League of Professional Theatre Women Award Ceremony Goes Virtual
From the panel: “How to Keep Creating When Everything Around You is Falling Apart. Featured: Torange Yeghiazarian, Hanane Hajj Ali
Beginning in 1980, the League of Professional Theatre Women was formed in response to the lack of women in positions such as artistic directors in regional theaters. At this time, a woman had also not won a Tony for directing. The idea came about at an American Theatre Association conference in San Diego in 1981. The founding member and first chair, Julia Miles describes the mission of the league as “to get the commercial Broadway theatre to know about non-profit women playwrights and directors so that we could get them some work…to bring commercial interests together with nonprofit interests so they could benefit from each other.” The league now boasts over 500 women representing both for-profit and non-profit sectors all across various artistic disciplines. Their mission is to “increase the visibility of and promote opportunities for women in all aspects of the professional theatre.”
One way they do this is with the Gilder/Coigney International Theatre Award Program. This program was established in 2011 in honor of Rosamond Gilder and Martha Coigney. This award is presented every three years and acknowledges the “exceptional work of a non-U.S. theatre woman, promotes expanded visibility and new opportunities for the Awardee and her sister nominees, and fosters connections and networking with LPTW members and local cultural institutions.” Joan Firestone, the Program Chair for the LPTW Gilder/Coigney International Theatre Award Program, says about this year’s program “We are excited about the opportunity to introduce new global audiences to the artistic achievements of women theatre artists, seen in the context of the harsh realities of tyranny and oppression that confront them.”
This year’s recipient was Hanane Hajj Ali of Lebanon.
“Throughout her 40-year career, she has written, performed, and directed acclaimed Arabic-language productions and also facilitated and supported hundreds of colleagues, students, and communities in Lebanon and throughout the entire Middle East-North Africa (MENA) region. Ali’s artistic career started as a founding member of Hakawati/Storytellers Theater in 1978, the Arab world’s pioneering experiment in socially engaged community led theater, where she was an actor and writer until 1992. In 1999, she co-founded Shams Association which bridges the sectarian divides of Lebanese society and brings together young artists from different backgrounds. Jogging, her most recent solo piece, is a “partly autobiographical and taboo-breaking performance that tackles the Bermuda triangle of Religion, Sex, and Politics.”
In addition to the awards ceremony, the event featured five panels with various speakers from across the world sharing their stories of making art in their country and how it has prompted social change.
In the first panel, “How to Keep Creating When Everything Around You is Falling Apart,” we get to catch a glimpse of Hajj Ali’s piece “Jogging” as well as the inspiration around it, and she discusses how what was going on in her life politically and personally led to the creation of the piece. In “Women on Stage and in the Streets” we get the opportunity to hear from three international female theatre-makers. They tell their story and speak to how the theatre they make lifts up the world around them. The panel features Lin Abyad, Maya Zbib, and Hajj Ali herself. The panel “Raising Social Awareness and Activating Change Through Theatre” features a group of incredible theatremakers from around the world: Mallika Sarabhai, Dominique Morisseau, Maya Zbib, Hanne Hamburger, and Mihaela Dragan, all discussing the kind of art they make and how they use it to spark change in their communities and the world. Morisseau sums up a lot of the discussion with “We as artists, more than not, are in the business of not selling comfort. We sell discomfort more than we sell comfort.” “Theatre Education: Reaching Beyond the Stage” brought in some of the artists featured (Iman Aoun, Grace Gachocha Nakaka, Stephanie Berry, and Ilire Vinca) to discuss their incredible work in theatre education. The final panel, “The Dynamic Alliance of Theatre and Technology” with finalists Faynia Williams and Lupe Gehrenbeck as well as Avra Sidiropoulou and Burbuqe Berisha, speaks with these incredible artists who utilize multimedia in their work and how/why they do so.
The original ceremony was planned to be live in October of 2020 but as the pandemic made it increasingly clear that in-person was not going to be an option as well as the devastating August explosion in Beirut, which was the home to a finalist and the award winner, it was decided to push the ceremony until February in order to give those affected time to heal.
Fredrica Lippa speaks a little more on the challenges of running a virtual festival as the technical director. They struggled with time differences (13 ½ hours for some participants), typical technology problems like Wi-Fi, and limitation of quality in Zoom. They also had to take into account the lifestyles of the people in various countries and what was acceptable to ask of them. Such as, if meeting incredibly late at night to accommodate someone early in the morning across the world was possible.
The general consensus among the participants of this year’s event is that in a strange way, the artists are both more disconnected and more connected than they’ve ever been. Of course, the ceremony and the workshops can now reach a larger group of people. However, the energy of being in the room and feeling the presence of fellow artists has been lost. This was echoed time and time again when the artists were asked about the differences of this event to previous years. I asked a few of the finalists their thoughts on the event going virtual and they all echoed a lot of the same things.
“Virtual events require a different mindset.” Faynia Williams of England says. “If, like me, you are a Live Theatre Director who also works for screen, then you know there are different acting skills required and different starting points. Yes, events on the internet will reach many more people, particularly during a Pandemic, when many more people can taste culture only virtually.”
Lupe Gehrenbeck of Venezuela says “It is necessarily different, it’s online! Although there is no doubt, nothing can replace physical contact, the online exchange has its advantages. Since each one communicates from her personal habitat, we are more exposed and that somehow is an invitation for deeper commitment. And the silence… when online, even though you are in exchange with other people, you are surrounded by the silence of your “own room”. I think that connects you to your inner voice in a way that enhances sensitivity and honesty. “.
An upside to this new change was that accessibility of performing arts started to be more possible to people, especially those who are not used to going to theatres. Iman Aoun of Palestine has this to say about accessibility:
“In my country performing arts was able to reach to massive numbers of audiences much more than any other year, for it is easier to reach to the people on their devices than to ask the people to reach out to you, and make the effort of visiting the theatre, especially when mobility in a shredded country is a big issue.”
For an event that is all about bringing different female artists from around the world together to celebrate the work that they do, online would certainly be able to connect everyone faster and broader than ever before. It will be interesting to see how this new access changes the upcoming years now that the audience has no doubt grown.
The ceremony itself was a wonderful celebration of not only Hajj Ali, but all of the nominees and three finalists of this year’s award. Each woman received recognition and a slideshow of their work presented and it’s clear that there was an incredible amount of talent spread amongst all of this year’s nominees. Hajj Ali finished the ceremony with an incredibly powerful and poignant speech that ended with this statement about theatre and its role in our lives and beyond.
“Art dismantles the impossible and releases the possible. Art does not change the world but changes our perception of the world. Art-or more particularly theatre-is a journey to the land of questions. Is theatre threatened? Yes. Performing arts? Certainly. But so is the factory worker the artisan, the office worker, the driver, engineer, the shoe polisher, and millions of the unemployed whose numbers were increasing before COVID-19, let alone now. My theatre is about the marginalized, downtrodden, and forgotten. The kidnapped…it’s about collective memory and distorted history. Through my work, I try to talk about what is kept silent and what is kept hidden. To break the taboos of sex, religion and politics. Knowing that we have to face the corruption, hypocrisy, and tyranny that is sweeping the world…in a sense-making theatre becomes a part of making a city, just as shaping a city becomes a part of its theatre.”
For more information about Hajj Ali and all the nominees, visit: http://theatrewomen.org/programs/awards/the-gildercoigney-international-theatre-award/