right? That is just so massive that I have to put everything down to to be where we're at. So I'd say that yes, war has completely defined me and who I am and what what my reason for creating art is. And for the longest time I felt I was bridging an Iraqi American divide and voice during during an actual war like in days where you couldn't speak or anybody that said anything that may be said from an Iraqi point of view was was canceled, right? Or was it was not allowed on our stages and before there was even a genre of Middle Eastern American theater like so those those days I know we're all feeling similar things now. So I bring it up to say like 20 years ago it was it was not a given that we could do plays about the Middle East. They weren't they were not on our main stages. They fundamentally were not allowed. And nine parts was you know we can we can make a nice quote about things now where it was received or whatever but like it was unanimously turned down by every theater in the United States that I submitted it and this was for a reading for a give me a workshop in your basement not put me on your biggest main stage. So so like where we've come is is still mighty as we're getting to this point of what we're speaking but so Nora Nora did come out of four years of workshopping with Middle Eastern women in Queens, New York. Some of them were born in the Middle East. Some of them were born here and it was a grant that was designed to build a demand for theater in the Arab American community of New York. So the goal was not to go into a community that had theater or was ever even going to theater but to go to a subset of the community that saw no value in it that maybe had never even cared to see a play right. So in in working in this community over time one thing that kept coming to the surface was the issue of individualism versus community and I think that that's something in America in particular we were we struggle with. We are a rugged individualist society and that's unsustainable right and capital is it's it's just all unsustainable right and to experience Middle Eastern women navigating a both a desire to do whatever the hell they wanted sometimes on their own without having to take their entire family and community with them but pitting that against a love for community and knowing we have to take our community with us. So that was kind of the one of the initial seeds of what Nura came out of but the other seed was about the lengths one goes to survive and what belonging really is and I think when we think about belonging and identity and immigrants experiences you know so many think of us as oh we're bridging two cultures or are we assimilating or are we not are we carrying our home you know like these Americana immigrant stories but what I was encountering were a leaving of home that was so harrowing it rendered one unrecognizable even to oneself and how far survival might push us and how far divisions might go and these were see these were themes that kept coming in the midst of watching the fabric of the United States dealing with a sense of polarization and questions around belonging that were as hot as they've ever been so I would say that my career my interest my heart started at 20 in Michigan and university when the first war happened and then after 30 years now living in New York and writing about Iraq and America as like trying to be a bridge builder of that conversation I have really turned focus toward my home state of Michigan I'm working out of the Arab American National Museum a lot I'm working and as many I'm at University of Michigan now but I just Michigan is a swing state my feeling is that swing state voters create policy that impacts the entire world and their lives are connected to lives of everyone across the world in ways they do not realize and these heat these very hot conversations are aren't aren't where artists are naturally leaning in in our nation because artists get pulled to the coasts for legitimate career reasons right especially in the theater you get pulled to New York right so I I just feel with my entire being that I understand something about that state I need to be in conversation with it I need to be working both in the Arab community there but in in many different kinds of community there and that it might be the most diverse place I've ever worked you know Heather you just kind of jumped to what my follow-up question was going to be which is you've talked about why you have you set the film in Michigan brilliant and could you talk even a little more specifically about the exact location which is Flint which is such a I don't know it's such a painful and complex circumstance that those folks have been dealing with whether they're part of the Arab community or not just the the water problem just so many different things happening in that state and I'm just wondering what brought you to that specific area by way of you know making the global local or the local global I don't know what you did but go talk about that just for a minute um yeah no I mean I I had this amazing opportunity to create a film of of nine parts of desire which was exclusively about Iraqi women during during the pandemic and so the natural choice would to set the film on location in the Middle East but I was in Michigan looking after my mother with bringing my kids my husband to right I was there for nine months and I knew that I had to set the conversation there um and so it became why like why is this gut instinct what what is the reason for this gut instinct right and um Flint is the home of the oldest Iraqi church in all of North America and that church happens to sit on the banks of the Flint River so that felt like the answer even though the answer is deeper than that so I would I would say that one of the reasons is because when I first wrote the play I had almost a hundred family members living in New York hold on one second I just made sure they knew everything they were saying would be heard on zoom for half the world anyway um so my my 100 family members that had been