April is Arab American Heritage Month and at 3GT we’re celebrating our collaborator, Debórah Eliezer. Debórah is the Artistic Director of Aviva Arts which developed a 3GT Innovator project in 2023. She is an actor, voiceover, dancer, choreographer, director, deviser and creator of healing spaces and convenings. Keep an eye out for Aviva’s next iteration of Burning Wild coming soon to the Bay Area.
Debórah holds the complex identity of being an Arab Jew. Her family can trace back their heritage in Baghdad, Iraq for hundreds, if not thousands of years. Jews had been well-integrated into Iraqi life for over 2500 years, and made up a third of Baghdad’s population in 1940. Within a decade, nearly all 130,000 were gone; expelled, escaped, stripped of belonging, businesses and citizenship. Today fewer than 5 remain. Her family members were killed or became refugees during this period, giving Debórah a particular affinity with refugees around the world and in the region. You can find out more about this story in her one woman play (dis)Place[d], on which I was proud to be the dramaturg.
Her identity as both Arab and Jew, as well as having many family members currently (and since the 1948 war in Israel-Palestine) living in Israel, make the current bloodshed there particularly painful. Debórah has been outspoken in her call for compassion and humanity in the face of terror and indiscriminate killing. This is not an easy position to take in the polarized world in which we live, and one that we applaud and uplift at 3GT.
Debórah is a founding board member of the Middle East and North African TheaterMakers Alliance and a member of Golden Thread Productions. For Golden Thread she is currently in rehearsal for The Tutor by Torange Yeghiazarian, the founding Artistic Director of Golden Thread. The play is directed by Sahar Assaf, Golden Thread’s current AD. Please support this work by going to see the play at NCTC from April 5 - May 12.This season, Golden Thread is producing a Season for Palestine and Debórah is on the Community Council for the season. Aviva Arts will be collaborating with others to facilitate a community listening circle, somatic liberation workshops, and more.
I’m so proud to have been a collaborator of Debórah’s since 2013 when I began serving on foolsFURY’s board, where she was the Co-Artistic Director and as an artistic collaborator since 2018 at both fF and Aviva. Aviva Arts, Golden Thread and 3GT are threeactivist theaters among many in the SF Bay Area. Uplifting and celebrating the work of marginalized communities has never been more important.Celebrate Arab American Heritage month by seeing some theater and perhaps, getting out of your comfort zone.
Pamela Hollings,
Curation and Education Director, 3Girls Theatre Company