The triumphant declaration that serves as the title of this article is uttered halfway through Arna's Children (2004), a documentary about the children's activities and theatre group founded in 1989 by Israeli activist Arna Mer Khamis in the Jenin Refugee Camp of the occupied West Bank.Footnote ² Written and directed by Juliano Mer Khamis and Danniel Danniel, the documentary combines footage ranging from the early 1990s to the early 2000s, presenting Mer Khamis's work with the camp's children, their relationship with theatrical activity and brief glimpses into their adult lives, the greater part of which meet devastating, early ends both prior to and during the camp's destruction by the Israel Defense Forces.

The imagining of a ‘Palestinian Romeo’ happens during an encounter between the young Palestinian actors and an Israeli television crew documenting Mer Khamis's work, an encounter itself documented by the Arna team. As Juliano Mer Khamis (the leader of the theatrical activities and Arna's son) accompanies the television crew through Jenin, the young thespians gather around and peer excitedly into the camera. The interview proceeds awkwardly, as the many translating voices struggle to balance the mix of Arabic and Hebrew. The English-language subtitles relate that Ashraf, one of the young people being interviewed, turns in confusion to Juliano to say, ‘Just explain what the TV guy wants’.Footnote ³ A few moments later, an invisible voice from behind the camera suggests to Juliano, ‘Tell him [Ashraf] to say he wants to be Romeo’. The leader responds,

Shortly after the end of this exchange, the viewer is confronted with an image of Ashraf's dead body, wrapped in a shroud and inscribed with the words ‘The Martyr Ashraf Abu Al Hayja’. The voice-over narrative informs the viewer that the Palestinian Romeo was killed six years later during the Second Intifada. Images follow of the elderly Arna in her own shroud, lost to a long-term battle with cancer, followed by references to the deaths of many of the child actors. The documentary proceeds as though in a graveyard, with few voices left to narrate the theatrical activities which serve as the film's foundation and provide its life force.

In this article, I explore the manner in which Arna's Children portrays the capacities of theatrical practice and its role in the depiction of life and death in Jenin. The awkward exchange between Ashraf and the television crew is exemplary of how the political and ethical efficacy of ‘theatre’ is imagined to function. Upon a preliminary reading, the scene builds on the familiar suggestion that participation in theatrical activity should resonate as a particularly pure, human form of expression, one whose emergence ought to elicit celebration, and whose passing is, in turn, mourned. I label such a suggestion ‘familiar’ because it mirrors a broader tendency in both certain cultural humanitarianisms and some theatre and performance scholarship to ‘emphasize the transformational potential of the performing arts’.Footnote ⁴ In Ashraf's case, this ‘transformational potential’ is intertwined with an equally familiar desire to identify the young Palestinian body as claiming a privileged moment of European ‘high art’: the abandon and passion of the Shakespearean hero whose antics have spurred centuries of theatrical reproduction and become a barometer of actorly talent and knowledge. Presenting Ashraf as ‘Romeo’ translates what might otherwise have been a more complicated set of desires and roles. It offers the interview's eventual audience a youthful hero who lives, loves and self-immolates from within a tradition which, in turn, relentlessly resurrects him. When Ashraf is asked to declare a desire to ‘want to be the Palestinian Romeo’, therefore, he seemingly evinces both knowledge of and an emotional connection to this theatrical tradition, while serving as fleshly evidence of its imagined universality: a Palestinian Romeo.

