Basel Zaraa
Dear Laila
- 22.11 — 30.11 2024
- portuguese premiere
- Biblioteca Palácio Galveias
- Free, by appointment only (TBA)
- age rating TBC
- 15 min
- English or Portuguese
"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.
Credits
By Basel Zaraa Comi Good Chance Theatre Supported by Arts Council England Translation and script edition Emily Churchill Zaraa Sound engineering Pete Churchill
Presented together with Teatro Nacional D. Maria II.
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 project, Dear Laila, 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.