Conversation between Tania El Khoury & Basel Zaraa and Kerstin Schroth about As Far As My Fingertips Take Me

Tania, As Far As My Fingertips Take Me is a collaboration with Basel Zaraa, who performs the work. How did you meet, and what was the starting point for creating the performance?

Basel and I met at a solidarity event hosted by Amnesty in London. While chatting outside the event, we discovered that we happened to live on the exact same street in London, and we planned to have a coffee the next morning. We became friends.

A year or so later, I was invited by LIFT Festival to propose a project about migration. I read the email on a plane and then fell asleep. It was a period of my life when I was often on a plane. While I was asleep, I saw the entire piece of As Far As My Fingertips Take Me in my dream including the part in which Basel performs. As soon as I woke up, I quickly noted down the idea and shared it with Basel, who was open to it.

We worked on it quickly and smoothly. The piece was originally created for a single event in London, and when it opened, I wasn’t even there—I was on a plane again. The work turned out to have a life of its own, touching so many audiences across the world, taking Basel to places we knew nothing about, and being translated into several languages.

Tania, this intimate work takes us as spectators on a sound- and touch-based journey—a poetic experience pointing to a big and difficult problem: increasingly closed borders and the rejection of refugees and migrants across Europe. I am curious to hear how you arrived at this performance format.

I’ve studied theatre all my life, through every level of education, including a PhD, but I’ve always struggled with the concept of entertaining faceless crowds sitting in the dark. From the first work I created as a very young adult in Beirut, I experimented with interactivity, bringing performance into the audience’s lap and bringing the audience closer and closer to the work.

I wasn’t following any particular format, genre, or rule, and I never paid much attention to norms. Eventually, when I moved to London and discovered live art as a multidisciplinary, form-defying practice, I began to think about interactivity and intimacy as mediums with political potential in live art.

Basel, you have performed this work – a one to one encounter with one audience member at a time – in various countries. Do you notice differences in how the performance is received depending on where you present it?

I didn’t feel that the location was what made the difference in the audience’s interaction of the performance. What I noticed wasn’t so much the difference in the venue itself, but rather the way the audience’s hands and arms reacted to the performance.
Touch is an amazing way to connect, it was enough to break down the barrier between us, allowing us to feel and to reconnect with each other.