Orient the Day, Beirut in the Work of Ibsen
Two Lebanese theatre companies coming from distinctly different theatre traditions were commissioned to start a dialogue with the Norwegian writer, Henrik Ibsen. The question is: “In what ways does Ibsen present us with a framework to address issues that are urgent in Lebanon today?”
Those two theatrical commissions became an opportunity for inviting major theatre and academic practitioners from the region as well as from abroad to also participate in this debate as well as invite local professionals to participate in a workshop on dramaturgy.
The question is not so much if we in Lebanon need Ibsen. Rather, we see this as an invitation to think about theatre by revisiting one of its most important modern poets. The event is an effort to make a modest contribution to a practice that must grapple with an institutional structure that remains largely hostile to theatre and to cultural life in general. To think Ibsen, is also to think how this exiled poet who quarreled with Norway all his life had to live precariously, with financial trouble and unstable institutional backing.
To start a dialogue with Ibsen means to join a transnational debate about the art of living with Others in our world today. Not only because of Ibsen’s popularity in world theatres, but because Ibsen steers the gaze towards the ethics of society-building and demands the spectator think up new ways of coming together, in a larger community, a community much larger than the present narrowness of identity formations.
