Actor-directors do not always share the interests or concerns of the academics, and certainly the fine distinctions that the latter draw between dramatic monologues and the
monodrama, or between these and the dramatic lyric, mask lyric and expressive lyric, are geared more toward an experience of poetry as it is read as opposed to how it might be performed.
"We will have two workshops this year," film director and TAA founder Kassem Istanbouli told The Daily Star, "one from Dorand on storytelling, acting and
monodrama and another from Pakistani director Hamid Azeem, who will give a three-day workshop on stage movement and body language."
And then came the main course, a presentation of Schoenberg's cabaret-style
monodrama Pierrot Lunaire which moved, harrowed and eventually drained both performers and audience alike emotionally.
Seretse is also a character in Motswana: Africa, Dream Again (2012), the second play, but is not the protagonist--only one of eight characters Molosi performs in this
monodrama, which takes the celebration of Botswanan identity in the first play and complicates it.
This is how Syrian actress Yara Sabri summed up the life of the Syrian people in a
monodrama. She was playing the role of a Syrian woman fighting entrenched behind sandbags in a one-woman play called Under the Sky performed in the Dubai Community Theater & Arts Centre.
Artists and art troupes from 55 countries will present their work during the festival, which includes some of the biggest cultural and arts events organised in Fujairah, such as the 7th Fujairah International
Monodrama Festival and the third cycle of Al Saif Championship.
Following on from awardwinning, internationally touring
monodrama Call Mr.
Bloom, multiple flutes, Carol Epple, flute, Pamela Marshall, horn, Dan Meyers, recorders, and Karl Henning, clarinet will perform two world premieres: Karl Henning's From the Pit of a Cave in the Cloud, Op.129 (an intense
monodrama written in 2015 on a text by Leo Schulte), and David Leone's Cathedral for flute, clarinet and fixed media.
The first female professional mime in Syria, Humsi wrote and performed The Option (1988), a
monodrama directed by Riad Ismat.