711956

research-article2017
CTP0010.1177/2057047317711956Communication and the PublicZiter

Original Research Article

Communication and the Public
2017, Vol. 2(2) 177­–190
The Syria Trojan Women: Rethinking © The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/2057047317711956
https://doi.org/10.1177/2057047317711956
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Edward Blaise Ziter

New York University, USA

Abstract
Therapeutic theater projects with Syrian refugees in Jordan and Lebanon work at the intersection of the public and the
private, facilitating individual healings while also promoting new group identities. The playing space becomes an open
discursive field in which varied understandings of the self become platforms for new understandings of the nation. In the
process, these artists/refugees trouble the boundaries between the private and the public, potentially creating a new
public sphere that is not only revolutionary in its critique of entrenched political power but in its reformulation of the
idea of the public itself. This article examines one such project, The Syria Trojan Woman, directed by Omar Abu Saada.
The article places this work in the context of Abu Saada’s work in applied theater in Syria prior to the uprising and
within the larger context of Syrian political theater. Applied theater, an umbrella term designating performance valued
as efficacious as well as aesthetic, has had a brief and difficult history in Syria because of its capacity to undermine the
regulation of speech. In the case of The Syria Trojan Woman, this speech has traveled beyond the countries hosting
refugees through the efforts of non-governmental organizations that bring additional fundraising and consciousness-
raising objectives to the endeavor. Through international tours and the use of new media, local performances become
international phenomenon, further complicating the idea of a revolutionary public sphere.

Keywords
Public sphere, refugees, Syria, theater, therapy, Trojan women

In the early days of the Syrian Uprising, theater prac-
titioners were prominent in organizing the Damascus
opposition to an escalating government crackdown.
As the Uprising gathered steamed, theater practition-
ers were prominent in the Creative Resistance
Movement filling the Arab Mediascape with opposi-
tional plays, puppet shows, and video blogs. Now, in
the midst of civil war, theater practitioners are work-
ing with the victims of government violence in
devised pieces that give aesthetic shape to traumatic
experience. Some of these works juxtapose diverse
wartime experiences and responses to trauma, inter-
spersing the verbatim with the fictional. Such work
aims to restore volition. Refugees become artists,
demonstrating an ability to make use of their past
experience, at the same time that the combination of
voices demonstrates different responses to war. The
playing space becomes an open discursive field in
which varied understandings of the self emerge as
platforms for new understandings of the nation. In
the process, these artists/refugees trouble the
Corresponding author:
Edward Blaise Ziter, Department of Drama, New York
University, 721 Broadway, 3rd Floor, New York, NY 10003, USA.
Email: ted.ziter@gmail.com
178 Communication and the Public 2(2)
boundaries between the private and the public,
potentially creating a new public sphere that is not
only revolutionary in its critique of entrenched polit-
ical power but in its reformulation of the idea of the
public itself.
Therapeutic theater and the
public sphere
These therapeutic theater projects extend work that
was being done in the years prior to 2011, and builds
on a long tradition of Syrian political theater. Applied
theater, an umbrella term designating performance
valued as efficacious as well as aesthetic, has had a
brief and difficult history in Syria. As an art form
committed to social and personal analysis in public
forums, it has run afoul of state efforts to police the
public sphere. Omar Abu Saada was prominent in
Syria’s Applied Theater movement before the
Uprising and is now creating therapeutic produc-
tions with Syrian refugees. By examining his work,
and specifically his 2013 production, The Syria
Trojan Women, which was performed by Syrian
female refugees in Jordan, I will demonstrate thera-
peutic theater’s potential to help in the healing of
individual and national identities. In the chaos of
war, practitioners like Abu Saada have claimed
greater freedom than before to create work that pur-
sues free and open self-representation. Going for-
ward, Syria’s tradition of theater activism could play
an important role in imagining a future after conflict,
a necessary first step in Syria’s reconstitution.
Before I brand myself a Pollyanna, let me
acknowledge the obvious fact that theater practition-
ers are not going to change events on the ground nor
hasten the resolution of a conflict that seems likely
to burn on for years. For that matter, a handful of
theater practitioners cannot redress the trauma expe-
rienced by 11 million displaced Syrians. However, I
do take it as a point of faith that building the capacity
of individuals and groups to think differently is
essential to the positional struggle (to evoke
Gramsci) that makes change possible—far-off
though it may be. Elsewhere, I have argued that over
decades, theater in Syria has engaged and contested
the tropes central to Baath party narratives, and that
these same oppositional strategies played out in the
revolutionary mediascape during the Uprising
(2015). Here, I will argue for the significance of
theater-therapy projects for modeling a self-healing
grounded in memory and discussion. Participants
and audiences enact and witness new ways of under-
standing self and nation, and aesthetic excellence
gives these exercises added weight in the social
imaginary. The performance of alternate forms of
nationhood continues even during wartime, and The
Syria Trojan Women should be viewed as a new and
important chapter in an ongoing struggle.
The Syria Trojan Women implicitly critiques the
state’s unfettered violence against its citizenry; in its
format, the work more broadly questions the forma-
tion and regulation of the public sphere. It asks both
who gets to speak to the common good and what
constitutes the “common” in the common good. It
does so by forcing its audience to rethink the bound-
aries of the public, a preliminary step—I would like
to propose—in theorizing a revolutionary public
sphere. Is a testimonial theater piece an act of indi-
vidual healing or political opposition? Put another
way, when do private concerns become questions of
public good? The question points to unresolved ten-
sions in Habermas’ generative discussion of the
bourgeois public sphere. Habermas assumes a clear
delineation between public and private when he
asserts that a bourgeois public sphere came into
existence when London coffee houses, French
salons, and German table societies organized ongo-
ing discussions between (ostensible) equals.
Participants claimed the “domain of common con-
cern” that had previously been the preserve of the
church or state (Habermas, 1989, p. 36).
