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Arna and Juliano Mer Khamis are mother and son who started theatre in Palestine to help children live during the two intifada between 2000 and 2002 against the occupation of their territories from the Israel troups.People living in West Europe or North America cannot understand what means to live in an outdoor prison. You have to try living there some months and feeling like an animal in cage. The following videos want to show how children live their childhood in towns like Jenin or Ramallah and to thank Arna and her work with the group Arna's children. We also want to thank her son, Juliano, who went on working for the nowadays children in Palestine reopening the destroyed theatre, now called The freedom theatre where he used to learn and teach the children as well with his dear mother.

The reason why we watch the videos is the attempt to share these children's everyday life, we cannot imagine how painful is. The next video is about Arna's son Juliano and his work today.

Last May The Freedom Theatre performed a play in the Refugee Camp for reflecting about dictatorship,revolution,and freedom. They chose Animal Farm by G.Orwell,who wrote it in the 20th century to tell Europe, between nazism and communism, what happens in a country without democracy. If you want to watch the play, visit the website
http://www.thefreedomtheatre.org

Rave Party vs Royal Albert Hall

Here is the Rave Manifesto:

Our emotional state of choice is Ecstasy. Our nourishment of choice is Love. Our addiction of choice is technology. Our religion of choice is music. Our currency of choice is knowledge. Our politics of choice is none. Our society of choice is utopian though we know it will never be.

You may hate us. You may dismiss us. You may misunderstand us. You may be unaware of our existence. We can only hope you do not care to judge us, because we would never judge you. We are not criminals. We are not disillusioned. We are not drug addicts. We are not naive children. We are one massive, global, tribal village that transcends man-made law, physical geography, and time itself. We are The Massive. One Massive.

We were first drawn by the sound. From far away, the thunderous, muffled, echoing beat was comparable to a mother's heart soothing a child in her womb of concrete, steel, and electrical wiring. We were drawn back into this womb, and there, in the heat, dampness, and darkness of it, we came to accept that we are all equal. Not only to the darkness, and to ourselves, but to the very music slamming into us and passing through our souls: we are all equal. And somewhere around 35Hz we could feel the hand of God at our backs, pushing us forward, pushing us to push ourselves to strengthen our minds, our bodies, and our spirits. Pushing us to turn to the person beside us to join hands and uplift them by sharing the uncontrollable joy we felt from creating this magical bubble that can, for one evening, protect us from the horrors, atrocities, and pollution of the outside world. It is in that very instant, with these initial realizations that each of us was truly born.

We continue to pack our bodies into clubs, or warehouses, or buildings you've abandoned and left for naught, and we bring life to them for one night. Strong, throbbing, vibrant life in it's purest, most intense, most hedonistic form. In these makeshift spaces, we seek to shed ourselves of the burden of uncertainty for a future you have been unable to stabilize and secure for us. We seek to relinquish our inhibitions, and free ourselves from the shackles and restraints you've put on us for your own peace of mind. We seek to re-write the programming that you have tried to indoctrinate us with since the moment we were born. Programming that tells us to hate, that tells us to judge, that tells us to stuff ourselves into the nearest and most convenient pigeon hole possible. Programming that even tells us to climb ladders for you, jump through hoops, and run through mazes and on hamster wheels. Programming that tells us to eat from the shiny silver spoon you are trying to feed us with, instead of nourish ourselves with our own capable hands. Programming that tells us to close our minds, instead of open them.

Are you interested in or do you prefer anything different?

Where do you feel at your best?

Royal Albert Hall

Going underground

Ever since the Victorians decided to run trains underneath London, many major world cities have folllowed suit and now rely on metros to keep their population moving.

