Our story
Dafa began in 2009 in Jordan, using puppetry to reach and connect with Palestinian communities living in the camps — art as a way to build trust, tell real stories, and bring people together.
In 2015, that work grew into Dafa Theater, a Prague-based company co-founded by Husam Abed and Réka Deák, two graduates of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (DAMU).
At Dafa Theater, warmth isn't just a word — it's the essence of our identity. Rooted in the Arabic word dafa, meaning warmth — the kind that isn't given from a position above someone, but built together, in the room, side by side. Dafa sees theatre as a search — an urgent, ongoing rehearsal for the future.
In the last 10 years, Dafa dramaturgy focused on three themes: First, creating performances and initiating projects that deal with past, current events and envisioned future. Such performances are drawn from personal experiences of Dafa members, literature and philosophical works or nowadays topics. Second, Dafa focuses on myths and archetypes. Dafa Theater finds inspiration in World mythologies, fairy tales, manuscripts, music and poetry. Third, Dafa focuses on the past century's events in Palestine and Belad AlSham (the Levant) — events still unfolding, still shaping people's lives, their identity, and their being today.
In our productions, we interpret real stories as collaborators, answerable for the choices we make. In our residencies and labs, we hand that authorship over entirely — the story, and how it's told, belong to the person telling it.
Dafa Theater works as an object and physical theater lab, a touring company, and a platform for community-driven storytelling. Before an object tells someone's story, we ask what it can do on its own — its own logic, its own possibilities. Dafa members research the connection between visual narrative, physical theater, music, rhythm, and multimedia — and how personal experience becomes embodied: carried by the body and the object together, not just narrated. Dafa searches how that embodiment crosses boundaries, connects, and opens dialogue between people and places.
Today, that work continues under Husam Abed, Jeries AbuJaber, and Matej Vejdelek, alongside Réka Deak and a wider circle of collaborators across design, production, and outreach.
OUR WORK
Productions
Residencies & Labs
Residencies & Labs
Our shows are accessible for international audiences and ready for international Touring
Residencies & Labs
Residencies & Labs
Residencies & Labs
Our residencies and labs give participants the tools to turn their own experience into performance — through puppetry, object work, and physical theater. As in our productions, we start by asking what an object can do on its own; here, that search belongs to the participants themselves, as they shape their own stories into something embod
Our residencies and labs give participants the tools to turn their own experience into performance — through puppetry, object work, and physical theater. As in our productions, we start by asking what an object can do on its own; here, that search belongs to the participants themselves, as they shape their own stories into something embodied, not just told — building confidence on stage, and connection with others who've done the same.
Alongside our residencies, Dafa runs education-focused workshops with children in schools and at festivals, using the same methods to open that same process to younger participants from an early age.
LIV'in Festival
Residencies & Labs
LIV'in Festival
An alternative cultural encounter in the living rooms of people of Prague.
partnerships
Artivism
Eco Awarness
Eco Awarness
Art solidarity, inclusive theatre, and freedom of expression drive our community work — using performance to stand with people whose stories are too often silenced or erased.
Eco Awarness
Eco Awarness
Eco Awarness
Turning environmental urgency into stories people can feel — through Eco-Flight, The Night the Earth Shook, and our climate and recycling work with Qutoof in Jordan.
Art Science
Eco Awarness
Art Science
Dafa's Art Science work turns complex science into puppetry, object theater, and film. Through Please ASK!, made with quantum physicists at the Technical University of Prague and QWorld–QCzech, Dafa creates theater for young audiences exploring quantum physics. Dafa's puppets have also appeared beyond the company's own productions — inclu
Dafa's Art Science work turns complex science into puppetry, object theater, and film. Through Please ASK!, made with quantum physicists at the Technical University of Prague and QWorld–QCzech, Dafa creates theater for young audiences exploring quantum physics. Dafa's puppets have also appeared beyond the company's own productions — including Quing Solomon, a quantum-physics short film directed by Réka Deák and shortlisted for Quantum Shorts 2020, in which Husam Abed performed as puppeteer.
ABOUT US
OUR MISSION
We reimagine lived experience through objects, bodies, and space — turning what's lived into what's embodied — and open that practice to the communities we work with.
OUR VISION
We envision object theatre recognized as a way of seeing and being seen — where the search for what bodies, objects, and space can do stands as seriously as memory and history. And we envision authorship following the same principle everywhere: real stories, told by the people who lived them, moving as freely as the theatre that carries them.
OUR APPROACH
On Visibility
Most theater work about displacement assumes visibility is always the goal — that the truest service theatre can offer is to make someone fully seen. We're not sure that's always true. Some bodies are permitted to be seen more freely than others; some are made even hyper-visible in ways they never chose, read as a category — victim, threat, foreigner — before they're read as a person. We don't think theatre can escape from that risk.
This is part of why we work with objects. An object can carry a story without demanding the same exposure a body does — it already holds its own memory and history, letting someone be present without being fully identified. We don't think this makes object theatre a safer form of representation than any other; every form of representation may risk falling into stereotypes if it's handled carelessly. What it offers is a choice most direct representation doesn't: visibility on the terms the person telling the story chooses — including, sometimes, the choice not to be fully seen at all.
That even raises the harder question — why represent anyone at all? We don't have a clean answer. What we have is an approach that tries to stay honest about the risk every time it chooses to tell one — stories embodied, always, in the hands of the people who lived them.
OUR VALUES
Our core values
- Authorship — who tells the story, and who answers for it.
- Craft — the discipline of finding a story through what an object and body can do.
- Restraint — a story earns its weight through honesty and care for the person who lived it.
- Warmth — a space built side by side, not offered from above.
1. Authorship
In productions, we interpret real stories with the people who lived them, as collaborators — but the choices, and what we owe the person whose story it is, are ours to answer for. In residencies and labs, we hand authorship over entirely: the story, and how it's told, belong to the person telling it.
2. Craft
Before an object tells someone's story, we ask what it can do on its own — its own logic, its own possibilities. That search is as disciplined as it is playful, and it's often where the story's real weight, and its lightness, are found.
3. Restraint
A story earns its weight through honesty and care for the person who lived it.
4. Warmth
Dafa means warmth — and warmth isn't given from a position above someone, it's built together. We don't arrive as experts with something to offer, to communities or to each other; every space and every collaboration is one we shape side by side.
OUR PROGRAMS
Our work spans theatre productions, residencies and labs, short film and animation, research and development, and the LIV'in Festival — each one an extension of the same practice: turning real, lived experience into object and physical theater. Some of this work we author ourselves; some we hand over entirely to the people whose stories they are.
Our Partners
