A Moment of Silence

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A young woman’s (Sheeva) life alternates between sleeping and awakening with 3-4 year intervals. Each awakening reveals a socio-political change, including revolution and war. While this life cycle is unfolded, the playwright who is in fact writing the young woman’s lifestory receives life threatening calls from the government’s secret agents.
The play has been widely admired for its innovative approach to playwriting and its audacity to bring to the surface issues of socio-political urgency. It has been translated to more than five languages and has been revived several times in the Middle East, Europe and North America. Its surreal narrative coupled with Mohammad’s poetic yet witty dramatic writing style addresses universal issues about freedom and security.

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Ella Iza

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The production narrates the story of the residents of a building in Lebanon. The building is in bad condition and the residents want to fight for their demands to live safely in their building. They talk about pressuring those in power, but their arguments often take a sectarian turn with each resident showing off their pride for their sect and dissing that of others. While remembering their history though, they seem to stop recalling what has happened right before the civil war. Later, a journalist supposedly comes to document the residents’ calls for their rights to live safely in their building. However, it is revealed that she was actually researching something about the residents’ sects and reveals information that shocks the residents of the building. The production’s premiere was in 2018 following a series of events in Lebanon highlighting political corruption. Namely, in 2015, the garbage crisis in Lebanon was just starting and several protests were sparked because of that and very little reform has been made since then. Khabbaz’s play highlights the role of Lebanese people to rid themselves of those ideological sectarian beliefs in order to better the country. In a comedic way, he writes characters that want to improve, but find themselves struggling to denounce their own leaders’ wrongdoings.

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Heavens

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Heavens closes the chapter of historical research we started in 2012 with Perform-Autopsy. Through this research, we gained insight into the private-public relationship with history. It revealed our incomplete historical empire: the curse of repetition and echoes, our fragile reality and selves, the breath-constricting anxiety when we attempt to bury the rubble of the past in denial and reconstruction, the fear, hatred and self-loathing at the thought of our murderers and reality silencers – and our victims, anxiousness over our struggles, actions and betrayals, nostalgia that sinks us in past events somehow linked to us.In this work, we come to a self realization as individuals. We have become what we lost and we have lost what we have become. Our history has reduced us to numbers that fuel a destructive controversy. We challenge that which paralyses us and denies us a future. Between the here and the there, the now and the then, recollecting our memories and our losses. On stage, we stand up so we can see, we speak out so that we may hear, we tell our stories so we can realize ourselves.

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Ghalia’s Miles

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Fleeing her family in Lebanon in the hope of building a new life in Europe, Ghalia, a pregnant teenager, makes an extraordinary journey through the Arab World. On her way, she encounters several women who guide her, and she sacrifices almost everything she has to make the crossing. Borrowing elements from mythological characters and archetypal figures of women warriors and nurturers, in addition to stories inspired from real women who were active in the upheavals of the Arab World, the play attempts to draw the changing map of our region through the innocent and feisty eyes of Ghalia and the strong women she meets. Ghalia slowly becomes the representation of the youth’s ability to adapt to the changing and harsh environments of our world today.

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Hair

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The play Hair gives a panoramic view of hair as a political statement through the monologues of nine characters from different cultures, ethnicities, colours, ages and sexualities It aims to bring to light the objectification of women through the commercial use of hair, through the heritage of fairy tales which transfer the ownership of the female body and hair to the man, and by examining the voyeurism projected towards hair. It also employs irony in some monologues, movement and dance. In one of the nine monologues, Hair speaks for itself and reveals many taboos about itself. There we can easily see Hair as a symbol of the unspoken oppression and dehumanization imposed on women and people of color. Another monologue is the voice of pubic hair, where we can also confront a tradition of patriarchy that enslaves, mutes, and infantilizes female sexuality.

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