Workshop: Antigone of Syria

As part of the staging of the production “While I was waiting”, the Syrian director Omar Abusaada is running a theatre workshop in which adult participants approach classic texts by means of a contemporary methodology.

Here is a note the director wrote about the workshop:
“Late in 2013, I ran a project in Jordan with Syrian refugees who had no prior experience of theatre. We worked together around Euripides’ ‘Trojan Women’, and the end result was the production ‘Syrian Trojan Women’.

The following year, I repeated the same project in the Shatila refugee camp in Beirut, where we chose to work on Sophocles’ ‘Antigone’.

At this workshop in Athens, we will be focusing on what it is exactly that allows us to use and reinterpret the ancient texts in order to tackle political issues of our times. We will engage in a thorough analysis of the methodology used to process the texts in these projects, and we will also be looking at certain core techniques and tools we can use to rework ancient works in a contemporary way, using the women’s stories as documents relating to the war in Syria. I feel that reworking ancient tragedies using contemporary authorial and directorial means creates the distance we need to design and present topical artistic works which respond to the complex conditions of the world today.”