Performance Research in the Maghreb : Interplay between Appropriation and Contestation
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1During much of the twentieth century international theatre research was typically focused on Europe and America. As that century drew to a close, however, the two international sister organizations (International Federation for Theatre Research IFTR and Performance Studies international PSi) became more implicated in addressing theatre as a truly global activity1.The urgency released from the intercultural debate to transcend the polarities East/West, and even North/South, within a global environment is the most significant indication of paradigm shift in performance research. As a revisionary project, the inception of the intercultural debate in the 1990s ushered in the promise of offering the rest of the world, specifically marginalized constituencies, a platform from which to articulate their own positions. In line with these belated developments have been noted a remarkable interest in North African theatre traditions. This article is devoted to a series of explorations into the local and global dimensions of performance research in Arabic speaking North Africa, and the interplay between West and East from the standpoint of a double critique. It explores the early Ta-awrubu ‘Westernization’ of Arab stages that had been conditioned by the general shock of encounter with the Western Other since the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt. The Napoleonic military expedition to Egypt (1798-1801) has ever since marked the beginning of such a conflicting interference between what the Moroccan sociologist Abdelkebir Khatibi calls “le pouvoir de parole”2 (the power of the utterance) of an incessant Arabo-Islamic autocratic metaphysics, on the one hand, and the ascendant Eurocentric negation of Otherness, on the other hand.
2My ambition is to critique3 the discourses on Performance that used to speak in the name of the Arab world, yet informed by a deeply rooted Eurocentrism. In the meantime, such critique is a reflection on how the Arabs view their performance cultures. It is a ‘double critique’, which is partly inspired by Khatibi’s proposition of an “uncompromising difference”4. The aim is to transcend simplistic Hegelianism by overturning its dichotomous relationship Occident/Orient, West/East… only to emerge as a deconstructive praxis of difference. The transgressive effects of double critique as a subaltern form of deconstruction are already apparent in its transformation rather than passive borrowing from the “progressive West”, namely Derrida’s deconstruction and Foucault’s discourse analysis5, and parallel subversive turns in the field of theatre and Performance Studies... The first implication of such critique is a complete shake up of Eurocentrism as manifested in world theatre history. As to the second implication, it is affirmation itself as proposed by Khatibi. In other words, the Arabs of North Africa, like other peoples of the globe, have performed themselves to themselves, yet in ways different from the Western tradition of theatre making. My contention here is that the Arabs’ sense of Otherness and difference were eclipsed by the shock of encounter with the Colonizer (the Western Other) at a time characterized by the Arab regression rather than backwardness.
The Journey West
3The Arab acquaintance with the Western dramatic medium was inaugurated by the 1798 Napoleonic invasion of Egypt. Theatre was among the Napoleonic civilizing tools in Egypt. The presence of representatives of fine arts in the expedition was not only part of the so-called cultural or civilizing mission, but also a precursor of the corporal conquest of the Oriental body. Napoleon Bonaparte brought with him the three basic constituencies of European modernity : power, competition, and knowledge. And if we wish to situate these three aspects in relation to our modernity, we will find : colonial intervention, competition between European powers (mainly England and France), and the emergence of modern thought in the Arab world. The Napoleonic military expedition has ever since marked the beginning of a conflicting interplay between modernity and colonialism. The Arabs’ appropriation of Western models of theatre making came as an effect of this interplay. Soon after Cairo was captured on 21 July 1798, “French bands played, concerts were organized, and Tivoli, near Esbekeih, was opened with dancing, gaming, reading and refreshment rooms.” As he was preparing to leave Egypt on August 22, 1799, Napoleon wrote a significant note to his successor, General Kléber, explaining the imperatives of theatre activity : “I have already asked several times for a troupe of comedians. I will make a special point of sending you one. This item is of great importance for the army and as the means of beginning to change the customs of the country.”
4Napoleon’s introduction of theatre was aimed to serve two main objectives : 1) a means of entertainment for the soldiers… 2) an agency aimed at changing people’s traditions and implementing French civilizing mission. Indeed, the Napoleonic aspirations echoes Karl Marx’s thesis on the British colonialism and its double mission in a supposedly backward India : “England has to fulfill a double mission in India : one destructive, the other regenerating the annihilation of old Asiatic society, and the laying the material foundations of Western society in Asia.”6 The destructive task led to breaking up the native communities and uprooting the local industry, whereas the regenerating undertaking pursued the path of modernizing India. The impact on India was so deep to the extent that Indians found themselves between two doors : that of the East that refuses to close totally and that of the West that refuses to open widely. Khatibi provides a significant reading of Marx’s terrifying statement : “the murder of the traditions of the other and the liquidation of its past are necessary so that the West, while seizing the world, can expand beyond its limits while remaining unchanged in the end. The East must be shaken up in order to come back to the West.”7 The introduction of European theatrical traditions was utilized as a means to bring the East back to the West8.
5Arabic appropriations of the Western dramatic/theatrical models were inaugurated in 1847, a significant date that is so often referred to as the point of departure/rupture. While there is a general consensus between Arab and Western scholars alike that the first modern Arabic play in the European sense was born in Beirut with Marun Al-Naqqash’s al-Bakhiil (1848), no scholarly attention has yet been paid to another modern Arabic play that was published in the Arab World. This pioneering play is entitled Nuzhat al-Muchtaq Wa-Rus-sàt al-Uchaq fi Madinat Tiryaq fi al-Iraq [“The Pleasure Trip of the Enamoured and the Agony of Lovers in the City of Tiryàq in Iraq”]. It was composed by Abraham Daninos, an Arabic-speaking Sephardic Jew from Algiers. Shmuel Moreh and Philip Sadgrove, in their groundbreaking collection of Jewish dramas in Arabic entitled Jewish Contributions to Nineteenth Century Arabic Theatre : Plays from Algeria and Syria A Study and Texts, provide ample evidence about the publication of Daninos’ dramatic piece before al-Naqqash’s performance of The Miser : “Now it is clear from the texts published here that al-Naqqash had a predecessor further afield in the far West of the Ottoman Empire in Algeria, Abraham Daninos”9. The play was printed in Algiers in lithograph and then sent to a member of La Société Asiatique in Paris. Daninos’ play was first mentioned in Le Journal Asiatique on 17 August 1848 by Jules Mohl : “Before leaving Arabic poetry, I should mention a literary curiosity ; it is an Arabic verse drama, preceded by a statement about the dramatic situation and the list of characters. At last, a full drama, whereby the author, Mr Daninos, in Algers, seems to attempt to give the Arabs the taste of the performance and dramatic poetry.”10 (My translation). Moreh’s review presents Daninos as a pioneer of the field of drama in the Arab world, and the play is seen as an attempt at familiarizing the Arabs with the making of spectacle and dramatic poetry. However, the fact that Daninos is the father of modern Arabic drama does not mean that the Arabs were previously unfamiliar with the art of performance. That is, Moreh’s review is biased by the Eurocentric claim of the mastery of the genre11.
