|
Palestine/Israel
News and Information
|
|
|
|
|
| 1/3/06 |
The Play “My Name Is Rachel Corrie” Cancelled |
|
We’ve got an e-mail blitz going on, e-mailing the director of The New York Theater Workshop in support of the Production. Would it be possible to include this in one of your newsletters? Thanks… There is also a petition in support of the Palestinian Film Paradise Now. In solidarity-Donna The Theater Director can be reached at: mailto:LynnM@nytw.org For the Petition: www.petitiononline.com/para222/petition.html From: Andres Kargar Date: Wed, 01 Mar 2006 Curtains For ‘Rachel Corrie’ The Play “My Name Is Rachel Corrie”, Directed In London By Actor Alan Rickman and Due To Open In New York City In March, Has Been Canceled For Fear Of Controversy The Theatre Workshop Cited The Election Of Hamas In Palestine, Ariel Sharon’s Medical Condition And The Furor Over The Danish Cartoons As Reasons For Refusing To Stage The Play Israel’s Murder Of Rachel Corrie Articles, Photos And Writings Rachel Corrie 1979 – 2003 … Bread and Puppet Theater have been the flagship gressroots political theater company for decades, and now they have turned their attention to the Middle East with a performance about Rachel Corrie, who was killed on March 16 three years ago. We’ll be hosting post-show discussions on each of the four performance nights, plus Rachel’s parents Craig and Cindy Corrie will be in Seattle on Saturday March 11 at 3:00 pm for a special presentation about their recent trip to Israel/Palestine, where they witnessed some of the ongoing nonviolent resistance to the Israeli military occupation. Consolidated Works (ConWorks) is hosting the show, and they are also hosting an art exhibit by Peter Schumann, artistic director of Bread and Puppet Theater. The exhibit is titled The U.S. Senate Reads an E-mail by the Late Rachel Corrie to Her Parents, and will be in the front gallery at ConWorks through March 12. Bread and Puppet Theater hasn’t brought a full-scale performance to Seattle in over twenty years. Don’t miss it. see you there <<<<<<< Internationally acclaimed performance group Bread and Puppet Theatre performs Daughter Courage, an oratorio about the courageous opposition of Rachel Corrie who died in the attempt to save a Palestinian home from an Israeli bulldozer. Bread and Puppet Theater performs March 8 – 11 at 8PM. Consolidated Works is located at 500 Boren Avenue North at the corner of Boren and Republican in the South Lake Union Neighborhood of Seattle. Tickets are $15 advance, $18 at the door, and $9-12 for ConWorks members. For tickets, call Brown Paper tickets at 1-800-838-3006 or purchase online at www.brownpaperticket.com. For more information, visit www.conworks.org. Daughter Courage Performances: Single tickets are $15 in advance; $18 at door; $12 for ConWorks members; $9 for premium ConWorks members. Tickets available through Brown Paper Tickets at 1-800-838-3006 or online at www.brownpapertickets.com. The U.S. Senate Reads an E-mail by the Late Rachel Corrie to Her Parents Gallery Hours Press Contact: Corey Pearlstein The Bread & Puppet Theater After a four-year residency at Goddard College, the Theater moved to their permanent home on a farm in Glover in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont in 1974. Until 1998, an annual performance known as Our Domestic Resurrection Circus was held at the farm in late August, drawing crowds of up to 40,000. Now the Theater produces a lively ongoing summer season from June through the end of August with the help of an internship company. During the rest of the year, The Bread and Puppet Theater tours its indoor shows and massive outdoor spectacles in the U.S., Europe, and Latin America. Their pageants have a broad theme-oriented appeal to large non-elite audiences. They address social, political, and environmental issues, or simply the common urgencies of our lives. Peter Schumann and The Bread and Puppet Theater have received the Obie Award, the Erasmus Award from Amsterdam, The Vermont Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, and the Puppeteers of America Award. Statement from Peter Schumann about the exhibit. I learned about Rachel Corrie from my daughter who had gone to Palestine to try to stop bulldozers from destroying homes and orchards, but unlike Rachel had returned unharmed. So obviously Rachel Corrie’s tragedy carried very special weight for me, and during the summer and fall of 2004 as part of Bread & Puppet’s First World Insurrection Circus we created four productions dealing with her story: 1) A community workshop at the Bread & Puppet farm which resulted in the play Daughter Courage based on one her last letters to her parents; 2) A street play by the same title which we took to the Street Theater Component of the Universal Forum of Cultures in Barcelona, Spain. 3) A three-part memorial service for Rachel at Theater for the New City in New York City which combined a musical recitation of her letter with the street play and a wordless pageant ruled by a 25-foot paper maché goddess. 