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SKeyes Center for Media and Cultural Freedom - Samir Kassir Foundation

“If you want to understand the culture you have to meet the people”: An interview with Sabine Choucair

Source Beirut
Tuesday , 19 February 2013

“I believe that in order to love a person, to like a person or to accept someone, the easiest way is to know his stories,” says Sabine Choucair, a Lebanese storyteller and art therapist. “That’s what links us together as human beings, not just in Lebanon, but all over the world.”

Choucair spent much of her childhood moving around the mountains of Lebanon due to the Civil War. At fifteen, she moved to Beirut with her family where she finished secondary school and decided to pursue her childhood passion for theatre at Lebanese University.

After graduating from Lebanese University she went on to complete a program at the London International School for Performing Arts where she focused on miming, storytelling, clowning and performing. Later, she also completed a program in social therapy studies.

When Choucair returned from London in 2007 she found it difficult to find people in the theatre scene in Lebanon whose work styles matched her own.

“In university and in school they don’t teach us how to work together,” Choucair says about the education system in Lebanon. The French school system she attended in Lebanon focused on competition and hierarchy whereas the program in London was all about creating something together. “It stopped being in our culture in a way,” she says about working together.

Also, the education system in Lebanon does not cultivate an appreciation for the arts. On the rare occasions that students get to watch or perform in a play it is in a very restricted and structured way. We were not raised on the idea that culture is important to life, Choucair says.  

Choucair grew frustrated with how disinterested most Lebanese people were in theatre. “We were the same three hundred or five hundred people who went to all performances… it made me feel like I don’t want to perform in Lebanon anymore,” she says. “That’s when I decided that maybe I would perform less and work more with people.”

“Theatre has so many amazing tools for discovering the self, getting to know the self and getting to know the other,” Choucair continues. Now, she organizes clown and storytelling workshops for adults and puts on performances for kids. Her workshops are designed for people who want to laugh, who have stressful lives and want to relax, people with psychological difficulties, drug addicts and marginalized communities.

In her workshops Choucair guides activities that help the participants form a group and accept themselves and others despite their imperfections. She has also performed stories and clowning in Palestinian refugee camps and for a recent youth nutrition campaign.

In 2011, Choucair took a one and a half month road trip around Lebanon with Chantal Mailhac, a friend and fellow storyteller, to collect stories. The two were sitting around one night trading books for their storytelling. They were looking at stories from other places and thought, “We don’t know about our country, really,” Choucair says. So, they decided to go collect stories to learn about Lebanon.

 “I’ve read the history of Lebanon. I don’t understand a thing,” Choucair continues. “I don’t understand what happens with politics in this country. It’s so confusing… What I care about is how people are living.”

Choucair and Mailhac received a grant from an Egyptian cultural organization that offers funding for projects throughout the Arab world in order to pay for their travel expenses and set off to collect stories. In a month and a half they gathered around 200 stories from villages all over Lebanon. They called the project “Whispered Tales”.

“We were looking for personal stories to understand the culture, to understand how people lived through the war and to understand how they are still living,” Choucair says. “Not as in they are not dead because of a bomb, but how they are not psychologically (dead).”

One of the stories they collected talks about a woman who went to the tailor during the fighting because she had a dress she wanted to get fixed. She did not care that she had to go through the bombs to make it to the tailor. “She just wanted to get her dress fixed,” Choucair says.

Another story is about a marriage that kept getting postponed because of the war. Every time they would plan for the wedding the fighting would start again, Choucair continues, but the couple really wanted to get married.

“The stories we found were real and very personal,” Choucair says. “It gave us a better idea of how people fought, each in their own way, to get over whatever they were living.”

The stories they collected also showed that people in the south were struggling with the same problems as people in the north during the war. “They just don’t know that this was happening to both of them,” Choucair adds.

After collecting all of the stories, Choucair and Mailhac selected 10 to perform for audiences. They performed the stories at a pub in Hamra, for the deaf and mute community, in a Palestinian refugee camp and in two villages. “We had this idea of performing the stories of the south for the people in the north,” Choucair says, “so people know about each other and how similar their stories are.”

The performances were well received by audience, Choucair continues. The audience in Hamra consisted of the normal group of theatergoers. “The real impact was in the other places where people don’t go to theatre,” she says. Audiences were impressed to know that they had similar stories. After Choucair and Mailhac performed four or five stories, people in the audience would start telling their own.

Choucair says she hopes people came away from the performances knowing that “the other is not an alien. He is a human being who lived just like you. He had the same stories with different details.”

Choucair and Mailhac also took “Whispered Tales” on tour in Portugal and the United States and still perform the stories in different places around Lebanon. In the future, they hope to do some fundraising so they can transcribe all of the stories from their recordings and compile them into a book.

Audiences abroad often asked if the Ministry of Culture in Lebanon was supporting or helping with funding for the project. We had to respond, “No, they aren’t interested,” Choucair says. Choucair and Mailhac contacted the ministry about their project, but the ministry said they could not help.

“I don’t think they care about the art scene,” Choucair says about the government, but “It’s kind of a free country.” She has never had to give a script to General Security for approval, she adds. “This is the good thing about being on stage. You just have the power. You can say whatever you want.”

The biggest challenge facing the art scene in Lebanon, Choucair continues, is that it exists in small circles. To break the art scene out of its isolation, Choucair is trying to take art to people by performing in communities, and other people are starting to perform in the streets.

“We are all trying different things, which is good,” Choucair says. “This is the difference, I feel, between when I got back here in 2007 and now… People are trying to change the individualism of art… they are trying to go more to a new public.”

You can find out more about “Whispered Tales” here.

Eric Reidy is a project assistant at the SKeyes Center for Media and Cultural Freedom researching and writing about the cultural scene in Beirut. This article is part of a regular interview series with artists living, working, and creating in Beirut.

 

Previous articles:

 

· “Beirut has a special magic”: An interview with Syrian artist Gylan Safadi

· “Our culture is dying”: An interview with Mohamad Hodeib

· “It’s a place for music… Beirut”: An interview with Bilad El-Sham

· “Culture has been put on the side”: An interview with Dima Mabsout

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