 That's your, how did that happen? I was told you know my family is just so frail. Oh well. Can you picture something like this? Very good. Um, yes. Yeah, very well. 11, 12, so that could be correct. And um, I will email you correction. Okay. Thank you. Yeah, it's the same place. I was thinking about applying but I might be surprised. Well because I'm so invested in you. We're going to have a, how would you like it? Enjoy it. Yeah. Here you go. I could give it a shot. Hey Mike. Hey. I got it. Oh good. Yeah. That's an interesting one to pick but thanks for coming. That's good. Okay. Alright you also, did she come to visit you? Enjoy. Did she come to visit you? Yeah. EFFs. No, E. Yeah. Best friends forever. So there's a chair or a stone. This is the one for you. This is a, no this is a good one. Sit here. I'm serious. This is good. Come here. Of course. No you won't. This is your own Bauhaus design. It's not, it's not too, not too comfortable. Oh yes. Dan Gerald was a big fan of God. Actually the book is, I was asked, maybe they would ask you to write a review there for the book. This book was probably a pretty contagious stance. Yes, right. He's very good at the lab. They sent me, have you read yourself from the Balkans? Yeah. Yeah. Very good community. Some form or another. So I hope maybe. Oh, I didn't know that. Well, the book here is just wonderful. It's kind of the kind of thing that John McGinsey would do of doing, that is to say, really takes the formative, connected performance art. We have social, economic, cultural developments in the book. He's just very, very good. He passed the book on to Corey. I suppose he must know. He's a chair. Well, tell me. Yeah. I would very... But anyway, that's his book. Yeah, I saw that. No, that's the book. Yes. He's very, very good. Very good. Yeah. Yeah. People do that. Yeah. He's had a bit of a revitalization. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's academic and it's theater, the place where they both meet. There's no way you can ignore that anymore. Welcome all, you can come and see me talk about it. Education changes people. Education changes communities. Education is the key for any society to prosper. Just a mention of Darwin was considered at that time something unacceptable to the faith, a great scandal. The UB was the first university in the region to accept women students. It was a very daring decision for the leaders of universities today. Sixty countries, every religious space in the sector could think of. Violence in Beirut, killings in the world, shootings in the world. They opened a briefcase and there was a gun there. You just didn't know what was going to happen from two weeks ago. There was a gun arrested on the road, some killed, some kidnapped. It was like a survival group. It's just not about that one chapter in the book. It's a true thing you should be and how you can reach persons. The history of this region is complementary. And this opens the mind. So, welcome everybody to the Martin East Eagle Theatre Center here at the Graduate Center Cune. Welcome in the green room of the PhD program in theater. My name is Frank Henschkernamber, director of the Segal Center and it's our great pleasure tonight to welcome you all here. But especially to celebrate this truly significant evening tonight and opening of a relation with the American University in Beirut. Projector seems to have different format than our Segal Center. Projector downstairs. But I think you did get the story of what those films are trying to tell. So I have with me Peter Akasal, Professor Peter Akasal who is the executive officer of the program and also a professor here at the PhD program in theater next to the Sahar who traveled all the way from the American University in Beirut and she was the theater initiative and she will also tell us more about the work. If you have a cell phone, please do take it out for the moment and see if it's off. And we also would like to welcome Professor Marvin Carlson who is here, the professor of theater and the ex-college of Arab theater in the Americas and Catania and the Central who came to join us. Thank you. A board member who came out of interest also for this program. And the provost and the president of the Guelters in Bacuni were not able to join us tonight. They had a long-standing apartment at the French Embassy tonight and we got this evening and this program, this exchange on a very, very short notice. This was the evening we had. Peter was leaving tomorrow for Paris and then Canada and then also to Shanghai where we will also open on November 1st. The Marvin Carlson Theater Center in Shanghai which will also be a new collaboration also with the Seagulls and the Antiquities Center. So we are really exploring our networks and our long-standing connections to scholars and visiting scholars from all around the world. Again, thank you for coming. It shouldn't be longer than an hour and hour and 15 minutes. Here in the very same room will be a reception. This is under the white. I said they had some wonderful Lebanese food also. Again, thank you all for coming. Peter. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Here we have beautiful things. What do you have now? Smells of the food. So I hope you can stay around for some good afterwards. So as Frank said, my name is Peter Ekassoul and I'm the executive officer of the Ph.D. program in the theater of the Graduate Center and a rare Seagull event that we're actually in the green room of the theater program. So we do a lot of work together with the Seagull Center and a lot of our practice-based research is a kind of work that we do in partnership with the Seagull Center. And this particular project I think is an example of the really productive relations that we can forge not only between the teaching program at the Graduate Center in theater and the Seagull Center, but also with the American University of Peru. So I'm just going to say very briefly how very pleased we are to be working on this very new exchange project. So this is the first of a series of events that will be taking place initially as a pilot program over the next year and then fully expect that this will continue to be a very productive program of exchange for both faculty and students between our program in theater and the theater initiative of the American University of Peru. So tonight we have, in a sense, doing an inaugural presentation of this exchange. So she's here as our guest and tomorrow we'll be having a series of meetings not only among our faculty but also with some of our provost to discuss building a relationship into the future because this is a new exchange that we're launching. Just to briefly mention some of the activities that we've got planned for the exchange already and just keeping in mind that this is something that we're still developing. So we will be thinking about other activities that we might have in the future. But first of all, there will be, at some stage, a visit by myself and Frank and even last night I was talking to our provost, Joy Connolly, and she was saying, oh, I'd like to come along. So I've also had discussions with Catherine Cole who runs the James Gullery downstairs on the ground level. She's also very interested. And so there might be a, you know, I will go and talk to the theater program and maybe do some of my work on dramaturgy with the students there. But we're looking at the possibility of having a visit by some of the, I guess, the people who are doing the kind of cultural work in the program in the Graduate Center. Next year, our colleague, Professor Robert Myers, who's a very close colleague of Marvin's, who's a translator of Arabic plays, will be running a conference at the American University of Beirut. And it's planned that our colleague, Dr. Professor Jean Brown Jones, who's an expert in theories of translation, will