As Far As Isolation Goes - Tania El Khoury & Basel Zaraa

1-on-1 Multi-sensory online performance

Wednesday - Sunday, Sep 9 - Oct 4 @ 4-6pm & 7:30-9:30pm (Time zone: UAE, Abu Dhabi, GMT+4) | Note International Timings: Beirut -1hrs, London -3hrs, New York -8hrs from listed times.

Past Event

Discover a new mode of online performance with a 1-on-1 multi-sensory online experience.

Theater for an audience of you. Through touch, sound, and interactivity As Far As Isolation Goes (online) is a moving microtheater piece which explores the journey of asylum seekers. Experience this very unique virtual performance; over Zoom artist Basel Zaraa takes you through a story where you respond to his prompts.

The work is a collaboration between live artist Tania El Khoury and musician and street artist Basel Zaraa. Reimagined for an online experience during physical distancing, the piece is a 1-on-1 virtual intimate experience.

Built from their original collaboration, As Far As My Fingertips Take Me, El Khoury commissioned Zaraa to record a rap song inspired by the journey his sisters made from Damascus to Sweden. This online iteration focuses on mental and physical health experiences of refugees in the United Kingdom. Zaraa created a song inspired by conversations with friends and colleagues who have recently claimed refuge in the UK.

“This is the extremely rare occasion on which a production draws on you. No, really, right on you. And it does so with both a touching illustrative delicacy and an appeal to the conscience that is impossible to turn away from.” – Washington Post’s review on As Far as My Finger Tips Take Me

Biographies

Tania El Khoury

Tania El Khoury is a live artist creating installations and performances focused on audience interactivity and concerned with the ethical and political potential of such encounters. She is a Distinguished Artist in Residence of Theater and Performance and co-director of MA in Human Rights & The Arts at Bard College, New York. Her work has been translated and presented in multiple languages in 32 countries across six continents, in spaces ranging from museums to cable cars to the Mediterranean Sea. She is a 2019 Soros Art Fellow and the recipient of the Bessies Outstanding Production Award, the International Live Art Prize, the Total Theatre Innovation Award, and the Arches Brick Award. Tania holds a PhD in Performance Studies from Royal Holloway, University of London. In 2018, a survey of her work entitled “ear-whispered: works by Tania El Khoury” took place in Philadelphia. Tania is associated with Forest Fringe collective of artists in the UK and is a co-founder of Dictaphone Group in Lebanon, a research and performance collective aiming at questioning our relationship to the city, and redefining its public space.

Basel Zaraa

Basel Zaraa is a spoken word artist and percussionist who writes on themes of exile and resistance. He has collaborated with a wide range of international artists including Akala, Guildhall youth project (Im)possibilities, Palestinian hip-hop group Katibeh Khamseh, Arabic fusion band Raast and funk band Shokunin. He is part of the cast of PsycheDELIGHT’s ‘Borderline’ satire about the Calais camp, in which he performs original music and DIY sound effects. He is also a visual and stencil graffiti artist. Basel has toured internationally in Tania El Khoury’s As Far As My Fingertips Take Me and has created with her a second piece entitled As Far As Isolation Goes.