A DEEP SPACE PERFORMANCE RESIDENCY
Rawya El Chab | Photo by Maria Baranova
“Immortal: Rise and Fall of the Jarmak Battalion” A Work In Progress by Rawya El Chab
On August 29, Rawya will present selections from the script, along with visual and auditory elements developed during the residency.
Immortal: Rise and Fall of the Jarmak Battalion is a solo storytelling performance that excavates the early years of the Lebanese Civil War through oral testimony, archival material, and spatial sound.
At its center is Khaled Bechara — a young man who leaves Beirut to join the Jarmak Battalion at a moment when revolutionary fervor was remaking the political imagination of an entire region. He is one man inside a much larger fire.
Rawya El Chab in “Crossing the Water” | Photo by Alia Haju
“The performance is an act of transmission. Drawing on interviews with family members, former fighters, and community witnesses, I retell the story as it was handed to me — fragmented, contradictory, worn smooth in some places and jagged in others.”
These living memories collide with archival materials: radio broadcasts, political documents, the official record and its silences.
Structured as a braid, the work spirals back again and again to the moment of Khaled's departure — each return revealing something new about how memory is built, distorted, and inherited across generations. Expressionistic puppetry brings political figures to life as unstable, shifting forms, exposing just how fragile ideological certainty really is.
The project treats war not as event but as ecology — something that reshapes land, domestic life, and the quiet systems by which people survive. Research into plant life in southern Lebanon shapes the set and projection design, building a visual language that moves between absence and reconstruction. From that research grows something stranger: a speculative mythology of what has been erased, and what refuses to disappear.
“We need to dehumanize people to kill them... What I’m trying to do with my stories is to bring the complexities, which is the humanity of the people I lived with, and share it with others to try to make space for this reality too.”
Read the full HYPERALLERGIC article…
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Rawya El Chab in “Lula 19/85 & the Pearl of the Bekaa” | Photo by Browen Sharp
Rawya El Chab (she/her) is a theater maker, performer, and storyteller based in New York City. She makes performances that dig through archives, whisper to ghosts, and ask what happens when history refuses to sit still—or when the present refuses to make sense. Working across theater, performance art, and audiovisual media, she explores power, memory, and the mechanics of collective decision-making.
Her practice blends poetry, devised theater, and research into lived and imagined histories—often beginning with a question no one can fully answer. Drawing from post-war Lebanon and her work in refugee camps, she creates spaces where participants don’t just watch democracy unfold; they practice it, fail at it, and test what breaks it from within.
Her work has been presented at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, The Brick Theater, the Exponential Festival, and The Rattlestick Theater. Recent projects include “Lula & the Pearl of the Bekaa” and “Crossing the Water” — works grappling with ideological collapse, collective memory, and what we lose along the way.
She has collaborated internationally with artists and institutions including Mousonturm (Frankfurt) and Santiago a Mil (Santiago), working across experimental theater, immersive installations, and film.
Her work has been supported by the Indie Theater Fund, the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC), and the Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC).
COLLABORATING ARTISTS
Ettie Pin (left), Omar Dewach (right)
Jacqueline S (left), Jesse Freedman (right)