Acceptance Speech by Hanane Hajj Ali of Lebanon
Upon Receiving the LPTW 2020 Gilder/Coigney International Theatre Award, February 16, 2021
My journey with this award is a series of pleasant surprises. It started with being nominated by Roberta Levitow, a member of the League of Professional Theatre Women. This nomination led me to discover the list of the nominees for this round as well as the winners of the three previous editions, who are a wonderful group of professional female Theatre practitioners from different regions of the world. The third surprise was that the shortlist included two nominees from the Arab world whom I admire for their brilliant work: Iman Aoun from Palestine and Maya Zbib from Lebanon. The fourth surprise was that I won! So, thank you to the League of Professional Theatre Women for this great honor.
There are three interlinked events that have led me to this moment: It started in 2017 with my participation in the Beirut-based Zoukak Theatre company’s program, FOCUS LIBAN, that supported local Lebanese Theatre productions by giving them international visibility. I was then invited to participate in the Arab Arts Focus, a platform for Arab Theatre at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, to present my latest play “Jogging”, that won awards at both events and gained considerable attention. Finally, representatives of the Sundance Institute’s Theatre program saw my play at Edinburgh and asked me to take part in their US-MENA Theatre Lab program the following year. Sadly, these opportunities did not last forever: The Sundance Theatre program’s MENA Initiative was later halted for institutional reasons, The Zoukak platform came to a stop due to the political and economic collapse in Lebanon, and Edinburgh’s Arab Arts Focus initiative has not been repeated since 2017 as it faced overwhelming logistical problems with more than half of the Arab artists and technicians invited by the Edinburgh Festival being denied travel visas.
This all might seem unimportant in comparison to the near total paralysis that has afflicted the performing arts because of Covid-19, but I consider it an integral part of what we need to think about regarding the future. We must not close our eyes to the problems we have faced in our profession and continue to face because of repeatedly curtailed cultural rights especially freedoms of expression and of travel. These two chronic problems have intensified in many countries due to increasing political decisions that too often claim to curb terrorism and maintain security.
Too many parts of the world had already turned into giant prisons way before the spread of Covid-19. Who could have imagined back in 1989 that it would be possible today to accept a separation wall in Palestine that is 712 kilometers in length and 8 meters in height, trapping inside thousands of people from the West Bank and Jerusalem, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs? We celebrated the fall of the Berlin Wall with such vigor so why are some people celebrating the building of other walls? Why do we accept such walls as a given in the 21st century? Politicians who talk about peace or leaders who boast about democracy and human rights will not prevent such crimes against humanity. Nothing breaks this siege of shame as successfully as Art that is creative, bold and that genuinely believes in the dignity of human beings and their right to a decent life.
After receiving the prestigious 2020 Design of the Year Award for their “Teeter-Totter” wall, architects Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello said “We don’t need to build walls, we need to build bridges…Walls don’t stop people from entering our Capitol, Walls don’t stop viruses from moving.” Their installation consisted of three bright pink seesaws that were slotted into gaps in the steel boundary wall at the US border and bridged people across El Paso in Texas and Ciudad Juárez in Mexico. This 20-minute-long event that occurred on the 28th of July 2019 was, to me, a true “live Art performance”, and as stated by Razia Iqbal – the chair of the judging committee – it “provided more than ‘a literal fulcrum’ between the countries, it was about the possibility of things.”
Art dismantles the impossible and releases the possible. Art does not change the world but changes our perception of the world. Art, and in particular Theatre, is a journey to the land of questions. Is Theatre threatened? Yes…Performing Arts? Certainly… But, so is the factory worker, the artisan, the office worker, the driver, the engineer, the shoe polisher and millions of the unemployed whose numbers were increasing before Covid-19, let alone now.
My Theatre is about the marginalized, downtrodden and forgotten, the kidnapped and the forcibly disappeared during periods of war and peace. It is about collective memory and distorted history. Through my work, I try to talk about what is kept silent and reveal what is hidden, to break the taboos of sex, religion and politics, knowing that we have to face the corruption, hypocrisy and tyranny that is sweeping the world.
Theatre action is not just about putting on a performance. It can be a multi-faceted activity that encompasses aid as well as organizational and protest activities according to what is urgently needed. An activity shaped by the back-and-forth movement that takes place across the invisible boundary between the space in which the action takes place, and between the practice of that activity and its realization. In this sense, making Theatre becomes part of building a city, just as shaping a city becomes part of its Theatre.
I have long dreamt of a 360-degree Theatre, a seemingly utopian ideal that I believe can be realized. We often experienced the failure of utopias. However, some of us did live their success for a while during the revolutions in Egypt, Tunisia, Palestine, Syria, Sudan and lately, the October revolution in Lebanon. Multiple sprawling agoras in which debates bubble, questions reproduce, and artistic interventions flourished in public spaces helped Theatre embrace the entire city.
Theatre has been around for 2,500 years and it has remained a platform for dialogue, resistance, antagonism and openness. Theatre did not die and it cannot disappear as an art form. It persists because it answers our human need – as living and social beings – to know one’s humanity and satisfy the thirst for dialogue and the hunger for dignity. Theatre cannot die because It seeps into the pores of besieged cities in new shapes and forms. Sometimes it remains latent only to explode again like water that can’t be trapped by stone. It erupts like justice, like freedom.
In the name of freedom and in the name of Theatre, I am remembering Virginia Woolf’s celebration of the first female playwright in England in the seventeenth century: “All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.”
Allow me then to, in my turn, spread flowers on the tombs of two pioneers of international and local Theatre who left a mark on my memory and career:
The first is the legendary and inspirational US artist Ellen Stewart,-nicknamed La MaMa, whom I was fortunate to meet when she visited us at the historical Beirut Theatre in the nineties after the civil war had ended. The second is Reda Khoury, the pioneering Beiruti actress who left an indelible stamp on Lebanese Theatre. She helped change the image of actresses who were looked at as “women of ill repute”. Through her talent, the value of her work and her belief in the power of Theatre, she gave us the courage to get on stage.
And last but not least, allow me to throw roses onto the laps of my fellow contemporary female Theatre-makers who believe in the role of Theatre in understanding our humanity and in reviving the agora of just citizenship. Greetings to all my fellow Theatre-makers in Lebanon who, starting with the pioneers Renee Deek and Nidal Achkar in the 1960s, have all carried and are still carrying the responsibility for the development and the continuity of Lebanese Theatre today, during one of the most dangerous historical stages that Lebanon has ever had to go through, at a time when the policies of gender, ethnic, racial and sexual discrimination continue to marginalize and oppress many, especially women. The list of their names, believe me, is very long.
This award does justice to the creative women and acknowledges their craft. Thank you all for your inspiring courage and your contagious perseverance.