Theatre in the Arab World — Perspectives/Portraits from Lebanon, Syria, and Tunisia

Abstract

Editors’ note: activism and autonomy — political aesthetics and aesthetic politics1 These days, few regions of the world enjoy as much presence in our media as the Arab world, with its revolutions, revolts, and wars. And there has barely been, in the reporting of world historic events, such a strange mixture of sympathy, dismay, and incomprehension, as in the coverage of what has been going on in Tunisia and Egypt, Libya, and Syria since December 2010. Arab theatre, however, is not mentioned in the coverage. The following three contributions were written with the context of the upheavals in mind, and with the awareness that theatre is often the most political and the most spontaneous of all forms of art. Hence, theatre can function as a seismograph of societal conditions (Rolf C. Hemke, Theatre in the Arab World, 2013) The following three perspectives on Arab theatre are drawn from Rolf C. Hemke’s book Theatre in the Arab World (Theater der Zeit, 2013) — a sequel to his journalistic and artistic engagements with the theatre of Sub-Saharan Africa (Hemke 2010). The focus of this particular book, so he writes, is the practice of theatre and its art-based aesthetic responses to political upheavals.2 In his words, the work discussed refers more so than not to dramaturgical and directorial work on text-based performances.