in Iraq for there are our um ancestors for thousands of years were now scattered across the globe I have one cousin left living in Iraq so this sense of the story I was telling about people that were in Iraq for me personally was a story about people that had been are now in diaspora and this church is built by people in diaspora but the particulars of what of this church that is so beloved and so well cared for is that it is in a community that was once thriving and economically very successful and that now is so forgotten and so destroyed that anybody walking through it would call it a war zone I mean there are burned out homes it is rubble there are people living in extreme poverty and it is unmistakable to me personally that I mean the Iraq war could be whittled down to oil from an American point of view right and why oil because of the car industry and Flint like this church on the other side of the river are the closed down GM Chrysler plants like it was just the the the levels of interconnectedness felt very great and I also just wanted um any American watching the film to instead of watching something about Iraqis over there or the war from 20 years ago for them to constantly feel that the the thing that was right next to the divisions they're feeling with their neighbors the reasons like the the implications of what it meant to be American in that war that we led and that the costs are here now we brought the costs over there we did it and and then we brought the costs home and now we have to face them thank you so much Heather I remember our first conversation about you're you were going to make the film we were speaking on the phone and I just I could I actually after I got off the phone I couldn't stop thinking about exactly what you said a brief version of what you just said about setting it in Michigan so thank you so much for that um and by the way when I was a child I I haven't spent much time in Michigan actually my husband grew up there but my only times in Michigan were at Hofflas in Detroit we would just go to parties you know and then we'd get the car and drive home whatever um so I'm it I'm going to come back to you I'm um particularly uh struck by this project that um is described in your bio um where you analyzed the vocal organ and digital vocality as sites of political negotiation okay my head is exploding could you talk about that a little bit yeah so I mean this is perhaps less identitarian and more um more of a Marxist analysis which I'm I'm okay with that which I which I'm biased towards but biased for rather um I um the history of speech synthesis for example is deeply tied with um America's attempt to disappear the working class right so from the get go bed labs um expressed that their intention for for wanting to create artificial voices and this is back in the 30s what to do away with the need for phone operators right so suddenly these jobs that are typically done by people using their bodies right start to disappear and obviously we've seen that with the way industrialization has evolved over the last you know however many decades um with the reduction of working class jobs and then the pushback um and for me vocality itself I mean the voice and maybe this is because I've I've I've always been a singer but I feel like the voices is really just one of those miracles of the human body um where especially for a body that is expected to hide right the idea that you could sort of publicly take in error right draw in from this sort of collective life force that we share and use this sort of abject flesh prison right to to create something that's that's beautiful and that is essentially signifying that language is is an inadequate conduit of meaning right there's there's a surplus of meaning that happens when you're singing words instead of speaking um and it really does sort of gesture the body towards the ineffable and when that comes from uh from a sort of otherwise abject body it's it's it's just I don't know it gets me all like hot and ready to be honest um sorry that sounds really daft but it is what it is um and I think something really interesting happens when you when you take that organ and try to attach it to AI right or to a machine um and what that does is not always necessarily a bad thing right it there's there's all sorts of sort of transgendered transing of the voice that happens through AI and through speech synthesis um there's there's a lot of room for play but there's also as with every technological advancement a lot of room for quashing resistance and and disappearing it um and so that was sort of where my research was going and and part of the opera that I'm working on right now for January is using a clone diverse like I cloned my voice into a speech generator that sort of operates like a seary version of my voice that I sort of perform with um it speaks it doesn't sing um but um the line between those two forms of vocalization is at best negotiable debatable uh if you ask me but anyway um did I answer your question sorry I tend to get well it definitely uh you know breaks the ice for me because I had no idea what you were talking about and now I have a little bit of an idea of what you're talking about um you know that makes a lot of sense now how did the opera come about I'm curious um how did this production can you tell us just briefly how that what happened uh what happened is I I stopped being able to write music for a while um I feel like I had a career that uh exposed me to and this isn't this isn't like a victim narrative I'm great I live in New York I'm my first commission is with the Met my life is killing it right now right I'm just gonna preface that before I trauma dump right but but I I did have a sort of disproportionate amount of um of trauma that I was forced to go through because of my work and because of being identifiably queer and Muslim in the public I in the Middle East and here for a while um and um and so for a while I just stopped being able to write songs because whenever I'd you know open a word document it felt like