Theatre
encounter, residency, creation
France / Iraq / Algeria

With Michel Cerda, director – Haytham Abderrazak, director and actor
Clément Bresson, Noémie Develay, Meriem Medjkane, Hasanain Ali Husseinn : actor. Arafat Sadallah, artistic collaborator and translator – Aboubaker Hamzi: video
Project in partnership with the Oran CCF and " jeune théâtre national."

Each director will work for one week in April 2010 on his "own territory": Baghdad for Haytham Abderrazak and Paris for Michael Cerda, on texts in the language of the other – that is to say Arabic for Michel Cerda and French for Haytham Abderrazak.
The two directors and the team will then meet in residency in Oran, Algeria, for ten days.

The ongoing project between the two directors Haytham Abderrazak (Iraq) and Michael Cerda (France) illustrates the challenge taken on by Siwa. It is an artistic project where two heterogeneous languages seek to enter into an impossible dialogue. This impossibility is compounded by the one-to-one meeting between the artist and the alien text/ text of the other. In a reflection on the structures of violence that underlie every act of appropriation and every use of form (representation), the reading and interpreting of a text brings forth tensions in international relations and exposes the (sometimes destructive) plasticity inherent to being with others and in relation to the world.

In the first edition, the space of encounter was created from a text by the Iraqi author Almadjidi Khazaal, who attempted a poetic translation of Shakespeare's Hamlet. Throughout the entire period the two directors were working together, each spent his time destroying preconceived ideas of the other, and as a result watching his own identity falter.
For this third meeting, during the residency in Oran in Algeria, each director will present his artistic proposition in the language of the other – this is the starting point for reflection. This place of translation is the place of the thinking that Siwa is trying to develop on the questions it began to raise from its first edition. Questions regarding representation in Arabic, Arab artistic creation, the passage from a Western art (theatre, for example) to another culture or another language, the transformations of the symbolic in artistic performance, and so on.

An Algerian video artist, will film this artistic process from a different perspective (that of an Arab spectator) and through images will provide a different angle.