Queens of Syria (the documentary) tells the story of fifty women from Syria, all forced into exile in Jordan,who came together in Autumn 2013 to create and perform their own version of the Trojan Women, Euripides’ timeless Ancient Greek tragedy about the plight of women in war. Not one of them had ever acted before.
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What followed was an extraordinary moment of cross-cultural contact across millennia, in which women born in 20th century Syria found a blazingly vivid mirror of their own experiences in the stories of a queen, princesses and ordinary women like them, uprooted, enslaved,and bereaved by the Trojan War.
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It was a process charged with emotion and fraught with challenges, as long buried issues came to the surface, and at times the project itself hung in the balance.
Yasmin Fedda’s subtly crafted and beautifully shot film explores the difficult choices the women have to make about appearing on stage, and the close relationships they form within the group as they explore with each other their experiences. It shows their bravery and determination that their stories should be told to the world.
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The original production was invited to go on tour in the US and Switzerland, courtesy of Georgetown University in Washington DC, and Columbia University in New York, but sadly the casts visas were denied, so the tour was 'virtual' since unfortunately our original cast were unable to travel to the US as their visas were rejected. Listen here to the story on NPR. After we showed the trailer and some short clips from the documentary footage from 'Queens Of Syria', The inspirational cast of The Trojan Women received a standing ovation from a visibly moved Georgetown audience.Under the expert moderation and translation of Syrian broadcaster Honey Al Sayed, the cast, director and audience were able to have a discussion about the project, sharing experiences of participating in and of watching some of the performance. Despite thousands of miles and visa denials, the team at Georgetown enabled our cast to tell their stories and ask their questions, and gave the Washington audience a flavour of what (we hope!) is to come if visas are granted and a live performance is made possible.
You can discover more about the event in a report by Peter Marks in the Washington Post and also in a Foreign Policy article by Ambassador Cynthia Schneider, co-founder of the Georgetown Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics.
Geneva
The Talberg Institute also hosted nine of the cast members to mount an abridged version of The Trojan Women at CERN in Switzerland.
The original production was invited to go on tour in the US and Switzerland, courtesy of Georgetown University in Washington DC, and Columbia University in New York, but sadly the casts visas were denied, so the tour was 'virtual' since unfortunately our original cast were unable to travel to the US as their visas were rejected. Listen here to the story on NPR. After we showed the trailer and some short clips from the documentary footage from 'Queens Of Syria', The inspirational cast of The Trojan Women received a standing ovation from a visibly moved Georgetown audience.Under the expert moderation and translation of Syrian broadcaster Honey Al Sayed, the cast, director and audience were able to have a discussion about the project, sharing experiences of participating in and of watching some of the performance. Despite thousands of miles and visa denials, the team at Georgetown enabled our cast to tell their stories and ask their questions, and gave the Washington audience a flavour of what (we hope!) is to come if visas are granted and a live performance is made possible.
You can discover more about the event in a report by Peter Marks in the Washington Post and also in a Foreign Policy article by Ambassador Cynthia Schneider, co-founder of the Georgetown Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics.
Geneva
The Talberg Institute also hosted nine of the cast members to mount an abridged version of The Trojan Women at CERN in Switzerland.
The original production was invited to go on tour in the US and Switzerland, courtesy of Georgetown University in Washington DC, and Columbia University in New York, but sadly the casts visas were denied, so the tour was 'virtual' since unfortunately our original cast were unable to travel to the US as their visas were rejected. Listen here to the story on NPR. After we showed the trailer and some short clips from the documentary footage from 'Queens Of Syria', The inspirational cast of The Trojan Women received a standing ovation from a visibly moved Georgetown audience.Under the expert moderation and translation of Syrian broadcaster Honey Al Sayed, the cast, director and audience were able to have a discussion about the project, sharing experiences of participating in and of watching some of the performance. Despite thousands of miles and visa denials, the team at Georgetown enabled our cast to tell their stories and ask their questions, and gave the Washington audience a flavour of what (we hope!) is to come if visas are granted and a live performance is made possible.