However, as Nancy Fraser and others have
pointed out, the boundaries of such a domain are
anything but self-evident. Fraser (1990) explains
that public and private are “cultural classifications”
and “rhetorical labels” that are frequently deployed
in political discourse to “delegitimize some interests,
views, and topics, and valorize others.”(p. 73). The
time has come, Fraser (1990) suggests, to theorize a
post-bourgeois model of the public sphere that
includes issues that a bourgeois masculinist ideology
labels private (p. 77). Testimonial theater then
emerges as a valuable site in which to imagine a
truly revolutionary public sphere, an arena in which
Ziter 179
one might demand political change and reimagine
the boundaries between the political and personal.
To take The Syria Trojan Women as example, can the
personal reflections of female refugees—their obser-
vations on a work of ancient literature, recollections
of cherished girlhood experiences, and descriptions
of violence and forced migration—become the
means of redefining the common good?
The potential for reimagining social structure is
implicit in therapeutic theater, which helps partici-
pants—both actors and audience—to process past
trauma through acts of creation and sharing. This
sharing distinguishes therapeutic theater from tra-
ditional drama therapy. Drama therapy is a private
activity. As Landy and Montgomery (2012)
explain, in drama therapy, “the clients within the
therapeutic process are both the performers and
spectators” (p. 196). By contrast, in therapeutic
theater, actors take control of painful memories by
transforming these memories into raw material for
art. As art, it exists to be shared. The audience for
therapeutic theater includes family, friends, and
any stranger who has been touched by (or is at least
interested in) the originating trauma and its theatri-
cal processing. Since the goal is to fashion trauma
into art, the therapeutic process is only complete
after a run of public performances. Making the pri-
vate public is the final step in an artistic/therapeu-
tic process. It is also a political act.
At its most basic, all forms of drama therapy rely
on the mind’s tendency to use metaphor to process
traumatic experience. In the same way that Freud
argued that the mind converts painful experience
into manageable tropes, drama therapy provides par-
ticipants with the tools to construct images and sto-
ries through which participants can access and
manage past trauma. In this sense, drama therapy
can be described as displacement in reverse, whereby
images retrieve rather than sublimate the past.
Through projective identification and dramatic dis-
tancing, drama therapy participants create new sto-
ries that incorporate past experience, inoculating the
artist/patient against the corrosive effects of trauma.
Drama therapy is a project of creative remembering,
a remembering that psychoanalysis posits is at the
heart of healing. In drama therapy, a therapist (often
called the facilitator or leader) helps one or more
clients create healing stories in a private setting.
Therapeutic theater extends this work outwards in a
public performance for a community that shares this
trauma at some level but did not participate in the
rehearsal process.
Therapeutic theater reveals the full significance
of the oft-cited feminist slogan, “the personal is
political.” As early as 1969, Carol Hanisch argued
that women’s consciousness-raising groups should
be viewed as political action rather than therapy.
According to Hanisch (1970), only a full venting of
one’s personal problems allows for the recognition
that “we need to change the objective conditions, not
adjust to them” (p. 76). I would like to expand on
the notion that the personal is political and propose
that the models of psycho-sexual development in the
writings of Freud and Lacan are important tools for
understanding processes by which nations are imag-
ined and boundaries of belonging are policed.1 I am
not the first to pursue such a line of argumentation
and in particular am indebted to Karen Shimakawa
and Maurice Stevens who employ Lacanian con-
cepts such as abjection to explain processes of
national identification (Shimakawa, 2002; Stevens,
2003). I will return to abjection and the idea of
the refugee as simultaneously undermining and
constituting the boundaries of national imagining
later in this chapter. For the time being, I will simply
note that understandings of national identity are as
much constituted through acts of exclusion as
inclusion.
Omar Abu Saada and Syrian
political theater
Before addressing The Syria Trojan Women, it is
useful to situate it and other works staged by its
director, Omar Abu Saada, in a tradition of political
theater. In using theater to open up spaces of resist-
ance, debate, and healing, Omar Abu Saada’s pro-
ductions continue a tradition of political theater at
least as old as the Assad Regime. While previous
Syrian regimes employed censorship, surveillance,
political detention, and torture, none did so on the
scale of the government of Hafez al-Assad, who
came to power in a 1970 intra-party coup.
Nonetheless, under Assad, a generation of
180 Communication and the Public 2(2)
theater-makers came of age, responsible for some of
the most openly political and probing theater in the
Arab World. Over the past 50 years, the very best
Syrian theater has engaged forbidden topics, criti-
quing the government’s use of surveillance, impris-
onment, and torture; analyzing Arab-Israeli
relations; drawing attention to Arab repression of
Palestinians; debating how ideas of history and her-
itage have been employed to serve the state; and
even problematizing such loaded concepts as mar-
tyrdom. The young practitioners whose theater
engages the Uprising and the conditions of the Civil
War follow in the path of directors such as Naila Al
Atrash, Walid al-Quwatli, and Fawwaz al-Sajir, and
playwrights such as Saadallah Wannous, Mamdouh
Adwan, and Muhammad al-Maghut who made
theater a privileged site in Syria for social and polit-
ical examination.
Omar Abu Saada’s recent work, and the tech-
niques he employs, gives insight into the connec-
tions between the current generation of
theater-makers creating work in the midst of civil
war and a previous generation that created work
under repressive rule. It is not simply that Omar
Abu Saada’s generation trained under the Atrash,
Quwatli, and Sajir and studied the plays of Wannous,
Adwan, and Maghut. More significantly, this gen-
eration inherited a society in which the theater was
the only space of public assembly outside the
mosque in which speech was not strictly scripted by
the state. While drama therapy and forum theater
techniques that Omar Abu Saada and others employ
are relatively new to Syria, these practitioners are
grounded in an understanding of theater and social
change that developed over decades. It is a compli-
cated history, but a few important elements can be
summarized here.
State-supported theater flourished during Syria’s
alliance with the Soviet Union, an alliance that grew
especially close after Hafez al-Assad came to power
in 1970. The National Theatre began a touring arm
in that same year, bringing productions to cities and
villages whether or not they had a physical theater.
