Conclusion of Future Stages and Readings of Participant's Texts By Playwright Mudar Alhajji

On March 14^th, 2016, the concluding event for Future Stages: A Creative Writing Project for Young Syrian Writers was held at the Sunflower Theatre. The event included readings of excerpts from scripts by original writers and a performance by the Zoukak theatre company.

Future Stages is a long-term capacity building project in creative writing. The programme is targeted at a group of talented Syrian and Syrian-Palestinian writers aged between 18 and 25.

The project – led by trainers Eric Altdorfer (Switzerland), Mudar Alhajji and Omar Jibaii (Syria) – focused on developing the skills of eight original playwrights. It also provided the opportunity for participants to experiment with their own creative directions before testing their scripts in the presence of an audience. The programme aims to increase the beneficial role of art in the lives of participants and in their communities today and for years to come.

The project is part of programme to engage and support emerging artists in the region. The programme was launched by Ettijahat- Independent Culture in 2013 and aims to work with talented young Syrians in various artistic fields. This project has operated in collaboration with the Shams Cooperative and has been supported by the Swiss Agency for Cooperation, the Middle East Office of the Heinrich Boell Foundation, and the Swiss Cultural Fund.

Trainer and playwright Mudar Alhajji, who supervised the participating writers’ journeys as they completed their texts, writes:

“One thing which was reflected in the writing of all the Future Stages participants is the desire to discuss their current living conditions and talk about their experiences of life since the region entered the current storm of political and social change.

The level of violence and brutality that has accompanied this period have questioned the limits of brutality and sensitivity alike; it is remarkable that the texts which have been produced have surpassed the political and tended towards more humanist directions in their discourse.

This direction may, on the one hand, be related to the freedom enjoyed by these young participants during the writing process. On the other hand, it may be a product of the training curriculum itself. The point is that the training considers the essence of the writing process as the fundamental approach for working on participants’ texts. In addition, the training focused on promoting dialogue, questioning the dominant, reaching to sensitive questions and conducting in-depth research into these questions. All these tools formed the basis of the methodology used by the trainers to support the writers during the workshops and throughout the scriptwriting process.

The vocabulary of change is generally absent from these texts and is replaced by a vocabulary of fear and harshness. Despite the fact that most of the writers had previously been active in different movements towards change (social, political, etc.), the hardships that they have experienced caused by these movements have left them both with different outward views and different internal understandings.

In Hanadi Al-Shabta’sThe First Siege, the writer goes beyond the traditional description of the siege of Yarmouk camp and avoids making the text merely an exposition of the suffering of humanity under siege. Rather, she looks into the social and psychological siege in which the camp’s residents find themselves before the camp enters the physical siege.

Conversely, in Heba Maree’s Divine Message and Dania Ghanayem’sThe Captive of Jasmine, questions about the effects of migration and the search for safety are very prominent. In both texts we see protagonists’ relentless pursuit of finding solutions to the crisis, primarily by leaving home and the possibility of finding a new one. At the same time, the search for a better and safer home is only temporary in the characters’ wider journey toward safety as they embark on a mission to find new ways of connecting with their new, temporary surroundings.

Hadeel Sahli’s The Drowned, Last Moments of Fear talks about the nature of ‘fear’ and labels it as the primary characteristic of a contemporary Syrian citizen’s life. Fear accompanies drown-victim Ahmad in various stages of his life and his attempt to escape fear by travelling by sea; ironically, in his attempt to escape fear, the only escape he finds is to drown.