Dear reader,

Dear reader,

Do you ever feel lonely?

We’ve definitely been there, although for the last few years, we’ve felt something different. We’ve known each other for a while now, so we feel safe to open up to you: We’ve felt like a burden at times—vulnerable and without our own home, reliant on the houses of our partners. Though we may have felt like a burden, at least we haven’t felt lonely. Rather, we’ve been surrounded by all of you, across many stages and programmes. With our theatre sloooowly being reconstructed, we had to ask others to mutualize space and resources, engaging in what will become a five-year collaboration.

This is not an attempt to romanticize our condition; the support of others is not an easy thing to ask for. In a world where we’re taught: be your own little island, be productive, independent, do not burden others, we come to view self-reliance as paramount to success. But now we wonder: what is solidarity—without a burden to carry?

If solidarity emerges from need (and God, these certainly are times of need), then maybe “solidarity” in easy times is nothing of the sort. This reality is heavy to inhabit. Every day, we have witnessed the genocide perpetrated in Gaza, the resourcedriven war exerted by western powers in Goma, the ethnic cleansing in Darfur, the erosion of rights for the most vulnerable groups by governments globally. Amongst all the injustice unfolding far beyond theatres (and also within them), we have tried to stand radically together.

Together with audiences, artists and cultural workers, we’ve navigated sickness, anger, and mourning. As we watched it all unfold, we stood, although it often felt we were standing in quicksand. Standing together sometimes feels like the only thing we can do. Solidarity became more than strategy; it was survival itself, a way to obstinately feel in a world that pushes us continuously towards apathy.

As care, resistance and connection became more urgent, more alive to us, not only in our personal journey, but concretely in the wider world, we realized something: What comes out of need turns out to be necessity; when times are heavy, the load is lighter if shared by many. We’ve asked ourselves the question, how to mend our brokenness? And of course, we do not have the answer. But we think it begins when we start to imagine each problem as a collective one.

To be without a fixed home, as we have been, is considered a burden. When we receive another’s care, when we are invited in, extending this care to others is a given: we want to share our pieces, or even, to break some pieces into two. And what forms from this practice is an ecosystem of sharing, of shared responsibility, shared destiny, the knowledge that to uplift another uplifts us all. In the coming years, we will return to our home, but what we have built together and shared does not stop there. Our doors will be open on all sides to you. In the meantime, we will be here and there, for and with each other.

So dear, let us be each other’s burden. With hope always,

Kaaitheater

(Text by Maria Dogahe, Elia Ephron & Dagmar Dirkx)