Art at the End of the Tunnel
Art at the End of the Tunnel: Exploding Head and the Phenomenon of the Horizontal Proliferation of Culture
Sikka, Dr. Rashid Mustafa Bakhit
Translated by: Salah Mohamed Khair
As the war entered its second month, dispersed displace people caught their breath in new cities outside Khartoum. Cultural actors and artists in these cities initiated works and artistic and cultural initiatives. These works and initiatives were mostly aimed at liberating the city's public spaces from militarization and the discourse that supports death and blatantly advocates its continuation. As an example, the initiative of the Shorouq Cultural Forum in the eastern city of Al-Gadaref, launched a series of intellectual and artistic activities supporting the cessation of war through a regular forum that began on June 5, 2023 and hosted significant events, under the slogan: "We love life if we find a way to it." The Awad Mashawi Cultural Center was active in organizing singing evenings in the same period. The Mafroush Initiative (an initiative of book exchange and promotion of the culture of reading) began to appear on the streets of the city afterwards. Later, the City Theatre organized sparse works in support of peace.
The poet and journalist, Hatim Al-Kinani, wrote in a previous report on the Raseef Electronic Website that, from 17 to 22 June, initial campaigns were held. Soon, these initiatives evolved and moved to other cities on a quest to restore civil space and uphold the gains of the glorious December Revolution in freedom and siding with the values of peace and the cessation of war. Contrary to what has been accustomed to within the inherited centralized pattern of cultural art, Sudan's various cities and regions have significantly embraced various cultural activities and events in the meantime. The free theatre festival was held in the southern city of Kosti, where its performances were made at one of the shelters of displaced persons, coming from Khartoum. In the eastern city of Port Sudan, which embraced many of Khartoum creators, the Sudanese Plastic Artists Union was able to hold a drawing workshop for children, and the theatrical works were active on the stage of the Writers and Singers Union and the clubs of the city. Plastic art exhibitions and workshops of musical composition and singing were organized and produced various works of solo singing, choral singing, and contributed to the establishment of the city's choral. In the same framework, the Al-Raseef Theatre Group made a theatrical performance in addition to the series of its theatrical performance, which was the theatrical work, entitled "A Street Vendor". The Group has launched live performances of the series entitled "Hankal and Hoopa", which is written in the Beja language and translated into Arabic, and then produces a new performance shortly afterwards. The theatre director, Atta Shams Al-Deen, presented the first performance of the play entitle "Tales or War and Peace" at the theatre of Kamboni School in Port Sudan. The Solution is in Art Initiative was active in the city, and a large number of activities were held in the face of the reality of war and displacement in popular neighborhoods clubs. The Habashakat Theatre Group presented a new work, entitled "In Between", on the stage of the Writers and Singers Union on October 9, 2023. The play was written and directed by Osama Maksab, and acted by Amir Hassan Amir, Mohamed Nour Yaagoub, Ahmed Idris, Wadia Abdulrahim, Hana Osama, and Mayar Osman.
The city of Al-Fasher, covered by the scope of war, was the first city where the theatrical works appeared. This was a striking and pioneering experiment from the creators of North Darfur who paid attention to the active role of the interactive theatre in approaching daily issues hate speech and peacebuilding among communities through artistic and innovative forms. In this field, several interactive performances were presented in the Abdulsalam Health center on May 5, 2023 in Al-Fasher. These performances shared the audience their critical moments in search for medical treatment.
The city of Port Sudan has been characterized by a significant activity in all artistic activities, and its brutal summer and humidity made it sweat with art and vitality. Even the theatre and cinema were active besides works of music, plastic art, performance, singing and cultural symposiums. On Thursday, August 17, 2023, the director Mahir Sayed replayed his outstanding performance, entitled: "Overhear, Abdulsamia!" on the stage of the Writers and Singers Union in Port Sudan. The text of this play was written by the Moroccan playwright Abddulkareem Barsheed, the roles were performed by the actor Qasim Arabi and the actress Amina Fathi, the scenography was prepared by Sahir Mustapha, and Alaa Al-Deen Rehan and Zaytouna worked as assistant directors.
