Create: A Project to Empower Art in Exile / Second Edition
The Names of Participants that were selected to attend the training programme for Create: A Project to Empower the Art in Exile Second Edition have been announced, based on the evaluation of the project's selection committee.
Based on the last committee members meeting on 18th of May 2018, the following institutions and individual applications have been selected:
Seba Kourani: Dual Presence and Absence of Sound
Chadi Makrach: My Imagination is Always Bigger
Zoukak Theatre Company: The Zoukak Theatre Mentorship Program
Al Caravan Project: From knock knock till Bye Bye (from A to Z)
Seenaryo Organization: Pulse Group
An additional back up list has been selected allowing these participants to benefit from some of the project activities.
The Selection Committee Included:
Aser Al Saqqa: Director of Arts Canteen, Programmer and Producer of festivals, a Cultural Initiator with extensive experience in managing and promoting emerging artists from the Arab world, the MENA Region, and Europe.
Marina Barham: cofounder and General Director of Al-Harah Theater, and Al-Harah Performing Arts Training Center (PARC), Vice president of the Palestinian Performing Arts Network, a Trainer in the field of Cultural Management in the Arab World.
Rana Yazaji: Researcher and a Cultural Activist
During the months of June and July, selected participants will participate in an intensive training workshop on artistic interventions in a time of crisis, which will be an opportunity for them to work on the development of their project ideas in details, all under the supervision of specialized trainers from the region and the UK.
The descriptions of the selected project
Seba Kourani: Dual Presence and Absence of Sound
An interactive workshop for 3 months with young men and women between the ages of 18 and 25 years of different nationalities. The workshop invites young people to go through a personal experience that is a journey to search for the original sound of each individual and to test the different spaces in this field, as well as to develop creative communication tools of expression for each individual. The workshop will happen in Beirut resulting in a theater performance show and falls within the scope of psychosocial support through theatre.
Chadi Makrach: My Imagination is Always Bigger
A theater training project on the techniques and mechanisms of work in the interactive theater, that aims to work with a group of trainers and actors who have experience in the field of children training on performing arts, followed by sessions with 100 children from a number of Syrian camps and Lebanese neighbor schools to develop the skills needed in order to overcome some of the problems and obstacles that children can face in their new societies. This will be done through hypotheses we will set in folkloric tales and traditional simple games, which they will play with each other, ending up with an interactive theatre show between the trainers and the children.
The work in the project will focus on fairytales due to the importance it has in enriching the imagination, and the social values it consist of which teaches the children how to handle difficult situations, and how to develop their mental and emotional abilities.
Zoukak Theatre Company: The Zoukak Theatre Mentorship Program
This programme is a theatrical mentorship of two groups of Syrian artists residing in Lebanon, of theatrical projects entrepreneurs. The artists are selected from among the participants of a previous workshop which was conducted in a collaboration between the Zoukak and Dawlaty organization on "Theatre, Memory and History". The Zoukak Theatre Company will work over a period of six months to guide and support artists, in order to strengthen and develop their skills in theatre and artistic management. The programme provides a platform for learning and development and for addressing how to process social and political issues through innovation and creativity, while preparing the artists for a theatre performance.
Participants are encouraged to take responsibility for creating their own performance by organizing regular work sessions led by members of the Zoukak Theatre Company that follows up on the work from the start to the implementation phase. The proposed projects include topics related to memory, political authority and the Syrian history, and highlight the difficulties of the Syrian refugees in exile.
Al Caravan Project: From knock knock till Bye Bye (from A to Z)
A monochromatic animation film of eight different sections arranged chronologically over ten years before and after 2011, the project is being prepared by Khaldoun Al Batal and a specialized team with Al Caravan Project, to discuss the years of Syrian conflict until 2018. The project is executed through workshops on the writing of short stories, biographies, and on drawings, and drawing by pencil with children and youngsters.
The goal is to produce an audiovisual cultural product directly prepared by participants in a spontaneous way, and presented in various languages to become a campaign and an artistic document at once, using the techniques of animation, collage, and stop motion, all it holds expressions of the participants, that they were able to construct out of the local environment that they lived or still live in, in Syrian and the neighboring countries.
Seenaryo Organization: Pulse Group
Pulse is a project for eight aspiring theatre-makers and facilitators to develop their original performance of Shajarat Al Durr into a fully realized show, which will tour to camps, schools, and a theatre festival, alongside a post-show workshop for children.
The project’s artistic focus is on devising original theatre collaboratively as an ensemble. The group will also learn how to facilitate theatre processes for other communities, particularly children. Part of the artistic goal is showing the group how to design a workshop series so that the process of theatre-making is linked to the final product, through a process that empowers participants (e.g. children) as producers, writers and creators.
Seenaryo believes that the group have the potential to continue as a theatre ensemble after the project, as well as to work with children independently in their own communities.
To look at statistics related to the applications of the second edition of the Create Syria Programme Click here.
Create
A project in partnership between the British Council and Ettijahat-Independent Culture and in collaboration with Mimeta, that seeks to increase the capacity of artists to contribute to the development of stronger, more cohesive communities through the design and delivery of high-quality community arts initiatives. The project will support artists to build their technical and artistic skills in community settings through providing a tailored training, local and international peer-to-peer networking opportunities and seed funding for the implementation of innovative community arts initiatives.
The project will support five innovative artistic projects that are beyond traditional frameworks for a maximum period of six months in all regions of Lebanon with grants up to $10,000. The project also provides a platform for dialogue and connection between artists in the Arab region and Europe.
