Damascus-SANA
The students of the fourth year - the Department of Acting at the Higher Institute of Dramatic Art, undertook a daring adventure for a week, led by Dr. Samer Omran, by presenting their graduation project under the title 3021, through which they explored the fate of humanity after a thousand years.
The show, which was attended by 22 male and female students (a relatively large number), carried a lot of experimentation in terms of directing and performance, and relied on involving the audience in its various narrative stages, which were accompanied by the diversity and multiplicity of spaces in which it revolves.
The beginning was in the lobby of the circular theater at the institute through a presentation to three students participating in the show, which included a prelude to the audience about what they will see during the next hour and a half, with all those who attended implicating that it is part of the theatrical game outside the classic and familiar.
The beginning of the show was inside the theater, with a signal from the director Imran through the percussion of the cymbal, so that most of the characters begin to reveal their identity one by one separately, and then return and meet in the scene of the outbreak of the epidemic of blindness among them until they are all infected with this new epidemic of unknown cause and source.
Then the actors and the audience move to an inner hall in the backstage of the theater in which a high iron cage was prepared, which is climbed via a ladder to begin the events inside this dormitory prepared to isolate the blind from society, and to unfold more stories of the heroes of the show through dialogues and monologues performed by the actors.
And the pace of the show takes a noticeable escalation and acceleration with the entry of another group of actors embodying the roles of the gang that took over to control the fate of the rest, despite the injury of all members of this gang also blindness, but the evil impulses overcome this group in their quest to obtain everything to accompany this stage of The show, with scenes of violence, rape, murder and suicide, throws events into chaos.
Then, the quick move out of the theater building witnessed a shift in terms of vision, tale, and performance, to reach the country of the blind, where the love story of a young sighted girl from that primitive country was born in the year 3021 in symbolic of the fading of civilization and a return to the first biography of mankind.
The performance in the primitive stage came as an epic fantasy with costumes and makeup that express that stage and the way of life of its people and their thinking rejecting everything that contradicts what they have composed over time. The show moves within the same context to about the building of the institute and the audience overlaps with the actors in a virtual market of this unknown and primitive country and everyone will witness the execution of the ruling on Young lover removed his eyes.
Then the actors ascend to the Italian theater to practice the rituals of that primitive country that soon becomes deaf and then becomes dumb, in reference to the fate that humanity can reach with the progress of time and the continuation of greed and greed, and the neglect of humanity's supreme interest in life, peace and prosperity.
The show carried a lot of calculated adventure by Imran by relying on the idea of blindness, which was taken from the novel Blindness by Jose Saramago, issued in 1995, and merged with the story of the country of the blind by Herbert Wells, published in 1904. So, these two texts were dramatized in a modern experimental way, with their preparation and transformation into an academic theatrical spectacle in which there is astonishment. And the fun and anticipation, which were in the interest of the show and perhaps the disparity between the performance of the actors for the benefit of the group as a whole and for the benefit of the work.
Mohamed Samir Tahan
