A Collective Place

Multidisciplinary theatermaker Rawya El Chab has become a fixture in the downtown theater scene since arriving in New York seven years ago. El Chab, who previously had a prolific stage and screen career in Beirut, has worked with Target Margin, La MaMa, Exponential Festival, Rattlestick Theater, and The Brick Theater, where she is currently performing Crossing the Water. Featuring live storytelling, shadow play, projections, and puppetry, the solo piece, directed by Jesse Freedman, is part two in a trilogy about the decline of the Lebanese left in the late 20th-century. (Its predecessor, Lula 19/85 & the Pearl of the Bekaa premiered in winter 2024.) I spoke to El Chab about Crossing the Water, which is set at the time of the Israeli invasion of Beirut three years prior, ahead of opening night for the three-week run. This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

I’d love to start by asking you to just briefly share a bit about both your artistic practice and this piece, Crossing the Water.

I was trained in what people here call a liberal arts school, so we studied a lot of different schools and methods and techniques. As I was still in school, I started working with Roger Assaf in Lebanon on the hakawati, which is a storytelling genre specific to Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, Jordan. [They] tell stories [and] they come back to the same place to continue the story, like chapbooks or series. I worked with several artists in Lebanon who do the hakawati style. This being said, I am a clown at heart. I love clowning. I find it to be important. I find it to be a very efficient way to say something, especially when you’re talking about painful and difficult issues. 

When it comes to my process – it’s very weird – but every time I have a few weeks where I’m not sure what I’m doing, I try to write poetry. I do have a story in my head that’s being built, but it’s through the poetry that I pinpoint the images that are moving me and that I believe will move others. And I do like to collaborate, so I do involve and implicate my collaborators from the beginning. My collaborator, Jesse Freedman [was] with me on this project when it was still poetry. Slowly, I come out of the poetry to tell a story – and this comes from a need that is urgent, that is fixed in a situation where I feel that my stories need to be told because no one else will tell them. And when I tell them, I realize that they’re not very special, which is even better. They are stories that a lot of people have been through. I have a good friend, Reuven, who came to me and said, you know what? I know a story about my aunt who had to have her birthday under the table because Stalin had died. My story is [also] about [a] birthday that had to happen in a very sneaky way because larger events were happening around us.

Your work experiments with media in really exciting ways, and, in this piece, you’re also using puppetry and shadow play. What draws you to these techniques in general and how do you feel they complement this particular story you’re telling?

My work is a lot about memory. Things that I remember, but also things that have been told to me repeatedly that I’m not even sure are in my memory – they might have been told to me so many times that I feel them in my body. I like this use of media and projection onstage because it helps me represent this idea of memory, but also it helps me distantiate a little bit between the story and myself. Or it sometimes helps me establish a context that is historical – use the archive, use certain images that were marked in my memory. When I started with the poetry, a question that was emerging was: where is the land of the dead? When you immigrate, it feels like you’re crossing a water and you’re going to another world, another land. Sometimes it feels like you become like a dead person to the people you just left and and they become like dead people to you. So is the land of the dead in the past or is the past still alive? Is the place where we are the land of the dead or is that other story back in the land of the dead? I wanted to keep this question alive while telling the story.

I try to tell the stories that I heard from my neighbors, from my family, from the people around me. These stories [that] never make it to history books [or] the news in a worthy way. People’s stories make it to the news when [they] become a catastrophe or a tragedy. But these stories contain a lot of humanity and beauty and intimacy. I wanted to tell that story with its complexity and to use very two-dimensional puppets – cardboard puppets – to think about these political figures who get a lot of time on the news and get to be studied and depicted in many ways just to be able to go back to what they were saying. Was what they were saying complex or was it more straightforward? It helps me, simplifying these characters into these two-dimensional creatures, to get to the core – this one is asking for money, this one is just saying no, this one is just accusing.

I love that! It also seems like, in many of your works, including this one, mythology is a strong influence. I’m curious to know more about this.

Growing up, I had trouble in school. Sitting and focusing used to be torture for me. But studying mythology, the moment we start[ed] studying history – suddenly I would feel [like] – oh, I can stay seated. I can focus on a story and listening to it. I find that mythology carries a lot of depth and insight into, of course, our psychology, our tendencies as humans (I didn’t discover this – Freud did it for me). You hear that very simple story and you realize it is telling you about something very human and very universal. Usually I find that mythology, wherever it comes from, is very unifying, even if the Norse mythology is gonna find that the world started with fire and ice and the Egyptians thought that it was water and there was a hill. There was always chaos at first and then there was order. This is a process that we go through every day, every moment – everything starts with chaos and then you find some order in it.

Could you situate Crossing the Water within the larger context of this trilogy you’re developing? It’s the second installment, right?

