The Horse of Jenin.. Two Theater Performances in Palestine and Britain Cut by a Single Bullet

SadaNews - In the heart of extermination, my thoughts intertwine around two questions that haunt me: What is the point? And how does life go on while the massacre is broadcast live on air?

This absurdity escalates when the massacre becomes a subject for art, visual material, breaking news, or a cold number that we swallow like bile. I ask myself: Are tears all I have for support or advocacy?

Yet on the other side of awareness, there is a small flame that does not extinguish: the massacre does not stop the journey of tomorrow. Tomorrow is coming, and after that, ten years, and God knows how long the universe will continue beyond that. On this note, we, the survivors, must protect tomorrow, not allow it to become a faded copy of yesterday, and seek the saddle of an authentic Arab horse that still clings to its dignity and pride, so we can all ride it until we land in a free land worthy of our spilled blood.

Culture and arts are like a stallion that can only be tamed by a brave knight; if it gets hold of him, it leads him wherever it wishes. Thus, art opens the doors of hearts for the owner of the cause and shapes a new collective knowledge. This is how Alaa Shihadeh appeared in his one-man theatrical performance: "The Horse of Jenin," leading the steeds of memory in the birthplace of "Balfour," the author of the famous promise. He resists the British Foreign Secretary who gave what he does not own to those who do not deserve, granting the Palestinians martyrs their names, stripping them of numbers to remind the world of the life they lived and the tragedy that still haunts them.

Alaa built his performance as a series of soft traps; resistance hiding in laughter and tears. You come out exhausted yet mentally balanced: Have I become like the character he embodied in Jenin? Am I laughing and crying and talking to myself?

Alaa is portrayed with lighthearted decorum; from the very first moment, he deliberately builds the image of the "heavy" character, starting with the pride of his parents in his birth in the city. However, this façade does not withstand his talent and lightness; the audience sees him as light, charming, talented, burdened by a life that has not done justice to his kin.

Although his play is classified as a one-man theater, during Alaa Shihadeh's hour of hospitality, we met many others. They all exchanged appearances so we could hear the grandfather's voice and see his trembling hands, the mother holding her shoe in one hand wanting to throw it at her son, and in the other holding an excess of love, and the friend Ahmad, a childhood companion and troublemaker, and many others.

Masks

Alaa used his masks with striking intelligence, for the mask here is a cover that places a thin insulating layer between him and the character, softening the shocks of memory while simultaneously overflowing with them. The masks are designed with a deliberate hint of clownery; bright eyes on a dark face, a bemused smile that does not laugh, a body moving like a marionette on a human body.

Yet, we, the viewers, fall into his well-honed trap; between laughter and excitement, the imagination depicts a skin for these masks that resembles layers of facial muscles, turning them into faces we know, we understand their camp, their streets, their school, their central hospital, and their theater, we cling to them as if they actually passed through our lives as they did in Alaa's life, who maintains his position in a carefully calculated isolation from them; a complete human being, carrying a cause, but she does not know him as a bearer of tragedy as the world insists on framing him.

"The Horse of Jenin" is the hero of the story. The performance takes us on a complete journey: from Jenin before the horse, to its formation and construction, transforming us into children playing in the square, dazzled by a beauty that embodies life and becomes a component of identity, where we see our adolescence, youth, and memory reflected. And when the occupation commits its act against it, the meaning of everything becomes clear: the occupation knows the value of the horse, the value of art, the value of identity, and understands the relationship among them all.

Here the aim of the performance becomes clear: an explicit act of resistance against erasure, against the obliteration of identity, against the calculated war to strip humanity from humans whenever the killer can annihilate them whenever and however they wish.

The Theater of Freedom

At the peak, Alaa takes us to Jenin in preparation for his first performance at the Theater of Freedom. He rejoices in the fruit of long effort, training, and preparation. Then, the biggest trap is set, which he began from the first minute when he compared us to the audience of Jenin, provoking our envy of their lightness and presence. He trained us on the way of the audience of Palestine, and when the moment of opening arrived, he told us: You are now the audience of Jenin. Not like them; you are them. Laugh as they laugh, and engage as I told you about them. At that moment, we find our souls in Palestine; we exchange awareness and live there for seconds.

Psychology says that the body responds to the scenarios of the anxious mind as if they had happened: the pulse quickens, the intestines twist, the breath becomes uneasy. There, in the theater seats in Edinburgh, we were indeed in Jenin. We laughed as the audience of Jenin laughed. Then bullets started to fire around them just as they did there. It betrays both audiences, with a single bullet. The electricity cuts off from the targeted theater, and the lighting goes out for us. Our bodies seek their instinctive reactions: to fight or flee. But what if we do not have that luxury, the luxury of choosing to fight or flee!

In that moment, we realize our comfortable hypocrisy: We liked the role reversal to be the best audience; to laugh from the heart and enjoy the company of aunts, neighbors, and the warm community and faces of loving life... not to confront the truth.

Alaa resists until the very last moment. We go out with him to discover what happened, to take a glimpse of what the occupation did outside our theater, as it did outside the Theater of Freedom in Jenin.

That audience which perhaps only knew Gaza through the screens of extermination came out of the performance knowing that Gaza is not much different from other cities in Palestine, and that the occupation is a lived reality that separates us from it only by some luck, and that the justifications for the massacre reside in the mind of the colonizer, not the mind of the colonized, contrary to what a "theater artist" coming from New York tried to convince the Palestinians of.

Stories of Life

Next time, when those exiting the hall search for news of Palestine, they will look for stories of life, survival, childhood, and joys, and the media's reduction of Palestinian identity to tragedy and weakness will not pass unnoticed. The "PlayStation" device Ahmed that Alaa talked about was not only immortalized in the Horse of Jenin but in the memory of all who attended the performance. I will see it in every sparkle of childhood that passes before me.

The Horse of Jenin was not lucky in its homeland, but perhaps it finds some solace in those who narrated its story, those who represented it, and those who introduced the world to it; and surely, it is fortunate to have brave knights who carried it with the gifts of ancestors and their legacy, placing it in their journeys wherever they went, then shared their legacy of glory and resistance with everyone who passed through their story. This performance makes art a shield for identity, and laughter a soft mask for a tear that does not surrender, restoring to the theater its original mission: to teach us how to guard tomorrow.

Source: Al Jazeera