Theatre and Performance Studies Commons^™

Des Arbres Comme Des Lignes De Vie – Pascale Cassagnau Et Suhaib Gasmelbari En Conversation, Pascale Cassagnau, Suhaib Gasmelbari

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As part of a study day organized in September 2025 at the University of Grenoble Alpes in partnership with the Centre National des Arts Plastiques entitled “The Loss of Images: Research and Creative Narratives,” Pascale Cassagnau and Suhaib Gasmelbari discussed his film Talking about Trees (2019), focusing on the film’s sources and structure, the history of Sudanese cinema that it reveals within the film itself, and the metaphors of trees and plants as lifelines and living archives at a time when images have disappeared.

Résumé
Dans le cadre d’une journée d’études organisée en septembre 2025 à l’Université Grenoble Alpes en …

Introduction – Carnets Filmiques, Carnets Sonores : Des Essais Intimes Et Collectifs, Robert Bonamy, Aude Fourel, Eve Le Fessant Coussonneau

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Le sens à attribuer à la notion de carnet filmique ou de carnet sonore suscite quelque indécision, en raison du caractère composite et mouvant des cas envisagés. L’enjeu principal ne paraît ainsi pas ici celui d’une définition serrée d’un objet, mais plutôt une attention accordée à des tentatives de réalisation. De surcroît, si la forme-carnet permet à peu près tout, elle n’interdit donc véritablement rien : l’esquisse, le brouillon, l’approximation, voire l’échec et l’interruption.
[...]

Du Journal De Deuil À L’Œuvre De Sépulture : « Lo » (Thanassis Vassiliou, 2021-2025), Marie Martin

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After his mother’s death in 2017, Thanassis Vassiliou returned to Greece and began filming. The instinctive act of recording aimed both to come to terms with the now definitive absence in places still filled with memories, and to document his own reactions, attempting to preserve them even if he could not fully understand them. These filmic notes could perhaps, later on, allow another perspective, according to the dynamic that Antoine Compagnon aptly analyzed as paradoxical in relation to Barthes’s Mourning Diary: “mourning and narrative are antinomic, but [...] only narrative [...] is capable of expressing the experience of mourning, …

« From Ground Zero » Et « Letters » : Carnets Polyphoniques En Quête D’Intersubjectivité, Eve Le Fessant Coussonneau

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The two polyphonic films From Ground Zero (2025, produced by Rashid Masharawi) and Letters (2025, produced by Josef Khallouf) bring together, in response to the war in Gaza, unique short films, letters and chronicles that address collective questions. How do these films take charge of the urgent need to problematize, aesthetically and politically, the relationship between subjectivity and the collective? From the Palestinian enclave or neighboring Lebanon, they seek irreducible singularities and intersubjective connections in the face of the horror of genocide. Caught in a complex combination of places and times, their address to our spectatorial gaze thus reveals the …

Le Vent Du Sud, « La Nuit Et L’Enfant » – Récit D’Une Vidéo-Correspondance Avec Zoheir Mefti, David Yon

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Entre 2011 et 2012, Zoheir Mefti et David Yon ont entretenu une correspondance autour de la réalisation filmique. A travers leurs échanges, ils questionnent la nécessité de l’image. Zoheir Mefti travaille un geste filmique de l’urgence, tandis que David Yon prépare un film en Algérie dans un temps plus long. Après les mots, ils partagent des images et des sons, tels des carnets filmiques, dans lesquels ils donnent leurs positions et interrogent les liens entre la vie et le cinéma.

Carnets De Bord. Tables D’Orientation « Tariq Teguia », Pascale Cassagnau, Tariq Teguia

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This interview by Pascale Cassagnau with Tariq Teguia puts into perspective the Algerian filmmaker’s work notebooks, which are both autonomous objects and working documents, linked to the film itself. A medium for thought, the notebook is a space for language, a score and a cartographic space that gives shape to the writing of the film in a graphic way. A discursive space parallel to the space of scriptwriting, the notebook accompanies the development of the film from its inception, collecting the writing of thought in no particular chronological order.

