GATEWAY by Eliana Rotella
First performance in Lebanon
Gulbenkian Theatre, LAU – Beirut
October 14, 8:00 PM
Directed by Dana Mikhail
In GATEAWAY, Eliana Rotella constructs a dialogue that is at once communication and the failure of communication.
The title itself – a hybrid of gate (door), away (far), and gateway (a device connecting networks) – defines the thematic horizon of the work: love and distance as network phenomena, as a flow of data, interrupted signals, and shared silences.
Two voices (perhaps two women, perhaps any two presences) speak to each other through screens, connections, glitches, apps, and deletions.
The third voice – “this one” – attempts to fill the voids, like an emotional artificial intelligence, an echo of poetry translating what remains unsaid.
The entire text becomes a digital soundscape, where language is no longer merely speech, but also noise, latency, image, and code.
Rotella captures the fragmented intimacy of the contemporary generation: love expressed through messages, nostalgia as a notification, absence as a file being uploaded.
Within the text coexist lyricism and technology, romanticism and backup, fusing into a collective voice that speaks of loss, connection, identity, and precarity.
The structure of the writing – interrupted flow, incomplete messages, fragments of news, sirens, numerical data – conveys the sense of a world in which every relationship is an act of digital survival.
No longer simply theatre, but an emotional architecture of the network: a listening device between the human and the post-human.
GATEAWAY is thus a piece that does not merely tell a story: it happens.
In its hybrid, intimate language, technology becomes confession, and connection – inevitably – isolation.
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Dana Mikhail graduates from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Lebanon, and completes at TAK a four-year practical school for performing arts in Germany. In 2013 she wins the Best Actress of the Year award at Ifab for Fadwa in the film SUR TON SEIN written and directed by Faraj Aoun, which also wins the Brandenburger gate award for Best Film of the Year.
She participates in Ashkal Alwan’s Home Works 5 and tours with Sabab Ensemble, Ensemble Integral, Compagnie Parnas and Collectif Kahraba. She features at Avignon Festival with Compagnie Le Minotaure, at the Münchner Kammerspiele for the Open Border Ensemble and at the Volksbühne in Berlin with director Avo Kaprealian. After the Beirut port explosion, she performs JUDE, a Lebanese adaptation of JAZ by Koffi Kwahulé, in the devastated area of Armenia Street, produced and directed by Alain Saadeh, along jazz pianist Marc Ernest. She takes part in the series Hell’s Gate directed by Amin Dora.
Since 2006 a member of Cologne ensemble bodyincrisis, she curates ROOM SERVICE DIGITAL in 2022, a project involving 30 artists living in Beirut. She directs LEATHERFACE, written by Helmut Krausser, adapted into Lebanese by Georges Hachem and performed by Dana Dia and Moe Yassine, for the reopening of cult Cinema Royal in Burj Hammoud. She takes part in the exhibitions “Les mondes de Willy Aractingi” in Sursock museum and “Allô, Beirut?” in Beit Beirut. She plays the role of Yevkiné in the first adaptation of Sorj Chalandon’s LE QUATRIÈME MUR, directed by David Oelhoffen. She features in SILVERFISH, written, directed and produced by Hussein Nakhal and Cinema Al Fouad.