 Okay. Thank you, Frank. Welcome everybody to the second day of the Disconference on Alternative Era of Properties. I'm Martin Collison. I'm one of the committee directing the conference that I'm delighted to see you here. Congratulations, you are getting up early in the morning to come to this first session. I want to begin with a few remarks about the subject of the conference and the beauty graduate center because this represents, it seems to me, a very important and unique convergence of interest and I just want to speculate about that and place it historically a little bit. I do notice that my opening remarks have been entitled, this is not my choice, but it's great, Arab dramaturgy is a multiplicity of options. I find that really quite striking and interesting and that gives me a launch to go back to say, I want to go back 20 years and at that time, at the very end of the last century, we held a special conference here at the Graduate Center on the subject of contemporary theater in Egypt. Daniel Alsoniu is here. He helped organize that. He was a graduate student at the time and taught me everything I knew at that time about the Egyptian theater. She did a wonderful thesis on Arab American performing artists. There was a whole group of very important women performers in New York and it was all the same though, more about that in a moment. At one day conference, it was really a very striking event in many ways. As far as I know, it was the first academic conference held in North America about the modern Arab theater, which is really quite remarkable when you think about it. I think back with this idea of multiple options, at that time, there was not even one option that is to say, by and large within the American academic community, if you ask people about the Arab theater, the answer would be, what Arab theater or is there an Arab theater? And as evidence of that, you have only to go back to the standard dramatic text that all graduate students and undergraduates in theater in theater history read at that time, which is Oscar Brockett's history of the theater, which frankly states there is no theater in the Arab world. It says that and it explains that the reason for that is that Islam prohibiting representation, totally false, of course, on a number of counts, but that was taught and believed universally or almost universally in the American theater at the end of the last century and indeed up until that time. Then, around the term of the century, more and more that claim began to be challenged and refuted and particularly after 9-11 when there was a real interesting learning more about the Arab world, which extended, of course, not only to its politics but to its culture, much to the astonishment of many American theater scholars, they discovered there was in fact a thriving theater tradition in much of the Arab world, which dated back for a century or more. We had, when we had our conference at the end of the century, here at the Graduate Center, three of the leading dramatists of the Egyptian theater at that time, let it go wrongly, coming along soon enough in Farah. That in itself is really quite remarkable. These now are well-known major figures of the last generation and we would have noticed them invited into New York, was really quite a remarkable thing and the proceedings of that conference, I followed my recent trip to Egypt, are well-known and circulated and are still going back as an important document in understanding and documenting the modern Arab theater. At that time, most of us who were becoming aware of such theater were only aware of the Egyptian theater and as time passed our vision expanded and we realized not only is there a very important and thriving theater in Egypt which goes back many generations, but in many other parts of the Arab world, in Iraq, in Syria, in Tunisia, in Algeria, and so on. So now we can talk about a variety and options in the theater in a way that would have been quite unimaginable 20 years ago. The Graduate Center in general and the Segal Center in particular have played a key role in illuminating those options for the American and international academic community. We have published a whole series of books and translations of Egyptian playwrights, Syrian playwrights, like Sadallah Wadous, who many consider the most important of the 20th century Arab playwrights, the plays of Tunisia, some of the plays of Tunisia, from Tunisia, who many consider to be the most important living Arab playwrights. We have also established in 2005 here at the Graduate Center an ongoing journal, Arab Stages Online, which appears twice a year, and which is continually a source of information for interviews with Arab theater artists. We have reviews of Arab plays, translations of new plays, historical articles about the Arab theater. Again, a kind of thing that was totally impossible to access just a couple of decades ago. Now all of that, which provides many, many options that were not available very recently in the past in terms of study and interest. I have to mention another very major part of the interest of Tunis and the development of this court here, and that is the diasporic Arab community. Very important from the very beginning, as CUNY and the Cinco Center have been involved with making more available to the New York public, the work of Arab theater artists has been the enormously important contribution of Arab American theater artists. Again, I must give enormous credit to Dalia who did extremely important pioneering work in Arab American women performance artists who really were the grounding of modern Arab American theatrical work in New York. This is a very important contemporary movement. A number of these artists have spoken at the Graduate Center, a number of them have performed in the Cinco Center, and in Arab stages we are also very strongly interested, not just in theater in the Arab world, but in the increasingly important diasporic theater because of course today with the huge refugee population, which includes obviously theater artists, there are very important diasporic Arab theaters in places like Spain, in Sweden, in Denmark, in France, in Germany, in the United Kingdom, and all of this provides yet other options in this enormously complex world of different geometrities present in development. Among the Arab American performing artists, certainly one of the most important and one of the first really to achieve major distinction on the New York stage, I'm happy to say this with us today, and it's my very great pleasure to introduce Betty to you many of you who are already original work. The black eye is her most famous work at the New