Résumé
Cet entretien de Pascale Cassagnau avec Tariq Teguia met en …

« Voi(E)X De L’Exil, Formes De La Pensée » : Le Cinéma-Essai De Borhane Alaouié », Elie Yazbek, Farah Alhashem

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This article offers a comprehensive study of Borhane Alaouié’s work, a central figure in modern Lebanese cinema, situating it within the tradition of the essay film. Through an analysis of Lettre d’un temps d’exil, À toi où que tu sois and Khallas, it examines how exile, wounded memory, and fragmentary thought shape the filmmaker’s aesthetic and ethical approach. Exile is explored not only as a geopolitical condition but as an interior state, a persistent uncertainty that structures voices, narratives and images. The study highlights the importance of voice-over, fragmentation, memory-driven editing and epistolary address, while positioning Alaouié’s work …

The Personal Is Collective: Egyptian First-Person – Documentary Cinema As Post-Revolution Diary, Eman Elharmeel

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The 2011 Egyptian revolution marked a watershed moment in the reconfiguration of individuality, autonomy and self-expression within Egyptian society. Challenging long-standing collectivist frameworks, the revolutionary moment opened new spaces for individual agency and subjective reflection. This paper examines how these shifts intersect with the rise of first-person documentary cinema as a powerful medium for articulating post-revolutionary subjectivity in Egypt.
Focusing on The Past Will Return (2015) by Dina Hamza, Happily Ever After (2016) by Nada Riyadh and Ayman El Amir, and Little Eagles (2016) by Mohamed Rashad, the paper analyzes how filmmakers negotiate personal desires, familial pressures and collective belonging …

Triste Souvenir Et Sombre Avenir, « Lettre À Ma Sœur » (2006) De Habiba Djahnine, Boualem Khelifati

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This article explores how Letter to My Sister (2006), a film by director and poet Habiba Djahnine dedicated to her sister Nabila, a democratic and feminist activist who was murdered by Islamist terrorists in Tizi Ouzou in 1995, revisits the fate of the direct and indirect victims of Algeria’s dark decade of the 1990s and the repressive religious and state policies towards women. It employs a narrative structure that combines several film genres – film-letter, film-journey, film-poem, and film-archive – showing situations in which memories and pain are shared, as well as the necessary perpetuation of a struggle that is …

Beyrouth 1978-1982 : Le Fonds Photographique De Monica Maurer – Une Collection Contre L’Oubli Et La Destruction, Aude Fourel

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It was while searching for unused film footage on the Palestinian struggle for a documentary essay that I discovered the filmography of German director Monica Maurer and her work restoring and preserving Palestinian films. For the past four years, we have been working together to digitise and catalogue the photographs and documents she still keeps at home.
I reflect on the paths opened up by the writing of a film in the making, on the formatting of Monica Maurer’s photographic collection, and on the initial prospects for visual and historical studies of this material in the particular context of the …

Sonorisation De L’Anarchive Ou La Palestine Comme Projet Politique – À L’Écoute De « A Fidai Film » De Kamal Aljafari Et De « Partition » De Diana Allan, Judith Abensour

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Kamal Aljafari’s A Fidai Film draws on Palestinian archives confiscated by Israel in Beirut in 1982. Diana Allan created Partition using archives from Mandatory Palestine held at the Imperial War Museum in London. The film notebook not only refers to a type of fragmentary editing, but also allows us to revisit the relationship between sound and image, thus offering an exercise in remembrance in the present. By adding sound to images, the two filmmakers question the contradictions inherent in archives, their erasure or their resistance to authoritative or propagandistic discourse. Thus, under the guise of sensory and sound anthropology for …

Videotracts For Palestine : Images Et Contre-Images, Lola Maupas

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This article examines the political and aesthetic gesture of Videotracts for Palestine, a collective founded on Instagram in November 2023 in the context of the Israeli offensive in Gaza. Heirs to the ciné-tracts of 1968 and, more broadly, to international militant cinema, these very short anonymous films also mobilize contemporary digital tools and produce what might be called a counter-visuality of resistance. The study highlights how the collective situates itself within a tradition of images as weapons of struggle while inventing its own forms, shaped by the massive circulation enabled by the Internet and social media. The videotracts deconstruct …

