Abstract
Therapeutic theater projects with Syrian refugees in Jordan and Lebanon work at the intersection of the public and the private, facilitating individual healings while also promoting new group identities. The playing space becomes an open discursive field in which varied understandings of the self become platforms for new understandings of the nation. In the process, these artists/refugees trouble the boundaries between the private and the public, potentially creating a new public sphere that is not only revolutionary in its critique of entrenched political power but in its reformulation of the idea of the public itself. This article examines one such project, The Syria Trojan Woman, directed by Omar Abu Saada. The article places this work in the context of Abu Saada’s work in applied theater in Syria prior to the uprising and within the larger context of Syrian political theater. Applied theater, an umbrella term designating performance valued as efficacious as well as aesthetic, has had a brief and difficult history in Syria because of its capacity to undermine the regulation of speech. In the case of The Syria Trojan Woman, this speech has traveled beyond the countries hosting refugees through the efforts of non-governmental organizations that bring additional fundraising and consciousness-raising objectives to the endeavor. Through international tours and the use of new media, local performances become international phenomenon, further complicating the idea of a revolutionary public sphere.
In the early days of the Syrian Uprising, theater practitioners were prominent in organizing the Damascus opposition to an escalating government crackdown. As the Uprising gathered steamed, theater practitioners were prominent in the Creative Resistance Movement filling the Arab Mediascape with oppositional plays, puppet shows, and video blogs. Now, in the midst of civil war, theater practitioners are working with the victims of government violence in devised pieces that give aesthetic shape to traumatic experience. Some of these works juxtapose diverse wartime experiences and responses to trauma, interspersing the verbatim with the fictional. Such work aims to restore volition. Refugees become artists, demonstrating an ability to make use of their past experience, at the same time that the combination of voices demonstrates different responses to war. The playing space becomes an open discursive field in which varied understandings of the self emerge as platforms for new understandings of the nation. In the process, these artists/refugees trouble the boundaries between the private and the public, potentially creating a new public sphere that is not only revolutionary in its critique of entrenched political power but in its reformulation of the idea of the public itself.
Therapeutic theater and the public sphere
These therapeutic theater projects extend work that was being done in the years prior to 2011, and builds on a long tradition of Syrian political theater. Applied theater, an umbrella term designating performance valued as efficacious as well as aesthetic, has had a brief and difficult history in Syria. As an art form committed to social and personal analysis in public forums, it has run afoul of state efforts to police the public sphere. Omar Abu Saada was prominent in Syria’s Applied Theater movement before the Uprising and is now creating therapeutic productions with Syrian refugees. By examining his work, and specifically his 2013 production, The Syria Trojan Women, which was performed by Syrian female refugees in Jordan, I will demonstrate therapeutic theater’s potential to help in the healing of individual and national identities. In the chaos of war, practitioners like Abu Saada have claimed greater freedom than before to create work that pursues free and open self-representation. Going forward, Syria’s tradition of theater activism could play an important role in imagining a future after conflict, a necessary first step in Syria’s reconstitution.
Before I brand myself a Pollyanna, let me acknowledge the obvious fact that theater practitioners are not going to change events on the ground nor hasten the resolution of a conflict that seems likely to burn on for years. For that matter, a handful of theater practitioners cannot redress the trauma experienced by 11 million displaced Syrians. However, I do take it as a point of faith that building the capacity of individuals and groups to think differently is essential to the positional struggle (to evoke Gramsci) that makes change possible—far-off though it may be. Elsewhere, I have argued that over decades, theater in Syria has engaged and contested the tropes central to Baath party narratives, and that these same oppositional strategies played out in the revolutionary mediascape during the Uprising (2015). Here, I will argue for the significance of theater-therapy projects for modeling a self-healing grounded in memory and discussion. Participants and audiences enact and witness new ways of understanding self and nation, and aesthetic excellence gives these exercises added weight in the social imaginary. The performance of alternate forms of nationhood continues even during wartime, and The Syria Trojan Women should be viewed as a new and important chapter in an ongoing struggle.
The Syria Trojan Women implicitly critiques the state’s unfettered violence against its citizenry; in its format, the work more broadly questions the formation and regulation of the public sphere. It asks both who gets to speak to the common good and what constitutes the “common” in the common good. It does so by forcing its audience to rethink the boundaries of the public, a preliminary step—I would like to propose—in theorizing a revolutionary public sphere. Is a testimonial theater piece an act of individual healing or political opposition? Put another way, when do private concerns become questions of public good? The question points to unresolved tensions in Habermas’ generative discussion of the bourgeois public sphere. Habermas assumes a clear delineation between public and private when he asserts that a bourgeois public sphere came into existence when London coffee houses, French salons, and German table societies organized ongoing discussions between (ostensible) equals. Participants claimed the “domain of common concern” that had previously been the preserve of the church or state (Habermas, 1989, p. 36).