before I've even written anything I know I'm gonna get in trouble right like I could say it's snowing and some Christian fundamentalist in north Lebanon was going to decide that snow is code for cocaine and that this is my like devil portion right and this is my indoctrination of the children that ass like that is how things were working I can't believe I just said that ass I'm 35 years old um so I I stopped writing songs for a while I went back to grad school I accidentally took a playwriting class and then found myself really sort of drawn to to musical theater um because it felt like so much of what I was doing as a performer on stage sort of presenting an audience with this persona of like oh here's a body that deserves to be on stage look I'm gonna be a rock star now for the next hour and a half before I go home and like binge on Taco Bell and cry about being alone right um and that was very much a character that I was synthesizing for an audience and it felt like it felt like theater at some point um so I started writing in that form and I think the line between musical theater and opera can be defined when the person defining that line is willing to say that opera in its current definition is necessarily a racialized form and so I'm using the term opera just to piss off a bunch of people that don't acknowledge that um and to get back kind of funding to be completely honest um but yeah does that answer yes yes thank you I was really curious how that came about brilliant brilliant um uh Jeanette I wanted to come back to you I you know um I think one of the things that uh has impressed me most about your work and and Zoukak's work um has been the way that um you have reached out into the world in a huge way all of you um you know Europe and the United States and all over the place but you have such a sharp focus on Lebanon and different communities in Lebanon and you have a great deal of the effort on the part of the company I think is on interacting with those various communities and getting their stories can you talk a little bit about that yeah sure so uh I mean our our uh our work is very contextual like we connect because our aim is to work on all these systems of marginalization so as like we work with marginalized groups that are identified in different ways in Lebanon like as refugees migrant domestic workers um queer communities and etc so and mainly in Lebanon there are like the challenges are in different levels of course like in the socio-political spectrum so our as individuals living we have our political and economical uh challenges that we need to deal with but also on the social level we have issues that are related to religion sex and politics in general these and these are the three main areas where you have uh censorship on it either this censorship comes from um from the government or from the uh social groups uh in Lebanon so and through that you can see what what are the topics that that shakes the system in a way and shakes the consensus and the and how the system is formed so working with people allows us to connect with the different actualities and how we can uh how we can understand a more complex uh uh speech and discourse to our work and content as well because it is easy to deal with issues like from a theory theoretical point of view or from also only your own point of view but when we you when you go and meet people living in different uh economical situation people who doesn't have your own privileges people who don't have access to culture and to your economic privileges then you see different perspectives and then you need to start to find a way to deal with issues from a more complex way and we believe in theater as a place of like of a place of paradox of complexity and of criticism a a place where you can think and generate questions and this is how we um we we learned a lot from the from communities and we go to work with communities not because we want to help them we don't help anyone because we want to help ourselves it's because we it's it's for us because it's a way to survive first to survive to connect to to to uh and to and to be um you know and to be in a uh not living in a uh uh utopia lala land you know because uh yeah life life is not a dream life is dreams are part of life you know we can dream of a lot of things but life is life life is what we are seeing today of the of ugliness of death of destruction and of impossibilities as well and you can meet these impossibilities when you meet people who are living on the edge you know like people who are living on the edge are people who you can listen to and learn to are not people that they need your help on a cultural level they are they are people who you near like we have the tools to maybe channel uh their narratives and stories because we have the privilege of being on a stage you have a privilege of being able to have a platform of a speed of speech yes of course we worked a lot to create that platform for example in Zoukak we we we really worked hard like since 18 years when we founded Zoukak we didn't have a space we didn't have a studio we didn't have a place to rehearse we didn't have any money like in Lebanon you don't have any governmental support for arts and culture in general so we had to work uh and but since we have that we have a responsibility and this responsibility comes through only our tools it's like we started on all of this like in 2006 as well as I said like when during the war and the first two days three days five days we started to you know we went and we started on the like the basic needs on first aid like you know we started to help groups and of providing people with with food water matrices etc and then after five six days when all the activists and groups were like already functioning then we said let's let's start to do what we know how what we know how to do is like to do theater and this is how it started and then we continued working after the war for two years with the people who lost their parents their relatives their friends or their homes or their schools so