What happens when you enter a space and invite audience members to engage in a fight with you? What do you learn about violence, intimacy, dominating, and submitting?
With Ways to Submit, performance artist Ira Brand evokes a relatively simple premise:
Over the course of this roughly 70-minute evening, Brand (the creator and performer) will fight about nine different members of the audience. She does not know which audience members. She does not know who they are. But she will fight them.
As the audience enters the performance space, a huge sign is projected above the stage that announces a set of four rules: “NO biting, scratching, eye-gouging, head-butting.” As Brand reveals her intention to fight members of the audience (fights 246 to 255 for Brand), the room fills with nervous, anticipatory laughter from the audience.
Ira Brand and opponent; Ways to Submit; Photo Credit: irabrand.co.uk (unedited photos by Thomas Lenden, Bartle Halpin, Johan Pijpops, Maurizio Martorana)
The audience is placed on three sides around a set of mats that create a small ring of about three by three meters. On either side of the mats are two large Xs, drawn in white tape, marking where the fighters will stand at the start of each match. A wooden bench is placed on the fourth side of the mats with a towel for Brand (who must fight for almost 60 minutes straight with relatively few breaks between fights). Audience members who choose to fight have the option of changing into the sport clothes provided by the production and having some of water offered to them after the fight.
Ira Brand and opponent; Ways to Submit; Photo Credit: irabrand.co.uk (unedited photos by Thomas Lenden, Bartle Halpin, Johan Pijpops, Maurizio Martorana)
During the fight, either Brand or her opponent are allowed to pause the match, take a break, or tap out of a position. A giant timer is projected above the stage counting down the three minutes of each fight. The end of each fight is marked by a buzzer. The fight starts once both Brand and her opponent bow to each other and step into the ring. This bow represents an agreement between the two people – both are taking responsibility for what happens in the ring, are agreeing to the risk taken, and agree to begin.
Brand – as she explains at the top of the show – is by no means a professional fighter. She has a little experience with dominance and submission, and a little bit of experience with jujitsu, but otherwise each fight is a learning experience for Brand.
Ira Brand and opponent; Ways to Submit; Photo Credit: irabrand.co.uk (unedited photos by Thomas Lenden, Bartle Halpin, Johan Pijpops, Maurizio Martorana)
Ways to Submit is – almost despite itself – not an implicitly violent performance. It is a production made up of nine to ten incredibly intimate moments between strangers. The non-participating audience is privy to these incredibly temporary relationships and the moments that occur within these three minutes. They become invested in these moments, but also use these moments to decide if they want to fight.
This is a performance where two people play off each other’s energies, wear each other out, find extreme closeness, make physical contact, and create what could be called a dance of pulling apart and coming together.
The production is marked by:
Ira Brand and opponent; Ways to Submit; Photo Credit: irabrand.co.uk (unedited photos by Thomas Lenden, Bartle Halpin, Johan Pijpops, Maurizio Martorana)
Heavy breathing
Nervous giggles
Slaps
Punches
Lifts
Trips
Throws
Ira Brand and opponent; Ways to Submit; Photo Credit: irabrand.co.uk (unedited photos by Thomas Lenden, Bartle Halpin, Johan Pijpops, Maurizio Martorana)
Grabs
Grunts of frustration
Gasps of fear
Silent concentration
Anticipation
Laughter
Sometimes the fights are silly, somethings violent, sometimes scary, sometimes playful, and sometimes they become a dance or an embrace between two exhausted people falling into each other again and again for three minutes. The energy of the fight changes based on the audience member who engages Brand and Brand is changed by each encounter – she grows more tired, more frustrated, more joyful, more focused, more inflective.
At the end of performance at CAMPO (on February 1, 2023), Brand noted that the Ghent audience was the most enthusiastic audience – in terms of participation – she’d ever experienced since she premiered the show in 2019… do with that what you will.
It’s interesting to note how much the first fight can influence the rest of the evening. After Brand explained the evening, the audience was suddenly overtaken with the nervous laughter and with that the first phase of the performance begins – the phase that, I would guess, sets the tone for the next 70 minutes. There is a truly awkward, nervous, and tense moment where everyone in the room waits to see who will get up to fight Brand first (or if someone will get up to fight Brand) and what will this fight look like. This moment of tense silence can last for seconds or minutes depending on the audience, but at CAMPO it lasted for only about one minute… maybe less. The first fight was light, playful – perhaps for Brand, who was knocked to the ground repeatedly, frustratingly so – but the intention and the initial willingness to jump into the ring moved the rest of the evening as audience member after audience member joined Brand in the ring with few pauses between fights.