Similarly, the Syrian Military ran its own theater
with a touring wing. The state also established sev-
eral regional theaters. More significantly, it began
sending practitioners to Eastern Bloc countries for
training. Many of these practitioners not only cre-
ated theater but taught at the High Institute for
Theatrical Art in Damascus. Fawwaz al-Sajir stud-
ied directing at the Russian Institute of Theatre Arts
(GITIS) and taught at the Damascus High Institute
from 1978 to 1983. He founded an independent
theater company with Saadallah Wannous which
included Walid al-Quwatli, who himself had studied
directing at National Academy for Theatre and Film
Arts in Sofia, Bulgaria. Quwatli taught at the High
Institute from 1979 to 1992, serving as Director of
the acting department from 1991 to 1992. At Sofia,
Quwatli studied alongside Naila Al Atrash who
taught at the High Institute from 1978 to 2001, serv-
ing as the Director of the Acting Program from 1989
to 1991 (when she stepped down to protest the
merging of the Institutes of Theatre and Music) and
then again from 1995 to 2001, when she was dis-
missed from her post by order of the Ministry of
Culture. Other directors who taught at the High
Institute and who studied in the Eastern Bloc include
Hasan Ouelty, Sharif Shakir, Fuad al-Rashid, and
Ajaj Salem.
These theater-makers and teachers have spent the
better part of their careers pressing against the
boundaries of permissible speech. They brought to
Syria from their studies in countries like Sofia, East
Berlin, and Moscow an understanding that theater is
a bodily art, and that metaphor and irony can trans-
form a seemingly neutral gesture into a pointed cri-
tique. They have seen their work banned in the
middle of rehearsals and at least once on opening
night. They have submitted the same works to cen-
sors multiple times under different titles in the hopes
(at times successfully) of gaining approval for per-
formance, and they have used current events to
shame the Ministry of Culture into allowing produc-
tions of banned works (Ziter, 2015). In some ways,
their students grew even more daring.
Omar Abu Saada studied under Naila Al Atrash
and Walid al-Quwatli at the High Institute, and even
as a student, he insistently used theater spaces,
including the conservatory, to advance his political
positions. In 2001, at the height of the Al-Aqsa
Intifada in Palestine, Abu Saada, like many Syrians,
was growing impatient with the refusal of the gov-
ernment of Bashar al-Assad to endorse Palestinian
Ziter 181
self-rule and come out in support of the intifada.
Assad’s position reflected Syria’s longstanding ani-
mosity to the Palestine Liberation Organization
(PLO) and his wish to avoid provoking Israel, espe-
cially when a renewal of talks on the Golan looked
possible. In response, Abu Saada organized roughly
15 students to sit silently in the lobby before signs
proclaiming their support of the intifada. Students
arriving at class joined them and soon Abu Saada
had organized a general strike.
While such an action might not prompt govern-
ment action in the United States, in Syria, it quickly
came to the attention of the Minister of Culture,
Maha Qanout, who personally came to the office of
Naila Al Atrash to insist that she order the students
to disband. When Atrash refused, she was soon vis-
ited by a general in the secret services who reiter-
ated the demand. Under this pressure, Atrash
convinced the students to hold their strike in the
courtyard before the institute. Two months later,
Atrash was dismissed from her post and banned
from teaching. In response, Abu Saada took a group
of 66 students to the Ministry of Culture, request-
ing a meeting with Minister Qanout. When they
were rebuffed, the students stood before the
Ministry of Culture, returning each morning for the
next 15 days. According to Atrash, the students
only broke off their action once they and their fami-
lies began receiving threats from the secret police.
The sit-in and subsequent dismissal of Atrash was
reported on in the Lebanese paper As-Safir. Syrian
papers simply announced her dismissal without
noting the context (Naila Al Atrash, personal com-
munication, 14 February 2014; Omar Abu Saada,
personal communication, 30 March 2014).
Studio Theatre: experiments in
public speech
Abu Saada turned to Augusto Boal’s Forum theater
technique soon after graduating from the High
Institute. In 2004, he founded Studio Theatre with
other recent graduates and current students, including
the playwright and dramaturge Mohammad al Attar.
Working under the auspices of the United Nations
Population Fund and with logistical support from the
Syrian-controlled non-governmental organization
(NGO), Fund for Integrated Rural Development of
Syria (FIRDOS), Studio Theatre began staging work-
shops and productions in the countryside outside
Quenietra, Idlib, Homs, Latakia, and Aleppo. Their
theater work addressed polygamy, marital relations,
women and poverty, and literacy.2 While support of
NGOs might seem antithetical to Syrian govern-
ment’s strict attempts at controlling public space,
such efforts fall under a governing strategy that
Stephen Heydemann (2007) has termed “upgraded
authoritarianism.” Heydemann argued that in
response to a growing pressure for greater civil liber-
ties, several Arab governments had attempted to co-
opt the rhetoric and structure of the civil society
movement, creating domestic NGOs visibly led by
regime elites but lacking any autonomy. Such NGOs
could be used to exclude or control Western-financed
NGOs. In Syria, for example, the President’s wife
was the official sponsor of the nation’s seven major
domestic NGOs, all of which were centralized within
the Syrian Trust for Development.
Abu Saada’s company clearly stretched the level
of public speech the Assad regime was prepared to
accept. In the first stage, a small troupe of Studio
Theatre company members spent a minimum of
3 days a week in a single village over 3 months.
During that time, through repeated theater games
with separate groups of children and young adults,
the company researched village beliefs and opinions
and paved the way for additional collaborations. A
theater game might begin with a simple question
such as “What was the most beautiful moment of
your life?” The questions and answers would ulti-
mately lead to the creation of stage pictures, which
would be followed by discussion and analysis. This
paved the way for more complex questions such as
“What was your most difficult experience in your
family, school, or workplace?” Ultimately, the groups
shaped these stage pictures into simple dramas.
