Should We Be Afraid of Fall Theater?: 2

Lebanese performers Lina Saneh and Rabih Mroué present this week their final work in a three-show visit to the 2007 Festival d’Automne program. “Appendice” is a fitting last word on their explorations in theater and body politics as it elucidates several issues raised in earlier pieces presented and helps answer the question I posed at the beginning of this series of articles, “Should We Be Afraid of Theater?”

After “Qui a peur de la representation?” and “How Nancy Wished Everything Was an April Fool’s Joke”, both examining, against the backdrop of contemporary Lebanese history, the body as a powerful political, social and esthetic entity, “Appendice” develops those same themes in a much more intimate framework : the story of Saneh’s struggle to find a way to have her corpse cremated, despite Lebanese law, which forbids it in accordance with the precepts of Islam. The idea she hits on, we are told by Mroué, who reads her written text while Saneh sits motionless behind him in profile, is to have her organs and limbs individually excised and burned, since this, at least, is allowed. At first, the careful enumerating of each progressively more vital organ she will have removed, beginning with her appendix, and the inconveniences she will have to accept in the absence of, for example, a stomach, reads as a grotesque joke. Between the tongue-in-cheek tone of the text and proposed website to follow the project (kinkylinah.com) and Mroué’s deliberately prolonged looks at Saneh, it is not clear whether this couple united in both art and life are serious or not. Luckily for Saneh, however, medical ethics step in to thwart her plan, by forbidding life-threatening, non-essential surgery. So now what?

As a performance artist familiar with the extreme uses of the body in the name of art and practiced by performers from Marina Abramovic to Chris Burden (see October 1 entry below), Saneh finds a ready and much less painless answer: she will ask artists to sign individual parts of her body, then sell these signed pieces of “art” to collectors and galleries who, upon Saneh’s death, will recuperate their “property” and have it either mummified for display or incinerated. As radical as it sounds, Saneh’s “Body P-Arts Project” is underway, with a dozen or so artists having signed on (and signed parts ranging from Saneh’s mouth to the air in her hair) and a dedicated Internet site featuring artists’ statements and an example of the contract of sale (www.linasaneh-body-p-arts.com). It would be pedestrian of me to suggest Saneh simply will her body to science (assuming Lebanese law allows that); seen in the light of “Body P-Arts”, the issue at stake in “Appendice” is less a question of individual freedom versus civic and religious authority, than the potential social and esthetic uses of the body as a saleable commodity, in this case as an art object, with a value and protections as deemed by the art market.

As a work of theater, “Appendice” proves the least satisfying of the three projects brought by Saneh and Mroué to Paris this fall. The piece is intriguing from the sole aspect of its set and direction, placing Saneh, dressed elegantly in black and sitting on a chair of transparent plastic, on display against a luminous white backdrop: part art object up for auction and part corpse in funereal, immobile silence. On the other hand, Mroué’s imperfect delivery of Saneh’s text in French, a language of which he appears to possess only a rudimentary mastery, seriously undermines both the subject, which reveals itself to be quite serious indeed, and the duo’s characteristically irreverent treatment of their chosen themes. Mroué is consequently forced to stick to Saneh’s well-composed text, where he would otherwise ad lib (he attempts this briefly on several occasions). One imagines a text of much greater nuance and resonance delivered in Arabic.

As for the question of the potential of something represented on stage to unsettle our beliefs regarding the forms of art, the roles of the body in it (agent, object, danger, sacrifice) and the social, political and esthetic value of what it represented there, theater, by its collective and unpredictable nature, demonstrates again it is a terribly powerful vehicle for the dissemination of radical views and visions.

Photo Credit: Ghassan Halawani/Penguin Cube

Terrorism of the Image

Walid Raad is a media artist born in Lebanon in 1967 and an American citizen since 2006. He was detained by the police at Rochester International Airport in 2004 and questioned concerning the contents of his luggage. As a photographer exploring representations of violence, in particular how car bombings effect the way urban populations relate to space, he had a few suspicious elements in his bags, notably photos of federal buildings, bombings and explosions, in addition to a slew of receipts, airplane tickets, airplane security cards and the calling card of an FBI investigator. He was allowed to leave after about 2 hours.

