I learned so much in our class discussion today and have been please to read over your thoughts in your collaboratively created Google Doc. Learning that the Arabic alphabet doesn’t have the letter P reframed the entire show for me–though this fact doesn’t make sense unless you’ve seen it, I guess.

When planning the semester, sometimes happy accidents occur which cannot be predicted. Before today’s class, I didn’t realize that The Band’s Visit would be such a rich experience due to the three languages in the show (Arabic, English, and Hebrew) and that our class would have speakers fluent in all of them. Or that the production’s canny use of multilingualism spoke to certain segments of the audience, while not to others, and how its use of language allowed audience members to feel the inability and difficulty of communication in this way. Brilliant!

I appreciate the dialogue and debate you’ve begun in the document and hope to continue to engage with apolitical/political art. How might we consider the relatively apolitical nature of The Band’s Visit to itself be a political decision? Conversely, what is the burden of representation when you set a film/musical about an encounter between Egyptians and Israelis? Is there one that this property avoids? Or is it possible that because of the language barriers, politics might not have realistically been an explicit part of the encounter (noting that “politics” are always already implicit)?