Deadlift

How much can a body carry before it breaks?

Palestinian director Bashar Murkus transforms Suleiman Mansour’s iconic image of a porter carrying Jerusalem into a wordless visual performance.

Suleiman Mansour’s painting Jamal Al Mahamel, often translated as Camel of Burdens, shows a porter bent beneath the unbearable weight of an entire city. In DEADLIFT, Bashar Murkus translates this enduring symbol into intense physical theatre, asking how much a human body can bear and when endurance itself becomes resistance.

Created without spoken text, DEADLIFT centres around a Palestinian ensemble, moving through cycles of weight, exhaustion, injury, care and reconstruction. Watch as a city is carried, broken and built again testing the limits of the human body.

Bashar Murkus is a Palestinian theatre director and playwright and the Artistic Director of Khashabi Theatre in Haifa. His work moves between theatre, performance and visual art to create a distinctive visual and physical language. His performances have been staged across the world and engage with urgent political questions while remaining rooted in deeply human concerns.

Poetic and visually stunning, DEADLIFT is a tribute to people living through destruction and to the stubborn human impulse to rise, carry and build again