EAST MEETS WEST in Arabic/African Theatre Topics
Universities of Amsterdam, Tetouan, Cairo, Alexandria, Sudan e.a.
Academic Institutions in Rabat, Cairo, Damascus, Athens
Research-project/ roundtable:
Dramaturgical Models and Moments;
Post-Aristotelian Dramaturgy in East and West
Reading through 20th century drama texts from Egypt, Syria, Libanon, the Magreb-countries and the West-European countries on the other side of the Mediterranean, one becomes fascinated by a shared history in dramatic forms and experimentation with that form.
Drama-history the end of the 19th Century, both in East and West, shows the temporally overall adoption of the Aristotelian model, as it was developed in England and France into the Realistic model of the well-made play. Accepted broadly as the perfect drama and standard model, the Aristotelian formula was eventually and gradually subjected to undermining, critical interventions, which can now be called a series of deconstruction of the Classic model and its theories.
In his important study on the Theory of Modern Drama (1900-1956), German scholar Peter Szondi describes the different ways modern playwrights and dramaturges tried to solve the incompatibilities of the Aristotelian model, tailoring its components within new perspectives and actual problems, both in society and on stage.
In his theorizing of the how and why of European expressionistic drama, the epic drama, the meta-drama of Pirandello, running into Absurdism and (later) post-modern broken text-forms, Szondi’s analysis of the form/content tension seems an extremely fruitful framework to approach comparable developments in the drama-forms of the Eastern countries and its specific moments of historical crisis.
Different moments in the history of drama during the twentieth century, charged with communicating political and aesthetic experiences seem to diverge, providing the main ground on which West meets East in dramatic performance.
The aim of the research-project would be to write an integrated history of drama with clear examples of same-ness and differences. Together with a series of play-texts the project-group could offer a new anthology in an attempt to rewrite the sacred canon of the West via revisiting that of the East.