York Theater Workshop, but she's had a number of plays, some 15 I think, all together, and has been a very important force in the Arab American theater community now for the last, well, really much of its century. So I'll turn this over to Betty now. She will address you for a minute and then afterwards perhaps we'll have time to talk about this. Thank you. I do want to second everything Mark has said. The Segal Center and Marvin and Frank and Dalia really have changed the landscape of the academic and political environment in this city by opening it up and giving voice to our voices here, and I just, this place is very much my home and I'm so delighted to be here, and thank you for doing another, yet another groundbreaking conference and allowing us to have these kinds of conversations. I'm trying to do something technical here. There are two things that I absolutely know are true, and that theater makers, and when I say theater makers, I mean audiences and artists because you need both to have theater. Theater makers hunger for stories because we are so in love with life we are not content to simply live our own. We want to know and experience more than we can by staying within our own skin. Theater makers are our own tribe. As a playwright, I have more in common with a playwright from any other culture than a person who does not care for stories from my ethnic background. This I know is true, but it's also true that culture is not created in a vacuum. I am a Palestinian-American playwright creating images of Arabs on American stages in a time of war. And one way you can make people complacent about war is by making them feel conflicted and confused about the reasons why you were fighting that war. Now I was in New York on 9-11. It was a place of mourning, confusion, horror, sadness, and anger. But the tragedy of 9-11 and the attacks were deemed enough to justify an immediate massive military response not right away and not by enough of the right people. The image of a good Arab or Muslim victims who needed saving from their own leadership became part of the government discourse as well. And most strikingly, was the form of Laura Bush in the extraordinary step of being the first lady to take over at President's Weekly radio dress to talk about the Taliban's brutal policies towards women in 2001. And instead of writing the art and theater creating an opposition to such pro-war propaganda, we got a spate of plays, the vast majority of images of Arabs in American theater, all presenting narratives that highlighted the human rights abuses under Saddam Hussein and the Taliban. Plays that could have easily been set in Saudi Arabia, an ally of America, an act that would have punctured through arguments like Laura Bush and revealed the hypocrisy inherent in them, but they were not. These stories of victims that clearly needed saving were set in countries we happened to be evading. And when human and women's rights are voked as a justification for war, government officials are using the language of the left to cripple the ability of the people on the left to mobilize those in the middle. Now in the case of the Vietnam War, the lefty artists were in full, they didn't fill American stages with images of horrors of living under Viet Cong and communism. Unlike the theater artists of today, they resisted rather than reinforce the governmental narrative that was calling for war. And when I think about my contemporary theater writers of my generation, some who claim the identity of the leftist and some who claim the identity of the Arab American, I wonder if they are willfully ignorant or simply not up to the task of grasping the concept of Orientalism. The idea that creating distorted images of the Middle East serves as implicit justification that are linked to colonial and imperial ambitions. What might theater that counters or even seriously question the War of Terror looks like? Great theater is not about teaching people about what they do not know, but rather it is about awakening within them truths that they already do. The most potent political theater today would not look like what we call political theater at all. Instead of the modeling stories that confine Arab or Muslim characters to either victims or perpetrators of an unimaginably horrific violence, depending on the political benefit of the writers, truly revolutionary theater in my opinion, shows a reality that is harder to face. That even in the worst of times, the vast majority of Arabs and Muslims are simply ordinary human beings. They work, have their hearts broken, dream of only a slightly bigger house than they can afford, get aggravated by their family members and struggle valiantly to be admired by those they admire. In short, there lies, deaths, both spheres and fantasies are not that different from the majority of Americans and Europeans. And when you combine stories on the stage about Arabs and Muslims to revolving exclusively around violence, it relegates the sound of the importance of a billion people to how they might or might not be affected by it. So what would it mean if there were more theater stories that sensitized audiences to the fact that despite the myriad of traditionally varied ways that human cultures would cross the globe for millennia, there is a human essence that unites us and it's utterly recognizable. In a world that is divided into nations that wage war on each other, it is theater's ability to humanize that makes it so politically potent. No one needs reminding that as some people who possess all the nuanced human complexity and capacity for feeling that we do have human rights, it is always connected to the fact that others have vastly more resources. And we who are complacent with that imbalance in power and resources mostly stay that way. And when I say we, I mean we. Because, not because we're ignorant, but because we know that the imbalance falls in our favor. And that political idea is the simplest to grasp and the hardest to swallow. It's much easier to tell ourselves by reinforcing solidifier conception about our differences through the medium of theater. Though the medium of theater at its best is designed to reveal how much we all remain escapably the same. So, when I first came to New York, I wanted to create theater that was actually anti-ethnic theater. So my first show was called Chocolate and Heat, my subtitle that's growing up I've receded to give you a show that had Arabs in it, but had nothing. It was about love and sex and sexual violence. All within the context of having Arab characters that their identity was never discussed. So I presented a show that was supposedly about Arabs who gave