I HATE THEATRE
I LOVE PORNOGRAPHY

OVERVIEW

“I Hate Theatre I Love Pornography” is an investigation on current forms of corruption plaguing today’s world. It uses theatricality as a tool to question how we position ourselves as artists and as individuals with regards to the multiple representations of this corruption. 

The past few years have witnessed citizens of countries in the Northern Hemisphere becoming more and more afraid of cultural difference, electing extreme right-wing leaders and voting for exclusionist policies, for the prospect of being safe from “The Other”. While most of the South continues to be torn by wars, destroying infrastructures and wiping out whole cultures, with real-estate businessmen waiting like scavengers for the right moment to sell and re-build. As the death of children continues to be bartered for profit, we ask ourselves how can we as theatre makers position ourselves in the middle of the obscenity of this political opportunism.

Today these same power-thirsty policy makers, warlords and traffickers, are setting the new paradigms of the world’s system of values… exclusion, marginalization, segregation, displacement, murder… specifying the worth of human bodies, through commodities, wars, and the media. In an era when people are brutally massacred and decapitated, and their deaths are broadcasted on daily news, while heroes in Hollywood zombie movies are systematically obliterating masses of the undead on screens; this performance attempts to shed light on this corruption through the value we assign to our bodies, creating a parallelism between the performative body, the pornographic body and the corpse.

INFO | CREDITS

Production Year:  2019
Production Language: Arabic
Production Duration: 60 mins
 
Conceived and produced by Zoukak Theatre Company

Directed by: Omar Abi Azar
Devised and Performed by: Lamia Abi Azar, Hashem Adnan, Ziad Chakaroun, Khodor Ellaik, Junaid Sarieddeen and Maya Zbib
Assistant Director: Rahaf Jammal, Natalie Maalouf
Light Designer/Technical Director: Nadim Deaibes
Scenography: Nathalie Harb, Omar Abi Azar
Communication: Marianne Kortbani
Graphic Design: Maya Chami
Production manager: Mohamad Hamdan
Co-produced by: IBSEN Awards
Supported by: Sundance Institute and Drosos Foundation

Filmed version produced within Borderline Offensive: Laughing in the Face of Fear, with financial support from Creative Europe and Västra Götaland Region

The first phase of this project was created in collaboration with Abdullah Al Kafri, Ahmad Ghossein, and Helle Siljeholm, at the Ibsen Theatre in Skien, Norway, in 2014.

This Project has been developed partly at IBSEN Theatre in Norway in 2014 and at Sundance Institute’s Theatre Lab in Utah in 2017.

PAST PERFORMANCES

2014

RESIDENCY AT IBSEN CENTER

Skien, Norway

October, 2014

Presentation as a work-in-progress at Ibsen Theatre

Skien, Norway

January, 2015

Performance at ITFOK – International Theater Festival of Kerala

Kerala, India

June, 2015

Performance at metro al madina

Beirut, Lebanon

October, 2019

Performance within the ibsen awards festival

Skien, Norway

December, 2020

Performance at Al Madina Theatre

Beirut, Lebanon

February, 2022

Performance within Faraway Festival

Reims, France

April, 2024

Performance within “Barcelona Calling Beirut” festival at the National Theatre of Catalonia

Barcelona, Spain

August, 2025 (upcoming)

Performance within “Noorderzon” festival of performing arts & society

Groningen, Netherlands