‘The Woman Who Dwelt in the House Before’ will return to D-CAF once more at Rawabet Arts Space

 

The highly acclaimed performance, "The Woman Who Dwelt in the House Before," will return to the D-CAF Festival once more, following its remarkable display in the festival's ninth edition in 2021. The Syrian-French show will take place on the 19th and 20th of October at Rawabet Arts Space at 8 pm, by French director  Henri Jules Julien, and features collaboration with the esteemed Syrian poet, Rasha Omran.

 

The One Who Lived in the House Before Me is a stage adaptation of Syrian poet Rasha Omran’s poetry collection of the same name. The show is an oratorio of three female voices, who bring Omran’s words to the stage in a bold, multilingual reinterpretation. The writer herself performs her own poems in Arabic, while celebrated Syrian actress Nanda Mohammad performs the same poems in French. A third voice, played by renowned improviser Isabelle Duthoit, sings the poems at her turn in a mystical “language before language.” 

 

Syrian poet Rasha Omran shared her journey, turning her poetry into art. The Syrian poet Rasha Omran stated: “When I rented the apartment where I now live in Cairo, I sensed the lingering essence of a previous solitary tenant, a Greek woman. This discovery stirred my imagination, and I imagined that this house was as if it were reserved for lonely, strange women in their fifties; I felt as if I was imitating her. As for the idea for the artistic show, it was sparked by a conversation with French director Jules Julien, who translated a group of my poetry verses and proposed the concept for the performance.

 

After studying literature at Damascus University, Rasha Omran founded the Al-Sindiyan Festival of Literature and Culture in the 1990s, which she directed for sixteen years. A vocal supporter of the Syrian uprising, Omran has lived in exile in Cairo since 2012, where she continues to write for various Arab media outlets.

 

Living between Cairo and Casablanca, Henri Jules Julien has collaborated with several of the region’s renowned theater makers, including Ahmed El Attar, Hassan El Geretly, Youness Atbane, and Khalid Benghrib. Julien has directed two other bilingual French-Arabic shows: De la justice des poissons and Mahmoud & Nini.

 

The play is produced by the collective art project SHAEIRAT, which produces and stages bilingual Arab poetry performances globally. The project was inaugurated at the 2022 Festival D’Avignon, and is currently run by Soukaina Habiballah, Carol Sansour, and Henri Jules Julien.