It was the first time that the centre has delegated such a task to an “outside” curator. This in itself was a big test for both the centre and myself. It was a test to see to what extent I could work towards a previously set topic that already falls within a certain order of events related to the history and recent past of the centre. This meant that on the one hand each step I took would be connected to this history, but also on the other that each step I took could also have an impact on the future of these histories. It was also a test for the German Centre in the sense of how much trust, support and freedom it could provide to me as a curator.

The repercussions of COVID-19 led to the event, which was initially supposed to take place in November 2020, being postponed until it finally took place on the 19th of June, 2021 in a hybrid form, thus exploring in practice the formats of hybridity that the event was itself discussing. With the changes to both the structure of the day event and the concept “Hybridity & Equality?”, it shifted from being an interrogation or a questioning to being an affirmation of necessity. The test for both parties proved to be much more difficult than expected, since all the fluctuations of the lockdown and the continuous instability within cultural organisations in Germany increased the challenges of holding such an event and confronted it with growing complexities. Nonetheless, as I have learned from Augusto Boal’s The Theatre of the Oppressed, the peak of the crisis can also be the peak of the opportunity. The pressures and challenges drove us all to succeed and to provide a model of how an established institution can work with an individual, not to mention that an individual – myself – who is a migrant POC and a woman! We were right in the heart of the topic that we were aiming to discuss in the annual conference. Our collaboration turned out to be a direct exercise in hybridity and equality. To me, this signified that we are absolutely on the right track and that the symposium is not just an intellectual exercise nor a mere annual event hosted by the ITI Germany, but a real, daily and concrete practise of learning autonomy within collaboration, emphasising equality in relation to the usual hierarchy of power when it comes to the individual worker versus an established institution and, moreover, repeatedly understanding what it means to transform the dynamics of dialogue and transnational encounters as a way of transforming one’s own inherited colonial patterns and discriminatory structures.

Boal’s notion of an opportunity for change lying within the peak of crisis proved to be right several times over. After all, it was The Theatre of the Oppressed that led me to become a project manager at ITI Germany in 2005, when a pioneering cooperation was launched with the Sudanese Centre of the ITI to establish the Centre for Theatre in Conflict Zones, almost the first cultural and artistic project to be funded by Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (Institute for Foreign Relations) at the time, and one that remains a model of equal transnational collaboration to date. I remember how we started our first concrete on-site training course for diversity, transparency and equal partnership together sixteen years ago, a training that was also influenced by the philosophy of the theatre of the oppressed and by a feminist perspective that led me to the workshops of Barbara Santos. Being a woman myself, I found it extremely challenging to work with teams that were predominantly male and followed a social behaviour pattern that remains heavily patriarchal. The challenge was even more complex since I am Egyptian, but at the same time was working as a project manager for the German side. On occasion it seemed to me that we were right at the crossroads of everything that we need to decolonise: patriarchy, colonial thinking (which is shared by both the coloniser and the colonised), and representation. These were exactly the topics that I aspired to transform throughout my career as a performer, author, choreographer and theatre director in Egypt. They remained with me wherever I travelled or worked, and even when I migrated to Germany in 2015. Only the topic of racism was added to the list, but racism too has many facets and can even exist within the oppressed towards themselves. Internalised racism is also part of the heritage of the pedagogy of oppression and subjugation.

All the training that we were doing throughout our transnational collaborations had to therefore be primarily a training in self-criticism, in the decolonisation of our own knowledge about ourselves and others, as well as criticism about how our own institutions work. The success of the Centre for Theatre in Conflict Zones project was more of a success for the growth of the two parties involved in the partnership, the German and the Sudanese. The Egyptian individual – myself – who sometimes had to be defined in terms of nationality, worked as a catalyst, a mediator or a bridge. It seemed that a bridge can also be a crossroads where all the issues at hand are projected. Nonetheless, such an entity emphasises the conflict, sharpens the perspective of decolonisation and escalates the potential of a transformative opportunity. Coming back to the annual conference in 2021, I can say that it was clear that the expertise in mutual trust had already been planted long ago, yet the risk was still there in implementing experimental formats and integrating an emotional dimension that is almost never present in conferences. The design of that encounter led us to blur the boundaries between intellectual input and emotional impact, between critical discourse and the performative input of music, song and poetry, and between confrontation and human bonding. For me, a symposium can also be a performance and a critical discourse can also be emotional, a song can be a political manifesto and a poetic monologue can be a transformation of the dynamics of power. Each identity is whole and can be practised in a holistic sense.

