170508 UE In Through the Caves of Impression. An Introduction to Arabic Theater (2025S)

Contents and methods:

“It is absolutely certain that the range of ethnic theater is going to broaden”, Marvin Carlson predicts in one of his recent lectures in Montréal, before explaining to the audience how his interest in Arabic theater grew after 9/11, when “the need for knowing more about the Arab world was really much more desperate”. During the Syrian war, and after many of its victims escaped to Europe, some refugees appeared on European stages as a spectacle, while those with theater training / education ended up constantly playing themselves: one refugee story after another.

Apart from this trend, we are hardly aware that in countries like Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Egypt – which share one language and deep cultural ties – there are plenty of unique, influential theater forms with a very long tradition, manifesting in “a whole series of instances of Arabian techniques for acting and portrayal,” and containing “elements which, since the sixties, many of Europe’s avant-garde performance artists have gone back to, so as to dissociate themselves from traditional bourgeois drama.” (Pannewick 2000) Conversely, in the case of Arabic medieval shadow theater and street performance, comparisons were drawn to Danse Macabre and commedia dell’arte, and links to ancient Greek comedy were recognized and established. So when, exactly, can we speak of Arabic theater? In which context and under which conditions? And where do Arabic theater forms meet European genres, or depart from them in order to create their own?

This course embarks on a journey through various epochs of Arabic theater, while touching on different genres with strikingly common aspects. From the medieval shadow play through Arabic operetta, to the carnivalesque and Brechtian stages of the 1960s–1970s. And last but not least, the Lebanese avantgarde, with its heavy contribution to youth culture in the region through the following decades. We will discuss selected performance and staging instances and work together to describe and analyze the historical and social contexts adjacent to them. A variety of media will be used, researched and sought after, to help students form their own impressions of Arabic theater and its most significant characteristics, while observing both ties and distinctions to comparable European forms. Relevant sources and image material will be provided online and at our department library, to be examined in close-reading sessions and discussed collectively in class.

Aims:

“One of the striking aspects of the new American social-science attention to the Orient is its singular avoidance of literature.” Edward Said wrote in 1978. “The net effect of this remarkable omission in modern American awareness of the Arab or Islamic Orient is to keep the region and its people conceptually emasculated, reduced to ‘attitudes,’ ‘trends,’ statistics: in short, dehumanized.”
Through providing students with the basic knowledge about Arabic theater and its most influential protagonists, in the context of historical and cultural entanglement between the East and the West, the course aims to shed light on this important, yet largely neglected dimension of the Arab World and its people, thereby creating new tools to disarm a rhetoric based on demeaning the collective other.