ihath
From the land of Arabian Nights, comes a story teller of a partially different kind.
Terrorist in a Desert.
12.7.06
My friend Simon said come with me to the Negev desert where I need to check on some scientific equipment I left there for my research, you can come for the ride, enjoy the scenery and keep me company. I thought it was a great idea, plus I never spent much time in the Negev desert south of Israel before and therefore thought it would be a fun adventure.
We drove and drove until we were about to reach our destination, when we encountered an Israeli army checkpoint blocking the road. The Israeli soldiers told us that we cannot proceed into the desert without weapons since there might be terrorists lurking around in the desert and they can’t let us through for our own safety. We tried to convince them that we were trying to do scientific research associated with the Hebrew university and that our business is not of interest to terrorists, plus neither Simon nor I know how to shoot a gun or a weapon of any sort and therefore even if we did have guns they would be useless to us since we don’t know how to use them. But the soldier was adamant. “Orders are orders” he said. “No weapons, no passage” was his final say.
Simon instructed me to stay in the car and attempted to talk to the soldiers himself. Man to man. Simon dug out fruit, nuts, juice and bags of chips from the trunk of our jeep and offered them to the soldiers. I sat in the jeep and couldn’t hear what they were saying to each other. And since Simon doesn’t speak Hebrew I was curios to find out how he was able to communicate with the soldiers manning the check point, but given their body language they seemed to be having a friendly conversation.
Following a twenty minute chat, I suddenly found one of the Israeli soldiers getting into our jeep. Ha? What? What is going on? … I gave a puzzled look to Simon. Simon explained to me that the soldier agreed to accompany us in our journey to the research site, therefore the rules would be followed since the soldier has a gun and can offer us protection while in the desert.
The soldier seemed very interested in me and was trying very hard to engage me in a discussion. I, on my part, was trying hard to ignore him and pretend to we interested in looking out the window and observing the scenery. He kept asking me all sorts of question, and I would answer him with curt yes no answers. I think that standing all day manning a checkpoint in the desert is boring and he looked happy to be chatting with somebody.
Once we got to the site, I was helping Simon with measurements and calibrating devices that are supposed to measure rain flow in the desert while the soldier whose name I forgotten was standing to the side, smoking cigarettes and watching us do our work. As we were about to finish up, I asked the soldier if it would be ok for me to take his picture. He smiled enormously and looked very happy that I wanted to take his picture. Simon grabbed the camera out of my hands and pushed me to stand next to soldier, which I reluctantly do. Suddenly I felt a heavy thing drop on my shoulders and arms, the soldier simply threw his rifle into my arms and I stood there looking at the rifle in shock. Seeing the rifle in my hands gave me all sorts of evil thoughts.
“I could tell the soldier at this point that I am Iraqi and he will shit in his pants” was one evil thought.
“I could start yelling Allahu Akbar and he will faint on the spot”
“I could laugh in the most evil way and tell him that he handed his weapon to the terrorista with his own hands willingly, and watch with enjoyment the look on his face”
Many more evil thought crossed my mind. After all we were in the desert where nobody could see us and I was the only one holding a weapon.
“Everybody! say cheese.” Simon yelled at us.
Snap!
The picture was taken
I kept all my evil thoughts to myself. But looking at that picture with my stupid expression in it and my awful hairdo I wonder, if somebody had tapped me on the shoulder in that frozen moment and asked me “When I touch you I want you to say a sentence that starts with: I want”, what would I have said.
Refugee in a Dream
It all started with a wacky dream.
I dreamed that I was an actress on stage in a play. I was playing the role of a Palestinian refugee who recently immigrated to Vancouver. I was wearing a beautiful hand embroidered Palestinian dress and I was on stage with about 20 other actors. The story of the play in my dream is that Latifa and Salah are husband and wife who arrive in Vancouver with their two sons. The stress of the move to a new country and a new culture creates stress within their marriage. Salah slams the door and walks out on Latifa leaving her to deal with two kids and living in a new country on her own. The rest of the play involves scenes where alternatively we see Latifa and Salah dealing with various characters they meet in Vancouver. A sense of alienation dominates the experience of both. At the end of the play Salah comes home to Latifa. The ending scene is between the two of them looking into each other’s eyes and speaking tenderly to each other as they decide that they need to stick together. In the dream I was thinking to myself: I wonder if my husband who was sitting in the audience is feeling jealous since I normally would only speak with such tenderness to him. Salah was played by a bearded tall Palestinian man that had a warm smile. It wasn’t anybody that I knew in real life. Thorough out the play I saw my friend Stephen standing on the right side of the stage dressed in black and facing the audience. Every once in a while he would look at the actors performing on stage as if he was observing the action but most of the time he was looking at the audience. He was somehow involved in the play but not in it. When the last scene finished, the audience erupted is loud applause. All the actors take a bow and then we started to all hug and congratulate each other. There was a feeling of intense joy.
