In October 2021, 6 BST members had the opportunity to conduct a theatre project in Cairo with a group of experts. Together with Noon Creative Enterprise, we conducted a three-week cultural exchange program promoting gender equality through the arts.
The artists we worked with were true artists – Luka, an incredibly talented musician and songwriter, Carol Ackad, a theatremaker and director, and Hany Taher, a social theatre artist and keen comedic deviser. We clicked in a heartbeat, and got talking very deeply at our first dinner together.
Dawar Arts, an arts and wellbeing organization, was our daily meeting spot - a beautiful rehearsal space in downtown Cairo. Post-COVID, working together in such energized space with other artists was a novelty. The rooms were large with ceiling to floor windows, essentially doing some of the lighting work for us! The team really appreciated the opportunity to work in-person so soon after lockdown, and because of this, you could sense the excitement and motivation from everyone to use our hearts, bodies, and mind to create.
One of the most memorable parts of the entire project was spending time at Dawar Kitchen, an extension of Dawar Arts, run by Syrian women refugees. The food was magnificent, some of our favourite dishes were the baba ganoush with walnuts, spinach sambusak, stuffed vine leaves (we LOVED these!), fried kibbeh and other glorious treats.
Eating together definitely helped us overcome language and cultural barriers, it was a way for both teams to get to know each other better and stimulate important discussions that we brought back to the workshops. We learned a great deal about their experiences living in Cairo and some of the social issues faced by women in that area and our final performance was informed 100% by these discussions.
The project began by co-creating a play around gender roles in Cairo - it was an hour-long performance that promoted gender equality and the ideas from scenes came straight from conversations about the realities women face, the performance creation flowed quite seamlessly. We played theatre games as an ensemble and focused on improvisation, comedy, non-verbal storytelling, and image theatre.
A short description of the final play:
“We meet a heroic married couple, Superman and Superwoman, who save the world together, but are unfortunately held to different standards in their home life, as the woman is ALSO expected to cook and clean. We come to know a husband who angers his wife, forcing her to leave him to do the housework for himself, which turns out to be a massive disaster. We learn more from a father who wants the best for his daughter and supports her decision not to marry an aggressive and arrogant man. Our scenes are interdisciplinary in approach as the diverse team uses physical theatre, music, and dance to look into gender issues faced by women in Egypt today.”
Having Hany and Carol as the narrators allowed the audience to engage with the performance easily! They were a huge help in facilitating the post-performance discussions, especially with the challenging questions like: “Who decides what counts as news? What do we learn from witnessing these stories? And What role do women play in these stories?”
After each performance, the team hosted theatre training workshops that were focused on advocacy techniques. We worked mainly with refugee women from Syria living in Ezbet Khairallah, one of the largest and most densely populated informal communities in Egypt. We ran sessions for women and their daughters. Half of the team ran the children's sessions downstairs, and the other half ran the sessions for the women upstairs. We also invited the women who worked in Dawar Kitchen to join our workshops, and for the final session, we incorporated objects that they were familiar with into our activities. For example, “What are 100 things that you can do with a cooking spoon?” We were impressed with how imaginative everyone was!
This project was a true collaboration of artists and showcased the strength that is found in community spaces. We hope all of the wonderful people at Dawar Arts and Kitchen are well and thriving. Have a look at the artists we worked with and the work they are doing currently, I’m sure it will not disappoint.
No comments:
Post a Comment