- This weekend at HERE Arts Center’s Culturemart 2012, resident artist Betty Shamieh presents her work The Strangest, inspired by the figure of the Arab in Camus’ novel The Stranger. Visit the show’s page for more info
- Irondale Center with Scenes (Lyon) present An Arab in my Mirror, an Egyptian-French collaboration that “paints an intimate picture of the different aspects of terrorism and the relationships formed between historic events such as the Algerian war and the Egyptian revolution through the eyes of the many, everyday voices that contribute to the common quest for answers and understanding”. It runs until February 11th.

From Irondale's performance Arab in my Mirror

Yasmine Levy

Call for Participants.

The Second Forum on Festivals in the Arab Countries is the only state-level Arab Festival event hosted in the Arab region. With a galaxy of experts in various fields and masters of great wisdom, this Festival Forum is another highlight of the festivals in the Arab countries.
In its second version, this festival forum is organized by the Ministry of Culture in the Kingdom of Bahrain, in coordination with the Arab Administrative Development Organization , to celebrate Manama, the Arab Capital Culture of 2012. This forum is committing itself to both innovation and originality as successfully held in its first version in Beirut in December 2009.
Over two days, a bunch of festival presidents, organizers, managers, and art directors will gather to exchange information and expertise about different issues of festivals exploring the way to improve and upgrade the levels of festivals in the Arab countries.
The sessions of this forum are comprised into a welcome/opening address, two keynote sessions, and five regular sessions presenting and debating the latest thinking and festival business insights in addition to reviewing the key achievements and challenges facing festivals nowadays. Also, there will be a further focus on the most important issues in the festival industry, plus extended and expanded networking opportunities for neighboring countries to share knowledge and update the quality of their festivals to include all the family. This forum ends up with a panel discussion and recommendations session.
We believe that the 2nd Festival Forum is not only a gathering for festival organizers, artists, even governmental officials, enterprisers, and celebrities, but will become one of important means for intercultural communication as well.
In view of this, we sincerely invite you to attend this 2012 Forum of Festivals in Manama on March 1st & 2nd. During this event, and exclusively for this year, there will be the opening of the Annual Spring of Culture Festival in Manama on March 1st so all attendees will have the chance to enjoy an array of cultural and artistic events along with the scheduled sessions.

Antigone is focused around the burial of Polynices’ corpse. The statesman Creon has prohibited the burial on the grounds that Polynices is an enemy of the state and Antigone defies his decree and buries her brother on the grounds of familial and religious duty. The dead body and the act of burial trigger a conflict between different sets of responsibilities (to the family and to the state) that a citizen carries in a democracy. In the course of the play the two poles of the conflict (Antigone, Creon) become increasingly fixated in their viewpoints bringing about equally personal and civic catastrophe. In between those two extremes there is a physically present chorus of elderly who maintains allegiance to Creon while trying to inspire some moderation in him, as well as an invisible implied chorus, the body of citizens, who, we are told, support Antigone in her action but are too afraid to speak up.

One would expect that a contemporary attempt to grapple with the figure of Antigone – given especially her popularity in explorations of civic disobedience- would thoroughly dig into the dynamics of the conflict between her and Creon, the significance of the tragic elements (i.e. tragic action, chorus) and the play’s structure (how the characters shift in the course of the play) beyond the easy and overused binary symbolism Antigone=resistance/ Creon=tyranny. It becomes therefore shockingly surprising to see how little thought and exploration of the actual tragedy has gone into Alexis: beyond the premise “who is Antigone today” and few text excerpts, there’s really not any committed engagement with the tragedy itself,its ideas, questions, characters or dramatic structure. As a result, the investigation of who Antigone might be today becomes very problematic insofar as the play limits its interpretation of the tragic character of Antigone to a generic and generalized symbol of resistance stripped of any context. Questions of allegiance and responsibility to civic and private obligations, as well as the character traits that make the tragic heroes hold on to their beliefs beyond self-doubt, give way in Alexis to a romanticized/idealized depiction of dissent, seen as a virtue in and of itself, and an a priori demonization of the state as a mechanism of oppression. What in the tragedy is structural (the state becomes increasingly repressive) in Alexis is essentialized (the state is by definition repressive). In the Greek context where Motus’ production is set, both notions of repression and dissent are a lot more complicated as the former is usually accompanied by extreme lawlessness while the latter, when it is not pure state-sponsored violence, is often lacking in ideological foundation.