This and other theater games served to familiarize
participants with the experience of self-examination,
debate, and envisioning alternate possibilities, all in
a public forum. In the second stage, the rest of Studio
Theatre joined the group and began to draft an
original script, drawing on the research of smaller
group, eventually performing an open text for the
village. This performance incorporated Boal’s Joker
182 Communication and the Public 2(2)
character, a kind of master of ceremonies who
encourages audience members to intervene in the
narrative and even replace actors. The Joker also
summarizes the solutions the audience has proposed.
The first phase not only identifies appropriate ways
of addressing issues in the village, this phase also
trains a critical mass of audience members who then
feel able to debate and intervene in public settings.
Such forum theater projects fundamentally under-
mine a central strategy of the Assad regime and the
ruling Baath party—the Baathification of the public
sphere. The selective tolerance of foreign NGOs
combined with their mandatory partnering with local
NGOs that are actually run by the government was a
means of channeling civil society forces into implicit
support for the regime. Forum theater, with its
emphasis on spontaneity, repeated questioning, and
communal scripting, threatens to disrupt this stage-
management of society. Not surprisingly, FIRDOS
withdrew its support ending the project despite the
United Nations Population Fund’s (UNFPA) desire
to continue.
With the state limiting Studio Theatre’s ability to
pursue forum theater projects, the group turned to
drama therapy and therapeutic theater. In May 2008,
the company developed a theater piece titled Sameh
(tolerance) with the inmates of the Khalid ibn al-
Wahid juvenile detention center. (Criminals in Syria
are tried as adults at the age of 11, and children serve
jail time for crimes such as petty theft.) The Italian
NGO Movimondo initiated the project, with finan-
cial support from United Nations Children’s Fund
(UNICEF). Movimondo trained Studio Theatre
members in working with troubled juveniles and
secured permission for the performance from the
Ministry of Social Affairs. The children generated
the material for Sameh writing about personal expe-
rience and taking part in theater games. They first
performed at the detention center but eventually
transferred the piece to the independent theater
venue, El Teatro.3 There they wore masks to pre-
serve their anonymity due to the stigma of imprison-
ment in Syria. The project was specifically framed as
“rehabilitation” as opposed to the potentially more
dangerous project of individual or social develop-
ment. Nonetheless, the state denied Abu Saada and
Studio Theatre permission to continue the project
after the first production. The troupe disbanded, Abu
Saada pursued directing opportunities in Damascus,
and his dramaturge, Mohammad al Attar, completed
a Master’s degree in Applied Drama at Goldsmiths-
University of London in 2010.
Soon into the uprising, Abu Saada and Attar col-
laborated on a new production addressing the deten-
tion and torture of demonstrators. Could You Please
Look into the Camera began as a verbatim theater
piece composed from the testimonies of 13 individu-
als who had been held by the security forces during
the first year of the Uprising. Over multiple drafts,
the play evolved into a fictional piece as Attar edited
and reshaped the interviews, and situated them
within an invented story about an amateur director,
Noura, filming a documentary about the Uprising.
Abu Saada directed readings of the play for the
traveling multidisciplinary festival, Meeting Points
6, in Berlin (January 2012) and Athens (March
2012). Abu Saada and his cast then rehearsed the
revised play secretly in Damascus before taking it to
the Doosan Art Center for a 2-week run in April
2012 followed by a one-night performance at
the Sunflower Theatre in Beirut. A new English-
language translation by Lisa Wedeen appeared in the
journal TDR (Attar, 2014).
The Syria Trojan Women and the
aesthetics of healing
In 2013, Abu Saada began devising adaptations of
ancient Greek dramas with female refugees. First, he
staged an adaptation of Euripides’ The Trojan
Women, with 24 Syrians living in Jordan. Mohammad
al Attar served as dramaturge and Nanda Mohammad
provided acting training. The Syria Trojan Women
ran for two nights in December 2013 at the National
Center for Culture and Arts in Amman. He then
staged an adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone with
Syrian refugees of the Shatila refugee camp in
Lebanon. Attar again served as dramaturge and Hala
Omran provided acting training. Antigone of Shatila
ran for three nights in May of 2015 at Masrah Al
Madina in Beirut.
In both productions, the development process
privileged the performers’ grappling with their own
personal experiences through the medium of an
Ziter 183
ancient play rather than focused on the play text for
its own sake. In both productions, only small por-
tions of the texts of Euripides and Sophocles were
performed. Instead, actresses used portions of the
original play to prompt reflections on their own
experiences. The Syria Trojan Women began with 60
performers but that number had shrunk to 24 by
opening night. As Omar Abu Saada explained to me,
the daily rehearsals over a 6-week period proved too
demanding for some (personal communication, 25
March 2014).
The staging choices in The Syria Trojan Women
consistently elevated the actors’ personal experience
over Euripides’ text.4 Speeches of characters were
confined to video projections; half the screen showed
a woman facing the camera, and the other half a
woman in profile. The woman facing the camera
began by identifying herself and stating her age and
then explained which character she most liked and
how that character resembled her. Hecuba’s sense of
loss becomes an occasion for the actor to remark that
“seventeen years ago I too desired death and felt that
a taste of bitterness would linger in my mouth to
the end of my days no matter how long I lived.”
However, she explains, that changed with the “great
joy” that entered her life, namely, her children and
husband. The woman in profile then delivers several
of Hecuba’s lines, in which the character describes
the horror of seeing her husband cut down before
her. The first actor, who is given the privilege of fac-
ing the camera, defines herself in relation to the play
text, and the play text that follows serves to further
clarify that self. In this particular instance, the refu-
gee who grounds her current happiness in the com-
pany of her family is contrasted with a past self that,
like Hecuba, feels bereft of meaningful connections.
In this manner, the audience encounters Hecuba,
Cassandra, and Andromache as illustration of the
performers’ memories and self-observations. In
other projected segments, women discuss the city of
Troy as a spur to their own memories of Syria, or
comment on their favorite lines, relating these lines
to moments in their pasts.