Ira Brand and opponent; Ways to Submit; Photo Credit: irabrand.co.uk (unedited photos by Thomas Lenden, Bartle Halpin, Johan Pijpops, Maurizio Martorana)
Ways to Submit is a production that holds the exciting potential to be radically different every night. To be lighter, heavier, softer, more, or less depending on who enters the ring and the energy that unfolds between the performer and her opponent. It is a production that is radically alive. It lives and breathes not only through its performer – Brand serves as a grounding figure who frames the evening, the only true constant in the performance – but through its audience finds shape. Audience members who fill the blank of each match, providing each fight and each night with a striking newness and unpredictability that is incredibly powerful to watch and be a part of.
…
At least from the perspective of the first audience member who felt oddly, almost uncharacteristically, compelled to end the awkward seconds of silence by jumping into the first fight.
Ira Brand and opponent; Ways to Submit; Photo Credit: Maurizio Martorana
“Perhaps we are the last remnants of a bygone era. Our conflicts: unending errors. Our history: a museum of failure. Our sensitivity: a dramatisation of nature. Soon, lava will flow where our houses stand. Forests will cover everything. Birdsong will echo amidst the ruins of our cities. I wonder who will tell our story. And to whom?”
A Review-Response to Milo Rau’s first opera by someone who knows nothing about opera
First things first….
About this post: In celebration of trying new formats in a world that is rapidly changing and has been forced into digitalization, this response-review is accompanied by an audio discussion with UK theatre-artist Kara Chamberlain. Writing is never a lonely process for me. All of my review-responses are born out of long discussions about the production I have watched with friends, family, and people I meet outside the theatre after the premiere. Alongside my classic essay-style response to Swiss-German theatre-maker Milo Rau’s newest production, Mozart’s final opera La clemenza di Tito, is the roughly one-hour discussion from which this essay was born. In this discussion we talk about a number of points not necessarily covered in the review itself and it gives insight into my writing, as well as dramaturgical and critical, process. This audio accompaniment is an experiment that was initially imagined as a video (but that threatened to invite too much negativity into my life, so be kind to any awkwardness and the shakey legs of a new experiment. That said, I hope you enjoy one or both parts.
Kara Chamberlain is a Canadian born England-based actor, producer, playwright, director, and musician. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Drama (honors) from the University of Alberta and a Master of Arts in Acting from Bristol’s Old Vic Theatre School. She is the co-founder of the London production company Crossline Theatre. Kara is currently writing a one-woman show about life with an anxiety disorder (“Headcase“). You can find more information about Crossline Theatre’s past, present, and forthcoming productions at www.crosslinetheatre.com and follow Kara on Instagram (@kara_chamb or @crosslinetheatre).
Second Things Second…
An Opera of the World, or Birdsongs: Milo Rau’s La clemenza di Tito
La clemenza di Tito, The Clemency of Titus, Mozart’s final opera, premiered on September 6, 1791 in Prague. The opera, which was written just two years after the beginning of the French Revolution (and which was still very much in progress) and eight years after the end of the American Revolution, was commissioned to celebrate the coronation of Leopold II (the Holy Roman Emperor) as the King of Bohemia and dissuade his subjects from revolution.
La clemenza di Tito, dir. Milo Rau, Théâtre Grand de Geneva, Photo Credit: Carole Parodi
On February 19, 2021, Milo Rau and his team – in their first attempt staging an opera – premiered La clemenza di Tito at Geneva’s Grand Théâtre.
At first glance, La clemenza di Tito is an odd choice for a Milo Rau production, because itis a notably anti-revolutionary opera. It hinges on the myth of a good ruler, celebrating the wise and merciful Roman Emperor, Titus, as he works to overcome the political turmoil spurred on by Vitellia, the daughter of the deposed Emperor Vitellio, who, using Titus’s lovestruck young friend Sesto (or Sexus according to the production’s surtitles), plots to assassinate Titus and usurp the throne. The production explicitly tells us (using Rau’s favourite device of projected text above the stage) that this operamarked the birth of bourgeois art. The terms bourgeois art and committed art are defined by Rau and his dramaturgical team as an artform that allies the middle-/bourgeois class with the political and social elites, using the suffering and ideals of the lower class as creative fodder for their creations. In this art, the artistically idealized “lower classes” (a term that is in constant shift, particularly within theatre) are not invited or even able (financially or otherwise) to view for themselves. Rau interprets La clemenza as the start of post-political art, which is not quite accurate as even the projected text acknowledges that this early bourgeois art and all the bourgeois art that followed (to which Rau, the IIPM, and NTGent’s productions certainly belong) is acutely political. It marks how one group of the oppressed allies itself with its oppressors rather than revolting against them to become the oppressors of those more oppressed than themselves.