In the ancient city of Sinnar, southeastern Sudan, a number of the founders of the Sinnar Literary Association, headed by Nabil Ghali, have worked to re-establish the Association and revive its reputation once again to absorb talents from the young female writers and writers of the city. Part of the members had returned from the capital, after the outbreak of war, and met with a number of the Association's founders and the new members to from the constituent office. The Association selected the writer, Salah Galadima, as general secretary and Nabil Ghali as president. The Association is working to write a constitution that accommodates the change that occurred in more than three decades, after being established in the 1970's. This was followed by several activities of the Nirvana Foundation, which organized an important series of symposiums and workshops in the same city in different cultural fields adjacent to writing, such as the writing passion workshop or the music industry workshop, which predict immersive activities for the youth of the city with Nirvana.
In the city of Al-Kamlein, the cultural director of the Goethe Institute, Sahar Abdulazeim, launched the New Beginning Initiative that initiated its activity in the displaced persons' shelters in Al-Kamlein with the performance of puppet theatre and an atelier for children on July 9, 2023. The flute player, Mohamed Marzouq, Mutadi Al-Halawi, Mohamed Abdulrahman and others participated in the initiative. Then, the initiative continued its work in more than one direction and organized a distinguished bazaar for heritage industries and handcrafts created by women and women of the shelter centers in the city.
Similarly, the cultural activity in the Blue Nile State has also been significantly active, where the State hosted the distinguished theatre director, Walid Al-Alfi, in a workshop about the theatrical industry. The hard work of this workshop resulted in a dazzling theatrical performance, with the active participation of the sons and daughters of the State. The director repeated the same experiment in the city of Al-Gadarif in a small way, before been reunited with his family in the city of Port Sudan, long months after that workshop held in the Blue Nile State. The opportunity will be favorable for the director to hold in participation of the young people of Al-Raseef Group and the Sudan Film Institute the same acting performance workshop, which he held before and created a good impact for all participants. The Fawi Films Foundation also organized its first workshop on cinema effect in the city. The Sudan Film Institute hosted other events. Session of the Country of Light Festival, held in the northern city of Al-Damar, saw the performance of a monodrama by the able actor Abdulrahman Al-Shibli as a part of the events of the festival.
To a lesser extent than it used to be, the spaces of the city of Wad Madeni have not seen the cultural promotion that characterized the rest of the Sudanese cities. The hospitality of the city to displaced persons was characterized by greed, resulting from the intensity of congestion in the early days of war, where the number of the shelter centers has amounted to 600 centers. These centers included among their displaced persons a number of singers, journalists, actors and directors. The director Izzaldeen Kojack, who is the son of Wad Madeni, presented an interactive theatre experiment as a part of his experiment tagged with "Theatre of the Cart." A group of actors combined their efforts with the director Rabia Yousef to direct a new play entitled "Barricades." But the most prominent activity, besides these works, is the return of the Al-Waraqeen Book Fair. This fair was organized by Al-Musawarat publishing House, in collaboration with the Al-Waraqeen Bookshop at the lounge of the Bar Association in Madeni within the memorial service of the late poet, Mohamed Muhie Al-Deen. In a context similar to the experiment of Mafroush in the city of Al-Gadaref and the return of the Al-Waraqeen Book Fair, the Maarifiyoun Movement organized a book fair in the city of Kadugli from 20 to 24 September 2023 in the courtyard of the Love and Peace Radio in the city.
The Al-Waraqeen Bookshop and the Al-Musawarat Publishing House issued a statement announcing their organization of this fair which intends to go around more than one city, after being held in Madeni, which was described by the statement issued in Madameek as "the last supper." The statement stated that "Surviving war requires expanding the horizon of knowledge and the possibility of imagining a better world. Sophisticated consideration, future establishment, and horizons of choice are the components of the civil struggle in our country."