we did a big work with the in the south in different schools and with the children and teenagers and then in 2007 we had a board in a Palestinian refugee camp in the north so also that we had a lot a whole camp were displaced into another camp and we worked there and then we had the you know like we worked with Iraqi refugees then Syrian refugees Sudan refugees and then we worked with also different centers that worked with refugees in Europe and one unforgettable experience was in Calais camp where we'll like and borders like between Paris between France and UK there in the Calais camp we spent like we went for two years to work there and one of the works were during the new year's eve and yeah I mean I can't I mean that was I mean you see people in the real thrives or you know the real the fight for finding dignity and life and same people in the news and media they look at them as yeah as I don't know as as animals like they're saying now so it's like yeah I mean this is what you learn from people is like the yeah the main values of life and it reminds you to yeah work on these values sorry I sound a bit emotional or something but I mean the situation now is yeah it's really very very intense and anxiety is really like shaking us on all levels and it also brings us to ask the I mean essential questions you know like that we ask ourselves and it always reminds us like yeah like if now we are going to do theater like people ask us like I mean yeah are you still opening the theater while people are dying in Gaza and then we say yes of course I mean it's difficult to carry that here emotionally and physically and to go to the theater and to do music parties and to do open theater and to do programs with the we have a mentorship program that is running now with the artists and like and to do theater and sometimes pieces that are talking about different topics but yes we hold this responsibility and we hold our bodies and emotions in order to face the the the situation and this is how this country have survived also through through the past 100 years it's like also through art and through the love of like art and culture and singing and music you see during the worst days of the past wars in Lebanon you have families gathering at homes and singing and drinking alcohol and you know and yeah and this is this is what we want to do and plus we are like art is our profession so I mean and it's the only profession that gets questioned in such times you know like I mean why no one asks a butcher to close the shops or a mechanic or a person in the media works in the media or a journalist or a lawyer like us them or or a doctor or whatever like art is as essential as a place as the only places of like communal places people who people who like gathers there and meet each other and they share their share they share their emotions they share the way how they are living these situations and uh yeah so this is what we're dealing now with absolutely you know if you wouldn't mind just um finish by telling us about this mentorship program that you're doing right now who are the people involved so we have a program called Kawalees Zoukok which is Zoukok behind the curtains it's like a program for practitioners to like it's a training program and the mentorship program and every year we choose like people artists apply and this year we have six artists who are selected with six different theater plays actually and so the the program ran for eight months and this week is the presentation week of the of the performances and it's amazing because we have six new young artists who have who worked on text and directing and like they composed a whole play and also all all like engaged very like their topics they are working on they are like really strong like they are also dealing with issues related to you know to the to what they it's a generation who who lived the past this past period in Lebanon like the the economical collapse the revolutions the the huge massive Beirut explosion the those artists who like their profession and life is like they were in university or in school and then the country collapsed again so they find their their questions in life are also on the edge and yeah it's I'm so happy with this I mean it's every time in the theater is like it's always full and people are really discussing it's like it's like never before people are talking about art and we're discussing I wish I were there I really wish I was there yeah yeah it's good that you're not I mean like stay away a bit it's better now but I understand yes I'm going to turn to Andrea again in just one second but just as a reminder for those who tuned in late to the conversation this is Mina theater makers alliance convening an annual national meeting that amplifies the voices of middle eastern and north african theater makers and we are in conversation with juneid sarah din heather rapo hamatsino and andrea asaf and it's you know just really remarkable because the title of this panel is a Mina political theater at home in in the diaspora and you could not be talking more brilliantly to that topic so thank you all so much andrea okay I first of all I want to know there are a couple things that I would love you to talk about one of them is the ways in which art to action and your work in particular well I guess art to action is an organization that encompasses several different communities correct so I'd love to hear more about what's happening there are they uh those communities are some of them immigrant communities as well and then two um I definitely want to hear about 11 reflections on the nation definitely but first talk about art to action if you don't mind sure um art to action is a a a coalitional project in a way it's um designed to support artists who identify as people of color within a u.s framework uh as well as queer identified artists and women uh artists who are leading ambitious projects and um it's really uh constructed as a kind of response to the system the systemic inequities in the arts field that are of course a microcosm of