As introduction to the performance Raad created in response to his experiences and those of other Americans and Canadians wrongly profiled as potential terrorists, he offers the following reflections:

“No matter where, it seems, a camera regularly happens to be there, when something happens to happen. So much so that it has become a cliché, a veritable commonplace, to say that today things don’t happen unless a camera is there. Of course, it takes not just a camera, but an entire network of editing, transmitting, distributing, and viewing technologies -- and agents -- that extend out from the camera, to make what McLuhan so famously and confusingly called a “global village.” But it begins with the camera and its operator, with the fact of their already having been there. […] The corollary, of course, of the cameraman’s being there is that, in some sense, we are too. The camera metaphorizes the becoming-public of the event, because we who watch and listen are also caught in the double intersection of the sniper’s and the cameraman’s viewfinders -- not as potential victims exactly, but in some other sense as targets of those vectors (borrowing the word in this sense from McKenzie Wark in Virtual Geography).”(1)

If the camera makes people and events real for the purposes of public discourse, Raad’s presence on stage in “I Feel a Great Desire to Meet the Masses Once Again”, at the Centre Pompidou for two nights last week, poses a number of questions. The technogically sophisticated and visually appealing Power Point presentation Raad spent two years researching and creating and spends one hour delivering is performance in the vein of the Chinese-Australian photographer William Yang, who delivers monological accompaniment to his slide shows of Aboriginal peoples and Sydney night life, and art in the style of the late Mark Lombardi, who drew elaborate pencil charts detailing the financial and judicial imbroglios surrounding major international banks and investment houses. The Village Voice has mused that Raad’s art « is like a detective report or a communiqué from a secret agent », with all the aesthetic and emotional feel of these. His stage presence is cool, though not impersonal; his delivery is measured, but not flawless. He is a presenter of facts compiled through his own investigations, and now that his conclusions regarding the collusion of the CIA and private aviation to transport suspected terrorists around the globe are no longer revelatory (the New York Times reported on this in 2005) - indeed, to the extent that nothing he tells us outside of the details of his detention is news, whether it be the circumstances surrounding the arrest and prosecution of fellow artist Steve Kurtz or the trial of the “Lackwanna Six” - his « show » is fatally dated in a world of 24/7 news, a conclusion Raad himself has already come to, as he tells the audience early on in the evening. So what is the significance of “I Feel a Great Desire…”? Why perform it anymore, or even at all?

To answer the above questions requires moving away from the first-degree tone of scandal and conspiracy that pervades the presentation, to examine underlying issues of identity and the uses of the image. As a reflection on the latter, “I Feel a Great Desire…” offers avenues of reflection, but on a more intimate level than the ones usually touched by the now well-documented “war on terror” and its reporting by the media. The visual uses he makes of his detention by airport police (with photos of each incriminating item) lead it to exist for us in a way it never could have otherwise, his story being only too banal amidst fear and ever stricter airport regulations. At the same time, he told me informally after the show, the image he created of that same experience – the performance - became too dangerous to circulate in the United States while his naturalization application was being reviewed, which is why he has never presented “I Feel a Great Desire…” in his new country.

As such, it seems that a much more interesting story is being told here, whether Raad is aware of it or not. The presentation begins and ends with Raad leaving Lebanon by boat under Israeli bombs: the first time in 1983, the second time in 2006. The images he records on his camera at a distance of 23 years deliberately compliment each other but the persons recording them are not the same. The first voyage is undertaken by a fearful adolescent leaving the security of home and country for the unknown (life in the United States with an older brother); the second not only has the feeling of déjà vu but is also framed by Raad’s new status as a US citizen, which allowed him to leave Lebanon on US military transport to return “home” to his wife and child in New York. Immigration Service stamps on his Lebanese and American passports testify to his travels and subsequent changed identity.

Of this evolution, its reasons and consequences, Raad remains silent, favoring collective history over individual stories, and even though the samples of work he had in his luggage that infamous day at Rochester Airport are unquestionably studies of identity. Similarly, as a widely exhibited artist and full-time professor at the Cooper Union, the implications of his performance and all the choices which informed it cannot pass unnoticed to him. Yet they are never explored here nor are they given time to germinate in the mind of the spectator, who must process a vast amount of factual information to merely follow the plot of his story.

