EVENING STANDARD

Fantasy of war

Out of the insanity that ravaged Beirut for 17 years and reduced the heart of a once-beautiful city to rubble, a group of young dancers is bringing a Shakespearean message of reconciliation to London.

At the Royalty Theatre off Kingsway next week, the Caracalla Dance Company will present An Oriental Night’s Dream, inspired by A Midsummer Night’s Dream and its theme of fractured relationships restored.

But in its frenetic fantasy sequences, choreographed by founder Abdul Halim Caracalla, audience may detect an echo of Lebanon’s nightmare.

Caracalla has lived it. His wife, Honeine, was shot while driving home from the theatre in what he believes was the first incident of the war, on 13 April 1974.

She only suffered a scratch, but others were not so lucky. One dancer was killed, another paralysed and another, a former Miss Lebanon, subsequently contracted cancer from which she died six years later.

At the time, he had only just created his company following a period in England in the late Sixties when he studied with London Contemporary Dance and discovered Shakespeare. The company is unique in the Arab world and owes its survival to Caracalla himself. As the conflict exploded around them, he moved the company from district to district and, when the crossfire became too fierce, took them abroad to Russia or Jordan.

Caracalla, who comes from a wealthy family, is a driven man. He is a missionary both for Shakespeare, whom he reveres as a god and yet who is relatively unknown in the Arab world, and for a new language of movement which fuses modern Western dance idioms with Eastern traditions.

“Nothing touched me until I went to London and saw Shakespeare performed at the Aldwych Theatre,” he said. “Now I am obsessed by him. It is strange that I, coming from the Orient, should adore such a mind. But he probes the depths of the human soul. He is for the human race all over the world.”

Caracalla sees his works as a means of introducing Shakespeare to an Arab world “very rich in petrol but very poor in culture”. Ten years ago he introduced his audiences to The Taming Of The Shrew and now comes the Dream.

It has taken him three years. “I have mixed modern techniques with the oriental to see how the body reacts and tried to create a new language of dance,” he said.

Caracalla is also responsible for the costumes. “You will never see so much colour on the stage at the same time,” he says, having scoured the souks of Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Marrakesh. The music is equally exotic, predominantly Arabic but incorporating a host of Western references ranging from the tango to the William Tell overture.

All this, together with the Caracalla Research Centre and the Caracalla Dance School, would have foundered long ago without the political astuteness of its creator.

His judgement and influential contact within Lebanon and elsewhere in the Arab world proved crucial to survival during the war. He is well-placed to understand. He is a Shiite Muslim and his wife Christian. The mix is reflected in his company, which is two-thirds Christian, the rest Muslim.

His judgement was recently proven when, against the advice of Western diplomats, he drove a small party of English and American journalists to his beloved home town of Baalbeck, or Heliopolis as it was known in the immediate aftermath of Alexander the Great.

“At last the Lebanon believe the war is finished,” he says. “The streets are open. There are no militia. The army is in control.”

No palm trees or flowers now grace the boulevards that once rivalled the Croisette at Cannes. But life is creeping back into the centre. The homeless occupy skeletal apartment blocks, their walls and windows long since blown out. Shopkeepers and traders are moving back to their old street-side location.

“The war started like magic and it stopped like magic,” says Caracalla. “Now it will take two years to get back to normal.”

He sank his soul as well as his money into his dance company to preserve it through the bitterest of conflicts. Now he is paying £75,000 out of his own pocket to help fund their London visit.

Robin Stringer