A secondary reading, however, ruptures the seamlessness of this narrative of theatrical practice. Indeed, a more complicated set of emotional, ethical and aesthetic commitments is revealed by the documentary's inclusion of Ashraf's prompter. This voice, while disembodied, signals the presence of a not-too-subtle souffleur and thus the orchestrated origin of the self-identification between Ashraf and Romeo. To ‘want to be the Palestinian Romeo’ may function as an innate desire to be included in the cycle of immolation and resurrection characterizing a recognizable, Western European theatrical repertoire. Yet it is unmistakably presented as a desire that originates from outside the young, non-Western subject, a subject who, as we will soon see, has an already available set of referents regarding life, love and martyrdom. Wanting to be the Palestinian Romeo is ultimately portrayed as a theatrical longing generated for an audience, however warmly it may eventually be embraced by the actor declaring it. In other words, the inclusion of Romeo's souffleur is not a mere moment of excess that overflows its filmic container. It embodies instead an ambivalence that threatens to overwhelm an analytic container that would contrast the celebration of theatre's benefits with a critique of its less-than-perfect humanitarianism.

My discussion of the role of ‘theatre’ in Arna's Children will struggle to foreground the ambivalence surrounding Ashraf's metamorphosis into Romeo, and suggest that it functions as a synecdoche for how the documentary highlights both the potential of theatrical practice as an aid strategy, and the hazards of romanticizing its unforetold consequences. The decision to juxtapose the Palestinian Romeo's lively outburst with immediate reference to its extinguishment further emphasizes the documentary's need to proceed warily in establishing a relationship between theatrical activity and an ideal of human emancipation. Put more simply, theatrical and creative expressions emerge as moments of release in the face of destruction. This affirmation, however, is joined by a critique of the self-evident moral good that can be attributed to theatrical activism, whether or not it is capable of release. Theatrical practice and expression, in other words, are depicted as at once emptied of prior referents and replete with expectation and meaning.

This dual-edged depiction resonates with what Laura Edmondson has called ‘the extraordinary complexity of theatre and performance’.Footnote ⁵ Indeed, Edmondson voices a concern central to scholarship on activist and community-based theatre, particularly in at-risk zones: how do we temper a desire to identify release and resistance in practices that may have a slightly more complicated relation to power and pain? Perhaps a closer look at the framing of theatrical practice in Arna's Children can provide insight into the vexed relationship between aesthetic practices and transformative/rehabilitative ideals. Of course, having aligned my objects thus, I risk reducing the filmic form to an analytic frame that carries the otherwise principal target of my study: theatrical practice. As the title suggests, my primary concern is with how a group of artists negotiate, critique and live a ‘romance’ with theatrical practice. But the medium through which I trace this negotiation is filmic, drawing on forms of expression, such as editing, that are specific to filmmaking. The raw material of my analysis then could more precisely be labelled the narrative that results when one medium is made to remember another, when the making of theatre is narrated through the documentary form.Footnote ⁶ I will return to this dynamic throughout the article.

Presenting Arna's Children

Arna's Children opens with shots of Arna Mer Khamis, rallying a group of protesters who have joined her demonstration for the refugee camp in Jenin.Footnote ⁷ Dwarfed by a kafiya that covers her bald head, Arna approaches a line of cars, prodding the drivers to honk their horns. Her life, we soon find out, has spanned the lifetime of the state of Israel. Eighteen years old at the state's founding, Arna joined the Palmach, fighting for the creation of Israel, later marrying Juliano's father, a Palestinian born in Nazareth and a member of the Communist Party. Her work in Jenin began in 1989, when she established ‘an alternative education system for Palestinian children whose lives had been disrupted by Israeli occupation’.Footnote ⁸ Several years later, Arna received an alternative Nobel Prize from the Swedish parliament and the prize money was spent on building a small theatre in the camp, in a space that was donated to the project by a Palestinian family.Footnote ⁹

