Imagining and Creating a Shared Home: Theater with Asylum Seekers and Israeli Citizens

This dialogic article between actor Omad Abdelshakur and theater director Chen Alon explores how Polarized Theatre of the Oppressed, a holistic model of community building and activist-therapeutic artistic medium for asylum seekers and Israeli citizens, can help imagine and create – inside and outside the aesthetic space of theater – a shared utopian home. Focusing on Holot Theater, an ensemble of African asylum seekers and Israeli allies, the chapter offers an analysis of three theatrical productions that develop personal stories in an interactive modality, with the goal of awakening consciousness about and to activate and/or recruit allies to the refugee struggle in Israel. In the case of “Holot Legislative Theater” and its sequel “Illegal Human Being,” the works help audiences imagine and participate in a world in which state policies around the status of refugees reflect equality, empathy, and shared futures, without ignoring the complexities of past traumas and the hostility of asylum seekers’ current realities.