Bashar Murkus and Khashabi Ensemble / Palestine - Milk

A play about mourning, loss and the relationship with death. Milk – by the Palestinian director Bashar Murkus and Khashabi Ensemble – is a work of  visual theatre focused on the figure of the mother. As Murkus explains: “I imagine that losing a son in Gaza or Paris is not very different in terms of grief for a mother, my goal was neither to quantify nor to draw comparisons. What was important to me was to understand how we deal with loss. In these two years of experimentation with the team, we have addressed the subject in many different ways with the purpose of creating different points of view. We thus came to expand our theme, to give it deeper and more general meaning”. The result is a visual poem based on six women, six mannequins, a man born adult and a sea of milk, all elements that give rise to a reflection on grief, seeking the universal in individual experiences. Milk, which in Arabic means both milk and possession (literally “it’s mine”) premiered at the Festival d’Avignon last year.

Born in 1992, Bashar Murkus is one of the founders of the Khashabi Theatre, an independent Palestinian theatre created in the city of Haifa – with the stated purpose of preserving Palestinian culture. It produces plays independently, refusing to take any government support to avoid risking censorship or closure, as occurred in 2014 when the Al-Midan Theatre presented a performance of The Parallel Time, inspired by the story of the Palestinian prisoner Walid Dakka. “We do not demand the right to do something” reiterates the thirty-year-old director, who belongs to the third generation of Palestinians who have lived in Israel since 1948, “we are claiming this right”. Active since 2011, the year he graduated from the Theatre Department of the University of Haifa, Bashar Murkus has directed over 20 productions. They are critical works that address open wounds and challenge the dominant narrative, in turn interrogating the spectator. Like in The Museum (2019), a play that introduced him to international audiences and confronts the audience with the extreme conflict between a terrorist and the policeman who arrested him.