02 April 2005

BEIRUT: It takes moxie to launch a theater space when your clientele are speculating about when the next bomb is going to explode, and where. Such concerns didn't abate on Wednesday evening, but neither did it keep hundreds of people from attending the gala re-opening of the Masrah al-Madina in Hamra Street's historic Cinema Saroulla.

Though the opening night audience was dotted with foreigners, the event - timed to correspond to International Theater Day - has an intensely local, even homemade, ambience. In a time when public demonstrations are the order of the day, this capacity crowd was a demonstration of loyalty - both to Nidal Ashkar, the force behind the Masrah al-Madina project, and to her concept of art as an expression of civil society.

The next two days of the program featured concerts by American jazz saxophonist Ren? McLean and oriental jazz oud master Charbel Rouhana. The fact that these have been cancelled, victim to Saturday's bomb in Sad al-Boushrieh, is less significant than the fact that day one comes off as well as it does.

Since its inception in the mid-1990s, Ashkar's project has always been imbued with a sense of memory. In a city were erasure is the norm, this has been a defiant insistence on maintaining the integrity of past and present as much as an exercise in nostalgia. It is no surprise, then, that there was a good deal of the original Saroulla in the theater's opening night.

This impression greets you as you approach the theater, whose main entrance sports an installation of antique cinema equipment, projector included. The Nuha al-Radi Gallery, in the theater foyer, is holding its first exhibit. Called "Saroulla Remnants," it has two components. The centerpiece of the show is a number of large black-and-white photos of personalities from Lebanon's stage and screen history, suspended from the gallery ceiling. The local intimacy of the exhibit is accentuated by the fact that the photos are unlabelled.

The walls of the gallery are adorned with a number of old film ads that were literally unearthed in the depths of the old cinema during renovation. The posters now serve as canvasses for some spirited art school students to improvise upon the theme of the Masrah al-Madina. The individual pieces lack maturity of composition but there is a sort of thematic balance in the exhibit's thrusting together of the historic and the unhoned.

Devotees of the Clemenceau incarnation of the Masrah al-Madina will be pleased to

know that the otherworldly voice that used to jolt out of the walls to welcome patrons to the premises and coax them to their seats in Arabic, French and English has survived the migration to Hamra.

People were sitting in the aisles and standing in the back of the 450-seat theater when the lights were lowered. The evening's program began with a film collage composed by Jean Chamoun and Mai Masri - two documentary makers whose oeuvre has come to embody the conscience of the local artistic community. Entitled "Memory and Vision," this piece was a sort of photo album of Beirut stage history, one in which Ashkar plays a conspicuous role.

The evening's performance program was, in Ashkar's words, "nationalist as we define nationalism." Jahida Wehbe sang the Lebanese national anthem with rare passion - her coy pauses after each verse prompting waves of premature applause from those assembled, many of whom accompanied her through all three verses.

After the anthem Wehbe asked the audience to observe a minute's silence in honor of assassinated former Premier Rafik Hariri. More tunes followed - musical arrangements of poems by Palestine's Fadwa Tuqan and Iraq's Lamiaa Abbas Amara.

Ashkar and fellow actor Rafik Ali Ahmad joined Wehbe on stage. Ahmad began on a wry note, pointing out that

(in a departure from convention) there was no minister attending the evening's event, a reference to Lebanon's present government-ness state. Chuckles arose from the audience. He then read Aryan Mouchkine's National Theater Day letter. Ashkar responded with a letter of her own and proceeded to thank the donors who made the reopening of the theater possible.

The rest of the evening unwound musically. There was a solo saxophone rendition of Goran Bregovic's "Kalashnikov" - which continued intrepidly despite the player's losing the use of one of his keys. Khalid Abdullah shook the rafters with a pair of oud-durbakeh tunes - the first dedicated to "the Opposition." Sumaya Baalbaki belted out a Fairouz favorite. Carole Samaha's form-fitting outfit and knee-high boots attracted nearly as much attention as her lovely voice.

The evening had a spirited, improvised aspect. Speakers and performers mounted the stage from their places in the audience. Most of the singers performed unaccompanied or to taped music. There was a bit of feedback from the sound system but, based on their response, the audience couldn't care less. They applauded, sang along to the patriotic tunes and, it seems, generally celebrated the fact that they can.

For details of Masrah al-Madina's upcoming schedule of events call +961 3 779977