I woke up from the dream still feeling the joy experienced in the dream. “What a wacky and elaborate dream” I thought to myself.
Two or three days later I got a phone call from my friend Stephen telling about this play he is attempting to organize and asking me if I would like to participate in it. The objective of the play was to tell stories about how the Palestinian and Israel conflict effects our lives right here in Vancouver. I almost right away agreed to do it. Stephen didn’t seem convinced when I said that I would do it and kept reminding me that I would have to attend a work shop for a whole week from 9 to 5 every single day. Which would mean taking a whole week’s vacation from work. Even though I said I would do it over the phone, he came over to my house the next evening trying to sell me on the idea. “But I already said yes!” I wanted to tell him as he was giving me his sales pitch. Stephen looked a bit puzzled with how easily a quickly I agreed to get involved.
My next task was to try to find more willing participants in the play. I tried very hard to recruit a Palestinian middle aged man that could play the Salah in my dream, but all the middle aged Palestinian men, including my real life husband, that I attempted to convince to be in the play refused citing various reasons like work commitments, lack of available time and fear of appearing on a stage. I managed to find other people but not the Salah of my dream. In the end I gave up thinking that perhaps Salah will just appear on his own or through other people’s recruitment efforts.
On the first day of the workshop, I was slightly broken hearted because all the Palestinian men were far too young to play Salah convincingly. And all the middle aged men were either Jewish or what we termed “non of the aboveniks” for participants in the workshops that were not Arabs, not Palestinians, not Jewish and not Israeli. I had to let go of the idea that the play we would come up with, at the workshop, would magically be the play I had dreamt about.
The idea was that you stick a group of people in a six day workshop and by the end of it the group comes up with a play. The intense workshop starts with various group exercises. Where people make images using their bodies that relate to the struggle with the issue at hand. Initially those images are frozen and are constructed without talking between the participants. Once an image was constructed the director David Diamond who was in charge of the process would say “When I touch you I want you to say a sentence that begins with the words “I want”. Later on he would say “When I clap my hands I want you to make a single movement in the direction of getting what you want”. Eventually, the frozen images become animated and are turned into a play. On other occasions he would ask us to disclose our secret thoughts, the kind of thoughts we would never divulge in real life.
Make a frozen image with your body
Snap!
ihath is wearing the white shirt.
David Diamond: When I touch you I want you say a sentence that starts with I want.
ihath: I want her to get away from me
David: No! that is what you want her to do, what do you want.
ihath: errrrr! I want …. I want ..... (I will tell you what I said in my next post)
The second picture courtesy of David Diamond artistic director of Headlines Theater.
We drove and drove until we were about to reach our destination, when we encountered an Israeli army checkpoint blocking the road. The Israeli soldiers told us that we cannot proceed into the desert without weapons since there might be terrorists lurking around in the desert and they can’t let us through for our own safety. We tried to convince them that we were trying to do scientific research associated with the Hebrew university and that our business is not of interest to terrorists, plus neither Simon nor I know how to shoot a gun or a weapon of any sort and therefore even if we did have guns they would be useless to us since we don’t know how to use them. But the soldier was adamant. “Orders are orders” he said. “No weapons, no passage” was his final say.
Simon instructed me to stay in the car and attempted to talk to the soldiers himself. Man to man. Simon dug out fruit, nuts, juice and bags of chips from the trunk of our jeep and offered them to the soldiers. I sat in the jeep and couldn’t hear what they were saying to each other. And since Simon doesn’t speak Hebrew I was curios to find out how he was able to communicate with the soldiers manning the check point, but given their body language they seemed to be having a friendly conversation.