attend that conference, along with, we hope, two students from our program who will go there and present work from their dissertation's work in progress. So they'll be essentially participating in the academic conference down there. Meanwhile, one of the things we're going to talk about tomorrow is the plans for a conference back here next year, which will be in partnership with the Segal Center on the theme broadly of Asian dramaturgy. Sorry, not Asian, I'm an Asianist, so I just always default through Asia. Arabic dramaturgy is a concept of dramaturgy and how it relates to theater and performance in the Middle East, and perhaps specifically to some of the examples of really exciting cultural production that's happening in Lebanon. And it's proposed that faculty and students will come from AUB to that program. And then the other thing that we have planned for at the moment is a series of documentations and publications. But as I said, this is a work in progress. It's something that we're developing. We already have, I think, three or four events that are in planning, but we're looking forward to developing more. So very much welcome you to New York and to the Graduate Center. And it's a great pleasure to have your presentation. Thank you. All right. I'm really very honored to be here tonight and to speak to you on behalf of the theater initiative at the American University of Haiti. I would like to thank a few people who were instrumental in bringing this partnership into being between CUNY's PhD program in theater and performance, the Segal Center, and the theater initiative at AUB. Thank you, President Chase Robinson and President Khaldukhuri, who initiated this project. Thank you, Provost Joy Connolly of CUNY and Dean of Arts and Sciences at AUB Nadia Sheikh. Thank you, Marvin Carson, Frank Henschker, and Peter Eckershall and Jean Graham Jones and our very own Robert Myers who made this collaboration happen within months after visits by our two presidents and the initial talks. In the last 10 years, in spite of the precarious political and security situation of the country and the region, Lebanon and Beirut in particular witnessed an upsurge in theatrical activity. New companies emerged. Pioneers of the pre-Civil War era are presenting new work. The post-Civil War generation of artists continue to present their work. Artists who left the country during the Civil War to live and study and train in the US and Europe have come back to contribute to the theatrical scene which is very diverse. Practitioners have contradictory aesthetics but they share intuition and passion and the real sense of political and social commitment and a common objective, that is to resist the status quo by maintaining a vibrant theatrical scene. A broad look at the contemporary Lebanese theater reflects how it's developing really under the influence of its historical and socio-political conditions as well as in relation to the influence of western theater. For some practitioners, theater is a political instrument to raise awareness, expose social and political ills and incite change and self-examination. In the mission statement, for instance, the award-winning ensemble Zuqab founded just after the 2006 war expressed their dedication to theater practice and I quote, as social and political involvement with the belief in theater as a space for common reflection and in collectivity as a position against marginalizing systems and codes. The repertoire of more than 15 productions tackled various themes such as the structures of power, gender and sexuality and death and immortality. That's one of my pictures there. Okay, this is Zuqab. Collective Kahrabah founded in 2007 by artists and technicians from different fields is another example of theater makers working collectively on the premise that art is a pathway for dialogue and openness. Perhaps the company's most impressive achievement is the Free Multidisciplinary Festival of us, the moon and the neighbors which they started in 2011 in the popular neighborhood of Marum Khayyil in Beirut. The festival expanded this year to Hamana Village in Mount Leberan and took place at Hamana Artist House a recently opened residency house under the artistic direction of Collective Kahrabah. Like Zuqab and Collective Kahrabah emerging company Minwale founded in 2014 aspires to decentralize theater by providing theater workshops for youth in various marginalized areas in the country. The company is interested in and I quote researching developing frameworks for theater productions and activities that assess the realities of humankind in relation to the various prices it faces. To devise their work they built on Arabic literature and contemporary international philosophy and also on multimedia. Many other artists also use theater as a social tool and write and devise their plays through the process of rehearsals thus utilizing the formula of collective creation although not necessarily in the framework of a company or an ensemble. Women directors are especially active in Lebanon. To name a few, Lina Abyat is one of the most prominent and prosperous directors. In the last couple of years she devised documentary pieces on a range of issues such as domestic violence and the Syrian refugee crisis. Ali Al-Khalidi another example recently conceived and directed a biographical performance based on her grandmother, Anbara Salam who was an early Arab feminist often credited with being the first Muslim woman to remove her veil in public in the near Middle East in 1927. Hanan Haj Ali another example recently wrote and directed and acted in her performance, Jogging a one woman show that revisits the actress's dreams, aspires, hopes and disillusions. Of the younger generation I have the example of Yara Bonassar who is an emerging director who uses documentary material for her work to expose and deconstruct social stereotypes. Contemporary theatre in Lebanon is also influenced by Western theatre traditions especially with regard to dramaturgy. The figure that remains relatively speaking absent from the Lebanese theatrical scene is that of the playwright. Theatre makers compensate for the absence of the playwriting tradition by translating and adapting Western texts. Examples here are plenty to name a few from recent history. Lebanese actor and director Jacques Maroune commissioned a translation of and directed David Ives, Venus Infer and Neil Labute's reasons to be pretty. Actor filmmaker and stage director Carlos Shaheen who recently moved back to Lebanon from Paris translated and directed Yathmina Rizal God of Carnage and Donald Marguely's Dinner with Friends. With Tahouil Ensemble Theatre I recently co-translated and co-directed Tracy Letts August Osage County. Lina Khouri translated and adapted Eve Ensler's Vaginal Monologues and Paula Vogel's How I Learned to Drive. Perhaps these productions have no direct political implications but their value lies not only in introducing Lebanese theatre galleries to modern and contemporary international theatre but also in bringing new audiences to the value to theatres. By presenting accessible text-based theatre that follows a clear storyline, they are making theatre available to a larger segment of the society. Contemporary Lebanese theatre is developing rapidly thanks to the companies and theatre makers who persist despite the various problems and obstacles they face. From the lack of governmental support to financial problems to an unstable security situation to problems regarding the relationship with audiences, to lack of proper theatre infrastructures as well as the censorship that still operates in Lebanon to this day and is responsible for banning several theatre makers from presenting their work. The examples I mentioned are by no means comprehensive of practitioners and genres. Improvisation of theatre, for example most prominently