2024-02-25 06:52:55
Theater is like existence, and existence is an expression of freedom, the resurrection of its permanence, because according to what we lived with the Lebanese actor and theater director Antoine Multaqa (1933-2024); It is also (knowledge) and a rebellious approach – a clash with tyrants, as he embodied it in his performances such as: Macbeth 1962, and The Chisel, in which he participated in the “Nancy” Festival in France in 1965 at the request of the festival director at the time, Jack Lang, a play in which Antoine introduced the intersection of the techniques of the storyteller and the imagination. The Shadow, The Flies 1963, Richard III 1964, Blood Wedding 1964, The Bowl is Lost 1966, Sesame 1966, Caligula 1967, I Voter 1969, A Dog’s Will 1972, Ten Young Slaves 1973, which is the play prepared and directed by his wife, Latifa Multaqa, regarding Agatha Christie, and he acted in it, period. On the Line 1980, Visiting the Old Lady 1987, War on the Third Floor 1993, The Brisbane Immigrant 1999. All of these works were the result of his awareness of freedom.
Antoine Multaqa brought to Lebanon the pioneers of modern theater from France, where he founded with Mounir Abu Debs the Institute of Modern Acting in 1960. He joined the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts (ALBA) and obtained a degree in philosophy (1956), following which he obtained a diploma in theater from the University of Paris. He was the owner of a theatrical project, with a graphic line in which he showed us his philosophy, the philosophy (meaning) of freedom and its suffering in Arab political and social life, so he placed it in its human context. The context of revolution and rebellion once morest what is familiar and accustomed. Just as Multaqa celebrated theatrical texts, most of which were by Shakespeare in his early days; Celebrate the art of acting. He considered that theater is the actor: “If I wanted to give a definition of the art of theater, I would have called it the art of the actor.” The actor is not a puppet, he is a body inhabited by a soul, and his body, according to the role of the character that he (plays), is the basis of the theatrical performance that is built by the actor’s motor formation, which is based on answering the question: (what) do I do and (how) do (I) the actor do on stage. And (what) this is the dialectic that the actor must answer in his performance in movement, showing us his awareness of the question, as well as his awareness of the question. Depending on the performance, the characters were from texts by Shakespeare or Brecht, or by Mahmoud Diab and Alfred Farag, or by Mamdouh Adwan, Farhan Bulbul, Saadallah Wannous. , or by the writer Yassin and Ezz al-Din Madani, or… Because just as we are taken by the word (the saying) that the actor says, the saying must be accompanied by action; By embodying it as a performance on stage, it teaches us, charges us, and motivates us, and does not empty us – it empties us. Because what we watch is as if it were a performance of a real act; For a living verb. According to Antoine, the meeting place of the body is the “house of desires” as in Christian theology. He and the actor on stage must practice civil disobedience, as he is an influential body and influences with his performance, showing us the actions of good and evil characters in their eternal struggle over who rules and who is master.
“Antoine Multaqa brought to Lebanon the pioneers of modern theater from France, where he founded the Institute of Modern Acting with Mounir Abu Debs in 1960.”
The actor at Multaqa – who founded in 1980 with his wife Latifa “Maroun Al-Naqqash Theater” – is the theatrical (show) who, through his performance, must achieve (the illusion of) merging with the action/conflict that he raises on stage. Acting is not the art of delivery, it is not the words in the text and then converting them into sounds. In his theatrical project – an experimental experimental project in which he worked on his characters as an actor, director, and with his companion Latifa Multaqa on Human Nature – he takes on the character, interprets and evaluates their actions, whether they are good or evil characters, and takes from them (the illusion) her illusion that justifies and beautifies life for her and throws her into (The truth) that you live from want, poverty, weakness, and disappointment, to live in truth and not in illusion; He takes the characters, of whom he was the author and maker, from non-existence as absence, to existence as presence, achieving “astonishment” in his theatrical presentation, thus reducing the torment of human feeling and its alienation. It is a cognitive moment in which he answers those questioning and interrogative questions (what).
His first appearance on stage was in 1937 as a young farmer. Then he acted and directed his first play: “Al-Zeer” by Voltaire, in 1950 in his hometown of Wadi Shahrour. You see him digging long and often to show us the boiling of the pent-up volcanoes in our feelings, and our questions regarding: Who stole freedom from us, chained us to those chains and shackles, and threw us into a brutal forest; Or will the thief/thief eat us, or will monsters eat us? The law of absence. This is what Antoine Multaqa worked to criticize in his plays. He loosens from our hands and necks, from our minds, the wires and chains of beliefs that play with man-made and divine laws to their advantage, in a dramatic and experimental manner. Antoine Multaqa, in his project, tried to save the Aristotelian and Brechtian dramatic form, and thus achieved a kind of controversy. From a conflict between actions, not between words; It was a dialogue or a conversation/conversation, and that conversation in the theater does not develop into action, and it is difficult for it to become action. As a director, he did not carry a stick and acted like a class teacher, and the students had to carry out his orders. He was, as an experimental director, inciting the actor to use his feelings and sensations in the role he was playing for the character, whether it was one of Shakespeare’s characters or Lorca. Although he worked on Shakespeare, his theater was influenced by Antonin Artaud (1896-1948), the founder of the Theater of Cruelty, who gave the actor’s body the first role in shaping and composing the theatrical performance, and not to the literary language in which the author wrote his text. With the departure of Multaqa, the Arab theater lost a pioneering intellectual and theatrical thinker who, in his theater, was committed to the cause of freedom and dignity that the Arab human being lacks, with the utmost cruelty.
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