2nd Season of Sharjah Art Foundation: Date, Time & More

Sharjah Art Foundation has made an announcement regarding another new season of ‘Perform Sharjah’ and welcomes the community to witness some new attractions while exploring the art spaces and heritage houses of the city.

Continuing the success of the previous season, the event has come back with its second season. The new season will be scheduled with eight performances, which will be presented across Sharjah city starting October 19, 2023, till February 11, 2024. As per the information shared by the Director of Performance and Senior Curator Tarek Abou El Fetouh, the new season of this event lined up with many interesting performances from a variety of artists from different fields, and disciplines.

While Season One has presented the performances in squares and streets, the second season will be focused and engaged in showcasing the urban projects of development which started 30 years back in Sharjah, that aim to rehabilitate, restore, and rebuild all the historical areas across the city with revolutionary art and culture at the center of Sharjah Art Foundation.

Alongside heritage preservation, the priority of this project is to construct the infrastructure for cultural activities, art, and other events. Many of the buildings are reused for the purpose of meetings scheduled for intellectuals, writers, artists, poets, and theatre makers. Equally, the buildings will be used as a platform to share their creativity with the public.

For the most part, staged in the heritage places and houses, the brand-new season two of Perform Sharjah will take the audience on an artistic and cultural journey across Sharjah, which will start and end at its historical destination in the city, which is a vital place in the imagination and the daily life of the populace.

The event will be presenting works that are fully engaged with channelized heritage and modern culture which have been on trend for the past few decades. It explains their part in the contemporary imagination and majorly focuses on the way artists recognize the various issues of identity, alternative histories, epistemology, and cultural particulars.

The performances that are going to take place during the second season are the following:

Metamorphosis #2 by Essia Jaïbi and Jalila Baccar

Essia Jaïbi will be revisiting the memories she has been scared of in her mind since her childhood in Metamorphosis #2. She will lock up her mother inside the glass-walled dressing room, Jalila Baccar. The scene will be imagined in the theater and will address the audience.

This performance will deliver art, cultural activism, and theater into Tunisia’s cultural, political, economic, health, and environmental systems, including the major rights of minorities and people with disabilities. The act is diverse as a face-off between two generations.

To present this performance, there will be a performance going to be scheduled by Baccar, where all the professional actors will be trained who belong to UAE, and the wider part of the Gulf region. She will assist the participants by offering instructions for acting by reading and describing her first script as a playwright. In search of the play that debuted in 1998, Aïda during an event to pay tribute to  50 years of the Nakba organized by the Beirut Theatre. In the play, she shares a story about searching for her Palestinian friend Aïda who is missing.

During this season, after a long 25 years, she will train all the young actors to go through the epic script of her, which will equally describe the current highlighted situation the Palestinians going through. Additionally, the master class will include an exclusive presentation that will be open to the audience.

The Return by Rayyane Tabet

The Return will showcase the 50-year journey of a marble sculpture that illustrates bullhead using inventory lists as well as interviews, legal documents, photographs, and many other pieces of evidence that were presented at the New York Supreme Court throughout the investigation which lasted for years.

The statue was restituted in Lebanon and is currently displayed at the National Museum in Beirut.

Hunkaro by Mohit Takalkar co-presented by Ishara Art Foundation

Listening to other people in modern society is very often replaced by the high consumption of audio-visual media. Hunkaro, which means ‘verbal affirmation’ in Marathi, welcomes the audience and makes them understand and practice the useful gift of observation through participatory and active listening ability.

The act will be interconnected with the three human trial stories and tribulations, knotted together by the importance of hopefulness, and the impossibility behind life without hope. The play will include all traditional vocal, and singing techniques. All the stories are narrated using different languages, dialects, and styles by six experienced and professional artists.

Though there will be an absence of musical instruments, still through that the artists will still draw attention to the aesthetic value and importance of languages and spoken words.

Singing Youth by Judit Böröcz, Bence György Pálinkás, and Máté Szigeti

Singing Youth is a larger-than-life memorial representation, representing the three youths by a famous Greek sculptor of a political refugee,  Memos Makris in Hungary. The statue was built in 1953 in Budapest, in front of a sports stadium, where it still stands high and has survived the communist collapse, and after that the demolition process of the stadium, and the recreation of another one at the same place.

This unaccompanied activity, to bring the sculpture to life involves A Theatre Maker, a Singing Youth, a visual artist, and a composer teaming up. Created with information such as newspaper articles, interviews, and statements made by many political leaders over the years, the lyrics represent the statue as a witness to the political disruption, and current affairs, equally the importance of sports and arts in the political field.

4 by Tao Ye

The choreographic presentation by Tao Ye will let the audience explore the capability of the human body beyond the dramaturgical narrative or representation. In this act, titled 4, the abstracting choreography along with the human bodies represent pure phenomenal actions.

The piece of music for four people to sing or play together representation of powerfully flowing fluid bodies that control movements all around one magical central point. Additionally, the act has a fixed and free pattern of movements, that will look like seeks to keep identicalness. The one major central point to keeping all of them together is that can not fill the distance between them. Throughout the performance, minimal movement shifts are expertly defined, which will draw the attention of the audience and drive them into a slowly growing trance.

The music represents voices full of energy and equally brisk, and there will be the sound of plaintive string instruments beating against the vocals, which will regenerate an energetic ambiance that will simulate anonymous figures moving through the bridge of the white stage.

Perhaps All the Dragons by Berlin

Perhaps All the Dragon will bring an interesting turn on the theory of ‘six degrees of separation’, which gives an idea that all people are connected and just away from each other with six or fewer social connections.

During the immediate start, all the spectators will be seated around a large oval-shaped table, and each of them will be facing one single screen. Same way, ordinary audiences will appear on their screens, and each of them will be found narrating a true unusual story in a filmy monologue, a philosophical proposition, with a scientific detail or an anecdote.

The brought-up stories in this are electrifying, all along, these will balance at the edge of truthfulness.

Libya by Radouan Mriziga

Radouan Mriziga, in Libya, collaborates with dancers to explain the epistemologies and shared histories by trans-generational from a different yet wonderful perspective, in which memories collected by each body will play an essential role.

North American dance and music along with diverse landscapes and cave paintings portraying pre-historical dance movements somehow have a connection in between and influence a complex choreographical adventure. The layers of meaning of the activity are such as drawing the features of an imagined, uncovered before us, shared future from an unusual point of view.

Perhaps Here by various artists

The title of the event is borrowed from the fourth book of poetry by Khulood Al Mualla,  Rubbama Huna. Perhaps Here unveils the paths of contemporary imagination by presenting a variety range of live performances. The event will bring artists from a d diverse fields, and all of them will be sharing their artwork with the audience, will welcome them to experience something that might be intellectual, aesthetic, or emotional by nature.

Throughout three long days, 16 theater makers, installation and video artists, contemporary dancers, as well as poets will be presenting repeatedly throughout the evening. This event is going to be a marathon of acts by various artists. The audience can make a selection between four or six short presentations per night, each program will be 10 to 20 minutes long.

Additionally, the performances in Perform Sharjah will bring a wide range of learning possibilities in theaters as well as the talks and workshops hosted by the artists who are participating in the events with other cultural practitioners and local partners.

Though the admission is free, the interested individuals have to book the tickets. The tickets can be booked from the box office at Al Mureijah Square, the venue of the particular performances, or from their official website.

People can book their tickets by clicking on the below link.

Official link of Sharjah Art Foundation: Click here

Link to book the ticket: Click here