A House divided. An alternative history of Pan-Arabism [working title] is a long-term and politically committed project that engages with the history of past militant and political utopias and ideologies. This history is at the centre of my personal social and societal commitments that are intrinsic to my practice and participation in the arts fields. This project touches upon sensitive on-going contemporary issues related to political power dynamics (colonialism, resistance, liberation) and vulnerable personal and collective histories. Hence it requires cautious research, and political and socially-conscientious creation and production processes that I will intentionally make visible (mise en abîme) in the artistic presentation. For these reasons and in order to adhere to these ethical principles, the project is slow-paced and unfolds into several phases: research and development in 2024-2025, production and creation in 2025-2026, presentation and touring in 2026-2027.

The early phase of this enquiry was supported by a trajectory grant of Flanders ministry of culture, thanks to which I was able to narrow my subject. I decided to focus on studying the relationship between performance and essay as a genre as well as the history of Pan-Arabism. At the same time, I am looking into concretely experimenting with ways of activating this theoretical knowledge in order to shape the dramaturgical framework for the creation/production
phase in 2025.

This research phase consists of three ‘Laboratories’ and three ‘Fieldworks’ ¹ that are laying the preparative groundwork for the creation of a new performance. The ‘Fieldworks’ are conceived as contemporary re-enactments of the research process and will take place in Lebanon, Palestine and Greece. They will generate the primary material for the subsequent writing process (scenarios, characters, dialogues, plot, media) and inform the visual aesthetics (set design, costumes) of the future performance. The ‘Laboratories’ are times dedicated to collective thinking and making that will draw together the project core team members. They will give the needed space to process, discuss, define better the work methodologies and ethics, and establish the dramaturgical structure leading to the following creation and production stages
of the performative work.

To essay: ‘to assay, to weigh, to challenge, to test, to attempt’²: from the essayistic performance to the performed essay

In my previous works, I have explored forms of ‘essayistic performance’ in which, through embodied actions, I presented what my research process entails: exploring, surveying, testing, failing and hesitating by thinking and acting out loud on stage. Through choreographing and performing, I found an artistic embodied alternative to the labor of writing or to what an investigative written essay requires.

With A House divided. An alternative history of Pan-Arabism [working title] I want to shift the question: what are the possibilities of performing an existing essay (rather than creating a performative essayistic work). I want to interrogate forms of translation/transformation/adaptation and explore pertinent ways to unveil on stage relevant elements intrinsic to the essayistic thinking and writing process.

While working on my previous performance series we dreamt of utopia and we woke up screaming, a very peculiar essay stood out in my bibliography. It was the only study I found that was dedicated to a liberation movement radio in exile on air in the 1960s and 1970s written by North American professor Donald R. Browne, who published “The Voices of Palestine: A Broadcasting House Divided” in 1975 following on a 1973-1974 Fulbright-Hays scholarship to study broadcast systems in the Arab World, and to teach at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon. Browne’s study retraces the history of the ‘many voices’ of Palestinian radios in exile after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war that resulted in the occupation of Palestine. Those broadcast services were aired by and were roaming around Arab state-owned radio stations throughout the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Their fate was inevitably subjected to both the vicissitudes and dissent of the various Palestinian factions and leadership in exile scattered across the region, as well as to the whims of young postcolonial nation states that hosted them. Almost half a century after the publication of the essay and considering the time distance, the renewal of and increased access to scholarship, my level of personal involvement and my militant activities, it is obvious that my readings, perception and reception of the ‘social drama’ and the series of defeats and cruel historical events he analysed, differ from Browne’s. The research and development phase will allow me to weigh up and debate Browne’s arguments and hypotheses, and to instigate what would it mean in terms of dramaturgy and writing process to ‘update’ a ‘dated’ inquiry and/or make it relevant. During the early research phase in 2021, I have examined and assessed the postulate of how to perform an essay. I delved into extensive literature and theory around the essay as form and the ‘scenic essay’. I dived deep into the essay in question in an attempt to identify what could stand in it as performative. For this, I literally ‘performed an autopsy’ of the essay (working backwards on retrieving Browne’s trajectory); I dissected it and dismembered all elements that constitute the essence of the genre.

¹ I have named this step in my project ‘Laboratory’ in homage to theatre director Adeline Rosenstein whose work and methodologies have been instrumental in my career.
² Jasper Delbecke, ‘Tracing the Essay in Contemporary Performing Arts’, Performance Research, 23:2, pp. 5-12