Sundayers pop-up theatres such as Thayal and Songul, drama therapy especially by the Parsons and Zeyna Zakash, playback theatre Lebanon Company and other forms constitute a significant part of the contemporary Lebanese theatre landscape. Driven by a strong passion for theatre and a sturdy conviction concerning its role in helping us understand our humanity the theatre initiative at AUB had made a special place for itself in this vibrant theatre landscape. Within a couple of years of its having been established before I speak about our work at the theatre initiative allow me to briefly contextualize it within the history of theatre at AUB. Theatrical activity has been present at AUB since the 1920s. However, because it was never institutionalized such activities were always sporadic as they were always linked to personal initiatives. A passionate student or a passionate teacher so it would prosper at points and then fade away when these students graduated or teachers left. Christopher's calf was one of the teachers who made an impact when he moved to Beirut after graduating from Oxford University to work at AUB. He founded the English drama players. The plays that the troupe presented were always in English and from the English repertoire. However English drama players had two spin-offs the theatre group and the phoenix players both founded by students who worked with the calf. Veritas Theatre Ensemble was another important group established at AUB pre-Civil War era. It was founded by David Qurani and Peter Shbaia both still teach at AUB. Upon their return from Lebanon after finishing their studies at the Old Vic. The company was active from 1968 to 1972 and presented works by Sophocles, Shakespeare, Valdoni, Breck, Tchaikov, Scho, Pinter, Ibsen and others. The company also presented work in Arabic such as The Fate of a Co-Proach by the Egyptian Tawfi El-Haki. The three men would swap roles acting, directing and producing. Despite the fact that these initiatives were very important they faced a common challenge which is succinctly stated by Lebanese historian Khalil Saeed in her prominent book on the theatre movement in Lebanon from 1965 to 1975. As Saeed said Lebanese theatre makers would rarely attend the shows presented by AUB troops except perhaps for the shows that were presented off-campus at Beirut Theatre or Baalbek Theatre. Both don't exist anymore. When renowned writer Mary Hanny attended Breck's Mother Courage by Veritas Theatre Ensemble she wrote a review of the play for Annahar newspaper and she closed her review with her bathroom that the Arabic and French theatre makers in the country did not attend the plays. As Saeed stated, these activities established a huge legacy at the university for its students and also for the Arab students who went back home and contributed to the theatre making in the respective countries. Their lasting effect on the Lebanese theatrical scene however is less tangible. And perhaps is what distinguishes today the theatre initiative. The kind of work that the theatre initiative at AUB has been engaged in serves many purposes. It satisfies its role as university theatre by exposing students to and engaging them in the educational and cultural aspects of theatre study and practice. The model that Robert Myers and I created allows the students to work side by side with professional actors and designers to debate in the creation of theatre production from A to Z while engaging in extensive historical and cultural research around the place. At the same time, the theatre initiative engages with the Lebanese theatre goer by presenting work that responds to and commends on issues of concern to the public and work that complements the Lebanese theatre scene and fills in its gaps. A renowned critic in the newspaper referred to our 2006 production of Shakespeare's King Lear as a gift to the Lebanese theatre. The production was part of the worldwide celebrations of the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death and the 105th anniversary of AUB and for the first time it presented Shakespeare to the Lebanese theatre goers in Proloquial Arabic. The theatre initiative was officially established in 2015. Robert Myers has been laying its foundation since his arrival at AUB in 2004. Before he came to Beirut, his plays were produced off-Broadway in New York, in Chicago, Washington, Atlanta, Los Angeles and elsewhere and he worked as a playwright at Dartmouth and Wesleyan and in Rayo de Janeiro, Amman and Tabaspis. His work is focused on charged social, political and historical subjects and he has also committed to this engaged project while at AUB. Writing unmanned about drone pilots, twilight country about racism in the U.S. South in the 1940s and Mesopotamia about the Gertrude bell and the British occupation of Iraq as well as translating contemporary political plays from the Arab world with Nada Saab. In 2013, Robert and I collaborated on staging rituals of science and which was translated into English by Myers and Nada Saab. Since then we have presented a range of activities. We produced more than six plays, some text based such as The Dictator, written in 1969 by Lebanese playwright and poet Esam Mahfouz and tells the story of a tyrant mentally disturbed individual under the illusion that he is humanity's long awaited savior and his comic an unpredictable assistant in Sadun. Another example of a text based is The Wraith written by Syrian playwright Sadallah Wanoos in 1989 and dramatizes the use of rape as a technique of interrogation by the Israeli Shembet in the West Bank during the First Nettifada. We also presented device original work such as Watch Your Step, a site-specific promenade performance produced in Arabic and English in the Khantar about Lebanon's Civil War. The work took the form of a co-architectural tour in a war-torn area in which the audience was led by tour guides who were actors. In the course of the tour, audience members encountered real-life scenes alongside stage scenes based on events that took place during the Lebanese Civil War. Most recently we created No Demand, No Supply a documentary performance lecture on this trafficking case that was uncovered in Lebanon in 2016 and which we will be reading parts of tonight. We presented our work off Broadway as part of the Between the Seas Festival at the Seagull Center, McGill University, Silk Road Rising in Chicago, Antoine Elvis Theatre in Belgium, and most recently at the Between the Seas Festival in Athens, Greece. We have produced translations and presentations in the Seagull Center, Gail Publishing, PAGE, and others. In the past three years we have co-sponsored academic conferences such as an international conference on Darwin, AUB and the Arab World. We have presented several stage readings, organized workshops, hosted master classes and theater talks. Our latest guest was Donald Margulis who still was in conjunction with the presentation of his play Dinner with Friends at the Mono Theater. We also hosted the acclaimed Lebanese stage director and actor Roger Assa in a series of master classes that will culminate at the end of this month in a device based on Escalis Agmemnon and European Strosian women at Sunflower Theater in Beirut. Our upcoming works include publications with Brill Leiden on Modern and Contemporary Leventine Political Theater by Robert Myers and on one news edited by Myers and Sonia Michel Attasi which has been submitted to the Cambridge University Press. We're also preparing for a production of Darcy Lorca's Blood Wedding in Arabic which will be presented in conjunction with an international conference organized by Robert on Latin America at Andalus and the Arab World. Among the participants will be Marvin Carlson and Jean Graham Jones of CUNY and some students, hopefully. We're also in conversations with Anne Catania at Lincoln Center to