ARCHIVES 2009 / Photo-Romance

Beirut, 2006, shortly after the Israeli attack on Lebanon. All the Lebanese are asked to take part in two large-scale demonstrations on one side or the other. The neighbourhoods and buildings are empty, their inhabitants having gone to demonstrate. In a small alley in the Beirut suburbs, two isolated beings who run into each other but here, it is about a former left-wing militant who has trouble adapting to the social and political reality of the time of a Lebanon polarised between fundamentalist and ultra-capitalist extremes, and a housewife completely absorbed by family, social and religious concerns. In this show, Lina Saneh and Rabih Mroué continue their research and questioning on the ideas of performance, acting, fiction and reality, on the relationships (quantitative and qualitative) of the last two in art. This time, they no longer use a local news story or documents, but another medium, from a spatial and temporal distance, a classic story with its fictional characters and its realistic acting to better compare it to Lebanese reality and its complexities as well as to the theatre itself.