Tania El Khoury Comes to REDCAT In May

Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater (REDCAT) will present Tania El Khoury's most recent project, The Search for Power, with performances from May 29 - June 1 and an installation from June 4 - 8. 

On a night with a sudden electricity outage in Beirut, the artist Tania El Khoury and her historian husband Ziad Abu-Rish promised each other to research the history of power outages in Lebanon. Sharing the story of this quest, the audience joins El Khoury and Abu-Rish in an intimate gathering to look into archival documents, question inaccessible knowledge, and ultimately reveal lines of power in this theatrical piece. Plumbing archives across five countries, they trace the intersection between public utility infrastructure, state politics, and various popular mobilizations to shape both arenas.

Going as far back as the introduction of electricity in Beirut, before it was even possible to imagine a Lebanese state, El Khoury and Abu-Rish collected documents from archives of colonial powers–Belgium, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States–to uncover a transnational story that locates electricity at the intersection of colonial legacies, the maneuvering of political and economic elites, and everyday acts of resistance and survival. 

The Search for Power can be experienced as a ticketed live performance or as an open installation without ticket or reservation. In the open installation, the audience is invited to listen through headphones to a pre-recorded text and explore the archives box in their own time. 

REDCAT and the Fisher Center at Bard co-present Tania El Khoury's The Search For Power.

A Co-Production with the Fisher Center at Bard.

Co-commissioned by Anti Festival and Shubbak Festival. Supported by Arts Council England and brut Wien.

Tania El Khoury is a 2024 - 2026 Fisher Center LAB artist in residence with lead support from the Mellon Foundation. Fisher Center LAB is the signature residency and commissioning program of the Fisher Center at Bard.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Tania El Khoury is a live artist whose work focuses on audience interactivity and its political potential. She creates installations and performances in which the audience is a witness and an active collaborator. Tania's work has been translated to multiple languages and shown in 32 countries across six continents in spaces ranging from museums to cable cars. She is the recipient of the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, the Soros Art Fellowship, the Bessies Outstanding Production Award, the International Live Art Prize, the Total Theatre Innovation Award, and the Arches Brick Award. Tania is Distinguished Artist in Residence of Theater & Performance and the Director of the OSUN Center for Human Rights & the Arts at Bard College in New York. She holds a PhD from Royal Holloway, University of London. She is associated with the Forest Fringe collective of artists in the UK and is a cofounder of the urban research and live art collective Dictaphone Group in Lebanon.

TICKETS & INFORMATION:

Performances
May 29 - May 31, 2025 at 8:30 p.m. 
May 31 - Jun 1, 2025 at 3 p.m.