Des Sons Pour L’Histoire. Correspondance Avec Mohammed Yaghi, Aude Fourel

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Sounds for History. Correspondence with Mohammed Yaghi
Mohammed Yaghi was born in 1992 and trained in sound engineering in Gaza. He has worked for UNRWA television and collaborated with Palestinian and international documentary film production companies.
These sound recordings for films, educational programs and interviews were the first step in the sound diary that he has kept on building on a daily basis.
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Résumé
Mohammed Yaghi est né en 1992 et s’est formé aux métiers du son à Gaza. Il a travaillé à la télévision de l’UNRWA et collaboré avec des maisons de productions palestiniennes et internationales de films …

Introduction – Musiques Au Proche-Orient Après Le Tournant Numérique, Amr Abdelrahim, Thomas Michel, Nicolas Puig

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Le développement des pratiques du do it yourself, l’avènement des home studios et la multiplication des circulations sonores (samples, échantillons sonores, etc.) grâce aux supports numériques et aux plateformes d’écoute ont modifié en profondeur la production musicale au Machreq. Cette introduction dresse le tableau des études produites sur la musique au Proche-Orient depuis l’avènement du numérique au début des années 2000 ; elle passe en revue les différents paradigmes mobilisés et propose une approche centrée notamment sur les Science and Technology Studies pour comprendre le sens des évolutions en cours.
Elle décrit ensuite les différentes contributions qui alimentent ce …

Liminality And Monopoly: Contextualizing The Transformations Within The Egyptian Digital Music Scene After 2013, Fayrouz Karawya

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The echoes of the political upheavals, notably in Egypt post-2011 and elsewhere in the Arab world, have produced a supra-monopolistic structure of music production systems and streaming platforms, reflecting post-revolutionary political strategies amid autocratic restoration across the region. While the digital age initially offered greater freedom and creativity to a rising “mediated dissidence class” and countercultural music currents, post-2013 strategies increasingly instrumentalized digital platforms to impose authoritarian control and restrict musical expression. In parallel, social media platforms, which have become crucial for musical mediation, promotion, and marketing, have mirrored broader social and political polarizations that emerged in the post-2013 period. …

Le Stade Rotana De La Pop Arabe, Pierre France

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Rotana, owned by Saudi prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, has been a central and ambiguous player in the Arab music industry since the 1980s, yet its history remains fragmentary and elusive. More than a simple record label with a defined sound and aesthetic, it stands as an audiovisual group embedded within a large holding company linked to Gulf-style capitalism. Rotana has established a lasting model where music operates in close connection — or dependency, from a more critical perspective — with other economic sectors, shaping both artists’ career paths (conceived as buy/sell transactions and transfer markets) and how songs are produced. …

Contentious Culture: The Convergence And Contestation Of Class And Identity In Egypt’S Mahraganat Scene, Elisa Schouten

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Since its inception in the early 2000s, Mahraganat music has undermined traditional cultural gatekeeping and reshaped Egypt’s music scene, becoming one of the country’s most debated music genres in recent history. This paper aims to examine Mahraganat within the broader context of cultural identity formation and technological developments and contextualize the criticism of the genre and its makers. Building on research conducted in Egypt’s capital between 2019 and 2024, this paper explores the history of cultural gatekeeping and argues that social class lies at the core of the heated debate surrounding Egyptian music and Mahraganat in particular. It shows that …

Brehony Louis, "Palestinian Music In Exile: Voices Of Resistance", Le Caire, Auc Press, 2023 – El Rashidi Yasmine, "Laughter In The Dark: Egypt To The Tune Of Change", New York, Columbia Global Reports, 2023., Amr Abdelrahim

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The contributions of this special issue demonstrate a renewed scholarly interest in popular music in the Middle East in recent years. In the face of resilient Arab authoritarianism and the continuing ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, it is not surprising that many scholars seek to identify a glimmer of hope in the everyday cultural practices of the dominated. The two volumes under consideration are representative of this scholarly impetus, as well as the challenges it must overcome to attain a better understanding of “music in everyday life”: namely articulating art and politics without collapsing one into the other, and resisting …

The Independent Music Scene In The Levant Between 2003 And 2023: Do-It-Yourself With The Support Of Arts And Culture Organizations, Areej Abou Harb

