Three Rooms, Shubbak Festival, London, July 2017
Performance; skype, internet, text, colored gaff tape, computer, webcam.
Duration 1.30hr.
Artists Hatem Hadawe, Amal Omran, Kathryn Hamilton, Onur Karaoglu, Jurjen Alkema and Deniz Buga.
Performed London, Arcola Theater, Shubbak Festival. July 2017; New York, CUNY, Prelude Festival. October 2017; Cologne, Orangerie, Urbang Festival. October 2017; Amsterdam, Frascati Theater, Dancing On The Edge Festival. November 2017; Marseille, la Friche la Belle de Mai, Les Bancs Publics,Les Rencontres à l'échelle festival. November 2017
Photographs from the premiere of Three Rooms at Shubbak Festival, 2017, in the Arcola Theater, London. Photo credits: Shubbak Festival/Merass Sadek
Three Rooms is a live-film / skype-play that takes place in three locations: a bedroom in Istanbul, a bedroom in Paris, and the theater where the audience have gathered. Research and document-based, the piece reconstructs a skype call between three friends who used to live in Istanbul, but who are now, because of geopolitical circumstances, unable to be within the same national borders at the same time.
Originally the trio were planning to stage a play, but the changing political landscape meant that two of the performers couldn’t get visas. Refusing to replace those unable to travel, they began to experiment with ways of working that could overcome the physical restrictions, creating a new kind of live-ness for this new world.
Three Rooms invites the audience into the quiet intimacies of daily life when you are essentially confined to your room – making tea, reading books, smoking cigarettes while watching the seagulls over Istanbul roof-tops, or watching the grey clouds over the Paris suburbs. It gestures towards the irreplaceability of people, and the impossibility of representing their experience without them.
Shubbak Festival
Shubbak (meaning ‘window’ in Arabic) is London’s largest biennial festival of contemporary Arab culture. Founded in 2011 by the Mayor of London, Shubbak is now an independent charity (charity number: 1150374) whose founding Chair was Omar al-Qattan. Shubbak connects London audiences and communities with the best of contemporary Arab culture through ambitious festival programmes of premieres and commissions of visual arts, film, music, theatre, dance, literature and debate. Shubbak works with arts institutions in London and internationally. Shubbak 2015 was the largest and most expansive festival to-date. It included over 130 artists, originating from 18 Arab countries, across 70 events in more than 40 venues, performing to a total audience of over 50,000.
Performance(s) Between Two Shores is supported by the European Commission. In partnership with: Les Bancs Publics – Festival Les Rencontres à l’échelle (FR), BOZAR (BE), Dancing on the edge (NL), Globalize: Cologne platform for dance & theater (DE), SEE Foundation (SE) – D-CAF Festival (EG).