Heeding McLuhan’s warning that “the price of eternal vigilance is indifference”, Raad repeated to me after the show that he felt very strongly he no longer wished to perform “I Feel a Great Desire…” and to move towards new themes and ways of exploring them. I noticed however that he took the calling card of a representative of the European Parliament who wished to invite Raad to preach to the masses in Strasbourg. The reign of the image of the “war on terror”, how the image presents a certain representation of this, and perhaps even inures us to its vastly destructive implications, will likely continue.

(1) Thomas Keenan, “Publicity and Indifference (Sarajevo on Television)”, PMLA 117.1 (Jan 02): 104-116 (cited in French in the program to “I Feel a Great Desire to Meet the Masses Once Again”).

Photo credit: Walid Raad

If War Was Only A Joke

The Lebanese Civil War lasted over 15 years, destroyed Beirut’s cultural and commercial life and drew neighboring regional powers into intense political and military conflict. The generation of Lebanese youth who grew up against the backdrop of the hostilities includes the 40 -year old director Rabih Mroué. Although he would only have been a young boy at the beginning of the war, in a caustically humorous examination of the conflict, recently presented in Paris, he and his contemporaries become “freedom fighters” of different and variable stripes, corpses enlisted incessantly into a seemingly endless battle. The show’s title, in English, “How Nancy Wished That Everything Was an April Fool’s Joke”, provides a clue as to how Mroué’s generation approaches its shared and painful history and faces the specter of renewed violence since July 2006 : a kind of deliberate naïveté where one could just wish the troubles away, eyes closed and fingers crossed. The four characters who relate their involvement in the war and the circumstances of their numerous deaths never flinch however from the causes they defend, whether they join the ranks of Communist revolutionaries, Muslim brothers, the pro-Syrian Amal party or the Christian Free Patriotic Movement. Wedged uncomfortably into a single couch, moving only when their turn comes to speak, and dressed in the threads of modern Lebanese 40-somethings, the actors and their “testimonies” blend into a single story of the paradoxical unreality of a conflict that claimed thousands of lives for little if any political or social gain. The message is underscored by the brilliant iconographical work of Samar Maakaroun and Ziena Maasri, who recreate faithfully and cleverly the posters of the glorious deceased in the colors and symbolism of the parties who claim their acts of “heroism”. Judging from the knowing laughter among the Arab-speaking members of the audience, Mroué and company touch a nerve in a society yet vulnerable to a past that threatens to repeat itself, and in so doing, demonstrate for audiences less versed in the geopolitical complexities and nuances of the region how theater can serve as a vital and immediate forum for social reflection. Drawing on the idea of the virtual worlds of video games now familiar, and ever more real perhaps, to the next generation of Lebanese youth, Mroué succeeds in showing, with “How Nancy Wished…” what is at stake for he and his contemporaries : life itself. “We have the responsibility to think seriously about our history, because we cannot continue in the way we have,” he has said. “We don’t want to die again, one more time. We have had enough.”
Note: Mroué’s accomplice in “How Nancy Wished…”, Lina Saneh performs “Appendice” later this month (see previous post for more details).
“How Nancy Wished That Everything Was an April Fool’s Joke”, to Oct. 21, Festival d'Automne/Théâtre de la Cité internationale, info/reservations: www.festival-automne.com or www.theatredelacite.com
Photo Credit: Rabih Mroué, "Martyr pour que vive le Liban", photo-montage by Samar Maakaroun

Should We Be Afraid of Fall Theater?

