Arabic Facts in Palestine: Clashing Hybridities in Transnational Cultural Production

Abstract

In 2012, Bethlehem's Al-Rowwad Cultural and Theatre Society undertook the challenge of co-producing Arthur Milner's Facts with the New Theatre of Ottawa for a nine-city tour in the region. The successful production and warm reception to the play highlighted the potential for more Canadian playwrights, companies, and artists to engage with Palestine through cultural and theatrical exchanges. It also highlighted a series of challenging political, cultural, and philosophical differences, which emerged in production, talkbacks, and audience reception. Palestinian communities in different cities reacted in remarkably different ways to the play, which tells the story of two Israeli and Palestinian investigators as they attempt to solve a murder mystery in the West Bank. In Bethlehem, political issues of security coordination between the Palestinian Authority and Israel dominated the discussion. In Hebron, the audience responded to the engagement with settlers and the predominant presence of the Goldstein massacre at the end of the play. The mixed Israeli-Palestinian audience in Jaffa reacted in similar ways to the Canadian audience in Ottawa, focusing on the rift between religious and secular Israel. These varied responses reflected the transnational dimension of the production: the Canadian origins of the play, its hybridity in production, its international appeal, and its relevance to Palestine. I will outline the challenges of the production through a description, analysis, and critique of the process that led to opening night in Bethlehem's Dar Annadwa Addawliyya, and closing night at Al-Rowwad. From the checkpoint to closing night, I tell the story of a successful partnership, while revealing the inevitable clashes of values that took place in this transnational cultural production. In narrating my experience as the director of the production, I draw on contested concepts such as transnationalism, hybridity, and modernity without defining them, a frustrating condition for the reader of an academic journal. Although I hope that these concepts may be enriched by the documentation of this production, I describe some of the challenges in this journey not for the purpose of theoretical development, but to identify a space between what we think we are doing and what we actually are doing. In transnationalism and through hybridity, this theatrical production enters an alternative space that simultaneously belongs to Canadians, but doesn't. By travelling to an alternative geography, this play became an exploration ground for multiple clashing and complementary identities and values. The dislocation of the cultural production from its indigenous home and relocation to the address of its characters became the catalyst that contested and temporarily disrupted its/our legitimacy. Facts in Ottawa Arthur Milner's play investigates the issue of Israeli settlements in the West Bank through the lens of religious conflict and the institution of archaeology. Produced in Canada in 2010, the play presents a Jewish-Canadian playwright's examination of the conflict in three perspectives: a secular Israeli investigator, a Palestinian Authority investigator, and a right wing Israeli-American settler in Hebron. The two investigators, Yossi and Khalid, must work together to solve a murder mystery, in which the primary suspect is the settler, Danny. The following question drives the plot of the play: Did Danny murder an American archaeologist in Hebron? However, the underlying dramatic question throughout the play is whether a Palestinian and an Israeli can cooperate in the investigation, despite their deep-seated conflict over the creation of the state of Israel in Palestine in 1948, the ensuing events leading to the occupation of 1967, and the Israeli expansion into the West Bank through the systematic building of settlements, a substantial Israeli investment in urban planning, and the ongoing exploitation of resources in occupied territories. …