Ionesco’s ‘Rhinoceros’ staged at University of the Arts

Imagine you live in a small town that is besieged by one roaring citizen who becomes a rhinoceros and tramples on the social order, and the rest of the town follows suit. Would you be able to maintain your human form and identity, or would you, too, be lured into the “beauty” of brute force and violence?

Eugène Ionesco’s absurdist play Rhinoceros raises complex questions about the responsibility of the citizen when faced with radical thoughts. 

The Ira Brind School of Theater Arts at University of the Arts collaborated with UArts’ schools of Dance and Music to present Rhinoceros. Featuring live bucket-drumming, dance and puppetry, the interdisciplinary performance blurred the line of the real and the absurd. Performances took place April 25–28, 2019, at the Arts Bank Theater in Center City Philadelphia.

Aesthetically speaking, it is important for our students to get introduced to a different style of acting that depends on a stark and grotesque style.
- Fadi Skeiker, associate professor of theater

The director’s unique cultural perspective added another layer to Rhinoceros. Fadi Skeiker, associate professor of theater at UArts, directed and taught theater at the University of Jordan and the University of Minho, Portugal, and was a visiting researcher at Free University of Berlin in Germany. Outside academia, Skeiker is an accomplished applied theater practitioner and expert on devised theater, a theatrical process out of which scripts emerge through improvisation and other exercises, rather than the more traditional practice of acting from a script.

“This performance is significant for many reasons,” Seiker says. “Aesthetically speaking, it is important for our students to get introduced to a different style of acting that depends on a stark and grotesque style. The performance itself offered a platform for different artists from UArts to collaborate. For example, Paul Matteson from the School of Dance designed the general physicality and the show’s dances, while Charles Heir from the School of Music taught our actors how to use the drums and some of his students were part of the performance.”

Skeiker has led applied theater workshops and devised theater with marginalized communities of women, youth and most recently, refugees in Jordan, Germany, Portugal and the U.S. He is originally Syrian and holds a PhD in Performance as Public Practice from the University of Texas at Austin. 

Photo by Cass Meehan ’19 (Theater Directing, Playwriting & Production)