Who is afraid of the representation? The question, asked by Lebanese writer/director Rabih Mroué in a performance of the same title, shown in September at the Centre Pompidou, sets the tone of the fall theater season. To answer the question, the theories of Peter Brook are typically illuminating. Writing in "The Empty Space" (1968), Brook defines “representation” as that moment when the audience “assists” the actor in performance so that “what is present for one is present for the other”. Understood in the context of Mroué’s piece, the proposition is a dangerous one. The show juxtaposes “body art” (not to be mistaken for tattooing and piercing, as the term has come to mean in our century, but understood here as the extremely violent forms of performance art practiced by artists like Bob Flanagan, Marina Abramovic and Chris Burden in the 1970s) and the story of a shooting spree in Beirut where eight office employees were killed by their fraudulent co-worker. The performance artists whose works are described matter-of-factly in the show (including Abramovic’s notorious “Rhythm 0”, where an audience was given the opportunity to use on Abramovic's body any of a variety of displayed instruments, including a pistol and a bullet, and in which the artist nearly died; or Burden’s “Through the Night Softly” in which he rolled, naked, through broken glass under the feet of passersby on a Los Angeles Street) examine audience passivity in response to violence. By textually and visually layering the explorations of artists like these with the story of gunman Hassan Mamoun and the context of the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990), Mroué and his partner Lina Saneh recognize the public’s understandable desire not to participate in bloody “spectacles” such as these, while also seeming to argue for precisely greater participation in such conflicts and tragedies so as to see them prevented or at least their effects mitigated. However, the show’s dramatic framework is provided by a game in which Saneh must recite the litany of Flanagan and company’s myriad acts of self-mutilation in a given space of time, usually under 1 minute, with Mroué holding the stopwatch. In so doing, they engage in a provocative glorification of the body artist’s courage in enduring extreme pain. Needless to say, any parallel with Mamoun’s desperate act of revenge or the victims’ suffering (thereby elevated to art) would be abominable. The line is razor thin here, but deliberately so. In a world where pain is the preferred fodder of mass media, where human suffering is its preferred (because profitable) spectacle, the general public is indeed asked to participate in frequently gruesome representations of life and death, if not by suffering personally, but at least by feeling with those who do, at the risk of loosing all feeling altogether. What can wake us from our torpor? Who indeed is brave enough to participate in the “representation”? Such are the questions Mroué and Saneh are asking us, in the irreverent tone by which they are making their theater known abroad.

The program of this year’s Festival d’Automne offers a variety of opportunities to pursue the line of reflection, with an emphasis on artists from the Middle East who are using theater to communicate with society in this conflict-torn region. Mroué returns to the theme of political and social violence in “How Nancy Wished That Everything Was an April Fool’s Joke” (in Arabic with French subtitles, Théâtre de la Cité Internationale, Oct. 8-14). In “Appendice”, Saneh introduces her own performance art project (tongue-in-cheek?) in which she plans to have her body parts individually removed and incinerated during her lifetime, so as to circumvent the outlawing of cremation in Lebanon (in French, Théâtre de la Cité Internationale, Oct. 22-28). Lebanese-American artist Walid Raad uses a multimedia palette to paint a vast tableau of acts of state-sponsored incarceration of supposed terrorists, following his own arrest at Rochester International Airport in 2004, in “I Feel a Great Desire to Meet the Masses Once Again” (in English, Centre Pompidou, October 12-13). And young playwright and director Amir Reza Koohestani offers his “Recent Experiences” of life in his native Iran (in Persian, with French subtitles, Théâtre de la Bastille, Nov. 8-18). From Belgium, but exploring the same question about the potential “dangers” of received performance, Tim Etchells has created a show blurring reality and representation in the style of the British collective Forced Entertainment, which Etchells directs, in “That Night Follows Day”, a searing commentary on parent-child relations, with repercussions for the artist-audience dynamic (in Dutch, with French subtitles, Centre Pompidou, Nov. 1-3). In a similar vein, Stéphane Olry relates in “Treize semaines de vertu” his reflections while attempting to follow Benjamin Franklin’s 13 virtues of temperance, silence, order and the like (in French, Archives Nationales, Oct. 24-Nov. 4) . Will his conclusion be “Don’t try this at home”? Information and reservations at www.festival-automne.com


Photo credits:
Photo 1: "Qui a peur de la représentation?": Houssan Mchaiemch
Photo 2: "Appendice": Rabih Mroué/Hatem Imam
Photo 3: "I Feel a Great Desire to Meet the Masses Again": Walid Raad
Photo 4: "That Night Follows Day": Phile Depraz