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The beginning of the 21st century witnessed the rise of the internet and mobile technologies, as well as the expansion of the digital sphere and the emergence of the Do-It-Yourself music. Simultaneously, it experiences significant changes that reshaped the arts and cultural scene in general, and the music production in particular across the Levant. This period marked the institutionalization of arts and culture production and diffusion. It saw the formation of “intermediate” pan-Arab and regional organizations such as Culture Resource (Al-Mawred Al-Thaqafy) and AFAC (The Arab Fund for Arts and Culture), as well as the establishment of small record labels, …

Sonic Acts Of Care: Friendship-Based Networks And Grassroots Activism In Beirut, Rim J. Irscheid

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The article examines a Beirut-based network of self-funded, independent musicians that translate memories and their emotions into artistic and activist practices. Drawing on musical albums created since the 2020 Beirut port explosion, the article explores the social and emotional impact of artist-run spaces for music production. Focusing on a friendship-based network around the collectively-run recording studio Tunefork Studios, it examines how care, trust, and solidarity with Lebanon’s citizens and music producers are translated into both their creative practices and their production and distribution strategies. I argue that Beirut-based musicians increasingly thematise the emotional toll and personal investment in political, infrastructural …

Promouvoir Son Image Et « Se Faire Un Nom » Dans La Scène Rap Proche-Orientale : L’Exemple De Soundcloud, Thomas Michel

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This article examines the role of the SoundCloud platform in building careers for independent rappers and producers in the Middle East, particularly in Jordan and Palestine. Based on an ethnographic survey conducted between Amman and Jerusalem, the author analyses how artists use this platform to make themselves known, distribute their music, and navigate a digitized musical ecosystem. The study draws on Popular Music Studies and studies of digital platforms to examine three main areas.
The first concerns visibility, through the recommendation tools and playlists offered by SoundCloud, which provide local and international exposure. The second looks at the forms of …

The Tragic Outlaw Hero In Modern Egyptian Fiction: A Case Study On Naguib Mahfouz’S "The Thief And The Dogs", Manar Ellethy

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This article examines the outlaw figure in modern Egyptian fiction

through the lens of the conceptual framework of social banditry and classical

tragedy. It offers a unique angle of analysis of one of Mahfouz’s most prolific

works that emerges in times of growing political anxiety following the Egyptian

Revolution of 1952. Reading the 1962 film adaptation of Naguib Mahfouz’s The

Thief and the Dogs directed by Kamal El-Sheikh as a projection of the socio-

political uncertainty of the post-revolution Nasser era, this paper considers the

outlaw figure within the condition of social alienation. Using the conceptual

borders set by Eric …

A Polyphonic Adaptation: Noir Sensibilities In Naguib Mahfouz And Salah Abu Seif’S Take On Émile Zola’S "Thérèse Raquin", Fadi Awad Elsaid

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In 1951, Salah Abu-Seif directed Lak Yūm yā ẓālim (Your Day Is Coming) – scripted by Naguib Mahfouz – adapting Émile Zola’s Thérèse Raquin (1867). In their third collaboration, Abu-Seif and Mahfouz went beyond merely adapting Zola’s novel – they also incorporated traits and techniques from film noir, creating what this article terms a “polyphonic adaptation” that draws from multiple sources. While their partnership is often credited with pioneering realism in Egyptian cinema, this article argues that the film’s crime-thriller elements invite a reassessment of that narrative. Although adapting French novels was common in pre-1952 Egyptian cinema, their …

The 1953 Codes: Rayyā And Sakīna On Screen (1953-2005), Elena Chiti

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This paper examines on-screen representations of female criminals. It focuses on Rayyā and Sakīna, two sisters who were arrested in Egypt in 1920 and executed in 1921. Since 1953, the sisters have inspired movies and TV series that have entrenched their myth in popular culture. Rayyā and Sakīna are at the core of narratives that bear moral imperatives on societal issues, such as the place of women in society and the relation of the nation to its margins. I will argue that, until a recent off-screen resignification, Rayyā and Sakīna have not been deeply resignified in Egyptian movies. Instead, they …

