Arab Voices: Playwright Exchange and Play Development is a collaboration between leading arts professionals from Lebanon and New York City. The team includes Beirut-based writer-performer Dima Mikhayel Matta, director-professor Aliya Khalidi, and creative producer-designer Walid Saliba. From the NYC-based Noor Theatre, we are joined by Catherine Coray (Affiliate Producing Director and Lead Curator of Arab Voices), supported from New York by Sivan Battat (Director of New Work Development), Kate Moore Heaney (Artistic Producer), and Ariana Sarfarazi (Executive Director.).

This collaboration builds on the successes of previous editions, fostering a vibrant community of Arab voices within Dar El-Nemer’s historic spaces.

Arab Voices: Playwright Exchange and Play Development was conceived by Coray, Matta, Khalidi and Saliba subsequent to their collaboration on Arab Voices: here/there/then/now (Abu Dhabi, 2016); Arab Voices: Stories of Palestine (Beirut, 2018); and Arab Voices: Three New Dramatic Texts from Beirut and Berlin (New York, 2019.) The team had hoped to continue building and expanding on Arab Voices in 2020 but were delayed by the Covid pandemic.

This year, Arab Voices: Identities in Translation, brings together Arab and Arab American theater artists to think and create within and beyond translation, across oceans, around the Arab diaspora, to build, for two weeks, a community of Arab voices echoing in the rooms of Dar Al-Nemer.

We will be offering three dynamic workshops, three public staged readings, and hosting private roundtable discussions with Lebanon-based theatermakers. The details of our workshops and readings are as follows:

Workshops:

Staged Readings:

These readings will be presented in Arabic in translations by Eyas Younes.