With his passing on July 10, 2025, the theatrical artist, storyteller, and owner of the Wonderbox/Sandouq El-Ajab, Adel Tartir, left us a theatrical legacy to preserve, celebrate, and continue, just as he always urged us to do. For more than half a century, Adel Tartir devoted his life to the theater and laid the founding pillars of the contemporary Palestinian theater movement. From Al-Saqifa Theater to Balaleen Troupe, and later the Sandouq El-Ajab Theater, Tartir believed wholeheartedly that genuine, committed theater—born of and belonging to the people—plays an enlightening, mobilizing, educational, and liberating role.

Tartir believed that real theater is an ongoing creative and resistant engagement; that theater is life; and that theater infused with love and vitality is never to be feared nor feared for. Adel Tartir repeated time and again: “We live theater, we breathe it, we walk it, we dance it, we sleep it”, and he always argued that theater—the father of the arts—is, above all, a space, stage, and arena for confession, revelation, provocation, debate, and creative confrontation.

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