Arab Nights - Tania's musings

Only five weeks now until Arab Nights opens at the Soho in London - and so this week I'm delighted to share Lebanese Live Artist Tania El Khoury's thoughts and musings on her contribution to the production. And for those of you especially interested in 1001 Nights her piece - both powerful and very funny - also has echoes of a great tale within the ancient Nights canon called 'Abu Kassim's Slipper'. It seems the precedent of shoes as powerful objects of provocation is even older than we realised...

Tania El Khoury in Jarideh

The multi-functional shoes

I stared at the newspaper's photo of the shoes that Asma El Assad purchased from Louboutin. This must a joke. Even for a play, I wouldn't write that the character of a brutal dictator’s wife buys a designer pair of shoes with nails coming out of them. Does she use them to poke the eyes of political prisoners? Surely she doesn't wear them to a dinner party thrown by queen Rania or any other freakishly smiling royal.

Being a dictator’s wife who is busy buying shoes while the people are dying is beyond a cliché. Shouldn't a modern and educated westernised first lady find herself a more unique passe-temps? Imelda Marcos, the wife of the former Philippino president did it before her. She left behind over 1000 pair of shoes when she fled the country.

Shoes in the Arab world played a part in politics long before the Assads' shopping basket was leaked to the media. They serve a specific task, to be thrown at the faces of dictators, war criminals, state media representatives and any other enemy of the people. If the world was a better place, these revolutionary shoes will be worth more than the entire collection of Louboutin.

Dictators in the Arab world also use shoes as a political tool. Last year, Nazeeha a friend from Bahrain was arrested for reporting on-line that she had witnessed the killing of a civilian by the police. She was tortured by having one of her shoes shoved down her throat. This story didn't make it to Vogue but Asma El Assad did.

Tania El Khoury | Wednesday October 17th 2012

Arab Nights - Raja's week

So we open our latest production - Arab Nights - six weeks today at the Soho Theatre in London (crikey - that's soon!) - and to celebrate the six diverse and wonderful voices that make up the play they are each going to write a little something for the Metta blog. First - the wonderful novelist and all round lovely human being that is our Palestinian writer Raja Shehadeh...

Raja Shehadeh (photograph Colin McPherson)

Just back to Palestine after a seven week absence in the UK promoting my new book, Occupation Diaries. Slight feeling of let down after the exciting time going from one literary festival to another. As expected found the garden in a dismal state, with only the shrubs barely surviving the heat and dryness of a hot Palestinian summer.

But before plunging into work on the garden, at my law office and on my various writing projects, had to take my wife to Makassed Hospital, a Palestinian hospital in East Jerusalem, to check on her arm which was broken during a hiking trip to Skye last July. Heard from the Orthopedic Doctor about the difficulties the hospital faces because of the closure of Jerusalem. 

Fortunately I don’t need to go often to Jerusalem. But most of the hundreds of the hospital’s employees, doctors, trainees and patients come from the Palestinian areas around Jerusalem and must get a permit from the Israeli military to get to work, to train or get medical treatment at this specialized, training hospital which has better facilities than any in the rest of the West Bank. They have to endure the daily ordeal of crossing the checkpoints around the eastern, mainly Arab part of the city. I cannot imagine how they endure this ordeal twice every day of their working week. In Arab Nights I wrote how Jerusalem now has not one but two walls. Within the older Ottoman-built wall today (Friday October 5th) there were confrontations between extremist religious Jews and Palestinians inthe precinct of the Al Aqsa Mosque.

Every day no less than 20,000 Palestinians cross one of the gates in the concrete wall newly constructed by the Israeli government around the expanded area of Jerusalem. They do so in silence, a heavy silence at that. Except, that is, for the orders they hear from the Israeli soldiers whom they do not see, just as though they were invisible Djinnis.

It was only natural then that when Metta Theatre proposed that I participate in writing a play that uses the style of Arabian Nights I found this the perfect style for presenting the surrealistic reality under which we live in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

We in Palestine are part of the rest of the Arab region. The revolutions taking place around us give us hope. It is this hope makes it possible to endure what appears for the time being to be a desperate situation, here. As the Palestinian character in Arab Nights endures his ordeal before the wall he remembers the scaling by Palestinians and Syrians of another border, a few months earlier, during the Arab Spring, when they crossed the Syrian- Israeli border daring to traverse what was thought to be a minefield.