establish director's lab Mediterranean to be held annually at AP. Once more on behalf of the theater initiative thank you Marvin, Frank and Peter for helping to bring this partnership to being between our institutions. This partnership will most certainly enable us to continue to produce work of international quality and to meet our role of institutionalizing theater at AP. Thank you. Thank you so much. That's a wonderful introduction and I think not only a very impressive introduction to a part of the world that the theater community is not really terribly aware of but also a suggestion of what a rich and active producing and publishing and writing world it is so we're very excited to be developing a connection with it that I know will be enormously helpful and productive for both programs. We're going now I think one thing we should try to do is get everybody in seats. There are a few chairs back here. There's a spare over here. Let's get as many people seated. For the next part of the program this will be an assembly of the rich dramatic literature that has already been mentioned. How is this going to be done? Are we going to have a set of chairs here? You tell us a little bit about the play and the introduction. We're going to go to the reading now. You mentioned the play but I'll just give a brief introduction so that it's really putting context so that you enjoy and it's going to be hard to enjoy but you know yeah so let me just read this introduction so on the 27th of March 2016 the Inquisitorial Commission in Mount Lebanon raided Silver and Chamory's brothels in the East of Beirut and saved 75 Syrian refugee women from what became known later as the largest sex trafficking network in the history of Lebanon. The story gained huge media attention as the women told horrifying stories about the torture and abuse they suffered at the hands of one of the lead figures of the network which was making more than one million dollars in months according to the police reports. Few weeks after the uncovering of the story the mainstream media lost interest in it and slowly it started fading into oblivion. A year later and as part of the Center of Arts and Humanities Conference at the American University of Beirut on post-war reconstruction in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Palestine the premier of No Demand No Supply in the form of a documentary performance lecture using Aliki Blight's Recorded Delivery Technique which requires actors on stage to listen to live audio recordings through earphones and repeat exactly what they hear. The performance was my attempt to give voice to the stories of the rescued women while I tried to comprehend how such a trafficking network could sustain itself for 10 years in a country as small as Lebanon. I could not forget the story when it was dropped from the mainstream media and I really didn't want to forget it. I felt responsible towards the women survivors. Tonight we'll give you just a gist of the performance with a focus on the women's testimonies. Jenny Youssef will be the narrator Lin Hadeib will repeat the testimony of Ruba Issa Denim and I will repeat the testimony of Nour also Issa Denim. Friday the 25th of March 2016 four Syrian women ran away from Sheymour Issa. The nightclub where they were in prison and forced into prostitution. They got into a van and asked the driver to take them to the Hadath area in the southern suburb of Beirut. The driver who turned out to be an informant to the Mount Lebanon District Investigative Police called the colonel and told him that he had four women riding with him, claiming that they were forced into prostitution. When the colonel sent the patrol, the officer told him, sir, these women are whores. Let us hand them over to the Bureau of Morals so we don't have to withstand their smell, literally. The colonel asked, are they beaten up? The informant said, yes, but perhaps because they are wild. On Friday the four girls arrived at the office of the Investigative Police and told their story. They were kept at the precinct until the colonel fact-checked the story. Two days later the colonel sent out 12 patrol cars six to Sheymour Issa and six to Silver. The women got a hold of the officer and said, we beg you take us with you. After the raid and before the girls were referred to by the police and geodes, Sandy Issa, the investigative reporter from At the Hadwi interviewed them at length. I told him I don't want to work. I told him I want to go back to my parents and my mother. He said, no, you can't go back now. You are old now. You won't go back. He asked me to stay under the table. He asked me to stay for two months. I told him I want to change the money I have and then go back. I stayed a month in Sheymour Issa and then moved to Silver. The working hours at Sheymour Issa were from 9 a.m. till 6 a.m. Imad al-Rihawi, the trafficker had them working two shifts torturing them in between. The work was being done on the floor. I hid inside and saw if they wanted to go down I didn't want to look at them but this guy I wanted to look at the stairs I hid inside and said I want to look at the work but he didn't say anything so I left him alone and asked him why he was going down I told him I wanted to talk to him but he came to me and told me I sought the wood and you sat there and I put the wood to my side and kept it on me and kept it on my side 30 bricks 30 bricks Some women were sold by their families and friends to Imad al-Rihawi such as Lana who came to Sheymour Issa at the age of 17 She was sold by the same friend from her husband who was prostituting her. Aiman told her that she had to work for two months to repay the money that he had paid her friend. The two months meant a life sentence. She had been locked up for two years when the raid happened. Noor had been there for nine days. She came to Shimodi with three of her friends from Syria. They were promised jobs at a restaurant. When they arrived, they discovered that Aiman had paid $6,000 to the person who brought them. He then forced them to stay and repay him the money by beating and torturing them. The sex buyer is the missing link in this story. The women at Shimodi would see 10 to 15 clients per day, seven days a week, no days off. They worked even when they were sick or menstruating. They told them that they couldn't work. They wanted to work for a week or two, if they wanted to. They said they wanted to see me. They asked, what do you want to see? They asked, do you want to see me? They said, no, of course I don't want to see you. Imagine if someone was going to put his hand on you and say, if you want to see me, or no. They said, no, no, I don't want to see you. The woman at Shimodi told them she didn't know you and she didn't want to see you. The semester came when the Arabs were sawing you up, and they didn't want them to see you. They took away the clothes they had left. Theyfortened him and decided I hired him. So they 20ed me all of a sudden. They told me I hired him. They told me they let me hire him and said, what do you do? Do you want to work for me? They told me to go to the hama. They asked, do you want to meet the client? We're here to talk about the accident. Some of the women survivors who escaped said that they were forced to have sex with 20 customers per day. 75 girls, times 20, times 7 days a week. Is that a lot? Let's assume then that each girl was seeing one buyer a day. One times 75, times 7. 