'Theater has taught me to be myself. Teached me life. Teached me love. It taught me to be open. It taught me to read and to discover small details. "
Director and theatre maker Mokhallad Rasem, also a teacher in our drama programme , gave this inspiring keynote at the opening of the academic year of the Royal Conservatoire Antwerp.ook docent aan onze opleiding Acteren, gaf een toespraak tijdens de opening van het academiejaar aan het Koninklijk Conservatorium Antwerpen.
Good day, everyone,
I am Mokhallad Rasem, theatre maker and actor at Toneelhuis, and teacher at the Drama department of
this school.
Frankly, I am nervous at the moment, like an actor just before a performance, or like a musical instrument that has yet to be tuned. It is very special for me to stand here and speak for you in a language that is not mine. I am very grateful that I was asked to speak at the opening of this academic year. I think it's a beautiful annual ritual, and it's an honor for me to be a part of it. I like rituals. Rituals are important. I have a lot of rituals myself.
I was born in Baghdad, the city nicknamed 'City of Peace', although it has known little peace. When I was very small, my innocent daily ritual was playing. Playing with other children, with my brothers and sister, very spontaneously. As I grew older, my daily ritual became to listen to a bedtime story, told by my mom or dad. Later that ritual changed to reading books myself.
When the war between Iran and Iraq broke out, it was a daily ritual to hide in a bunker during the bomb alarm. This ritual continued for eight years. Most of my childhood.
As I grew older, I developed the ritual of escaping daily reality by plunging into my imagination. In that way, I forgot the fear and the power that the dictator exercised on us, which was in itself a kind of ritual. Also during the first Gulf War I maintained this ritual of fear and caution.
Afterwards I started my theatre studies, which changed my ritual again. My daily reality became different now that I related it to art. I read a lot of books about history, philosophy and the visual arts.
When the last war between Iraq and the US was over, I realized that my reality was anything but normal. This
realization has made me put a stop to my daily rituals. I then decided to leave my reality, and to look for another reality where I could build new daily rituals.
One of those new daily rituals is to remember, to think of my family. I remember the tea with the taste of cardamom that my mother made for me in the morning. I remember the bread that was baked in the clay oven. I remember the dates we picked in the garden.
My daily ritual as an artist is imagining and observing reality. Silence. Watering the plants. Listening to classical music. Thinking about what's going on in the world. Reading poetry. Drawing. Drinking tea with cardamom.
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I've lost a lot in my life. I lost old rituals. I lost my daily reality. I lost my home. I lost my country. I lost my language. I lost my friends. I lost my dreams. I lost my dog. I lost my touch. I thought I'd lost everything. But in my new reality, with my new daily rituals, I found everything back in the theatre.
Theatre taught me to be myself. Taught me life. Taught me love. It taught me to be open. It taught me to
read and to discover small details. It taught me how to draw lines. Triangles and squares. I've learned to take care of my personality. I've learned to have fun. To divide my energy. It has allowed me to discover a new time and a new space.
I feel that the stage is my home. My country. I feel free there.
Like on this stage, I feel free to share my thoughts and feelings with you.
I feel a strong connection with you. We all have our own, special relationship with art here.
Art touches us and connects us to ourselves and to the world around us.
It plays a very important role, to spread a message and a vision. It provides communication. Communication that generates warmth between us. It can give people insights and alert people. It helps us to explore reality and read it in a different way. Art allows us to imagine other worlds, which makes us think about existential questions. Through art we can look for the truth that has disappeared in our society, in the mechanical political system. Art can develop a new generation, and ensure that people do not resign. Art can offer democracy in a country without democracy. Art is catharsis. It washes our brains and can reprogram them. It has a healing effect, in two directions, both for the public and for the artists. Through art we dare to describe our feelings.
In my view, art offers an individual perspective, with individual feelings, on the daily world in which man is central. Art is the pulse of life, and gives meaning to life.
Creativity and art provide access to greater awareness, can provide new insights, and can help express
the unspeakable. Today's world, and certainly education too, needs this approach now more than ever.
I came here today not only as a teacher, but also as an enthusiastic student.