It sounds like magic and in some ways it was. And yet it happened. One episode in the play leads to another, just like in our turbulent life in this unstable region. From despair to hope, to dreams, to frustration just like the life here that I returned to after my few weeks in the UK.

Raja Shehadeh | Friday October 5th 2012

Metta likes connection...

Arab Nights

The more observant among you may have noticed that we haven't blogged for a while...or in fact at all this year! Ooops. We shall use the at least partially valid excuse that we've been quite busy having a baby. But as well as having a baby we have also been busy (perhaps too busy) making some theatre. Our two major projects this year are a new opera about Locked In Syndrome (a condition where the body is cut off from the brain leaving the patient fully aware and in tact cognitively but physically entirely paralysed) called Flicker, and a collection of 6 short plays responding to the events of the Arab uprisings, within the framework of the Arabian Nights, called (somewhat unimaginatively perhaps) Arab Nights.

On the face of it the two projects couldn't be more different, but this week I have been struck by how they speak to each-other in terms of connection. The opera - for which I am writing the libretto - is being based on the verbatim transcripts of interviews with patients and staff at the Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability and after months of meetings with the staff, last week Jon Nicholls (the composer) and I finally met with some of the patients. Some of them are completely Locked In (and can only blink their eyes to communicate - as in the book and film 'The Diving Bell and The Butterfly') and others partially locked in with some degree of movement in their hands - such that they are able to use assistive communication aides, most commonly a light-writer which allows them to type sentences that are sometimes then translated into speech by the same computer. But as you can imagine this is an incredibly long and tiring process for them, and it can take up to half an hour for them to communicate one sentence. But perhaps the most striking thing about these interviews, aside from the patients' somewhat surprising optimism about their condition and situation, is how hard they were prepared to work to make a connection and communicate something to us. And relatedly how a large part of this act of connection and communication is (although helped a lot by the technology) actually still hugely non-verbal and conveyed through their eyes and through touch.

Meanwhile I have been making connections - again with the help of technology, albeit the simpler form of email - with the writers of Arab Nights who come from Egypt Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine & Syria and who mostly still reside in these countries. It's an amazing thing to have forged relationships with these writers - some of whom I may well never actually meet in the flesh, or 'in the real' as one of the writers so poetically put it. And yet through email, Facebook, Twitter we share stories, pictures of our children, the minutiae that make up a life. As well as transcending borders, and languages, to create these plays together it feels like we're also making very human connections that I hope will continue long after the production itself is over.

And between the meetings and the emails and the connecting with people on the other side of the world and with people locked inside their own private worlds we also fumble towards the connections you try to make with a tiny person - who now four and a half months old is desperate to make his own connection to the world and everyone in it.

Metta likes...Belarus Free Theatre

Through our dear friend, and patron of Metta, Laura Wade we've recently been introduced to the Belarus Free Theatre, or BFT. Having been on some of their marches/protests it was really lovely to put names to faces. And having now got to know them quite well it's lovely to put personalities to the names. The work that the BFT does is astonishing on so many levels - the art they make is beautiful and powerful, the workshops they lead inspiring and totally transformative for the participants, and everything they do is some form of protest against Lukashenko's regime - the last dictatorship in Europe. On top of this they are forced - as a theatre company in exile from their own country - to work from Britain on the tiniest of shoe-string budgets. Last year they had a smash hit in Edinburgh with their Fringe First award-winning show A Reply to Kathy Acker which will run at the Young Vic for a month in June next year, and before that they're doing an adaptation in Belorussian of King Lear at the Globe for their Globe to Globe Festival.

Lessons from Metta

After an awesome couple of years it's time for me to step down as Executive Producer for Metta. Since I started working with Metta, we've staged 111 performances of 8 shows in 17 different venues. It's impossible to do that much theatre without learning a thing or two, so I thought I'd use my last blog for the company to note down a few of the key lessons here.