Taher Najib / Ofira Henig / Khalifa Natour

IN SPITTING DISTANCE

[ Print ] TrailerPhotoGallery

Jump this block

23,24,25 NOV 8.30 pm

PALLADIUM

National Premiere
If the normality of life is war, what remains of normal life?
In spitting distance is a penetrative gaze, laced with black humour, on existence in the Israelo-Palestinian context through the virtuoso solo stage performance of the actor Khalifa Natour based on a writing by Taher Najib, who are both Palestinians, directed by the Israeli Ofira Henig. On stage: a Palestinian, Israeli-passport holding actor, on his way to Tel Aviv from Paris for work on September 11, 2002, has to go through frontier police checks in a crescendo of grotesque situations that seem to be the surreal development of the classic Russian tales on bureaucracy.
International airports and intercontinental flights are the metaphorical places of a precarious life, of the lack of identity, of existential doubts, while Najib’s texts looks at the role of the theatre with disenchantment, seesawing between evasion and social commitment. Far from being an experiment on art as a peaceful cohabitation or from being a provocative ostentation of anger, the show is rather an exemplary testimony of civic theatre, where humour, participation and detachment mix with bitterness and irony are played out through rigorous acting and gestures against a backdrop of essential lighting. In spitting distance won first prize at the festival TheaterNetto. It has also been successively staged in Paris by Peter Brook’s Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord. While the gesture – this time angry and repeated – of the Palestinian youths as they spit on the floor all day long seems to signal just how close war, as a normal fact of life, is to us. In spitting distance.

Taher Najib was born in Um El-Fahm and worked as an actor in Ramallah. After the second Intifada broke out, he fled to Paris, and was later recalled by director Ofira Henig for a theatre project that put together Israeli and Palestinian actors.
Ofira Henig is one of the most important Israeli directors. She has been artistic director of the Israel Festival Jerusalem from 2002 to 2004. In the last two years she directed the Lab, a space for theatre experimentation in Jerusalem.
Khalifa Natour is an acclaimed actor in the international theatre scene and performs in the Palestinian National Theatre of East Jerusalem, the only Palestinian repertory company.

*The lowest price refers to tickets purchased with Formula9 subscription