people a show that was just about people and asked them to make their own conclusions about what the political point I was trying to make. That was three weeks before 9-11. That show sold out at the French Festival. We did really well. People were into the idea of kind of exploding the idea of what an ethnic show that would be subtitled Growing Up Arab in America would look like one of those themes where I wanted to just humanize. And that's what I have in my these are my shows in America really tried to do with my work. Just really tried to not show victims or perpetrators of violence. Because I think that is for me what the political point I could make. So I went to end down. We'll talk tomorrow a little bit. And I just want to thank you all for being here. Okay. I think the maybe in the in the spirit of the conference I should I should ask any or all members of the of the panel to just speak briefly about alternative Europe that is given the fact that the theater of the Arab world and the diasporic theater is increasing all the time. So is the complexity of that world that is already to begin with. I know is certainly a revelation to me to realize how different the theater of let's say Algeria and Tunisia is from the theater of Egypt or Iraq or heaven knows the United Arab Emirates and then when you add into that mix the theater, the diasporic theater the kind on one hand the kind of theater that a number of her fellow artists have been creating in New York and the very different sort of theater that's being now created by refugee Arab groups in Paris and elsewhere. The range of dramaturgies that one might consider is almost overwhelming and let me just sort of throw that out as a phenomenon and just ask members of the members of the panel to make whatever observations they would like to make about understanding or relating to this now multiplicity of dramaturgic options that the Arab theater now represents for us or offers to us. Okay? Three, four years ago I was on the jury of the National Theater Festival another amateur festival one that was a theater festival and it was fascinating for me to count how many international plays in the Egyptian National Theater Festival there were 43 plays there were five Macbeth and four Hamlet and one that was not called a Hamlet because it was a mix between a Hamlet and the Abouzedel Elayl which is an Egyptian saga so it was really interesting to look at what is the young ones, what are the young ones choosing to work with and they found comfort in the classics and they still continue to do there are so many renditions of classical like a European Shakespeare but also classical older versions, old plays and very few new plays and in the jury conversation we were debating who do we give the new writing award to and there was only one new play offered and it was not really worthy of an award and that was a big conversation, let's give it the award but it was really bad meanwhile I know a lot of writers who are doing some nice work, interesting work, new work that are not finding a place on the stage so it's a fascinating gap between the writing and what the theater makers are choosing to create that's a first intro I'm going to be speaking in the next session actually using two of the plays that we've done in the theater initiative to give examples of two different kinds of what we're calling Arab dramaturgies or like approaches to dramaturgies so I'm not going to repeat myself but to also make observations about what's happening in Lebanon today we are trying to probably what you just said about Egypt I think it's more in the directorial dramaturgies in Lebanon with the playwriting tradition is really almost nonexisting you have like some new voices I would name as the Hedai Maesbib you know these are two females playwright today in Lebanon that are producing as directors but also as writers but it's not really something that you know that's developing on the other side which really developing at a fast pace I would say is different esoteric choices and styles you know a combination of different methods different ways of producing theater in found spaces alternative spaces you know of theoretical days it's happening at a big scale and you know and it's actually what's also interesting is that it's coming outside the big city you know it's not as much as it would like but it's also you know it's so I don't have any pretension I don't have any great insight but whatever I do comes from these besides the work we have done together these two forthcoming books one on Sa'al-Iwanis which includes his theoretical writings and I think one of the most poignant important things that he says is that he rejects the sort of sight of the line of having a kind of civilizational base on which they absolutely rejects it the idea that there is some Arab essence and I think coming from a secular Marxist eastern block artist that sort of the prehistory of the present reinforces also that contrary to what many people in say North America think this dynamic did not begin on September 11th 2001 it and to dates by centuries and I think it is specious and extreme to suggest that dramaturgy or anything else be seen through the lens of the attack of 9-11 I think that should be right out there I like the way that Betty dealt with that another couple of trends I think again by doing a history of the last 50 years picking five plays of Natha and I did in the other book which is forthcoming from Brill starting with the dictator by the Samaphus here you had one of the key elements I think in what is going on now at least in the Lebanese theater but I think beyond is a recognition that writing Fusat is the final residue of nationalism and it will go and we've seen this it's been put to the test by doing King Lear and blood wedding in Lebanese vernacular and the way that people respond to the vernacular on stage they immediately own it it speaks to their lives you may say it's Aristotelian but you have a completely different relationship and performance and in fact who's also in that volume is Hamam Bakdadi who so kindly did an event when I brought him here to New York when his play was done on Broadway has rewritten his own play in Iraqi vernacular in his way of updating he came to the conclusion himself he's that earlier generation that it doesn't make sense to have two brothers who are a bus driver speaking to each other in Fusat it's just you know why would you do that and what he does is it's a very difficult and specific vernacular I must say unless you're in Iraqi it's daunting it's whatever what it feels like it has a kind of texture so the final thing I would say that's evolved from