The world is becoming what it was: a home for masters and slaves. (…)
I liberate us from our mission.
You, Galloudec, the farmer from Brittany.
You, Sasportas, the son of slavery.
I, Debuisson.

from The Mission, Heiner Müller

In the spring of 2027, Syrian theatre teacher, dramaturg, translator, writer, and director Oussama Ghanam and tg STAN present the production MISSION. Depending on the situation in Syria and the Middle East, this production will be created together in Damascus, Beirut, and Antwerp. We will have to be flexible in this regard and adapt to the whims of the times. The working languages ​​are Arabic, Dutch, and English. MISSION premieres in June 2027 at Monty Antwerp. A domestic and international tour will follow in the 2027-2028 season.

The context:
Oussama Ghanam and tg STAN had a mission, each in their own part of the world: to show the harshness of the world through theatre and the love of poetry, and to hope that through their work they could make a small contribution to the survival of humanity in mankind. Almost forty years later, they conclude that this mission has failed. The world has not softened, injustice is rampant, intolerance and stupidity have won, and poetry has been stifled. Why then still believe in a mission? Why continue? Or, in Oussama’s case, why stay? That is the starting point of MISSION. It is an inquiry into engagement.

The story:

A playwright from Damascus writes a play. In that play, a director on one side of the sea works with three Syrian actors from three different generations on the theatrical adaptation of Ghassan Kanafani’s 1962 novel Men in the Sun, in which he tells the story of three Palestinian men attempting to travel from Iraq to Kuwait, where they hope to find a better life; while on the other side of the sea, a company of three actors stages Heiner Müller’s The Mission in which Müller describes the failed attempt by three envoys of the French Revolution to export that revolution to Jamaica. The playwright somehow ensures that these two worlds meet.

Oussama and tg STAN:
Oussama Ghanam was born in Damascus in 1975. After his studies at the Faculty of Economics of the University of Damascus and at ISAD, the only place in Syria where one could study theater, Oussama moved to Avignon in 1997, where he trained as a general technician and stage manager at the Institut Supérieur des Techniques du Spectacle. A year later, Oussama enrolled at the Université de Paris-VIII, specializing in theater studies. He first completed a master’s degree, then a DEA, and finally a doctorate. He remained in Paris until 2005, thereby developing a deep knowledge of both European theater and that of the Arab world. After defending his dissertation, Oussama returned to Damascus, became a professor at ISAD, and gradually began to make the transition from theory to practice. In 2008, as part of ‘Damascus 2008, Arab Cultural Capital’, he collaborated on an adaptation of Slawomir Mrozek’s The Emigrants reworked in the Damascene dialect. Subsequently, Oussama created his own version of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, followed by a staging of C’est arrivé demain, a monologue by Dario Fo and Franca Rame. The performance was presented in late 2010, a few weeks before the outbreak of what would later become the Arab Spring. It was very warmly received and toured in Lebanon and Germany. During that period, the need also arose to create a collective, a company. This led to the creation of the ‘Damascus Theater Laboratory’.

When the Arab Spring escalated into a civil war in 2011, Oussama’s freedom of movement came to an end. Since obtaining a passport in Syria was linked to military service—and Oussama did not wish to fulfill this—travel became impossible for him. In the following years, Oussama Ghanam would remain in Damascus, teaching at the drama school, writing, adapting, and staging plays, and leading his Theater Laboratory. From 2017 onwards, he was able to travel again. His productions were presented in Syria, Tunisia, and Lebanon, among other places. Meanwhile, the exodus of Syrian students and intellectuals, and compulsory military service for all young people, caused an extremely worrying academic and artistic drain. Throughout all those years, Oussama tried tooth and nail, at the risk of life and limb, to keep cultural life in his country alive, virtually without money or resources.

During his student days in France, Oussama also saw all the performances that tg STAN presented in Paris. Tg STAN met Oussama in 2007. That year, Frie Leysen was a curator at the ‘Young Arab Theatre Fund’, an institution dedicated to contemporary artists within the Arab world. For the multidisciplinary festival ‘Meeting Points’, which presented projects in nine Arab cities that year, tg STAN was invited to perform 2 Antigone and The Monkey Trial in Rabat, Cairo, Tunis, Beirut, and Damascus. It was in that last city that we also had the opportunity to lead a workshop at ISAD, the national drama school, at the invitation of Oussama Ghanam… Three years later we created The Tangible, a performance in which two students from the drama school in Damascus participated. For that production, we worked closely with Oussama in Damascus. Since that period, we have made strenuous efforts to develop a performance together with him. The situation in Syria and the Middle East, the resulting refugee flow, and the administrative nightmare all of this caused in the West as well, have made cooperation impossible until today. That is now changing, and those addicted to violence and war will not stop us.

The mission of art is to make reality impossible. (Heiner Müller)