{"id":33465,"date":"2024-06-21T09:11:15","date_gmt":"2024-06-21T07:11:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldmarkaz\/?p=33465"},"modified":"2024-06-22T12:40:54","modified_gmt":"2024-06-22T10:40:54","slug":"creating-community-with-community-theatre","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldmarkaz\/creating-community-with-community-theatre\/","title":{"rendered":"Creating Community with Community Theatre"},"content":{"rendered":"
Can theatre drive political change? Rarely, but it creates the conditions of possibility for achieving it.<\/span><\/h5>\n

 <\/p>\n

Victoria Lupton<\/h4>\n

 <\/p>\n

A young woman holds the giant head of an orange cartoon fox costume. Her wan smile matches that of the animal. In faltering Arabic, she explains to her fellow actors that after a year banned from contacting her son, she hid in this fox head in the hopes of seeing him at a children\u2019s party. She scraped the money together to buy the fox, naming it \u201cYorno\u201d because she would either manage to see him, or not \u2013\u2013 Yes or No. Ultimately, her plan worked. \u201cI was very happy and very sad at the same time,\u201d she says of the hours she spent playing with her son. \u201cIt was hot and I was crying inside Yorno.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is Tima, an Ethiopian woman living in Lebanon, appearing in a scene in TILKA<\/em>, a documentary film directed by Myriam Geagea. Taking its title from the Arabic word meaning \u201cthose\u201d in the feminine, TILKA<\/em> is the first film made by Seenaryo<\/a>, the organization I founded which makes participatory theatre across Lebanon, Jordan and (more recently) Palestine. I have known some of these women for eight years; I produced <\/span>TILKA<\/i> and advised on the play of the same name whose creation the film depicts.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Tima,
Tima, an Ethiopian woman in Lebanon, who wore a fox costume to be able to see her son.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The film follows a group of five women as they live together in the mountains above Beirut in March 2021 while making a play. The women are not professional actors; they live in different regions of Lebanon and come from Lebanon, Syria and Ethiopia. The beautiful, calm surroundings of their temporary home at <\/span>Hammana Artist House<\/span><\/a> are a radical departure from routine. Of the women, two have lost custody of their children for years because of <\/span>Lebanon\u2019s sectarian custody laws<\/span><\/a>, which separate divorced mothers from their sons at a young age. These same two women have also lost homes: Tima in the Beirut Port Explosion of August 2020, and Fida after fleeing a massacre of her family in Syria. Two of the women grew up in care. The final woman, Najah, has lived for eight years in a refugee camp in the Bekaa Valley; one scene is filmed in her tent. \u201cIn Hammana I had a space all for myself. Do you think there\u2019s hot water or a shower here?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Over two weeks of residency, and four months of rehearsal, the women tell their own stories and imagine new ones: a group try to stay silent while escaping an angry dog; a human breathes heavily in her astronaut suit in the silence of space; a woman chooses to sell her daughter at the market. (\u201cIf I sell her, they\u2019ll take care of her. If I give her away, they won\u2019t. I don\u2019t want her to suffer like I suffered.\u201d) They build their strength, learning to lift each other up \u2014 literally, as the play\u2019s director Lama Amine is a physical theatre practitioner who trains the women to carry each other as they leap above each other\u2019s heads and walk along walls.<\/span><\/p>\n

They perform their piece of abstract, devised physical theatre at the end of the film to a small and socially-distanced audience: one of the reasons that the film <\/span>TILKA<\/span><\/i> was made was because of the pandemic\u2019s impact on audience attendance. It began as a budgetarily constrained afterthought, simply to allow more members of these women\u2019s communities to be able to engage with the theatre performance they devised, and was conceived as a continuation of Seenaryo\u2019s community practice. But since premiering eight months ago, it has taken on a life of its own, winning prizes at two Beirut festivals, presented at festivals in London, Cambridge and Sheffield in the UK, with screenings planned in other countries.<\/span><\/p>\n