looking at different plays Rabind al-Taghaz where would I find someone like you Ali the works of Wadous of Muhammad al-Maroud is almost everywhere that you look you see these configurations that go well beyond the so-called Arab world whether they're drawing on Ian Esco in the case of Mahfuz or Mulhadej is looking at Othello is that it was always there that the the earth theater was always much larger than it's construed in the area of studies and I think those two things you see in the drama I think this this tension that Robert speaks of between the vernacular the classic form is really and has been for decades a central concern in the Arab theater it doesn't really have a correspondence in the diasporic theater although I think there is a similar kind of tension I'd like to ask Betty to comment on this between the first thing that Robert spoke about and that is the Arab essence or what is it to be Arab and it seems to me that right at the heart of the challenge to an Arab-American performer is that question Betty spoke about the desire and the obligation to let people know that those are human beings they have an existence which is like everybody else's and I'd like to ask Betty to elaborate a little bit more on the tension between being an Arab-American performer and an American performer is this one you know for me I created for every play that I got produced and it's so what is interesting to me is that it's the market curates what the world seems and so I but I make a very conscious effort to localize and humanize my stories and by that I mean deaking out violence as the core part of the identity of Arab or Arabness or Arab because I feel like what happens so I'm in a very strange place because I know that if I was in Palestine the kind of work I would create would have a lot more to do with women's rights and a lot of the things that I think need to change which is within the dialogue of Arab culture and I know I'm not speaking exactly to your point but for me I'm hyper conscious of what images I'm putting out there of Arabness in an environment like New York where the only images you see of Arabs are in relation to violence whether perpetrators of violence or victims of violence and I'm so what I consciously try to do is just show that humanity and delete that kind of duality of your only important and only on an American stage reinforcing how you relate to us which is either as our victim or as our oppressor so you know I live right in between two worlds I grew up speaking Arabic as my first language and I lost it when I went to school and so I'm a Palestinian in America but I'm an American in Palestine and so I have a very clear sense of how much these kinds of concepts make no sense because and so let me open the discussion up to the audience we'd be happy to hear any thoughts or questions you have to any of us frankly sort of take charge of this I think the microphones are working thank you thank you very much I would like to come back to what you say about this we like a bridge between writers and makers because this is a very important issue I would add another comment on it is that I observe all these years especially in North Africa in some cases for Syrian playwrights there is kind of a move that the theatre maker is also the writer so there is a what we call in French Écriture Sénique so it's on stage, it's happening during the process and many of those artists are making theatre their own attributes and their references from the socio-political situations and so on and we have Mohamed Al-Aqqal Rayla Suleiman and Wael Ali with Christel Khudr in Mayrood Mustafa Balfoudil in Algeria so you have many of them Tris Kisitas in Morocco working with what we call the theatre of today so there is also another way of giving theatre like in the process in the timing it's more faster than before with all this the play translating thinking it will be better in dialect or in those so there is kind of need of reacting and bringing artistic universe back to the audience and the community so that's what I want to say maybe we have to think of this new stages position and bridging to maybe those I have a presentation this afternoon all about the immediate theatre that happens that continues to happen so I don't want to start now because I'm going to have only 15 minutes for that but I myself I am a theatre maker I write my own work and I direct it and I haven't released any of my plays to anybody else to work with them yet and there is a lot of current work that is trying to respond by using that model and the documentary theatre and the painting theatre different models of theatre of the oppressed so it's an important model but I was thinking is there back and looking and why would young Egyptian writers return to classics and are sick to handle it year after year so it's just an interesting choice for maybe safety or distance or other political situation Thank you, yes I'd like to just shift the conversation a little bit towards the question of methodology this is an opportunity to speak to the editorial board of the Arab Stages and the questions are very open-ended but I'm following up on Malvin's introductory remarks about the idea of multiplicity because the Arab Stages is a remarkable and unique journal in that it proposes a certain kind of aistemology it creates a form of knowledge that didn't work it existed in practice but there was no journal to aggregate and to theorise and to document and to develop the knowledge of Arab Stages it's a slightly speculative question if you had endless resources and endless time to think what would an Arabic epistemology theatre look like in a journal, what would it look like? Certainly we have essays and reviews and a certain kind of methodology but I'm thinking about the need to also in a sense replicate certain kinds of western logocentric knowledge that exists within the academy i.e. a referee journal but also to think about how we might develop or expand on or develop different forms of knowledge that are perhaps more situated within the local cultural community so you could think about what does an Arabic modernity look like what does an Arabic intellectual community look like how does that reflect an academic journal of this kind? So it's a very speculative and a good question I'll take a little step one thing that might you know it's an incredible resource I'm just a normal I'm just a great role for it I look at it closely I read what's in it I think one thing that's informing our practice which it's not connected necessarily in a direct way the scholarship of people like Marvin like Il Hamouri Magdasi like Karim Magdasi that engages in this