Artists emboldened by cultural freedom
BAGHDAD -- Haytham Abdel Razak lunges forward so hard that his eyeglasses pop out of his shirt pocket as he shouts at his troupe of 10 thespians.
"Scream when you get slapped, scream like it really hurts!" he bellows at one actress, whose character is being beaten by one of Saddam Hussein's secret police.
Razak and his actors are rehearsing a production that is, as far as possible, the opposite of the stodgy state-sanctioned art that proliferated under Hussein's regime and stifled a generation of young artists.
"Sir, I Didn't Mean To" portrays a schoolteacher who descends into madness when he finds he can't answer a student's simple query about the meaning of freedom. Razak and his actors developed the play collaboratively without a script, and it's evolved into a frenetic critique of the violent and intrusive nature of life under the Ba'athists.
On the streets of Baghdad, Iraqis frequently complain about the decline in their quality of life since the US-led invasion, often voicing a common refrain: "What kind of liberation is this?"
But in the theaters, at least, young actors have embraced a measure of new freedom. The dozens of young actors and directors at the National Theater scrambling to ready plays for a festival next month have seized with enthusiasm an artistic freedom unknown for 25 years in Iraq.
"The policeman inside me has been lifted," Razak said, the glee obvious in his widening hazel eyes.
Their palpable energy is echoed elsewhere in the fine arts, where a cadre of younger Iraqi painters and sculptors have emerged from the shadows of a generation of state-funded artists who lived comfortably under the old regime -- so long as they hewed to a narrow and apolitical path.
For the artists discovering a new space in post-Hussein Iraq, liberation from a totalitarian government has wrought a cultural revolution.
No longer do government censors vet paintings for political content before exhibitions and command artists to create works about the evil effects of the United Nations sanctions. No longer do the officials in charge of the actors union and gallery owners with crony ties to the regime choose who will succeed in the scrap for government-financed culture.
The same newfound wonder rippling through the National Theater permeates the Contemporary Visual Arts Society, or CVAS, a group of young painters, sculptors, and graphic designers who were shut out from lucrative galleries and government commissions.
"I've been painting like mad since the end of the war," said Tara Sharif, 30, who uses watercolors and oils in a modern style. "I don't care if there's no electricity. Sunlight is enough for me."
CVAS is opening a show of postwar paintings Thursday at Rabat Gallery on Magreb Street in downtown Baghdad. The group is proclaiming a new cultural movement, a renaissance for Iraqi art.
"We are proud of the fact that, for so many years, we had effectively disappeared," said Nizar A. Rawi, a 33-year-old graphic designer and president of the artists' collective.
He and the other artists in their 20s and 30s used to live hand-to-mouth because they refused to join the cocktail society of literati supported by Hussein's Ministry of Culture, which controlled art through generous funding and censorship.
The young artists are putting their work on the Internet. In addition to this week's exhibit, they are preparing for a show with 120 visual artists opening on Oct. 15, sponsored in part by the US-led occupation authority. Some of the new artistic vitality has already made its way to the public. Right after Baghdad fell in April, an artists' collective called Al Najeen, or the survivors, replaced the toppled statue of Hussein in Firdos Square with a green angel-like piece called "Freedom."
They also staged an outdoor play called "A Madman in My Country" in the same square.
Although artists who chafed under the regime are thriving, the new cultural opening has angered others.
At the National Theater, depressed establishment artists and directors sit in the shadows, sipping tea a floor below the bustling rehearsal rooms.
"I'm still dizzy from the bombing," said Qasim al-Mallak, the former director of the National Theater. "Can you stage a performance when tanks are rumbling in the streets?"
On the edge of the capital, intellectuals sip tea at Hewar Art Cafe, where much of the regime-approved art was displayed and sold. The owner, Qasim al-Sabti, projects a vital bohemian air with long black hair and a Hawaiian shirt.
But he shares little of the enthusiasm of the younger artists downtown. "My friends can't paint, because there's no electricity," Sabti said. "Creativity and art need security and stability."
Rawi dismisses such comments as the nostalgic carping of the old establishment.
The losers in the renaissance are also mourning the loss of generous state subsidies, which they received for all manner of creative work. The young artists are also beginning to feel the financial pinch. Directors corner visiting Westerners at the National Theater for money to pay the actors who currently volunteer their time. CVAS has gone hat in hand to foreign nonprofit organizations and to the United Nations for help buying art supplies and renting exhibition space.
Like Sabti, Razak flourished in Hussein's time, as a television star; he drives a BMW and wears crisp Polo shirts. But he has made a quick and apparently successful transition to the new mores.
Razak and his actors are practicing for now in an unfurnished room on the upper floor of the National Theater, which was spared the worst looting after the government fell.
In one particularly poignant scene, the main character -- who has quit teaching after abusing the student who dared ask him "What does freedom mean?" -- sets up a tea stand in a shantytown by a busy highway.
But even there, other castoffs from Hussein's Iraq intrude on the narrow life of forgetfulness he's trying to build. A mother whose sons have been killed, a young Ba'athist in sudden disfavor, and a mentally ill beggar all set up competing tea stands and eventually come to blows.
Like modern dancers, the actors hurl themselves to the floor, screeching, as they reenact a beating from Hussein's secret police.
"We were all fed a culture of violence," Razak said. "We want to create an opposing current, to help Iraqis believe in one another again."
At a time when many Iraqis are reeling from the effects of the war -- spotty power, high unemployment, rampant crime -- Razak and other artists harbor no illusions about the power they have.
"The theater isn't going to make people feel better," Razak said. "But these plays will make people think about the things we went through and the crimes we perpetrated."
Thanassis Cambanis can be reached at tcambanis@globe.com.