With the same ease that the play appropriates Antigone as an unproblematic symbol of resistance, it uses the dead body of Alexis Grigoropoulos as a “stand-in” for the dead body of Polynices. A parallel is drawn between Creon’s proclamation that the warrior’s body is to be left unburied “a feast to the wild birds” and the Greek police’s reaction of shooting and then abandoning the boy’s body in Exarchia square. Here the performance misses a very crucial point: Polynices’ dead body is heavy with meaning: he is a disenfranchised heir to the throne, who came back to claim his rights and now he is proclaimed an enemy of the city; he is a brother, a citizen and a leader and the sum of these conflictual roles and responsibilities render his burial a crucial political issue (in Greek tragedy the personal and the political are always conflated). By contrast, what was tragic about the shooting of Alexis Grigoropoulos was the complete lack of meaning. The shooting was pure accident – the term accident here used in fully existential terms to denote a life being lost at the flip of a coin: the boy, a middle class teenager from the suburbs of Athens who was in that evening hanging out with his friends in Exarchia square, provoked the police, an exchange of insults ensued, the police car followed the kids who threw some empty cans at them, the policeman came out, fired and shot the kid dead. It is precisely the complete accidentality of the event (so reminiscent of Camus’ Meursault shooting at the Arab in The Stranger), the ultimate absence of any serious reason, motivation, meaning, politics or ideology behind this clash between citizen and authority, that caused an unprecedented rioting in the city: it was as if the shooting signaled the eruption of bottled feelings of lawlessness, lack of governance, meaninglessness experienced among Greeks for years, generalized feelings that actions don’t matter and don’t make a difference because no one is ever held accountable even if a life gets lost so absurdly in the middle of the street. The riots that erupted were riots of despair, anger and not protests of change, destructive and hopeless. This in fact was more of an anti-tragedy, closer to the world of Camus’ where meaning is lost, than to the world of tragedy’s multiple negotiations of meanings and significations that are equally valid for their defenders and are worth dying for.

This is why Motus’ exploration of who Antigone is does not go too far (despite rather shallow attempts such as “Antigone is the protesters” or “Antigone is the Exarchia square that still resists”): in forcing their own rather narrow meaning and oversimplified binaries (protesters vs.state) onto reality the performance misses the far more rich and productive complexity of the actual social conflict. A good look into the reality (not only of Greece but anywhere in the world where indignation boils) will reveal the diversity of backgrounds and viewpoints, interests and motivations of protesting, the messy, unclassifiable and conflictual collective as all collectives are in such moments of profound social change. Such a look might have engaged the group into a deeper exploration into finding what are the intricate relations between leader and led that tragedy may be able to illuminate in the dialectic relationship between heroes and hero and chorus. Not doing so and imposing premeditated meanings on such a crucial historical moment instead, is, as one reviewer rightly notes,an indication of irresponsibility. While Alexis raises interesting and provocative questions, it seems that the performance as a whole misses the opportunity, artistic and intellectual, to go deeper into the intersections between tragedy and life.

- The Istanbul Theater Festival is having an open call for applications for their 2012 edition. The deadline is December 30th 2011 and here’s the link to more details.

-The Young Arab Theater Fund offers grants under its “cultural spaces” category which aims at ensuring the sustainability of existing and emerging cultural spaces in the Arab region and encouraging the establishment of new ones by offering structural and operational support. The deadline is January 15th 2012. More information here

- The Internationalists, an interesting collective of directors working all over the world, are launching their second annual playwriting contest (deadline January 13th 2012). The winning playwright will receive readings of his/her play in various cities in the world. Information and an online submission form is available here.

We need:
- 2 lighting designers/board operators, that will work closely with the invited companies, assist with their lighting needs and operate the lighting board during the shows. Experience in design and previous work in a festival setting is highly desirable.
-2 sound board operators to work closely with the performers and musicians, help with all their sound needs and operate the board during shows. Experience working with concert artists is required.
-2 technical directors to overview all production needs and work and be the point of contact between artists, technical staff and the festival organizers. The position is ideal for someone with enough technical experience who wants to take the next step into technical direction.