4) An exhibit which presents her slowly falling body surrounded by the portraits of 100 U.S. Senators who failed to act both on behalf of her death and her cause.” Rachel Corrie Rachel was a student at Evergreen State College where she worked with the Olympia Movement for Justice and Peace, opposing the Bush administration’s plans for war in Iraq and the Israeli occupation of Palestine. In January 2003 she went to Palestine to work with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a group of international activists who engage in non-violent resistance against the Israeli occupation and attempt to reduce Israeli violence against Palestinian civilians. During the weeks that Rachel was working in Palestine she sent e-mail letters to family and friends. This work is based on a letter Rachel sent to her mother on February 23rd 2003. Rachel was killed by an Israeli bulldozer while defending a Palestinian home from demolition in the Gaza Strip town of Rafah. She carried a bullhorn and wore a fluorescent orange jacket with silver reflective stripes. She had crouched stubbornly in the bulldozer’s path in an effort to save the home of Samir Nasrallah, a Palestinian pharmacist with a wife and three young children, in a buffer area near a security wall being erected by Israel in the Gaza Strip. The Israeli military claimed later that it was only clearing brush and debris to search for buried bombs. An investigation, led by the chief of the general staff of the Israeli Defence Force, found that Israeli forces were not guilty of any misconduct. It concluded that Rachel was not run over the bulldozer and that the soldiers operating the bulldozer which hit Rachel did not have any intention of harming her. The Israeli Advocate General subsequently ruled out charging anyone in Rachel’s death. The Israeli government has sought to obscure the circumstances of Rachel’s death and prevent an independent investigation. It has refused to release its June 2003 military police investigation final report to the United States, only allowing an American embassy official to read and take notes from selected parts. For more information about Rachel’s life and work please visit the Rachel Corrie Memorial Website: www.rachelcorrie.org Rachel’s letter to her mother, February 27 2003 Love you. Really miss you. I have bad nightmares about tanks and bulldozers outside our house and you and me inside. Sometimes the adrenaline acts as an anesthetic for weeks and then in the evening or at night it just hits me again – a little bit of the reality of the situation. I am really scared for the people here. Yesterday, I watched a father lead his two tiny children, holding his hands, out into the sight of tanks and a sniper tower and bulldozers and Jeeps because he thought his house was going to be exploded. Jenny and I stayed in the house with several women and two small babies. It was our mistake in translation that caused him to think it was his house that was being exploded. In fact, the Israeli army was in the process of detonating an explosive in the ground nearby – one that appears to have been planted by Palestinian resistance. This is in the area where Sunday about 150 men were rounded up and contained outside the settlement with gunfire over their heads and around them, while tanks and bulldozers destroyed 25 greenhouses – the livelihoods for 300 people. The explosive was right in front of the greenhouses – right in the point of entry for tanks that might come back again. I was terrified to think that this man felt it was less of a risk to walk out in view of the tanks with his kids than to stay in his house. I was really scared that they were all going to be shot and I tried to stand between them and the tank. This happens every day, but just this father walking out with his two little kids just looking very sad, just happened to get my attention more at this particular moment, probably because I felt it was our translation problems that made him leave. I thought a lot about what you said on the phone about Palestinian violence not helping the situation. Sixty thousand workers from Rafah worked in Israel two years ago. Now only 600 can go to Israel for jobs. Of these 600, many have moved, because the three checkpoints between here and Ashkelon (the closest city in Israel) make what used to be a 40-minute drive, now a 12-hour or impassible journey. In addition, what Rafah identified in 1999 as sources of economic growth are all completely destroyed – the Gaza international airport (runways demolished, totally closed); the border for trade with Egypt (now with a giant Israeli sniper tower in the middle of the crossing); access to the ocean (completely cut off in the last two years by a checkpoint and the Gush Katif settlement). The count of homes destroyed in Rafah since the beginning of this intifada is up around 600, by and large people with no connection to the resistance but who happen to live along the border. I think it is maybe official now that Rafah is the poorest place in the world. There used to be a middle class here – recently. We also get reports that in the past, Gazan flower shipments to Europe were delayed for two weeks at the Erez crossing for security inspections. You can imagine the value of two-week-old cut flowers in the European market, so that market dried up. And then the bulldozers come and take out people’s vegetable farms and gardens. What is left for people? Tell me if you can think of anything. I can’t. If any of us had our lives and welfare completely strangled, lived with children in a shrinking