Ibrahim Al Mulla (Sharjah)
Loaded bodies with symbolic intensity, and figures wandering in an enigmatic presence, roaming with prickly features and shabby clothes as the audience flocks to the exhibition hall, making the place covered with a strangeness that provokes the question and produces circles of wonder: What is happening? What visual mechanism is this, capable of disrupting the vision itself and distorting the appointment at its center? And why did the actors pick up the strings of the theatrical game so early? Did the audience become a partner in this game, and a cornerstone in it?
This is how the play “I See You” surprises you with a form of thumb, to say to the audience out loud: “I see you,” so be aware of what is coming, even before the creative frenzy begins on stage, and even before the actors begin to release the stark performative moment, as we see them sneaking behind The audience is not in front of them, and they form the first thresholds of the show from outside it, not in its depth. It is the game that director Hassan Ragab is good at changing the rules in every new work of his, avoiding repetition, and clinging to innovation, especially since he is entangled here with a towering text by the extensive writer who read: Ismail Abdullah, text It is also crowded with a burning memory, high potential, popular eloquence, pure dialect, abundant variety, and audacity that catches the eye of fear.
The play “I See You”, produced by Umm Al Quwain National Theater, was shown yesterday evening at the Culture Palace in Sharjah, and it is part of the official competition performances in the 31st session of the Sharjah Theater Days Festival. It was used by the guards of the towers surrounding the old local forts and others built at the entrances to cities, especially when strangers and unknown people approached them.
The show deals with the strange atmosphere surrounding a group of lunatics in a remote isolation located on the outskirts of the city as a kind of exclusion, marginalization and collective punishment. The idiots mentioned by the French philosopher Michel Foucault, in his extraordinary book: The History of Madness, where there was a dense tragic awareness watching over the critical awareness of madness, when the Middle Ages identified madness within the hierarchy of vices.
However, the madness that we see in the show “I See You” seems more noble and resistant than the hostage and submissive mind. It is an alternative and temporary madness until one escapes by himself from the character of “wasted man” who has given up his dignity, his rebellion and his desire to break the chains of injustice, subjugation and humiliation.
After a break of popular songs and chants, ranging from “Al-Radh” to “Alone”, we listen to the introductory monologue to be presented by one of the madmen in the ghetto – performed here by the artist Jamal Al-Sumaiti, who refers to the many diseases that afflicted the people of the region, as a result of which many died and few remained, Diseases such as: smallpox, plague, tuberculosis, and others, adding that the disease he suffers with his companions in the “isolated” is of a different kind that doctors and therapists have been unable to treat. To keep the secret of this affliction closed in the face of those who know and interpreters, this open and remote prison was made, so that healthy people in the city would not be infected with madness.
This strange description of the group’s disease, during the dramatic escalation in the folds of the show, will lead us to a completely different area, when we discover that these accused of madness are nothing but a rebel group that lived stories of valiant resistance against the occupier, and what they practice of apparent madness is a hidden means and a new trick against This occupier, who considered them mere parasitic and harmful elements.
The guard of the tower – played by the artist Saeed Salem – leads this rebel group, to preserve the legacy, customs and identity, before the occupier begins to blur and distort this identity with the help of a group of local individuals who benefit from their influence and positions provided by the occupier, including Al-Tawash, who plays the artist Saif Adran, the lunatics resist the violence and ferocity of the occupier with their music, chants and dances that resemble the dance of a bird slaughtered in pain.
It is the same pain that culminates in the show at the end when the tower guard is placed in a glass cage in a museum made by the occupier with the help of his accomplices, so that this cage becomes an example of the fate of the indigenous resistance fighters, so that their likenesses do not recur, and so that distortion penetrates into the joints of the identity with its fertile memory, its authentic folklore and its sources. The marine, its desert songs, and its deep-rooted arts, such as: Al-Samari, Al-Ayyala, Al-Liwa, Al-Maled, Al-Tarij and others.
The show “I See You” succeeded in conveying this intense and compact pain in all its severity and bitterness to the auditorium’s audience, to say with an overwhelming and forward-looking cry: “You see me, I see you,” armed with an anatomical and deep social criticism, before strangers, transients and greedy go too far in obliterating, alienating and commodifying the local identity.
Director Hassan Rajab was able to employ theatrical spectacle tools with its ritual and ceremonial aspects, to emphasize the importance of heritage arts in resisting the great and savage erosion practiced by the hybrid and exotic arts for the values of belonging and their synonyms related to collective memory and the spirit of the place. In order to create captivating audio-visual outlets, resonating intimately with the recipient, distributing its ciphers, symbols and theatrical connotations in a balanced manner in the body of the scenography and its margins, and in the dimensions, angles and middle of the stage, as if he wanted to dominate the ideas that oppose the ambition of those loyal to their homelands, an ambition imbued by the text vertically and horizontally with all its implications, ends and indications .
The show was also distinguished by its dazzling “calligraphy” aspect that relied on body rhythms, kinetic improvisation, expressions of gesticulation and melancholy parade, despite the comic interludes that mitigated the internal torment of the chorus of marginalized and displaced people from the homeland of their childhood and the land of their memories.
The main characters were also distinguished by their confident performance, whether in filling the voids of theatrical formation with an interactive presence and aesthetic formation, or in their ability to fulfill the narrative side what it deserves of care through alternating degrees of voice between high and low depending on the situation and situation during dialogue with oneself or with the other, and according to the fluctuating rhythm Between narration and poetry, in order to serve the performance system in general in the atmosphere of the show with its various paths and transformations, and we mention among these actors: Salah Muhammad Saeed, Faisal Ali, Mahmoud Al-Qattan, Noura Ali, Khalifa Nasser, Saleh Muhammad, Hussein Saeed, Dalal Al-Sharaibi, and Ali Al-Zarouni, In addition to the choir, which contributed to the enrichment of the scenery and inspiration, and to reinforce the elements of theatrical spectacle.
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