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
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