6Daninos’ play is an ‘African-European hybrid’, for its constructs belong to two different cultures. The play, then, can be considered a product of the third space, the hybridized space of the colony. Its extended dialogues in verse are frequently unacknowledged quotations from Alf Layla wa-Layla [The Thousand and One Nights] and from Kashf al-Asraar [“The Revelation of Secrets”] by Izz Al-Din B. Abde al-Salam al-Maqdissi (d.678/1279)” (Baquir 13). The play has a local field of reference besides its recourse to an alien medium. Daninos’ play has a prologue, a list of characters, and stage directions. Its prologue contains a brief synopsis of the whole drama. “This may have been read by a figure called al-was-saf [“The Praiser of God”]12. This technique, which is typical of the Arabic tradition of shadow play, proves that Daninos’ textual practice was oscillating between Self and Other, and eventually between East and West.
7Sometime between 1847 and February 1848, Marun Al-Naqqash (a Christian Lebanese businessman) performed his Arabic adaptation of Molière’s L’Avare : Al-Bakhiil [The Miser]. Al-Naqqash’s play was performed by male members of his family and attended by the elites of the Lebanese society – a Westernized and liberal rising upper class, somehow a supplement or shadow of a deeply rooted European bourgeoisie. A host of drama critics (Western and Arab alike) mistakenly acknowledges Marun Al-Naqqash’s Al-Bakhiil as a founding presence and a starting point of modern Arabic drama. M.M. Badaoui, for example, declares, “Modern Arabic drama is an importation from the West : it was directly and consciously borrowed in about the middle of the nineteenth century by a Lebanese writer in Beirut Marun Al-Naqqash, and two decades later by an Egyptian in Cairo, Yaqub Sannu.”13 Badaoui’s statement, though unaware of the existence of Daninos, is a clear testimony about the beginnings of Arab appropriation of the Western model. However, reading backwards would eventually problematize Marun Al-Naqqash’s experiment as a landmark beginning in the Arab world, for this landmark represents a moment of rupture rather than a moment of departure from theatrical tradition. It is a rupture between a period of indigenous performing events that might have been dynamized from within, and a new era of imitation and mimicry that will last for a hundred years or so. Of course, the degree of imitation varies from one drama to another through the strategy of ‘molding, ’ yet the medium remains always alien. ‘Molding’ is also a form of interweaving of different performance traditions within performance.
8At the opening performance of Al-Bakhiil which took place on an improvised stage in Marun Al-Naqqash’s house, and that was attended by important personalities, he delivered a significant speech acknowledging the Western influences in his work. Al-Naqqash described his play as a “literary theatre and a European gold cast in Arab molds.”14 Thus, since the medium is European, it should be remodeled to fit Arabic taste – a taste oriented by indigenous customs of free and adaptive festive performance events such as al-halqa and L’bsat…15
The Apparatus of Translation and the Spread of the Western Model
9The first visiting European theatre companies performed Shakespeare and other classics in Egypt, a cultural centre in the Arab world since the Napoleonic invasion. These performances were examples of transplanting Western civilization in the so-called Oriental world where they served as entertainment for troops, as well as landmarks of superiority insofar as they were performed in European languages and to audiences made up of, mainly, Europeans and ‘European converts’ -that is, Westernized Arabs and Turks. Arab audiences, then, were a minority of nouveaux riches and privileged people. The first Shakespearean plays performed in the Arab world were Anthony and Cleopatra, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and Macbeth. These plays were performed in private clubs and privileged coffee houses until 1868 when the first permanent theatre was built in Egypt and named “Commedia”. A year later, the Khedive Ismail ordered the Opera House to be constructed in commemoration of the completion of the Suez Canal in 1869. Arab intellectuals admired European plays and identified with dramatic characters that stirred their passions and overwhelmed their emotions.
10The introduction of Shakespeare into the Arab World, then, was part of the dynamics of colonization rather, the dissemination of the West into non-Western territories. The three years of the French expedition in Egypt served to acquaint the Arabs not only with the plays of Shakespeare and Molière among other European canons, but also, and most importantly, with the genre of drama as deployed and developed in Europe. Such tradition was sustained during the reign of Mohammed Ali, who invited European companies, especially French Theatrical troupes, to perform in Egypt. The first cultural contact with Shakespeare, as an exemplary first instance, was established through the mediation of French translations and adaptations, which marked the subsequent use of Shakespeare by Arab translators, playwrights, directors, actors, and readers, since these first translations were in fact ‘translations of translations’ or supplements of other supplements, which invoked a constant refashioning of the master model. The first Arabs who translated Shakespeare either Islamized or omitted certain Christian oaths, ribald jokes, and lewd allusions, which could hardly be accepted and transferred into Arabic, the sacred language of the Quran. The mediation through translation and cultural transformation to Arabo-Islamic standards resulted in a distortion of the original Shakespearean model.
11Jacob M. Landou, in Studies in The Arab Theater and Cinema, comments on the Arab translations of Shakespeare that :
in the early days of the Arab theatre, approximately from its beginning until the First World War, most translated plays were ‘adapted’ for the benefit of the audiences. Transposition of the plot to surroundings known to the theater’s patrons were not uncommon in the early days of other theaters, such as the Romanian. Transpositions, however, necessitated also the changing of place names and the names of the ‘dramatis personae’, sometimes quite ingeniously (Othello appeared as Ata Allah)16.
12Thus, adding scenes and changing names and locations were common practices among the early Arab translators who strove to transpose Shakespeare into a different environment. In the early translations of Shakespeare into Arabic, adaptation was a common practice. It is important to note that the Arabs insisted on adapting rather than translating Shakespeare. Christopher Spencer defines adaptation as an act of rewriting that “includes substantial cuts of scenes, speeches, and speech assignments ; much alteration of language ; and at least one and usually several important (or scene-length) additions” (Cohen 3). Indeed, the hegemony of adaptation over other modes of cultural exchange between the Orient and its Other has strong implications. The first Arab translators were aware of the general audiences’ religious and cultural sensibilities. Their translations were far removed from the Shakespeare text due to the differences between the two languages and the two cultures. The outcome is a text that is neither a translation nor a supplement to Shakespeare’s text, but rather an Arabized, molded, and hybridized adaptation to meet Arabo-Islamic standards.