reconfiguration historicizing through the kiss of Ibn Daniel and Ibn Daniel being connected to Aristophanes Il Hamouri Magdasi looking at radicalism in the eastern Mediterranean I was talking to Maximilian yesterday about the relationship between Greece and the Levant in general this is something that's looked at here this is exactly what Sahar is doing in her practice by creating a med layaba as it were Karim Magdasi the historian from Rice also looking at areas of history from the Balkans from Turkey from the Levant and Egypt that are contemporaneous and looking at that history as opposed to areas studies kinds of histories you get different answers that inform practice so what that reinforces is the extent to which this kind of cultural back and forth is taking place between Europe and the Arab world has been going on for centuries in the same way that the world did not, this relationship did not again on 9-11 in North America in Europe the relationship between this part of the world in Europe obviously Sahih has given us one optic, one prism for looking at I think there are a number of useful other optics for practitioners to look at those relationships and the extent to which that's integrated and it's not simply a report on current practice what is informing the practice and obviously it can be social media, obviously it can be technology it can be a range of things but perhaps because I'm first of course a cultural historian I think that it has a way of informing our world view and as artists we have a world view and sometimes the practice of artists leads us forward and sometimes the historians and the scholars lead the way and the artists kind of then take their cue from them I think the two in tandem that's the one thing that I would sort of say about it at the same time what a beautiful resource and we're so grateful for it I will just add on to that I totally agree with the observations and even more with the the impetus of life behind it I think that the real challenge that we have both as citizens of the modern world and as theater practitioners is to try to work with the knowledge that the world is not centered on Europe we all grew up with that idea indoctrinated with that idea that the theater is a European invention that the only theater that exists is European obviously this is a respective view but the implications there it's easy to say that but then the implications are of saying alright now let's really begin to think about alternatives to seek out alternatives that consider the implications of it that's work that you already have to learn about other cultures you have to learn other languages you have to travel you have to experience other performative conditions and so on that's a heavy job and of course nobody can do it alone the world is too big and complicated but if as a profession and as a discipline we in theater commit ourselves to becoming more global then we can take some important steps I think the biggest problem now is to look at this vastly expanding world of possibilities and say I can't do that I can't do all of that I can't relate to all of that and then do up and say well alright in the English 18th century that's it if that's your solution that's your solution but I do think that we all have to take seriously the challenge to keep pushing out I mean as Robert says it's not just a contemporary but it's a historical situation I'll be talking about this a little this afternoon but again I can only very strongly underline what Robert says that the the interpenetration and interrelationship of different parts of the world go back forever and as I begin working on Ibn Daniel this is the 13th century I find that there's all sorts of networks and connections that have really not been looked at seriously at all that I am totally convinced again I'll say a little bit more about this this afternoon that Ibn Daniel was profoundly influenced by the contemporary Byzantine theater about which very little has been studied not that there's not more material there but it's just who is interested in Byzantine theater and yet here is a key bridge between what we think of as the east and west the whole theatrical world along the silk route and the practical and conformance traditions that are connected with that all through what we in the west call the middle ages has been very very little looked at by historians and so the the challenge is a vast one but I think that perhaps the most important thing for our generation is to acknowledge that this challenge is to say this is something that must now we must turn our attention to it we can't get away with saying well if it's western Europe it's okay otherwise they don't want to this was just a comment about how your comments about finding comfort in the vernacular reminded me of Brian Dorsey's theater 4 so I guess there are a lot of but that's more in terms of using the pre-plastics for veterans combating PTSD but I guess if we want to elaborate on that thought in terms of parallels in the Arab world I know we don't want to talk about victims but more about aspects of Arab communities that are also affected by PTSD because of colonization or war I don't know if this will probably speak to what you're saying but this whole idea of Arab dramaturgies and Arab identity really challenges me personally when I think about it because I don't wake up everyday thinking about my Arab identity one thing that plays into the equation here is that living and I speak about myself quickly I only represent myself and just my experience in Lebanon when you live in a country that you have nothing in terms of let's say civil services, infrastructure you have a garbage crisis, you have a warlord leading the country you have the warlords that the 15 years war are still in office you have no democratically like you have nothing really the priorities to become these problems not the problem of for me personally how am I represented in the West or how do people see me or what do I you know so that question of the vernacular I think this is what we're doing really and we're only I loved what Thad said yesterday about how his purpose really comes or he discovers his purpose in the process you know and I like that idea and I think this is what's happening with us in a way that you know we do clear yes and people say why clear you know we do clear in the vernacular and for some people it's the first like I've heard feedback such as I understood Shakespeare for the first time but why clear yes it's because this crazy king you know like the kingdom throwing everything you live this on databases it's written what you know remember plus years ago but you live