A long street lined on its sides with a group of cafés extending along the street to its end. These cafés witness gatherings of friends to talk about art and theatre. Specters of people flock to Habib Bourguiba Street in Tunis to enjoy and watch the performances of the Carthage Days of Theater Festival until the street becomes as if A small cosmopolitan city, in this atmosphere full of art and creativity, Habib Bourguiba Street did not stop receiving delegations, as it is a meeting point for creative people, where an open outdoor theater was built. It was designated to receive street theater performances and traditional music performances, so that Tunisia was filled with art and music throughout the festival’s activities, as if this street had turned into a major arena bursting with arts of all their diversity and cultural backgrounds. The festival brings together multiple types of theatrical works and types from cultures and countries that do not share geographical borders, while they were brought together by creativity. In this place, you will meet different types of people, whether participating in their theatrical work within its activities or coming as guests to follow these important, non-recurring activities in a theatrical festival. Another.
Habib Bourguiba Street is distinguished by its hosting of the largest number of theaters in Tunisia. These theaters have realized the necessity of holding an intimate meeting between people to engage in conversations and fruitful viewing. In Carthage, you will not see… Just a passing viewing, but you have to talk and think about what you saw, and therefore most of Tunisia’s theaters contained a good number of cafes attached to them to facilitate ways of friendship and acquaintance between the attendees. Among these theaters, distinguished in their artistic architecture and spaces, are the Municipal Theater, which is more than a hundred years old, which is located in the middle of Habib Bourguiba Street, the Rio Cinema Theater, the World Cup, the Fourth Art, Ibn Rashiq Hall, Ibn Khaldoun Hall, and the Hamra Cinema Theater. Then the festival’s activities branched out into Theaters adjacent to this busy street, such as the Teatro Theater, Lartisto, the Tunisian National Theater, and finally the City of Culture Theater, the Opera Hall, which includes more than one theater hall inside it.
Case Among the exceptional pleasures experienced by the audience and guests of the Carthage Theater Days Festival in its twenty-fifth session is the joy of racing to book and attend theatrical performances that were crowded with audiences until the halls were filled to capacity, then the joy of meeting creative people from Arab, African and European countries. You will not find a theater hall empty of audiences and if you are bad… If you are lucky and you are not able to book your priority viewing shows, you will not be able to find an empty seat, which reflects something very important: the intensity of awareness of the Tunisian public among non-practitioners. For the artistic process…with “theatre” An audience with an abundance of awareness of the culture of theatrical viewing, despite the different types and forms of participating performances, different dialects and multiple languages. The audiences were remarkably keen to attend these very diverse and different performances, whether the Chinese theater show “The Return of the Star” Or African theater performances and performances from Arab and European countries. You will not find a Qadam website and you will not be able to book if you do not seek to book your shows early. This is the largest festival in the Arab region and its shows carry a full logo, but perhaps the only reason in this context is that there is a crisis due to the lack of translation sometimes. With this huge influx of shows, some works in different languages did not provide Arabic, English, or sometimes French translations for the Arabic shows, which made it difficult for many to communicate with a good number of shows. The festival!
«The Return of the Star»
The festival opened its activities with the Chinese show «The Return of the Star» In which its makers showcased the extent of technical development, artistic proficiency, and mastery in practicing this development, the work was not just a traditional dramatic theatrical performance, devoid of drama, and relied on the idea and how to employ this idea to showcase the technical superiority and excellence in presenting highly precise group scenes and mastery in the motor and vocal performance of the makers. The artwork is presented by artist Lemmy Bonifacio, who has been working for thirty years to introduce the culture of indigenous communities around the world. He puts the viewer in a state of amazement and confusion with a different artistic proposal. It mixes the cultures of the ancient peoples of China and presents ritual forms as a spiritual invitation to thought and contemplation, and mixes them with contemporary artistic forms in the style and method of artistic treatment that tended to use modern techniques in portraying this star, who is expected to return in a wonderful scene that is extremely dazzling and difficult to implement. On stage we see… Behind a transparent curtain, an astronaut seemed to have broken through the Earth’s gravitational barrier on stage, flying slowly in this vast space, freed from the law of Earth’s gravity, as if the scene of ascension into space was embodied alive on the stage, which sparked The audience’s admiration and astonishment at this artistic work that ritually displays man’s relationship with planet Earth and his search for life in another world, perhaps farther and more welcoming than this planet crowded with humans!
