DEADLIFT

"It is impossible to write a synopsis for this performance. It simply cannot be done.

I write these words as Bashar Murkus, the creator of this work, after being commissioned by Al-Harah Theater, in partnership with Boy Jonkergouw Producties, with a remarkable mission: to create a theatrical piece in dialogue with the works of Palestinian painter Suleiman Mansour, one of Palestine’s most prominent artists and the creator of its most enduring symbols. I was to begin with his painting ‘Camel of Burdens’ - a portrait of a porter carrying an entire city on his back.

No sooner had I agreed to the project than the genocide committed by the Israeli occupation against Gaza - erupted once again, and it continues unabated as I write these words. What city do we carry in this performance, when our cities are being erased and our souls collapse with them? How can we embody a porter who endures the burden while our people die and we stand by, merely watching?

In this visual performance, I place my outcry, my shame, my fear, and my questions. This may not make for a perfect synopsis, but it has made for a performance bristling with questions—testing the limits of the human body’s endurance, and trying, from a heap of rubble, to piece together questions about the future. Not only the future of Palestine. 

What does the rubble teach us?"