PeaceBirds will be make an appearance at Clear Visioning at the Cottage Street Studios this weekend, May 4 & 5, and JuPong Lin invites readers to perform “Phoenix in the Holy Land,” a play focussed on the current genocide of Palestinians. Readings of the 35 minute play will begin at 11:00am Saturday and Sunday, and we’ll hold a talking circle after the reading for dialogue and solidarity .
“Phoenix in the Holy Land” is a play birthed in the crucible of the current assault on Palestine—what some call the second Nakba—that spurred the PeaceBirds project. We—collaborator, Mona Shiber and I—launched a socially-engaged project and art installation as artists in residence at Goddard College, February - March 2024. For the opening of the exhibition, we hosted a poetry reading and recitation of excerpts of the case of Genocide in the Gaza Strip that South Africa brought against Israel in January 2024. In the following months, I joined a group of organizers in the Town of Amherst, Massachusetts to advocate for a Ceasefire Resolution.
The Playwrights Circle of the LAVA Center in Greenfield supported me to develop this impromptu performance into a one-act play. The play combines the verbatim transcripts of the South Africa case with the words of Palestinian and Jewish poets and the story of a small town’s fight to end the assault on Palestinian life. Several more poets are featured in the play, as well as the story of one town’s struggle to pass a ceasefire resolution. The play is slated for a public reading at The LAVA Center as part of the On the Boards Festival in June.
The most recent version of the play will be posted here: Phoenix in the Holy Land folder