Basel Zaraa: Dear Laila (Relaxed Slots) – Sophiensæle | Independent Theater in Berlin
Basel Zaraa:
Dear Laila (Relaxed Slots)
Dear Laila (Relaxed Slots)
Optionally English, German or Arabic
25€/20€/15€/10€
Berlin premiere
For the performance Dear Laila by Basel Zaraa, one Relaxed Slot is offered per performance day. Dear Laila is an intimate and interactive installation that can be experienced by one audience member per slot. The Relaxed Slot provides more time and allows the space to be adapted to Access Needs.
Registration via barrierefreiheit@sophiensaele.com or by telephone from Monday to Friday between 10:00 and 18:00 on 030 278 900 35
„Dear Laila, you are five now and have started to ask me where I grew up, and why we can’t go there. This is me trying to give you an answer.“
The seeds of Dear Laila were planted when Basel Zaraa’s five-year-old daughter began to ask him about his home growing up. Unable to take her there, he decided he would try to bring the place to her, by creating a model of his childhood home in Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus. Dear Laila, which has been touring the world since 2022 and won the ZKB audience Award in 2023, shares the Palestinian experience of displacement and resistance through the story of one family, exploring how war and exile are experienced through the everyday, the domestic, and the public space.
An intimate, interactive installation experienced by one audience member at a time, Dear Laila uses the retelling of memories, tactile details and objects to bring this now destroyed place to life.
By: Basel Zaraa
Translator, script editor: Emily Churchill Zaraa
Sound engineer: Pete Churchill
Production assistant: Ward Zaraa
Basel Zaraa is a UK-based Palestinian artist whose work uses the senses to bring audiences closer to experiences of exile and war, and who creates art in order to face, express and understand the trauma that his community lives with. His current project, Dear Laila, received the ZKB Audience Award 2023. His previous work includes As Far As My Fingertips Take Me, a collaboration with Tania El Khoury, which was awarded Outstanding Production at the Bessie Awards in 2019. His work has been shown at over 50 venues and festivals across five continents.