These projected segments alternate between loss
and joyful memories, but they largely focus on life
before civil war. By contrast, the live performance
grapples with the trauma of flight from a war zone and
the dislocation of life as a refugee. These painful rec-
ollections are interspersed with brief choral odes from
the play, which—ironically—come as something of a
relief from the pain manifest on stage as refugees
relate, sometimes with visible duress, their stories of
flight. A middle-age woman sits stilly, hands on a lap,
speaking into a microphone, describing crossing back
into Syria on learning that her mother had descended
into a coma. She delays her return to Amman, and
days after her mother’s death, masked men who break
into the home, throwing her young nephews to the
floor and threatening to haul them off unless her
brother, Mohammed, agree to come peacefully. She
describes crossing back into Jordan and later receiv-
ing the phone call from her sister:
Mohammed is dead.
How!
Don’t know. The Red Cross found him in the street, the
bullet entered from his mouth.
She concludes that her remaining brothers went
to the hospital to identify the body and then brought
it home for burial. Another woman recounts fleeing
from al-Bayda and the decision of her male relatives
to remain behind. The audience knows how the story
will end; al-Bayda was the site of one the worst mas-
sacres of the civil war. The story concludes with the
woman’s brother-in-law returning to the city to iden-
tify the bodies as they are readied for mass burial.
The juxtaposition of linguistic registers renders
these memories all the more immediate. The
speeches of the characters and the choral odes are
delivered in classical Arabic with rhythmic deliv-
ery—a language used in print and official presenta-
tions. By contrast, the live reminiscences are
delivered in the Syrian dialect, the language of the
everyday, the pauses and ellipses, and the apparent
effect of human frailty rather than a performance
choice. The choral odes were performed by a group
with stylized movement or tableau staging; the remi-
niscences were performed by a single woman sitting
before a microphone. The artistry of the staging of
Euripides’ text rendered the stillness of the reminis-
cences much more immediate, further underscoring
its status as “real” as opposed to theatrical.
184 Communication and the Public 2(2)
As much as the stories of atrocities grab out atten-
tion, the production is careful to present them as one
way of remembering the past. A woman might reflect
on a line by Hecuba and use it as a springboard to a
childhood memory of life as a tomboy and being
mistaken for a boy. Lines about smoldering Troy
prompt a memory of a class trip to a museum in
Tartus, the most beautiful moment of the young
woman’s life. The complexity and different experi-
ences of life as refugees are emphasized in the pro-
duction’s closing sequence. Eight different women
come forward to read letters they have composed to
loved-ones back in Syria. A mother congratulates her
daughter on her recent wedding, and only the moth-
er’s delivery betrays her pain at being absent. A
woman writes to her aunt, relating her joy on being
reunited with her son who was separated from her
during flight. Another woman writes a letter of love
and longing to her former home. The performance
ends with a young woman who writes her mother
about the stress relocation has put on her marriage.
The remarkable honesty of this last letter reveals a
courage equal to, though entirely different from, that
of the woman who narrates learning of her brother’s
death. The project, one gathers, was productive of
the courage it dramatized.
None of the women had previous theater experi-
ence, a fact suggested to the audience by the past
lives described in the reminiscences they relate. Two
of the women wore niqabs and the costume was a
black dress and black hijab, suggesting to the audi-
ence that these were traditional women for whom
theatrical performance was a new adventure. Such
an impression is borne out by a report on the project
that appeared in the Guardian (Tran, 2013). One par-
ticipant is quoted that despite her enthusiasm for the
project, her “conservative” husband forbade her par-
ticipation and she was only able to take part “after a
lot of nagging.” In that article, the show’s British
producer explained that many of the participants
came from Deraa, the conservative city in
Southwestern Syria where the uprising began. Given
the production’s marking of the performers as tradi-
tional women, their discovery of their own theatrical
voice became part of the show’s drama.
Abu Saada’s stylistic use of the chorus further
emphasizes the journey of the performers over the
journey of the characters. In Attic theater, the chorus
mediates between audience and myth, explaining,
contextualizing, and elaborating on the words and
actions of the named characters. While the charac-
ters are figures of legend, the chorus is composed of
unnamed fellow citizens or figures of even lesser
status than the audience (with rare exceptions such
as the Eumenides). In the case of this play, the chorus
is women and barbarians—both categories of
reduced humanity according to ancient Greek law.
The chorus’ mediating role is manifest in the spatial
arrangements at the theater of Dionysus, where the
play originated. The sloped bank of the “seeing
place” (teatron) reserved for the audience flows
without differentiation into the “dancing place”
(orchestra) reserved for the chorus. Both audience
and chorus enter from the same side passageways
(paradoi). By contrast, the named characters enter
from the scenic house (skene) erected beyond the
orchestra. The journey back into myth is a move-
ment upstage, deeper into the house of mythic fig-
ures. At the moment that the drama reveals the true
scope of the community’s tragedy, the doors of the
scenic house swing open and the effects of violence
are wheeled forward on the cart (or ekklyklema).
Abu Saada’s choices echo these performance
choices but reverse their effects, revealing the indi-
viduality of the performers rather than the mythic
stature of the characters. As in fifth century BCE, the
named characters in The Syria Trojan Women appear
upstage, this time as film projections on the back
wall of the stage. These passages are not presented
as illustrations of a shared past as in Attic theater, but
as fodder for the performers’ self-discoveries in the
present. The chorus is similarly close to the audi-
ence, but not so as to clarify or elaborate on the
words of the named characters. These named charac-
ters only appear briefly as projected images and then
disappear. Instead, the brief choral odes frame the
longer personal narratives of the seated performers.
These odes effectively comment or contrast with the
more important reminiscences of the performers. In
Attic theater, all of the performers were masked, and
if we take the three-actor rule as hard and fast, then
different performers might play a single character in
the course of a performance. In short, the conven-
tions serve to elide performer and augment
Ziter 185
character. The complete opposite is true in Abu
Saada’s production, where not only individual char-
acters but the entire play is presented as a tool for the
actor’s articulation of self. This is not so much a pro-
duction of Euripides’ The Trojan Women but a dram-
atization of the self-discovery that comes of deeply
contemplating that text.
