Abdelkrim Berchid: Festive Theatre and the Post-Colonial Condition

This essay highlights the reasons that pushed Arab theatre harbingers to think of a theatrical theory in light of which they could express themselves without feeling trapped in Eurocentric histrionic patterns. It also examines Abdelkrim Berchid’s keen interest in theorization and elucidates Festivity’s athletics and poetics of difference. The essay celebrates Berchid as an iconic figure in modern dramaturgy in post-colonial Morocco, but at the same time takes issue with his festive Occidentalism which is informed by a certain will or intention to dominate, control, even to incorporate, what is apparently a different (or alternative and novel) world as a result of borrowing the Orientalist system of representation and politics of dominance. It is within this conjunction that festive Occidentalism is defined as an Arab- Muslim style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over Western theatre–or more precisely over Epicization—which is almost a festive invention. It is created–or, as we would like to call it– ‘Occidentalized.’ In other words, Epicization exists in festive discourses as an invention, a creation, a representation, thus, a misrepresentation. Hence, our definition of festive Occidentalism as a style of thought reposed upon ontological and epistemological difference(s) invented between two theatres, the Western and the Festive. In this sense, Occidentalism reposed on centrism is the inspiring ideology of Festivity.