Last night my daughter and I enjoyed the immersive theatre experience Zaffé. Led by director Stéphanie Ghajar, Zaffé’s international team of musicians, poets, and theatremakers worked together for three years to develop this work – Lara Week, Ayman Kaake, Jean Bachoura, Meena Shamaly, Taj Aldeeb, Camille El Feghali, Rawya El Chab, Salma Zahore, Mia Shouha, Giovanna Yate Gonzalez, Julia Landberg and Jessica Smart.
I was drawn to reviewing this show first because I wanted to see what Stéphanie was up to, as she was part of the Theatre Works associate artist residency group I was part of during COVID which was mostly run online. Secondly because Zaffé was the winner of 2023 Melbourne Fringe Director’s Choice Award and Green Room Award for Best Sound Design and Composition (Independent Theatre) so I was curious.
The blurb reads:
here’s to the ways we scrape together a party
from shredded streamers
and shattered furniture
the ways we turn bomb shelters
into dance floors
and disappointments
into a future
Step through a portal into an abandoned building in Beirut. Tangled knots of power cables and battery-operated candles mark the path. Fluorescent flowers bloom in the dust. There is dancing, singing, ululation, wedding games, gossip, and long-distance video calls, but something is missing.
How does this generation attempt to commemorate what is lost through migration and the passing of time? Together, we will throw a party: to create in the face of loss, root themselves in history, express their resilience, provide for each another, and help each other heal.”
Zaffé isn’t what I expected, but in a good way. Using the word “immersive” to describe it is accurate. When the audience arrives, immediately you don’t feel like you are arriving at a theatre show, but rather a wedding for a distant friend. The space was set out like a reception hall, with long tables of flowers and place settings, candles – everything you would expect from a wedding – a very stunning design, visually pleasing and colourful. Your host, Stéphanie, asks you to sit wherever you like. There is mystical Middle Eastern music playing that serves to transport you. Every seat has a name card, but instead of your name printed it said ‘open me’.
This card then became the start of the immersive experience which very quickly made you feel like it wasn’t a distant friend’s wedding but rather a cousin. Smartly executed and using a variety of techniques which I won’t go into because I don’t want to spoil the show, you quickly feel like you at a very important celebration, a celebration of human resilience in the face of a cruel world where there is no fairness or justice. What does one do, when your country is in the Middle East and you are in Australia and you don’t know when you will see your family again, or if they will survive?
Zaffé, we are told, is a celebration of love and life, and this is what they do, to survive, because joy is what is needed to survive sorrow, and this message, or rather “feeling” was very much transferred into us as the audience or guest at this zaffé. This theatre experience connects you with guests who cannot attend the celebration because they are stuck in the Middle East, and it also connects you with the guests on your table in-conversation and with the wider party. At times it was fun, joyous, funny, nostalgic. At times it was sad. The show created this overall feeling of celebration and sense of sadness all at once. Even at moments where the show was in a peak of happiness, still in my heart I felt an unease, perhaps only a taste on what it’s like for those from the Middle East. Zaffé was a powerful experience for the politically inclined.
– Koraly
Koraly Dimitraidis is a Cypriot-Australian poet, writer and performer and the author of Love and F—k Poems, Just Give Me The Pills, She’s Not Normal and The Mother Must Die. Her theatre show “I say the wrong things all the time” premiered at La Mama.
“Zaffé” runs 26th – 30th November Book tickets here.
Disclosure: The Plus Ones were invited guests of Arts House
Photo credit: Gregory Lorenzutti