In the video shown during the intermission, Rau actually directly discusses the concept of the good dictatorship of art as well as the impossibility of political artist to portray suffering without then profiting from it – an issue present within Rau’s work.
La clemenza di Tito, dir. Milo Rau, Théâtre Grand de Geneva, L-R: Anna Goryachova (Sesto), Bernard Richter (Titus); Photo Credit: Carole Parodi
Rau’s La clemenza begins with the opera’s final scene, the titular moment of Titus’s clemency (“May Rome know that I remain unchanged…”). Following this short scene, the production immediately returns to the true beginning of the opera to illustrate the journey to this moment of clemency and re-analyse the concept of perceived mercy from the ruling class. Anton Lukas’s beautiful set – which certainly doesn’t fit the constraints of the eighth rule of Rau’s “Ghent Manifesto”: “The total volume of the stage set must not exceed 20 cubic metres, i.e., it must be able to be contained in a van that can be driven with a normal drivers licence” – illustrates the ever-growing divide between the 1% and the other 99%. On one side of the revolving stage (the most beloved of German theatre mechanisms) is an art museum with ivory white walls that was initially covered with recreations of famous historic political paintings/images in the first scene of the production, pictures that we later learn are recreated on the stage and photographed throughout the performance. In the opening scene of La clemenza’s (i.e., the opera’s conclusion), this museum is filled, but when we return to the opera’s true beginning it is emptied and steadily refilled with the recreated images as we move back towards Titus’s clemency.
On the other side of the stage sits a massive homeless camp occupied by the population of Rome. It is overflowing with dirty tents, littered with garbage, and a giant (somewhat on the nose) white banner (which also doubling as a screen for that classic Rau projection) hangs over the stage with the words “Kunst ist Macht” [“Art is Power”] printed across it. As the artist-emperor Titus – portrayed by Swiss tenor Bernard Richter – moves about the encampment accompanied by his entourage of bodyguards and police while gesturing for the onstage cameraman (another classic Rau-ism) to follow him and witness/document his kindness and compassion but not his entourage’s brutality. However, those living in the camp serve only as objects for Titus’s art and as objects for the other named characters who mold them into their recreations of classic paintings. While the Roman populace is the central object of the art created by Titus and other elites like Vitellia and Servilia they are never made subjects and never truly succeed in elevating themselves to the position of subject. Even the “revolution” of the opera is simply the result of a petty power struggle among the elites, who are ultimately uninterested in changing the situation of the populace. They are only interested in elevating their own position.
The statement that “Art is power” is proven to be a fallacy, because art is really only power for the person who has the means and position to produce art for grand museums (like the one of the other side of the revolving stage) and massive theatres (like Grand Théâtre de Geneva). As we move through the opera, it is not Titus’s “clemency” that is revealed or even what Rau refers to as a Titus’s hypocrisy. What is revealed is Titus’s carelessness. It is not that he is a hypocrite in his perceived wisdom, compassion, and clemency, but he simply does not care about those people he paints, photographs, or directs outside of the capacity that their suffering benefits him. He does not care that they continue to suffer, it is in fact better for him if they do, because if they were to actually benefit from his art than he would lose his subject matter. He only really cares about helping those within his perceived ilk. Even the “revolutionaries” – Sesto and Vitellia – are only interested in seizing power for themselves and not in the situation of those people in camp where they plot their revolution.
The Roman populace in Rau’s La clemenza is made up of eighteen Genevans (lay-actors, as per rule seven of “The Ghent Manifesto”) while the six named (i.e., singing) characters in the original opera – Titus, Vitellia, Sesto, Annio, Servilia, and Publio – are played by an international cast of professional opera singers. Rau’s La clemenza is just as much a story of the city of Geneva – home to numerous international organizations such as the Red Cross, World Trade Organization, and United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees – and exploring what the city of Geneva and its populace looks like in 2021.