525 buyers a week, which means 2,100 a month, which makes 25,200 a year. If we assume that each girl was seeing one buyer a day, and the buyer was paying only 50,000 Lebanese pounds, $33 excluding tips, so 2,100 buyers, times $33 would make $70,000 a month. That is if we assume that each girl was seeing one customer a day. The buyers were the link that no one mentioned when the story was uncovered. The mainstream media denounced the abortion doctor who confessed that he did 200 operations and got paid for each one. And the security authorities who are facilitating and protecting the traffickers job. But no one talked about the buyers. Thousands of men who were intentionally or ignorantly participating in the crime of Shimodi's evaporated as if they had never existed. From an economic point of view, the equation is simple. No demand, no supply. Why is it important to understand the demand? Because it is the essence of the matter. It is clear that the demand at Shimodi's was very high. 10 years, 75 girls, 7 working days a week. Two shifts, 2,100 clients at least per week. 100% of the clients were men. The number of clients arrested during the raid was 3, even though according to the colonel, the place was packed. The number of clients who noticed that the girls were beaten up and tortured is undefined. The number of clients who tried to report the matter to the police is zero. This is what happens when you turn your hand around in Alilah Fustana, sorry, in the middle of the day, on the roof. If you say to me in a very dirty voice, take it. And if you don't want to report it, of course, we will put an end to it. That is, they will do everything they want. They will say, for example, sorry, I want to be loved, I am with you from outside. I don't want to say no. I don't want to say no at all. And whether there are girls, whether they are open-minded or not, or they don't want to return to me, return to me. What do they think? That all the girls who went to the place, of course, Shimodi's, they think that the girl is in danger, they think that the girl knows that she is coming. All the girls, or 90% of the girls. And I want to tell you 100% of the girls. All the girls come to pick her up. This is not working in the supermarket. This is not working in the store. This is not working in a restaurant. This is not working in a disco. This is not working in my house. This is not working. All the girls who came, who came, who I talked to, all of them. There are days, there are days, the girls who were, they were still working. One of their mothers and aunts, they brought her and opened her up. She was the one who came to pick her up. She said, you are ashamed. You loved me. Return to me. Return to me, tell me. Tell me that you are ashamed. Tell me that you are my love, but tell me that I am. Tell me that you are the one who is living with me. Tell me that you want to be with me in every way. Tell me that you are ashamed of your whole body. If you have all this, tell me that you are ashamed. That your daughter is ashamed. A strong son. He says, for example, that he is a big girl, and he wants to be with you. He wants to have you in his heart. The only thing that remains is what you are called, and he is changing the same words. Of course, inside, there is no one inside, or of what I knew, she was happy, or I am not affected by it. It has a great impact. There is heat, there is heat. You were not created like this, and no one of us created like this. There are circumstances, something is wrong with you. Something is wrong with him. He wants to buy. He thinks that his daughter is tired of him. He wants to be with her in his heart. God willing, he will kill her. God willing, he will kill her. The girls will still be on me. The girl, in a simple way, will give her more. If you did not do this, I will not give you. She will wait. She will do everything she wants. Because she thinks that he is the one who is the one. The company will give her three in her heart. There is one who is the one who killed her. I was in her room, and I was in her room. I was killed by one. She said, you are the only one who is right. You have 100,000. You are the one who is right. I will make you my daughter. God willing, I will accept you. I will defend your right. Why? Because he wants to kill her. She is sick. You should give me the medicine if you want to kill her. Everything is not allowed between the couples. Everything is not allowed. God willing, the couples will soon get married to the girl. Of course, I feel I know from inside, but I will not show that she is the one who is the one. You feel that she is the one who is the one who is the one. Your life is over. I am free. I feel that I am ashamed. You are right. My body is eating me little by little. Of course, I thought that I will die. This person who is coming is eating me. It is not just a curse that the one is eating you. The one above or below is eating you. The one below is dying. The person is not sleeping alone, sleeping with his body. People do not think that this woman is human. No, she lives with the animal. There is no such thing. We only come to get rid of you from the soul. We are not allowed to cry. We want to write to you and laugh at you. Even if you want to sleep once a week in the room for an hour and sleep with your body four times, I will pay for your right. I have been hiding from my husband. I tell him to live and not to go to Syria. I do not live I live in the ground. What is your eating? I saw the competition with all colors. I saw the end The survivors of Shimoudi said that each girl would sleep with 10 to 15 men on average per day, which means each woman was bought by 105 men per week. Nevertheless, when we talk about prostitution, we talk about women. The law incriminates the woman, society incriminates the woman, but the truth is that there are always way more men participating in prostitution than there are prostituted women. The woman is prostituted only if she has a prostitute's hair. The Lebanese state did not provide anything to the victims of Shimoudi's. Some were arbitrarily sent to shelters while others were released without any kind of protection. In April 2017, the legal sanctions on Shimoudis were removed. The building was sold and the new owner intends to demolish it, the only witness to the suffering of these women. The case of Shimoudi is the biggest human trafficking case faced by the Lebanese judicial system and the internal security forces. The court trials are still in progress. Ahmad Rihawi was released on June 21, 2017 on $13,000 bail, and Fawad Ali Hassan, the head of the trafficking ring, was never caught. The second court hearing took place on Friday, July 7, 2017, at which nothing happened. Some of the accused didn't show up at the court, so the judge postponed their hearing until November 11, 2017. Meanwhile, Noor, one of the survivors, writes in her diary, I am a woman with thousands of question marks revolving around me. I am a woman blooming on the outside and dead on the inside. I think we are very serious and most impressively thinking, thank you for bringing this to us. We are going to talk a bit about the play, but also about the university and your work down there. So Sahab, before we go to the university, can you tell us, you chose the play, tell us a bit about it, and how was it received? As I said, when the story came out, many Lebanese traumatized me, I was devastated. It was still on my mind, like a year later, when I got the opportunity with the centre of arts and humanities, that you need to put on something related to the Syrian war crisis and refugee crisis, I immediately thought about this story. So I started digging and my initial attempt was basically to give voice to these stories and to the women, and to just remind people that this happened. But as my research started, I noticed that in every single report or video I saw on the subject, mainstream media, there was no mention of the men who were frequenting these proposals. Not at all, not one mention. The media talked about the abortion doctor, as we said, as the narrator said, the security forces, the authorities who actually facilitated the network and its work, all the elements, all the people that made this story were mentioned except for the