Those are two brilliant examples. Many walked on the roofs of oblivion. They carried on with their days like somnambulists. They thought they would not live in safety nor in an old duty. They were in the grip of terror finding it to be an ugly anthem. Those who have ideas and dreams in their minds flocked in war. Their eyes and bodies opened, first to an innocent daze. Then to the country’s tumorous tyranny. They found their coming of age in the war. They would not melt in the brain’s raw naïveté nor in weeping. That was the age of singing. Roger Assaf was found on the ambushes in the Chyah district. His star exploded there, digging and rejoicing with every renewed round of fighting. This was his season. It was the season of those who found essence on the chains of freedom’s wings, in its heroic exploits.
Those survived the horrors of past stages. They exploded like stars on axes between warring districts. Those named and unknown lost the heat of their bodies when they failed before the surprises and volcanoes on the ground, and the flying meteors in the sky. Soon those who had found their days in peace-transient days-were swirled in the dizzying feeling of change into clashes. Khaled El Haber, Ahmad Kaabour, Hassan Daher, Toni Wehbe, Naseer El Asaad, Fawaz Traboulsi, Raif Karam, Elias Khoury, and many more. Thus, they overcame the final hurdle.
The war was a heavy tarantula on some. The war was a reservoir swollen from corruption, repression and social inequality for others. They lend an ear at length. And they heard the sounds of the moving tectonic layers, their windows filled with days and skills, and the gasp flames of a long-bated breath. They came out of the empty pits into the world. They found themselves on the map of the world. They absolved old anger, indifferent to revolution, and set out towards hope. They mixed the sparkle in their eye with the sparkle of the world. Pioneer experiments were out in the light. Meyerhold, Mayakovsky, Mnouchkine, Appia, Craig, Vakhtangov, Brook, Pushkin, and many more. Brecht was shown in theatre houses as if he were a pretty girl. Peter Weiss was toured in the streets of Beirut and on the country’s leaflets thirsty for radical change. The names broke out like fires. Julian Beck and Judith Malina, Bread and Puppet, underground theatre, high brothel theatre. Vaudeville, cabaret, exegesis, boulevard.
Theatre is a man of war. War is a woman of theatre. Men are many in war. Visual arts, political songs, new poetry, novels, short stories, cinema. War makes expression forms fertile. And it brought out other forms of anxiety, with the heads of its protagonists, to foreground duty. The experiment of political songs is the great flower of the war. A flower with dangling legs. Marcel Khalife, Khaled El Haber, Ahmad Kaabour, Ousama Hallak, Hanan Mayas, Ousama and Marwan Ghandour. Ghazi Mikdashi is the number one patron of political song. Goldfish in the quagmires of blood, and fields of dreams.
The war is a hamper full of whatever is outside the confines of the market. Deluded feelings died with the political song. There is nothing in a beautiful voice but a fleeting smile. What matters is not being off-key. Dandelion blossoms will come in contact with other colorful flowers in the field of political song. The chorus is the voice of the group. New poetry the vocal chords of song. The voice is the master of the instruments. Dozens of flowing groups of various were founded on the margins of the Al Kawras Al Shaabi (popular chorus) experiment with Ghazi Mikdashi. As if they had come out of forgotten gift boxes lying at the bottom of Christmas trees. Khaled El Haber and the Band, Marcel Khalife and Al Mayadeen Ensemble, Sami Hawat and the Band, Ousama Hallak’s Band. Ahmad Kaabour and the Band. The Sanabel Band brought out of the red breath Al Kawras Al Shaabi. The experiment of the new children’s theatre. First, Sanabel, then Sunduq El Firje with Najla Jreissati Khoury and some child carers in Mme Falanga’s school. Then Paul Matar’s modern band, the butterfly. Dozens of groups across the country, after Nabil’s adventures captured the Lebanese scene like grass withering in the sun of the other days.
Joseph Fakhoury’s theatre dominated the scene for decades. The war revealed to him education not upbringing. For, new experiments were carried by avant-garde curricula around the world.
Nabil started out as a poor man upholstered in velvet. Unremarkable theater. His role was reproducing the prevailing ideology. Cleanliness, diligence at school and obedience at home. One round. Followed by seventy rounds. More than one hundred theatre groups. Amateur and professional. Murmuring and muttering, then exploded the moujammaa el fadalat el fadila (complex of residuous virtues).The war jumped on the pillars of the golden era of Lebanon’s history, until the war reached the war. Old dysfunction exploded in the new space. It defeated all the shelves harboring large quantities of dust. Dusty dust. No dust came out. The dead conquered the dead.
