IMPRIMATUR by Alessandro Paschitto
First performance in Lebanon
Radio Karantina – Beirut
10-17 November 2025
Directed and adapted for the radio by Chrystele Khodr
With the voices of Rodrigue Sleiman andChrystele Khodr
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A world-premiere radio production.
With IMPRIMATUR, Alessandro Paschitto leads us into a space where language – that which should be impressed, that which should affirm a “yes” – becomes at once an act and its own undoing, both form and vanishing trace. The imprimatur that ought to authorise, to sanction, to begin, turns here into a missed gesture: communication that falters, the message that never quite lands.
In this radio adaptation, the blank page remains ever present, silent, suspended, unsettling. The performers – at least two, of any gender, ideally in balanced alternation – inhabit a landscape of words, pauses, distances, and sudden ruptures. The soundscape itself becomes the stage: the laptop as a miniature theatre, the printer’s rotating heads as creative engines, the voice as a fragile bridge between presence and absence.
The piece unfolds in microscenes: a girl abandoned and healing; a couple conceiving a child; a birth, a death; the universe expanding endlessly. “I’ll come to you,” says a voice, “I’m on my way.” And yet the more it approaches, the further it seems to drift, as if the act of speech itself extends the void it seeks to fill.
A disembodied phone conversation follows, the other never answers. Behind each speaker stands a prompter, whispering every word almost inaudibly. Speech dislocates, identities blur, and what remains is the bare mechanics of representation.
The action erupts, then collapses: a struggle, absurd, primal, liberating, until silence reclaims everything.
IMPRIMATUR is a radiophonic experiment about the impossibility of saying and the beauty of trying nonetheless. It is the “yes” that never arrives, but still vibrates in the air — a refusal transformed into resonance.
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Chrystèle Khodr is a Beirut-based theater performer, playwright, and director. She studied theater at the Lebanese University’s Institute of Fine Arts and trained in physical theater at L’École Internationale de Théâtre LASSAAD in Brussels, rooted in Jacques Lecoq’s pedagogy. Her artistic work stems from a desire to reconstruct collective memory through personal narratives, using theater as a medium for research, testimony, and historical engagement.
Between 2009 and 2012, she created intimate solo and small-format works such as Bayt Byout, 2007 or how I smashed my bubble envelopes, and Beirut Sepia, presented across Lebanon and Europe. Her acclaimed production Augures premiered in 2021 at Théâtre Tournesol in Beirut and toured major European festivals. Exploring economic speculation and its influence on theatrical narratives, she developed Rise and Fall of Orient Swiss – Bedtime Stories and the installation Who Killed Youssef Beidas? (2022). Awarded the Ibsen Scope, Khodr wrote and directed Ordalie (2023), inspired by Ibsen’s The Pretenders, which received critical acclaim and toured extensively in Europe. Currently, she is developing Record with Nadim Deaibes, retracing the 1976 Tel al-Zaatar massacre, set to premiere in 2025 at Festival Sens’Interdits. Chrystèle is an associate artist at Théâtre des 13 Vents – National Dramatic Center of Montpellier.