2001-2011: A Decade of Arab Performance Under American Eyes (original) (raw)
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Introduction: Articulations of Contemporary Arabic Culture in Theatre and Performance
Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, 2008
and Evergreen State College. She has published articles on Palestinian and Arab cultural productions. She is the senior editor of Mahmoud Darwish: Exile's Poet (Interlink 2007), Performing the Nakba on the Palestinian Stage (forthcoming Winter 2008 from Interlink). She is currently working on two manuscripts, on urban insanity in Arab women's fiction, and the performance of militant iconography in the Middle East.
Arab-American Theatre: Still a Struggle for Visibility
Amidst the current resurgence of anti-Arab and Muslim sentiments in American conservative media outlets, the need for active Arab American artistic voices has never been more urgent. The present political and social environment reminiscent of post 9/11 America, where many Arab Americans experienced an endangered sense of identity. Historical challenges during this time have represented, however, a catalyst for more activist and artistic Arab-American ventures. Arab American theatre has seen a new wave of fruitful and concentrated artistic expression as a direct response to 9/11, and its repercussions on the Arab American community. Today’s political milieu similarly invokes powerful Arab American voices. In service of these artistic ventures, it becomes imperative to survey past experiences and struggles of Arab American artists, evaluating the needs and the challenges that they have, thus far, faced. Drawing lessons from past endeavours can both enlighten and better direct current and future Arab-American dramatic expressions towards greater visibility and viability.
Global Posts The Arab Theatre Festival (7th Session
The Arab Theatre Festival is an annual event organized in a different Arab country each year by the Arab Theatre Institute.[1] This year's session chose Morocco as the host nation.[2] The Festival took place in the capital Rabat between January 10 and 16, 2015, and was attended by theatre representatives from around the Arab world.[3] This seventh version of the Festival also corresponded with Morocco celebrating the passage of one hundred years since the establishment of a modern theatre tradition there. This gave the festival a particular focus and marked this year as one of the most notable in the history of the Arab Theatre Institute. Ismail Abdellah, the secretary-general of the institute, during a press talk held a day before the opening of the festival, confirmed that all indications promised that the seventh session of the Arab Theatre Festival, the "Moroccanized" version, fully supported by the Moroccan Ministry of Culture, would be a great success as groundwork. He added that the institute had been looking forward to such an event since its launch in 2009, and predicted that the occasion would constitute "a new turn in the history of the Festival." The Moroccan Minister of Culture, Mohamed Amine Sbihi, announced during the opening ceremony that the seventh celebration, which was being held under the patronage of His Majesty King Mohammed VI, expected the participation of about five hundred Arab attendants belonging to the field of theatre and performance arts, and that a hundred of them would be from Morocco. He added that the event's effects would not be limited to the area of the capital (Rabat), but extended to reach other cities around the kingdom. All of the cultural centers around Morocco were activated during that period and hosted different cultural activities reflecting the atmosphere of the two ceremonies that were being coordinated: The Arab Theatre Festival and the Centenary of Moroccan Theatre. The Seventh Arab Theatre Festival was marked by the organization of cultural activities of various types. One of the most important elements was the presentation of about seventy plays, of which seven dramas competed for the prize of Sheikh Sultan Bin Mohammed Al Qassimi, rewarding the best Arab theatrical show of the year 2014. The tradition of presenting such an award was established as an attempt to keep the Arab theatre active and encourage Arab dramaturgy to carry on updating itself, contemplating, and reflecting upon some of the most prevalent current issues. Moreover, the Festival held the largest scientific conference ever in the domain of theatre and performance studies organized in the Arab world. Six panels of various research topics were enriched by discussions led by some of the most prominent figures in Arab theatre and performance studies. The festival honored twenty-two Arab artists and organized workshops, training for the benefit of theater amateurs, animating workshops dedicated to children, and allotted, next to the Festival's Book Fair, a large space to signatures (book launches) of new theatrical releases. This last activity, together with press conferences related to competing plays, was organized inside the Mohamed V Theatre.
The Jewish-Iraqi theatre -Ur Ensemble: Majnūn Laylā as interweaving performance cultures
Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, 2020
In 1955, Iraqi Jewish immigrant artists founded Ur Ensemble (Lahakat Ur in Hebrew) and produced in Arabic the Majnūn Laylā (The Madman of Layla) by the Egyptian poet and playwright Ah mad Shawqī. The Israeli Establishment subsidized and supported the Ensemble and intended the play for Palestinian spectators in Israel. It is a puzzling fact, because the policy of the Zionist melting pot required Middle Eastern Jews to move away from Arab culture and adopt a western orientation. I argue that the Israeli establishment perceived the Ur Ensemble as a propagandistic vehicle in order to display the state's favourable attitude towards the Arab minority for the international community. However, in practice, the theatrical event created an Arab-Jewish dialogue based on a shared Arab culture contrary to the establishment's political intentions.
Submission Deadline: 15 January 2017 Bursary Application Deadline: 22 December 2016 The Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research invites proposals for contributions to its forthcoming meeting at the IFTR annual conference in São Paulo, Brazil from 10 to 14 July 2017. We particularly, but not exclusively, welcome contributions that address the conference theme "Unstable Geographies: Multiple Theatricalities", which, as the organizers put it, emphasizes " the massive migrations and increasing deterritorialization of human cultures ". This topic has a strong relevance to the contemporary Arab world and its historically multi-layered inter-and intra-cultural shifts and displacments. If anything, this concern is particularly evident in the growing crises facing today's Arab and Arabo-Islamic migrant and refugee communities. This topical concern notwithstanding, it is equally evident in the historically-rich but largely under-explored theatrical practices of Arab and Muslim communities in South and Latin America.
Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences Studies, 2020
Arab American theater refers to theater performances by Arab American playwrights and artists from the early decades of 20 th century onward. It dramatizes contemporary issues that challenge the Arab American community in the United States. Arab American theater discusses mainstream American culture and the minority culture of Arab Americans in different theater performances, reflecting the relationship between the two cultures and how each one looks at and negotiates itself with the other. It provides a bifocal vision of the two cultures as it delineates understanding, acceptance, repudiation, or negotiation between both cultures. This paper, thus, sheds light on American discourses, as well as Arab American theater performances as counter discourses which provide space to depict fairly images of their communities and cultures. The paper critically analyzes some plays, written and performed by Arab American playwrights with the intention of expounding their attempts to resist, recast, restage, and redefine negative depictions. The main contention of this paper is to expose how Arab American theater plays an important role in the lives of Arab Americas in the early 21 st century, as it gives the Arab American playwrights space to articulate their identity and voice the challenges they face in American society. It explicates how the position of Arab Americans has changed from invisible to hypervisible, from passive to dynamic, from silent to vibrant and from an unknown to a well-known community.