Acting the part

Dr James Mirrione has ambition. His hope is that when the Performing Arts Centre on Saadiyat Island opens its doors for its first big production, at least one or two of his students will be working in the company.

The man tasked with establishing and developing a thriving educational theatre department at the United Arab Emirates University in Al Ain doesn't stop there. He would like to see a proper theatre built on the new campus one day, where young Emirati men and women can develop their knowledge of the dramatic arts along with practical skills so that they can take on roles in theatre production on their merits.

"I think that one or two Emiratis will be ready to take on roles in theatre production by the time the new centre is built. We need line designers, production designers and directors, and up here in Al Ain we are investing in home-grown talent and preparing for that. If we can get a training programme going within the parameters of cultural restrictions it is possible. These are creative people and they have the skills.

Mirrione sees two main long-term challenges for the country's artistic development; to have a national theatre for plays and drama with a mixed company and to move towards an acceptability of a national theatre company. "Men and women don't perform together here. We have women dressing as men and playing the parts of men. No men and women take classes together. It's totally segregated, which makes for challenging teaching situations. I knew that before I came here, of course, but I think it has to change in order for an aesthetic such as fine arts, which would encompass music, theatre, drama, painting and sculpture, to flourish here. Theatre is a collaborative art.

"Cinema is pushing the envelope. You can't have cinema with only women in it. It's developing at the same time. Somehow it's more acceptable for men and women to act together on screen than to appear together on stage, perhaps because it's live," he says. He has already witnessed the huge inroads that have been made in the past five years in the process of making the arts more familiar and the world of live theatre less "exotic". And he points to the work done by the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage (Adach), the Abu Dhabi Music and Arts Foundation (ADMAF) and projects such as the restoration of the Al Jahili fort, now a magical open air concert venue and major tourist attraction.

When the New York born playwright and author of the successful musical Ambassador Satch, the life and times of Louis Armstrong arrived in the UAE in 2005 it was something of a cultural challenge, but his arrival coincided with he start of a cultural renaissance that saw the best of the world's musicians, orchestras, dramatists and individual artists performing here at the same time as fostering and creating home-grown arts.

"My arrival in Al Ain and since that time has corresponded to a real change in the arts availability, the number of offerings, the comfortability students have with art, theatre, music, drama. It's the most difficult country in the world to figure out the demographics for. It's an expat population that's trying to bring in nationals. At the same time, nationals don't have the same longevity of experience with these art forms so everything is new, whereas with the expats everything is 'relative to'. These two things clash, so with programming there's a lot of 'throw it against the wall and see if it sticks'. You might go from Tom Jones to the Berlin Philharmonic in the space of three days."

After 28 years with the Creative Arts Team at the City University of New York, Mirrione - who also wrote the play Rosa Parks: Back of the Bus, about the black American woman whose refusal to sit in the segregated area of a bus in Alabama in 1955 was a key moment of the civil rights movement in America - was appointed as associate professor in the English Literature department of UAE University with a brief to create an educational drama and fine arts department.

"When I came here it was to this oxymoronic position of being the theatre and drama person with no theatre, which is a bit like being a cowboy without a horse. Although the programme was on the books, it wasn't up and running yet and so in my first year I had four students and I wasn't even teaching theatre and drama. I was teaching all the other courses. "I took over a huge empty room which doubles as a theatre. It's called the multi-purpose room and I made it the uni-purpose room because I got tired of not having a theatre space," he says.

When the ADMAF-backed Seminars in Mastering the Arts (Smart)programme was introduced, students were able to take part in a series of master classes in digital photography, led by visiting artists-in-residence and it soon spread to embrace the embryonic drama department. "When the Smart programme came in I needed a space for the artists to perform in, so I lobbied to get the chairs taken out and for it not to be an examination hall.

A natural first project to bring to the UAE was his own musical Ambassador Satch, co-written with the Broadway actor, singer, dancer and writer André de Shields. The original commission from Carnegie Hall in the early 1990s started off as three one-act plays about the jazz artists Bessie Smith, Fats Waller and Louis Armstrong and eventually developed into a full-length musical. With choreography by Mercedes Ellington, the grand-daughter of the legendary Duke Ellington, and backing from the Abu Dhabi Tourism Authority, the 2006 UAE show was a success and returned the following year with performances and workshops in Al Ain as well as Abu Dhabi and Dubai.