However, as Nancy Fraser and others have pointed out, the boundaries of such a domain are anything but self-evident. Fraser (1990) explains that public and private are “cultural classifications” and “rhetorical labels” that are frequently deployed in political discourse to “delegitimize some interests, views, and topics, and valorize others.”(p. 73). The time has come, Fraser (1990) suggests, to theorize a post-bourgeois model of the public sphere that includes issues that a bourgeois masculinist ideology labels private (p. 77). Testimonial theater then emerges as a valuable site in which to imagine a truly revolutionary public sphere, an arena in which one might demand political change and reimagine the boundaries between the political and personal. To take The Syria Trojan Women as example, can the personal reflections of female refugees—their observations on a work of ancient literature, recollections of cherished girlhood experiences, and descriptions of violence and forced migration—become the means of redefining the common good?
The potential for reimagining social structure is implicit in therapeutic theater, which helps participants—both actors and audience—to process past trauma through acts of creation and sharing. This sharing distinguishes therapeutic theater from traditional drama therapy. Drama therapy is a private activity. As Landy and Montgomery (2012) explain, in drama therapy, “the clients within the therapeutic process are both the performers and spectators” (p. 196). By contrast, in therapeutic theater, actors take control of painful memories by transforming these memories into raw material for art. As art, it exists to be shared. The audience for therapeutic theater includes family, friends, and any stranger who has been touched by (or is at least interested in) the originating trauma and its theatrical processing. Since the goal is to fashion trauma into art, the therapeutic process is only complete after a run of public performances. Making the private public is the final step in an artistic/therapeutic process. It is also a political act.
At its most basic, all forms of drama therapy rely on the mind’s tendency to use metaphor to process traumatic experience. In the same way that Freud argued that the mind converts painful experience into manageable tropes, drama therapy provides participants with the tools to construct images and stories through which participants can access and manage past trauma. In this sense, drama therapy can be described as displacement in reverse, whereby images retrieve rather than sublimate the past. Through projective identification and dramatic distancing, drama therapy participants create new stories that incorporate past experience, inoculating the artist/patient against the corrosive effects of trauma. Drama therapy is a project of creative remembering, a remembering that psychoanalysis posits is at the heart of healing. In drama therapy, a therapist (often called the facilitator or leader) helps one or more clients create healing stories in a private setting. Therapeutic theater extends this work outwards in a public performance for a community that shares this trauma at some level but did not participate in the rehearsal process.
Therapeutic theater reveals the full significance of the oft-cited feminist slogan, “the personal is political.” As early as 1969, Carol Hanisch argued that women’s consciousness-raising groups should be viewed as political action rather than therapy. According to Hanisch (1970), only a full venting of one’s personal problems allows for the recognition that “we need to change the objective conditions, not adjust to them” (p. 76). I would like to expand on the notion that the personal is political and propose that the models of psycho-sexual development in the writings of Freud and Lacan are important tools for understanding processes by which nations are imagined and boundaries of belonging are policed. 1 I am not the first to pursue such a line of argumentation and in particular am indebted to Karen Shimakawa and Maurice Stevens who employ Lacanian concepts such as abjection to explain processes of national identification (Shimakawa, 2002; Stevens, 2003). I will return to abjection and the idea of the refugee as simultaneously undermining and constituting the boundaries of national imagining later in this chapter. For the time being, I will simply note that understandings of national identity are as much constituted through acts of exclusion as inclusion.
Omar Abu Saada and Syrian political theater
Before addressing The Syria Trojan Women, it is useful to situate it and other works staged by its director, Omar Abu Saada, in a tradition of political theater. In using theater to open up spaces of resistance, debate, and healing, Omar Abu Saada’s productions continue a tradition of political theater at least as old as the Assad Regime. While previous Syrian regimes employed censorship, surveillance, political detention, and torture, none did so on the scale of the government of Hafez al-Assad, who came to power in a 1970 intra-party coup. Nonetheless, under Assad, a generation of theater-makers came of age, responsible for some of the most openly political and probing theater in the Arab World. Over the past 50 years, the very best Syrian theater has engaged forbidden topics, critiquing the government’s use of surveillance, imprisonment, and torture; analyzing Arab-Israeli relations; drawing attention to Arab repression of Palestinians; debating how ideas of history and heritage have been employed to serve the state; and even problematizing such loaded concepts as martyrdom. The young practitioners whose theater engages the Uprising and the conditions of the Civil War follow in the path of directors such as Naila Al Atrash, Walid al-Quwatli, and Fawwaz al-Sajir, and playwrights such as Saadallah Wannous, Mamdouh Adwan, and Muhammad al-Maghut who made theater a privileged site in Syria for social and political examination.
Omar Abu Saada’s recent work, and the techniques he employs, gives insight into the connections between the current generation of theater-makers creating work in the midst of civil war and a previous generation that created work under repressive rule. It is not simply that Omar Abu Saada’s generation trained under the Atrash, Quwatli, and Sajir and studied the plays of Wannous, Adwan, and Maghut. More significantly, this generation inherited a society in which the theater was the only space of public assembly outside the mosque in which speech was not strictly scripted by the state. While drama therapy and forum theater techniques that Omar Abu Saada and others employ are relatively new to Syria, these practitioners are grounded in an understanding of theater and social change that developed over decades. It is a complicated history, but a few important elements can be summarized here.