The poetics and politics of
abjection
Abu Saada’s reimaging of the Greek chorus is the
most formally innovative component of the produc-
tion. Euripides’ chorus serves to further illustrate the
reduced state and of the named characters and—at
times—to embody a loss of self in unrestrained lam-
entation that the named characters approach but
never fully engage. Omar Abu Saada’s staging care-
fully skirts the boundaries of such abjection, and
this—I will argue—is central to the work’s therapeu-
tic value. The opening moments of the show feature
a crowd of veiled women backlit against a bright
screen so that they appear only in silhouette. They
speak different text simultaneously, each woman
announcing her name, their voices growing louder in
an incomprehensible din as they walk downstage
toward the audience. Only after a lighting change
that makes their faces visible do they begin to chant
in unison an ode revealing the fear of the Trojan
women at becoming the chattel of the army and sub-
ject to the licentious desire of the Greeks, their
voices ascending in pitch.
The performance of subsequent odes similarly
disconnects speaker from text, producing a sense of
the reduced humanity of Euripides’ chorus mem-
bers. In the next choral ode, the clumped women
silently mouth words while an unseen speaker
recites. That speaker only becomes visible at the
end of the ode; one by one, her companions have
broken off from the group leaving her alone on
stage. The choral ode following the story of the
Bayda massacre is recited in darkness while the nar-
rator remains silent but visible in a small circle of
light. The chorus begins with a droning hum that
grows louder and segues into a brief lamentation for
the destruction. Humming precedes a later choral
ode as well, this time increasing in pitch until it
breaks of in a cry followed by the lament that “God
had forsaken us.” The women then lift their hands in
unison and cover their mouths stiffly as they deliver
the ode rapidly as if ululating at a funeral, lamenting
the destruction of their poor city.
The abjection of Euripides’ chorus is made evi-
dent through a performance style in which language
threatens to spill over into mere vocalized pain even
as formal choices separate the performer from the
reduced state she represents. From the opening
moment, the effort to name oneself is thwarted by
confusion. Repeatedly, Abu Saada disconnects the
choral ode from a specific speaker or speakers; cho-
rus members have lost the ability to name and define
themselves in language. This happens literally in the
opening but also in the decision to deliver odes in
darkness or to have the speaker of an ode shrouded
by women mouthing words. These non-naturalistic
choices create a protective space between actors and
choral characters.
The formal physicality of the chorus augments
this protective buffer. In the opening moments, the
chorus walks forward with an eerie solemnity (and a
documentary about this production, The Queens of
Syria, reveals that this effect required repeated
rehearsal); they then deliver their lament in perfect
unison; later, the chorus members coordinate styl-
ized gestures. These passages are all recited in clas-
sical Arabic, as opposed to the dialect of the actresses’
personal reminiscences. The characters’ tenuous
control of language is juxtaposed against the actors’
self-possession; stylized production choices signal,
rather than manifest, abjection. In short, stylization
quarantines the performer against the state she repre-
sents. In the process, Abu Saada works against both
the eloquence of the Euripides’ text and its potential
to subsume the performer into its own emotionalism.
The result is a more powerful performance and one
attentive to the performer’s mental hygiene.
It is important for the production to preserve
images of abjection, not simply for their emotional
power but because it is against such images that the
performance choices and life choices of the refugee
performers are made meaningful. The refugee is
both the figure that defines the border and that trou-
bles our position relative to that border. The fact that
individuals can be deprived of national identity gives
186 Communication and the Public 2(2)
national identity significance as a quality bestowed
by the state (rather than an innate and inalienable
quality). The idea of the refugee reminds those with
their citizenship intact of the stability their nation-
states afford. However, the physical presence of the
refugee makes present the fact that what is given can
be taken away. The refugee affirms national borders
while also undermining the certainty of one’s place
within those borders.
The power of the refugee to subsume the certainty
of national identification recalls Kristeva’s discus-
sion of abjection as the boundary between subject
formation and undifferentiated life (the “real” in
Lacanian parlance). For Kristeva, all humans retain a
memory of life before language acquisition, before
even the moment individual awareness is born with
the realization that the mother exists separate from—
rather than as an extension of—the self. The abject,
according to Kristeva, recalls this early state, threat-
ening to overwhelm the idea of the individual sub-
ject. As Kristeva (1982) explains,
Abjection preserves what existed in the archaism of the
pre-objectal relationship, in the immemorial violence
with which a body becomes separated from another
body in order to be—maintaining that night in which
the outline of the signified thing vanishes and where
only the imponderable affect is carried out. (p. 10)
A corpse produces the sensation of abjection, accord-
ing to Kristeva, because it evokes that boundary at
which an individual reverts to all-consuming materi-
ality. One responds in horror to the abject because of
the persistent fear of dissolving back into that cor-
roding night wherein “the outline of the signified
thing vanishes.”
We can think of national identity as similarly con-
structed as an act of differentiation at the morrow of
memory, in that “immemorial violence” in which a
people (rather than an individual) become separated
from another “in order to be.” The world’s unwill-
ingness to address the problem of refugees (with
more than 40 million refugees and internally dis-
placed persons worldwide at the time of writing) is
akin to the personal aversion prompted by the abject.
Here is the figure that gives the lie to the reassuring
fiction of the stability of national identity. The refu-
gee, to adopt Karen Shimakawa’s evocative phrase,
is a figure of “national abjection.” This might help
account for why natural disasters invariably prompt
financial outpourings from individuals and nations
many times greater than what is levied for the vic-
tims of human-made catastrophes like war. In an
article of 22 March 2014, the New York Times noted
the difficulty aid organizations have had raising
money for humanitarian assistance in Syria, discuss-
ing two organizations in particular that were only
able to raise one-tenth of what they raised in the
aftermath of the Haitian earthquake (Barnard, 2014).
Nations recoil at the tragedy of refugees much as
individuals cower in the presence of a corpse.
