Salvation Boards

Between Furn al-Chebbak and Monot, I managed to see two theatrical performances in the space of a single week.

I will not analyze here, nor discuss what I watched. I am not a critic, and what I lived through during those performances is far too personal.

But something awoke inside me.

A fierce desire to speak, not to judge, but to bear witness.

Theater.

Light.

The direct encounter with the other.

The other who reveals himself before me in his body and his voice, in his sweat and his living breath.

And I, I go alone,

as if between me and the theater there is a romantic appointment.

I ready myself for that encounter,

I choose my clothes with care,

I walk toward it with a lightness that resembles longing,

and I sit in the darkness and wait.

I the actress, the spectator,

I was them between the summer of 2024 and the winter of 2025,

when the city trembled, I ran toward the theater, not away from it.

During that period, theater became a personal act of resistance,

a way of saying that my life had not ended yet, and that fear would not declare its victory over my passion.

That day, we were not even certain whether the opening would happen at all.

The performance had been postponed to the rhythm of shells that kept falling,

and each day carried within it the possibility of another delay, a cancellation, or something worse.

And still, I longed for that day.

I longed for people to come and sit where dust lay on the black leather seats,

for the theater to fill with the breath of bodies rather than silence,

for applause to return louder than whatever was happening outside.

But I also would not have grieved had that day never come.

I told my partner, more than once:

“I’d sooner die in rehearsal than die watching the news on the sofa.”

And he would always answer, with an unwavering calm:

“Yes, go ; that is your place.”

Yes, it was “my place.”

I preferred to live and to die there,

in the warmth of a projector eaten by rust,

beneath the ceiling of an old cinema in Bourj Hammoud,

rather than let them steal my life while I was still breathing.

That stage was my salvation. Had it not existed, neither would I.

When some grew afraid, and others grew exhausted and found their salvation in other countries,

I found mine there,

among the damp wings and the smell of dust, and a curtain hanging that neither closes nor opens, and beneath a chandelier whose light illuminates the universe.

There was my breathing space,

there we would postpone the collapse… our collapse.

We would write texts while the city was being erased,

and rearrange scenes while everything outside was falling apart.

We would stop at every sudden sound,

listen for a few seconds,

then return to rehearsal as if repairing the world sentence by sentence.

What I gave in that performance had waited twenty years,

twenty years of accumulated memory,

of words I had hidden inside my texts,

of faces that had passed through me and never left,

and of a fear I did not know where to place except on that stage, with all the courage I had.

Between truth and performance was my game,

to speak without quite confessing,

to hide behind the character while stripping myself completely bare.

I would steal words from my own life,

from my disappointments a body language,

from my solitude a tone of voice.

And the closer the scene came to me,

the more the audience applauded,

and that applause was… my pulse.

Theater was not a luxury.

It was neither a hobby nor a space for escape or psychotherapy,

but a declaration of existence.

A declaration that our bodies had not yet been turned into numbers,

and that our voices… still reached.

And today,

when I sit alone in the darkness

and watch an actor come into himself under the light,

I feel that someone is surviving again.

And I feel that I am meeting myself too,

that woman who once ran toward an old theater

to survive the world upon a stage.