The play tells the story of a group of women, one of them the Mona Lisa, who are the subjects of artworks in a museum. They escape their paintings, deciding that they must travel together to succeed in finding a better home.<\/span><\/p>\n

In creating this piece of theatre, the women become advocates for their rights and those of women in Lebanon. Tima, hidden in her fox costume, is a stand-in for every woman in Lebanon unheard or unseen, isolated from family and homeland by political injustice. This is reflected in the characters in the play, who begin it in full face bandages, which they slowly remove from each other as they show each other their scars. Indeed, Tima hiding in Yorno seems to embody a dramatic archetype of female characters hidden behind masks. Belying the nylon and industrial stitching is a figure as powerful as Rosalind of Shakespeare\u2019s <\/span>As You Like It<\/span><\/i> or Hellena from Aphra Behn\u2019s <\/span>The Rover <\/span><\/i>\u2014 the masked female character, disguised to avoid political persecution and to speak truth to power. Life imitates art which imitates life, in the two-way traffic of the Seenaryo process.<\/span><\/p>\n

The experience of being cut off from the most intimate relationships in life is at the heart of the film <\/span>TILKA<\/span><\/i>. At another point in the film, two young women sit on a stylish maroon sofa, a neat bookcase in the background, explaining that they have stopped waiting for their parents. Fatima \u2014 black-painted nails dancing as she turns the rings on her fingers \u2014 explains that \u201cat 18 I decided to stop looking for them.\u201d She is sitting with her sister Rania in Dar Al Aytam Al Islamiya, the orphanage in which she grew up. She swallows a sob as she says: \u201cAt the end of the day, when I put my head on the pillow at night I would ask myself: where are they? Inside we wanted to meet them, but we\u2019d say to each other that we didn\u2019t.\u201d But this is no simple sob story: the pain of separation has also forged a sibling bond beyond the strictures of the nuclear family. Her sister Rania steps in with a wry smile and a glint in her eye: \u201cWe only wanted them if they were rich, or if they were celebrities. I would say my mother was Rihanna. Fatima\u2019s was French: C\u00e9line Dion.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Seenaryo\u2019s work looks for these moments of unlikely power: imaginative leaps, wry smiles, and downright slapstick when our facilitators propose a prompt or stimulus (a poem, a theme, an image). This stimulus opens space for participants to improvise scenes together; our facilitators listen to and refine their ideas and send them back for a new round of scene-building. It\u2019s a recursive, months-long game of creative ping-pong between the facilitators and the group that ends in a play.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Fida
Fida Al Waer in rehearsal.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Earlier in the film, we see Fida, a Syrian single mother who spent five years separated from her two daughters, hugging them both, laughing on the sofa. Echoing Tima\u2019s smile and the glint in Rania\u2019s eye, she says lightly: \u201cSince we left Syria there hasn\u2019t been a home. It ain\u2019t home. But it\u2019s somewhere. (<\/span>Ma f\u012b bayt. F\u012bsh bayt. F\u012b mak\u0101n.)\u201d <\/span><\/i>Then she clarifies: \u201cI dream of an ideal country, I don\u2019t dream of an ideal home.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

What are the boundaries between private and public lives? How are they drawn by political regimes? And how do women find ways to manoeuvre around them \u2014 sometimes in disguise, sometimes strutting, often forced to seek refuge in hostile environments? In a sense, making a play answers these questions. The women seek a temporary sanctuary onstage. Theatre creates formal settings for injustices to be heard, most crucially by an audience \u2014 however small \u2014 of peers from one\u2019s own community. And sometimes, through a national or an international tour, or even a film documenting the process that travels to audiences further afield.<\/span><\/p>\n

Theatre is by definition ephemeral, at base a simple encounter between a community of actors speaking to a community of spectators. A documentary about a play can be quixotic \u2014 even a contradiction in terms \u2014 sidelining the final performance in favor of the process of collective creation. However, creating conditions to be heard \u2014 not necessarily removing the mask, but exploiting its ambiguity \u2014 is a fundamentally political act.<\/span><\/p>\n