this today this is the play that's happening Midwest it has nothing to do with Lebanon it has everything to do with Lebanon the idea of the family so all the love story the press desires so you know I don't want to be simplifying the issue too much or philosophizing about it too much in person as a theater maker I start from what speaks to me and what I need to say and what I need to understand this is my you know and at this point in my life in my career I that that era of identity is not surfacing you know it's just for some reason I just want to say something that I was so moved by Marvin's question who cares about visiting theater this is really I think essential to me is it's the question of who cares because you have the oral tradition of chappers at it you have the most famous storyteller in any iconic context being a Middle Eastern woman who tells stories to save her life and if that was highlighted and what I think the work that you're doing at Arab stage is so important because people need to be told what's important if visiting theater was suddenly seen as connected to Shakespeare and everybody wanted to do the updated Byzantine play or the you know the things that goes above you know what I mean I think the academics and what you said Robin really mattered to me too about that sometimes it's the academics it's the academics who tell us what's worth studying whether it's Byzantine or whether it's the oral tradition of chappers at and Hakuats intimately connected to everything in the West from stand up comedy to this preponderance of one person shows you know like when I was coming out of theater school the idea of somebody doing a one person show and that being on Broadway was crazy but now it's a whole new form and I think it's coming back to that you know and if we were to elevate what exists within Arab culture which is the Hakuats tradition which is the oral tradition and say suddenly that's as important as Shakespeare this idea of stories within stories and stories saying the life of a woman you know that was elevated by academics we would suddenly as audience theater makers suddenly wake up and be like oh I've got to do the new shoppers ad set and you know and I think it's very important and that's what's so critical about having that news like Arab stages to articulate and you know for me as I said for every play that I do show I have three plays that aren't produced so I'm very conscious of what actually gets curated by the economics of being an Arab in this city in this culture but as an artist you know the thing that I'm most excited about is I did a sequel to 12th Night because I finally feel like I've written enough and I've expressed enough about what it means to be Arab in this context that I can actually go back to what I at the core avenue is somebody who's deeply interested in theater and so thank you for leading the way and saying that this is an important thing worth studying and what we articulate actually influences what artists think. Let me let me put in a plug for Turkin Margin Theater which has committed itself to an ongoing Arizona project that started last year I think during the third phase of it now and it's really quite an interesting undertaking then let me go on to shift around as I like to do and look at things from a different perspective and that is I'm going to defend Shakespeare in the Arab world I think it is important to remember two or three things about European influence and about use of European subjects King later 12th night whatever like it or not the European influence is enormous I mean this is we're living a post-colonial period we're aware of this we might say oh it's too bad that Europe has dominated the world in such a way but it has I mean to say historical fact it's all very well to say whether you believe it or not or whether you would be right or not to say wouldn't it be wonderful if everybody in India spoke Hindi instead of English but that's not going to happen there are facts on the ground we start with where we are and where we are is a post-colonial situation I think that I am not all uncomfortable with the fact that that Hamlet is such a popular character in the Egyptian theater any more than I was with the fact that Hamlet was a very popular character in the Eastern European theater in the old Soviet days what was being done then and this is being used the same way of course in countries and alas there are many of them in the Arab world today where it is very tricky to do contemporary work the traditional and generally accepted way to make political statements is by something that indeed can be represented outside the culture like Shakespeare you make your political statements by making Claudius Stanton from Mubarak or whatever it happens to be that's a very useful device and is a time-honored device so that when we I guess I'm just saying this is a very complicated question that is to say like it or not cultures are hybrid now and are becoming more hybridized all the time and I think that our responsibility is to be aware of this, conscious of it we can't fight it, it's just something that happens but we can view it intelligently see what is going on ask what is going on and indeed look at other possible hybridizations or other possibilities as this conference suggests alternative possibilities alternative draw entourages what other things are open to us by getting broader and clearer knowledge about the world cultures but I don't think we need to deplore the influence of Shakespeare it is a fact and there are many parts of it that ought to be celebrated Stefan? Well I had sort of two questions and both of them have already been answered so how is it how is it when I am reading about Europe theater when I'm listening to you talking unlike if we were to talk maybe about Indian theater or African theater or whatever we would be talking a great deal about the idea of post-colonialism and kind of deep western influence and cultural imperialism and as I understand in much of the modern Arab theater really has developed in the 19th century and at this point it seems to have and I don't know whether this is a provocative statement but it seems to have it seems to have become it seems to be taken from for granted that those influences are there are there US playwrights theater makers in the Arab world are there ways as to have to sort of consciously hark back to some Arab and Middle Eastern traditions that go really, really and how do you as theater makers and playwrights do that where do you go those kinds of traditions in order to create those kinds of hybrids really and those kinds of trends cultural beginning on what Betty was