Dear Laila at IMPACT 25 International Theatre Festival

Accès

À propos

“Dear Laila, you are five now and have started to ask me where I grew up, and why we can’t go there. This is me trying to give you an answer...”

The seeds of Dear Laila were planted when Basel’s five-year-old daughter began to ask him about his home growing up. Unable to take her there, he decided he would try to bring the place to her, by creating a model of his childhood home in Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus.

Dear Laila shares the Palestinian experience of displacement and resistance through the story of one family, exploring how war and exile are experienced through the everyday, the domestic, and the public space. An intimate, interactive installation experienced by one audience member at a time, Dear Laila uses the retelling of memories and tactile details to bring this now destroyed place to life.

This piece is experienced by one audience member at a time in 20-minute time slots. While free and open to the public, pre-registration is recommended to avoid wait times.

Basel Zaraa is a UK-based Palestinian artist whose work uses the senses to bring audiences closer to experiences of exile and war, and who creates art in order to face, express and understand the trauma that his community lives with. His current installation, What Will We Do Without Exile? is an immersive, multi-sensory installation that creates a lush world within a refugee tent, inviting audiences to imagine life beyond occupation and war. Since 2022 he has also been touring Dear Laila, which received the ZKB Audience Award 2023. His previous work includes As Far As My Fingertips Take Me, a collaboration with Tania El Khoury which was awarded Outstanding Production at the Bessie Awards in 2019. His work has been shown at over 50 venues and festivals across five continents.

Liens

• IMPACT 25 Webpage mtspace.ca

Organisateur

MT Space

IMPACT (International Multicultural Platform for Alternative Contemporary Theatre) is a biennial festival produced by MT Space in Waterloo Region, Ontario, Canada – presenting politically-charged and urgent international, national, and local work by Indigenous, Black, and Racialized artists since 2009.

Founded in 2004 by Majdi Bou-Matar, MT Space centralizes minoritized voices and narratives through theatre. Over the past two decades, MT Space has grown from being a company that produces one show every other year to an organization that brings culturally and socially relevant work from across the country and around the world to communities in Waterloo Region – bringing different communities together to create a community of difference.