One of the first theatrical exercises that the documentary portrays in this space is an animal-impersonation game. While the children approach each other as various creatures, barely containing the giggles that burst to the surface, we meet four of the young actors who will become central to the narrative thread of Arna's Children: the youngest, Nidal, his brother Yussef, Yussef's best friend Ashraf and Ashraf's next-door neighbour, Ala. As we watch the young actors play, the documentary begins the first of what will become a series of temporal leaps, establishing a visual link between the children's actorly selves and their future combat selves. These visual couplings dot the documentary, asking us to consider these individuals’ seemingly contradictory moments of engagement with the world: innocent theatrical play versus death both experienced and inflicted. Theatre, in these early scenes, is indelibly linked to life.Footnote ¹⁰ And yet injury is a familiar experience. Ala's home has recently been blown up by the Israeli army, destroying Ashraf's home as well. In class, Arna asks the children, ‘What would you like to do to them?’ Suggesting that she be the army, she encourages Ala and Ashraf to hit her, hurt her in a way that will provide release. The scenes that follow depict the children tearing large sheets of paper, painting on the walls of the classroom and, under Juliano's direction, staging a play. Their performance draws extensive applause, as well as the Israeli television crew mentioned above.

The interview serves as a turning point within the documentary's narrative. Shortly after Ashraf announces himself to be the Palestinian Romeo, the jocular aura of the earlier moments gives way to the varieties of loss that have since followed. Juliano meets Arna at the hospital where she is receiving cancer treatment and takes her back to Jenin, where she bids her community farewell. Seven years later, in 2002, the Israeli army invades Jenin during the Second (Al Aqsa) Intifada and another layer of rubble blankets the already shaky physical and emotional architecture of the camp.Footnote ¹¹ Echoing his mother's return, Juliano visits the camp once the siege is lifted. He walks by the old theatre and finds that most of the familiar faces have vanished. Nidal and Ashraf have been killed during the fighting in Jenin. Yussef has carried out a suicide attack in Hadera, Israel, killing four and severely injuring many more. Ala and two other participants, Majdi and Mahmoud, become Juliano's guides in the new Jenin. Juliano meets their families, reminisces with them about the days when they did theatre as children and spends a night with Ala, witnessing the internal organization of Jenin's armed resistance movement. Ala has become a target for the Israeli army, and Juliano's conversations with the fighters and their families depict a complex ecosystem where every exchange is a comment on death. As the documentary draws to a close, Ala dies in battle. News of his death is concurrent with news of the birth of his son. The documentary ends with a group of children facing the camera, singing, ‘For every martyr that falls, a new one will rise’.

Although brief, this outline provides a glimpse into the genre-hybridity of Arna's Children. In earlier moments, the documentary serves primarily as a record of the use of psychodrama with children in conflict situations. In later moments, it wades into turbulent territory, depicting the lives of individuals whose everyday choices rarely enjoy the luxury of transcending the occupation. The filmmakers never excuse the machinery of war that they encounter, whether they are the Israeli tanks that repeatedly roll into Jenin or the arms with which Yussef kills Israeli citizens before being gunned down in Hadera. Instead, the documentary offers a portrait of what death has come to mean in Jenin, and the manner in which the camp's inhabitants have come to live with it. Juliano Mer Khamis mirrors such an objective in his interviews, rejecting appeals to ‘pity’ and adding that he ‘wanted people to touch those people, not through the CNN and BBC perspective of war and terrorism but as human beings with faces, with histories, with dreams’. An inevitable part of these dreams, as he makes clear, is ‘to show that there is a resistance, an aware, political resistance’, in Jenin.Footnote ¹² In turn, the manner in which the documentary presents the many forms that such political resistance takes avoids, in Talal Asad's terms, turning ‘absences into signs’.Footnote ¹³ Acts of martyrdom, Asad suggests, are ‘regarded either as an instance of individual psychopathology or as a case of collective ideology’, surrounded as they are by a vast field of interpretive possibilities that attempt to fix the ‘truth’ behind (now absent) individuals’ actions.Footnote ¹⁴ ‘The open-endedness of motive’, he notes, beckons interpretation in a way that risks obscuring political configurations.Footnote ¹⁵ Arna's Children documents Yussef's friends and family in their attempts to ‘interpret’ his actions, yet these remain half-hearted in contrast with the stronger impulse to simply remember and share a final conversation. The documentary, in other words, does not force its way into any one individual's interiority, real or imagined.Footnote ¹⁶