By 2007 the numbers of students studying theatre and drama had grown to about 100, although it was still an elective subject. "It's part of the English literature department and now students can take a minor in theatre and drama. We are slowly building a sensibility for this kind of genre." A major development came in 2008 with a request from the university vice chancellor Dr Abdullah Al Khanbashi, the founder of the Smart programme, for Mirrione to write a proposal for bringing artists of all sorts to Al Ain from all over the world every two months.

With the help of former colleagues from his old theatre company he was able to kick the programme off with a two-week workshop from the creative arts team from City University of New York. Later, 12 students from Al Ain were able to visit New York to study educational theatre there. A workshop featuring the Canadian screen writer Noel Baker followed. Since then Mirrione has worked closely with Adach to bring visiting artists and dramatists to Al Ain to give his students unique learning experiences. There have been poetry workshops in Arabic and English and visits from the Kuwaiti playwright and director Sulayman Al Bassam with his Shakespeare in Arabic production of Richard lll.

Mary Zimmerman, the director and writer of Metamorphosis and Arabian Nights, who works out of Looking Glass Theatre visited in 2009, recreating scenes from Arabian Nights in the vast uni-purpose room where students learned how to create scenic backdrops for productions. Another workshop in the programme was with the American storyteller Margaret Wolfson. Then Mercedes Ellington and André de Shields took students through numbers from the Ambassador Satch show including the Lindy Hop, to wild acclaim. "They need all these other examples even if they are not going to be doing the jitterbug, there should be some form of dance that is acceptable. Dance is a common denominator in all countries."

Last year a group of Chinese students from Peking University came to Al Ain as part of the Smart programme to showcase the work they have been doing on producing Shakespeare in any language. "The Chinese students had been working on 12 scenes from Shakespeare in Chinese, Arabic and English which was an amazing thing to see because it allowed our students to see other cultures." Mirrione has had exceptional support from Adach, which asks all visiting artists to Abu Dhabi if they would be willing to speak to students. Most of them are happy to do so.

"Anything I can get that will give students another experience I will take," says Mirrione. This month he is taking a group of six female students to California State University, Eastbay, to study diversity training and inter-cultural dialogue. "Students here tend to be very clannish. They don't talk to other students outside their groups and don't mix with other nationalities even within the Arab-speaking world. They are in separate enclaves. There is a fascination but I don't think they know how to embrace it because it might cause challenges to their way of life," says Mirrione.

Later in the summer he is off to China to organise a follow-up exchange project at Peking University. In short, his students are already being exposed to a rich and diverse variety of experiences. Mirrione himself was a comparative late-comer to educational theatre. Born in Brooklyn to a family that originally hails from Palermo, Sicily, he was educated by the Jesuits and initially intended to enter the priesthood. The church's ambivalent attitude to the Vietnam War, however, changed his mind.

"They asked me why I was leaving the seminary and I said I was raised to believe certain things that you tell me like war is bad and now you get the institutional church not taking a stand. There were priests like the Berrigan brothers pouring their own blood on the draft cards and the church was ostracising them. This did not sit well with me. "It was very painful watching guys you went to college with going off to Vietnam and dying. You had to take a stand and try to end this craziness. It was the times you lived in. I'm glad I grew up in those times."

He returned to Brooklyn and managed to get a job in a Catholic grammar school in Harlem teaching physical education and later theology in another school, where a colleague was impressed by his theatrical style of teaching and suggested he join the masters programme in educational theatre at City University of New York. After completing it he was invited to join the CAT department. "To begin with we squatted in a costume shop and we had no money, but 28 years later we had a $2million (Dh7.3m) budget and 100 people on staff."

As the playwright-in-residence he was expected to write one or two plays per year, mostly with topical social and political themes. In 1981 he decided to research the story of Rosa Parks and turned it into a musical. "It was coming up to the 25th anniversary of her historic act of civil disobedience, seized upon by Martin Luther King, who built his civil rights movement around it. I thought it was a compelling enough story to write a play about with music. It turned out that it kind of hit a gold mine when a reporter from the Daily News heard about it and wrote a cover story. Rosa Parks was still alive. She was in her 80s and living in Detroit and she came to see it. She was amazed that we could create a musical out of it and said there was no singing or dancing then, it was all struggle," he says.

When the university president decided to eliminate sponsored programmes in 2005 the department was phased out and Mirrione found his way to the UAE with his wife Tatiana and step-son Sebastian, 16. "It's been an interesting journey so far. Now my mission is to move the course from an elective to a minor and then to a major within the faculty of fine arts within the next three years."