In the 1860s, when the British Empire was at its largest and wealthiest, London was quite literally the capital of the world. The city was growing rapidly and as its population grew as well, transport within the city began a big issue. Roads that had been originally designed for smaller, slower vehicles now became choked up with horses, carriages and pedestrians. A solution was needed, and people looked to the innovations of the Industrial Revolution for answers. Soon, people hit on a radical new idea, namely that it could be possible to transport people by trains underground. The invention of the steam engine was relatively new and excting, and the idea of combining this with inner-city travels was seen as somewhat preposterous but nonetheless worth a try. So it was that in 1863, using techniques borrowed from digging tunnels for other uses ( such as pedestrian tunnels, waterways and sewers) a 2-mile line from Paddington in west London to Farringdon in East London was excavated. The Metropolitan Railway opened and, despite the smoke-filled, cramped conditions, was immediately adopted by Londoners as a fashionable way to travel. As traffic above ground worsened, the Metropolitan Railway grew, eventuall coming to be called The Underground, or more affectionately, The Tube, a reference to the narrow tube-like tunnels that characterise the older parts of the network.

(taken from Mary Glasgow Magazines, reported by Alistairs Simmons)

Fifteen years ago, Paul Middlewick found himself staring at a London Underground map when he discovered the shape of an elephant hidden within the Circle and the Central Lines. So he thought to create a website with all his discoveries about animals on the underground.

If you cannot believe, visit http://www.animalsontheunderground.com/

Visit London

You have several ways to visit London. You can relax yourself walking through the many parks, unique for a big city like it is, you can go for the majestic monuments, you can experience the West End musical life, you can stay a whole day in Trocadero, you can go around the street markets like those in Camden town and Portobello Road, enjoying the street artists in Covent Garden or sitting on a stool at the Globe Theatre during a Shakespearian play.

But there is a very interesting way to live London: it is through literature, I mean, visiting the places where writers lived and wrote their works.

London's Dickens is one of the most attractive experience you have to live to better understand what you have read in the short-story A Christmas Carol

Here you can watch the last clip taken from the musical about it.

Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts

Endless forms is the title of the exhibition in Cambridge for the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth. It is collocated within the Fitzwilliam Museum, the second most important museum in England, after London, that contains a plenty of wonderful paintings from Italian, Spanish, French and Flemish painters from the XVI to the XX century and arts from Egypt, Greece, Rome, the Near and the Far East.

Digesting England by the pound

"Can you tell me where my country lies?"
said the unifaun to his true love's eyes.
"It lies with me!" cried the Queen of Maybe
- for her merchandise, he traded in his prize.

"Paper late!" cried a voice in the crowd.
"Old man dies!" The note he left was signed 'Old Father Thames'
- it seems he's drowned;
selling england by the pound.

Citizens of Hope & Glory,
Time goes by - it's "the time of your life".
Easy now, sit you down.
Chewing through your Wimpey dreams,
they eat without a sound;
digesting england by the pound.

Young man says "you are what you eat" - eat well.
Old man says "you are what you wear" - wear well.
You know what you are, you don't give a damn;
bursting your belt that is your homemade sham.

The Captain leads his dance right on through the night
- join the dance...
Follow on! Till the Grail sun sets in the mould.
Follow on! Till the gold is cold.
Dancing out with the moonlit knight,
Knights of the Green Shield stamp and shout.

There's a fat old lady outside the saloon;
laying out the credit cards she plays Fortune.
The deck is uneven right from the start;
and all of their hands are playing apart.

The Captain leads his dance right on through the night
- join the dance...
Follow on! A Round Table-talking down we go.
You're the show!
Off we go with - You play the hobbyhorse,
I'll play the fool.
We'll tease the bull
ringing round & loud, loud & round.

Follow on! With a twist of the world we go.
Follow on! Till the gold is cold.
Dancing out with the moonlit knight,
Knights of the Green Shield stamp and shout.

The christian heritage in Cambridge

Cambridge is famous all over the world for its 28 university colleges, where great authors like John Milton, scientists like Charles Darwin and Isaac Newton, politicians like sir Herbert Pembroke studied. But what is to remember is that the cultural background of the town gown is christian. In fact the presence of a church in the first millennium, the Round Church like the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem witnesses the faith in Jesus as the Roman Emperor Constantine wanted the Church to be built.