It is in the absence of such overt hermeneutic labour that theatrical practice emerges as the ‘sign’ anchoring the documentary, endowing it with an orientation as well as coherence. This anchoring takes place on a number of levels. The theatrical experiment serves as a reference point for understanding the development of life histories, as the individuals in question are tethered to this experiment and their participation in the theatre serves as a temporal mark through which their life trajectories are examined. Additionally, the theatre space and its surroundings serve as the visual centre to a multitude of images and observations that otherwise threaten to dissolve the narrative coherence of the work. While such a positioning establishes ‘theatre’ as a steady anchor on both substantive and formal levels, however, the manner in which theatrical practice is in fact depicted, and the formal interventions of filmic technique, instead make ‘theatre’ out to be an unsteady, precarious enterprise. In what follows, I will identify traces of this ambivalence in three domains: first, scenes of theatrical improvisation that illustrate the workings of self-expression; second, the presentation of the television interview with which this article began; and finally, the broader patterns at work in the documentary's editing.

Expressing anger

How does theatrical improvisation figure in Arna's Children? The animal-impersonation game led by Juliano serves as the first instance of theatrical role play, preceded by a brief vocal exercise where Juliano asks the students to scream at the top of their lungs, a suggestion with which they reluctantly, but soon avidly, comply. The focus is on Ala, whose home has been destroyed and who is grieving silently. In class, Arna asks him, ‘Can you go back to your home, Ala?’ Following Ala's barely audible response, she adds, ‘What will you do now?’ While Ashraf volunteers to hit Arna in the belly (she is impersonating the army), Ala stands back, eventually choosing to contribute to a wall painting. ‘All right, this is anger’, Arna notes, ‘and when we are angry, we have to express it’. This statement on the relationship between anger and self-expression is positioned as a tentative, albeit universal, truth throughout Arna's Children: the experience of anger necessitates both its recognition as such and the presence of an expressive outlet. Yet this complicated suggestion is left unpacked, generating a somewhat arbitrary link between make-believe (Arna is the Israeli army), violence (the children are encouraged to attack it/her) and the eventual conceptual transfer of simulation to the actual world (the suggestion that having expressed anger in a pretence-world will have released a part of it in the real world).

The volatility of these connections is evident in the next exercise, led by Juliano. One of the boys is asked to imitate their English-language teacher while the others are (nominally) themselves, seated in a row, waiting for class to begin.Footnote ¹⁷ When the teacher/actor enters the scene, he asks the students questions. Incorrect answers are immediately followed by corporal punishment, as the actor rapidly hits his friends with what appears to be a ruler. As the violent ‘scene’ unravels, Juliano calls out to them to stop, and the narrative turns to the more structured (yet at moments equally rough) rehearsal of the play the group will eventually put on, which involves staging a fight for the sun. What happens in the scene with the English teacher? Are we to imagine that this is a ‘true’ representation of an abusive teaching situation? Is it a more symbolic statement on English-language instruction as a somewhat rough imposition? Is it a theatrical excuse for some forceful pre-teen play? Whatever the underlying logic of the acts that ensue, what emerges are the complexities of make-believe, impersonation and the manner in which they implicate selves. While the documentary presents the necessity of self-expression in symbolic registers (Arna as the army) as acceptable and healthy, a stance delivered via Arna's in-scene comments, it frames a more improvised version of individual theatrical action as too unruly, and presents it to us without a narrative or in-scene voice elucidating the function of theatrical role play.