State-supported theater flourished during Syria’s alliance with the Soviet Union, an alliance that grew especially close after Hafez al-Assad came to power in 1970. The National Theatre began a touring arm in that same year, bringing productions to cities and villages whether or not they had a physical theater. Similarly, the Syrian Military ran its own theater with a touring wing. The state also established several regional theaters. More significantly, it began sending practitioners to Eastern Bloc countries for training. Many of these practitioners not only created theater but taught at the High Institute for Theatrical Art in Damascus. Fawwaz al-Sajir studied directing at the Russian Institute of Theatre Arts (GITIS) and taught at the Damascus High Institute from 1978 to 1983. He founded an independent theater company with Saadallah Wannous which included Walid al-Quwatli, who himself had studied directing at National Academy for Theatre and Film Arts in Sofia, Bulgaria. Quwatli taught at the High Institute from 1979 to 1992, serving as Director of the acting department from 1991 to 1992. At Sofia, Quwatli studied alongside Naila Al Atrash who taught at the High Institute from 1978 to 2001, serving as the Director of the Acting Program from 1989 to 1991 (when she stepped down to protest the merging of the Institutes of Theatre and Music) and then again from 1995 to 2001, when she was dismissed from her post by order of the Ministry of Culture. Other directors who taught at the High Institute and who studied in the Eastern Bloc include Hasan Ouelty, Sharif Shakir, Fuad al-Rashid, and Ajaj Salem.
These theater-makers and teachers have spent the better part of their careers pressing against the boundaries of permissible speech. They brought to Syria from their studies in countries like Sofia, East Berlin, and Moscow an understanding that theater is a bodily art, and that metaphor and irony can transform a seemingly neutral gesture into a pointed critique. They have seen their work banned in the middle of rehearsals and at least once on opening night. They have submitted the same works to censors multiple times under different titles in the hopes (at times successfully) of gaining approval for performance, and they have used current events to shame the Ministry of Culture into allowing productions of banned works (Ziter, 2015). In some ways, their students grew even more daring.
Omar Abu Saada studied under Naila Al Atrash and Walid al-Quwatli at the High Institute, and even as a student, he insistently used theater spaces, including the conservatory, to advance his political positions. In 2001, at the height of the Al-Aqsa Intifada in Palestine, Abu Saada, like many Syrians, was growing impatient with the refusal of the government of Bashar al-Assad to endorse Palestinian self-rule and come out in support of the intifada. Assad’s position reflected Syria’s longstanding animosity to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and his wish to avoid provoking Israel, especially when a renewal of talks on the Golan looked possible. In response, Abu Saada organized roughly 15 students to sit silently in the lobby before signs proclaiming their support of the intifada. Students arriving at class joined them and soon Abu Saada had organized a general strike.
While such an action might not prompt government action in the United States, in Syria, it quickly came to the attention of the Minister of Culture, Maha Qanout, who personally came to the office of Naila Al Atrash to insist that she order the students to disband. When Atrash refused, she was soon visited by a general in the secret services who reiterated the demand. Under this pressure, Atrash convinced the students to hold their strike in the courtyard before the institute. Two months later, Atrash was dismissed from her post and banned from teaching. In response, Abu Saada took a group of 66 students to the Ministry of Culture, requesting a meeting with Minister Qanout. When they were rebuffed, the students stood before the Ministry of Culture, returning each morning for the next 15 days. According to Atrash, the students only broke off their action once they and their families began receiving threats from the secret police. The sit-in and subsequent dismissal of Atrash was reported on in the Lebanese paper As-Safir. Syrian papers simply announced her dismissal without noting the context (Naila Al Atrash, personal communication, 14 February 2014; Omar Abu Saada, personal communication, 30 March 2014).
Studio Theatre: experiments in public speech
Abu Saada turned to Augusto Boal’s Forum theater technique soon after graduating from the High Institute. In 2004, he founded Studio Theatre with other recent graduates and current students, including the playwright and dramaturge Mohammad al Attar. Working under the auspices of the United Nations Population Fund and with logistical support from the Syrian-controlled non-governmental organization (NGO), Fund for Integrated Rural Development of Syria (FIRDOS), Studio Theatre began staging workshops and productions in the countryside outside Quenietra, Idlib, Homs, Latakia, and Aleppo. Their theater work addressed polygamy, marital relations, women and poverty, and literacy. 2 While support of NGOs might seem antithetical to Syrian government’s strict attempts at controlling public space, such efforts fall under a governing strategy that Stephen Heydemann (2007) has termed “upgraded authoritarianism.” Heydemann argued that in response to a growing pressure for greater civil liberties, several Arab governments had attempted to co-opt the rhetoric and structure of the civil society movement, creating domestic NGOs visibly led by regime elites but lacking any autonomy. Such NGOs could be used to exclude or control Western-financed NGOs. In Syria, for example, the President’s wife was the official sponsor of the nation’s seven major domestic NGOs, all of which were centralized within the Syrian Trust for Development.
Abu Saada’s company clearly stretched the level of public speech the Assad regime was prepared to accept. In the first stage, a small troupe of Studio Theatre company members spent a minimum of 3 days a week in a single village over 3 months. During that time, through repeated theater games with separate groups of children and young adults, the company researched village beliefs and opinions and paved the way for additional collaborations. A theater game might begin with a simple question such as “What was the most beautiful moment of your life?” The questions and answers would ultimately lead to the creation of stage pictures, which would be followed by discussion and analysis. This paved the way for more complex questions such as “What was your most difficult experience in your family, school, or workplace?” Ultimately, the groups shaped these stage pictures into simple dramas.