In war, the Lebanese cried out that they were alive. Some of them, after transforming their experiment from shadow experiments to pillar experiments. Others, after escaping an artillery shell that came falling on walls and roofs, without advance warning. War is a high life. The life of high culture. The life of high arts. After artists and intellectuals drew their arches and fired their arrows from heart to heart. War is a pacifier of precedents. Not a pacifier of urbanization and civilization. An event that is an achievement, resuscitative, through gesture, hint and transformation. A lyrical breeze on the wind of change. Sharing the King’s majesty, sharing the Queen’s highness. All Kings and Queens. All symbolic horizons, realistic horizons and imaginary horizons are united on the arch of war, and they fuse with the pillars after planting them in fertile soil. Every condition in war is an abortive condition. The features of past years have been unveiled by the years of war. The elements of the years, the tools of the years have been unveiled with all their impressive qualities. Intentions are freed from waiting sites.
The culture of war is a culture that has not been preceded or followed with the gushing culture of things, words and days. As death gushes in the dead. Collectiveness is one of the passports of war. The collectiveness of performance in political song. The collectiveness of writing and directing in theater. The collectiveness in drawing. Annihilating the vision, by hand, with an experiment led by Samir Khaddaj by painting a work with dozens of hands. Collectiveness in children’s theater. More than one writer for a single text. More than one composer. More than one opinion in directing. The wounds of music-making have healed and its leading thread is in song. Performance comes first.
The war completed quickly what past stages were preparing with great composure and patience. The many names echoed through political song to the twinkle of old dreams. Khaled El Haber took over the task of getting out of compulsory service in the Lebanese Army to embrace his visions. He held the rite of the birth of new song. Ahmad Kaabour derived some of the most prominent French names, without filtering the study of methods of influence. Music and the salutary role of words in the songs of Jaques Brel, Brassins, Vera, Ferro, and many others. Through them he found ways to reach his song. He fused in the elements of their songs after performing their songs in the mother tongue. Then he embodied his new age with Unadikom (I call you) and the songs of his first album.
Marcel Khalife made his first appearance in Amshit to the struggle with rightist parties there. He was forced to immigrate to France. He did not come back to Lebanon before Promises of the Storm. Few expected chemistry to be established between those who followed them and those came before them.
They encircled unoriginal ideas with original song. Enrichment is the main feature of the southern poets.
The rhythms of understanding current concerns. Many are the poets and poetry has become only a floating probability over the land of conflict. The story was flooded with new points. The novels of Elias Khoury, Hassan Daoud, Jabbour Douaihy, and many more. The theatre mixed identity with pleasure. The theatre was not preoccupied with the idea of death. On the contrary. Playwrights hit the anvil of language, of the idea of breaking free from fetters. They delved into a rhythmic momentum and an emotional charge, which resulted in the blending of realism with mystical and non-mystical contemplation. Something in the vein of suluk poets. Every time they scratch a body, they peel it and reveal it. Then, they quickly filled the white spaces of the new era with everything that contributed to their transformation from emotion to action.
Dozens of experiments to unravel everything that is vague about life. Shows behind closed doors, in squares, in hospitals, at seam lines. Street shows. Giant puppet shows. Here, dreams and bodies became fertile. Here, wounds wed dreams. Joining the ribs directly to the universe. No longer is anyone monopolizing the districts. The Lebanese University is a purple valley, offering something whose shine does not fade. The entity of the university was linked to all the rights of life. No more taboos. War granted full freedom a full mark, to all the letters of the new city. Readings in the notebooks of disobedience, no readings in the notebooks of sin. The chasm is gaping between the two.
War and culture; culture and war. The war did not look favorably on culture as a friend. And vice versa. A union of two bodies on the path to reproduction, on the psychological dimension of union and reproduction. Where love is union, and reproduction not a result. And where the social dimension exists, since the rights of the spouses and children are recognized. And where that happens, there is harmony between the elements of society, which leads to the rotation of its growth processes. A growth process, on the sacred dimension of the union of two bodies and two souls. Because humanity is only complete with love, for each of the lovers. Its compassion for the entire human race leads to nurturing the other element as a sacred being.
War here is a sacred being because it seemed, at the time, the most sacred gifts of wisdom. War is the meaning. A meaning required by reality. It was embodied not by bygone rules and dead rules and niceties. Through exchange. Through dialectical debates between war and the people of war, up to organized and methodical expressions.
War did not rage over major points. It raged over everything. That stage will not end without contradictions. This was used in the service of the unique goal. To write a new life. Writing in utmost freedom. Without following roads. Inventing roads. The war sentenced Lebanon to extensive freedom, resulted in serving its interests. It did not seek to connect with old freedoms. And yet it did. Not by virtue of connecting being a function. But by virtue of connecting being fate. Freedom is the creed of Lebanon.