13As an example, the first Arabic translation of Romeo and Juliet (by Wajih Al-Hadad and performed by Salama Hijazi’s theatrical troupe in 1905) foregrounds an important aspect of Shakespeare’s reception in the Arab world. The play was subtitled Martyrs of Love (Chuhada al-gharam), which is an allusion to the well known love story in the Arab literature of the Umayad period (661- 750) called Qays and Layla. The Shakespearean model was thus criss-crossed by an Arabic version as its counter-part. Khalil Mutran (1872- 1949), an established Arab poet, also took liberties while translating Hamlet. His translation of Hamlet, which bears no date of publication in its first edition, “did not translate directly from the English text”, as M. M. Badaoui informs us, “but from the French text of George Duval.” As a result of too many omissions, Mutran’s translation is divided into four acts instead of the original five. Indeed, Mutran didn’t leave a single page unchanged from the original. The original first scene of the second act, which introduces the audience to Polonius’ bombastic instructions to Reynaldo to spy on Laertes in France, together with Ophelia’s imparting news of Hamlet’s madness to her father, is eliminated, and an additional 50 lines are deleted from the following scene. In brief, early translations of Shakespeare into Arabic sought to smooth the shock of encounter with Western Otherness. Most translations compromised between Shakespeare’s text and the sensibilities of the Arab culture as well as the general test of its public.
14Although most translations of Shakespeare into Arabic were in prose, the plays in their original form provided some Arab playwrights and poets with a model to imitate. Ahmed Shawqi (1868-1932), in his adaptation entitled Masra’ Cleopatra [The Murder of Cleopatra] (1927) borrowed some scenes from Shakespeare. Even the imagery and metaphors used by Shawqi are Shakespearean. The only difference is in his interpretation of Cleopatra’s character, for Shawqi conceives her as a patriotic queen of old Egypt, whereas Shakespeare presents her as a wanton, fickle woman whose moods are unpredictable and who is erotic by nature. Indeed, Shawqi’s interpretation of the character of Cleopatra is part of the dynamics of negotiating a margin within the Shakespearean space. Another obvious connection with Shakespeare is found in Tawfiq al-Hakim’s play entitled ad-dunya riwaya hazliya [Life is a Comedy] published in 1974. In the second part of al-Hakim’s play, the balcony scene of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is reproduced as a dream sequence in which of the main characters of the play are incarnated as Romeo and his beloved Juliet. The same characters are re-incarnated as Antony and Cleopatra in (2. 5) of Shakespeare’s original play. In these two scenes that parody Shakespeare, al-Hakim used practically the same diction of the master models, though in a humorous way. Meanwhile, Hafiz Ibrahim (1872-1932) seems to have read and enjoyed Macbeth to the point of being inspired to compose a poem “khanjar Macbeth” [Macbeth’s Dagger]. The poem is subtitled “An Ode translated from the English Poet Shakespeare”, and consists of twenty-five verses that fuse together Macbeth’s soliloquy (2. 1. 33-61), and the actual dagger scene itself.
Divided Loyalties
15The Arabs’ appropriation of Western models of theatre-making came as a consequence of their abrupt disavowal of native performance cultures along with their own cultural identity17. The colonial enterprise has, indeed, brought about divided loyalties manifested in two mystifying discursive practices that look different but share a slot of essentialism as a major source of epistemic violence. The first stance sees Western theatre as a supreme model opposed to its local counterpart that is so often called ‘pre-theatre’. In fact, this position also reproduces the same Eurocentric eclipse, if not exclusion, of other peoples’ performance traditions. In this context, the European theatrical traditions are considered as unique models that should be imitated and reproduced. In other words, there is no other theatrical practice but the one that developed in old Greece and re-appropriated by many parts of Europe some twenty centuries later. However, Western theatrical models are more than dramatic/theatrical spaces, for they are cultural and discursive ones as well. These models are not homogeneous and subject to the same rules and structures, for they are multifold, heterogeneous, and variable from one Western country to another, and most importantly, one European theatrical age to another with all the ruptures and epistemic breaks between them. Borrowing Western models without critiquing their exclusivist tropes amounts to a new kind of colonialism.
16This discourse held by many westernized Arabs falls into another kind of essentialism which sees European theatre as a unique and homogeneous epitome that should be disseminated all over the world even at the expense of other peoples’ performative agencies. Lila Abu-Lughod calls these westernized Arabs ‘guides of modernity’. Her sharp argumentation runs thus : “a concerned group of culture-industry professionals has constructed of […] women, youths, and rural people a subaltern object in need of enlightenment. Appropriating and inflecting western discourses on development they construct themselves as guides of modernity and assume the responsibility of producing […] the virtuous modern citizen.”18 The Europeanization of Arabic performance (Ta-awrub al-furja al-arabia) exemplifies the complicity of colonized subjects. Rustom Bharucha’s critique in Theatre and the World : Essays on Performance and Politics explains the dangers of such ‘exchange’ : “Colonialism, one might say, does not operate through principles of “exchange”. Rather, it appropriates, decontextualizes, and represents the “other” culture, often with the complicity of its colonized subjects. It legitimates its authority only by asserting its cultural superiority.”19 There is no exchange in the tradition of going West under colonial corporal conquest of alterity, for such exchange is, in fact, a one way utterance that claims an inherent power. At this juncture we might widen our frame of reference to include Gayatry C. Spivak’s agonistic outcry about the subaltern’s inability to speak, an outcry that is very much contested and misunderstood by many actants in the Postcolonial field. Indeed, “the subaltern can’t speak”, Spivak explains, “means that even when the subaltern makes an effort to the death to speak, she is not able to be heard, and speaking and hearing complete the speech act. That’s what it had meant, and anguish marked the spot.”20 Exchange requires reciprocity rather than a one-way communication ; and this constitutes the Subaltern predicament along with the inability to recover her/his voice. The subaltern’s inaudible cry preconditions the impossibility of communication. Such silent cry reminds us of Brecht’s mother Courage when confronted with the body of her proper son… Empowering such voice requires much of what Gramsci calls ‘optimism of the will’ played against the agonistic ‘pessimism of the intellect’.
17With the advent of colonialism, the colonial machine eclipsed the differences between Self and Other and forced bipolar opposites such as colonizer/colonized, Western/Oriental, superior/inferior, civilized/ primitive. The European subject forcefully made his way to the Others’ space and eclipsed the latter’s voice. The Eurocentric exclusion, then, prevailed within the empire(s). The canonization of the Western dramatic and performance traditions were made possible in the colonies by relegating indigenous performance cultures as non-dramas, manifested forms of folklore and formulaic Orality, or at best, as pre-theatrical phenomena. Thus the fiction, invoked by the great narrative of Eurocentric tradition in order to assert itself as a founding presence, became reality through various strategies of containment, appropriation, and dissemination.