Following a twenty minute chat, I suddenly found one of the Israeli soldiers getting into our jeep. Ha? What? What is going on? … I gave a puzzled look to Simon. Simon explained to me that the soldier agreed to accompany us in our journey to the research site, therefore the rules would be followed since the soldier has a gun and can offer us protection while in the desert.
The soldier seemed very interested in me and was trying very hard to engage me in a discussion. I, on my part, was trying hard to ignore him and pretend to we interested in looking out the window and observing the scenery. He kept asking me all sorts of question, and I would answer him with curt yes no answers. I think that standing all day manning a checkpoint in the desert is boring and he looked happy to be chatting with somebody.
Once we got to the site, I was helping Simon with measurements and calibrating devices that are supposed to measure rain flow in the desert while the soldier whose name I forgotten was standing to the side, smoking cigarettes and watching us do our work. As we were about to finish up, I asked the soldier if it would be ok for me to take his picture. He smiled enormously and looked very happy that I wanted to take his picture. Simon grabbed the camera out of my hands and pushed me to stand next to soldier, which I reluctantly do. Suddenly I felt a heavy thing drop on my shoulders and arms, the soldier simply threw his rifle into my arms and I stood there looking at the rifle in shock. Seeing the rifle in my hands gave me all sorts of evil thoughts.
“I could tell the soldier at this point that I am Iraqi and he will shit in his pants” was one evil thought.
“I could start yelling Allahu Akbar and he will faint on the spot”
“I could laugh in the most evil way and tell him that he handed his weapon to the terrorista with his own hands willingly, and watch with enjoyment the look on his face”
Many more evil thought crossed my mind. After all we were in the desert where nobody could see us and I was the only one holding a weapon.
“Everybody! say cheese.” Simon yelled at us.
Snap!
The picture was taken
I kept all my evil thoughts to myself. But looking at that picture with my stupid expression in it and my awful hairdo I wonder, if somebody had tapped me on the shoulder in that frozen moment and asked me “When I touch you I want you to say a sentence that starts with: I want”, what would I have said.
Refugee in a Dream
It all started with a wacky dream.
I dreamed that I was an actress on stage in a play. I was playing the role of a Palestinian refugee who recently immigrated to Vancouver. I was wearing a beautiful hand embroidered Palestinian dress and I was on stage with about 20 other actors. The story of the play in my dream is that Latifa and Salah are husband and wife who arrive in Vancouver with their two sons. The stress of the move to a new country and a new culture creates stress within their marriage. Salah slams the door and walks out on Latifa leaving her to deal with two kids and living in a new country on her own. The rest of the play involves scenes where alternatively we see Latifa and Salah dealing with various characters they meet in Vancouver. A sense of alienation dominates the experience of both. At the end of the play Salah comes home to Latifa. The ending scene is between the two of them looking into each other’s eyes and speaking tenderly to each other as they decide that they need to stick together. In the dream I was thinking to myself: I wonder if my husband who was sitting in the audience is feeling jealous since I normally would only speak with such tenderness to him. Salah was played by a bearded tall Palestinian man that had a warm smile. It wasn’t anybody that I knew in real life. Thorough out the play I saw my friend Stephen standing on the right side of the stage dressed in black and facing the audience. Every once in a while he would look at the actors performing on stage as if he was observing the action but most of the time he was looking at the audience. He was somehow involved in the play but not in it. When the last scene finished, the audience erupted is loud applause. All the actors take a bow and then we started to all hug and congratulate each other. There was a feeling of intense joy.
I woke up from the dream still feeling the joy experienced in the dream. “What a wacky and elaborate dream” I thought to myself.
Two or three days later I got a phone call from my friend Stephen telling about this play he is attempting to organize and asking me if I would like to participate in it. The objective of the play was to tell stories about how the Palestinian and Israel conflict effects our lives right here in Vancouver. I almost right away agreed to do it. Stephen didn’t seem convinced when I said that I would do it and kept reminding me that I would have to attend a work shop for a whole week from 9 to 5 every single day. Which would mean taking a whole week’s vacation from work. Even though I said I would do it over the phone, he came over to my house the next evening trying to sell me on the idea. “But I already said yes!” I wanted to tell him as he was giving me his sales pitch. Stephen looked a bit puzzled with how easily a quickly I agreed to get involved.