Lutter Contre L’Effacement Et Pour La Reconstitution De Traces : « Penser Entre Les Disciplines », Lara Mroué

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Living outside Lebanon, Lebanese artists like Rabih Mroué and Lina Majdalanie have contributed in many ways to the evolution and reconstruction of the cultural and artistic scene in Lebanon, as well as to its history. They took part in the shaping of Civil War memory. This article will analyze the way in which these artists put on stage absence, disappearance, and the erasure of traces, while transforming contemporary artistic practice in Lebanon. Rethinking creation as a field of resistance and change, the artist on stage becomes, with Majdalanie and Mroué, an actor, a dancer, and a visual artist.

Résumé

Vivant …

Traduire Novarina En Arabe. Les Mots Sens Dessus Dessous, Georgine Ayoub

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The theater text is always a text to come, according to Valère Novarina’s expression. Once written, it writes itself over and over again on stage. And translating it is always a delicate undertaking. This task becomes even more difficult when the theatrical text is one where the adventure of thought resides in the very act of passing through language – where “a speech from before the ability to speak” emerges, where words, “set in motion,” surprise with unpredictable, incisive meanings, thanks to a mysterious sonority or a tripping up of grammar.
This is the great difficulty in translating Novarina’s theatre …

عن تمويل فنون الأداء المستقلة في المنطقة العربية: في احتضان الجديد, Abdullah Al Kafri

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Nous nous penchons dans cet article sur le sujet des modèles de production et des sources de financement des arts de la scène indépendants, afin d’analyser les questions qu’il génère. Nous examinons son rôle en tant qu’élément fondamental pour l’existence du champ des arts de la scène indépendants durant les deux dernières décennies. Nous tentons de cerner le financement des arts de la scène indépendants dans la région arabe, en nous focalisant sur l’étude des principaux acteurs qui ont joué un rôle clé dans la constitution et l’existence de ce champ, à savoir les organismes donateurs arabes qui ont émergé …

Coopérer Pour Exister : Les Collaborations Théâtrales Avec L’Europe Ou L’Impérative Stratégie Des Théâtres En Palestine, Astrid Chabrat-Kajdan

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Since the Oslo Accords in 1993, theatrical collaborations between European and Palestinian artists have multiplied. They play a role in the development of theatres in Jerusalem and the Palestinian Territories. In this article, we examine their forms and manifestations. The collaborations range from workshops – which consist predominantly of technical classes – to co-creations involving partly European and partly Palestinian teams.
Through the analysis of European–Palestinian theatrical collaborations, this article questions to what extent different forms of collaboration contribute to the key challenges of professional Palestinian theatre: the sustainability of institutions in Palestine, the visibility of Palestinian artists, and the …

Introduction – Quel Avenir Pour Le Théâtre Dans Le Monde Arabe ? Pratiques, Formes Et Perspectives De La Pérennisation Du Courant Théâtral Dans Le Monde Arabe, Najla Nakhlé-Cerruti

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Quel avenir pour le théâtre arabe ? En posant cette vaste question qui a guidé la réflexion collective présentée dans ce dossier thématique, nous avons souhaité interroger les effets de durabilité et les procédés qui participent à la pérennisation du mouvement théâtral dans le monde arabe. Dans ce contexte, les contraintes, nombreuses et de natures diverses, s’ajoutent à la dimension éphémère du genre théâtral. Il se construit en effet sur sa propre mise en péril puisqu’il n’existe que dans la fugacité du moment de la représentation, lorsque les comédiens sur scène et le public dans la salle sont réunis.

Molière Chez Les Hommes De Théâtre De La Nahda Et Tayeb Saddiki, Mahfoud Kecili

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In this paper, we study the presence of Molière in the theatre of Mārūn al-Naqqāš and of Tayeb Saddiki. We show how al-Naqqāš appropriated Molière’s theatre to introduce a new literary genre in the Arab world: Western-style theatre. He employs the comedy and satire of Molière’s theatre as a tool for reflection. In his play al-Baẖīl, he deals with the theme of avarice and that of generational conflicts, which he exposes with a comic vein and satire. In doing so, he urges his fellow citizens to innovate in the arts, drawing from the classical adab and the glorious past …