The journalist Osman Al-Assbat wrote on the website of Independent Arabia about another theatrical initiative, in the city of Wad Medani, that would use psychodrama in its work within the shelter centers of the displaced persons, with the participation of various theatre and drama stars. He wrote: "The initiative of some Sudanese actors represents a different picture from the one that was formed by those fleeing the inferno of war about the reality of war and the horror of bullets through simple plays full of life, hope and a bright future. The works of the dramatists are not limited to introducing works of arts, but it goes beyond to discovering talented young people and nurturing them to join the theatrical groups, after the war stopped. The plays discuss real stories about the situations of the displaced persons, where the actors participated in the portrayal of characters reflecting the challenges they face and ways to provide support and treatment that help them recover.
The most interesting event during this period of the Khartoum War and the phenomenon of the horizontal proliferation of culture was that the son and daughters of The White Nile Culture and Arts Organization proceeded to reopen and rehabilitate the Ahlia Cinema in the city of Kosti on August 10, 2023, after a break of 20 years. The cinema was open in 1951 by the assistant inspector of the Kosti Center, the late Sharf Al-Deen Afendi Mohamed.
In the city of Rabak, an interactive theatre initiative was also active within the "We Are All Values Initiative", supervising the feeding and accommodation of many centers. This initiative is led by the famous actor Hassan Osama, known as Al-Shain. The initiative carried out its initial activity at the beginning of October 2023. It joined the procession of flourishing theatrical activities and played a dual-tasking role, as the present report will emphasize.
Traveling and Dramatization of the Diaspora in the City of Al-Damazein
Artists were first confronted, during this war, with the question: "Is Art a luxury or an existential necessity?" When the city skies were covered with the smoke of gunpowder, some people think there is no place for art. Therefore, among their many confrontations, the dramatists faced this question with practical answers emphasizing another role that is resistant, enlightening and rooted in the place with all its existential facts. The place is the empty space that regathers the people after their gathering was completely thrown down by the war, and the daily need of the people in Khartoum has become searching for arms to dig the graves.
Later in the same war, the director, Walid Al-Alfi, was displaced from the neighborhood of Umbada, in Omdurman, to the city of Al-Damazein, in the Blue Nile State. The director planned a long theatre workshop to be carried out with the help of some friends. They called this workshop "Workshop of the Performance Industry", and it had met unprecedented turnout. It was first agreed that participation should be limited to between 15 and 20 participants at the most, and it was subsequently agreed that the workshop would include 25 participants. When the workshop began, there were 37 participants, including more the 10 musicians and popular singers. Participation was based on linguistic diversity among the local languages in the city of Al-Damazein.
Walid Al-Alfi has an extensive experience in training in the industry of performance, according to his own approach which based on the principle of environmental adaptation and activation of the imagination. The director is interested in the various components of the performance that include lighting, décor, exercises and makeup derived from harmless and environmentally friendly substances.
During two weeks of hard and connected training, the workshop produced a theatrical performance carried the image of the reality of displacement and diaspora to the show ground, through the simple idea of travel. A range of travel buses was designed; with each one of them had a destination that was different from the other. The actors come together with the audience, when they climb the bus is the place where they sit to watch the performance, at the same time. Local languages take the audience to new places outside this bus station that represents the moments of travel, migration and diaspora. The use of local languages has found public satisfaction, and sent a sudden delighted sense of comfort, after the cruelty shown by the performance in the portrayal of the diaspora moment, and firmly established it in the mind of the audience due to the war that is present in the place and time.
Replacement of the Identity of Displacement and Dramatization of the Avarice in the City of Wad Medani
One of the inspiring theatrical experiments after the war, in the city of Wad Medanin, was the experiment of "The Building of Theatrical Performance Workshop" that came to light in one of the shelters in the city, which was Azza Shelter. This experiment came against the backdrop of the meeting of a number of directors and theatre actors from Wad Medani, such as the actor Muatasim Al-Jabour, Anwar Hassan, and the actor Nasr Al-Deen Abdallah. This group joined some displaced actors from Khartoum, among them the director Rabia Yousef Hassan, Abbas Al-Lafeef, Ghadeer Merghani, Muzdalifa Al-Haj, Mohamed Wad Al-Bahar and the assistant director Maysara Hassan Bakhit.