My next task was to try to find more willing participants in the play. I tried very hard to recruit a Palestinian middle aged man that could play the Salah in my dream, but all the middle aged Palestinian men, including my real life husband, that I attempted to convince to be in the play refused citing various reasons like work commitments, lack of available time and fear of appearing on a stage. I managed to find other people but not the Salah of my dream. In the end I gave up thinking that perhaps Salah will just appear on his own or through other people’s recruitment efforts.
On the first day of the workshop, I was slightly broken hearted because all the Palestinian men were far too young to play Salah convincingly. And all the middle aged men were either Jewish or what we termed “non of the aboveniks” for participants in the workshops that were not Arabs, not Palestinians, not Jewish and not Israeli. I had to let go of the idea that the play we would come up with, at the workshop, would magically be the play I had dreamt about.
The idea was that you stick a group of people in a six day workshop and by the end of it the group comes up with a play. The intense workshop starts with various group exercises. Where people make images using their bodies that relate to the struggle with the issue at hand. Initially those images are frozen and are constructed without talking between the participants. Once an image was constructed the director David Diamond who was in charge of the process would say “When I touch you I want you to say a sentence that begins with the words “I want”. Later on he would say “When I clap my hands I want you to make a single movement in the direction of getting what you want”. Eventually, the frozen images become animated and are turned into a play. On other occasions he would ask us to disclose our secret thoughts, the kind of thoughts we would never divulge in real life.
Make a frozen image with your body
Snap!
ihath is wearing the white shirt.
David Diamond: When I touch you I want you say a sentence that starts with I want.
ihath: I want her to get away from me
David: No! that is what you want her to do, what do you want.
ihath: errrrr! I want …. I want ..... (I will tell you what I said in my next post)
The second picture courtesy of David Diamond artistic director of Headlines Theater.
Change of heart
10.7.06
Do you remember Harvey Enchin? The man that called the play that ihath performed in "Palestine, Israel and me" a "piece of improvisational theatre in which the audience is invited to publicly vent its hatred against Israel and Jews". After that article I wrote to Harvey Enchin a cheeky email to invite him to come see the play. Since he criticized it already he might as well come see it. At the last performance, I noticed a man in the audience with a very intense look on his face that was writing in a note book. He captured my attention and I thought to myself "Hmmmmm, I wonder if Mr. Enchin had decided to accept my invitation".
Well he did, and in today's Vancouver Sun, he wrote a review of the play.
He starts by saying and I qoute exactly " Palestine, Israel and me; A Power play is, it turns out, not hate speech in theatrical dress as I had characterized it recently" ...... Wow! that is radical dude! Mr. Enchin is admitting he was wrong. This play must be revolutionary to change people's opinions like this.
He ends his article by saying "it seems that everybody at Palestine Israel and Me had a good time." Wow! .... I think Mr. Enchin loved the play.
----
Ok! I admit that I only took the parts I wanted out of today's review, I don't think my interpertaion is the one Mr. Enchin intended. But since he takes what he likes and ignores the rest from our play I decide to only take the parts I liked out his article and ignore the rest as well.
Well he did, and in today's Vancouver Sun, he wrote a review of the play.
He starts by saying and I qoute exactly " Palestine, Israel and me; A Power play is, it turns out, not hate speech in theatrical dress as I had characterized it recently" ...... Wow! that is radical dude! Mr. Enchin is admitting he was wrong. This play must be revolutionary to change people's opinions like this.
He ends his article by saying "it seems that everybody at Palestine Israel and Me had a good time." Wow! .... I think Mr. Enchin loved the play.
----
Ok! I admit that I only took the parts I wanted out of today's review, I don't think my interpertaion is the one Mr. Enchin intended. But since he takes what he likes and ignores the rest from our play I decide to only take the parts I liked out his article and ignore the rest as well.
Another review
7.7.06
Finally! a review on the play by somebody who actually saw it.
Here is the review of the play "Palestine Israel and Me: a power play" in the Jewish Independent by Veronica Stewart
Here is the review of the play "Palestine Israel and Me: a power play" in the Jewish Independent by Veronica Stewart
A few pics from the dressing room
1.7.06
Those fake eyelashes are driving me crazy
Ready to get on stage
I am not sure I have enough makeup splattered on my face
All photos by Cathy Knowlton
Ready to get on stage
I am not sure I have enough makeup splattered on my face
All photos by Cathy Knowlton