BAGHDAD, KABUL, AR RAQQAH, MAARRAN ...

Snapshots from the lives of those who had to leave. 

A theatrical meditation on identity, nostalgia, determination, and the realization that it is possible to move forward along any path.

Those places seem inaccessibly distant, those destinies reach us transformed into numerical codes estimating the number of those suffering, fleeing, finding asylum, or into tables of affiliation to ethnicities, armies, faiths.

When the war in Syria began, the content of statistics and tables became people, nations, and places that had once been known intimately. Their fates joined the similar fates of those who escaped from Iraq, Afghanistan, or anywhere else – or who stayed behind. For all of them, the world in the form of familiar and accepted structures and relationships disappeared; from everything they had built and created over the course of their lives, only that life itself remained. Any further similarity between these destinies is, however, only apparent. The pain of separation and the will to go on cannot be compared once they are removed from newspaper reports, analyses, and calculations, and become a personal characteristic.

Work on the performance was preceded by a journey to the Turkish border region with Syria and encounters with those who can no longer be met at home. Their hearts are kind, their eyes radiant, and their gaze direct. Their stories are full of humor, lightness, and resolve. There may be more in common with them than might at first appear.

THE CREATION OF THE PERFORMANCE WAS SUPPORTED BY A GRANT FROM NADACE ŽIVOT UMĚLCE, WITH GRATITUDE.