La clemenza di Tito, dir. Milo Rau, Théâtre Grand de Geneva, L-R: Jordan Hopkins (Publio), Bernard Richter (Titus); Photo Credit: Carole Parodi
Rau’s theatre is always about the human element of the production. When Rau employs a classic text in a production, he is really asking “What does this classic text say about this specific place and this specific conflict in this specific present?” So, just as the opening of the opera was rewritten to tell us about the lives and experiences of the six professional opera singers, the ending of the opera is rewritten for those eighteen extras. It tells us who they are and how they ended up in Switzerland and (by proxy) in this production.
In the conclusion of La clemenza, Rau returns to one of the many famous paintings shown – without any pomp or pageantry – in the opera’s opening (a painting also mentioned in Rau’s Everywoman): Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” (c. 1560).
In the first set of introductions at the opera’s opening (the introduction of the named characters) Bernard Richter’s introductory surtitles state: “For Bernard, we could write a play with the story of every human being.” This point is then reintroduced in the closing section, “Lament of the Ordinary Man,” using the concept of Bruegel’s painting. The conclusion tells the story of a city through its ordinary citizenry, not through those who built the theatre but through those who laid down the red theatre’s red carpet. “The Fall of Icarus” is a fascinating painting, because amidst the daily life portrayed in the landscape – a man plowing his field, a shepherd herding his sheep, a ship sailing, and the assorted nature scape of trees, rocks, hills, distant mountains, and the sea – is the figure of the fallen Icarus, whose leg one only notices disappearing into the sea upon close inspection. Icarus, the painting’s titular subject-matter is largely camouflaged by the overwhelming normalcy of the larger image.
The painting tells a story of a day that is – with one exception – normal. Bruegel the Elder does not create a hierarchy of events within the painting, but instead places the fall of Icarus alongside the farmer, the shepherd, the fisher, the ship, and the landscape. There is no visible internal dramaturgy within the painting to push Icarus and his fall to the fore. It is simply and unspectacularly a part of the larger landscape. In the finale moment of the performance, Vitellia (Serena Farnocchia) tells us that in her opinion (which really means Rau’s opinion) the best way to write the story of the world is just as Bruegel did in his painting: “An off-centre image, without dramaturgy [and] without staging.” Yet it should be pointed out there is a dramaturgy to Rau’s staging of the world, the (in comparison, celebrity) opera singers are introduced at the opening of Act One and the Roman/Genevan populace are introduced at the close of Act Two (although, to be fair, Act One opens with a monologue from Dominique, an extra and part of the populace, just as Act Two opens with a monologue from Gor, another Genevan).
This final Act, particularly the “Lament of the Ordinary Man,” was (for me) the triumph of the production: what I love in Rau’s work is the focus on the ordinary over the mythic heroic and how through personal narrative finds the heroic in the private and personal. Yet I struggle with the idea of using opera – which is the most bourgeois, elitist, and closed of the bourgeois arts, marked by the excessive pageantry of black tie performances, hyper expensive tickets, and the considerable time commitment that excludes a great deal of people from performances – as a way to respond to the inherent and near inescapable failure of political act and theatre. Those watching the opera are part of the system being critiqued, and those creating and staging the opera are not only a part of the system but also benefit directly from the unevenness of this system.
Rau is actually refreshingly self-reflexive about this particular aspect in La clemenza. The production closes with a direct statement about this problem and the need for change within larger artistic institutions. La clemenza concludes with a statement that stayed with me through both viewings:
“Perhaps we are the last remnants of a bygone era. Our conflicts: unending errors. Our history: a museum of failure. Our sensitivity: a dramatisation of nature. Soon, lava will flow where our houses stand. Forests will cover everything. Birdsong will echo amidst the ruins of our cities. I wonder who will tell our story. And to whom?”
That said, as is almost always the case in theatre and art, there are certainly problematic images present within the production that should have been looked at more closely. However, there are also a number of images that are quite simply outside my field of knowledge and watching the production, I was at times unsure if I was just missing the reference for the image. I will say that one should always be careful when having two Congolese immigrants cut out the heart of the self-proclaimed “last real Genevan,” as there may be some unintended implications and undertones (but again, I might be missing a key cultural reference for this moment).