18Indeed, modern Arabic theatre has been informed by the previously mentioned Eurocentric claim to the birth and mastery of theatre practice. It has been “over determined from without,”21 transfixed and emptied as well as exploded in the “fetishistic” and stereotypical dialectics of the gaze of the Other. Within the conflict-economy of colonial discourse, the Arabs’ Other was experienced as a stifling burden rather than a diminished and reduced category. Admittedly, this Other presented itself as a transcendental entity. In a related vein, Homi Bhabha argues that “not self and other but the ‘Otherness’ of the self inscribed in the perverse palimpsest of colonial identity.”22 The rhetorical strategy of negation and reductive annihilation has been so often deployed by Western orientalists (French ethnographers in the case of the Maghreb) to designate the Arabs as a cultural Other whose presence is eclipsed and substituted by an overwhelming absence and emptiness so as to justify colonial corporal and discursive expansion. Thus, the West prevailed “within the West and outside ; in [the] structures and in [the] minds”23 of the colonized Arabs. In this context, the legacy of reification and auto-reductionism operated as a form of conceptual entail or constraint on the Arabs’ attempts to recover theatrical experience. These instances of reification that were brought about by the colonial encounter caused a rupture between the old tradition and the newly acquired one. The introduction of Western Theatrical traditions in the Arab World took place precisely at this very moment of rupture. The first negotiations of Western dramas – as outlined in the previous section – represent the phase of duplicating the Western model, though they can be considered double enunciations outspoken by the colonized in order to subvert the surveying model of the colonizing Other.
19Thus, the Arab subject was invited to borrow Eurocentric theatre discourses via different Western colonial enterprises without realizing, at least in the earliest beginnings, their claim of universality, their subordination of the political in favor of the poetical, their specific relations to particular peoples, and most importantly, their deployment as parts of the strategy of extending and disseminating the West into non-Western territories. “The influence of the West,” as John Maier admits, “is a burden on all Arabic writers who opt to write in narrative forms invented by and for the west.”24 Theatre practice, then, is among the Western artistic forms that have significantly influenced the Arab intellectual. The burden of such influence is felt through the Arab’s appropriation of the proscenium tradition that does not match their cultural structures. The act of borrowing has been justified as one of the different “facets of modernism.” However, such modernism did not develop as a dialectical relationship, or as a result of a conflicting internal economy/politics ; it had been part of the Western desire to contain the Arab’s cultural otherness. It was transplanted in the Arab body from without. Of course, a local intelligentsia enhanced the incorporation of Western models. Paul Bowles, the most prominent American expatriate writer who lived in Morocco for more than fifty years, writes about the predicament of self-annihilation experienced by some Moroccan intellectuals in the Forward to a collection of essays entitled Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue : “My own belief is that the people of the alien cultures are being ravaged not so much by the by-products of our civilization as by the irrational longing on the part of members of their own educated minorities to cease being themselves and become Westerners.”25 Clearly, this statement by a Westerner who strove to rid his gaze of the masks of difference and who chose to live in a double exile26 reveals the violence of the letter as experienced by the natives. The colonial enterprise produced a native intelligentsia that spoke the same language as the colonizer. Western literary forms, among other things, were thus internalized by the educated elites who were already incorporated within the Western discourse as docile bodies ready to rehearse the colonial text.
20From 1847 until the mid 1960s, Arabic theatre could not escape the Western telos as manifested in the European apparatuses of playwriting and theatre making27. Dramatic texts were ranging from translations and adaptations of Molière and Shakespeare, and embryonic forms of Arabization were attempted – mostly coming from the Middle East as it was far ahead in assimilating Western theatre. Meanwhile, the Arabization of foreign texts (texts written, or rather re-written, with recourse to an alien text) was a common practice. Thus, these were native appropriations of an alien medium though they strove to mirror an inner self, for in borrowing the Western model, “the shape of lives and the shape of narratives” change in the process. This period was characterized by native collaboration through various excesses of self-annihilation and the othering of the self. Consequently, the Western text becomes the model of all writing. Here, again, Western logocentrism found its way in structuring and refashioning dramatic writing in the Arab World.
The Journey back to the East
21The second posture, however, is a result of the previously outlined one-way communication as it repudiates Western performance models at large and calls instead, for a return to the “indigenous” performance traditions, and by extension, a return to pre-colonial African traditions. The quest for the so called pre-colonial purity is an untenable one that is partly inspired by Frantz Fanon’s call to leave the European model behind. The past in its three intrinsic manifestations of memory, tradition, and history has reasserted itself, demanding attention, allegiance, and even homage from the present. This tendency has led some to the worship of ancestral ways of performing everyday life, and eventually to a useless quest for purity that amounts to a new kind of logocentrism which can be called “Arabocentrism”. Such essentialist intellectual and theatrical enterprises rest upon a new myth of origin in the name of “authentic” Arabic theatre, a tendency that has also been fueled by discourses of Pan-Arabism in the realm of politics. In a related context, Edward Said openly discredits all kinds of essentialism that surrounds discourses of national cultures : “Far from being unitary or monolithic or autonomous things, cultures actually assume more foreign elements, alterities, differences, than they consciously exclude”28. The rebirth of literary/theatrical Pan-Arabism in the late 1960s is not an immaculate conception. It is a painful process of renewal that grew out of attribution and contention, a postcolonial struggle affected by violent taxonomic labeling and conflicting aspirations for a better future. Yet, the period of crisis that followed 1948 (the beginning of Arab/Israeli conflict) is the catalytic stage for the emergence of the seemingly irreconcilable struggle between political necessity and the creative imagination. Arab nationalism, as has mostly been performed on Arab stage, seems to enact the same violence against those it identities as the Other, including the native non-Arabs such as the Imazeghen people in North Africa.
22However, the so-called “authentic” performance cultures are fundamentally diasporic cultural constructs that constantly change time and again, and are transformed according to the inner dynamics of folk traditions as adaptive, fluid, and changing behaviors. Despite that these performances have been of great artistic delight as social dramas belonging to what Victor Turner calls society’s ‘subjunctive mood’, they did not develop into a theatrical activity similar to western theatre. Decolonizing Arab theatre from Western telos does not mean a recuperation of a ‘pure’ or ‘original’ performance tradition that pre-existed the colonial encounter. Such tendency falls into an inevitable process of inverted violence and a dangerous quest for purity. “Does there even exist the possibility of returning to an ‘authentic’ state, or are we not all somehow caught upon an interactive and never-to-be-completed networking where both subaltern formations and institutional powers are subjected to interruption, transgression, fragmentation and transformation ?”29 There is no way back to an authentic or rather pure state. The Europe that we want to redeem ourselves from has become part of our past, memory and history ; a part that we cannot erase. In Derridean terms, the “authentic” is very much like a “cinder” or a “trace,” for it destroys its purity at the very moment of presenting itself or rather thrown into being. The matrix form of plenitude, fullness, and origin is a myth. Derrida puts it thus : “The concept of origin... is nothing but the myth of effacement of the trace that is to say of an originally differance that is neither absence nor presence, neither negative nor positive”30. Obviously, origin as presence is, according to Derrida, ‘the myth of addition’. There is no origin but ‘differance’ ; there is no presence but representation. The origin is constructed only through a non-origin ; its existence as differance precedes its delusive essence, for it originates in a lack of plenitude. “The trace”, as a matter of fact, “is not only the disappearance of origin... it means that the origin did not even disappear, that it was never constituted except reciprocally by a non-origin, the trace, which thus becomes the origin of the origin.”31 The implications of Derrida’s deconstruction of the Western metaphysics of presence and plenitude – as manifested in the myth of origin – are extremely important in the present critique of ‘going past’. Despite the illusion of boundedness, theatre evolves historically through mimetic borrowings, appropriations, and cultural exchanges. There is no theatre in, and of, itself. Western theatres are themselves hybrid models. More than that, theatrical art is a hybrid medium that necessitates a transformation of something written on a script into an acoustic and visual world called the mise en scène.