The theatre director, Rabia Yousef says about the theatrical performance, entitled "Barricades":
"From the same memory of the displaced persons, we produced the performance entitled "Barricades.", where we have attempted to move the audience from being displaced persons waiting for something that will never happen to the creation of the identity of the action in the new place, according to known circumstances. It was our concern to preserve the identity of cultural resistance on the basis of the location of theatre, without waiving our right to expose the political dimensions. We experienced security difficulties in obtaining permits to perform the work in other shelters, after the performance was attended by a very large audience at the first two performances in Azza Shelter."
The premiere of the play was performed at the Palace of Culture in the city of Wad Medani, at the beginning of July 2023.
In October, when the war was about to complete its sixth month, the play entitled "Taking a New Way" revisited the problem of the displaced persons themselves and the story of the human exploitation and avarice they were subjected to, after being kept away from their home and displaced in the city of Wad Medani in groups and individually.
Awad Shakespeare, Ussama Jinkis and a group of theatre stars starred the play. The play was written and directed by Omar Al-Haj. The play is a social and comic play whose basic idea is to depict and dramatize a family exit from Khartoum to Wad Medani. The family is being extorted by crisis traders with regard to travel, housing cost, and other survival necessities. The play also addresses comically the internal conflict of the family that swings between leaving the country and heading to the country's states. The play also discusses the illusions of travel to Europe and America and migration beyond the borders. The play presents a panorama of the city with its history, figures, and residential neighborhoods. At the end of the play, the family decides that the solution lies in the production, and begins its new journey by farming a plot of land. Funny things happened during the rehearsals of the play at the Al-Jazeera Club, in the city of Wad Medani. The team noticed that the audience began to form the audience of a real performance, while the team was in the process of memorizing the dialogue. In a special briefing to Sikka, director of the performance, Omar Al-Haj, said that "It became out of control in the first week, forcing me to stop performing and working on memorizing the dialogue, while the actors were sitting down. Rehearsals for this performance took more than two months because of displacement conditions, sickness and urgent works that occurred for some actors."
There is another experiment of interactive theatre in the city that was produced and implemented during the fifth month of the war. Atif Al-Bahar, Ghadeer Merghani, Nasr Al-Deen Abdallah, Abas Al-Lafeef, Ayda Ahmed Mohamed, Salma Abdullah, Rabia Yousef Al-Hassan, Muzdalifa Al-Haj, and Mohamed Al-Bahar met on a text discussing the issue of planning for childbirth and safe maternity within the shelter centers and villages. This issue concerns the whole spectrum of society, according to Ghadeer Merghani.
The performance was entitled "Nauoma is Pregnant" and treated in an interactive theatre style. There was an intense discussion during the performance rehearsals that necessitated the participation of a specialized midwife during these discussions. Ghadeer Megrghani, one of the actors participating in this experiment says: "The pleasure of the performance in the shelter centers in Wad Medani was complete with the participation and discussion by the audience. One of the performances was in a center with a number of deaf people and their families, when we were amazed by the interaction we found and the debate that took place." This performance was presented in more than one place during October 2023.
