‘We use art as bullets’: Inside the show ‘Children of Fire’ at the fifth annual RUTAS festival

Deep in the Qandil Mountains of Northern Iraq, two theatre artists from Canada pose questions to scores of female Kurdish freedom fighters in one of the designated camps for artists. The visitors sip hot tea as they take notes, listening.

The fighters talk about live performance, storytelling, the struggle to promote an independent Kurdistan. Anna Chatterton and Shahrzad Arshadi, a world away from their respective homes in Hamilton and Montreal, write down what they can as Arshadi quickly translates.

These stories will eventually become a play in Canada, “Children of Fire,” glued together by quotes from the fighters, and from Chatterton and Arshadi as storytellers. As one of the freedom fighters said to Chatterton and Arshadi in the mountains: “We use art as bullets. My tambour is my weapon.”

Chatterton and Arshadi are the voices behind “Children of Fire,” a documentary-style play about the fighters and their lives. The play had an outdoor premiere earlier this summer, but it will enjoy an intimate remount through the RUTAS festival Oct. 6 to 9.

The RUTAS festival, helmed by Toronto’s Aluna Theatre, Factory Theatre and Theatre Passe Muraille, celebrates international performing arts. It’s now in its fifth year of operation.

Arshadi, in Canada since Christmas Eve of 1983, is a master of documentary. Primarily a photographer and visual artist, Arshadi prides herself on her ability to tell stories. For previous projects, she’s constructed narratives from interviews, diaries, notebooks and letters, painting a complete portrait of her documentary subjects. For “Children of Fire,” she worked with Chatterton to bring these oral stories of the Kurdish mountains to the stage.

“I knew this wasn’t something I could write on my own,” said Chatterton in an interview.

Chatterton, deeply inspired by what she’d heard previously about the female fighters who drove ISIS out of Rojava during the siege of Kobani in 2014, initially collaborated with a researcher at the University of Toronto, sharing the loose ideas and text fragments that would eventually coalesce into “Children of Fire.” Eventually, the researcher suggested Chatterton reach out to Arshadi.

“At first, we didn’t know what the show was going to be. Shahrzad was sharing her documentaries with me, talking about the women she had met in the mountains. And I talked to her about being a scaredy-cat, about being interested in superheroes and strong women, and wanting to write about the fighters. But I didn’t know what came next,” said Chatterton, who was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for English-language drama in 2017 for her play “Within the Glass.”

“I was writing a grant for the City of Hamilton and I had this sudden realization. I called Shahrzad and I said, ‘Do you want to go to the mountains? I think I need to go,’ and she said yes,” continued Chatterton.

Chatterton and Arshadi went to the mountains and began collecting stories, with Arshadi frequently acting as translator.

“I never thought I was going to write the play with Anna,” said Arshadi. “I thought I was there to help, to help know about the subject, to help translate. I wasn’t there to be a playwright, I didn’t think. I was there to introduce Anna to the fighters.”

Chatterton took furious notes in a journal, soaking in synopses of each woman’s story — stories that continue to surprise Arshadi to this day.

“Every single one is different,” said Arshadi. “They all have such different perspectives. It’s incredible. There’s not a single moment where it felt repetitive and the women are such beautiful storytellers. Each and every one of them is just incredible to sit and listen to.”

Perhaps the hardest part of creating “Children of Fire” for Chatterton and Arshadi was the inevitable cutting and shaping of the stories. At one point, an early version of the play spanned nearly four hours.

“I was very emotional about the cuts,” said Arshadi. “Every sentence being cut was so painful for me.”

“Like a dagger in her heart,” added Chatterton.

But the emotional spine of the piece lives on in a completed version of “Children of Fire,” which preserves dozens of real stories and presents them to audiences in a tighter, more digestible package.

“My writing is rewriting and rewriting and cutting,” said Chatterton. The writing isn’t just writing; in this case, it’s also curation and performance. Chatterton and Arshadi both appear in “Children of Fire” alongside a handful of other performers, remembering their time in the mountains and sharing the stories of the fighters with Canadian audiences.

One of those stories comes from fighter Peyman, who said to Chatterton and Arshadi: “In the history of Kurdistan, Kurds were not allowed to write their own history, so we taught our history to the next generation through songs. We sang about our pain, oppression, injustice and our heroes.

“For us it is important to sing, write poems, create art and fight at the same time.”

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