Catharsis on an Iraqi stage
Play
Drama therapy lifts girls from the morass of trauma
Haneen, who's spent most of her life in orphanages, used to stay weeks locked up in herself, aimlessly eating, watching TV and sleeping through each day. But last week the 13-year-old Iraqi girl was beaming with joy and excitement when the crowd at a Baghdad theatre gave her and her friends a rousing round of applause.
“Now I’m happy. I sing, dance and joke with my friends from the orphanage,” she says. “I’ve changed. People ask me, ‘What happened? Have you gone crazy?’”
What happened was a project set up by the Ruya Foundation for Contemporary Culture in Iraq and aimed at introducing “drama therapy” in a country where almost everybody has suffered some kind of trauma.
The play at the Theatre Forum, an edgy arts centre that opened in a beautiful old building on the banks of the Tigris, was the culmination of a months-long programme.
Six theatre professionals were trained in Beirut by Catharsis, a drama therapy centre led by Zeina Daccache, known for her work with prisoners and migrant workers in Lebanon.
Bassem Altayeb was one of the trainees. He took the lead in helping a small group of teenage girls from the Dar al-Zuhur orphanage in Baghdad put together a play that tackles the issues they face.
“Each one found some confidence and self-esteem, built their character,” he says. “The script is about the girls saying, ‘We too have a right to live, to be protected and have dreams.’”
Onstage, one of the girls puts on an old white-haired man’s mask and, in a disturbing scene filled with doom, takes a young bride still clutching her doll to a nuptial room. From lost childhood and early marriage to social inequalities, the play tackles a range of issues with a spontaneous mix of humour and gritty bluntness.
The young troupe also takes a swipe at politicians and echoed the despair that is driving the country’s youth out of Iraq and onto Europe’s shores, drawing hearty laughter but also a few embarrassed chuckles from the crowd.
“I am proud of them today,” says a misty-eyed Iman Hassoon, the orphanage’s principal, after the show. “I sometimes get men coming to the orphanage asking to adopt one of the girls” – but she always refuses because she’s afraid they’ll end up enslaved as maids or used for prostitution.
“I hope they can use the energy they found with this play to protect themselves and carve a place of their own in society,” Hassoon says.
For decades Iraqis have been battered in turn by dictatorship, economic sanctions, foreign and civil conflicts – sometimes several of those at the same time. Violence continues to be omnipresent, with car bomb massacres and beheadings sowing death and fear across the country, while the chaos has also allowed thieves, extortionists and traffickers to prosper.
The drama-therapy project explores a way of “addressing people and their problems in an extremely damaged society such as Iraq, that has experienced so much trauma and violence”, says Tamara Chalabi, chair of the Ruya Foundation.
“Iraq is a society for men, not really for women. These girls are particularly vulnerable,” adds Furat al-Jamil, an Iraqi-German artist who also works with Ruya.
“The first time the Ruya Foundation visited the orphanage, the girls were very shy – they were hiding, all of them wore scarves. Now you see them liberated from a lot of inhibitions,” Jamil says.
After the play, the girls themselves can hardly believe their own transformation. Ruqayyeh, an elfish 13-year-old who played the child bride, bursts into tears when the lights come back on and the audience stands to applaud.
“I’d always dreamed of being an actress, of being on stage, but I used to be depressed and bored and nobody liked hanging out with me. Now everything’s changed and the girls love me.”
