Dear Colleagues,
Our colleagues in Palestine need our voice.
We believe that we can no longer remain silent while Palestinian voices in Gaza and now the West Bank are systematically killed or silenced and Palestinian culture and heritage are destroyed. We ask for your cooperation.
Can you share this message with your audience before your performances?
How you do that is up to you. The best option is if you want to read it before the start of the performance, from the stage or in the hall, but you can also print it and hang it in the hall or hand it out to the audience.
Of course, you are free to change anything in the text, as long as the message remains clear: we stand in solidarity with our colleagues in Palestine.
Please let us know if you are participating in this theater-wide campaign.
Thank you from Al Harah Theatre, Ashtar Theatre, Theater Day Productions, Freedom Theater, and the rest of the Palestinian Performing Arts Platform.
Liesbeth Coltof, Carly Everaert, Marijn Lems, Laura van Dolron, Nan van Houte and other members of TheatervoorGaza
P.S. It would be nice if you shared a recording of the reading on social media and the Instagram account theatervoorgaza.
Statement to be read at performances:
Dear audience,
We would like to take a moment to share with you a message about a precious theatre under attack.
On the morning of Wednesday 13th of December - along with about a hundred other residents of Jenin - the leaders of FreedomTheatre were arrested and imprisoned and Palestine's most famous theater was vandalized. Jenin is located on the West Bank, near Ramallah. Numerous actors have already lost their lives in Gaza, as have 89 journalists and 35 other artists. 9 publishing houses and 21 cultural centers, museums and libraries, 20 historic buildings, centuries-old churches, and mosques were bombed into rubble. An entire culture is being wiped out.
We have a voice, we have a stage, and we will not be arrested if we use our voice... theater has a rich tradition of speaking out against injustice and inhumanity. We are not doing justice to that if we remain silent tonight about Gaza, about Jenin, about Palestine, and if we do not use this theater lamp and this stage to give words to our anger, our dismay at the humanitarian disaster that is unfolding before our eyes. Only then can we play for you today… So we speak out so that you will do so. Do what you can, where you can, don't let powerlessness become indifference.
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