Dear Laila at Leeds Kirkgate Market

Reflective and deeply resonant, Dear Laila is an intimate, one-to-one performance installation that shares the Palestinian experience of displacement and resistance through the story of a single family. Presented as part of Transform 25, it offers Leeds audiences a rare chance to step into a world otherwise out of reach.

The project began with a simple question. When artist Basel Zaraa’s five-year-old daughter, Laila, asked him about the place he grew up – his childhood home in Yarmouk Palestinian Refugee Camp, Damascus – he couldn’t take her there. It no longer exists. Instead, he began to recreate it for her – not just through words, but by building a detailed model of the house and the neighbourhood it once stood in.

Through miniature models, tactile objects and audio narration, Dear Laila transforms that reconstruction into an immersive storytelling space. Experienced by one audience member at a time, it conveys how war and exile are lived in the most everyday of places – homes, streets, doorways, fragments of community life. This unique and intimate performance tells the story of a normal family living in extraordinary circumstances, and depicts how historical events like the Nakba – the mass displacement of Palestinians in 1948 – continue to shape daily lives across generations. Though the piece recounts Zaraa’s childhood in Damascus, the performance resonates with the ongoing genocide and mass displacement of Palestinian people today.

Basel Zaraa is a UK-based Palestinian artist whose work uses sensory experience to bring audiences closer to the realities of war and exile. His practice is rooted in confronting, expressing and understanding the trauma endured by his community. Dear Laila has already won the ZKB Audience Award 2023 at Zürcher Theater Spektakel, while his earlier collaboration with Lebanese artist Tania El Khoury, As Far As My Fingertips Take Me, received New York’s Bessie Award for Outstanding Production in 2019. His work has now been presented at more than 50 venues and festivals across five continents.

Commissioned by Good Chance Theatre, and happening as part of Transform 25 at Leeds Kirkgate Market, Dear Laila sits at the heart of Transform’s mission: to expand what theatre can be, and to give urgent, unconventional work a platform.

Poignant and profoundly human, Dear Laila is a meditation on memory, home and survival – revealing how even in exile, stories and connections endure.