At stake in these brief instances is theatre's capacity to provide a venue of joyous self-expression or even salutary release. As play therapist Sue Jennings suggests, play is fundamental to human endurance, as is the capacity for fancy, ‘to be able to call into mind what is not there and does not exist’.Footnote ¹⁸ Examples of constructive, curative play-therapy encounters and theatre workshops are ubiquitous. Interesting here, however, is the logic by which certain kinds of improvisational self-expression are distinguished from the legitimacy of directed aggression. This distinction often turns on the ability of the play therapist or workshop facilitator to contain the imaginative outpouring of the participant. The therapeutic reasoning behind self-expression and release resonates with the terminology offered by psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion: the availability of the correct container for such self-revelation, a container which will both hold and render meaningful that which has been revealed.Footnote ¹⁹ The traditional psychoanalytic relationship (the patient–therapist dyad) offers a minuscule container, extending little beyond the two-person exchange. Transferring the dynamics of this controlled encounter to any form of public self-release entails the exponential widening of the container. Theatrical self-release always entails an audience that is by its very nature open-ended and out of control. In turn, the volatility of this far larger container is tempered with the suggestion that the ‘release’ is happening through make-believe, through the guise of a character. This, for example, is the logic behind the staging of a pre-written, structured play where the children assume roles. The precise workings of self-expression, however, are harder to chart when the theatrical exercises implicate the children's selves.

Theatrical illusion's ability to function as an unproblematic venue of healthy self-expression is undercut by the documentary's own unease with the precarious nature of containment. By including Juliano's hasty arrest of the scene, Arna's Children highlights containment's haphazard presence. In her analysis of theatrical facilitation in Croatia, Sonja Kuftinec identifies this arbitrary dimension as evidence of ‘the limits of theatre's ability to contain and even to identify “misbehavior”’.Footnote ²⁰ Containment is rendered further elusive by the inability of the make-believe itself to be bounded by clear-cut theatrical walls. Juliano's anxious directive to the youth playing the teacher receives an in-character response, as the actor playing the English teacher breaks the fourth wall (the imagined wall separating the stage action from the spectators), waves his arm dismissively at Juliano and turns back hungrily to his ‘pupils’. As the filmmakers willingly document what Kuftinec would call ‘archives of failure’, they outline the complexities attached to the broader notion that theatrical self-expression could ‘hold’ rage and thus prove an efficacious venue of self-control.Footnote ²¹ Indeed, the theoretical expectation that underlies theatrical self-expression is that in having punched Arna in the belly, the children will have experienced release and thus refrained from punching the far-less-forgiving body of the Israeli army. This expectation is countered not only with the practical, unexpected outcomes of directed aggression, but with the ideological underpinnings of theatrical appeasement. Augusto Boal's Forum Theatre provides a useful conceptual framework for considering this relationship between theatrical and social action. For the Brazilian director, the theatrical spectator's ability to comment on and intervene in the dramatic action serves as ‘a rehearsal of revolution’, for the spectator-turned-actor produces ‘a real act even though he does it in a fictional manner’.Footnote ²² Yet for Boal, as well as for Arna's Children, the suggestion that theatrical catharsis might serve as a rehearsal of self-pacification remains both theoretically and politically distinct.

Throwing stones

The brief exchanges that lead to ‘I want to be the Palestinian Romeo’ further engage the relationship between self-expression, violence and theatrical activity. Shortly after the Israeli television crew arrive, they encourage Majdi to ‘play a [Israeli] soldier’, and the young actor obliges, chasing Nidal down and holding an imaginary gun to his head while yelling: ‘You maniac, why do you throw stones and bottles?’ As Nidal passively accepts the beating, Majdi continues to corner him and, much like in the classroom scene, the improvisation quickly turns violent. As Majdi yells ‘What is your name?’ into Nidal's ear, Juliano admonishes ‘Enough!’ and the scene ends. The following exchanges ensue, and I will quote here the English-language subtitles at length. The crew is interviewing Yussef, with Juliano (presumably, although it is difficult to tell at times) acting as translator:

Several definitions of theatrical activity emerge from these brief exchanges. For the interviewer, who remains invisible throughout the exchange (Juliano is the only one to transition between the camera's field of vision and its recesses), theatre is a metaphorizing vehicle. It is a medium that, much like the anger exercise, transitions an emotion from its actual, immediate context to an illusory one where it continues to live as the symbolic version of the original sentiment. Yussef's comment on theatrical activity provides a contrast, focusing on the medium's openness to a more declarative mode: ‘I can tell people what I feel. What I want and don't want. Whether I love life or not’. Later, Ashraf adds, ‘I give myself totally’, a statement that both resembles an actorly declaration of having traded in one's self for that of a character, and suggests a turning over of oneself to one's work, which might not involve the same conceptual transfer. While the interviewer insists on an affirmation of theatre's non-violence and self-reflexive potential (‘a better way to protest than violence’, ‘making people see their own situation’), Ashraf, like Yussef, articulates the fact of being onstage differently. In Ashraf's narrative, stage activity is a continuation of life lived offstage. ‘I don't think about the audience’, he notes, equalizing the stage and the everyday performances of social life, yet his ‘giving’ of himself is conscious of the need to ‘capture people's attention’. Acting, in other words, is both seamless with life and entails a heightened vulnerability to spectatorship, a venue that leaves one feeling ‘strong, alive, proud’. Such an experience is perhaps not commensurate with ‘expressing your anger through theatre’, yet the disparity between these two attitudes is resolved a few lines later, by which time Ashraf has adopted (perhaps with a little prodding?) the language of metaphor and the possibility of a theatrical Intifada. He states, ‘when I am in the theatre I feel like I am throwing stones’ and ‘to me, acting is like throwing a Molotov cocktail’ (emphases mine).

These conversations reveal two conceptualizations of theatrical activity, one which highlights theatrical action's status as symbolic representation and another which considers embodied action more broadly as constitutive of a certain state in being practised. Of course, these alternatives are not easily distinguishable and conceptualizing theatrical acts as representation does not negate their status as ‘real’ or tactile action in the world. However, assessing the multiple meanings associated with the theatre reveals not only the alternative ways in which theatrical activity can be lived and narrated but also, in D. Soyini Madison's words, ‘the layers of contexts and motivating factors that generate acts of activism’.Footnote ²³ It is entirely unsurprising that the interviewer maintains the imagined safety of theatrical space, where violence can be expressed without consequence. Given the constant materiality of the aggression these children experience, it is tempting and, indeed, useful to position theatrical practice as a vehicle that can diffuse a grievance, render it ‘art’. Nonetheless, it is important to note what is elided when such a conception of theatre's benefits obscures what Ashraf says about being onstage. For him, it is an opportunity to say ‘what I feel’ and to ‘capture attention’ while iterating an ongoing message: ‘We won't let the occupation keep us in the gutter’. This affirmation of live-ness in the midst of loss sidesteps ‘protesting’ as Romeo. The unexpected and undesired effects of spontaneous role-play affirm the distinction between a symbolic understanding and what we might label an embodied approach: in both the classroom scene and the soldier scene, aggression transfers fluidly between the world and the stage, so much so that Juliano needs to break into both. Thus the link between ‘art’ and ‘violence’ is not simply one of symbolic protest, nor is the theatre a space of safe action, as the conceptual underpinnings of make-believe are called into question.

The mechanics of the filmic scene accentuate the suggestion that theatre is in fact a vulnerable space. There are presumably two sets of cameras (those of the documentary team and of the TV crew) facing the children, making it difficult to identify the voices that emanate from behind the lens, leaving one half of the conversation in the (spectatorial) shadows. Yet the voices and gestures of these invisible interlocutors are within earshot and invade the camera's lens, thereby rendering the distinction between the stage space of the interview (which ostensibly wishes to present children who choose theatre over war) and the backstage of filmmaking (where adults struggle to cohere the actual information that the child actors give them) impossible to maintain. The precariousness of the interview's ‘stage’ mirrors the impossibility of maintaining the security of the theatrical stage. In Arna's Children, theatre is simply a space whose connotations are multiple and shifty and immediately filled with the children's uncensored resourcefulness.