customers. And it just appeared to me that this could not be possible, this should not be the case, because for me these men were actually committing the crime with the trafficker and with the abortion doctor and others. So that became the focus of the performance. As it's mentioned in the small note that we have in the programme, the documentary piece is really a hybrid kind of documentary theatre. I used verbatim interviews with survivors, but I also used the indictment report. I used interviews the other journalists did with the survivors right when they were rescued. I used interviews I did with the colonel, with the head of trafficking unit at Women Empowerment, the expert on the prostitution there. She did a study which is the first of its kind in the Arab world about the demand for prostitution. So the study became also part of this piece. And I think one example I can give about the impact that the story had. So as I said in the mainstream media there was no mention. And then in July 7, which was the last performance in Lebanon of the piece, a journalist, a reporter from a TV show on a national TV, one of the most watched TV programmes, she was present and she listened to the play and she stayed for the talk back and she usually takes longer than the performance itself, usually would stay for like an hour and 30 minutes to just allow the people time to process and debrief and all of this. So she was there and she was, it kind of struck her, she said that she never thought of this. So she went back and she dedicated 20 minute segment to talk only about the demand aspect of the... She talked about the case of Shimori, but she really talked about the demand aspect. So that enjoyed my journey with this piece. Now the future of this performance would be a national tour in Lebanon to keep telling the story because the trials are still happening, nothing is happening in the trials. The guy is trying to say that he's only a facilitator of prostitution which in Lebanon by law is not, you know, he won't be incriminated or anything. So he's trying to get away from the trafficking. So I think it's very important to tell the story and to keep telling it. So this is one of the objectives of this piece. So it happened at the university theatre in the campus? Yes. And how long was the run? The first performance was on the margins of the company. It was actually the closing event of the conference that I mentioned with the Center of Arts and Humanities and it's a theatre initiative work. So that was the first performance and then the Lebanese American University learned about it and they invited us to put a presentation there. And then the NGO that I was working with fully endorsed the performance and we took it off campus to the city and we presented it at Al-Madina Theatre in Beirut. And then I travelled with the performance to Athens, to the Between the Seas Festival. And now what I'm back in Lebanon, the plan is to do actually, you know, a tour to universities, schools and remote areas in Lebanon to present it. So really it was only three shows at Lebanon, but it still is very early faceless. It's still work in progress and we're still developing and still interviewing survivors and, you know, other people that could help tell the story. It's a courageous work to put on anywhere in the world. Marvin and Peter, what are your reactions? Well, I'm still curious to get a little more information about what the culture allows to be done. Can you say a little bit more about the judicial system, about what crimes, you say the trials are going on, what crimes are being charged, what penalties are available to the legal system? That is, suppose a lawyer, let's say, committed to social justice said, all right, I want to do something about this. What is open legally? That is, the work you're doing is obviously important which is to expose and make people aware of something. But I'm curious now as to what, let's say people say something must be done. What courses, what's available to them? Yeah, legally in Lebanon there's a lot of work that still needs to be done, especially in cases of trafficking. Right now, in the law, prostitution is, you know, if a man and a woman were arrested in an act of prostitution, the woman is taken to jail, the man is sent free. So this guy was actually arrested several times. That's why the, you know, I say in the play that the authorities, the security authorities were actually perpetrators and, you know, as responsible because they would go, raid the brothels, take some women, and then the trafficker himself would go and sometimes he was arrested and you would claim that he's a client. And because he's a client, he can, you know, he's not charged with anything. But the women are put in prison. And then he would go and pay something and then bribe the officers and then they would be released. So when the last raid happened, the women really didn't believe that it's going to save them. So at first they didn't say anything and then after like four of them ran away. Anyway, so one thing I'm trying to do with this performance is to, you know, at least, you know, raise it in the conscience of the people. So for instance, when I did the show at El Medina, that was on, sorry, the show was actually on July 4 and there was a trial happening on July 7. So I mentioned that and I invited the people to go to the court room because many people also never know that this is an option, that these are open for the public. And to my surprise, when I went there on Friday the 7th, two of the audience members were there. Now two is a very small number, obviously. But for me it was, you know, refreshing to see that people actually, they are interested now to know more about the story. Women are men. One woman, one man, actually, yeah. So it's really, it's going to take a lot of time, but that's, I'm now working in close collaboration with Caffa and Giro, which is the feminist secular Lebanese NGO. Caffa passed recently, 2015, they passed a law against domestic violence and it took them seven years to pass the law. So now domestic violence is a crime in Lebanon. It wasn't before 2015. So I can imagine like such a law against, you know, prostituting women how much time it's going to take to happen. But right now, if he's charged with a trafficking crime, he will be put in prison for at least 10 years. But what's happening now with his lawyer, and I met his lawyer and we talked over the phone, he's trying to actually say that the guy is simply a facilitator. They call it in Arabic, like moussahed, facilitator, moussahed al-da'ara, you know. So it might work. He's now released on bail and it actually, you know, he might be able to get away with it. Is prostitution itself a crime in Lebanon? That is, can a woman be prosecuted just on the charges of being a prostitute? Yes and no, because there's really no clear law against prostitution. I mean, like the authorities, they know that it happens. In Lebanon, there's the culture, for instance, of the Super Night Club. They call it Super Night Club. And this is a place where men go and they meet prostitutes, but they're not allowed to prostitute them on the premise. They go there, they pay money, they pay for alcohol, and the next day they take them out to her hotel. So the authorities, they know and they give visas to these women, coming from Eastern Europe, from, you know, Morocco, and they give them artist visas. Oh, it's still called, yeah. That's very common. It's common. Sex trafficking. Yes, and the situation is made more complicated by the sort of trafficking equivalent of consensual acts. That is to say, let's say you have a culture like the Netherlands, where indeed prostitution is a business. That is, a woman can freely decide, this is something I want to do. She must get a permit from the government. She must undergo help. But you