“The role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible.”
—Toni Cade Bambara
This is a sentence that I state in just about every organizing and activist space I find myself occupying. It’s a simple statement that sums up the work of most of the artists who have inspired my work connecting performance with leftist movements, most notably El Teatro Campesino and Jana Natya Manch, though there are many, many more that I could mention. They are artists who place their artistic practices and creativity in service of movements to create a world in which they want to live.
When I speak to my students about the role of the artist in the revolution, they quickly become overwhelmed by the challenges facing us and the structures, institutions, and systems that keep them in place. To this point, I often add another of my favorite quotes from another of my favorite creative visionaries. Yes, these powers seem inescapable. However, as the visionary speculative fiction author Ursula K. Le Guinn once said, “So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art.”
This spirit of resistance and change is alive and well in the artists who have been engaging the many organizations and autonomous groups calling for swift and complete action by the United States government in the State of Israel’s ongoing mission to commit genocide against Palestinians. There could barely be a soul in the United States who has not at least heard the propagandized news churning from most mainstream media in the United States, as well as the White House, since 7 October, framing Israel’s response as justified and state-sanctioned, with the ever-growing number of casualties deemed acceptable—at least acceptable enough not to stop them.
There are plenty of organizers across the world who have been sharing, interrupting, and resisting this point of view since Israel began the time-honored, imperial tradition of asymmetrical warfare and rapid dominance. They call upon others to stand up, speak out, and resist what can only be seen as an escalation of Israel’s mission. As of the publication of this article:
- Over 34,000 people killed, including 14,500 children,
- Over 77,000 injured,
- 2,000,000 civilians forcibly displaced (85 percent of Gaza's total population)
News of the attack on the Freedom Theatre was the catalyzing event that sent theatre artists across the world—many of whom were already in the streets attending protests, marches, and gatherings—to rally around the Freedom Theatre and demand the release of Sheta and other artists currently in detention.
For the theatre community, this human tragedy escalated significantly on 13 December 2023, when Mustafa Sheta, the general manager at the Freedom Theatre—located in the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank—was pulled out of his home by the Israeli Defense Force (IDF), “blindfolded, incarcerated, beaten, and deprived of food or water.” Abu Joas, a recent graduate of the Theatre School at the Freedom Theatre, was also arrested and subjected to similar violence. Shortly afterward, the theatre’s creative director, Ahmed Tobasi, was also beaten and arrested, but not before his home and the theatre’s office were vandalized and sacked by IDF forces. It is certainly not the first assault on any of these artists. Indeed, anyone associated with the Freedom Theatre seems to be a target of the IDF. Bilal Al-Sadi, the chair of the Freedom Theatre’s board (similar to a board of directors), was arrested in October 2022 and detained for six months. As of the publishing of this article, both Al-Sadi and Sheta remain imprisoned in Israel. Tobasi was released twenty-four hours after his arrest and has been vocal and public about his experiences.
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Thank you for your article. I'm surprised you did not mention Golden Thread Productions in San Francisco, the first theatre company in the US devoted to theatre for or about the Middle East. They have dedicated their 2024 season to Palestine and recently closed a sold out run of Returning to Haifa, adapted from the Ghassan Kanafani novella by Ismail Khalidi and Naomi Wallace. In March 2024, their annual What do the Women Say? featured several Palestinian artists and activists including two attending via zoom from the Middle East. In fact at last year's ReOrient Festival, only days after October 7, they created space for Palestinian artists to speak about their personal grief, loss, and coping mechanism in a panel titled, Sustainability and Self-Preservation: Palestinian Artists Speak Out. Golden Thread's advocacy for Palestinian artists and their centering of Palestinian narratives is not only inspiring but can serve as a model for other theatre companies in the US who sadly have remained silent on this issue.
Hi Torange, Thank you so much for lifting up the incredible work Golden Thread does and for providing these links for folks to further explore. Beto chose to focus his article primarily on individual artists based in NYC, but we do welcome and encourage others to contribute writing about the important work happening elsewhere around the country and around the world!
For those reading, we encourage you to also check out Golden Thread's conversation series No Summary—the upcoming four sessions of which focus on theatremakers in Palestine: https://howlround.com/series/no-summary
Thank you again, Torange, for naming Golden Thread here, and of course for all your own work.