The Search for Power
Tania El Khoury and Ziad Abu-Rish
- Price
- $27*
- Genre
- Theater
- Season
- Winter/Spring 2025
- DATE
- MAY 29-JUN 8
- TIME
- Performances:
5/29-5/31, 8:30 PM
5/31-6/1, 3 PM
Installation:
6/4-6/8, 12 PM-6 PM - RUNTIME
- Approx. 75 minutes, no intermission
* Discounts available for REDCAT members, students & the CalArts faculty and staff
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About
On a night with a sudden electricity outage in their Beirut neighborhood, Tania El Khoury and her husband, the historian Ziad Abu-Rish, discussed the history of power cuts in Lebanon. Born during the Lebanese Civil War, El Khoury grew up with the understanding that the problem with the country’s electricity was rooted in this conflict. However, Abu-Rish recalled finding a government document dated 1952 that announced scheduled electricity outages across Beirut. The pair decided to research the history of power outages in Lebanon, delving into the intersections between public utilities infrastructure, people’s relationship to the state, and various popular mobilizations that have shaped both. Their investigation reached as far back as the introduction of electricity to Beirut, before it was even possible to imagine a Lebanese state. The documents they collected come from across Lebanon and beyond its borders, extracted from the archives of colonial powers: Belgium, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. What they pieced together is a transnational story that locates electricity at the intersection of colonial legacies, the machinations of political and economic elites, and everyday acts of resistance, survival, and sabotage. The Search for Power presents a record of El Khoury and Abu-Rish’s conversations, research, and findings in a performance and installation.
The Search for Power can be experienced as a ticketed live performance or as an open installation without ticket or reservation. In the open installation, the audience is invited to listen through headphones to a pre-recorded text and explore the archives box in their own time.
Late seating for the perfomance is not allowed.
FOOD ALLERGY NOTICE: Please be aware that the table featured at the center of the performance will be set with—among other items—candles, tree nuts, grapes, and dried apricots. For the open installation, the table featured at the center of will be set with almonds, walnuts, dates, dried apricots, and apple cider.
Tania El Khoury creates interactive installations and site-specific performances to question the hidden aspects of History and share knowledge that is difficult to access, with an aesthetic and political objective of repair and reappropriation.
—
Marion Boudier, théâtre
REDCAT and the Fisher Center at Bard co-present Tania El Khoury’s The Search For Power.
A Co-Production with the Fisher Center at Bard.
Co-commissioned by Anti Festival and Shubbak Festival. Supported by Arts Council England and brut Wien.
Tania El Khoury is a 2024 - 2026 Fisher Center LAB artist in residence with lead support from the Mellon Foundation. Fisher Center LAB is the signature residency and commissioning program of the Fisher Center at Bard.
about the artistS
Tania El Khoury creates interactive and immersive installations and performances that reflect on the production of collective memory and the cultivation of solidarity. Her work is activated by tactile, auditory, and visual traces collected and curated by the artist and her collaborators, and they are ultimately transformed through audience interaction. El Khoury’s work has been translated into multiple languages and shown in 5 countries across 6 continents in spaces ranging from museums to cable cars. She is the recipient of the Herb Alpert Award, the Soros Art Fellowship, the Bessies Outstanding Production Award, the International Live Art Prize, the Total Theatre Innovation Award, and the Arches Brick Award.
El Khoury is a Distinguished Artist in Residence at the Theater and Performance Program and Founding Director of the OSUN Center for Human Rights & the Arts at Bard College. She holds a PhD in Theater Studies from Royal Holloway, University of London. El Khoury is a co-founder of Dictaphone Group, a research and live art collective in Lebanon, and is associated with the Forest Fringe collective of artists in the UK.
Ziad Abu-Rish is Associate Professor of Human Rights and Middle East Studies at Bard College, where he also directs the MA Program in Human Rights and the Arts. A scholar of the modern Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, his research centers around state formation, economic development, and popular mobilizations, particularly in Lebanon and Jordan. He earned his PhD in History from the University of California Los Angeles, and his MA in Arab Studies from the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University. Abu-Rish is coeditor of The Dawn of the Arab Uprisings: End of an Old Order? (2012), among other edited volumes. He is the author of several articles and chapters, including “Garbage Politics in Lebanon,” “Municipal Elections in Lebanon,” and “Lebanon Beyond Exceptionalism.” He serves as coeditor of Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya e-zine, and codirector of the Lebanese Dissertation Summer Institute.
cast & creative team
Creation: Tania El Khoury and Ziad Abu-Rish
Production Design: Petra Abousleiman
Research: Ziad Abu-Rish with support from Owain Lawson and Joelle Boutros
Graphic Design: Jana Traboulsi & Haitham Haddad
Sound Design: Ali Beidoun & Fadi Tabbal
Dramaturgy: Deborah Pearson
Production: RR Sigel