The successful candidates will be resourceful, able to think quickly and come up with ideas and solutions and work within the time and technical restrictions of a festival setting.
For theater technical specifications please visit: http://www.thewildproject.com/rentals/index.shtml
For more information and to submit a brief cover letter and resume please email lesmanouchestheatre@gmail.com
To find out about the festival visit www.betweentheseas.org

In a recent article in the Deutsche Welle, two academics engage in a very interesting discussion of the radical shifts in the European political imaginary with their starting point being the coverage of the Greek “indignados” in the German press:

Demonstrations in Syntagma square in Athens, June 2011

“The media reproduction of the movement in Syntagma square is a of a purely exotic nature in Germany.” says Vassilis Tsianos. “This exoticization has to do on the one hand with a Greek peculiarity which is the great love for uprisings. On the other hand it has to do with the fact that in Germany people cannot comprehend the intensity and dimensions of the social changes currently happening in Greece. The result is the dominance of an exoticizing gaze which often contains racist elements as we saw a few days ago when Ms. Merkel made the remark that the Greeks are lazy and should be working more.”

Simon Teune adds that the lack of coverage of such demonstrations in Germany is also due to a type of political fatalism among Germans: “In Germany such manifestations around economic and social issues like in Greece and Spain, are not taken seriously into account because there is a belief that the decision-making in such matters – privatizations or lowering of wages- are incontestable and there are no alternatives”.

Both Tsianos and Teune agree on the imaginative and social power of this movement. Looking at its role at a European level, Tsianos says that:

“In this moment, the Mediterranean is a vast social and imaginative laboratory of social reconstruction and of a new relationship to politics that has no relation to existing political parties or the existing political system. Presently Europe experiences an immense democratic challenge that comes from the Mediterranean.”

Source: Deutsche Welle
Translated from the Greek by A. Stathaki

From the movie Lost Kisses screening at Open Roads

-At MoMA, the MoMA store features, for a limited time only, the Destination: Istanbul products collection, showcasing contemporary Turkish designers. According to the store’s website “the collection captures the aesthetic of a cultural crossroads where east meets west and ancient meets modern. Istanbul’s celebrated design history is an amalgam of Byzantine and Ottoman influences, blending geometric patterns, rhythmic lines, and vivid colors.” Revenues from products sales will go towards contributing to the Museum’s programs and exhibitions.

-The installation The Hidden Location by Egyptian video artist Hassan Khan will be presented at the Queens Museum of Art, starting May 22nd until August 14th. The 52 minute visual material “takes the city of Cairo and its inhabitants as a container in which disparate scenarios and investigations come to life.” The event will be complemented by parallel activities such as discussions, screenings and a musical performance of the artist following the opening- click here to find out more.

Hoda Barakat, has lived through the civil war and Israel’s invasion in Lebanon. She left Beirut in 1989 at the age of 37 “ at a time when violence was at its peak” and went to Paris, where she lives and works to this day. “I was taken by a feeling of fear, especially with regards to my two kids. I could not find any meaning in living in a country that was self-destructive and destroying me, as part of a general, indiscriminate madness. I wished to leave, to get away, not necessarily to reach somewhere or build something somewhere else. I felt that my inner life was full”.
The war in Lebanon radically changed her worldview. How does she see the current turmoil and the bloodshed that is currently shaking the Arab world? “These events were not expected nor easy to foresee. Yet they were so much needed! I wouldn’t call them “conflicts” though, but revolutions. Both in Egypt and in Tunisia. These societies could no longer remain inert, on the verge of death, outside of time.” Will they be able to find political stability? “Democracy is an almost absolute value” Barakat says. “It is something that is practiced daily, while the way towards it is long, I’d say endless. For us every step of the way is a big accomplishment and it’s worth the risks”.

