The TC: Conversations about occupation and self-determination, specifically in Palestine, have really come to the forefront in the past few years. Rimah, have you noticed a shift in how people engage with these topics since starting this development process?  

Rimah Jabr: Yes, the changes are noticed, especially on social media, more and more people are curious about educating themselves about the Palestinian cause, and art can be one of many ways where people can get a sense of what it’s like to be dealing with an occupation and its circumstances such as closures, vulnerability, uncertainty, accessing space, and being controlled, and gazed at. Palestinians since 1948 have witnessed territorial destruction that shifted the urban landscape, created visual occupation, and a space of oppression under the pretence of surveillance and control. The influence of confinement on Palestinian creativity is unignorable. 

I realized that time had a crucial influence on my spatial experience back in Palestine, especially concerning the suspension associated with curfews, which generated a feeling of being confined. It affected my sense of continuity; therefore, unintentionally, I created all my plays since I started making theatre in obscure places where the characters are trapped in a situation. Despite the influence of my experience on the way I work, the story of Broken Shapes is in an unidentified place, and it could be happening anywhere. We wanted to approach the story from a global perspective focusing on the human experience, whoever they are and wherever they are. A show like Broken Shapes can give the audience a sense of those experiences. People can interpret these senses based on what they know about the Palestinian cause or other conflicts, such as the war in Ukraine and the American invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. 

The TC: Grief is such a universal experience, even though everyone processes it differently; how have both of your approaches to working through grief shown up in this work? 

RJ: Grief can be over people or things; in the show, it is clear that it is about a daughter grieving the time she didn’t spend with her father, but the daughter processes grief through confusion, questions, and dark humour. I often write absurd text, and this is my way as a person dealing with losses, with the idea in my head “at least let’s laugh”. When I wrote the first draft, it was structured based on the five stages of grief, but the more we worked on it, the more this line between stages of grief blurred. 

DA: I thought about grief for a long period of my life while being aware of the dangers of aestheticizing it of course. What I wanted to deal with in this work was more the contemplative qualities of grief, because it has this fusion or a sort of immersion between “the self” and the object of grief, I think this contemplative aspect can be very healing.  

The TC: Broken Shapes was supposed to open two years ago and was postponed because of COVID-19 restrictions. How does it feel to finally bring this performance to audiences?