Al-halqa in Arabic Theatre: An Emerging Site of Hybridity

Traditional Western scholarship on Arabic theatre has borne a strong colonialist imprint, interpreting such theatre almost entirely as a form borrowed from Europe and essentially developed according to European practice. In the later twentieth century, however, more attention has been paid both by Arab scholars and dramatists to performance techniques and practices from their own culture. Of particular importance has been the circular space, the halqa, widely utilized in popular performance, where the audience gathers around and interacts with performers at their center. This essay provides a brief history of the use and symbolism of the halqa, and then discusses its utilization by a number of leading modern dramatists and directors from across the Arab world—from Tayeb Saddiki in Morocco and Abdelkader Alloula in Algeria, to Sa’dallah Wannus in Syria. Major works of each of these dramatists are analyzed to show how each has employed the traditional halqa as a means to explore liminality, hybridity, and postcolonial agency. In order to retrieve this performance tradition, theatre in the Arab world has become more and more improvisational and self-reflexive, even though such retrieval is still negotiated within the paradoxical parameters of appropriating and dis-appropriating the Western models. This modern effort started with the call for an original/autochthonous Egyptian/Arabic theatre by Yusif Idris, whose masterpiece, al-Farafir (The Flipflops), is still considered a central reference, with a strong aura of authority all over the Arab world. Idris’s challenge, in turn, has led some to the “worship of ancestors” and to a ceaseless quest for purity in the name of “authentic” Arabic theatre. The reality, however, is that even so-called indigenous performing traditions such as that of the halqa are cultural constructs undergoing continual change.