This and other theater games served to familiarize participants with the experience of self-examination, debate, and envisioning alternate possibilities, all in a public forum. In the second stage, the rest of Studio Theatre joined the group and began to draft an original script, drawing on the research of smaller group, eventually performing an open text for the village. This performance incorporated Boal’s Joker character, a kind of master of ceremonies who encourages audience members to intervene in the narrative and even replace actors. The Joker also summarizes the solutions the audience has proposed. The first phase not only identifies appropriate ways of addressing issues in the village, this phase also trains a critical mass of audience members who then feel able to debate and intervene in public settings.
Such forum theater projects fundamentally undermine a central strategy of the Assad regime and the ruling Baath party—the Baathification of the public sphere. The selective tolerance of foreign NGOs combined with their mandatory partnering with local NGOs that are actually run by the government was a means of channeling civil society forces into implicit support for the regime. Forum theater, with its emphasis on spontaneity, repeated questioning, and communal scripting, threatens to disrupt this stage-management of society. Not surprisingly, FIRDOS withdrew its support ending the project despite the United Nations Population Fund’s (UNFPA) desire to continue.
With the state limiting Studio Theatre’s ability to pursue forum theater projects, the group turned to drama therapy and therapeutic theater. In May 2008, the company developed a theater piece titled Sameh (tolerance) with the inmates of the Khalid ibn al-Wahid juvenile detention center. (Criminals in Syria are tried as adults at the age of 11, and children serve jail time for crimes such as petty theft.) The Italian NGO Movimondo initiated the project, with financial support from United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). Movimondo trained Studio Theatre members in working with troubled juveniles and secured permission for the performance from the Ministry of Social Affairs. The children generated the material for Sameh writing about personal experience and taking part in theater games. They first performed at the detention center but eventually transferred the piece to the independent theater venue, El Teatro. 3 There they wore masks to preserve their anonymity due to the stigma of imprisonment in Syria. The project was specifically framed as “rehabilitation” as opposed to the potentially more dangerous project of individual or social development. Nonetheless, the state denied Abu Saada and Studio Theatre permission to continue the project after the first production. The troupe disbanded, Abu Saada pursued directing opportunities in Damascus, and his dramaturge, Mohammad al Attar, completed a Master’s degree in Applied Drama at Goldsmiths-University of London in 2010.
Soon into the uprising, Abu Saada and Attar collaborated on a new production addressing the detention and torture of demonstrators. Could You Please Look into the Camera began as a verbatim theater piece composed from the testimonies of 13 individuals who had been held by the security forces during the first year of the Uprising. Over multiple drafts, the play evolved into a fictional piece as Attar edited and reshaped the interviews, and situated them within an invented story about an amateur director, Noura, filming a documentary about the Uprising. Abu Saada directed readings of the play for the traveling multidisciplinary festival, Meeting Points 6, in Berlin (January 2012) and Athens (March 2012). Abu Saada and his cast then rehearsed the revised play secretly in Damascus before taking it to the Doosan Art Center for a 2-week run in April 2012 followed by a one-night performance at the Sunflower Theatre in Beirut. A new English-language translation by Lisa Wedeen appeared in the journal TDR (Attar, 2014).
The Syria Trojan Women and the aesthetics of healing
In 2013, Abu Saada began devising adaptations of ancient Greek dramas with female refugees. First, he staged an adaptation of Euripides’ The Trojan Women, with 24 Syrians living in Jordan. Mohammad al Attar served as dramaturge and Nanda Mohammad provided acting training. The Syria Trojan Women ran for two nights in December 2013 at the National Center for Culture and Arts in Amman. He then staged an adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone with Syrian refugees of the Shatila refugee camp in Lebanon. Attar again served as dramaturge and Hala Omran provided acting training. Antigone of Shatila ran for three nights in May of 2015 at Masrah Al Madina in Beirut.
In both productions, the development process privileged the performers’ grappling with their own personal experiences through the medium of an ancient play rather than focused on the play text for its own sake. In both productions, only small portions of the texts of Euripides and Sophocles were performed. Instead, actresses used portions of the original play to prompt reflections on their own experiences. The Syria Trojan Women began with 60 performers but that number had shrunk to 24 by opening night. As Omar Abu Saada explained to me, the daily rehearsals over a 6-week period proved too demanding for some (personal communication, 25 March 2014).
The staging choices in The Syria Trojan Women consistently elevated the actors’ personal experience over Euripides’ text. 4 Speeches of characters were confined to video projections; half the screen showed a woman facing the camera, and the other half a woman in profile. The woman facing the camera began by identifying herself and stating her age and then explained which character she most liked and how that character resembled her. Hecuba’s sense of loss becomes an occasion for the actor to remark that “seventeen years ago I too desired death and felt that a taste of bitterness would linger in my mouth to the end of my days no matter how long I lived.” However, she explains, that changed with the “great joy” that entered her life, namely, her children and husband. The woman in profile then delivers several of Hecuba’s lines, in which the character describes the horror of seeing her husband cut down before her. The first actor, who is given the privilege of facing the camera, defines herself in relation to the play text, and the play text that follows serves to further clarify that self. In this particular instance, the refugee who grounds her current happiness in the company of her family is contrasted with a past self that, like Hecuba, feels bereft of meaningful connections. In this manner, the audience encounters Hecuba, Cassandra, and Andromache as illustration of the performers’ memories and self-observations. In other projected segments, women discuss the city of Troy as a spur to their own memories of Syria, or comment on their favorite lines, relating these lines to moments in their pasts.
