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Raphael Khouri | |
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Raphael Khouri (previously Amahl Raphael Khouri) Is a Jordanian queer, transgender documentary playwright, journalist, activist, and theatre artist. [1]
Khouri was born in the United States, but moved to Saudi Arabia, and lived his teenage years in Jordan. [2] Khouri earned his bachelor's degree (BA) in Communications from the Lebanese American University in Beirut, Lebanon. [3]
Khouri started his career as a journalist but was introduced to documentary theatre through a festival in Alexandria, Egypt.
Before becoming a documentary playwright, Khouri was an apprentice to a prominent stage director in Lebanon and intended to become a director himself. After finding difficulty entering the directing world, Khouri turned to working as a journalist while he set out to write his own play. Taking inspiration form Antonin Artaud (among other theorists), Khouri decided to explore writing within the documentary theatre genre. [2]
Khouri has also been commissioned to write new work for the Outburst Queer Arts Festival in Belfast (features in 2019 and 2020), and he will appear in the upcoming International Queer Drama anthology published by Neofelis Verlag, and the Methuen Anthology of Trans Plays. [4]
First performed at the Politik im Freien Theatre Festival in 2018.
First performed in Beirut in 2014, No Matter Where I Go is a play that explores how queer people navigate public spaces and how their identity is constantly questioned within these spaces. Khouri explains that the Lebanese media is profit-oriented and often misrepresented homosexuality and queerness. No Matter Where I Go actively fights against stigmatization by elevating narratives that disrupted the hegemony portrayed in Lebanese media.
This was the first queer Arab performance of its kind. Though some Arab plays had some gay content, this was the first work that went out of its way to be queer. This text was performed as pot of “Bodies in Public” a conference on bodies in Beirut. [5] It is published in the anthology, Global Queer Plays. [6]
This work was created for Climate Change Theatre Action. Khouri describes this play as an elegy to all the fish that have been killed due to climate change. Khouri stated, "That’s what happened to the tuna, they loved it so much that they’ve killed it.” [7]
Nouhad Wadie' Haddad, known as Fairuz, is a Lebanese singer. She is considered by many as one of the leading vocalists and most famous singers in the history of the Arab world. Fairuz is considered the musical icon of Lebanon and is popularly known as "the soul of Lebanon".
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Rami George Khouri is a journalist and editor with Palestinian background and joint Jordanian and United States citizenship. He was born in New York City to an Arab Palestinian Christian family. His father, George Khouri, a Nazarene journalist in what was the British mandate of Palestine, had traveled with his wife to New York in 1947 to cover the United Nations (UN) debates about the future of Palestine. His family resides in Beirut, Amman, and Nazareth. He is also a highly regarded public speaker. After attending secondary school at the International School of Geneva in Switzerland Rami Khouri returned to the US to complete his education. Khouri has served for many years as the chief umpire for Little League Baseball in Jordan.
Theatre in Lebanon has its origin in passion plays. The musical plays of Maroun Naccache from the mid-1800s are considered the birth of modern Arab theatre. Some scholars, such as Abdulatif Shararah, have divided Lebanese theatre into three historical phases centered on 1) translations of European plays, 2) Arab nationalism, and 3) realism.
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