Sharing a breath

Over the summer, I was invited by a dear friend and collaborator to create a piece of theatre for a festival her theatre company, Rivendell Theatre, is facilitating called The Breath Project, a nationwide initiative to contribute to the undoing of white supremacist structures that exist within our world and therefore, our industry. It's a call for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color to ruminate on how we can make our dearly beloved and oft succubine craft one that, at the very least, can truthfully respond to the Actual World it finds itself in an artful, respectful way. Each piece can only be 8 minutes and 46 seconds long, the amount of time former police officer and convicted murderer Derek Chauvin kneeled on the neck of George Floyd, resulting in his inhumane and utterly senseless death. The pieces would be shared with their communities to foster education and advocacy, and act “as a living time capsule of this moment in history.” I wanted to be mindful of the space I was taking up as a non-Black person in a festival dedicated to the death of an innocent Black man at the hands of police and the political and social movement it spurred. I stand in fierce solidarity with the Black liberation movement, and I began thinking of the ways that manifests in my political and artistic work. My short film, or Something Better is an exploration of attempting to commit one’s life to the practice and ideology of abolition, particularly through a Palestinian American lens. Recently, 6 Palestinian political prisoners escaped from an Israeli maximum security prison by tunneling underground using spoons. Hearing and following this news and being lucky enough to be a part of an organization full of brilliant political minds who help explain, process, and oftentimes translate exactly what’s happening on the ground was completely electrifying. After the events that occurred in Sheikh Jarrah this summer, which forced us to watch Palestinians be bombed and brutalized by Israeli soldiers day after day for weeks as they were forcibly removed from their homes, we needed to feel like forward motion was possible. I needed to. Simply put: I needed to know that my people’s deaths weren’t in vain and that the almost imperceptible shift in the cultural attitudes toward Palestine meant something. My film is a response to that moment. It’s how I feel living in the diaspora every so often, preparing picnics for martyrs that never come. I want to share it with you because I love you and also because I am doing a better job at settling into and honestly processing each facet of abolition, particularly the ones that rip our beating hearts out. It is my accountability statement, that no matter how hopeless I get or how fruitless things feel, my north star will always be a better and different world. 

You can access or Something Better here. I really hope you enjoy it.