Crossing Borders between West and East
23The Moroccan playwright Abdelkrim Berchid’s Othello wal-Khayl wal-ba-rud (Otayl, Horses and Gunpowder)32 exemplifies the everlasting quest for a lost tradition, yet with a permanent negotiation with the Western canon. The play manifests a disturbing gulf between what is represented and what is representing. Otayl ‘s little drama is clearly a revised version of Shakespeare’s Othello. Shakespeare’s characters : Othello, Desdemona and Iago (re)appear in Berrchid’s drama as Otayl, Maymuna, and Iago. The reader/audience of Berrchid’s play cannot help thinking of the original Shakespeare play. The character of Shahrayar, however, refers us to the Arabian Nights. A strong literary allusion is established as he enters in his majestic ceremonial manner that is typical of the famous narrative stories of the Thousand and One Nights. Al-Bouhou is another literary reference that reminds the reader of the famous character in L-bsat as a Moroccan performance tradition. In the present festivity, Al-Bouhou remains the spokesman of the lower classes who is admitted into the palace and granted license to perform in the lights of topsy-turvidom33. Sayid Ghamud is another character from the L-bsat tradition that reminds the reader of this indigenous theatrical form.
24Literary allusions that permeate the text establish self-conscious vehicles of the drama’s awareness of the heterogeneity of mimesis itself as it turns the mirror on its own medium. Otayl wal-Khayl wal-ba-rud brings together Shakespeare’s Othello and Iago, on the one hand, and Shahrayar and Haroun Arrachid, on the other hand. All these characters are loaded with some kind of mythical grandeur and historical presence, at least in the imagination of people. However, Berrchid’s festive methodology demythologizes these characters’ mythos. At the end of the play, they emerge as new human beings (festive characters) who are free and emancipated from previous confines. The play, then, seeks to deconstruct the mythical proportions attributed to Shakespeare’s Moor as well as the victimizer of the Arabian Nights. This very fact shows that Berrchid resists not only the Shakespeare myth, but also that of Shahrayar though it is a local product. In this context, Berrchid seems to offer a double demystification : The first demystification concerns Shakespearean representation of the Moor, and the second one regards local historical/imaginary figures. This double demystification is also an attempt at re-locating the demystified dramatis persona in a new and different con/text ; this new con/text is manifestly the postcolonial hybrid space that is so often referred to by Berrchid as the Festive space. All characters are transplanted into a Moroccan context. By the end of the play, their “Moroccanness” becomes apparent as a dominant feature. Shakespeare, then, is brought to the fore only to be backgrounded and de-mythologized.
25Imruu al-Qays fi Bariz34 is Berrchid’s second play that is strongly related to the Shakespearean canon. Unlike Otayl wal-Khayl wal-ba-rud that is an immediate response to Othello and a way of coming to terms with Shakespeare’s representation of the Moorish Other. Imruu al-Qays fi-Bariz is a projection of the present state of being in the Arab world with a particular reference to Hamlet’s situation. Berrchid describes the link between Hamlet and Imruu al-Qays in the following terms :
I was always fascinated by Imruu al-Qays not only as a poet but also as dramatic personae who has strong affinities with the character of Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark. Both of them are princes ; they both lost their fathers and kingdoms. Each of them strived to avenge his father and restore his proper kingdom. Hamlet’s knowledge of his father’s death – that he performs on stage – constitutes a moment of transition between two periods and two characters ; and so is the case of Imruu al-Qays. Since there is that borderline between today and tomorrow, wine and the matter. (Imruu al-Qays fi Bariz, 16)
26Obviously, what attracts Berrchid to Shakespeare’s Hamlet is the tragic predicament of bewilderment, hesitation and procrastination besides the loss of the father and the kingdom. The play draws attention to the similarities between the well-known Arab poet and prince, Imruu al-Qays and the mythical Shakespearean character, Hamlet. Imruu al-Qays in the present festivity is transposed to a different time and space in order to suggest the predicament of the postcolonial Arab subject : “Do not search for Imruu al-Qays beyond the relation between East and West, past and present, the possible and the impossible. The new Imruu al-quays cannot be but the spirit of this new age, that is the age of homesickness, murders, and military coup d’etat, and the migration of intellectuals and laborers in search for bread and dignity” (Imruu al-Qays fi Bariz 15-16). Hamlet’s tragedy of delay and procrastination are re-appropriated by Berrchid so as to become a collective tragedy rather than an individual tragedy. Imruu al-Qays fi Bariz, then is a tragedy of a whole nation that is lost between self and other. It is informed by the new relationship between East and West within the space of the postcolonial turn.
27Berrchid’s Imruù al-Qays is not a fictional character but a flesh and blood Arab subject of the postcolonial era who stands for Arab men everywhere. He also represents the humiliating shock of encounter between the Arabs and their ‘superior’ Other. For this reason the play is situated in Paris, for this city, though it represents different aspirations for different characters of the play, remains the site of the Other and a capital of the world or, Berrchid argues, it represents the whole world as a “technical device – a device that might reduce the whole world into a single spatial and temporal spot” (Imruu al-Qays fi Bariz, 19). Paris, then, is an international melting pot where all sorts of people co-exist together and form a mosaic of multi-ethnic varieties and diasporic public spheres. It is a city of rich and poor, oppressor and oppressed, exploiter and exploited. Different Arab subjects meet in Paris : the Prince Imruù al-quays, ‘Amer the blind, El-azhari, Ayoub the ploughman, the peasant, the Egyptian gentleman, Kenza and the workers, such melting between all the different Arab subjects can only be made possible in a city like Paris, and here lies the significance of Paris as a location of utter hybridity.