only get into trouble if it can be proven that she's coerced into doing this. And so this adds another dimension, but even though it's perfectly clear from the testimony that these people were coerced, that's another level that has to be proven. That they're not, especially it seems to me, when their mothers or their aunts bring them, then it seems to me that a prosecutor or a defender could say, well, they needed the money, they wanted to do this, they didn't have any other options, and so it is a consensual act that they're doing. Yeah, this is what they're trying to say. In the court of this, in the sessions. This is one thing that we wanted to highlight in the performance. So it started as, at least my journey in this piece, started as just wanting to give voice to the stories, but then I found myself learning a lot more about prostitution. And the premise of the show, of the performance lecture, was to say actually that the ultimate goal is prostitution. So we can talk about trafficking and prostitution as the same thing. At least with CAFA, this is our take on the issue. We're not separating between the two because we believe that if he didn't need to sell them in prostitution, he wouldn't have trafficked them in the first place. I mean, what for? It's really for these men to come and buy whether people call it service or the women. And if you listen to the testimonies that men share, sex buyers, they actually don't think of it as a service. They say we're buying the women. We pay $50,000, 11 is zero, which is $33, and we can do whatever we want. And I put the voices of these men on the stage. They were not impersonated, but just their voices. And that juxtaposition between the sex buyers and what they believe and think and their views on women in general, not only women in prostitution and the testimonies of these women. And I need to say that some of the interviews we shared even tonight, they happened right when the case was uncovered, but some of them a year later when I started, you know, when I did the play in April, exactly a year later. So you see, like in reflection, these women talking about what prostitution in general does to the body of the woman. So consent and all, you know, the play really tackles all these questions in a way. I'm sorry. Peter, I have maybe first and one second. First of all, thank you for sharing that piece. It's a very powerful piece of theatre and it's a very rich insight, I think, into the complexity of theatre that's taking place in Lebanon. For me, it was a very powerful depiction of what Georgie Elgum, then, a philosopher called Bare Life, where one exists in a state of bare existence. And also the form, the chosen form of the Baton Theatre is an excellent form to, I think, present the stories of Bare Life. I mean, it's a form that is associated so often with theatres of the oppressed and theatres of people who have experienced hardship or sex trafficking and refugees and so on and so forth. So I think it's a really strong piece and I do like the way that you've dramaturgically made the piece also about this, you know, sexual economy of bodies. So the point that you make about the fact that, you know, without the demand there wouldn't be the service in inverted commas is a very powerful one. Could you, and also the use of the earphone and the recordings, could you imagine a situation where, through a process of workshops, some of those women themselves could appear on the stage and tell their own stories in the way that perhaps many protocols do and would that, I'm aware that that would be an enormous risk in some respects. So could you imagine that that could be something I'm not sure, but I think that would be, that would take a different kind of process. I would probably need to be doing more drama therapy kind of performance rather than documentary. I actually ignored the women that I, you know, repeated her story tonight. So I interviewed her a year after and she was still in the shelter and she came and saw the performance at L.E.U. and during the interview, she was really composed. I was in tears, but she was like a strong woman and she was just sharing the story. And then she came to L.E.U. and she listened to the entire piece, right, with her testimony about others' testimonies and she was devastated. She was in tears, like throughout. Luckily we had two social workers come with her because we expected that such a thing would happen. So we kind of told her and Rada and myself that this is going to be harsh and we gave her the warning, but she insisted to come see it and then she did. And then I kept visiting her once a week doing some kind of closure with her because the interview was very traumatizing, I would say. So I kept seeing her once a week and then at some point during this process and she took like three months afterwards, she kept saying that next time we do this play she wants to be there and she wants to speak. At L.E.U. I came to her afterwards and said, do you want to say anything? So later on she kind of decided that she wanted to be there and she wanted to reveal her identity which is huge. And now she ignores in Canada. She's resettled to Canada. So I think this really shows that a university theater can have a real impact in the city of the country but this is just an example of your work. So tell us a little bit, how's your university structure? What can students study? What different fields? How many are doing that? How many are on campus? How is it part of the university? So the theater initiative really started as Robert and I meeting once and talking about co-teaching the production course together. And he was translating Rituals of Science and Transformation by Thadela Wanoosa and he's like, would you like to stage this play? And I'm familiar with the work of Wanoosa and I went back and read the play again and I came to Robert and I said, I don't think we should do this. At least I can do this with students and I think that was my excuse of running away from Wanoosa because his theater is really, I think it's, you know, quite difficult to tackle but Robert had another idea. He said, what if we hire professionals to do the job and then you can work with professionals and students. So and that became our model so we would always hire professionals, you know, actors, designers but the students would also, Samar was in Rituals of Science and Transformation he was still a student. So the kind of work we do is that we actually transform students from business into theater. Samar had a job with PWC after he graduated and last year he came to me saying, Sahar, I'm resigning, I'm going to go back and do theater and it's from this course, right? Am I exaggerating? Yes, my experience is horrible. Okay, so Mayan is another student who worked with us. So the theater initiative right now faces different challenges. One of them is the absence and the lack of infrastructure at AUB but luckily the administration, the new administration, especially President Fatul Khouri and Dinadir Sheikh, they're so keen on helping us find a permanent space. We really lack a space to rehearse sometimes so that's why our work has been very tactic. Partly because this is what we like to do and partly because we're trying to adapt the situation. So if we can't find enough money to rent a theater, we do site-specific. You know, on the streets, on campus. The last few years have been really very busy for us. I mean, some of the examples I mentioned some of the plays that we did. Students at AUB cannot major in theater yet. We have a minor. It's housed under the Fine Arts and the Artist City. Hopefully with this new collaboration partnership with Martin Siegel and the PhD program here at CUNY, we're hoping that we will start soon hopefully in MFA in theater studies or playwriting. We can talk more about this. Let's talk about building a