These projected segments alternate between loss and joyful memories, but they largely focus on life before civil war. By contrast, the live performance grapples with the trauma of flight from a war zone and the dislocation of life as a refugee. These painful recollections are interspersed with brief choral odes from the play, which—ironically—come as something of a relief from the pain manifest on stage as refugees relate, sometimes with visible duress, their stories of flight. A middle-age woman sits stilly, hands on a lap, speaking into a microphone, describing crossing back into Syria on learning that her mother had descended into a coma. She delays her return to Amman, and days after her mother’s death, masked men who break into the home, throwing her young nephews to the floor and threatening to haul them off unless her brother, Mohammed, agree to come peacefully. She describes crossing back into Jordan and later receiving the phone call from her sister: Mohammed is dead. How! Don’t know. The Red Cross found him in the street, the bullet entered from his mouth.
She concludes that her remaining brothers went to the hospital to identify the body and then brought it home for burial. Another woman recounts fleeing from al-Bayda and the decision of her male relatives to remain behind. The audience knows how the story will end; al-Bayda was the site of one the worst massacres of the civil war. The story concludes with the woman’s brother-in-law returning to the city to identify the bodies as they are readied for mass burial.
The juxtaposition of linguistic registers renders these memories all the more immediate. The speeches of the characters and the choral odes are delivered in classical Arabic with rhythmic delivery—a language used in print and official presentations. By contrast, the live reminiscences are delivered in the Syrian dialect, the language of the everyday, the pauses and ellipses, and the apparent effect of human frailty rather than a performance choice. The choral odes were performed by a group with stylized movement or tableau staging; the reminiscences were performed by a single woman sitting before a microphone. The artistry of the staging of Euripides’ text rendered the stillness of the reminiscences much more immediate, further underscoring its status as “real” as opposed to theatrical.
As much as the stories of atrocities grab out attention, the production is careful to present them as one way of remembering the past. A woman might reflect on a line by Hecuba and use it as a springboard to a childhood memory of life as a tomboy and being mistaken for a boy. Lines about smoldering Troy prompt a memory of a class trip to a museum in Tartus, the most beautiful moment of the young woman’s life. The complexity and different experiences of life as refugees are emphasized in the production’s closing sequence. Eight different women come forward to read letters they have composed to loved-ones back in Syria. A mother congratulates her daughter on her recent wedding, and only the mother’s delivery betrays her pain at being absent. A woman writes to her aunt, relating her joy on being reunited with her son who was separated from her during flight. Another woman writes a letter of love and longing to her former home. The performance ends with a young woman who writes her mother about the stress relocation has put on her marriage. The remarkable honesty of this last letter reveals a courage equal to, though entirely different from, that of the woman who narrates learning of her brother’s death. The project, one gathers, was productive of the courage it dramatized.
None of the women had previous theater experience, a fact suggested to the audience by the past lives described in the reminiscences they relate. Two of the women wore niqabs and the costume was a black dress and black hijab, suggesting to the audience that these were traditional women for whom theatrical performance was a new adventure. Such an impression is borne out by a report on the project that appeared in the Guardian (Tran, 2013). One participant is quoted that despite her enthusiasm for the project, her “conservative” husband forbade her participation and she was only able to take part “after a lot of nagging.” In that article, the show’s British producer explained that many of the participants came from Deraa, the conservative city in Southwestern Syria where the uprising began. Given the production’s marking of the performers as traditional women, their discovery of their own theatrical voice became part of the show’s drama.
Abu Saada’s stylistic use of the chorus further emphasizes the journey of the performers over the journey of the characters. In Attic theater, the chorus mediates between audience and myth, explaining, contextualizing, and elaborating on the words and actions of the named characters. While the characters are figures of legend, the chorus is composed of unnamed fellow citizens or figures of even lesser status than the audience (with rare exceptions such as the Eumenides). In the case of this play, the chorus is women and barbarians—both categories of reduced humanity according to ancient Greek law. The chorus’ mediating role is manifest in the spatial arrangements at the theater of Dionysus, where the play originated. The sloped bank of the “seeing place” (teatron) reserved for the audience flows without differentiation into the “dancing place” (orchestra) reserved for the chorus. Both audience and chorus enter from the same side passageways (paradoi). By contrast, the named characters enter from the scenic house (skene) erected beyond the orchestra. The journey back into myth is a movement upstage, deeper into the house of mythic figures. At the moment that the drama reveals the true scope of the community’s tragedy, the doors of the scenic house swing open and the effects of violence are wheeled forward on the cart (or ekklyklema).
