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
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