"The Birds That Are Your Hands...How to Start a Fire Under Siege"

By A. David Dahmer

"The wall along the U.S./Mexico border is being constructed by the same company that is building the wall in Palestine," says Madison activist and artist Sol Thea Kelley-Jones, noting just one of the commonalities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the daily struggles along the U.S.-Mexico border. "But that's not where the similarities end. There are checkpoints in both areas. [There are] helicopters, drones. [There are] people asking everywhere for your identification — and those who appear to be brown or of color are seen suddenly as suspect, as an outsider, and as a threat. There are so many parallels in these two experiences."
Kelley-Jones explores the people and the militarized landscapes of these two border places in her original piece "the birds that are your hands ... how to start a fire under siege,"  which is currently playing at the Broom Street Theater. This politically charged, provocative performance delves into universal themes of coercive population control, racialized state violence, and militarized borders. It shares the voices and stories of those so often deemed "collateral."
"I felt it was my role and responsibility both as an activist and an artist to find a way to share these voices that we don't hear," says Kelley-Jones, who is both the writer and the director of the play. "It's [about] people who have been systematically silenced and whose voices have been relegated to the margins in all different ways. They kind of scream out and plead and pray and demand to be heard."

The stories are fictional composites from various tidbits from Kelley-Jones's experiences in both Palestine and Mexico. Kelley-Jones embarked on this project after teaching theater in refugee camps in the Palestinian Territories and working on behalf of immigrant rights at Coalicion Derechos de Humanos on the U.S.-Mexico border.
 "I had just got back from Palestine and I was literally in Madison a week before I was in a whole different war zone on the Mexican border," Kelley-Jones says. "It probably wasn't healthy, but it made a whole lot of sense to me at the time.
"In both of these places I had an academic background and done research, but there was also so much everyday real-life experiences — people facing policing from border patrol agents, facing family separation, and having loved ones disappear in the desert during the crossing," Kelley-Jones adds.
Dissecting tyranny and resistance through overlapping stories, "the birds that are your hands" move from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to struggles closer to home on the U.S.-Mexico border.  Even though she spent quite a bit of time in both of these areas and got to know the people well, Kelley-Jones considers herself to be an outsider.
"As a White American, as a person with great access and great privilege, I didn't want to tell these stories for people as much as carve out space to weave these stories into a collage that can get at the deep humanity they share,” she says, "That we all share."

Billed as a multimedia work, "the birds that are your hands” is broad in its reach, but Kelley-Jones also turns inward to focus on individuals close to the action: stone wielders, bread bakers, shepherds, and lovers. Throughout the play there is a lot of imagery of hands and birds. "We're looking at two people who are enclosed by walls and borders," Kelley-Jones says. "One of the things I've seen in my experiences is the great depths of storytelling and how people use their hands to share those stories."
Kelley-Jones also looks at everything that people's hands hold. "From nursing children, from wielding stones, from baking bread, from washing dishes, planting the ground, holding guns, and building the wall," says Kelley-Jones, who co-founded Proud Theater in 1999. "We're looking at the hands as telling the stories."
The hands become like birds, Kelley Jones says. "The hands can be liberated like birds; they can be liberated in their movements even while they are restrained," she says. "It's a theme that goes throughout the play — the people's hands and the stories they weave."
 There are 10 principle actors in the play — some very seasoned and some rookies —  and they are all very versatile.  "It's a great group; an interesting mix of people. They are all fabulous and can play multiple characters," Kelley-Jones says. "To play everything from an elder Israeli man to a young Palestinian, they have to be versatile and they have to be able to connect with their humanity."
The many interesting stories of "Birds" aren't the type of amazing, sensational stories you would find in, for example, the highly acclaimed movie "Slumdog Millionaire."
"Sometimes, ordinary everyday stories can be very effective and entertaining," Kelley-Jones says. "Besides, most of us don't win a million dollars or find love in a subway station.
"These are not exceptional stories by any means. Actually, they're mild in many cases," Kelley-Jones adds. "But I think each and every one of them are extraordinary."
The people, stories, and themes — and life lessons learned — may come from far away, but they hit home right here in Madison.
"There are issues in the play that may seem distant to us, but they are happening right here in our our own community," Kelley-Jones says. "Think of things like increased policing of communities of color.
"It's also a lot of the language we here even in Madison as we divide communities of color and seeking to pit working-class White workers and working-class Black workers against Latino workers," she adds. "These kinds of things — fear mongering — are used to divide people in Palestine."
Social justice has long been a passion for Kelley-Jones, who has been speaking out and taking action since at least the age of 10, when her testimony at a Wisconsin state legislative hearing made headlines statewide. She hopes that one thing people begin to see more of is how different struggles for justice all over the state, nation, and world are often interwoven.
"We can get really singular in our issues in a lot of ways," Kelley-Jones says. "I think it's important that we start to see the interconnection between people's struggles and between people's multiple identities and multiple systems in our world that are so interconnected.
"It's stuff we don't see in the media; we don't see this side of it," she adds. "I think it is new stuff. I think it's scary stuff; it definitely can be scary stuff to see in that it's people every day. It can offer a really human portrayal of resistance but also of each of us and where our hands are and what they are holding and how we can kindle our own fires inside of us and within our own communities."
Her innovative attempt to bring these two unique situations together will hopefully, at the very least, get people talking.
"I hope that it will move people and challenge people," Kelley-Jones says. "I hope that they will learn something and maybe identify with something. I hope it is entertaining, but also meaningful.
"It's really just a beginning — an opening for more conversation," Kelley- Jones adds.  

Through April 19, "the birds that are your hands: how to start a fire under siege" is being presented by the Broom Street Theater, 1119 Williamson St., every Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. and every Sunday at 2 p.m. 
Tickets for evening shows are $9 and matinees are $6.  There will be talkbacks after the March 29, April 5, and 12 performances. To make reservations, call the Broom Street Theater hotline at 244-8338.