Flashforward, flashback

While the specificities of filmic technique play an important role in how Arna's Children narrates the relationship between self-expression and violence, the documentary's broader comment on theatrical practice stems directly from its editorial decisions. Temporally discontinuous sequences are crucial to how Arna's Children remembers and comments on the social potential of theatre in Jenin: in a series of flashforwards and flashbacks, the children's participation in the theatre serves as a shorthand reference for the ‘innocence’ of early adolescence. As we meet the children, flashforwards to images of them wielding arms, wearing combat outfits or wrapped in a shroud announcing their passing disrupt an otherwise soft visual entry into the world of theatrical activity. For example, Nidal and Yussef's playful animal banter is interspersed with news of their coming death. As the newly displaced Ala discovers painting in Arna's classroom, Juliano narrates that he will become the leader of the Al Aqsa brigades in Jenin. Elsewhere, Ashraf's interview with the television crew is followed by the harrowing image of an inert body. These ends are chronologically far, yet near in the context of Jenin, where the constancy of death has already foreclosed upon the children. These visual juxtapositions are reversed in the second half of the documentary. Images from the theatre classroom serve as a contrast to the world of armed struggle and resistance. For example, during Juliano's post-siege visit to Jenin, Majdi and Mahmoud take Juliano to Yussef and Ashraf's graves. This visit is juxtaposed with an image of the young duo onstage, in a scene where they are battling each other to ascend a ladder and steal the sun. Likewise, as Yussef's mother recalls the final days leading up to her son's fateful and murderous trip into Israel, we see images of a young Yussef from the group's costume fittings. In these shots, the children are giddy with anticipation. Excited by the colourful costumes that adorn their bodies, they bask in the glow of the adults’ undivided attention.

These temporal compressions telescope the unravelling of a life into momentary juxtapositions, and function to generate the kind of shock associated with the familiar cinematic formula of ‘what things were like back then’ versus ‘what they have since become’. Discordant images are thus united: early adolescence versus adulthood, giddiness versus more complicated emotions, and commitment to a collective project versus the splintering of different life paths. Theatre has a specific role within these pairings. Early adolescence, for example, is often signalled by scenes where the children are clothed in their clearly extra-daily theatre costumes. Upon repetition, these costumed images come to stand for the ease with which the boys’ younger selves could exercise their ability to transcend the ‘real’ while later scenes depict them as enmeshed in the actual, the violent, even if some (like Majdi and Mahmoud) are not active fighters. The fact of having participated in the theatre functions as evidence of having once imagined otherwise and ‘theatre’ itself emerges with a set of contradictory temporal connotations. It is a fleeting medium, what Peggy Phelan has called performance's broader tendency to ‘disappear into memory’.Footnote ²⁴ The effects of this ephemeral medium are dissolved and eventually erased by war. Yet theatre also exerts a durational effect on a life whose filmic narration is nonetheless made to seem coherent, standing by way of the visual backbone that theatre provides.

Theatre's ubiquity thus complicates the suggestion that the medium is responsible for creating a domain shielded from aggression, a state of nature that precedes or displaces the violence of political involvement. Rather than a substitute for violence, theatre emerges as a parallel to it, often recycling its realities and embodied experiences. Certainly, it is possible to suggest that the costumed scenes depict the theatre as a space of transformation, a space where one leaves one's self entirely behind, internalizing the power of as if and thus living a healthier, more expressive life. Yet by positioning theatrical practice as visual evidence of childhood, the documentary also underlines how difficult it would be to depict the children's lives as children. In a world permeated by violence, such a project would require an entirely different yet equally theatrical as-if framing, akin to what Richard Schechner labels the ‘restoration of a past that never was’, of a ‘nonevent’.Footnote ²⁵ Instead, in Arna's Children, theatre promises a negotiated make-believe, where the as-if of theatrical impersonation is countered with the if-only of its continued failure. Scenes depicting the theatre both function to produce an aura of childhood play and remind us that such an impression requires theatrical production. Theatre's association with life (as a medium that is imbued with connotations of spontaneity, vitality and, in this case, survival) ultimately has less to do with the medium's inherent qualities than with the responsibilities it takes on when practised in proximity to spaces of death.