saying the production is connected to the funding the culture production in general in my case and sometimes I get commissions the last two commissions I had were from the American Cultural Center part of the embassy and to produce work in Egypt they want the work to have something American in it so that they can justify their mandate of spreading the American culture as if we don't have American culture so I need to write a proposal to say I will loosely base my project on this blog I started initially by them asking me to Arabize the crucible and I said okay it's an interesting play and it would work wherever we are and eventually they said it would be very difficult to get the licensing because I have to translate it back to English for the state of the playwrights it was like just write a new play why don't you? I was like okay so I created a new play that is based on the idea of which trial and I wanted to make it my own so I went back to the country the songs that people sing in the fields I went even further back to ISIS and the idea of spreading the wings and flying and I created a new play that is completely Egyptian and new and steeped in the folk tradition of the songs of the fields and the ancient tradition of the pharaohs but they can legitimize their funding or spending it because it is the story so that was not successful in the future productions unfortunately of other plays where they asked me to do something about women and I said can I do something like maybe cuckoo's nest but for women and now controversial something else about women but not that I proposed something on stage doors so it's a play about women in the theater auditioning and for me to make it interesting I would have them audition or rehearse something about the revolution because this is what I want to speak about and they said great I got the funding I started writing with my meetings with my actors just to get a feel of the play submitted the play for them next morning 9am as soon as they reached their office they said page 19 of 11 say the word no, the revolution of that or you can't what do you mean I wrote a proposal about a play that people are rehearsing for something I call opera tahir it's a dream of mine to do a musical about tahir square and they said oh but you can't mention the revolution it would not work because we would be seen as instigating revolution and they completely censored the play I mean you cannot do this day eventually after much time while I wrote another play where I presented the revolution visually so it was not on the text they liked the text clean without the words as you did when you were talking about your censorship issues it's like it's not there I would work with it visually so I am aware of being in between worlds and the postcolonial situation but these are the only people who trust my process and would work with me and these are the conditions and sometimes I say no I just hide in my form and just continue to be a farmer and forget about theater but there are so many stories I want to tell so I am in that constant conversation and negotiating when do I give up in order to be able to do the work and coincidentally my second play was about that the conversation between the playwright and the director both are me in reality the show must go on but how about authenticity and the integrity of the play do you want the play to be shown at all some of the play are nothing at all so it's a unfortunately censorship in many different ways some financial and some political but we still want to work and the show must go on so what can we do to present what we want to do and our real stories within the current circumstances I'll give an example also from a theater practitioner in Lebanon who works with drama therapy and that would speak about how this traditional you know like the storytelling tradition for instance the Arabic storytelling tradition how it is really played within the contemporary theater and we also speak about the I told today we will how we live today really hybrid cultures especially in the theater culture I think it's very hybrid Zenat and Kashin drama therapy was like two famous plays in Lebanon you know took place in prison settings so she worked with the men's prison and the women's prison when she did the play with the men's prisons she used as a device to play 12 of angry men and she made it into 12 of angry Lebanese that was the essence of the play but when she worked with the women's prison the device that she used was the Shenezad storytelling so the play was called Shenezad and Ba'abda Shenezad and the Prison of Ba'abda and they both spoke perfectly with the audiences and actually the first play that took a change in Lebanese law it led to actually enforcing the law that was passed but was never enforced in prison statements so these things happen all the time but honestly sometimes you do it unconsciously you know it's part of your repertoire also as a human being to begin with I just want to say something that's just so evident to me right now and you know when I talk about Dali talks about the same sort of thing but also actual censorship I don't think any other culture and maybe I'm making too blank in the statement but if you think about it we're all talking about how we can control and get them heard and I don't know if we were doing a lot of American or African there would be this much pressure on Arabs whether they're working in an American theater context or working in the Arab world about dancing around trying to get even a part of what you want to say here and so it's striking to me that you know I'm not a big identities person I think we all are multiple things my identity because I chose it more than anything else I've been born into but I think we're all dancing around the same sort of thing and I don't think any other culture has this much for and I think it's connected to the politics of what's happening in the region and what's happening in America and how what's happening in America is affecting what's happening in the region I can't imagine thinking of any other culture that would have both the artists within the western context feeling economically censored trying to dance around and get a portion of their humanity on stage and also those working and I just... I would say Dottie I read the Center for American Studies at the American University of Beirut and when I hear the word when it's spreading culture if you hear the word American and spreading in the same sentence for your life whatever they're spreading you don't want to be spread this is my picture you don't want to be spread you don't want to be spreading on you but I think