As part of the “Discussion” series organized by the “Palestinian Cultural Space” magazine, in cooperation with “Arab 48”, an electronic dialogue was held yesterday, Wednesday, entitled “Theatre of Palestine”. Raja Ghanem.
The dialogue focused on the challenges facing the Palestinian theater and its capabilities, in terms of focusing on financing possibilities and the nature of joint work between theatres, and the impact of the absence of a joint work umbrella that activates the coordination and exchange of experiences between them, in addition to the question of renewing theatrical and artistic content.
Theatrical artist Iman Aoun, who works at the Ishtar Theater in Ramallah, said that coordination work is possible despite the challenges, as there is a model of “effective institutions with real visions that gathered to work jointly under the ‘Performing Arts Network’.” The director of the “Storyteller” theater in Jerusalem, the artist Amer Khalil, recalled the theater’s memory in the eighties of the last century, and the experience of joint work within the framework of the “Al-Rabita”, which was not a strong body at the time, but it worked to find a rhythm for joint work between the Palestinian theatres, indicating that the advent of The Palestinian Authority and the external and official funding mechanisms it brought in affected the work and development of Palestinian theaters, and thwarted the “Al-Rabita” project and prevented it from developing.
As for Ahmed Tubasi, the artist and theatrical trainer at the Freedom Theatre, he believed that there is a need for an official Palestinian decision that clearly acknowledges that theater is part of the Palestinian cultural and educational process, within the framework of improving the conditions surrounding theatrical work, and that there is a need for female artists to gather, and to abandon Individual orientations and individual institutional thinking, to pose a question to the Palestinian theater: “Do we want theater and dignity, or are we only looking for funding?”
The dialogue, which also included questions and posts from the audience present on the (Zoom) platform, touched on the decline of the theater audience in favor of other consumer or entertainment habits, asking the question: Is the theater, as an artistic institution, struggling for survival now?