28The play opens with Imruu al-Qays’ permissive and lost life in Paris. He drinks excessively to the extent that he forgets his mission as a student who has to acquire knowledge. As his father dies, ‘Amer joins Imruu al-Qays with the sad news of the loss of his father and his kingdom, carrying with him, as a matter of fact, a will, a horse, and a sword. These are all that are left for the Prince. However, the Prince’s extravagant state of insobriety erects a barrier between himself and his present situation. ‘Amer’s task to induce the Prince to consider revenge failed at the beginning, yet after realizing his ‘corrupt’ surrounding – that is manifested in the play through the greedy interests of Hayim’s daughter – Imruu al-Quays realizes his predicament. After a long procrastination, the Prince at last decides to act, but his life comes to an abrupt end. However, ‘Amer will carry on the Prince’s mission :
‘Amer the Blind : You died, Imruu al-Qays, with the intention to become a martyr. You died for me, for the sake of my brothers and friends. You were the first to embark on the road of blood and pain. This is your sword and your father’s before. You left, and it is still alive. You recommended me to hand it to that who shall use it against injustice. I will. This sword, Imruù, is my sword. Yes, mine. And the horse is mine. It’s from here, from Paris, that the sun shall rise tomorrow... (Imruu al-Qays fi Bariz, 126)
29Thus, Berrchid uses Shakespeare’s Othello only to illuminate a different narrative, that of the postcolonial Moroccan subject. As for his Imru al-Qays, it subverts Shakespeare’s Hamlet at the very moment of repeating it, in a festive way. Berrchid’s re-reading of Shakespeare has produced a Shakespeare who is his contemporary, a Moroccan Shakespeare. This latter is not represented as an inviolable presence rather ; he is demythologized, revised, and re-located within the emerging space of Moroccan theatre.
30Aswat Koltes (Voices of Koltes) by Zohra Makach35 is another postcolonial re-enactment of fragments of different pieces of Bernard-Marie Koltès, the most performed contemporary French playwright who invented a language of his own that is very much urban. Thus, the modernity of the Koltèsien theatre comes initially from its form. Makach made this very clear in her self-reflexive performance. She interweaves Koltès’s globalised theatre based on displacement, fragmentation, and ‘liminal de-representation’, along with provincialised narratives. Makach is particularly attentive to Koltesean liminal spaces that cross over borderlines between what constitutes French nation-ness as an imagined community and its various Others. Voices of Koltès was performed in 2009 as a tribute to Koltès on the occasion of L’année de Koltès in Amazigh, Moroccan dialect, African languages, and French. The performance is not a guided tour through fragments of Koltès’ five plays. One can look at the performance as the history of some figures in their relationship with the Other… It is an encounter with the most disenfranchised characters of Koltès (Mathilde, Adrien, Fak, Claire, Zucco, Léone, Alboury…) who narrate with the simplest words, the most important things of our existence. Makach’s re-enactment does not create characters but rather figures that speak their own languages. He is the Arab (Aziz), the mysterious African (Alboury), the French (Adrien) ; he is even the dog… Through the many fragmented voices, and disenfranchised bodies, the performance exposes these figures, to make us more attentive to the texts and traces of Koltès in several languages. The original is subtly interwoven with its re-enactment.
31The performance juggles between monologues and sharp-edged encounters, between insults in daylight and confessions of dark nights. A body of cinematographic choreography permeates Makach’s performance. It exemplifies the emergence of a new mode of theatrical representation in Morocco informed by visual dramaturgy and ‘intermediality’36. Visual dramaturgy “does not mean an exclusively visually organized dramaturgy but rather one that is not subordinated to the text and can therefore freely develop its own logic.”37 The visual landscapes and quotations from Bernard Marie Koltes’Le Retour au désert, Combat de Nègre et de chien, Roberto Zucco, Dans la Solitude du Champs de Coton, and Quai Ouest, serve to subvert the traditional formulations of meaning and perception through fragmented narrative frames and mental systems… Makach further complicates the web of intertextuality through her weaving together different artistic mediums as well. Through various simulational dimensions typical of hyperrealism the performance suggests that preconceived realities, identities, and subjectivities are no more than cultural constructs duplicated by the medium of theatre and its unlimited representational strategies. The process of an infinite remediation throws the audience into the abyss of representation and mise en abyme, or what Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin describe as the “representation of one medium in another”38. Hierarchies between original and copy, unmediated presence and representation, live and mediatised performance are all deconstructed.
32By her peculiar use of paratactic syntax that juxtaposes dissimilar fragments and different aesthetic forms, Makach aims not only at challenging traditional Moroccan modes of representation, but perception too by inviting audiences to construct their own meaning of what is happening around them rather than on-stage. In this vein, Erika Fischer-Lichte reminds us that the “incorporation of reproduction technology appears to be just one more device with which to challenge spectators’ modes and habits of perception… But such a change in perception does not reduce the quality of liveness, let alone annul it39. Thus, live and mediatised paradigms converge, blurring the boundaries between the performance space and time, only to disappear afterwards in the spectators’ memories like self-erasing traces (insofar as “la trace n’arrive qu’à s’effacer”). Makach’s persistence on unsettling the traditional hierarchical representation inherent in Moroccan theatre is clearly apparent in her intrusion of the filmic representation, which creates fluctuating identities in a rather volatile time and space. The performative tear/rupture intentionally choreographed at the closing of the performance is an instance of praxis. Live and mediatised performances interact revealing an excess of violence typical to any tearing apart as an act of bursting open of a closed structure. Such moment is far from being a revelatory cathartic moment insofar as the mediatised characters are, by the force of rupture, thrown into being onstage as flesh and blood actors repeating the same text : who will gain Africa ?
Performance Studies between East and West
33In the present article I have attempted to offer some elements of reflection upon middle-grounds of performativity beyond postcolonial hybridity, where binary relationships between East and West dissolve and become more and more interwoven. Ultimately, the search for thematic and conceptual crossovers of different performance practices remains an open enterprise. It remains still a great challenge for most subaltern scholars to critique postcolonial hybridity and reflect upon the interweaving prospects. For more than ten years my concern with theatrical hybridity was central to the study of the various forms the subalterns perform back while repeating Master models, yet in a different way or rather a different sameness of “almost the same, but not quite” (Bhabha 1994 : 86). But do we have to consider hybridity as the ultimate and inexorable condition of all postcolonial subjectivities ? Or shall we think of it as a road map leading to alternative exchanges ? These postcolonial subjectivities are just as diverse, and their histories just as varied, as the peoples who were colonized. Today, there is an urgent need to perform anew the postcolonial stance ; hybridization remains a first step.
