I'm Elise Hugh. You're listening to Ted Talks Daily. Amir Nazar Zubi is a theater writer and director,

but his performances go on in rather unconventional spaces. He makes traveling shows for refugees

about the refugee experience. In his talk recorded for Ted Monterey

2021, Zubi shares his vision for taking theater out of the theater and into the streets

and the power in this ambitious approach. Do you know who's watching you?

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I'm Amir Nizar Zerbi. I was born in East Jerusalem, in a tough part of town between

Bethanina neighborhood and the Shafat refugee camp. I'm a mixed child. That means my mother is Jewish

and my father is Palestinian. So the refugee experience runs very deep in the DNA of the family. When my Jewish

grandparents were fleeing Europe because of World War II, they came to Palestine and drove the

other part of my family into exile. When I was 14, I stumbled by accident into a theater show

in this rough part of town. And I fell in love. I fell in love with a reality that was being created in front of me, a reality that was full of possibilities, that was wilder, that was free, a reality that was an opposite contrast of the harsh reality we were living in.

And I became a theater practitioner.

Becoming a theater practitioner in Palestine is like conjuring water in the desert.

We don't have the infrastructure.

We don't have the big artistic institutions.

What we do have is a need and something to say about

the world we live in. Taking my shows to communities and refugee camps in Palestine, I was always

...