Against
This text confront us with the simple questions about war, power and freedom- about our life under the daily violence, destroying the humanity and the future.
This text confront us with the simple questions about war, power and freedom- about our life under the daily violence, destroying the humanity and the future.
Hamlet Machine, written by Heiner Müller in 1977, was adapted by Ayham Majid Agha in 2018. The Exile Ensemble, of which Ayham serves as Artistic Director, has been part of the Maxim Gorki Theatre in Berlin since the 2016/17 season. The ensemble’s seven actors are investigating the original texts alongside Ayham’s adaptation, as well as researching their own positions in an open ended project. With Hamlet Machine, they’re pursuing the dramatist who radically questions the intellectual’s position in a world that is out of joint, dissecting Shakespeare, among others, and then putting the remaining fragments together again.
Skeleton of an Elephant in the Desert focuses on loneliness and murder. It’s about four characters in a destroyed city, about a circus on the frontlines of battles, about unmarked and un-murdered corpses, about a sniper postponing the death of a nurse, about who is documenting the incidents, and about the last witness.
Dushka is a dynamic play performed by five Syrian actresses, which tries to showcase the mechanisms of building dictatorships- the dictatorship of the ruler, the father, money, and every other controlling authority- and how we become their victim, because we did not resist it from the very beginning of its formation, and we have stood up to those who are trying to resist it.
Once They Die, They’ll Realize is the first of an identity performance series that was a part of the “Identities”project which aimed to research the process of putting the socio-religious rituals of the Arab World -particularly in the previously-called The Levant region, and the mixture of religions it accommodates (Islam, Christianity and Judaism)- in the form of theatre performance. This aim is to be achieved by researching a ritual’s movement vocabulary. With its form, indications and tokens; this vocabulary holds the possibility of being turned into an integral movement language that can eventually construct an identity of the Arab.