From the performances of the World Theater, the special show “Poor Lisa” was also presented within the festival’s activities.
“Poor Lisa” ; Similar to international opera performances that contain tragic love stories that are simple in content and deep in meaning, but rely primarily on sung dialogue, a form of musical theater. Russian director Mark Rozovsky presented a quote from the story of “Poor Lisa.” Written by the Russian writer Nikolai Karamzina, it is one of the classics of love in Russian literature. The play tells a love story between the poor peasant girl Lisa and one of the noblemen, Ernest. The two lovers live a state of love full of hope, desire, longing, and passion until the lover gets bored of it, and begins to give priority to the social differences between them and retracts his decision to… Marrying her, Lisa commits suicide at the end of the show out of grief over her lover’s ingratitude. This romantic story is close to the story of Romeo and Juliet. William Shakespeare, in a wonderful lyrical form, performed these dialogue clips, sung by the heroes of the show, with sweetness and great creativity. The audience enjoyed watching this musical work, despite the difference in language. However, the singing clips in Russian did not deprive the audience of the pleasure of listening to the show’s singers, whose voices varied and varied in degrees. They gathered together. Together in one vocal unit, they formed a group singing work of great beauty and mastery, and its makers were keen to translate the show. Completely.
«limits»
“limits” It was presented on the stage of the National Theater, which is a joint production between Tunisia and Italy. It is a dance work that deals with the idea of a group of people who tried to overcome the borders that they had to cross and the challenges they faced in staying or crossing borders farther from the homeland in collective movement formations that initially combined the screen. The cinematic film, in which the dancers cross rocky mountainous areas as if they were passing from one place to another, then the space that was allocated for them on the stage in the middle of the audience and which was covered with sand, the heroes of the work danced on it among those sands that form On the ground, everyone presented various collective movement formations. The movement performances varied and differed between each individual. Not everyone committed to one movement as if they embodied the difference that brought them together in one unit. It was a well-crafted artistic display, whether in movement or vocal performance that did not depend on the music that accompanies the performances. Traditional dance, while an audio tape of the desert’s desolation encapsulated the work to confirm the state of disorientation and desertification experienced by those crossing the distant borders!
«Hedi’s Faces Lamarr»
In this work, director and puppeteer Kay Schumacher presents the dreamy and dramatic life of Hedwig Kelser, known as Hedy Lamarr, this young Austrian woman who was able to carve an artistic career in Hollywood, the story of a woman with many faces. She is a fashion icon, a film actress, and a charming and charming woman. With her face like no other, she is also the victim and the monster at the same time and her intelligence is often underestimated, Hedy Lamarr is… A face, a mask, and sometimes features that hide facts about her life. This is how the creators of the work summarized its idea. From this philosophy, the show started by moving a huge doll closer to a human doll, which the heroine wears in front of the audience, embodying her movements, gestures, and words, as if that doll turned into a living being on stage, and then a group of small dolls. The actor and actress manipulate between moving, acting, playing music, and the movie screen in the background of the stage to show scenes from the life of Hedy Lamarr with precision and mastery between puppet play and dialogue. Perhaps it was… The oldest bride is the most striking and powerful bride in the show, as the heroine excelled in embodying her spirit with intelligence and great proficiency, as if it were an integral part of her.