The contributions varied between institutional input, presentations by cultural activists and talks by theatre festival creators and artists. The amount of honesty was outstanding. And honesty is a milestone towards equality, mutuality and growth. A map of scattered topics filled the screen of the digital encounter, like an auction of words, covering topics such as: funding, decolonisation, spectatorship, isolation, privilege, racism, hierarchy, categorisation and labelling, objectification, stigmatisation, exoticisation, empathy, solidarity, normality, the gaze, cultural justice, togetherness, transformation and humanness. It seemed that we were successfully passing the test and even increasing the level of challenge and difficulty by bringing in criticism of our own institutions, among them the ITI Germany itself. It is very possible to support criticism of the dynamics of hegemony in transnational artistic collaboration while also criticising the institution we work for. Actually no criticism or conference is really sincere and effective until it triggers – or starts with – self-criticism. Therefore the challenge of being commissioned to curate the annual conference while the German Centre was at a point of transformation proved to be exactly the right moment, because both operations – creating the annual conference and the institutional transformation – went hand in hand and influenced each other in an ideal way.

In the elections to the board in June 2021, the very first female president of ITI Germany was elected: Yvonne Büdenhölzer. It appeared to be a huge injustice that over almost seventy years no woman had occupied that position before, in spite of the large number of women working in the performing arts sector in Germany. The same applies to women working in this sector all over the world. Patriarchal notions of leadership remain at the heart of injustice and discrimination within the creative sectors. Yet this could change. Based on the premise that patriarchy is also a colonising force, the flow and exchange of critical ideas can lead to institutional decolonisation. Creating activities where revolutionary speakers and artists contribute honestly can also lead to strategic change. Such change always needs to function through each person claiming ownership of their identity and creativity, beyond the divide and the colonisation of knowledge and systems of thinking. They also require courage, the courage to assume responsibility, and the courage to give up privilege sometimes. This is also an exercise of destabilisation. A hard one, not least because it was executed amidst a global fluctuation in our safety, value of life and human fragmentation. Yet this is exactly why it could work. Again, crisis and opportunity. Rather, crisis is opportunity.

While the circumstances of the pandemic forced us to choose a digital version of the annual conference, it also caused us to produce a film of the meeting, a direct channel to achieve massive outreach and archive the conference at the same time. This meant we could also contribute to the overall discussion in Germany’s cultural sector and provide documentation of the encounter that remains for further consultation and dissemination beyond the occasion and the specific moment in time. It was a chance to think about the present while also keeping an eye on the future of that present and being aware that a present will always become a past. Nonetheless, I remain convinced that boundaries in time do not exist: time is continuous, connected and interwoven. Nothing goes away, everything transforms. It is due to continuous learning and training that we build knowledge and expertise. Projects we have created since 2005 – like Theatre in Conflict Zones – where everything was put to the test led us to the present moment of the ITI Germany’s transformation of its institutional identity, which in turn led us to the recent elections to the board, and now to the upcoming ITI Academy where an emerging generation of festival makers can envision their own future and train towards its realisation. In my experience, Sudan, Brazil, Egypt and Germany are connected. I remain a mediator and a bridging identity, yet I transform due to that role, and by consequence I keep transforming the role. I change my home city and reposition myself, yet I still have the same urge to liberate my expression and to own my transformative body on stage, beyond norms and gender. I realise the agency I have. I realise how I carry time and history under the identity of a migrant. I realise that I too have power.

Our identities are continuously in metamorphosis. One way to decolonise our performance cultures and arts from the powers of patriarchy and coloniality, and to retrieve our authority over our cultural production beyond the white hegemony, the colonisation of knowledge and the economies of exploitation, is to evacuate the notions of discrimination and division. We must also practise alternative behaviour within the local production of performance cultures – the whole journey of independent theatre in Egypt is an example of this, a model of continuous transformation creating its own structures of production as an alternative to state-controlled culture – while also opting for revolutionary models of transnational collaboration that develop their own economies and creative strategies. In fact, we could even name them “trans-boundary collaborations” to emphasise the shift from collaborations between “nations”. The formats also need to be revolutionised, because the formats have become stigmatised to the point of stagnation. A symposium can also be a performance and a performance can also be a space to create new theory and knowledge. Empathy is a powerful weapon for decolonisation and for retrieving the dignity that has been broken due to a heritage of racism and cultural subjugation. The future starts with what we create today. Listening to our bodies teaches us about transformation. Our institutions need to learn from our personal and intimate transformation, because an institution always starts with the individual, but an individual does not necessarily need an institution to start operating. Let’s all be a body of transformation, beyond the boundaries and obstacles imposed by power interests and beyond the global heritage of injustice. Because in crisis lies the opportunity.