the nation at large um and are impact globally as well um so it's not even though I'm an Arab-American identified artist it's not an Arab-American identified organization because I think my queer identity is as important and has shaped me as much as my Arab identity and in fact I often feel I often say I it was easier to come out as queer than it was to come out as Arab in a post 9 11 America but anyway um so I you know so I really I really have always been interested in movement building and the the ways that we can learn from each other's movements the history of uh incredible movements um you know civil rights movements so the movement for Black Lives in the United States um it it movements for indigeneity and land back movements and um the ways that various immigrant communities and communities of color in a u.s framework have um have uh have art art and cultural expression has been a part of movements for change pretty much since this nation became a nation so uh so I'm really interested in that and I'm interested in how uh middle eastern theater makers in the framework that we're using are people with ancestry in southwest central Asia and north Africa can learn from the movements that have come before us and how we can connect and build together and break this I'm trying not to cuss isolation that we have felt uh for so long and I think the way the way forward is through coalition building and collective voice and uh an understanding in a way to what Heather was speaking to that um we're all actually fighting the same systems the same systems of militarism white supremacy uh patriarchy that came with colonialism uh imperialism that is rooted in colonialism we're we're actually all reeling from the same systemic patterns and if we can see that then we can build more power together than we can apart so anyway so I basically uh art to action is a is a platform for me to invest in artists who are doing that and uh you know say uh see what people are doing and say you're amazing that should be supported and if if like the mainstream of our theater community doesn't get it uh let's see if art to action can leverage some money to make it happen and or to be a partner in helping make it happen so that's that's really what art to action about and it's also a platform for my own work as well so uh in addition to commissioning developing and supporting uh the work of other artists um my work is in the mix too so it's a way for me to do community based and socially engaged work in places like where I live Tampa Florida like as Heather was saying also a swing state and truly a battleground against fascism right now um and that feels important it sometimes feels more important than being in New York or California uh where audiences are kind of politically more homogenized right um in places like Florida there's actually the potential that an artistic work or engagement with an artist can move the needle on a conversation in a really important way and and then and I'm interested in that too as much as I also like tour around and do work wherever and with with incredible organizations all over the country which leads me to 11 reflections on the nation so uh you know so I started first I started with a solo show called 11 reflections on September that was really just uh gathering pieces of poetry and spoken word that I've written since 9 11 and saying you know from my very New York spoken word aesthetic what would happen if I collaborate with Middle Eastern musicians and see what we can make together and made this kind of very hybrid multimedia piece that toured around for a while and then um and then during the pandemic we we had an opportunity uh supported by the Carver Community Cultural Center in San Antonio to turn it into a digital production which was really like one of those things when you know as a good as well-trained theater artist someone says hey could you make this into a digital piece you say yes I can what does that mean I'll figure it out and I like accidentally made an experimental art film that is now like got 20 official selections in international film festivals around the country I don't know thanks um but actually uh then I started feeling like uh yeah that that was that was therapeutic for me to um rant on stage for many years and collaborate with these amazing artists however my voice is particular and not enough at all we're not remotely enough right now in the in the political moment that we're in right so 11 reflections on the nation is about how can I um go around the country using the the instigating the initial work as a kind of instigator to ask locally based artists and communities in each location what is the impact of the the policies that followed 9-11 this post 9-11 era in your community I know what it was in New York I lived it in New York but I don't know what it was in Texas or California or and how to how do we create a platform to talk about that and so it's certainly how it's impacted Mena or swana communities uh of course um everything from you know the wars to the muslim ban and uh but also how 9-11 and the policies that were created after impacted our entire immigration system impacted our entire electoral system it impacted the way that the US is participating in proxy wars now right so that those are the questions I'm interested in so I you know go around the country and I look for a partner I'm very excited to be partnering with Golden Thread here in San Francisco uh next season on a San Francisco version with uh with Brava and some other partners uh and we did this in San Antonio and and eventually it'll make its way back to New York but I want but I want to gather these stories around the country first and hear hear the voices of you know like for example in San Antonio Arab and muslim communities are very isolated in that city um there really wasn't you know um there wasn't a way for people to gather in a public venue like a theater venue like we we had a an artist who participated who had an Iraqi musician had an entire 10-year career uh in Turkey as a as a