Freedom is the creed of the Lebanese. Thus, theater became a wild jungle in which the armies of old theatre lost their way. The Greek army, the Roman army, the Germanic army. Many armies. Not equal in cruelty, for theater sowed its groves with the finest and juiciest vegetable and fruit. One platform at first. Followed by many platforms. Theatre stretched like a horizon on the country’s new horizon. Not as a fountain. The first message is narrating the stories of the other, through thousands of new points. No one will ever again fall into totalitarian languages. The people’s language not the Fuhrer’s language. Old theatre became a killer grandmother. Everything was open to sabotage. Poetic sabotage. A resounding paradox. Theatre was spreading and bringing together. Because playwrights did not sign contracts and they did not go into excesses, like they did before, by capturing wind in their cages. A blow that deposits the hell of salt. Theatre was no longer a kite loose in the space of the world. Theatre put on the face of astonished and astonishing. There is a rich reflection of the sun, the experience of the Hakawati (storyteller) theater. I return to the Hakawati as an advanced example. Roger Assaf escaped the tyranny mire in a professional theatre experiment in Beirut. He worked inside Palestinian camps with Mahjoub Omar El Masri. He worked in Makassed Saida with Ahmad Zaazaa. He worked in Ainata with Abdel Latif Koteish and the people of the southern village. A village like a lamp that hung the words of its previous experiments in the night. Here were the pristine promontories, the spirit of the water and the unknown, the mysterious half. A world no one considered plunging into. A stream.
Roger Assaf gave up the sea of the sea. He was no longer addicted to meaningless theatre forms. For he looked for meaning in new walls and numbers; came back the same. The Hakawati was the promise of his new, pure life. Old theater a frank constraint.
The Hakawati group is a feral cat, soon tore away with its claws and teeth and a healthy instinct at all the old theatre anthems filled with the shame of being preoccupied with the smells of theatre’s early years in the world, and not the private world. No play on stage. Play is in the audience hall. The hall is a hall, not a temple. The show is a crazy tent of tales. No more alienation. No laws of past abilities. The hot blood of hunting at the door to the theatre. He greeted the members of the audience team as guests. No traditional hakawati. No Brechtian hakawati. The Hakawati is the knight of evenings in people’s houses. A person with the ability to control rooms inhabited by night owls. Someone who can revive evenings with tales, memories, good performance, signing and bright flashes. A naked body on strong legs. A naked body with a heart tracking every dead part in others, to revive it with its own palpitations. A playful hakawati, like a crown star high in the sky illuminating the earth.
The experiments appeared like fish in a huge, giant aquarium. No tranquility before dreams in the country of masked fear and loneliness decorated with black images. A daydream is different from night dreams. Everyone dreamt of war. They entered the folds of the beats of the hours. There were many experiments in a country against its old images. The crystal country. A lineage of groups and experiments.
The Lebanese Hakawati Group (Bil ibar wal ibar; Min hikayat Jabal Amel 1936; Ayyam El Khiyam-the latter won the musical theater award at the Carthage Theater Festival in 1983, and toured many European and Arab cities).
Al Manara Studio. Raif Karam and Adel Fakhoury founded the Studio. The Sindbad Group with Raif Karam (Dashar qamarna ya hout…). Yacoub Shadrawi’s experiments headed to the centers of light with war plays. Gibran wal qaida; Naeema; Al Tarator; Bala le’eb ya wlad. The ambassador of Soviet theatre opened the nights of the silent and closed city, at the time of the Israeli invasion in 1982, on the tremors of turmoil, in a play full of dawn-Al Tarator. Satirical, it fanned the flames of the besieged city’s poetry, a commedia dell’arte. Sharon playing with the water valve, to cut off water from the humans of Beirut. Beirut’s humans are serving tarator (a tahini-based sauce). A spectacle staged against darkness and silence. Against death, hunger and thirst. Ziad Rahbani mixes his plays with his age. Fear and sadness in plays came mixed with the sounds of castanets of pleasure and an outpour of joy from the wings of laughter, breaking from under the skin. Bennesbeh la bourka shou; Film ameriki taweel; Shi fashel. Plays against the foulness of resentment and against planting poison in gold. Many came out of the pain of darkness. Siham Nasser (Al jayb el sirri), Mashhour Moustafa, Nidal Al Achkar and Fouad Naeem (Al Halabah). Everyone put their heads in their hearts and theirs hearts in their heads. The names have always come out of the maze of the markets. Raymond Jbara, Rabih Mroué, Berge Fazlian, Antoine and Latifeh Moultaqa, Joseph Bou Nassar, Jean Daoud, Antoine Kerbaj, Noura Sakkaf, Laila Debs, Ziad Abou Absi, Lina Abyad. The last four names are the names of reciting the rites of