Betty said something that's really quite important I think we acknowledge it in the case of African-American literature, culture, theater and cultural morality I know that as I mentioned Marvin's work on Imandaniel which I was really intrigued with and then recently wrote an article about how Imandaniel is the clear source of Rojas' Celestina there's absolutely no doubt but to put that together Rojas' Celestina many people would put it one of the great sources of modern the modern European novel theater, etc once you look it's incredibly hard because it's oral traditions in the Iberian Peninsula there's really no doubt so this interpenetration it's important when we talk about post-colonialism that we acknowledge as I was talking about yesterday Menopouls' work it's basically clear that without the Arabs in Spain there's no Bocaccio there's no Petrarch there's no Chaucer there's no Provincial poets everything, you know all of these things that are seen as the wellspring of western literature so you can think both things at the same time and I think that one reason that we work together so well is that the glasses have full in terms of practice I can keep filling it up and I'm saying well look at what's missing from the puzzle whether it's Margaret Litman's work on Arab Hamlet or the new work that she's doing on Russian influence in the Arab world is that as soon as we confine our universe what we do is create a dramaturgy which is reductionist by its nature it's reductionist so clearly through practice you're trying to define your dramaturgy but as you embedded your saying without some platform or trying to follow the money what we do is have a little bit of money and within that we can do whatever we can get away with with the censor and say that maybe very shortly we have your next question but yes I want to just expand on that my flash is back to our first conference on contemporary drama in Egypt which I mentioned before that W helped to organize and in the discussions and the discussions are important reproduced in the proceedings in the discussions which follow censorship was the main concern and it was I'm interested in how little things change in a sense that is to say we had a representative which I think we don't have today from the Egyptian in New York who stood up and said there is no censorship in Egypt which I'm sure is what would be said today and I'll just let that pass but I would say that one of the responses I think was when the Romney's response maybe not in any case was well there's censorship and censorship that is not state censorship there's economic censorship which everybody in the United States must understand it is naive to say oh there is no censorship in the United States you can do anything you want obviously you can and to some extent there is economic censorship anywhere in addition to political censorship and again this is not a question of overt saying you can't say that but it is a question of theatre is especially vulnerable because it is a certain amount of material supports necessary just to put the thing out there and so I just want to remark that it does strike me that these concerns in human terms and those concerns have not in fact changed the way we deal in 20 years one last question I was curious to ask that as well but I don't need you to put this popular theatre comedies and then there's the experimental underground is there is there anything in between or is it just some comedies and then there's this white gap and you get to sort of the experimental theatre where you know ground shot of that are there any bridges to that and I'm curious if that's the same with that the the Egyptian formula has a lot of categories some of them are the government run theatres so there is the the cultural palaces the cultural clubs and the Egypt that has their own like clubs and competitions and festivals and the public theatre which is like 14 theatres and even two in Alexandria the independents and the experimental and the independents have been having harder time in Egypt but many of them have access to other places so I'm showing her work in Europe Ahmad Al-Adtar opening his plays upload first and then in Cairo what happened in the last few years which is not something I'm very happy about is something called Masrah Masr Egypt's theatre and it's a weekly television that televised play that many people think this is theatre because very few people go to the theatre Cairo has 22 million people has 14 stages four of them are closed so very few people are paid to go to the theatre and I'm shaking hands with everybody I know most of the audits in many of the smaller plays so Masrah Masr becomes the theatre and defines the theatre and many of the young ones who have never been to a live performance see this as theatre and it's mainly bad most of the old film slaps take comedy making fun of people like weight or height or stick colour or whatever but it's the weekly dose and another model was based on it so now there are two or three of these that are televised they do one play a week and they show it and they don't even bother to write it so it's a new addition but it's not a very healthy one I have to say and Robin can also speak about that I think there's a range of things happening you have on the social comedy successful in terms of box office social comedies you have device theatre companies like Zoukha Ardoink or Karate Karabade work with puppetry and masks we're doing the last of our work was blood wedding variety of different things so it's very eclectic in a way people are working with verbatim documentary techniques translations happen a lot because yeah, if it's a text that's already tested and it can sell and it can speak to people some of the last plays I've watched in Lebanon one of them was also successful in terms of box office was a talk of the men or something but also different forms of theatre is really very prospering play back theatre, drama therapy improvisational theatre, puppetry all sorts of things really and Beirut is a very small city right now we have maybe five theatres we've seen us battle just closed down last year Zoukha opened their studio and the rest are the alternative spaces but yeah, I think it's not one thing that's happening with two things like extremes okay, thank you son we've come to the end of our time now I'm really very much like two there they saw Robert W.R. for this variety of perspectives and alternative drama therapy and we'll be taking a round of applause please, thank you we'll finish up the break and the coffee and shortly after one of the performances we'll start again thank you Robert, great, thank you thank you