Damascus Theatre Festival (review)

Looking back, it is hard not to read the performances at the 15th Damascus Theatre Festival in light of the demonstrations that would begin less than a month later in Tunisia and eventually spread through much of the Arab world. Since the biennial festival was revived in 2004 (after a fourteen-year hiatus), it has featured a number of well-known political theatre-makers from the Arab world, such as Tawfiq al-Jabali, Touria Jabrane, and Naila al-Atrash. The 2010 festival lacked such famously controversial voices; however, as in past years, there were a large number of younger performers whose work addressed both the aspirations and frustrations of Arab youth.

The World Bank estimates that 36 percent of the population in the Middle East and North Africa is less than 15 years of age, and that a quarter of young, working-age people are unemployed. Theatre practitioners are very much aware of the Arab youth explosion and are examining how underfunded and hierarchical national theatre institutions can accommodate new generations of theatre-makers, the role of the growing number of new independent companies, and theatre's ability to address the needs and concerns of the burgeoning Arab youth population. At the last two festivals, round-tables and lectures were devoted to the new generation of theatre-makers, and at the 2010 festival two of the three lecture sessions took up the issue of "Theatre and Youth." As a speaker at one of these sessions, the work and concerns of young theatre-makers were very much on my mind when attending the festival, and this informed the shows I chose to see from the thirty-four that were mounted.

In recent years, the organizers have attempted to provide broad representation from the Arab world, and they were particularly successful this year, with companies from fourteen Arab countries staging productions. The festival also featured productions from Cyprus, Turkey, and the UK. The increase in the number of Arab countries taking part meant that several countries with more limited theatre traditions sent companies. This fact may have accounted for what I perceived to be a greater number of weak productions than I had seen in the previous two festivals; however, it also meant that a much greater number of young theatre-makers attended as guests of the festival, many of whom have limited opportunities to see theatre in their home countries. Since the festival's inception in 1969, the Syrian Ministry of Culture has cited the festival both as evidence of and spur to Arab unity, and so the greater inclusion of young people from throughout the Arab world clearly served the festival's mission.

If any one show seemed to identify the complexities of the youth explosion, it was Laila Soliman's adaptation of Frank Wedekind's Spring Awakening. The production followed three months of research that included interviews with teenagers from the Delta region and the outlying neighborhoods of Cairo, followed next by workshops in Cairo schools and a process of improvised rehearsals, all of which contributed to the final text. Later, when the company

Salma Said (Rasha/Wendla) in Spring Awakening. (Photo: Salam Yousry.)

Sherin Hegazy (Lola/Ilse) and Ahmed El Gendy (Yousef/Moritz) in Spring Awakening. (Photo: Salam Yousry.)

took the production to Beirut after the performance at the festival, it again staged a workshop, this time with Palestinian teenagers from a refugee camp in Tripoli, Lebanon. All of this information is present on the production's blog, and it is worth noting that the production also features its own Facebook page. As in the United States, young Egyptian theatre-makers who work without government patronage rely on social media both to publicize their work and to create ongoing relations with their audiences. Moreover, like other young theatre-makers throughout the Middle East, the company for Spring Awakening combines its artistic research with a program promoting health and education to underserved Arab communities. The Spring...