I’m also not sure if an opera is the best vehicle for political theatre, because of the necessity to maintain a level of fidelity to the original text. People are paying to see and listen to an opera and, as the director, one must stage an opera. I felt I understood the 20% rule of “Ghent Manifesto” because more than 20% of the opera was used (Rule Four: “The literal adaptation of classics on stage is forbidden. If a source text – whether book, film or play – is used at the outset of the project, it may only represent up to 20 percent of the final performance time”). I missed the usual power of deconstructing the text in a purposeful and political way, and I missed how this deconstruction allows for the intersection of public/political with private/personal. Yet, the reverse of this critique was also probably true for a number of people who are ardent opera fans: that there was too much Milo Rau in this opera and not enough Mozart.
I also have to say that I don’t know opera. La clemenza is maybe the fourth opera I have ever seen in my life and I don’t feel confident responding to it on the same critical level as regular theatre productions or political actions, because theatre and opera have inherently different dramaturgies. I don’t feel confident in assessing if La clemenza is good nor bad, nor do I think that is a particularly helpful qualifier for the production.
What I can say is that La clemenza employs a best-of of Rau and the IIPM’s bag of tricks: a rotating stage, graphic onstage violence that employs explicitly theatrical technics such as stage blood, someone peeing onstage, the same font as always on placards, live streamed film, a camera man on the stage throughout the production, the seamless switching between live streamed video to pre-filmed video, actors stepping in and out of character to introduce themselves as private persons, professional and lay actors performing side by side, various states of undress, showing the mechanics of the theatre during the perfomrance, closeups of the actors’ faces projected above the stage, surtitles to incorporate the multilinguality, and (of course) fog machines. Rau normally works within 100 minutes for his productions and La clemenza nearly twice that at 2.5 hours in length (plus a thirty minute intermission), so perhaps the temptation to indulge in every Rau-ism proved too much, or perhaps there is a running gag in the inter-production dramaturgy of IIPM and NTGent productions.
There were moments in this opera that made me flinch, moments I hated, moments I didn’t understand, moments I could have watched again and again (and in some cases did), and moments that made me laugh out loud because they were just struck me as deeply funny.
But where, at the end of three hours, does La clemenza actually land? Does it really succeed in providing a clear critique of political art? In truth it was only upon second viewing that I found this critique, however, this could easily have come from the discombobulation that accompanies the digital format in combination with the language, surtitles, cinematography, and the excesses of opera. Is the strangeness of the piece a by-product of the strangeness of the covid-safe staging that forced the performance to happen without an audience and that forced the opera chorus to spread in the space the audience would normally occupy?
I don’t have a proper response (nor the space to really discuss them here) to these questions and larger issues. I adore the final message of the performance and its poetic response to the potentiality for a radical change to take place within the artistic and theatrical institutions at this moment.
But even at the end of this long reflection, I’m still not sure if I even like opera.
Life, death, and theatre in the age of covid. Milo Rau’s “Everywoman” at the Salzburger Festspiele, starring Ursina Lardi and Helga Bedau.
Everywoman[i] opens with two large boulders, a black piano, a pile of seven cardboard boxes, a large puddle of water between the performance space and the audience, and a soundscape of tolling bells is heard in the background (stage design by Anton Lukas). Unlike most of Milo Rau’s plays, when the audience enters the theatre, there are no actors on stage, which is understandable with the new corona rules where entrance begins 30 minutes before start.
The performance features Swiss actor Ursina Lardi live onstage and Helga Bedau – a retired teacher from Berlin (originally Lünen) who, in February, received a diagnosis of inoperable pancreatic cancer – appears projected on video. Rather than attempting to
What does a human life look like in material terms? Photo Credit: Salzburger Festspiele, Armin Smailovic
create a morality play as Jedermann does, Milo Rau’s newest project, Everywoman, is a mortality play. It takes on the near Sisyphean task of exploring themes of life, death, representation, melancholy, and human loneliness within the tight time constraints of a 90-minute performance.
Everywoman premiered at the Salzburger Festspiele (the only major festival not to be cancelled this summer) on August 19, 2020. Like many of Rau’s earlier productions (Orestes in Mosul and Mitleid. Die Geschichte eines Maschinengewehrs) borrows bits and pieces (monologues, plot points, thematics, descriptions, and quotes) from Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s beloved Jedermann (a mainstay production of the Festspiele and which, at least according to Rau, has been used to torture German high school students for decades). The production then juxtaposes the classical source material with the autobiographical experiences of its actors – Lardi and (to a greater extent) Bedau. Rau and his dramaturgical team uncover parallels between Lardi and Bedau: both left their hometowns for the promise of Berlin, both are mothers, and both have a son.
