This performance is part of Shubbak Festival. Supported by The Lowry, Shubbak is the UK’s largest biennial festival of contemporary Arab culture.

/‘jes.mɪən/ /’aʊdiʃəʊ/ /’ʁrɑː.wiː/ lived and cautiously thrived in a dictatorship for almost two decades. ‘From The Daughter Of A Dictator’ is a one-person show exploring the personal journey of migration from Baghdad to Beirut to Berlin to Britain.

There still lives the belief, a false one perhaps, that the UK, Europe, “the West” are the final bastions of human rights. But what if these illusory safe shores of democracy are in danger of disappearing. What if living in a democracy is becoming no different than living in a dictatorship. Where do we go then?

More importantly, where will you go?

‘From The Daughter Of A Dictator’ is a collage of fragmented images and anecdotes about displacement, hope, sorrow, joy, and resistance converging into the body and voice of one person trying to orient in a violently loud, crushing world. Stories are spoken, whispered, sung and woven together with the conviction of a ‘rawiya’. The body takes its chances to hold, preserve, resist and crack under the weight and pressure of extremes.

This is a performance about the dreamers who left, and those who remain. A reminder of our
individual and collective power, and human right to dream.

This is a manifesto for dreamers.

It’s high time we met.

With love and urgency,
Yasmeen

Written and performed by Yasmeen Audisho Ghrawi.