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overhearing in Beirut
Zoukak Theatre Beirut, Lebanon 2019Overhearing in Beirut formed through listening and writing down a collection of fragmented phrases from conversations gathered during a period spent in the city. These fragments emerge from multiple sites, within the walls of the American university, on the street, in bars and while walking.
The work attends to what is heard in-between: partial exchanges, overlapping voices, moments of mishearing or interruption. As a visitor, the artist moves through these encounters without fully belonging to them, holding a position that is both present and peripheral. Through centring listening, the text does not attempt to capture or represent the city, but to remain with the limits of what can be understood, translated or embodied.
The fragments are arranged without a single narrative thread, allowing gaps and silences to remain. Meaning does not settle within individual lines, but emerges through their relationship to proximity, repetition, and disjunction. These spaces between fragments open the possibility for other voices to appear, including those that sit outside the dominant frame of the American institution.
At Zoukak theatre, the text became a score for voice. In performance, it is read aloud and translated live into multiple languages by participants and audience members. Language shifts in real time, moving between voices, accents and interpretations. No single version stabilises; instead, the work disperses across languages, carrying both connection, difference and partial understanding. Always in translation.