celebrated musician on television came to Texas and hadn't been on a stage since he arrived in the United States and I mean extraordinary musician and nobody understood that he was right there in Texas right and so I'm really interested in those uh not only the gathering the stories of the community but where are our artists what has displacement done to our artists right in the in the wake of the Iraq war in the wake of uh the war in Afghanistan in the forces that are driving global migration that Heather's working on right now right with the new migration play cycle that she's doing um so that's what 11 Reflections on the Nation is about and um the idea is then to take some of the strongest pieces that are devised out of that process around the country and bring it back to New York for the 25th anniversary of 9-11 to really ask the question how do we commemorate how do we remember tragedy and whose voices are left out and whose voices matter uh and and so that's the that's the project that's the intention wow thank you so much it sounds incredible truly um we have a few minutes left um I thought there might be some questions from attendees but I'm not seeing any um I wonder if this is a moment where you the panelists might either tell us something that I haven't asked you about that you would like to share or do you have a question for one of the other panelists based on what they've been talking about I'm just curious ah so there are people in person attendees who can come up to the mic right is anyone eager to ask a question I see the mic but I don't see people moving toward it and so we're going to keep moving on um and and panelists you're going to say if there's anything else you'd like to share or you have a question for each other I had a question yes um which is I guess maybe a little bit more for for well not maybe this is more for those of us who are in the US but um I've been coming up against this wall a lot for the last 22 days that I guess I wanted to ask if if y'all have had to navigate in the past for advice um where I feel like partially maybe because of our backgrounds and what we grew up with we have a tendency to to to feel more satisfied by our work when it quote unquote engages whatever that means to you and I feel like I keep coming up against this wall where in the face of sort of structural racism in this country I keep getting asked if I'm so bothered by the politics here why don't I just leave um which which I think is horrifically undemocratic and and actually quite unpatriotic whatever that means as well but um I was wondering if if you've had to navigate that where you where you're sort of told that your political opinions about the way this country is operating are lesser than because of your backgrounds I would say personally if I may and then yeah I just want to say that I don't know that anyone expressed you know an argument with my political views because of my background due to my background first of all I grew up in a different completely different era from everyone else here and uh my family was pretty assimilated and plus my name doesn't give me away which is so weird but it's actually hoodie and you probably knew this but um I think that in general in my youth because of my political views I was often told you know that if uh if I was unhappy that I should just I should leave and that's without even knowing that I came from an immigrant family you know as though and I was raised in a house where yeah yeah you say what you think because that is the democratic process so I did experience that not necessarily due to my ethnic background Andrea yeah um I you know I like to remind people that dissent and rebellion is like the most American thing ever like all of our all of our narratives are about that right um and I also like to remind European dissented folks that they are immigrants on this land uh yeah I was like literally on a panel once uh like a national arts conference and a white man next to me said well you know I'm not an immigrant I was like really Mr. White man that's amazing you know because I think you know again it's about narrative it's about the narrative who's shaping the narrative who's otherized by it what are we acknowledging in American history US history and what are we normalized what's being normalized in those kind of comments right um so the why don't you leave also there is no there is almost no place on the globe that the US doesn't touch now where do you where to go that the US does not have a hand in right and so I think that this this the belly of the beast is the place that maybe maybe we can make change I will say one thing which is that my Lebanese uncle would give me a hard time because he would say I was lucky to be here he would go on and on about that yeah Heather yeah I would say that one one aspect of that that I find really interesting is that um and my daughter helped define this for me she's like the new the new cancel this is from her talking about her first month in high school right is um you is the new cancel is so polite because nobody wants to be racist or this or anything so it's just like you just get passed by right and I said when she was describing this to me as a high school I went well that's not so new like I mean the the idea that like there just isn't a place for you right so the fact that somebody's even saying go like I'm really interested in that because I'm like oh are they engaging with actually offering you something because my experience is like nothing's really on offer right so you're kind of like in what space will you will you work or can you work and then the flip side of that is that the places on offer can be in aren't necessarily in communities where the conversation is still hot it's this is a gross generalization but let's just say it's in New York how hot is the conversation in New York everybody's so liberal everybody's right you can be racially diverse but not politically diverse so like like how to even make space in communities where the conversation can be heated right so I I don't know