Barakat’s first novel The stone of laughter was published in 1990 and received the Al Nakint prize. Next there was The enlightened (1993) and The Tiller of Waters (1999) that received the Naguib Mahfouz prize in 2000. The novel’s central hero, Nicolas Mitri, is a Greek-Orthodox Lebanese. “There’s really strong ties between these orthodox Lebanese and the Greek-Orthodox of other countries like Russia, but particularly with Greece because of its proximity” she explains. “History and geography are full of examples. The Greek community in Lebanon was very affluent and there are still families in the country with a hundred per cent Greek names. These bonds are strong and impossible to break.”

The world-traveled novelist still writes in Arabic (her work has been widely translated) and Beirut always features in her books. “I believe that, had I stayed in Beirut, I would still have the same opportunities to write and get published because I write in Arabic. Compared to other Arabic countries, women in Lebanon enjoy great freedom. Also in Egypt, in Tunisia, women were and remain present. They keep on fighting their fight daily and vigilantly. In other countries it will be harder to improve their status because of the weight of racial, religious and other traditions. Still, the first step is enormous. The times are changing when women realize that they are citizens. In that sense globalization has done some good.”

Having lived in two different countries and two cultures Hoda Barakat believes that we live in a time of “false ideas” that the Westerners have for the ‘Orientals’. “This one-sided approach is our century’s evil” she points out. “We refuse to meet the ‘other’, we have a deep-seated hatred for differences. Before we even start talking about acceptance or tolerance, let’s talk about the interest, the curiosity that we are missing. Look at the difference between traveling, the journeys from which there are still written documents dating back to antiquity, and today’s tourism”.

In her new home, France, did she encounter difficulties to be welcomed and accepted? “I have never been a victim of racism, but that doesn’t mean I don’t experience the problem, among Arabs or foreigners in general. People are generally more tolerant to a wealthy foreigner as opposed to a poor one who doesn’t even know how to defend him/herself. But if I never encountered racism it had nothing to do with being wealthy. What saved me is the good command of the French language and knowledge of my civil rights as well as the fact that financially I didn’t have to ask the support of the French government. And I should also add the literary success which came very fast when my novels were published in France, and I was honoured twice with the highest prizes in the cultural field.” Yet she never forgets that she is a “foreigner”: “I am not in France in order to become a local. I am a Lebanese who doesn’t live in Lebanon but who returns there with more freedom, more meaningfully and radically. My writing testifies to this”.

Source: Eleftherotypia.
Translated from Greek by Aktina Stathaki

Have you heard from your family? What do they say about the revolution?

Most of my family members are in Benghazi. I finally spoke to my sister yesterday and she was excited about the revolution. She described that that for the first time in her life (she is 34 year old), she saw Libyans working together as one big family, trying to safeguard their belongings and take care of their city. We haven’t seen this in a long time in the country.

How do you feel to be so far from home? And what are you trying to do to help your country?

I feel selfish missing my family and missing the most important moment for Libyans. The only thing that I can do is gather the Libyans who live here. Today we did a demonstration in front the Libyan House to show our support to the revolution. I know it is nothing compared to what our families are suffering.

When you were in Libya, did you think that your country wasn’t free?

Yes, every day we felt that we were in a prison. [We were] not free to talk or to express ourselves. We felt that the Libyan energy resources were consumed by Gaddafi and his family. While most of my friends were trying to make the ends meet, his sons were partying around the world. His famous son (Saadi) spent money in Italian soccer clubs.

The purpose of the rallies is to get the freedom which we’ve been denied for 41 years-the freedom of a better life. We were led by a family that was not legitimate to rule the country. They used Libyan resources for their pleasure.

Libya is rich in oil and many other countries, such as Italy, depend on its resources. What is the role that countries with economic interests in Libya could play?

At this moment, I feel that these countries with an interest in Libya’s oil resources are watching the situation from far. They care more about the oil than Libyan bloodshed.

How much is the Internet important in these days of revolt? In Tunisia and Egypt, the Internet was the social change’s media. Is this the same in Libya?

Yes, [the internet] has played a huge role in the Libyan revolution. The February 17 revolt in Benghazi was organized by thousands of Facebook pages. No press was allowed to get into the city. From abroad, I have access to a page called “The Light House (Al Manara)” that gives my friends and me reliable information about my city and Libyan cities. The reliability of this site has been proven many times in the world wide press.