The Promise of Performance in the Arab World

Theatre entails the physical practice and site of performance, and as such exists in an ephemeral state with unique methodologies to document and present this research. Contemporary efforts — evident in both The Theatres of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia and Doomed by Hope — peel back layers of live art from their historical, political, and cultural contexts to resituate this medium squarely within our present day.

It is particularly salient that each of these volumes was assembled and released in the context of the uprisings that occurred throughout the Arabic-speaking world between late 2010 and 2012. In August 2013, at the time of this writing, Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria has used chemical weapons in the Damascus suburbs of Arbeen, Zamalka, and Ein Tarma, while promises of change in Egypt have been met with multiple shifts in government, culminating with the ominous release of former President Hosni Mubarak.¹ Revolutionary art has been abundant during this time, with artists and funders alike responding with a high level of production and support that has been scrutinized for being untimely and off the mark, despite the best intentions.² Can art function as an interpretive lens of our times, particularly when those times shift in such startling degrees? These volumes, when considered alongside each other, offer up performance as a praxis: the study and form of material and embodied knowledge. Each volume attends to its revolutionary context, offering a methodology for how to talk about art’s usefulness for imagining an alternative future or resisting a current oppressor. This methodology binds these texts to each other, and makes them powerful interventions in the contemporary writings on performance and world theatre.

The project of Eyad Houssami’s volume is inspired by the late dramatist Saadallah Wannous who in 1996 delivered the international message “Thirst for Dialogue” for World Theatre Day, created by the International Theatre Institute founded by UNESCO. In his address, Wannous observed that, “We are doomed by hope,” and further wrote:

I firmly believe that the theater, despite all the technological revolutions, will remain the ideal place where man can reflect both upon his historical and existential condition . . . . [T]he globalization that is taking shape at the end of this century is almost the very opposite of the utopia dreamt of by philosophers and which has nourished our spirit through the ages . . . . [I]t seems to be mercilessly destroying all forms of solidarity in societies, until at last there will remain only isolated individuals, worn down by solitude and depression. Indeed, theater is more than art; it is a complex phenomenon of civilization itself. If we were to let it vanish, the world would become a lonelier, uglier, and poorer place.

Doomed by Hope offers readers insight to Wannous’s texts, along with an unparalleled survey of his works and the social, historical, and cultural contexts in which they resonate. The book cultivates a dialogue between essays and creates a story arc that begins with a lucid foreword by celebrated writer and intellectual Elias Khoury, who, as a close friend of Wannous, offers insight into the multi-disciplinary and deeply collaborative world that Wannous created for himself and his peers.

Doomed by Hope dialogically accumulates an array of adaptations and experiences of Wannous’s texts and juxtaposes them against material interventions of theatre practice. In his close reading of Wannous’s Soirée for the 5th of June, scholar Assad Al-Saleh emphasizes the use of dialogue to define the play’s structure. Wannous wanted it to be a “live, improvised celebration,” a search for truth in the 1967 defeat. The play has no breaks and comprises a single unit of text with the following subtitle: “the audience, history and officials participate in addition to professional actors.” No single voice has a definitive answer to the questions, and yet a panoply of voices gives generations...