place where we knew, because of previous experience, that soldiers and tanks and bulldozers could come for us at any moment and destroy all the greenhouses that we had been cultivating for however long, and did this while some of us were beaten and held captive with 149 other people for several hours – do you think we might try to use somewhat violent means to protect whatever fragments remained? I think about this especially when I see orchards and greenhouses and fruit trees destroyed – just years of care and cultivation. I think about you and how long it takes to make things grow and what a labour of love it is. I really think, in a similar situation, most people would defend themselves as best they could. I think Uncle Craig would. I think probably Grandma would. I think I would. You asked me about non-violent resistance. When that explosive detonated yesterday it broke all the windows in the family’s house. I was in the process of being served tea and playing with the two small babies. I’m having a hard time right now. Just feel sick to my stomach a lot from being doted on all the time, very sweetly, by people who are facing doom. I know that from the United States, it all sounds like hyperbole. Honestly, a lot of the time the sheer kindness of the people here, coupled with the overwhelming evidence of the willful destruction of their lives, makes it seem unreal to me. I really can’t believe that something like this can happen in the world without a bigger outcry about it. It really hurts me, again, like it has hurt me in the past, to witness how awful we can allow the world to be. I felt after talking to you that maybe you didn’t completely believe me. I think it’s actually good if you don’t, because I do believe pretty much above all else in the importance of independent critical thinking. And I also realize that with you I’m much less careful than usual about trying to source every assertion that I make. A lot of the reason for that is I know that you actually do go and do your own research. But it makes me worry about the job I’m doing. All of the situation that I tried to enumerate above – and a lot of other things – constitutes a somewhat gradual – often hidden, but nevertheless massive – removal and destruction of the ability of a particular group of people to survive. This is what I am seeing here. The assassinations, rocket attacks and shooting of children are atrocities – but in focusing on them I’m terrified of missing their context. The vast majority of people here – even if they had the economic means to escape, even if they actually wanted to give up resisting on their land and just leave (which appears to be maybe the less nefarious of Sharon’s possible goals), can’t leave. Because they can’t even get into Israel to apply for visas, and because their destination countries won’t let them in (both our country and Arab countries). So I think when all means of survival is cut off in a pen (Gaza) which people can’t get out of, I think that qualifies as genocide. Even if they could get out, I think it would still qualify as genocide. Maybe you could look up the definition of genocide according to international law. I don’t remember it right now. I’m going to get better at illustrating this, hopefully. I don’t like to use those charged words. I think you know this about me. I really value words. I really try to illustrate and let people draw their own conclusions. Anyway, I’m rambling. Just want to write to my Mom and tell her that I’m witnessing this chronic, insidious genocide and I’m really scared, and questioning my fundamental belief in the goodness of human nature. This has to stop. I think it is a good idea for us all to drop everything and devote our lives to making this stop. I don’t think it’s an extremist thing to do anymore. I still really want to dance around to Pat Benatar and have boyfriends and make comics for my coworkers. But I also want this to stop. Disbelief and horror is what I feel. Disappointment. I am disappointed thatthis is the base reality of our world and that we, in fact, participate in it. This is not at all what I asked for when I came into this world. This is not at all what the people here asked for when they came into this world. This is not the world you and Dad wanted me to come into when you decided to have me. This is not what I meant when I looked at Capital Lake and said: “This is the wide world and I’m coming to it.” I did not mean that I was coming into a world where I could live a comfortable life and possibly, with no effort at all, exist in complete unawareness of my participation in genocide. More big explosions somewhere in the distance outside. When I come back from Palestine, I probably will have nightmares and constantly feel guilty for not being here, but I can channel that into more work. Coming here is one of the better things I’ve ever done. So when I sound crazy, or if the Israeli military should break with their racist tendency not to injure white people, please pin the reason squarely on the fact that I am in the midst of a genocide which I am also indirectly supporting, and for which my government is largely responsible. I love you and Dad. Sorry for the diatribe. OK, some… men next to me just gave me some peas, so I need to eat and thank them. Rachel |
|
|
|
|