In this tribute, his son celebrates the actor and theatre-maker Adel Tartir’s relentless belief in theatre as liberatory practice—a legacy that endures beyond his death.
With his passing on July 10, 2025, the artist, storyteller, and guardian of the Sandouq El-Adjab (eng.: Wonderbox), Adel Tartir, left a theatrical imprint to preserve and celebrate. For more than half a century, he devoted his life to the theater and laid the founding pillars of the contemporary Palestinian theatre movement. From Al-Saqifa Theatre to Balaleen Troupe, and later the Sandouq El-Ajab Theatre, he believed that genuine, committed theatre—born of and belonging to the people—plays a mobilizing, educational, and liberating role. Tartir understood theatre as an ongoing creative and resistant engagement. He repeated time and again: “We live theatre, we breathe it, we walk it, we dance it, we sleep it.”
On this occasion, I want to focus not only on the artist but on the man himself, writing as his eldest son, friend, and colleague. Forty years of warmth, passion, love for theatre, hope, determination, creative struggle, and shared pride.
Alaa Tartir, Program Director of Al-Shabaka, Engaged Scholar, Global Citizen 