that's it's just a that's just some of the stuff I was feeling when you asked that it's like um my experience is you usually just get passed by and you don't get to be in conversation with the why of it but that the the um the way of engaging in places where it really matters and is of most used to you I don't know I'm not finishing my thought on that I'm just I'm I'm I'm just navigating how hard it is to find spaces to work right like and this idea that any invitation is genuine is is rare wow okay mm-hmm anything else I have a I have a I have a random thing um and this is I think due to the title of this talk um so it's not a quite it's a it's a wonder more than it is a question of there has there is rarely work in translation you know that done on our stages Catherine and you've championed that and tried to make it happen um and the the I'm wondering where where one can create opportunities for um Middle Eastern American artists to work alongside artists from the Middle East in institutions either here or elsewhere that is a um that's a collaboration I've yet to have fully and would love to see happen more at least across this country well Heather since you brought it up um though I cannot provide all the details keep your ears open for a project that I'm doing with the north theater uh in Lebanon in September of 2024 that will actually address those very questions and desires so more on that soon I also want to um say like I I'm really interested in multilingual work and especially through music and poetry and I'm wondering sometimes how much needs to be translated like there's there's something that in me that enjoys that the bilingual or multilingual audience member gets the most out of it and is the privileged audience member right instead of the monolingual English speaker and so um I'm really looking for the like both and in that like how do we make the translations available so that people can deeply understand the poetry music that is coming out of the Middle Eastern texts but at the same time maybe in the live experience that isn't uh what I want to privilege in the space in the in the in the time of experiencing it like what is it to experience the poetry and music that isn't explained to you in a language you already know and so I I want it all I guess is what I'm saying I want all Andrea Andrea you're just you'll never be satisfied I know it's true all right I'd be shameless for a second here well we have a question from the audience Hamid and uh since we begged them to ask questions but I think you give somebody the opportunity what's your question not a question but an answer to Heather this is Wafa Bilal oh sorry sorry oh there you go hello hello Wafa hello Heather this is Wafa Bilal I'm an Iraqi artist Iraqi American artist and I do have an answer for you I've been working with the Golden Threat for a year now and on a residency here and the answer is I'm working with Sahar here on a residency for theater people from Iraq and here in a Golden Threat to answer the question where do Middle Eastern go to collaborate with people in United States so we are in the process of finalizing that collaboration and our hope is to connect people in the Middle East to Golden Threat and to the people who are in the theater business in United States thank you thank you John I was gonna add something to that to both I mean Heather and Andrea that um so I'm I've kind of been grappling with this question a lot for the last couple of years and the the opera that I'm working on for January a third of it is in Arabic and it it really does matter to me that that something within discourse around opera comes out in the language that is not German Italian French or English right and so that's been like really sort of tricky to navigate and there are parts Andrea in which like there's a part where I sing them will which for me is actually a very loaded form because it's something that I persisted very actively when I was in Beirut because it you know I associated it to everything that was conservative and sort of bogging me down while I was there and on coming here it sort of felt like a weird kind of surrender and I think that will not translate to anyone except the bilingual people in the audience well it's specifically except the bilingual immigrants in the audience and so there are parts in which I'm not translating the Arabic to English but everything that is in English is translated to Arabic in the in the subtitles basically about projections on stage but yeah no it's like it's a crazy question and I feel like it's so it's so meaty and there's so much room to play there and to sort of really sort of kick at things and it's it's very exciting you know I've had so many plays translated and and we've had workshops as Heather knows and readings and you know some of the I just need to point out that some of the organizations that were focused on work and translation and on really connecting the playwrights in the Middle East and beyond have shut their doors for one reason or another and the organization that I worked with for many years which was the LARC I was the director of Middle East exchange there and that was the mission not only with the Middle East but yeah with Eastern Europe and Mexico and you know and it was a thriving organization for a long time and we need to rebuild that's that's my take on the situation in terms of creating exchanges and you know I'm working on it anybody here to join me just let me know but meanwhile we are at time and you know I just I can't thank you all enough for just sharing so much with us it's very meaningful for me and I'm sure too for anyone who is listening in I want to thank howl round for hosting the live stream program I hope people did tune in that way as a reminder the panel will be archived on howl rounds website soon yes so please feel free to share it with people who couldn't make it today and thank you and I hope that people will be able to join for the remaining sessions and with that I say good afternoon from Washington Heights thank you Catherine yeah