A lot has happened since my last post. My workshop ended on Friday. first let me tell you about that.

I almost wish I had had another week with these kids. Sometimes I forget how deep a passion I have for theater. The day of the performance, I went to Bil’in again to demonstrate against the nightly raids and arrests that have been happening in recent weeks there. I was wary to go because I wanted to rest and take it easy before my students performed in the evening. But I decided to go. There was an Israeli press group at the demo so there was relatively less tear gas. Tear gas and chemical water cannons are probably not the best for your nerves on an opening night, but I promised myself that this would be part of the package for me in coming to Palestine. To be present and to show solidarity, this is important to me.

There was something refreshing about coming back from Bil’in and walking into the theater. Seeing my students, doing a dry cue-to-cue with lighting, running through sound cues, working beats with my actors, this is sublime. My love affair with theater and acting is a volatile one. Sometimes it feels unsustainable. But on Friday, it brushed me with an old familiarity. Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry bellowed from my students' mouths like smoke and made shapes in the air. 15-year-old kids became creatures chasing a dark legacy, crawling in blue light and engaging with exile, dislocation, emergence, and fierce pride. Of course this was a vision that only materialized when I was watching the piece. In the end, the performance was very rough and unpolished. A work in progress in every sense. One more week would have been enough. But I didn’t come to Ashtar to give a performance. I actually came because I was curious. I don’t know if they know it, but I didn’t teach those kids a damn thing. It’s really not that hard to make interesting pictures with bodies in a performance space. Especially if you are as talented as many of them were. The truth is that I was curious about kids who live here. Curious about how they relate to a fraught history. I wish I could have spent more time with them.