Seenaryo\u2019s work contributes to a tradition of participatory and political theatre in Lebanon, much of which has focused on shifting the audience role from a passive to a proactive one, drawing on approaches that extend from Forum Theatre and <\/span>Theatre of the Oppressed<\/span><\/a> to the more recent Playback Theatre. Through these techniques the audience (\u201cspect-actors\u201d) are responsible for proposing ideas and intervening on the direction of the performance.<\/span><\/p>\n

Rather than focusing on the audience\u2019s role, Seenaryo aims to shift the actors\u2019 role from professional performers to creators and advocates. We also train these creators to lead and facilitate the work themselves, challenging the hierarchies between writers, directors and performers by creating plays with radically inclusive creative teams that are nonetheless powerful and entertaining enough to be presented on major national stages.<\/span><\/p>\n

There is a moment in <\/span>TILKA \u2014 <\/span><\/i>the film \u2014 when Rania and Fatima are in Dar Al Aytam, showing the camera the bedroom they grew up in. Suddenly, the play\u2019s director Lama comes out from behind the camera wearing a Covid mask. \u201cThe bed Rania is sitting on, was my bed. My number was 149. They used to number all our clothes. When the washing came, they\u2019d call: 149. I don\u2019t know why it means something to me, but I love this number.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cMy number was 38,\u201d says Rania. \u201cMine was 1,\u201d says Fatima. \u201cWow,\u201d exclaims Lama, \u201cnumber 1!\u201d In a moment, Lama\u2019s own history becomes clear. Throughout the film we have seen her as the leader, differentiated from her cast of participants; we now understand that she grew up in the same community as many of them.<\/span><\/p>\n

Seenaryo aims for as many of our director-facilitators as possible to come from the communities we serve (currently, around 30 of our freelance team of 100). We have just finished a project funded by UN Women (under the Women\u2019s Peace & Humanitarian Fund) and in partnership with Syrian feminist organization <\/span>Women Now for Development<\/span><\/a>. After making a play as participants, 80 women received both civic and theatre leadership training. They were then funded and mentored to lead their own theatre projects. This month, Seenaryo published a handbook, \u201c<\/span>Women Leading Theatre for Change<\/span><\/a>,\u201d for other practitioners in the region to follow.<\/span><\/p>\n

Can theatre drive political change? Sometimes it can, directly: Zeina Daccache\u2019s play set in Lebanese prisons, <\/span>12 Angry Lebanese<\/span><\/i>, and the documentary that emerged from her drama therapy process led to the <\/span>implementation of Law 463<\/span><\/a> in 2009 \u2014 the reduction of sentences for good behavior. More often, theatre does not make the change itself but rather creates the conditions of possibility for achieving concrete changes in the law. Participatory theatre trains people to create through collective deliberation, and to speak in front of an audience forced to listen. There\u2019s a reason I have friends working as theatre trainers with ministers and officials from courtrooms to parliaments to international assemblies. And just as diversity is critical to effective representation in politics, a theatre that is inclusive creates the conditions for political change. As Najah says, \u201cI am a person who\u2019s changing, I have changed, and I will create change.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Theatre also does the slow, hard work of changing and challenging the preconceptions different communities hold of each other. In Seenaryo\u2019s process, Lebanese participants from Dar al-Aytam are thrust together with Syrian and Palestinian individuals, striking up lasting friendships. In a world where so many are seen as a \u201cburden\u201d (as Fida says) to be dealt with through aid handouts, blithe disregard or state violence; and where populist political regimes across the world play them off against each other to stoke tensions, <\/span>TILKA<\/span><\/i> opens up a rare space for participation across communities of difference.<\/span><\/p>\n

The film <\/span>TILKA <\/span><\/i>premiered in September 2023 where it won a prize at a festival in Beirut. The participants came to the screening, striking Instagram-ready poses on the red carpet and receiving a standing ovation. Fida and Tima brought the children from whom they had been separated for so many years. I met Karim, Tima\u2019s son. He said he enjoyed seeing his mother in her fox costume again.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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