Creating platforms for cultural exchange

The first impression Kabul makes is surprisingly relaxed and peaceful: dust and bazaar clamour, mule carts, traffic jams and women wearing blue burqas. On the second, closer look black walls with splinter shields and barbed wire, armoured vehicles and roadblocks increasingly enter my awareness. Kabul is oriental and exotic as well as menacingly frightening – surreal. A citified village built of bitterness and hope with an estimated four million inhabitants.

One of the pieces in the puzzle of the new Afghanistan is the Theatre Festival, which has been held every year since 2004 and, in its fourth season, presents 50 productions from all parts of the country. They are performances in which content is more important than form, most of them no longer than 30 minutes, without stage sets or technical equipment. Almost all of the plays are by domestic writers; they deal with war and violence, with the big problems and little pleasures of everyday life, with the bloody past and the yearning for justice, with the oppression of women, with police corruption or with superstitions. It is politically involved amateur theatre, which reveals the country’s wounds and sometimes their healing.

The resurrected Afghan theatre has only just begun and possesses nothing but the will to exist. There are neither premises, nor funds, no artisans, no training – but there is great enthusiasm and the will to learn and to carry on. That’s a lot in a country in which for years theatre was vilified and forbidden and still is considered unseemly for women.

That is why the festival is so important for the theatre people; it is their only opportunity to compare notes, learn from one another and to reassure one another. Lien Heidenreich, head of the Goethe-Institut Kabul, is also convinced of this. “I think the platform function of the festival is more important than its work exhibit function; the fact that the theatre folk can get together once a year, that they all live together and can discuss their difficulties and their progress with one another. For the people from the provinces it is the only opportunity at all to see theatre made by others than themselves.” The Goethe-Institut is the initiator and chief organizer of the festivals and continues to be the driving force, although other international and Afghan institutions have now joined them in the stage boat. This fourth festival year, the only international contribution to the festival is from Germany: Return to Sender by Helena Waldmann. Five German-Iranian actresses perform the play in Farsi, which is related to the Dari spoken in Afghanistan. So, there are no language barriers and no mental barriers in any event, for the questions of identity and exile – where one comes from and whether one might prefer to be elsewhere – are all too familiar to the audience here. This makes the performance a huge success in spite of its unfamiliar aesthetics and abstract character.

The workshop held the next day by Waldmann is almost liberating. As in Arabic theatre, in Afghan theatre the actor consists mainly of head and hands. Today, two dozen women from the provinces learn that the body, too, can play a role on stage. They have great fun with the exercises for reaction and memory skills. One after another they even remove their veils, which keep slipping anyway during the physical exertion.

How much liberty can lend wings to art is demonstrated by the probably best Afghan group, the Aftaab Theatre from Kabul. It gets its name sun theatre from a workshop held by Ariane Mnouchkine two years ago in Kabul. This year, Aftaab is presenting Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle in the production by the Iranian Arash Absalan. Simply the way men and women romp together across the stage, look one another in the eye and touch one another is a minor revolution.

It is great, colourful community theatre, witty and quick, that tells the parable of the true and the false mother imaginatively and in a relaxed manner. Actors and audience are intoxicated with joy. Pure theatre pleasure, below and above, men and women – all in unity. This is no longer Kabul; it’s the Cartoucherie at least. The utopia of Afghanistan, of art and of life. Everything is possible and it will happen, too.