Abu Saada’s choices echo these performance choices but reverse their effects, revealing the individuality of the performers rather than the mythic stature of the characters. As in fifth century BCE, the named characters in The Syria Trojan Women appear upstage, this time as film projections on the back wall of the stage. These passages are not presented as illustrations of a shared past as in Attic theater, but as fodder for the performers’ self-discoveries in the present. The chorus is similarly close to the audience, but not so as to clarify or elaborate on the words of the named characters. These named characters only appear briefly as projected images and then disappear. Instead, the brief choral odes frame the longer personal narratives of the seated performers. These odes effectively comment or contrast with the more important reminiscences of the performers. In Attic theater, all of the performers were masked, and if we take the three-actor rule as hard and fast, then different performers might play a single character in the course of a performance. In short, the conventions serve to elide performer and augment character. The complete opposite is true in Abu Saada’s production, where not only individual characters but the entire play is presented as a tool for the actor’s articulation of self. This is not so much a production of Euripides’ The Trojan Women but a dramatization of the self-discovery that comes of deeply contemplating that text.
The poetics and politics of abjection
Abu Saada’s reimaging of the Greek chorus is the most formally innovative component of the production. Euripides’ chorus serves to further illustrate the reduced state and of the named characters and—at times—to embody a loss of self in unrestrained lamentation that the named characters approach but never fully engage. Omar Abu Saada’s staging carefully skirts the boundaries of such abjection, and this—I will argue—is central to the work’s therapeutic value. The opening moments of the show feature a crowd of veiled women backlit against a bright screen so that they appear only in silhouette. They speak different text simultaneously, each woman announcing her name, their voices growing louder in an incomprehensible din as they walk downstage toward the audience. Only after a lighting change that makes their faces visible do they begin to chant in unison an ode revealing the fear of the Trojan women at becoming the chattel of the army and subject to the licentious desire of the Greeks, their voices ascending in pitch.
The performance of subsequent odes similarly disconnects speaker from text, producing a sense of the reduced humanity of Euripides’ chorus members. In the next choral ode, the clumped women silently mouth words while an unseen speaker recites. That speaker only becomes visible at the end of the ode; one by one, her companions have broken off from the group leaving her alone on stage. The choral ode following the story of the Bayda massacre is recited in darkness while the narrator remains silent but visible in a small circle of light. The chorus begins with a droning hum that grows louder and segues into a brief lamentation for the destruction. Humming precedes a later choral ode as well, this time increasing in pitch until it breaks of in a cry followed by the lament that “God had forsaken us.” The women then lift their hands in unison and cover their mouths stiffly as they deliver the ode rapidly as if ululating at a funeral, lamenting the destruction of their poor city.
The abjection of Euripides’ chorus is made evident through a performance style in which language threatens to spill over into mere vocalized pain even as formal choices separate the performer from the reduced state she represents. From the opening moment, the effort to name oneself is thwarted by confusion. Repeatedly, Abu Saada disconnects the choral ode from a specific speaker or speakers; chorus members have lost the ability to name and define themselves in language. This happens literally in the opening but also in the decision to deliver odes in darkness or to have the speaker of an ode shrouded by women mouthing words. These non-naturalistic choices create a protective space between actors and choral characters.
The formal physicality of the chorus augments this protective buffer. In the opening moments, the chorus walks forward with an eerie solemnity (and a documentary about this production, The Queens of Syria, reveals that this effect required repeated rehearsal); they then deliver their lament in perfect unison; later, the chorus members coordinate stylized gestures. These passages are all recited in classical Arabic, as opposed to the dialect of the actresses’ personal reminiscences. The characters’ tenuous control of language is juxtaposed against the actors’ self-possession; stylized production choices signal, rather than manifest, abjection. In short, stylization quarantines the performer against the state she represents. In the process, Abu Saada works against both the eloquence of the Euripides’ text and its potential to subsume the performer into its own emotionalism. The result is a more powerful performance and one attentive to the performer’s mental hygiene.
It is important for the production to preserve images of abjection, not simply for their emotional power but because it is against such images that the performance choices and life choices of the refugee performers are made meaningful. The refugee is both the figure that defines the border and that troubles our position relative to that border. The fact that individuals can be deprived of national identity gives national identity significance as a quality bestowed by the state (rather than an innate and inalienable quality). The idea of the refugee reminds those with their citizenship intact of the stability their nation-states afford. However, the physical presence of the refugee makes present the fact that what is given can be taken away. The refugee affirms national borders while also undermining the certainty of one’s place within those borders.
The power of the refugee to subsume the certainty of national identification recalls Kristeva’s discussion of abjection as the boundary between subject formation and undifferentiated life (the “real” in Lacanian parlance). For Kristeva, all humans retain a memory of life before language acquisition, before even the moment individual awareness is born with the realization that the mother exists separate from—rather than as an extension of—the self. The abject, according to Kristeva, recalls this early state, threatening to overwhelm the idea of the individual subject. As Kristeva (1982) explains, Abjection preserves what existed in the archaism of the pre-objectal relationship, in the immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from another body in order to be—maintaining that night in which the outline of the signified thing vanishes and where only the imponderable affect is carried out. (p. 10)
A corpse produces the sensation of abjection, according to Kristeva, because it evokes that boundary at which an individual reverts to all-consuming materiality. One responds in horror to the abject because of the persistent fear of dissolving back into that corroding night wherein “the outline of the signified thing vanishes.”