The Syria Trojan Women production invokes
images of abjection, but then holds them at arm’s
length. This act of distanced conjuring demonstrates
that the performer is greater than her recent history,
and this gives the performance its power. It is not
simply that Euripides’ text in the Arabic is moving. It
is. However, even more impactful is the knowledge
that this performer, who has mastered the text and
the physical choices that frame and provide shape to
the loss of self-possession, may have herself experi-
enced similarly harrowing events. “See,” she would
seem to proclaim, “such events can destroy a person;
however, I have chosen to make theatre.” The first-
person narratives, the most direct and unmediated
expression of trauma, are themselves stories rather
than lamentations. The speaker transforms her expe-
riences through narrative and in doing so masters
them. If there is dramatic tension for the audience, it
is akin to what one experiences when watching an
acrobat perform: one does not wonder how the feat
will end but marvels that it can be successfully com-
pleted. Every pause, every repeated word or seeming
omission, heightens audience members’ attention
and their hopes for the performer’s success.
Therapeutic theater in the global
context
As an example of therapeutic theater, The Syria
Trojan Women brings a wounded community closer
and moves both performers and audience toward
healing, which prompts questions about what hap-
pens when therapeutic theater projects are remounted
far from conflict sites. It is as especially relevant
Ziter 187
question as aid organizations and theater venues
have identified such projects as means of raising
consciousness and funds. When The Syria Trojan
Women was performed in Amman, its audience was
likely composed of people who had been directly
impacted by the war: the families of the 28 perform-
ers, other refugees, aid workers, and Jordanians who
were living with nearly 600,000 registered refugees
in their country. The show undoubtedly meant some-
thing very different when the Tällberg Foundation
invited the group to perform at the 2014 Tällberg
Workshop at CERN, The European Organization for
Nuclear Research, for a selected audience of chief
executive officers (CEOs), scientists, academics, art-
ists, and former government officials. The perfor-
mance came at the end of the second day of this
3-day workshop, and followed a session on interna-
tional crises that included a discussion of “the new
Middle East.” Judging from the YouTube video
posted by the Tällberg Foundation, the performance
served as fodder for a discussion the following day
that addressed global responsibilities, the tragic state
of Syria, and the power dynamics at play in resituat-
ing the performance at CERN. The performance
clearly meant many things to the different members
of this audience; however, it had ceased to be an
occasion of mutual healing (Tällberg, 2014;
YouTube, 2015).5
In July of 2016, the show was remounted as
Queens of Syria for a United Kingdom tour. This
version was co-produced by the Young Vic and fea-
tured 13 performers. London-based director Zoe
Lafferty staged this new version. Farah Karouta
designed new costumes that evoked ideas of tradi-
tional clothing in bright burgundy, purple, and mus-
tard, while also featuring traditional patterns.
Bissane Al Charif—who provided interactive
theater training and the entire scenography in the
Amman production—designed a new set for the
London production. After five performances at the
Young Vic, Queens of Syria traveled to venues in
Oxford, Brighton, Liverpool, Leeds, and Durham
before returning for a gala performance at the New
London Theatre in the West End. In Amman, the
performers’ direct delivery of their personal narra-
tives contrasted with the formalism with which Abu
Saada approached Euripides’ text. If the Amman
production had access to elaborate costumes and
setting, it might have served the production’s
engagement with Euripides, but probably at the
expense of the simple immediacy of the personal
narratives. Aesthetics can come at the expense of
the efficacious, when the display of artistry eclipses
healing. However, aesthetic considerations took
greater precedence as the work moved further (in
both time and geography) from the therapeutic
event of 2013. However, the production may have
been efficacious by a different metric: audiences
might be more likely to support relief efforts for
recipients who share their modernist aesthetics.
While this is an extreme example of adapting a ther-
apeutic theater piece to new contexts, it is not
unique. Omar Abu Saada’s second production with
female refugees, Antigone of Shatila, traveled to
Marseille in January of 2016 and Hamburg in
February of 2016.
A production invariably achieves multiple ends,
whether it is drama therapy in an institutional setting
or a musical extravaganza on Broadway. However,
no end can be achieved without funding. When
Brecht (1964) chastened artists who make the mis-
take of “imagining that they have got hold of an
apparatus which in fact has got hold of them,” it was
not because he advocated a theater free of financial
concerns (p. 34). Rather, he insisted that artists con-
front the business of theater so as to be better aware
of how it affected their artistic output. When British
producers of The Syria Trojan Women (Charlotte
Eagar, William Stirling, and Georgina Paget)
selected a Western canonical text for production by
refugees, they may have considered the pressures of
fundraising. The selection no doubt made it easier to
raise the 75,000 pounds sterling needed for the pro-
duction. With that relatively modest sum, they were
able to provide the performers with food and travel
subsidies, provide daycare for their children, and
provide psychological counseling.
The cachet of Western theater also may have
inspired the producers’ next theater project: an
Arabic language version of Lionel Bart’s Oliver!
with a cast of Syrian refugees and Jordanian chil-
dren. Bart’s 1960 musical had a successful West End
revival that ran from 2009 and 2011, followed by a
UK tour. The Syrian production not only evoked the
188 Communication and the Public 2(2)
West End but drew from Disney; the productions’
musical director and translator had worked on sev-
eral Arabic versions of Disney animated films. Two
Jordanian companies sponsored the production:
Umniah (a mobile phone company) and Al Nisr (an
insurance company). An attention-grabbing big pro-
duction musical brings different funding opportuni-
ties, whether on Broadway or in the Middle East.
The project required training six drama and music
therapy coaches to work with the children and cast-
ing was preceded by 6 months of drama and music
workshops for between 40 and 100 Syrian and
Jordanian children (Oliver!, n.d.). A documentary
about the development of the project was in post-
production at the time of this writing. Here, the pro-
ducers repeated a strategy that has already proved its
success. The process of creating The Syria Trojan
Women was captured in Yasmin Fedda’s documen-
tary The Queens of Syria (which no doubt provided
the name for the UK touring production). That docu-
mentary earned eight awards from six different film
festivals and has prompted a spate of news articles
(Queens of Syria, n.d.).
