The Teatro del Barrio de Madrid (calle Zurita, 20) opens on Wednesday 19 November at 7.30 pm its new production: Preso en la esperanza / Trapped in hope / مسجون في الامل, with the Palestinian activist and actor Nabil AlRaee. Show in English and Arabic with surtitles in Spanish. Tickets can be purchased at this link.
This cultural cooperative, the Teatro del Barrio, located in the multiethnic and rebel neighborhood of Lavapiés, puts on this political and emergency show in co-production with the Madrid company unavezenlavida and Freedom Theatre, a Palestinian theater that challenges violence from art, as an act of rebellion.
Nabil AlRaee has traveled here from the West Bank to summon us to the theater. He will guide us through his biography in a journey traversed by historical milestones of the Palestinian resistance against colonial occupation. An occupation perpetrated first by the Zionist movement and later by Israel, backed by Britain and the United States, with the acquiescence of Europe. Trapped in hope is a reflection on the hegemonic narratives of oppression: how they are built, what they are made of and what allows them to be perpetuated. It is also a song of encounter as a method of resistance, liberation and cultural construction in times of genocide, colonial violence and occupation.
The Palestinian actor, director and activist Nabil AlRaee, who was for 13 years artistic director of the Freedom Theatre, plays this play, written with the Spanish playwrights Juan Ayala and Miguel Oyarzun, who also direct the proposal. Trapped in hope denounces colonial narratives and gives voice to stories of Palestinian resistance against the Israeli military occupation.
Nabil AlRaee will come specially for this occasion from the refugee camp Al-Arrub, where he lives, in that West Bank bombed and scouted by Israeli spy drones provided by Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites. He will tell what he has seen, lived through and heard from his elders in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. All, after months of writing and rehearsing between Madrid, the Castle of Magalia de Avila where INAEM organizes a program of artistic residencies, Oporto and Al-Arrub, in the West Bank. Trials pervaded by the vibration of the genocide being perpetrated by Israel, sponsored by the Western powers and with the complicity of economic corporations from all over the world, including the Arab world.