Yes. This is definitely from the hakawati. The hakawati would go to a coffee shop, tell part of the story, stop on a cliffhanger, and come back the next day or the next week. I thought about these stories that have been told to me, that I lived, [and] I realized that they deserve to be told in more than one show. At first, I thought that they would be two plays, but then I realized that it is a trilogy: each story should be given its own time and its own opportunity to be listened to. 

It started with a story about this cousin of mine who was martyred in the Bekaa. I remember talking to a friend about something related to the story and he was like, what happened to the left? After this phase when these young people started doing these military operations, why was the left vilified so much? It triggered something in my memory and I did remember – this is when I started feeling that my family, which belonged to this leftist world, became disenchanted. They were excited and pushing for it before – a whole family joins and everybody’s pushing in all means necessary. Somebody might wash clothes for young activists, make sure they’re well-fed and feeling good in their clothes and in their body; somebody’s going to go protest and organize and get signatures; somebody’s going to be on the front[lines]. I am grateful for the left – I grew up having family and friends around the world because of the left. I have cousins in Europe and Africa and here because of the left – because there are people who were willing to overcome race, ethnicity, whatever people think differentiates them from each other to be like, oh – we are all workers and we all believe in a unified world. 

I wanted to understand what happened to this. Why did we suddenly let go of all these beautiful ideas and decide that we lost, so we have to let capitalism go rogue and become completely unchecked? Every story would get me deeper into another one. I understood after a while that it has to come in three stories – what was the left doing in Lebanon, how did it rise, and how did it fall – to understand how people got disenchanted and maybe provide insights into ways to bring back these beautiful ideas.

That’s incredible. I also am curious what you think – maybe in general, maybe in the context of your own work – about so-called political theater. Do you even believe in this categorization? Do you have material goals for your work as an artist, or are you more interested in just stimulating thought? 

I’m looking for the story that I want to tell and also that will get me closer to the people that I’m meeting. This is a story that I might not have told in Lebanon in this way. This is a story that I made here in New York for my new family, for my new neighbors, for my new friends, for these people that I’ve been living with in the past seven years who don’t know about this history. So I am introducing these people to this history a little bit, but I try not to put a lot of pressure and expectations on myself. Of course, there is something happening – my family is being displaced from the south of Lebanon – there is something happening on the ground that’s urging me to tell people a story and remind them that there is complexity, there is life. There is a lot more than what you’re seeing on your social media while you’re scrolling. But I try not to ask people anything but to listen. Also, like I said, to remind people that these stories are not unique: my friend Harold, whose father is from Chile, came to me and was like, oh, my father would tell me often about these checkpoints in Chile and how they used to maneuver around them. These stories are universal. By telling them, I’m also reminding people of our collective humanity. I want people to listen and remember that we have more in common than the things that differentiate us. 

You mentioned this a little bit, but could you share more about the relationship between your individual experience, the more familial or communal elements, and your use of archives within the piece? I know you said they often really bled together, but – especially because you were so young when this show takes place – I’m interested in how you consciously sought to fuse these sources.

I am interested in everything as archive. I start with memory and oral storytelling. I’m trying to find that difference between archive that is transmitted orally and material archive that is recorded and presented to us in a sort of final outcome. I am interested in the freedom and the liberation [of] oral story in the face of this rigid form that is the archive, a newspaper, a picture, a recorded interview. I like to blend them together to give a taste of that difference, to remind people of that pleasure of archiving with our bodies, with our words – remembering together and allowing for that memory to transform. 

Further down the line, I just discovered this young artist who uses vegetables and plants as archives and this is absolutely fascinating for me. I’ve spent most of my life in cities. I love cities – but I also was blessed to have access to my village. My grandmother knew every herb and every plant. Every spring, I would go with her and we would come back with bags and bags and bags of herbs and plants that we would eat for weeks and weeks. For me, there is a story to be told there about me, about the people that come from my region, about this relationship, that knowledge. So I would like to think more about this archive that is mutating – that transforms, changes, allows for progress. And to try to see the difference between these rigid archives that are final and the ones that allow for more interpretation or fluidity. 

That is amazing! I’m so looking forward to the show. Is there anything else that you want readers to know about the work or future projects you want to tease?

I really hope that people will come see the show [and] will tell me about their stories too after the show – because I am interested in solidarity, in universality, in bringing people together. That matters to me above everything. And I am excited to continue working. The next show is going to go back in time. The first one was about 1985, which was the start of the Lebanese National Resistance Front – also the decline of the left itself. [Crossing the Water] went to 1982 with the retreat of the PLO. And I’m going to go back even further in time to 1976, which is the entrance of the PLO in Lebanon. I’m going to explore how the left started in Lebanon and how all these ideas made it further than the city and to villages – how people joined and thought about the world as one, as a collective place.