With a lot of feelings and thoughts mixed up, just like many of you:
Passion for a start,
With open eyes to the world,
Looking for beauty,
Hungry for a new experience,
Confrontation,
Doubt, joy, fear, trust.
I first started studying theatre in Iraq when I was sixteen. I didn't have enough knowledge and insights on art back then. I was unsure about what I wanted to say, which way I wanted to go or where I wanted to land. But something had gotten me excited and I knew I wanted to be there.
My mother used to say to me, "If you don't know what to do or what to say, plant just one word. The word will grow into a tree”.
I planted myself like a seed in the school. Because of my teachers, my fellow students and my love for theatre, my roots have become firmly attached.
This school also has a very fertile soil, and I look forward in seeing all of you seeds germinate. I wish you all can also grow solid roots here and grow and bloom.
My tree has always kept on growing, in me, and I still water it every day. My tree has many branches, and each branch longs to find its own direction in which to grow, often without me realizing it myself.
So this academic year I'm going to be a student again and I'll be conducting my master's thesis here. A study on imagination. Because the basis of art is imagination.
The imagination of artists is indispensable. But even science and education, for example, cannot do without imagination.
There are several phenomena that stimulate our imagination. Humor, play, physical sensations, dreams, works of art, religious images... All these phenomena can put us in a situation where the natural world makes way for the experience of something new and surprising. They help us to look at something from different angles and to combine perspectives in unexpected ways.
Only people have imagination. We can imagine things that are not present and even things that do not exist in reality.
In my research I want to focus on the relationship between imagination and reality.
What is the relationship between imagination and the subject?
What is the relationship between the actor and his imagination?
What is the relationship between the body and imagination?
How does imagination relate to time, space and rhythm?
How can we develop our imagination? Can it be trained, and in what way?
What are the foundations of our imagination?
How can we transform reality into something from our imagination?
What if imagination were a subject to be taught in all schools?
When I started making theatre, I had a certain method of building the structure of my performance. I drew a circle, and then departed from this circle to think up scenes and characters. I wrote down ideas, key words, themes in the circle. One day, when I was looking at my notes from a distance, I made the impression that it seemed as if the circle represented the director's head, with all his thoughts in it. But the circle could just as easily represent the floor plan of the stage. This note‐taking trail has evolved over the years. The circle became a triangle. The triangle became a square. When I made notes and reservations within the square, I started to divide the square into smaller segments. I came up with a grid structure that was very similar to the structure of a crossword puzzle. At that moment I realized that my performances are constructed in the same way as this puzzle. I still see the crossword puzzle as the director's head with all his thoughts in it, arranged in an orderly manner according to the system of the game. This system is ingeniously constructed, with horizontal and vertical elements. The horizontal elements are the tangible concrete elements, the reality. The vertical elements are the imaginative elements. So the task is to fill in imagination and reality in such a way that the puzzle is correct. With this in mind, my work acquired new meaning and a new perspective. The findings of my own research in the theatre are always expressed in my performances. I want to use the crossword puzzle as a starting point to create a performance.
In theatre I am looking for a space to connect past, present and future. The essence of my work is asking questions. Questions that make me search deeply for content. I still ask myself a lot of questions that
confuse and provoke me.
Imagine you stop talking, dreaming, searching, questioning. Who would you be? What about me? And our children? We would be people without ambition, curiosity and stories. We would be people who have no interest in our past, present or future. We would be indifferent, unchanging and unambiguous. We must not stop asking ourselves questions about ourselves and our world.
So:
Why do we want to study art?
Why do we want to take on this challenge and confrontation?
To create universal content?
Or for aesthetic or ideological reasons?
Do we want to change the world through art?
Or create a new world?
Are we looking for lost beauty?
Is there a voice in us that wants to come out?
Are we just doing it for our own happiness?
Or maybe to make others happy?
Is it because we want to understand each other?
Perhaps to find solutions to some problems?
Maybe find out the truth?
Maybe something happened?
Maybe to discover yourself?
Maybe to be yourself?
Maybe because of the conflict?
Maybe to please ourselves?
Maybe to live in peace?
Or to analyze reality?
Maybe to realize our lives?
Or maybe because we dare?
I wish you all lots of energy, strength, dreams, passion. We are here for each other. Above all, let's have some fun.