Human

After the Nablus show, I had a great moment when greeting some of the audience who stayed to say hello. The man from the University who welcomed us and gave us the dignitary’s tour said to me, “Do you know what the people are saying about you? You’re an amazing actress! You don’t act the part, you live the part.” (Oh… no truer words are said in more ways then one.) But to me, of course, that IS acting, the present moment-to-moment connection, you HAVE to live the part on stage. They have a young tradition of theatre here – only thirty years or so, they are still finding their way with it and they often pull from the cinema and that is a very different and plastic style of acting.

Kamel is an amazing director. I would love to see him act as I think he understands this idea of really living the part.  In fact, he often keeps his actors purposefully in the dark, as he doesn’t want them to act, he wants them to be. He has a way of layering that at many times drives me crazy with not letting others in on the process, but he often works with young actors and he likes to work somewhat organically. He tills his soils with trust that something will take root and if it’s full of weeds at the same time, so be it.

It was great to drop the idea of being blind and I marvel at the fact that others didn’t even consider what I was working on. Instead, they simply thought I was either using a very strange American acting method or once they knew, thought, how could I do this or that without seeing. But being blind does not mean you do not see. And that is exactly what Kamel understood about blindness. The blind see heat or feel the change in vibration as objects or people get closer, they hear every creak in a floorboard or breath as it shifts with emotions. They know darkness to be their friend and allies.

It was that layer we were working on; the character of a director and an ability to sense and taste and feel the action of the show, not just watch it or hear words only as meaning.  And that is the very act of directing to know the show’s full sensory ride, to give that impact and experience to an audience. That is what live theatre is all about! Our visual senses dominate so much of the time and it was an amazing process to discover the minority within and to breathe that into the character.

I love travel; it allows me to look inside myself without fear just as I am visiting a foreign country. Not that there isn’t fear but it’s more of a curiosity with more caution then fear itself. I am fortunate to be here. Especially a second time and I would come a third and a fourth if somehow I can. I wish to.

Palestine is purity and magic and so bizarrely atrocious all at the same time.

The Palestinians are people who continue to hold onto their homeland and live under another country’s military occupation and deal with the installations of checkpoints and walls that further divide them from their families and each other and are made to feel inhuman and forced to make normalcy of the situation that has now reached such tension that it is sure to explode and implode and form some huge chemical reaction.

The Palestinians are the kindest, most generous people I have ever met in the world – such an opposite impression of the way they are painted -as terrorists – and yet are they not simply resisters? Would each of us not resist to the raping of our land, the raping of our culture? And would not the insane among us, act out as they do in every one of our cultures, including our own America when the distraught among us takes aim at others before turning their gun on themselves so they can be somehow heard. All of these acts of violence are flatly unacceptable and yet we rarely look at the why. What causes a person to do such things?

The atrocities I spoke of earlier are simply and horrifically, the occupation. It has reached such astonishing levels that despite the numbers of witnesses to counter the political spins, (from Scandinavian humanitarians to Jews helping in the fight from both inside and outside Israel, to International NGO’s and solidarity movements) this oppression continues as if the destiny of the world is bent on Right-wing Extremists ruling through fear, ignorance and domination.

What is that all about? How do we wake up from our blindness or accept our blindness and develop our other senses because of it.

The Palestinian hearts have a freedom that juxtaposes their ever-repressive, unknown daily circumstances that govern their lives.  The world is here with its many hands that keep ripping parts of their fabric in an attempt to help or understand or to control depending on one’s alignment. Inside of this, the Palestinians hold that internal freedom as their most beautifully pure and magical treasure that no one in the world, can ever possess.

The blind metaphor is not such a bad way to see this. We are all blind. Anyone who sees what is actually happening here cannot justify actions by our country supporting this kind of brutality and violations of international laws.  We must all educate ourselves and acknowledge our own country’s use of Vetoes and finances for this continued oppression.

And as an actress, I must continue to discover my oppression of my own self and grow from that insight in order to find that internal magic and alchemy of theatre that allows the world in and through that experience reflect on their own personal growth and that of the collective so we can all embody the word humanity.

Ever forward in love and art,

mik

 

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