Shubbak Festival curators question what it means to be Arab

The arts and theatre events will run until July 9 in London and across the UK

Shubbak commemorates the Nakba with the evolving play Trouf: Scenes from 75* Years. Photo: Bayrem Ben Mrad

How do you programme an Arab festival that questions Arab identity? This was the challenge facing Alia Alzougbi and Taghrid Choucair-Vizoso as they approached their first attempt at curating Shubbak Festival – the arts, film and theatre event that runs every summer in Britain.

Running until July 9, Shubbak will stage more than 40 plays, music events, films, exhibitions, workshops and standup comedy shows, produced by creatives from the Middle East and its diaspora.

The acts will range from debut solo work by musician Hamed Sinno, formerly of Mashrou' Leila, to stand-up by Palestinian comedian Sharihan Hadweh, who dissects the hurdles of life in the West Bank from her perspective as a blind artist.

“We’re quietly challenging 'stay in your lane' politics,” says Alzougbi, who was appointed with Choucair-Vizoso as co-chief executive of Shubbak last year. While the 75th anniversary of the Nakba was a major part of the backdrop to their curation, so were wider cultural conversations such as climate change and the Black Lives Matter movement.

And the pair, who each grew up across the Middle East and London, saw that the very notion of being Arab includes complex layers of belonging, which they wanted Shubbak to reflect.

Hamed Sinno wrote Poems of Consumption during a residency hosted by Shubbak. Photo: Derrick Kakembo

“Part of the obstacle that we come across in being an ‘identity festival’ is this notion of homogeneity and genericity,” Alzougbi continues. “One of the first things that we did was to change our strap line from 'Shubbak: A Window on Contemporary Arab Culture’ to ‘A Window on Contemporary Arab Cultures’.

“We pluralised it in order to acknowledge that Arab identity is complex, it’s fluid, it's imagined, it’s constructed, and we were very interested in both the personal and political changes – whether they're tectonic or barely sensed.”

As part of their commemorations of the Nakba, for example, they are staging the play “Trouf: Scenes from 75* Years,” which evolves and grows every year it is performed. First staged as “Scenes from 68* Years” at the Arcola Theatre in East London in 2016, it reflects the continuing nature of the Palestinian struggle as it records the years that have elapsed both since the Nakba and since its own beginnings.

Its author, too, speaks to the movement of people common in Arab (and non-Arab) cultures. It was written by Hannah Khalil, a Palestinian-Irish playwright, who now lives in London and grew up briefly in Dubai.

The version of the play at Shubbak is staged by two Tunisian theatre companies – L’Artisto and Nabeul Performing Arts Centre found points of connection between the Palestinian story and their own experience, in scenes showing queuing for goods or lost and forgotten villages, as people in both Tunisia and Palestine move from rural to urban environments.

Shubbak joint chief executives, Alia Alzougbi, left, and Taghrid Choucair-Vizoso. Photos: Shubbak

The festival features performers from a number of Maghrebi countries including Tunisia. Alzougbi and Choucair-Vizoso were interested in the Arabic-speaking countries of North Africa as places where Arab and African identities have long mixed and intersected.

They partnered with the recently reopened Africa Centre, an important site in the history of African liberation movements, to host an exhibition that takes Libya as its starting point, dissecting and expanding the way governments use visual culture to entrench their power.

“North Africa sometimes can get lost in identity politics and borders around imagined communities,” says Alzougbi. “This collaboration between Shubbak and the Africa Centre represents a deep commitment – an acknowledgement and celebration of North Africa as this place where we all meet.”

The pair also thought hard about the inclusivity of the event: “Shubbak is for everyone,” says Choucair-Vizoso, explaining that some performances offer childcare, so that parents can watch the play without thinking about the babysitting cost waiting for them at the end, while other events have a pay-what-you-can sliding scale.

Others are free. “We’re committed to reducing access barriers to the arts and to festivals,” she continues. “We're actively thinking of who may have previously felt excluded – not necessarily from Shubbak, but in any festival. People are so overwhelmed by the grind of the everyday, particularly here in London with the cost of living crisis and the illegal immigration bill.

“They’re so battered by having to survive daily life that there's no capacity to be an exhibition visitor or a theatre audience member. So for us, we thought, how do we bring together people – who feel like they're on the periphery – together with exceptional, global artists?”

The Tunisian-Belgian choreographer Mohamed Toukabri performs a drama of separation and loss with his mother. Photo: Christian Tandberg

The festival also continues Shubbak’s past practice of staging events beyond London. The Saudi-Palestinian artist Tamara Al-Mashouk presents a piece about migrant detention centres in Dover, the coastal destination for many crossing the Channel from France.

The choreography The Power (of) The Fragile, in which Mohamed Toukabri explores separation and closeness, on stage with his mother, will be performed both at the Battersea Arts Centre in London and at the Lowry near Manchester.

Their consideration of the ethics of the event also went beyond the audience. Much of the subject matter treated by Arab cultural producers is harrowing: responses to continuing occupation, deprivation or unstable politics. What does it mean to launch yourself through that, night after night? And how do Arab producers tackle challenging topics, such as gender violence or religious extremism, without falling into stereotypes about the Arab world?

To deal with these concerns, Alzougbi and Choucair-Vizoso are inviting performers, artists and writers from the Global South to closed-door sessions, where the pair hope participants can freely discuss these concerns and the emotional tolls – as well as what might be changed in the future with new generations of performers.

“We’re working with the knowledge that we're constantly in flux, and that what served us yesterday no longer serves us today,” says Alzougbi. “That's the human condition. We have these conversations openly in the team, and we do not always agree or have consensus. And aren't we blessed to have that? Aren't we blessed to have a space where we're able to say 'we've moved on'?”