Racha Baroud
+ More info- Live performance
- maison folie Wazemmes, Lille
- 50min
- Pass Latitudes
What if these tears were not only mine ?
“You are neither the first nor the last.” Between childhood memories and adult awareness, the director and performance artist Racha Baroud revisits the intimate stories of her family, and finds hope for a reconciliation.
It is nearly dark in the images appearing on the screen: we glimpse palm trees swaying in the wind, the movement of the sea, a concrete terrace. It’s the house of Jal el Bahr, Racha Baroud’s grandparents in Lebanon, where she spent her childhood. Here is where it all began: the imposing figure, even after his death, of a grandfather taller than everyone else; the severe, austere figure of a grandmother who was married when still a child … And it is here where the artist came to understand as an adult how the solitudes of all the women of her family are woven together. Through words, the image, and the body in resonance, Racha Baroud reveals the unspoken, and shows us the mechanisms of an unconscious heritage which crosses through the generations.
Accessibility disclaimer :
→ high volume
→ spoken text is in french and arabic with french subtitles
→ this performance contains mentions of sexual violence
Avec le soutien des Lieux culturels pluridisciplinaires de la Ville de Lille
Biography(s)
Racha Baroud is a Lebanese performer and stage director. Alongside a Master’s degree in Theatre Studies at Sorbonne Nouvelle University, she joined Jacques Fontaine’s Atelier du jeu in Paris. She continued her training with a focus on body and voice at the Grotowski Institute in Poland, and further developed her performative practice with various masters across Europe, notably Irena Tomazin or Theodoros Terzopoulos.
In her personal creations, Racha Baroud’s work revolves around death, memory, and intimacy. In 2015, she staged Today It Was My Birthday in Paris, a musical tribute to Tadeusz Kantor’s Theatre of Death. In 2020, following the explosion at the Port of Beirut, she co-directed the documentary Ali, Hachem and Khaled with filmmaker Roy Arida. In 2022, she presented her first solo performance, What If These Tears Were Not Only Mine?, in Beirut. In 2023, she began a performative research project on the question of erasure in collaboration with patients at the Malévoz psychiatric hospital in Monthey, Switzerland.
She is currently working on her next performance, When Adjusted to Darkness, in collaboration with composer Kinda Hassan, with whom she now forms a duo focused on the creation of sound-based performances. In 2026, as part of the Mediterranean Season, she will also present Elegy of a Disappearance, a work co-directed with artists Kinda Hassan and Carine Doumit, and produced by GMEM. Since 2019, she has been a member of the team at Studio Amalgam, a space dedicated to the performing arts in Beirut.
Credits
Concept, performance, and video: Racha Baroud
Artistic collaborator: Karol Jarek
Assistant director: Yara Boustany
Dramaturgy: Wissam Arbache
Choreography: Yara Boustany, Anna Beghelli
Composition: Charbel Haber
Sound design: Fadi Tabbal
Sound engineer and video operator: Joy Moughanni
Lighting design: Tarek Mourad
Set design: Riwa Baroud
Editing: Nader Bahsoun, Tatiana el Dahdah
Translation: Sophia Moussa Fitch, Aya el Dika, Kate Ryan
Performance recording: Pierre-Emmanuel Urcun and Kassem Dabaji
Supported by:
Abu Dhabi Cultural Foundation
Amalgam Studio
French Institute of Lebanon
Embassy of Poland
Pro Helvetia Cairo
Malévoz Cultural Quarter
Stank Production
Théâtre Sévelin 36