34It goes without saying that the field of theatre studies is rapidly being re-shaped by the performative turn, abetted by the rise of multiculturalism, inbetweeness, and interdisciplinarity of performance studies. One can trace back the age-old logocentric privileging of drama over performance and text over context… to Aristotle’s notion of spectacle that “has, indeed, an emotional attraction of its own, but of all the parts, it is the least artistic, and connected least with the art of poetry.”40 Inherent in Aristotle’s assertion is the dependency of spectacle on dramatic poetry. Such dependency has informed theatre studies ever since Aristotle. Diana Taylor invites us to renew our perspectives on theatre : “In order to appreciate carnival… or indigenous performance… or women’s use of spectacle for political organizing… we had to abandon traditional notions of theatre and culture, we had to replace the word theater with performance, a term that allowed us not only to include all sorts of spectacles that ‘theater’ leaves out but to look at theater itself from a more critical perspective.”41 Admittedly, traditional theatre studies entered into an era of self-questioning regarding the specificity of its proper methods and its autonomy as a discipline within the humanities. Expansive currents of self-interrogations merged together with others from various disciplines and created the context of uncertainty in which many theatre scholars presently practice their research. The metaphor of the labyrinthine library of Babel has served over time for referring both to the complex morphology of performance cultures and to the complexity of reading texts that are ephemeral, obscure, hermetic, and diffuse. It is once again the return of the labyrinthine trope that accounts for the current performative turn. Thus, textual modes of understanding theatrical performance have been rephrased in a radical way.
Notes de bas de page
1 For more information about the visibility of Arab Theatre in the international scene, see Khalid Amine, Hazem Azmy and Marvin Carlson “IFTR’s Arabic Theatre Working Group”, Theatre Research International (Cambridge University Press, Volume 35, Number 3, October 2010) 263-275.
2 Abdelkebir Khatibi, Maghreb pluriel, (Paris : Denoel, 1983) 48.
3 Critique is a strategy of reading backwards by relating given theoretical systems to their historical genesis and cultural construction. Critique, thus, does more than criticism, for it engages in the task of deconstructing the various discourses that construct a text, and more importantly, “the reading must always aim at a certain relationship, unperceived by the writer, between what he commands and what he does not command of the patterns of the language that he uses.” Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, Barbara Johnson (trans.) (Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 1981), xv. Also, Barbara Johnson, in her introduction to Derrida’s Dissemination, had this to say : “A critique of any theoretical system is not an examination of its flows or imperfections. It is not a set of criticisms designed to make the system better. It is an analysis that focuses on the grounds of that system’s possibility. The critique reads backwards from what seems natural, obvious, self-evident, or universal, in order to show that these things have their history, their reasons for being the way they are, their effects on what follows from them, and that the starting point is not a natural given but a cultural construct, usually blind to itself. (D xv).
4 Abdelkebir Khatibi, Maghreb Pluriel, 50.
5 Mary Ellen Wolf, “Rethinking the Radical West : Khatibi and Deconstruction, L’Esprit Créateur (Summer 1994, Vol xxxiv, n° 2) 65. In the closing statements of The Rhetoric of Empire, David Spurr pays a belated tribute to Khatibi’s deconstruction of the colonial discourse : “The Moroccan writer Abdelkbir Khatibi observes that the Third World has not brought about a corresponding deconstruction of thought which would be, apart from a simple reversal of colonial power, the “affirmation of a difference”, an openness to plurality and a free subversion of the powers that inhere in discourse (1983 : 47).” David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire : Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing and Imperial Administration, (Durham : Duke University Press, 1993), 200.
6 Karl Marx, “The Future Results of British Rule in India”, New-York Daily Tribune, August 8, 1853 ; reprinted in the New-York Semi-Weekly Tribune, No 856, August 9, 1853. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1853/07/22.htm [last accessed : 04.12.2011].
7 Abdelkebir Khatibi, “The Decolonization of Arab Sociology”, 12. Khatibi defines double critique in the following terms : “So, I call for a double critique : which is centered on us as it is centered on the West and which should take place between us and them. Its aim is to deconstruct both the concept of unity and entirety that we are burdened with. Double critique aims at a demolition of divinity and ideology which are based on origin and absolute unity… I believe that this is the only effective way which can support our strategy. The countries which are subjugated by the West, whatever the subjugation is, can know the foundation of Western domination and ask a very critical question away from the delusive assumptions of origin and unity.” [my own translation] Abdelkbir Khatibi, Double Critique (Rabat, Oukad Publications, 1990), 12.
8 Our modernity is the result of our coming to terms with colonial ambivalence between violent rule and the utopia of modernity, on the one hand, and re-thinking our great narratives such as pan Islamism or pan Arabism... North Africa has been a transit region of the cross-over between colonialism and modernity. For instance, post-war European concepts for mass housing developments came about in colonial cities like Casablanca in Morocco, then transplanted later to the outskirts of Paris, London, and Berlin… Casablanca, in particular, was a test case for the “city of tomorrow”.
9 Shmuel Moreh and Philip Sadgrove, Jewish Contributions to Nineteenth-Century Arabic Theatre (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1996), 16.
10 “Avant de quitter la poésie arabe, je dois mentionner une curiosité littéraire ; c’est un drame arabe en vers, précédé de l’exposé de la situation, de la liste des personnages, enfin un drame en règle, au moyen duquel l’auteur, Mr Daninos, à Alger, paraît vouloir essayer de donner aux Arabes le goût du spectacle et de la poésie dramatique”. Moreh and Sadgrove, Jewish Contributions to Nineteenth-Century Arabic Theatre, 10-11.
11 Daninos’ play was also mentioned in 1850 in the annual review of literature in the Zeitschaift der Deutschen morgenlan-diichen Gesellschaft :
The newest of the newest in the grove of the Arabic muses is at present a play in verse by Mr Daninos, interpreter at the Civil Court of Justice in Algiers, entitled ‘The Tranquilities of Mind of those filled with Desire and the Pain of Lovers,” of course an Afro-European hybrid. You could hardly call it a Semitic half-breed. In any case it is only slightly related to Bottcher’s Aeltesten Bühnendichtungen [“Oldest Dramatic Poems”]. (Moreh and Sadgrove, Jewish Contributions to Nineteenth-Century Arabic Theatre, 11).
12 Moreh and Sadgrove, Jewish Contributions to Nineteenth-Century Arabic Theatre, 22.
13 M. M. Badaoui, Early Arabic Drama, 7. Meanwhile, Farouk Abdelwahab declares : “In 1848 a young man from Beirut by the name of Marun al-Naqqash brought the French (and to some extent also the Italian) theater closer to home by writing and producing the first Arabic play on a European model, al-Bakhil” (Modern Egyptian Drama : An Anthology, Chicago & Minneapolis : 1974 : 18). Mahmoud Manzalaoui also admits that “the date 1847 marks the occasion when Marun al-Naqqash (1817-55) and male members of his family put a performance in his own house” (in Arabic Writing Today : Drama, [Cairo, American Research Center in Egypt, 1977], 18). Mohammed Al-Khozai states that “the art of the theater, or rather dramatic literature as it is conceived today, had been long absent, until, in 1847, the first Arab dramatist made an innovative attempt at writing and producing a play based on a European model” (The Development of Early Arabic Drama 1847-1900, 1). Besides these established scholars from the Arab World who confirm that Al-Anaqqash’s play is the first dramatic piece in Arabic, there are other Arab intellectuals who follow the general consensus about this misleading departure.
