Above zero

“Is this how men live?” asked Aragon in one of his famous poems. This is a question also asked by Syrian choreographer and director, Ossama Halal, now in exile, after witnessing the behaviour of his countrymen and women, shellshocked by war.

How do people react to bombing? How do people live in a refugee camp where the folding metal cots, like steely implements of torture, are metaphors of imprisonment and detention rather than of sleep, and where the battle for food and space paradoxically mimics the mechanisms of war?

Echoing poems written by Bertolt Brecht on the subject, the poetic quest of Ossama Halal, supported by Syrian, Lebanese and French performers, becomes universal in its appeal and subverts the dialectical impulses in the human psyche which cause violence to breed fear and fear to breed violence.