Dafa Puppet Theatre is a multi-awarded theatre company based in the city of Prague.
Dafa yearns to spread puppet art, to promote theatre in education and awareness, to challenge stereotypes, and to connect people through theatre.
Dafa sees theatre as a public practice, inviting members of the community, after giving them the techniques and tools to express and address issues and concerns that face their community.
Dafa Puppet Theatre, a multi-awarded theatre company based in Prague, co-founded by Palestinian Jordanian theatre director Husam Abed and Hungarian stage designer Reka Deak.
Dafa is an Arabic word that means warmth.
Dafa is in the warmth of an invitation extended to every child, youth and adult to imagine, dream, act, and give the best of their potential towards the betterment of their communities.
Dafa is the opposite of isolation and alienation. It is what resists when human rights are violated; when education and health are not provided; when lands are stolen, and when water and air are exploited.
Last month Dafa had a premiere in the Czech Republic of “The War Maker”. It's a multidisciplinary experimental performance that blends visual art, new media with documentary and object theatre. Is based on the real story of Palestinian visual artist Kareem Shahin from Gaza.
Karim Shaheen is a Palestinian visual artist from Gaza who holds an Egyptian document and is a friend of the performance's director, Husam Abed.
Abed met Shaheen, and the two shared an apartment in Yarmouk camp, Syria, in the year 2000 while Abed was attending applied chemistry at Damascus University. Shaheen was a forerunner to embody the Damascene neighborhood in a realistic 3D stylized miniature form. From a young age, Shaheen was attached to science fiction cinema, and his dream was to create visual effects for sci-fi movies. Three wars formed Shaheen's memory: the Iraq/Iran War 1980, the Gulf War (Iraq/Kuwait) 1990, and the Yugoslavian war in 1991. In addition to these wars, he was also shaped by the collective memory of his Palestinian family Nakba/Catastrophe in 1948 through the Israeli military forced displacement to Gaza.
The show plays on the boundaries of visual art, miniatures, documentary, and object theatre; a type of modern puppet theater where people are represented in a theatre performance by animating any objects or materials: kitchen objects such as matches, and any materials for example salt.
"The War Maker" raises questions related to identity, the absent marginalized and ignored refugee within the media narrative, and the role of major forces and events, wars, documents, and exile in determining the course of our lives, our family connections, love relationships, and our attempt to achieve our dreams.
Husam Abed was born in 1980. He is a Palestinian Jordanian versatile artist with multilayered projects in his art career. He is a theatre creator, director, performer, puppeteer, musician, and producer living in Prague, Czech Republic. As a community theatre maker and facilitator, he believes in theatre as a public practice, a tool for social change, for rewriting personal and collective history, and for finding new narrations.