theater. Building a theater. I mean, right now we're in the process of the administration is looking. This is live streaming and this is partly confidential. So I'm looking at the stuff. But I'll tell you about that tomorrow. I can say there are serious moves towards acquiring a proper theater for you. So are you from the theater family? Because I noticed there's a lot of... Rocher has a... No, he's not my father. Everyone asked me. He's my father. He's a very, very great mentor and friend. We only worked together when we did theater. We invited him to be there to be the star. And no, we're not related for a lot of work by the theater. So maybe it's a good moment and to open up, we also want to point out that Araku was a next generation fellow here and then worked at some film festivals that came from the American University of Beirut. We offered her a work here and then she went on to Columbia University where she is about to finish her studies in theater management. So we have strong existing connections and I hope this initiative will... And Jenny from... Jenny. Jenny, of course. She's also a graduate of AAD. Of Robert's program. And Robert was chair of my thesis. Of your thesis, yes, of course. So there are really deep, deep, deep connections. So we have about, you know, 5-10 minutes for some questions so we would like to open this up and any comment or thought or question? Is there a possibility that Cuny could host a full production of the play somewhere here in New York? Yeah, I think... The good thing is if you have money you can do really almost everything. So that's what it is about. I mean, there are Cuny theaters and others. And yeah, there are possibilities perhaps but something to think about or maybe they come and direct a play here often it's expensive, you know, to bring over by something to redirect. I wouldn't play. Yeah. Whenever I travel abroad and people say tell me about the American theater I always start by saying it's all about money. First thing I know that I say. So picking up on that point yes, I think that is true but I think I would qualify and this sounds kind of traitorous I guess but I would say if the money can be found to do a regular production even in a small theater then I would think and of course the Segal Center is an admirable channel for this there are countless very good small companies full of very talented people who would reap at the chance to be involved with this not only because they reap at any chance where they might have a chance to act and perform but this is such a special kind of case so that I would say I think it's a great idea but I think to think of it as would CUNY do this I think it's not the way to go I think would CUNY facilitate this with its connections in the New York theater world especially to the Segal Center then I think this would be a perfect kind of thing for CUNY to be involved in Hi, thank you so much for your work I mean I think it's incredible I did a piece I directed a piece with young people survivors of sex trafficking in Brooklyn and Queens so it's a topic that's like near and dear to my heart and I was actually wondering what your experience was with audiences post-show of it brought up issues of sexual assault any other sexual violence if there were social workers for audience members and basically how the audience was taken care of during that period of time that's a very, very good question after the show at El Medina the show in the city I had a friend who was a drama therapist present in the audience and the next day she called me to say she shared her experience and she basically said that without the performance she kind of disassociated and she was protecting herself because she knew how to do that but she said I had nightmares all night and I need to tell you Sahar you need to give audiences a disclaimer and I didn't even do that and we did it here but that was a mistake that's something I learned also the reactions were quite intense not to the extent of people sharing this the one example I can mention is also at El Medina one of the audience members she shared that she was the first to speak and she said that she knows the guy by name the trafficker because he at some point he also did the same thing with her cousin in Syria so he was doing that job in Syria and then came to Lebanon probably because of the war we had discussions with the audience took an hour at least and we would stop because we get tired and the audience needed more and that for me was really at the essence of the matter that was what's important for them to talk about the issue and to open this debate at a national level to make it of concern for them I don't know if I answered your question but I'm still thinking about what can be done maybe one last question over here the missing piece the customs you didn't get hold of any interviews from the police or anything like that because this can complete the story and the performance and maybe also as culture these women are victims and the culture doesn't accept them so the customers maybe reach like stories maybe reach the culture reach the people more I don't know the only access I had to the sex buyers were actually from the study that Kafa did in 2014 so what they did is the study was exploring the demand for the constitution and the researcher, Ghada Jean-Pour she went on and interviewed 55 sex buyers and the small fives of the sample she said that basically it was very hard to get to them because the places they go like super nightclubs these are not places accessible for researchers but still the 55 sample was gave great insight to the performance so what I basically did is hired male actors to record the quotations I pulled from the study and then these voiceovers were played and we played a testimony so they were kind of juxtaposed we would hear a testimony narrator the narrator was basically my take on my analysis of the story so that was for this at this stage this is what I could get but again we're still developing this play I'm still trying to seek funding to do the national tour also to document it in a documentary film and then I will need to interview myself, sex buyers it's not going to be an easy job it's really they don't want to say it they're proud they talk about it maybe to their friends but they don't want to identify themselves so it's you know as one would expect I understand you for coming you woke up yesterday morning still a bit ill you know maybe some closing remarks just also on behalf of the program I think it's a really great start to what I have it's going to be a really wonderful exchange and I think the serious nature of the work has really provoked me to be excited about this exchange so thank you just also to thank a few people who've made this event happen so sometimes in universities you do things quickly because the opportunity is there and we certainly put this program together rather quickly and that's not a bad thing that's the way universities happen sometimes but it has involved a lot of people who've really given time and energy first of all to thank Marvin and Frank from our side who we met during the summer and we had meetings with Robert and also Joy Connolly our provost who's been very actively supporting this as President Chase Robinson but perhaps more hands on the ground there's been a number of people who haven't made this event happen Jean Youssef I think over there you've done a really exceptional job today Joy Arab who has produced this event I think you must be learning something up at Columbia You Chen who is always a stalwart for the Siegel Center and Manon where's Manon and Manon and Michael who's been recording us and sharing your secrets and who else Selma so really please stay for a bit of food and a bit of drink it's a time we can mix more socially so thank you for your attention thanks for coming today