14 Marun Al-Naqqash, quoted by Mohammed Al-Khozai, The Development of Early Arabic Drama 1847-1900 (London and New York : Longman, 1984), 23.
15 Al-halqa is a public performance in the form of a circle in a public space (be it a marketplace, Medina Gate, or a newly devised downtown square). It is a space of popular culture that is open to people from all different paths of life. Al-halqa hovers between high culture and low mass culture, sacred and profane literacy and orality. Its repertoire combines fantastic, mythical, and historical narratives from Thousand and One Nights and Sirat Bani Hilal, as well as stories from the holy Quran and the Sunna of the prophet Mohammed along with local, witty narrative and performative forms. L-bsat is another Moroccan performance tradition. It means “a large plain”, “carpet”, or “amusement”.” In the form of a social satire, L-bsat enacts a neurosis whose narrative symptoms are profoundly metaphorical. Its themes are politically sensitive and aim at touching the hierarchical power structure. Corruption and power abuse are major themes of L-bsat that are ironically performed inside houses of al-makhzen (Officials’ homes).
16 Jacob Landou, Studies in the Arab Theatre and Cinema (Philadelphia : 1957), 108.
17 Abdelkbir Khatibi, Double Critique, Rabat : Oukad, 1990 : 143. My own deployment of Khatibi‘s double Critique aims at foregrounding what Khatibi has termed « the affirmation of a difference ». The first implication of such critique is the deconstitution of Western Logocentrism as manifested in the history of dramatic art. As to the second implication, it is affirmation itself as proposed by Khatibi. In other words, the Arabs have their own performance cultures, yet different from the Western traditions of theater making.
18 Lila Abou-Lughod, “The Object of Soap Opera : Egyptian Television and the Cultural Politics of Modernity”, in World Apart : Modernity Through the Prism of the Local, ed. Daniel Miller (London and NY : Routledge, 1995), 191.
19 Rustom Bharucha, Theatre And The World : Essays on Performance and Politics of Culture (New Delhi : Manohar, 1992), 2.
20 Gayatri C. Spivak, interview with Donna Landry and Gerald Maclean, in Selected Works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, eds. D. Landry and G. Maclean (London : Routledge, 1996), 292.
21 Frantz Fanon, in Alan Read, ed., The Fact of Blackness : Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation (London : Bay Press, 1996), 116.
22 Homi Bhabha, “Remembering Fanon,” in the Foreword to Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (London : Pluto Press, 1986), xv.
23 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (Hammondsworth : Penguin, 1967), 193.
24 John Mair, Desert Songs : Western Images of Morocco and Moroccan Images of the West (Albany : State University of New York Press, 1996), 178.
25 Paul Bowles, Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue (New York : Ecco Press, 1984), viii.
26 « Double Exile » here refers to the situation of estrangement related to Paul Bowles as an American writer who lived for about 50 years in Tangier, a voluntary exile which had contributed a great deal to his ambiguous compromises.
27 Lenin Ramly describes the first Arabic reception of Western Theatre : “Discussing the French Expedition to Egypt of which he was a witness, Egyptian Chronicler Abdel-Rahman al-Jabarti wrote that the French had constructed at al- Azbakiyya quarter special buildings where men and women would gather to engage in unrestricted entertainment and acts of licentiousness. It was theatre that he was describing. As we get to know later, Egyptian natives would go out of their way to steal a look at what took place inside” (Lenin El-Ramly, “Comedy in the East, or the Art of Cunning : A Testimony on a Personal Experience,” tr. Hazem Azmy, 1).
28 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York : Alfred A. Knoff, 1994), 15.
29 Ian Chambers, Migrancy, Culture, Identity (London and New York : Routledge, 1994), 74.
30 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimre : The John Hopkins University Press, 1976), 167.
31 Jacques Derrida, Position, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1981), 61.
32 Abdelkrim Berrchid, [Otayl wal-Khayl wal-ba-rud] (Othello, Horses and Gunpowder), Casablanca : At-taqafa Al-Jadida, 1975. The play was first performed in 1975-6 by the amateur theatrical company (At-ta’sis al-masrahiya’] of Casablanca and directed by Ibrahim Ouarda.
33 Bouhou : Who am I ? I am the one who put on the garments of a fool. I am the one who took people’s complains to your majesty, then I came disguised as a clown loaded by the sufferings of the poor ones, the hunger of the humgry ones. I came to you with things that happen in your absent presence (Otayl wal-Khayl wal-ba-rud, 31).
34 Abdelkrim Berrchid, imruu al-Qays fi-Bariz (Imruu Al-Qais in Paris), Rabat, Editions Stouki, 1982. All references are from our English translation.
35 Zahra Makach is a Moroccan playwright, director and theatre scholar who supports cultural diversity and strives to give voice to Amazigh Women artists.
36 According to Freda Chapple and Chiel Kattenbelt, intermediality “is about changes in theatre practice and thus about changing perceptions of performance, which become visible through the process of staging. We locate intermediality at a meeting point in-between the performers, the observers, and the confluence of media involved in a performance at a particular moment of time. The intermedial inhabits a space in-between the different realities that the performance creates and thus it becomes, at the minimum, a tripartite phenomenon.” Freda Chapple & Chiel Kattenbelt (eds.), Intermediality in Theatre and Performance (Amsterdam, Editions Rodopi B. V., 2006) 12.
37 Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, tr. Karen Jurs-Munby (London : Routledge, 2006) 93.
38 J.D. Bolter and R. Grusin, Remediation : understanding New Media, 3rd ed. (Cambridge, MIT Press, 2000) 45.
39 Erika Fischer-Lichte, “Quo Vadis – Theatre Studies at the Crossroads”, Modern Drama, V. 44 (Spring), 2001, 60.
40 Aristotle, The Poetics, 29.
41 Diana Taylor and Juan Villegas, eds., Negotiating Performance : Gender, Sexuality, and Theatricality in Latin America (Durham & London : Duke University Press, 1994), 11.
Auteur
Faculté Abdelmalek Essaadi, Maroc
Président du Centre international
Des Arts du spectacle (ISCP)
Est professeur d’enseignement supérieur à la faculté des lettres et des sciences humaines Abdelmalk Essadi (Tétouan, Maroc). Il est président du centre international des éarts du spectacle (Tanger) et membre du bureau exécutif de la fédération internationale de la recherche théâtrale (2011-2013). Parmi ses ouvrages : Fields of Silence in Moroccan Theatre (Union des écrivains marocains, 2004), The Theatres of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia (Palgrave, 2012).
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Licence OpenEdition Books. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
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