© The Runaways by Wafa Tabboubi
Stagings of the possible: Introducing AFAC’s 2025 Performing Arts grantees
28 / 8 / 2025

On stages and in rehearsal rooms, the 21 projects selected for AFAC’s 2025 Performing Arts program shine a light on performance as a site of possibility to address personal and collective experiences in the region. Across dance, theater, shadow puppetry, storytelling, music and multimedia, they probe the urgencies of the present and the unsettled realities behind it.

Some projects turn to the past – fossil records, archival footage, or plays by Shakespeare, Genet and Beckett — to craft performances that ask what could be different if we lived in societies less focused on heroes or changed the racial hierarchies of care work. Others turn to the body in all its tactility or the dominant narratives orbiting our realities, looking to fashion them into new vocabularies, aesthetics, sensibilities and terrains. The silence of detention is made into an act of defiance. The corrosive forces of occupation give way to studies of the freedom of movement. The fissures of family are recast in a surrealist swirl that figures power relations anew. Breathing becomes an act of resistance.

The works — from practitioners and entities in Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine, Somalia, Syria and Tunisia — employ traditional repertoires as much as hybrid experiments. Many of them stretch the frame of performance beyond conventional spaces, and, in doing so, they attend to the communal dimension of the practice to stage encounters in streets, community centers and discursive spaces. In their multiplicity, they affirm the performing arts as both a vessel for continuity and a medium for resistance and transformation.

This year’s applications were reviewed by readers’ committees, which included Abdullah Al-Kafri (Syria), Asmaa Houri (Morocco), Chrystelle Khodor (Lebanon), Sahar Assaf (Lebanon) and Omar Abusaada (Syria). Projects that made it past this initial stage were then submitted to a committee of independent jurors.

The 2025 jury – Tunisian actress Lobna Mlika; Lebanese actor and director Fadi Abi Samra; and Syrian actor Mohamad Al Rashi – convened to make the final selection. At the end of their meeting, the jurors issued the following statement:

    “This year, the Performing Arts Program jury convened to evaluate a wide range of projects, marked by varied modes of expression, with notable intersections among many of them.

    A considerable number of submissions demonstrated advanced artistic form. In their engagement with the lived realities of their communities, they also exhibited significant depth of treatment. Prominent themes included identity, migration, war, belonging, and gender-based violence and discrimination — themes that mirror the struggles we endure and the challenges our communities face.

    The projects also highlighted a need to promote artistic activity beyond major urban centers and out to villages, rural areas and regions marginalized by authorities. Another key observation was the challenges artists face in finding venues – rehearsal spaces, small theaters and cultural centers – for their work, an issue that needs to be addressed to ensure the continuity of artistic practice in the region.

    The jury also encourages applicants to remain realistic in their proposed budgets to allow a greater number of artists to benefit from the grants, to submit clear, concrete proposals with detailed examples and active links, and to avoid overly abstract approaches. This ensures that submitted proposals are robust, transparent and impactful.

    Finally, the jury wishes to commend the significant work undertaken by AFAC and emphasizes the critical importance of sustaining this support, which has enabled – and will continue to enable – many artists to realize their visions on stage.    ”

The selected projects