university theatre. The Easter of theater not its church. War encouraged it to collect the value in university, away from rhetoric. The war nurtured new theatre and dozens of playwrights. New playwrights. And the playwrights’ cheeks were rosy again, after looking more like fruit cast with the shadows of doubt. The theater rained in war, rained on a field, not rain on a flower. The war made theater fertile. It made fertile all forms of expression. The magical din of theatre sounded in the war. New roots without silk curtains. The absurdity of Raymond Jbara. For me his magical realism. The plays of Yacoub Shadrawi break their fast on a breath that mixes vagueness with the unknown with a body opening constantly towards clarity. Eyes in swords not on the ground. The world burst with showers of awe. Theater was no longer a solitary man. Theater is the voice of the group in a war of many faces. A war intoxicated with the aroma of loud traffic in the streets of the city and its halls, to the point of providing the conditions for the emergence of amateurs and the theatre of amateurs (Abu Moussa El Zabbal, with Pierre Abi Saab and Fadi Abi Khalil, and others). War is not death papers. It is not an ammunition dump and military machines. It is not a corpse warehouse. War is life in more than one life. War is life multiplying life, as it brings it out of sealed chests of secrets to a long green street. Ink is the grave of sacred old arts.
There is no similarity between the Syrian war and the Lebanese war. The former is vertical, the latter horizontal. The civil war in Lebanon was conceived with care to push the Lebanese to overcome the game of confusion, by creating areas open to everything that is perfect. “Western Area”. And areas that did not experience their happy times, in terms of culture. “Eastern Area”.
Theatre in Lebanon and Syria was brought together by intertwined relations in war. And the two wars played out two universal scenes. Yet the Lebanese war is an abstract war in concise concepts. Whereas the Syrian war is a realistic war. The former war is a metaphorical war. The other one, a war of rhetoric-the more they are used, the more violent it grows.
Theater in Lebanon took on the role of intermediary between culture and the public. A theater not made fragile by attendance. The attendance of Syrian theater inside and outside, a fragile attendance. The fragility has increased with feeding delusions to one party and feeding fear to the other party. Growing delusions in the plays of the Syrian opposition, especially in Lebanon. And it increases fear in the play of the inside besieged with filming equipment of battles and the dangers their owners run in these battles, which increases the confusion of their owners. One of the brilliant examples is the Omar el-Jebai’s The Window. It was shown at the Arab Theater Festival in Oran, Algeria. Theater beings become reality beings. Not the other way around. A man and a housewife in a fictional world watch a window with a light flickering behind it, or what they think is a light. War here is a war reflected on the web of relations between the spouses. A husband addicted to drinking alcohol and cigarettes. No words to be shared with the wife. Because he spends most of his days observing the light behind the window. The play ends with the wife joining the husband to observe the light just as he observes the light. I can’t remember is a political manifesto. An ex-detainee recounts his stories before an audience that does not find its new presence except through the story of the new detainee. That’s how Osama Halal’s Above Zero is, or Omar Abu Saada’s Can you please look at the camera?, or Majd Fidda’s For a yes or for a now, or Samer Fidda’s Al Muhajeeran.
The war in Lebanon swept the old standards of artists. He is no longer in the middle of a game of cubes. He is now in a new atlas, moving cartographic forms by inputting special data on current circuit board. Hakawati Theater’s Ayyam El Khiyam and Min Hikayat 36 are exemplars of anti-quantitative perceptions of war. Other experiments, for the most part, raised the artist’s control on the wings of utmost freedom.
War has opened the imaginary field of possibilities in Lebanon. There are no fields of fiction in Syria before the scenes of violence, killing, rape and mass destruction. Destruction of living flesh and regions, unlike humans. The Lebanese transformed the world into a thread in the civil war. Syrian playwrights have not been able to extract new data from a war still raging between one rupture and another. The lack of a cosmopolitan spirit in cities of war and villages of war in Syria made theater lose the artist’s preoccupations in favor of rhetoric without embellishment.
People volunteered in danger, they resisted death. Creators, fighters, do not want their collective life to be wasted. Or to descend to the bowels of the earth one final time. War is a feast. Politicians have pillages their great country. A loss. In Syria, war is still a cruel game, measured only on a scale of losses and gains. The Lebanese situation went beyond that with theatre, for it stressed the ambitious and cynical nature of artistic projects.