Seba Kourani
Could you tell us a little bit about yourself and what it is that you do?
“My name is Seba Kourani, and I’m half-Syrian and half-Lebanese. I’m currently staying away from home in Istanbul, but I was born and raised in Beirut. In addition to being a theatre-maker, I’m also a performer and puppeteer. I often use theatre as a mediation tool when working with young people and on projects related to social transformation. I see theatre as a tool for communication; it’s great at catalysing conversation among different people.
Recently, I’ve been working on my own performance piece called ‘The Golden Hour’ . It’s about the uncertainties that we all live in and how we seek answers. I’m trying to connect a lot with people, so I’m referencing coffee cup reading, a very popular practice we do in the SWANA region. Now, with the invasion of Lebanon, I had very big questions while I was making this performance. Is this performance for the people of Beirut? Or, is it for people who know me outside Beirut? It’s become a different shape of uncertainty; I am the uncertainty itself.
Anyway, for this piece, I’ve gathered a lot of small stories from people in my generation because, in Lebanon, you generally only hear the story of Beirut from either the youngest generation on social media or from the older generation that experienced the Civil War. However, my generation, which is from the ‘90s, hasn’t yet created their own narrative of our city. I’m trying to gather these small stories to help shape it.”
How did you end up connecting with IMPACT?
“Rosanna Lewis/Rosie, one of IMPACT’s board members, is close to Artists with Elbows, an organisation I’m also a part of. I ended up participating in one of IMPACT’s Creating Hope Together events as a speaker talking about the arts in times of crisis. I also participated in another IMPACT event a few months ago, The Art of Collaboration; it was a great pleasure to meet up with people I had never spoken to and known before, where we had to work together to present “what does it mean to have an equal and open collaboration”. However, just as the event was starting, my parents called me and told me that their neighbour’s house, just next to them, had been bombed. I had to cut down my 10-minute speech to around three or four minutes, and I ended up leaving the event as my family was forced to evacuate their house. It’s nice to be back working with IMPACT, though.”
Why arts, culture, and conflict transformation?
“For me, there’s always this kind of magic whenever I work on the arts with young people. I’ve seen that magic; everyone who works in this field has experienced this kind of magic. For me, it’s very human when you place yourself in someone else’s shoes and start to think critically and have empathy toward others. It provides a chance for the people that you are working with to be part of something bigger and to create something together. I think these characteristics are what we are losing in our world: to feel safe, to have empathy, and to feel both heard and seen. This is where you can see the magic of transformation in a character, in a person, in an opinion, or in a different perspective. This is how I define the success of my work.When the recent invasion of Lebanon began, I was outside of the country in a festival called Flying Carpet Festival in Mardin, Turkey where I was invited to take part as a director. It is a 10 day festival for children living in difficult places. People come from different backgrounds, but we all had one thing in common: humanity. 36 artists from different parts of the world came together to create a performance full of music, clowning, dance, circus in 2 days, that we perform in different cities of the Turkish-Syrian borders. I had this sudden feeling of homesickness, and I missed my family. Of course, I felt worried about them but, at the same time, I didn’t feel alone. I was surrounded by another family. I have never felt the magic of togetherness, humanity and love as I did in this extraordinary experience. I have truly accepted all different stages of human connection. This is exactly how art brings people together when you really create a really safe space. That’s the magic of it all.”
Could you describe for us the most emotionally impactful creative project that you’ve worked on to date?
“The first project I worked on taught me a lot the hard way. I did it all from scratch and everything. It was about the duality of the absence and the presence of sound. I had this idea where we were all in a city where each one of us was a sound entity. Our sound could be anything – it could be something that we speak about, something we think of, something we hear, or even something that we do. I decided to work with young people from Beirut. We ended up recruiting 12 young people from Shatila, a refugee camp for Palestinians, ranging from 18 to 30 years old, of different nationalities: Lebanese, Syrian, Palestinian, Congolese, Filipino, and Iraqi. I realised that, in Beirut, we have a very diverse community of people. I brought together a diverse mix of young people from different socio-economic backgrounds. After they got together on the first day, I was terrified because they split themselves into small groups. As the days passed by, however, I started seeing them gather together as one big group. Then, by the end of the project, they started mixing together like I never thought they would. They were mixing together, mingling, and breaking barriers!
Another project I worked on was back in 2016/2017. I worked a lot with women in the refugee camps around Lebanon. It was very hard and heartbreaking to see how powerful, smart, and capable they all were. They were often the rock of their houses and of their families. I worked with these women and, together, we created a toolset for stress relief, we developed games to play with their families, and worked on creating plays for make-shift community theatres. Afterwards, these women started organising workshops in their own camps and started to become theatre trainers in their communities and with their families. It was inspiring to see them breaking gender stereotypes by teaching their men how to breathe well and how to release their own stress. So, a lot of great projects may have a small impact, but they still change a lot.”
If you could give yourself one piece of advice 10 years ago, knowing what you know now, what would it be?
“I still feel like a young person, but one thing that I’ve just learned and I wish that I had known earlier in my 20s is that I don’t have to wait for others to create opportunities for me. There’s immense value in seizing opportunities in a different way and creating my own. This is what I’m trying to do now. Back then, I used to wait for a project to come along. Now, I’m leaning more towards creating my own opportunities. It’s very hard, but I feel more productive, and I enjoy it more like this. I feel like I can create something that resembles me more. This is what I would like to tell my 20-year-old self. Don’t wait. No; create something. Don’t wait for people to tell you what to do.”
What is one piece of content that profoundly impacted the way you view and/or work in this field?
“I heard of this story from one of my old professors. Augusto Boal, who used to create theatre in rural areas of Brazil, had an impactful experience after one of his shows. At the end of the performance of this particular piece, the actors would all hold up their weapons and say that they were going to free the land. Once they left the stage, people would clap, and the performance would end. However, at the end of one of these shows, one man approached him and said: “I want to be with you. I want to go with you and defend my land.” You see, working in theatre is not an easy thing. People are very impressionable, and some people really believe what they see on stage. We as theatre makers need to be responsible for what we do. Being accountable and responsible is something that is always on my mind when working.I’ve also been inspired by Chloe and Dan, the co-founders of Artists with Elbows. Working with them was the first time that I felt as if someone was truly listening to me without judging or labelling me. I enjoy their work and really enjoyed working with them because they kept encouraging me. They would say things like: “You can do anything. You are capable of doing anything.” I now feel that I am capable of doing anything. Having someone who believes in your potential and feels that you are capable of creating something – I get very inspired by this feeling.”