We can think of national identity as similarly constructed as an act of differentiation at the morrow of memory, in that “immemorial violence” in which a people (rather than an individual) become separated from another “in order to be.” The world’s unwillingness to address the problem of refugees (with more than 40 million refugees and internally displaced persons worldwide at the time of writing) is akin to the personal aversion prompted by the abject. Here is the figure that gives the lie to the reassuring fiction of the stability of national identity. The refugee, to adopt Karen Shimakawa’s evocative phrase, is a figure of “national abjection.” This might help account for why natural disasters invariably prompt financial outpourings from individuals and nations many times greater than what is levied for the victims of human-made catastrophes like war. In an article of 22 March 2014, the New York Times noted the difficulty aid organizations have had raising money for humanitarian assistance in Syria, discussing two organizations in particular that were only able to raise one-tenth of what they raised in the aftermath of the Haitian earthquake (Barnard, 2014). Nations recoil at the tragedy of refugees much as individuals cower in the presence of a corpse.
The Syria Trojan Women production invokes images of abjection, but then holds them at arm’s length. This act of distanced conjuring demonstrates that the performer is greater than her recent history, and this gives the performance its power. It is not simply that Euripides’ text in the Arabic is moving. It is. However, even more impactful is the knowledge that this performer, who has mastered the text and the physical choices that frame and provide shape to the loss of self-possession, may have herself experienced similarly harrowing events. “See,” she would seem to proclaim, “such events can destroy a person; however, I have chosen to make theatre.” The first-person narratives, the most direct and unmediated expression of trauma, are themselves stories rather than lamentations. The speaker transforms her experiences through narrative and in doing so masters them. If there is dramatic tension for the audience, it is akin to what one experiences when watching an acrobat perform: one does not wonder how the feat will end but marvels that it can be successfully completed. Every pause, every repeated word or seeming omission, heightens audience members’ attention and their hopes for the performer’s success.
Therapeutic theater in the global context
As an example of therapeutic theater, The Syria Trojan Women brings a wounded community closer and moves both performers and audience toward healing, which prompts questions about what happens when therapeutic theater projects are remounted far from conflict sites. It is as especially relevant question as aid organizations and theater venues have identified such projects as means of raising consciousness and funds. When The Syria Trojan Women was performed in Amman, its audience was likely composed of people who had been directly impacted by the war: the families of the 28 performers, other refugees, aid workers, and Jordanians who were living with nearly 600,000 registered refugees in their country. The show undoubtedly meant something very different when the Tällberg Foundation invited the group to perform at the 2014 Tällberg Workshop at CERN, The European Organization for Nuclear Research, for a selected audience of chief executive officers (CEOs), scientists, academics, artists, and former government officials. The performance came at the end of the second day of this 3-day workshop, and followed a session on international crises that included a discussion of “the new Middle East.” Judging from the YouTube video posted by the Tällberg Foundation, the performance served as fodder for a discussion the following day that addressed global responsibilities, the tragic state of Syria, and the power dynamics at play in resituating the performance at CERN. The performance clearly meant many things to the different members of this audience; however, it had ceased to be an occasion of mutual healing (Tällberg, 2014; YouTube, 2015). 5
In July of 2016, the show was remounted as Queens of Syria for a United Kingdom tour. This version was co-produced by the Young Vic and featured 13 performers. London-based director Zoe Lafferty staged this new version. Farah Karouta designed new costumes that evoked ideas of traditional clothing in bright burgundy, purple, and mustard, while also featuring traditional patterns. Bissane Al Charif—who provided interactive theater training and the entire scenography in the Amman production—designed a new set for the London production. After five performances at the Young Vic, Queens of Syria traveled to venues in Oxford, Brighton, Liverpool, Leeds, and Durham before returning for a gala performance at the New London Theatre in the West End. In Amman, the performers’ direct delivery of their personal narratives contrasted with the formalism with which Abu Saada approached Euripides’ text. If the Amman production had access to elaborate costumes and setting, it might have served the production’s engagement with Euripides, but probably at the expense of the simple immediacy of the personal narratives. Aesthetics can come at the expense of the efficacious, when the display of artistry eclipses healing. However, aesthetic considerations took greater precedence as the work moved further (in both time and geography) from the therapeutic event of 2013. However, the production may have been efficacious by a different metric: audiences might be more likely to support relief efforts for recipients who share their modernist aesthetics. While this is an extreme example of adapting a therapeutic theater piece to new contexts, it is not unique. Omar Abu Saada’s second production with female refugees, Antigone of Shatila, traveled to Marseille in January of 2016 and Hamburg in February of 2016.
A production invariably achieves multiple ends, whether it is drama therapy in an institutional setting or a musical extravaganza on Broadway. However, no end can be achieved without funding. When Brecht (1964) chastened artists who make the mistake of “imagining that they have got hold of an apparatus which in fact has got hold of them,” it was not because he advocated a theater free of financial concerns (p. 34). Rather, he insisted that artists confront the business of theater so as to be better aware of how it affected their artistic output. When British producers of The Syria Trojan Women (Charlotte Eagar, William Stirling, and Georgina Paget) selected a Western canonical text for production by refugees, they may have considered the pressures of fundraising. The selection no doubt made it easier to raise the 75,000 pounds sterling needed for the production. With that relatively modest sum, they were able to provide the performers with food and travel subsidies, provide daycare for their children, and provide psychological counseling.
