ABOUT

are you safe [or ‘the occupation of love’] unfolds across a desert, an interrogation room, and a beauty parlor. A girl loves a boy who is full of holes; a man reckons with his own thirst for violence; a chorus sings of the wars we love to hate and hate to love. The play straddles the space between those who live in war and those who only visit it, and the corrosive intimacy of crossing borders into each other. A chorus moves through the space, asking are you safe?—never mind who is gone, never mind what has been destroyed. A nuanced examination of survival, moral responsibility, guilt, and love.

bio

Shebana Coelho is a writer, performance artist, and facilitator of Faraway is Close creativity workshops that invoke nature. Originally from India, often in New Mexico. Mad for wild open spaces and story-poems under the skin.

Her plays, The Good Manners of Colonized Subjects, Once I Was a Stone, When the Stars Trembled in Rio Puerco, and Undo—have been staged at New York’s Pan Asian Repertory Theatre and The Player’s Club, Santa Fe’s Teatro Paraguas, and the University of Cadíz, among others. Performance training includes flamenco, bharatanatyam (dance), and Navarasa Sadhana intensive with G. Venu at Natanakairali Arts Center.

Since 2012, she has presented plays and workshops in New Mexico, the A:shiwi (Zuni) community, Palestine, Mongolia, American Samoa, Ireland, and Spain. Her work has been supported by a New York Foundation for the Arts Fiction Fellowship, a Fulbright grant to Mongolia, a Creative Europe grant, and a CEC ArtsLink award to collaborate with ASHTAR Theatre, Ramallah on the project, Land Out Loud – excerpts appeared in Sukoon magazine, and the 2015 NoPassport Theatre Conference. She has covered ASHTAR Theatre’s Youth Festival for HowlRound and The Gaza Monologues for Al Jazeera America. Find her and a new blog about ancestral nature at shebanacoelho.com

ASHTAR is a dynamic local Palestinian theatre with a truly progressive global perspective. Based in Ramallah, ASHTAR Theatre is a non-profit organization that was established in 1991 in Jerusalem as the first theatre training organization for youth in Palestine, by two Palestinian prominent actors: Edward Muallem and Iman Aoun, who worked in theatre since 1977. With artistic director Emile Saba, ASHTAR offers programs for theatre professionals and students from around the world to engage in intensive training and cultural exchange, while learning about Palestine at the same time. One of ASHTAR’s pioneering specialties is a highly successful genre known as Forum Theatre, which promotes more active social and political dialogue by transforming a commonly passive audience into involved participants. Through the use of the integrated methods of Forum Theatre, ASHTAR stands as an agent of change in Palestine. https://www.ashtar-theatre.org/