The Dockside of Port Sudan: Theatre and National Political Limbo
The city of Port Sudan was active in many cultural and artistic fields before and after the war, and these activities emerged in the number and type of plastic arts. In addition, the city had three theatrical performances after the war, despite the heat of the scorching summer. There have been many initiatives, plastic art exhibitions, musical works and singing, which will be mentioned in the right place of the present report. As a part of the theatrical works, the Al-Raseef Theatre Group reperformed its distinctive theatrical work entitled "A Street Vendor" at the Writers and Singers Union Theatre on July 20, 2023. The Group also participated in the events of the displaced persons in the city and the clubs of residential neighborhoods with performances of the series entitled "Hankal and Hoopa". After the performance entitled "A Street Vendor", the group produced a new performance entitled "Survival", which was played by Mariam Yousef and Nariman Fayez, written by Mahmoud Talib, musically illustrated by Said Adarob, and directed By Qasim Al-Arabi. The performance of the play entitled "A Street Vendor" addresses the tale of the national limbo that hangs over the skies of the Sudanese politics, after the social success and political failure of the December 2018 Revolution. The characters of the play are represented by five young men and two young women gathered by the desire to escape their dire reality. The young people use one of their acquaintances to reach one of the brokers working in the smuggling of migrants that no such sea voyage can be completed without their presence. The dialogue between the characters is about the reasons of their escape and the symbolic connection of such escape to the reality of projections and manifestations of the state of the broad national crisis, personal ambitions, irrational fluctuation in attitudes, and exclusion! The objective of this sea voyage is different from one person to another, where this problem of the different objective highlights, by necessity, other problems associated with it. Multiplications of the dialogue include intelligent hints, spread between the folds of the sea voyage itself through a comical personification of the political reality. The performance debunks the power and attempts to approach the transformations it makes, by employing the element of comedy on the human, during the paradoxes of the attitudes.
The tale of the voyage ended with these characters sitting in their places on the Red Sea coast, without the coming of their craft of salvation. The young people ended up determining to stay in their positions and confront the problems that call them to escape. They took care of the outcomes of life, whose springs had bubbled up before their eyes, during their short stay on the coast. The performance employed the folk dances and heritage songs as a part of the performance itself. This aesthetic marriage of dance and performance played a role in highlighting the historically diverse cultural maps of the place. The simple wooden décor and the movement of collection have allowed the performance to gain lightness and agility. Despite the simplicity of production and execution, the scenery of it came rich in visual diversity in costumes, décor, accessory, and formation of the collections of dances.
A lot of water has passed over the bridge and displayed the lives, hopes and disappointments of the characters of the play. The reality of the characters became naked before their eyes, and confronted the falsification of their claims in anger. But the future determination, which grew up in the meantime among the wrecks, forced them to refrain from this path that leads to nowhere. The performance ends up with the characters leaving the coast and chanting in a loud voice: "Let us see if we can return the rights/ Let us take our rights/ And return the rights that others have to them." The play was written by Mahmoud Talib, directed by Qasim Al-Arabi, and acted by Mahmoud Talib, Mohamed Hassan Tashbobi, Mohamed Yaagoub, Assim Hashem, Amir Idris, Nariman Fayez, and Mariam Fayez.
Is the War Absurd or Tragic? The City of Al-Daein Replies
Although it has been in an actual war zone more than once like Khartoum at present, it was not surprising that the city of Nyala in South Darfur State was engaged in this horizontal proliferation of culture, art and the activities seeking life, the cessation of war, and the resistance of militarization of the civil space. In this context, came the initiative of Mohsin Mohamad Mahmoud, known as "The library of Knowledge". The library is a free library constructed in the shape of a closed shed, with a tea lady. The library operates when the sounds of bullets stop, and it prevents selling, buying and borrowing. Just you have to order a cup of tea, and don't wish for any moment of fighting.
However, it was strange and remarkable for the city of Al-Daein, in East Darfur, to be active in a large and influential cultural work that was carried out by the Cultural Center in the East Darfur State. As a part of its activities, the Center made a distinct singing theatre performance addressing the state of tragedy caused by the explosion of death in Darfur in general and the East Darfur State in particular. The audience interacted in an influential manner with the scenes of murder, intimidation, sounds of the weapons, and the transition of life from the state of reassurance and work to the state of death and nothingness. A short video of this special performance showed a large audience went into a crying fist as a response to the tales and scenes of this distinct theatrical work. In addition to reinforcing the hypothesis of the horizontal proliferation of culture, this performance also changed the hypothesis of the war generals that this war is "absurd", and shows the tragic dimension of loss, fear, panic, and crying caused by memories and pain. War is not absurd; it is steeped in tragedy and yearns for a new meaning to the world, rising from under this wreckage. Pain teaches us faster, as long as the book could not do this.
October 2023.