We proud Lebanese are still living in the 1970’s – that’s Raffi Feghali’s theory, anyway. He tells more to Danielle El Chemaly.

What is improvised theatre?
As its name implies, improvised theatre is pure improvisation. From a simple idea you can make many things. It’s a western idea that started in the 1970s, but back then in Lebanon we were busy improvising better ways to kill each other – so you see, now we are living in the 1970s, with the addition of a few extra things that they didn’t have back then. Improvisation takes lots of practice, lots of hard work but anyone can be part of it. We don’t believe in talent, we believe in passion and skills
– once you have one you can acquire the other. In improvising you have to have chemistry between the individual and the group mind. It can be taught through practice.

Tell us more about yourself and your team?
I am an actor, a musician, a peace builder (I create projects for peace, work on conflict resolution… ); I combined all this into improvising theatre. We have four characters on stage: Raffi Feghali, Shant Kabakian, Farah Bitar, Rima Jreich, all improvising multiple personalities. No materials are used because we don’t know which ones will come in handy – we use virtual objects, which convinces you to see things on stage. For example, with a virtual car you can see its colour and its shape. The only extra things we have are live music by George Kassis and lighting by Rashad Taha.

Why the name Live Lactic Culture (aka ‘Laban’)?
I searched a lot for a name and loved the fact that Live Lactic Culture has both ‘Live’ in it, because we are improvising, and ‘Culture’, which is the main message in our plays. Then ‘Lactic’ stands in the middle, it’s absurd yet funny. And that’s how the name came together, it’s bacteria that spreads and that’s how I want the theatre to open out. I needed an Arabic translation for it because I needed to give this western art a local touch. I could’ve chosen milk or yogurt, but saw that ‘Laban’ was the best translation since it shares the same roots as ‘Lebanon’.

What are your goals?
‘Laban’ is an NGO that everyone can be a part of. We work on two branches: first, performance, where we facilitate improvised shows – we train groups to not only use their passion on stage but also in real life. Our aim here is to create a community of improvisers – the more sub-communities in the city the better for our society. Second, we perform civil society activism. We organise projects and inject the training with improvisation. We train them in a different set of skills and hope they will use them in society. All this is done in a fun way, because we believe the more fun we have the more we learn.

Future plans?
In the short run, in June, we will have the English version for tourists, called Full Fat – a full-length improvised play, probably fatty! There will also be three playshops (we don’t call them workshops). The first one is for actors who want to use improvisation in their text-based theatre, the second will be for actors who want to be like us, improvisers, while the third is for non-actors who will learn skills for everyday life. In the long run, my hope is to have a three-floored building somewhere in Beirut, a place for all our ownership (because everyone is an owner here at ‘Laban’) to simply hang out, practice and discuss.

‘Kemil Addasam’ special edition ‘Keis el 3alam men Laban’ Sat 5, 12, 19, 26, 7.30pm-9pm Tickets LL15,000.(Arabic)