AZZA at Space Theatre

An old man dies and azza - the Palestinian mourning ritual - begins. Six men gather to pay their respects: sharing memories, dredging up old quarrels, remembering acts of fearlessness, ferocity and love, and quietly or noisily expressing their grief.

Blending song and spoken word with an Arabic a cappella chorus, the story weaves a rich pattern of life and death through shared experiences, minor rivalries and brief moments of compassion and empathy. This ritual, in its rigid form of repetition and small gestures, is a ceremony where the mundane and dramatic are intertwined to create a peephole into the soul of a community.

Unexpectedly moving, AZZA is an intimate portrait of comradeship and ritual from Amir Nizar Zuabi, one of the Middle East’s most important director/writers, who founded the ShiberHur Theatre Company in Haifa in 2008. While this troubled region is the invisible backdrop to the work, its resonance lies in the universality of its embrace, the shared ways we mark the end of a life and our duty both to honour the dead and to go on living.