You can discover more about the event in a report by Peter Marks in the Washington Post and also in a Foreign Policy article by Ambassador Cynthia Schneider, co-founder of the Georgetown Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics.
Geneva
The Talberg Institute also hosted nine of the cast members to mount an abridged version of The Trojan Women at CERN in Switzerland.
In 2013 Refuge Productions in partnership with Oxfam mounted a new production of Euripides’ great anti war tragedy the Trojan Women in Jordan with a cast of Syrian refugee women displaced by the war in Syria. The production was intended both as a psycho-social support measure for the participants, and as an advocacy tool to highlight the plight of Syrian refugees. The women who participated arrived at the workshops in varying states of suffering from depression, feelings of isolation and PTSD. Without claiming that the production cured these, the Syrian psychologist we employed to monitor the workshops and rehearsals confirmed that the process allowed the women to take back a great measure of self confidence and self respect, as well as finding a new support group through sharing each others’ stories and experiences. In 2013 the refugee crisis engulfing the region as a result of the civil war in Syria was very under-reported internationally. We correctly projected that showing this crisis in a different and dramatically surprising way would have a much wider impact in reporting terms, and as such the play was widely covered by regional and international press both in newsprint and on television.
TROJANS UK 23
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Following on from our previous ten years of highly acclaimed productions, and commissioned by K+C Festival, Trojan Women Project ran a combined psycho-social support and advocacy drama project, Trojans UK 23, with the Chelsea Theatre, SW10. This culminated in two highly acclaimed performances, one in June at Hammersmith and Fulham Council's Refugee Week event, and one as part of the K+C Festival in July 2023 which received a standing ovation.
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TROJANS UK 22-23-24
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WHAT WE DO
Refugees and migrants are often lonely, traumatised, making their way in a new world, and have extraordinary stories to tell: of courage, determination, and overcoming tragedy. We all are driven by the same desires for safety, for hope for our families, a future, a place to live. For some people that is harder to achieve than others.
We run community drama projects with refugees, building their stories into the text of a play (The Trojan Women) and staging their stories publicly at a high artistic level.
We provide a hot meal for the group and a creche for their kids - so the participants can make friends with each other - and access to psychological counselling. Where possible, we try and help our participants into employment or education. We’ve been doing this since 2013 in Jordan, Europe and the UK, including the highly acclaimed Queens of Syria 2016 Young Vic Tour and the 2019 Trojans at the Edinburgh Festival and our 2015 Oliver! In Arabic project in Jordan.
We’re currently running a series of workshops at the Chelsea Theatre, in partnership with Hammersmith and Fulham Council, with a view to putting on a play in the summer at the Chelsea Theatre as part of K+C Festival and in Hammersmith.
We have participants from Ukraine, Afghanistan, Syria, Iran, Pakistan and other countries. Some of them were even professional performers in their own lives. The participants are very keen to continue the project.
Our August 2022 productions with K+C Festival and FT Weekend Festival were highly acclaimed. You can watch the K+C 2022 production on YouTube.
TRAILER TROJANS UK 22:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UeKZELPivg
PLAYGROUND THEATRE K+C FESTIVAL 30 MINUTE ‘SHARING’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNd6B54HtJo
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Our Future
This is the next step in our plan to roll this project out round the UK with a series of drama workshops and local productions, before returning to London in two years’ time with a full production. We’re currently applying to the Lottery to do projects in Stirling, Bradford, Manchester and London.
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Schools and Universities
We frequently do screenings and Q&A’s at schools and universities in the UK, the US and Europe, and are studied on the syllabus at several US universities, including UCLA. We’ve done screenings at Oxford, Edinburgh, St Andrews, Godolphin and Latimer, Princeton, Yale, University of Texas, Columbia, to name a few.
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Drawings of the performance by an audience member