Highland Lake – On Saturday, August 29th, at 7:30pm, NACL invites audiences to witness a selection of scenes from Rawya El Chab’s Immortal: Rise and Fall of the Jarmak Battalion, including audio-visual elements that Rawya and her collaborators will be developing during their residency.

Rawya El Chab is a theater maker, performer, and storyteller based in New York City. She makes performances that dig through archives, whisper to ghosts, and ask what happens when history refuses to sit still — or when the present refuses to make sense. Working across theater, performance art, and audiovisual media, she explores power, memory, and the mechanics of collective decision-making. Drawing from post-war Lebanon and her work in refugee camps, she creates spaces where participants don’t just watch democracy unfold; they practice it, fail at it, and test what breaks it from within.

Immortal: Rise and Fall of the Jarmak Battalion (the third in a trilogy of solo storytelling performances) is an excavation of the early years of the Lebanese Civil War through oral testimony, archival material, and spatial sound.

The project treats war not as event but as ecology — something that reshapes land, domestic life, and the quiet systems by which people survive. Research into plant life in southern Lebanon shapes the set and projection design, building a visual language that moves between absence and reconstruction. From that research grows something stranger: a speculative mythology of what has been erased, and what refuses to disappear.

Homemade soup and conversation with the artists will follow the presentation at 110 Highland Lake Rd, Highland Lake, NY.

More information at NACL.ORG.