‘Jogging’

“Those who know me will find that they did not really know me, those who do not know me yet, will curse the day they met me,” warns Hanane Hajj Ali at the start of her performance.

Hanane Hajj Ali is one of the most famous theater figures and agitprop exponents in Lebanon, even if she is now already past fifty. The monologue of the actress, wife and mother who goes jogging every day to prevent osteoporosis, obesity and depression, takes the viewer through the streets of Beirut and into her dreams, desires and disillusionments and the characters she interprets.

The daily jogging ritual has contradictory effects. Against the backdrop of a city that destroys to rebuild and rebuilds to destroy, the two hormones released by exercising, dopamine and adrenaline, also seem to have alternating destructive and constructive effects.

With Jogging Hanane Hajj Ali presents a multi-layered text that eschews neither the personal nor the political.