‘Strange stuff indeed’

What is theatre's responsibility in Jenin? At times, the significance of theatrical practice is most tangible when nobody is acting, when the manner in which life is lived itself resembles the temporariness of theatre. As the documentary ends, Juliano visits Ala's home, where his mother is drinking coffee and discussing her son's future. The situation is tense. Ala is a significant figure in Jenin's resistance and if he does not surrender, harm may come to his family's home. ‘I won't tell him to surrender’, Ala's mother announces to Juliano, later adding, ‘surrender is cowardice’. When Juliano suggests that this might jeopardize her home, she smiles, reminding the viewer of her family's history. ‘A house’, she notes, ‘is just a house’, a statement later mirrored by Ala: ‘a house is not worth more than a martyr's life’. Ala is in fact killed soon afterwards, although he lives on in the posters that Mahmoud plasters around the camp. This is the texture of Jenin – both life and its physical architecture are vulnerable to brutality, which generates a different set of relationships between property and life, violence and death. The transitory quality of collective theatrical performance is a mirror to these notions of precarious, fleeting existence and propertied security. This resonance is impossible to ignore: both the stage set and life are systematically dismantled. Could theatrical activity shoulder more than that resonance, nothing short of transcendence and transformation? Arna's Children is both invested in such metamorphoses and wary of concluding that the very evocation of this aesthetic medium can function as beneficial, curative and suggestive of a shared humanity no matter its context and its daily practice. Such an approach might engulf the far more complicated tale that theatre actually tells, which, examined closely, is, in Laura Edmondson's words, ‘strange stuff indeed, and perhaps in our rush to celebrate it, we are not being fully attentive to its ambiguities, dangers, and gifts’.Footnote ²⁶

Attending to theatre's ‘ambiguities, dangers, and gifts’ is especially difficult when they are intertwined, when what appears to be the ‘gift’ of theatre is revealed to have been another kind of offering as well. Several years after the initial theatre workshops, Juliano returns to Jenin with his camera and asks the children what they took away from the activity. Yussef says that Juliano ‘taught me a lot, things I could use in the future’. As the conversation continues, it seems that the most valued element of this practice has been the interaction with Juliano himself, identified in the children's conversation by the aspect of his identity that is most difficult for them to reconcile: that he is a ‘Jew’. They reveal that they distrusted him at first, fearing that he was a spy for the occupation. As these words are uttered, we can hear Juliano smile behind the camera as the subtitles translate him saying, jokingly, endearingly, ‘Is that what you thought of me, you dirty sons of . . .’. The children giggle and Yussef adds that he asked himself: ‘Why would Jews, who are enemies of the Arabs . . . why would they do all this for us? I really wondered’. It is a moment akin to what Sonja Kuftinec identifies as ‘the potential for performance to reimagine community and reanimate ethical relationships’.Footnote ²⁷ While theatre and performance are significant to this particular reimagination and reanimation, they are perhaps the secondary frames for the encounter. The primary one is Juliano himself; it is his co-presence that carries tremendous potential. ‘Theatre’ pales in comparison.

Shortly after I concluded this article, Juliano Mer Khamis was assassinated in Jenin on 4 April 2011. His passing has both sharpened and rendered paltry my thoughts on theatrical aid and its relation to death, and serves as a reminder of scholarship's peculiar temporality. This article does not encompass a life's work; it only focuses on an artefact Mer Khamis left behind. Even so, it is dedicated to his memory.