The cachet of Western theater also may have inspired the producers’ next theater project: an Arabic language version of Lionel Bart’s Oliver! with a cast of Syrian refugees and Jordanian children. Bart’s 1960 musical had a successful West End revival that ran from 2009 and 2011, followed by a UK tour. The Syrian production not only evoked the West End but drew from Disney; the productions’ musical director and translator had worked on several Arabic versions of Disney animated films. Two Jordanian companies sponsored the production: Umniah (a mobile phone company) and Al Nisr (an insurance company). An attention-grabbing big production musical brings different funding opportunities, whether on Broadway or in the Middle East. The project required training six drama and music therapy coaches to work with the children and casting was preceded by 6 months of drama and music workshops for between 40 and 100 Syrian and Jordanian children (Oliver!, n.d.). A documentary about the development of the project was in post-production at the time of this writing. Here, the producers repeated a strategy that has already proved its success. The process of creating The Syria Trojan Women was captured in Yasmin Fedda’s documentary The Queens of Syria (which no doubt provided the name for the UK touring production). That documentary earned eight awards from six different film festivals and has prompted a spate of news articles (Queens of Syria, n.d.).
This brings me to a final observation about The Syria Trojan Women and its various afterlives: it was conceived from the start to be both local and international. Perhaps this duality is the most significant development in what is here being theorized as the revolutionary public sphere. Through foreign tours and festival screenings, these Trojan Women projects went from fostering local healing to calling for international action. This has involved engaging online media at every step in the process, from fundraising through sites like Indiegogo and Virgin Money Giving, to Facebook pages and Vimeo accounts. Trailers for the film and performances remain on the YouTube channels of various theaters and film festivals. The producers have also used the Internet to circulate original content depicting Syrian refugees; We Are All Refugees is a six-part audio drama about Syrian refugees in Jordan. A team of Syrians and Jordanians wrote the scripts, and the series featured several major stars of Arab film and television along with actors from the original The Syria Trojan Women project. The Levantine star cast included the Syrian actors/activists Nawar Bulbul and May Scaff (both in exile), the Palestinian film-star Eyad Hourani, and Jordanian comedian Nabil Sawalha. The series streams on Radio SouriaLi (via SoundCloud and YouTube) and was broadcast on BBC Arabic and SouriaLi’s FM station in Jordan. 6 Consistent with the producers’ earlier efforts to circulate their projects to English speakers, they created an English-language adaptation, Welcome to Zaatari, that was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in November 2015.
Rethinking the public
This mix of public and online interactions and the multiplicity of participants and audiences (from refugees to a West End audience) further complicate the idea of a revolutionary public sphere. For Habermas, the bourgeois public sphere developed through, and continued to reference, face-to-face interactions. Habermas explains that in England, for example, journals were the extension of coffee house circles that had grown so numerous and extensive that contact could only be maintained through print. The fact that many journal articles employed the dialogue form, according to Habermas (1989), attests to “their proximity to the spoken word” (p. 42). Speech is central to the creation of a realm of rational discourse as social activity that generates the public will. According to Habermas, the equality of the speakers is implicit in their presence in the neutral ground of the coffee house. However, that equality soon dissipated with the rise of consumer culture and powerful media interests. In the last 15 years, numerous books and articles have debated whether the Internet might bring about the conditions for a new virtual public sphere or whether political and economic interests had already circumscribed new media’s revolutionary potential. 7 Is the Internet a space of free exchange between equals? Can a disembodied debate generate a shift in public will?
Therapeutic theater reminds us that political speeches (like all political actions) are acts of self-definition in relation to a community. The political is merely one genre of the constant exchanges by which individuals mark the boundaries between self and other and, in doing so, invent their wholeness. If online communication has this same power, it is likely a function of the human ability to imagine a partner to our speech, whether or not that person is in the same room. I think we witness the limits of this imaginative power when online culture sometimes veers toward paranoia, incoherence, and echolalia. The domain of common concern requires first the ability to conceive the common, to both identify with and differentiate from others. Whether remarking on the decline of salon culture or the end of bowling leagues, commentators have noted that coherent social bodies are premised on the proximity of real bodies. Communication technology—from the printing press to the Internet—helps us imagine this proximity where it does not exist but technology cannot endlessly substitute for proximity.
The Syria Trojan Women and subsequent projects helps us imagine the shape of a new public sphere in which the virtual act as an extension of face-to-face interactions. All of the creative work connected to the The Syria Trojan Women—whether in Amman, Shatila, London, Marseille, or CERN—began with the spoken word or declared its close proximity to the spoken word. The project departed from and returned to workshops and performances. Equals first shared their experiences in the rehearsal process, shared these experiences with an audience of fellow refugees and citizens of their host nation) and only then disseminated information to online and gala audiences. Discussing this work in relation to Habermas’ public sphere helps one identify barriers to political engagement that exists throughout the world for those with and without citizen status, and helps us imagine how these barriers can be overcome. We might then theorize a revolutionary public sphere, one grounded in new models for promoting civic engagement as social and personal healing, one in which private concerns translate into public good.