What happens when history refuses to stay in the past?
That question is at the center of Immortal: Rise and Fall of the Jarrah Mark Battalion, a theater project by New York City-based performer and storyteller Rawya El Chab. The solo performance examines the early years of the Lebanese Civil War through oral testimony, archival material and sound.
El Chab is developing the work during a residency at NACL in Highland Lake. Audiences can see selected scenes from the work Saturday evening, followed by soup and a conversation with the artists.
The Lebanese Civil War began in 1975 and continued until 1990. For El Chab, the story of the conflict is also a story about what happens when a country chooses to leave parts of its history untold.
After the war, she said, political figures met in 1991 and decided to forget what had happened. That contributed to what she describes as an erasure of history.
“Students do not study,” El Chab said. “We don’t have a common mythology or a common history that creates our nation.”
She said Lebanese history books stop around 1960, leaving generations to reconstruct the missing decades from their own perspectives.
That is why she describes Immortal as an “excavation.” El Chab said she wanted to move beyond stories centered on well-known historical figures and bring forward stories from people, including members of her own family, who were deeply involved in the conflict.
The work is built around the complications of memory. Oral histories can preserve experiences that never make it into official archives, but they can also change over time.
“Memory is always a tricky thing,” El Chab said.
As people tell and retell stories, she said, they can adopt a particular narrative. Going back through those stories can reveal contradictions between the narrative and the facts.
Collaborating artist Jesse Freedman, who is working as director and dramaturge, said the process has required a different approach from a typical theater production.
Instead of beginning with a completed script, Freedman said, the team is working from El Chab’s stories.
“I really look and point everyone towards Rawya and to the stories that she’s telling,” Friedman said.
The physical world of Lebanon is also part of the storytelling. El Chab has researched plant life in southern Lebanon, incorporating it into the set and visual design.
She said recent destruction has affected not only human communities but animals and plant life, including flowers and herbs that are disappearing.
“There are animals and flowers that are being erased who live with us,” she said.
El Chab’s experiences working in refugee camps also helped inspire the larger trilogy of which Immortal is the third installment. She recalled asking children what they wanted to become when they grew up and hearing some say they wanted to become martyrs.
That response prompted her to explore how ideas of martyrdom are passed from one generation to the next.
Now, as the final installment takes shape, El Chab is questioning even the archives she has relied on to reconstruct the past.
She said she has begun to see the search for archival material as a kind of “vulturing” — raising questions about the impulse to extract from the remnants of history.
“I am in the storm,” she said.
Image: Rawya El Chab will present Immortal: Rise and Fall of the Jarrah Mark Battalion presented Saturday at 7:30 p.m. at NACL in Highland Lake. (NACL)