The poet in the nebula

Alsir Alsayed

This title is taken from the book (The Poet in the Theater), written by Ronald Peacock and translated by the poet and playwright Mamdouh Adwan. Its second edition was published by the Syrian Ministry of Culture in 1994.
My inspiration for this title and my attempt to project it on the experience of the Sadeem theatrical group, until it was founded in April 1980 at the Higher Institute of Music and Theater at that time, came because the group included in its membership a significant number of poets, namely the deceased, our professor Muhammad Mohieddin, Qasim Abu Zaid, Yahya Fadlallah, Hatem Muhammad Saleh, and Abbas Al-Zubair and the deceased Hamid Jumaa… These names, given the group’s experience and without neglecting the role of the group’s members who do not write poetry, had a major role in the group’s journey at the levels of directing, acting, writing, and politics.

*Poetry in the community experience:

It can be said that the Higher Institute of Music and Theater represented a model incubator for the group, especially in the period extending from April 1980 to 1983, as it and its internal institutions were the platform from which the group was launched.
Since this period, as I see it, is the period of (commercialization of poetry), by moving it to open spaces such as university squares, higher institutes, and squares, so that the poet, with his living presence, becomes a disseminator of pleasure and knowledge, and perhaps this deliberate movement is what enabled poetry to be the master of the creative scene in that period and for the poet to become an expression of hope, dream, and desire for truth, goodness, and beauty. This dominance of poetry over the creative scene had repercussions on the status of poetry, as many critical writings appeared in this period that took the poem as its subject.

I had pointed out that the institute represented a model platform for the group, and I added that through its interiors, which served as a meeting place and starting point for most of the poets of that period, (Muhammad Madani, Abdel Moneim Rahma, Muhammad Muhammad Khair, Osama Al-Khawad, Muhammad Najib Muhammad Ali, Hamid, Muhammad Al-Fateh Abu Aqla, and the deceased Adel Abdul Rahman and Muhammad Taha Al-Qaddal, and this is of course due to the group’s poets, led by Hatem Muhammad Saleh, who was the link between the group and these poets.
We were in the group, and despite our practice of theater, celebrating and promoting poetry, we were competing to acquire poetry collections and competing to memorize poems. We would also read to each other the poems we wrote. It witnessed the birth of many poems written by Yahya, Qasim, or Abbas.
Poetry has formed in the group’s experience, as I see it, the hidden reference for the group’s cohesion and perhaps for its view of theater itself. Therefore, it was not strange that the group’s beginning was with two performances whose scripts were written by two poets. The first (Night Rain) by Muhammad Mohi El-Din is a text that could undoubtedly fall into the circle of poetic theater despite it includes prose dialogues here and there, and the second (Love in the Sudanese Style) by Al-Fatih Mutee, which is a text based on transparent poetry, even if its dialogue is dominated by prose.

*Poetic theater in the community experience:

It can be said that the period of the eighties was characterized by qualitative transformations in the Sudanese cultural scene with a (democratic) aspect, including the establishment of the Sudanese Writers Union, the Transgression Group, the Salamander Musical Ensemble, the Arab Heritage and Culture Society, and the Sadeem Theater Group, and the crystallization of a “new sensitivity” that accompanied this, especially in the field of criticism, because Al-Sadeem was not far from these transformations, but rather was in their heart, and since poetry in that period was the master of the scene, as we indicated, the poetic theatrical text found a special place and interest in the group’s project, despite the challenge represented by the saying that was popular among playwrights at the time, which states that: (Poetry is far from the language of theatrical performance), so the group produced the poetic play (The Nebula) by the poet Adonis, which was suggested by the poet Muhammad Madani one joyful evening. That play, which later became the name and title of the group. After that, the group continued in Directing poetic theater texts, I presented “Night Traveler” by Salah Abdel Sabour, “A Soldier Among the Dead” by Adonis, and “The Tragedy of Yarwal” by Al Khatim Abdullah, and I delved further, presenting the poem “The Torrent” by Muhammad Taha Al Qaddal. Indeed, the presence of (poetics) was not absent even in the prose texts until the group dealt with it, such as texts by UNESCO, Beckett, Pinter, Robert Merle, and Zulfiqar Hassan Adlan.
Last but not least, I say: In the experience of the Sadeem group, the poet has always been present, whether in quality or quality
Texts or in the (conflict) of creative identity between (the poet and the playwright), as in the case of Qasim Abu Zaid, Yahya Fadlallah, Muhammad Mohieddin and Hamid Jumaa.