Perform Sharjah returns for its third season with a new series of performances, running from late October 2024 until early January 2025. The programme seeks to create spaces of encounter between the local public and contemporary artists from the region and beyond. 

Sharjah is known for its active theatre scene. In addition to its numerous local theatre festivals, theatre companies and organisations, the emirate is now also home to the Sharjah Performing Arts Academy, considered the first of its kind in the region. In its third season, Perform Sharjah engages with local actors and dancers by creating opportunities for collaboration with other artists from the region, while continuing to introduce audiences in Sharjah to new and extraordinary productions from around the world.

The programme begins in the midst of difficult times charged with tension and uncertainty about the future in many places across the Arab world. Opening the season this year is theatre director and playwright Sulayman Al Bassam's Mute, which takes as its point of departure the Beirut port explosion in 2020. As Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote about muteness in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which he completed in 1918 during the last days of World War I: ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’ Al Bassam's performance piece premiered in 2023 and has received numerous awards in various Arab theatre festivals. Created in collaboration with Hala Omran and the music band Two or the Dragon, the performance unfolds like a theatrical poem that questions the usefulness of artistic action as a means of resistance amid rampant misinformation and intellectual censorship.

In his performance Reminiscencia, artist Malicho Vaca Valenzuela weaves a poetic map of memories that he started to collect in the midst of the personal isolation he experienced during the global COVID-19 pandemic. With surprising intimacy, Valenzuela’s journey moves from a curious interest in the neighbourhood where he lives in the centre of Santiago, to a deep dive into the city’s collective memory, filled with glimpses of love, revolution and hope as well as fear, pain and disorientation. Documentary and fiction blend to produce an emotionally absorbing work of poetic theatre that crosses thresholds of time and space and connects with the essence of what it is to be human.

In their lecture-performance The Vertiginous Story of Orthosia, filmmakers and artists Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige spin a tale of people, stones and ruins. For the Sharjah version of the performance, the artists are working with professional actors from the city. The performance serves as a time machine—starting from the year 1948 when the Nahr al Bared refugee camp was hastily set up to shelter Palestinian families fleeing the Nakba. In 2007, conflict broke out between the Lebanese army and a radical group within the camp. The most ferocious battles since the Lebanese civil war, these skirmishes ended up revealing, under the feet of the two warring sides, vestiges from the ancient Roman city of Orthosia, which had vanished after the catastrophic tsunami of 551 CE. What does this unexpected and important archaeological discovery entail? Will it result in yet another displacement for the camp’s residents? And what can the demise of an ancient civilisation tell us about our present and future? The performance is in co-presentation with Art Jameel.

Dancer and choreographer Nacera Belaza’s latest performance, La Nuée, takes place in a space shrouded in darkness. With an effect not unlike a 3D painting on a black canvas, fine and precise stage lighting allows the eye to follow movements of the 10 dancers. Commingling two elements prominent in her works—the circle, as a symbol of precision and permanence, and rhythm, with its oscillation between harmony and dissonance—Belaza draws inspiration from the ritual dances of the First Nations Dakota people in North America. Three dance students from the Sharjah Performing Arts Academy will participate in the performance, alongside seven professional dancers from Belaza’s international troupe.

From mid-December, Perform Sharjah focuses on contemporary productions that use performance techniques and experiments from the history of Arab theatre. In his first piece for the theatre, titled Living with a Piece of Furniture, Nicolas Fattouh assumes a dual role, that of the director and the actor. He sits alone on the stage, enacting the roles of numerous characters in a style reminiscent of old Lebanese comedy theatre. The performance weaves together two parallel stories simultaneously. In the first, the audience is treated to a gossip session about old village ladies who are competing to be the next president of the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception. The characters end up dishing the dirt on the village families, disclosing secrets about Fattouh’s own family in the process. For the second narrative thread, Fattouh prepares a plate of tabbouleh as he tells the audience about his connection with the soul of his deceased grandfather, a sculptor. The two tales combine to immerse the audience in the small world of the village, while exploring how memory and the senses can be used to build a deeper understanding of love, loss and longing.

In Egypt, mainstream comedies in the early 1970s dominated stage productions, starting with the massive success of Ali Salem’s play Madrasat Al-Moshaghbeen (The School of Mischief), the recording of which is still being streamed by viewers 50 years after its premiere. A prolific playwright in the 1960s and 1970s, Salem spent his later years in isolation. His reprehensible political views have been widely rejected by Arab artists and intellectuals. Nine years after Salem’s passing, Ahmed El Attar joins forces with actor Sayed Ragab to reclaim the playwright’s one-act play, A Writer on Honeymoon, which was published in the early 1970s. The plot revolves around a prominent writer who becomes anxious a few days into his marriage. A series of small events lead him to believe that he is being monitored by a foreign intelligence agency; his young wife begins to suspect that he suffers from a mental illness. The happy honeymoon quickly descends into a nightmarish mess of quarrels and paranoia.

Together, these performances examine the current state of performing arts in the region, while offering local artists a chance to feature in new productions. In its third iteration, Perform Sharjah puts a firm emphasis on the history of Arab theatre and its continuing presence within contemporary works as well as its articulations within the city, whether on land or on sea.