The Syria Trojan Women: Rethinking the public with therapeutic theater

Abstract

Therapeutic theater projects with Syrian refugees in Jordan and Lebanon work at the intersection of the public and the private, facilitating individual healings while also promoting new group identities. The playing space becomes an open discursive field in which varied understandings of the self become platforms for new understandings of the nation. In the process, these artists/refugees trouble the boundaries between the private and the public, potentially creating a new public sphere that is not only revolutionary in its critique of entrenched political power but in its reformulation of the idea of the public itself. This article examines one such project, The Syria Trojan Woman, directed by Omar Abu Saada. The article places this work in the context of Abu Saada’s work in applied theater in Syria prior to the uprising and within the larger context of Syrian political theater. Applied theater, an umbrella term designating performance valued as efficacious as well as aesthetic, has had a brief and difficult history in Syria because of its capacity to undermine the regulation of speech. In the case of The Syria Trojan Woman, this speech has traveled beyond the countries hosting refugees through the efforts of non-governmental organizations that bring additional fundraising and consciousness-raising objectives to the endeavor. Through international tours and the use of new media, local performances become international phenomenon, further complicating the idea of a revolutionary public sphere.