Who gets to tell the story?

For more than two decades, Sudanese theatre-maker Walid Al-Alfi has worked with women to turn their own experiences into performances. War and displacement have given that work a new urgency.

“What do you miss?”

It was a simple question, but for a group of Sudanese women displaced by war, the answers carried the weight of homes, families and lives left behind.

One woman said she missed her pillow. Another remembered a tree in her family’s yard. Someone else longed for a particular corner of her home. One participant spoke of something that could never be recovered: the chance to say goodbye to her father, who was killed during the war.

These memories became the starting point for Mushtaqeen Keteer (We Miss It So Much), a poetic musical performance created with Sudanese women in Kampala, Uganda.

For Sudanese theatre-maker Walid Al-Alfi, the intimacy of those memories is precisely what gives them their power. He does not believe theatre needs to announce its message through slogans or explicit political statements. A pillow, a tree or an empty corner of a house can reveal the devastation of war in ways that a direct declaration cannot.

“The best person to tell a woman’s story on stage is the woman herself,” Al-Alfi says.

For him, this is more than an artistic principle. It is the foundation of a theatrical practice he has developed for more than two decades, built around a deceptively simple question: who has the right to tell a story?

His answer has shaped what became known as Girls’ Theatre, a project in which women are not simply performers interpreting somebody else’s words, but participants in creating the stories they eventually bring to the stage.

The project began in 2004 at Ahfad University for Women in Sudan, where Al-Alfi was working as a drama trainer with female students.

His assignment appeared straightforward: train students in acting, develop a script and prepare a performance for the university’s Women’s Week activities.

But Al-Alfi became uncomfortable with the idea of writing a play about women’s experiences on their behalf.

“The issues we were addressing were about women in the first place,” he says. “How could I think on their behalf when writing the script?” Instead of arriving with a completed text, he began with conversations.

He asked the students how they understood their lives, how they saw their position as women in Sudanese society and what they themselves wanted to say. Their responses became the raw material for the performance.

Al-Alfi’s role shifted. Rather than creatively imagining their stories, he helped turn their experiences into theatre: shaping dialogue, developing dramatic moments and finding a structure capable of carrying their ideas to an audience.

The stories, however, remained theirs. That process became central to Girls’ Theatre.

For Al-Alfi, theatre is not simply the act of standing on a stage. It begins much earlier, with questioning. “Theatre is connected to awareness,” he says. “There is no awareness without knowledge, no knowledge without research, and no research without questions.”

His workshops therefore do more than teach acting techniques. Participants are encouraged to examine their experiences, question the conditions around them and find ways of transforming what they discover into artistic expression.

The process is both individual and collective. Women develop confidence in expressing themselves, but they also have to listen, negotiate differences and build something together.

Al-Alfi resists separating “women’s issues” from the wider concerns of Sudanese society. The experiences women bring to the stage, he argues, are part of the social, political and cultural realities affecting everyone.

Once a performance reaches an audience, its meaning also changes. A story that begins with one woman’s experience can become something in which many people recognise parts of their own lives.

That idea has taken on greater significance since war broke out in Sudan in April 2023, forcing millions of people from their homes and devastating much of the country’s cultural life.

For Al-Alfi, the war has also revealed more clearly the roles women have played in holding families and communities together through displacement, bereavement and uncertainty. It has made the need for women to document and interpret their own experiences even more urgent.

But turning trauma into performance, he says, cannot begin with asking people simply to stand on stage and recount what happened to them.

His workshops with people affected by conflict and displacement include exercises intended to help participants confront painful memories before transforming them into artistic material. He describes the process as locating “the darkest point” within a person and trying to turn it into “a point of light”.

Only then, in his view, can personal expression begin to open into wider social questions.

This approach informed Mushtaqeen Keteer. Rather than attempting to summarise Sudan’s war, the performance began with what people remembered and what they longed for.

The ordinary details became a language for displacement. A missing pillow could evoke a bedroom, a house and the security of an earlier life. A tree could contain memories of family and childhood. The inability to say goodbye to a father could carry the finality of war more powerfully than any explanation of the conflict.

For Al-Alfi, this is what theatre can do at its best: create images and emotions that leave room for audiences to discover meaning for themselves. His work has itself been transformed by displacement.

After leaving Khartoum, Al-Alfi continued developing Girls’ Theatre rather than allowing the project to disappear with the institutions and spaces disrupted by war.

In Sudan’s Blue Nile region, he worked on theatre training and performances in communities where opportunities to encounter theatre had previously been limited. According to Al-Alfi, more than 10,000 people attended performances there.

The project later travelled outside Sudan, including participation in the Carthage International Theatre Festival.

After arriving in Kampala, Al-Alfi began working with Sudanese adolescent girls and refugees. The group created three theatrical productions before presenting Mushtaqeen Keteer at Labonita Theatre in the Ugandan capital.

Keeping the project alive has not been easy. It is earliest years relied heavily on collective effort and self-funding. Later support enabled the group to develop productions including Hakawi Ghanawi, inspired by the cultural heritage of Sudan’s Blue Nile region, and to establish the Girls’ Theatre Festival.

But Al-Alfi argues that theatre cannot be reduced to budgets, buildings or professional actors. At the centre of his practice is the belief that everybody carries material from which theatre can be made.

He rejects the idea of the “finished actor” and the assumption that only professionally trained performers have something worth putting on stage. A performance, in his approach, might begin with a memory, a song, a folk practice, a movement or a personal story rather than a conventional written script. He calls this process “the making of performance”.

The distinction matters in Sudan, where oral storytelling, music, dance and collective memory have long been part of everyday cultural life.

For Al-Alfi, developing a theatre that speaks distinctly from Sudan does not mean reproducing theatrical models developed elsewhere and simply changing their subject matter. It requires looking closely at the country’s own ways of speaking, remembering, celebrating and telling stories. “If we want to arrive at a Sudanese theatre, we have to understand our way and style of living,” he says.

More than 20 years after Girls’ Theatre began with a group of students at Ahfad University for Women, the project has moved from Khartoum to Blue Nile and, through war and displacement, beyond Sudan to Kampala. It is geography has changed. The circumstances surrounding it have changed dramatically. The central principle has not.

Women, Al-Alfi believes, do not need somebody else to explain their experiences for them. What they need are spaces in which those experiences can be questioned, shaped and transformed into stories of their own making.

And sometimes that story begins with something as small as a pillow, a tree, or the corner of a home that no longer feels reachable.