«estrangement»
An artistic show inspired by the poetic worlds of Thomas Eliot. Which translated the feelings of human fear in a consumer world that has abandoned its humanity. The work embodies a day in the life of a person living in the city in the twenty-first century, where the lives of ordinary people are limited to work. It is summed up in the distance they travel between home and the workplace, a miserable and terrifying world dominated by consumerism, which has become more like a strange being similar to a human in appearance but devoid of emotion. The heroes of the work wore similar masks, they all move in one automatic movement, meeting and separating over things in a crowd sometimes. At the speed of catching something they might miss, it is a theatrical situation closer to the mass hysteria of a very specific work created by this work that relied on mechanical, mechanical movement performance between its heroes and these lonely masks. The sign on the open stage on Habib Bourguiba Street, the heroes of the work moved among the crowds in this formal form with unknown features. All of them had their features faded, as if they had become one person suffering from this crushing, merciless consumer life, and everyone was transformed into distorted beings moving in one unchanging movement pattern, devoid of feelings. Or the features that distinguish human beings, a philosophical vision that was embodied in simplicity and mastery among the crowd of passers-by on the street without the need for theater or huge techniques. The heroism was in the depth and simplicity of the idea. Implementation.
This was a quick overview of the World Theater performances that participated within the activities of the Carthage Theater Days in its twenty-fifth session. The festival did not stop at these performances, while… His schedule was crowded with countless theatrical performances, whether the official competition performances, which varied between 12 theatrical performances from Tunisia and sister Arab countries, including “Sky Dance” performances; Tunisia, “Bukhara” Tunisia, “The Lover” Palestine, “Monday at night” Lebanon, “Abu Abdullah’s House” Iraq, “free zone” Boys, “doctor after death” Senegal, “Between Two Hearts” Qatar, “O you who ascend the mountain” Jordan, “La Victoria” Morocco, “How do we forgive us” UAE, “End Game” In Egypt, the technical level of the competition shows varied, most of which were not up to expectations, as non-competition shows at the festival, whether in the Tunisian theater or the World Theater, outperformed most of the official competition shows.
In the same context, there were many participating theatrical events and works that did not There is enough space to mention them all, as the festival’s themes were not limited to just international performances and an official competition, but rather it had many artistic themes and paths, all of which triumphed in the festival’s basic theme “Art is Resistance.” And “Theatre for Humanity&rdquo” Among these themes are the performances of the Freedom Theater “Prison Theater” This axis is mainly concerned with the diverse productions of the prison theater of men, women and children, which is the axis that is unique to Tunisia in its theater festival, which emphasizes the integration of the elements of society and the rehabilitation and correction of the behavior of its members, then the integration theater “for people with special needs, and school theatre, in addition to Arab and African performances.”
Raising the Days of Carthage as the slogan of art is resistance in support of the Palestinian cause and what Lebanon is suffering from, based on this theme that triumphs for humanity and resistance. The festival’s shows branched out around addressing multi-faceted humanitarian issues, then shows directly dealt with the crisis of the Palestinian issue, such as the Palestinian show “The Lover” and the Jordanian show “O You Who Rise the Mountain.” The first was a celebration of the poems and biography of the poet Mahmoud Darwish. The work mixed his poems and presented paths. Times and places left their mark in his poetry, such as the village of Baradah, Haifa, Beirut, Paris, and the West Bank, and that was the narrative With the acting and singing performance in showcasing the extremely strong and sweet voices of the heroes of the work, “O You Who Climb the Mountain” It combined lyrical narration and storytelling with acting and the kinetic performance of the heroine of the work, and the voices of the heroes and the live music playing had the strongest presence in the artistic work. The festival also celebrated the Syrian theater by organizing a symposium that reviewed its history and industry. The festival honored the artist Duraid Lahham, one of the pioneers of the Syrian theater, who was unable to attend the day of the ceremony for external reasons at the closing ceremony. Of his own free will, he also participated in the activities of this session from Syria, presenting “The Two Refugees” By the Malas brothers, it is a black comedy that embodies the relationship between two people who took refuge in France to escape their countries.
