The French Revolution generated four large-scale festivals in Paris from 1790 to 1794. The festival project housed a foundational and ultimately insurmountable tension: liberty was to be established through a manipulation of people’s natural free will by means of their leaders’ methodical organization. How do you orchestrate fraternal attachment without imprisoning the participants in new rules? How do you, in short, choreograph freedom?

The Oyoun Theatre brought their performance of The Gaza Mono-logues from Gaza to Haifa for the RS/PS: Richard Schechner and Performance Studies conference, hosted by the University of Haifa. They were part of the larger Gaza Mono-Logues project, conceived by the Ashtar Theatre in Ramallah, which commissioned 33 first-person pieces written by children about their experiences during the three-week-long 2008 war in Gaza.