This brings me to a final observation about The
Syria Trojan Women and its various afterlives: it was
conceived from the start to be both local and interna-
tional. Perhaps this duality is the most significant
development in what is here being theorized as the
revolutionary public sphere. Through foreign tours
and festival screenings, these Trojan Women projects
went from fostering local healing to calling for inter-
national action. This has involved engaging online
media at every step in the process, from fundraising
through sites like Indiegogo and Virgin Money
Giving, to Facebook pages and Vimeo accounts.
Trailers for the film and performances remain on the
YouTube channels of various theaters and film festi-
vals. The producers have also used the Internet to
circulate original content depicting Syrian refugees;
We Are All Refugees is a six-part audio drama about
Syrian refugees in Jordan. A team of Syrians and
Jordanians wrote the scripts, and the series featured
several major stars of Arab film and television along
with actors from the original The Syria Trojan
Women project. The Levantine star cast included the
Syrian actors/activists Nawar Bulbul and May Scaff
(both in exile), the Palestinian film-star Eyad
Hourani, and Jordanian comedian Nabil Sawalha.
The series streams on Radio SouriaLi (via
SoundCloud and YouTube) and was broadcast on
BBC Arabic and SouriaLi’s FM station in Jordan.6
Consistent with the producers’ earlier efforts to cir-
culate their projects to English speakers, they cre-
ated an English-language adaptation, Welcome to
Zaatari, that was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in
November 2015.
Rethinking the public
This mix of public and online interactions and the
multiplicity of participants and audiences (from ref-
ugees to a West End audience) further complicate the
idea of a revolutionary public sphere. For Habermas,
the bourgeois public sphere developed through, and
continued to reference, face-to-face interactions.
Habermas explains that in England, for example,
journals were the extension of coffee house circles
that had grown so numerous and extensive that con-
tact could only be maintained through print. The fact
that many journal articles employed the dialogue
form, according to Habermas (1989), attests to “their
proximity to the spoken word” (p. 42). Speech is
central to the creation of a realm of rational discourse
as social activity that generates the public will.
According to Habermas, the equality of the speakers
is implicit in their presence in the neutral ground of
the coffee house. However, that equality soon dissi-
pated with the rise of consumer culture and powerful
media interests. In the last 15 years, numerous books
and articles have debated whether the Internet might
bring about the conditions for a new virtual public
sphere or whether political and economic interests
had already circumscribed new media’s revolution-
ary potential.7 Is the Internet a space of free exchange
between equals? Can a disembodied debate generate
a shift in public will?
Therapeutic theater reminds us that political
speeches (like all political actions) are acts of self-
definition in relation to a community. The political is
merely one genre of the constant exchanges by
which individuals mark the boundaries between self
and other and, in doing so, invent their wholeness. If
online communication has this same power, it is
likely a function of the human ability to imagine a
partner to our speech, whether or not that person is in
the same room. I think we witness the limits of this
Ziter 189
imaginative power when online culture sometimes
veers toward paranoia, incoherence, and echolalia.
The domain of common concern requires first the
ability to conceive the common, to both identify with
and differentiate from others. Whether remarking on
the decline of salon culture or the end of bowling
leagues, commentators have noted that coherent
social bodies are premised on the proximity of real
bodies. Communication technology—from the print-
ing press to the Internet—helps us imagine this prox-
imity where it does not exist but technology cannot
endlessly substitute for proximity.
The Syria Trojan Women and subsequent projects
helps us imagine the shape of a new public sphere in
which the virtual act as an extension of face-to-face
interactions. All of the creative work connected to
the The Syria Trojan Women—whether in Amman,
Shatila, London, Marseille, or CERN—began with
the spoken word or declared its close proximity to
the spoken word. The project departed from and
returned to workshops and performances. Equals
first shared their experiences in the rehearsal pro-
cess, shared these experiences with an audience of
fellow refugees and citizens of their host nation)
and only then disseminated information to online
and gala audiences. Discussing this work in relation
to Habermas’ public sphere helps one identify barri-
ers to political engagement that exists throughout
the world for those with and without citizen status,
and helps us imagine how these barriers can be
overcome. We might then theorize a revolutionary
public sphere, one grounded in new models for pro-
moting civic engagement as social and personal
healing, one in which private concerns translate into
public good.
Notes
1. I develop this idea in greater detail in relation to the
writing of plays of Saadallah Wannous in Political
Performance in Syria (see pp. 70–73).
2. Technique detailed in Marie Elias’ (2007) book. Elias,
who was a professor at the University of Damascus at
the time, served as mentor to Studio Theatre. She is
currently a refugee in Beirut.
3. El Teatro was a short-lived independent theater
venue managed and funded by the film and televi-
sion actress, Mai Skaf. She is an outspoken critic
of the Syrian regime. She was repeatedly impris-
oned and fled the country after reportedly
being warned by senior regime officials that she
would be killed if she remained in the country
(“Mai Skaf One of Many Syrian TV Stars Who
Has Paid a High Price for Standing up to Bashar
Al-Assad,” 2013).
4. My analysis of the production is based on an unedited
videotape of the performance in Amman. My thanks
to Omar Abou Saada for providing me with the tape.
Translations are my own.
5. Planned performances in the United States were
canceled when the US Bureau of Consular Affairs
denied the performers visas. Instead in 2014, foot-
age from the production in Amman and behind the
scenes footage was screened, along with Skype inter-
views with the performers and Omar Abu Saada at
Georgetown and Columbia Universities on 19 and 29
September, respectively. Both events included panel
discussions.
6. “SouriaLi” is a play on the phonetic resemblance
between the Arabic phrase “My Syria” and the Arabic
pronunciation of “surreal.”
7. For a bibliographic summary of the debate, see
Papacharissi (2002) and, more recently, Goldberg
(2010).
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Author biography
Edward Blaise Ziter is Professor of Theatre History at the
Department of Drama at New York University (NYU).
His book, Political Performance in Syria: From the Six-
Day War to the Syrian Uprising, received the Joe A
Calloway Prize for Best Book on Drama or Theatre. He is
also author of The Orient on Victorian Stage.