While I was waiting / FOCUS: SYRIA

Location: Damascus, Syria, on the brink of collapse. Time: 2015, the fifth year of the bloody civil war. Young Thaim is mercilessly beaten at one of the dozens of military checkpoints in the city and taken to hospital in a coma. It is the second tragedy to befall his family--the first was his father’s death--, and it brings his loved ones face to face with agonizing questions and painful revelations.

Deep in coma, on the cusp between consciousness and unconsciousness, Thaim imagines himself a mute observer of both his family crisis and the sweeping changes that are so rapidly transforming his country into a no man's land. Nothing will ever be the same again.
Five years on from their participation in Meeting Points 6, the contemporary art festival dedicated to the Arab Spring, the Syrian director Omar Abusaada and his long-time collaborator, the author Mohammad Al Atar, return to the Onassis Stegi to explore anew an existential struggle that is creating traumatic conditions such as absence, waiting and the need to belong. Situated in the grey zone between documentary and devised theatre and making use of audio-visual media and archive material, Abusaada acknowledges a country’s contemporary history in a work of fiction. Neither alive nor touched by death, Thaim is an intermediate grey zone personified as he teeters painfully between hope and desperation.

Born in Damascus, Omar Abusaada sees political theatre as an act of resistance, even though, as he says, “its values failed to be implemented when that was still possible”. His theatre also operates as a potential for recording History as it poses the question once again: how can fiction impact on a war-torn reality? For the dramatic needs of “While I was waiting”, the director spoke both to doctors and to families with loved ones in a coma in order to more fully understand the workings of a human body that has shut itself down. His production is just as much an intervention as a rescue mission in a war zone.