Although Everywomen is a Lardi-led production, Bedau is the key to its engagement with Hofmannsthal’s discussion of death and judgment as well as Rau’s interest in the theatricality of mortality and existential dread. Bedau appears only on video, projected
“Treatment makes me tired”; Ursina Lardi (forward) and Helga Bedau (behind); Photo Credit: Salzburger Festspiele, Armin Smailovic
above the stage, while Lardi is alone on stage, often interacting with the pre-recorded video. However, this medial element is not just a stylistic choice, Bedau has a prognosis of between three months and two years. When Everywoman was written, rehearsed, and filmed, there was no guarantee that Bedau would still be alive for the premiere – a fact discussed in the performance. Bedau first appears seated at a long table surrounded by people; meanwhile, on the stage below, Lardi discusses the nature of human relationships in drama. How visual clues indicate action and conflict: What does it mean when we see two people on stage together? Three? Four? And, finally, one? This is a play about one.
Bedau loosely reenacts Jedermann’s dinner party scene, where Jedermann hosts an extravagant dinner party only to be interrupted by Death and Jedermann is about the titular character’s search for a companion into death. In Everywoman, Death does not arrive, it is already there. Bedau has a terminal diagnosis. Her parents are long dead and buried in the hometown (Lünen) she never returned to after she moved to Berlin in 1968. Once she finishes chemotherapy, she wants to go to Greece to be with her only son. The production recognizes the loneliness of dying, that you cannot take anyone or anything with you. Everything is eventually left behind… brown cardboard boxes (like those piled at the back of the stage), filled with pictures, binders, and knickknacks now all meaningless as the inscriber of meaning falls out of history.
Everywoman is uninterested in issues of good and evil or the final judgment that Hofmannsthal’s original spends so much time on. Rau’s production looks at singularity, aloneness, and theatre. It looks at a single human life, inevitably falling short in its attempt to bring this life in all its complexity and fullness – the love, the loss, the hopes, the fears, the successes, the disappointments, the joy, the sadness – to the stage. Lardi undertakes a nuanced and complex discussion about the capacity of theatre to represent a person. Lardi discusses visibility on a small, maybe even selfish, level. It asks if we, as individuals, are ever really seen? Are our stories are ever really heard (and can they be)? If anyone is ever actually there, listening, seeing, sharing, and living in it with us, or if we – in the end – are simply alone? The Jedermann begs for time to find a companion into death, while Everywoman knows there is no companion for death.
Everywoman isn’t just about loneliness. It is also about theatre as a conduit of togetherness, looking at its audience as a sort of collectivity. However, it is a collectivity united in their aloneness as well as in despair and outrage (“Must I die too!”). It is not entirely without irony that Rau looks at this issue of audience and togetherness in an evening where because of covid19, the audience is perhaps less together than ever before with every second seat in the auditorium blocked off to separate spectators. In Everywoman, Lardi describes a dream of an evening in the theatre where everything is said and heard. An evening where the entire being of a person is captured and given the sort of immortality that theatre can offer. Yet in the new era of covid19 – where theatres are closed, festivals cancelled, and stages left empty – if such an evening were to happen, if an evening of everything… would it even matter?
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, did it even fall?
(There is also something in this metaphor about theatre and maybe even about death)
Icarus
Everywoman is a performative essay discussing the nature of theatre and that of life and death. It is a melancholy production, but it says something profound in a time that feels so marked by sickness and death. Ursina Lardi does a beautiful job breathing life into the text in a performance in a performance that is felt from across the room. She is given no easy task with the text, which makes quick, almost seamless transitions from idea to idea, giving it the sense of stream of consciousness. It is a highly ambitious production and it is, for the most part, mostly successful in meeting its lofty goals. Everywoman provides a nuanced and poetic discussion of the anger, despair, melancholy, and ultimately acceptance. It captures the sense of shortness that accompanies human life (particularly as it approaches its conclusion) and – like an evening at the theatre – how fast everything passed by.
Everywoman can, at times, feel oversaturated. For a production that talks about a moment where (as Hamlet famously states), “the rest is silence,” there is very little
Landscape with theFall of Icarus; Peter Bruegel the Elder, ca. 1560; referred to in Everywoman; Photo Credit: wikipedia
silence. Perhaps that is the point: there isn’t much time left, everything that can be said should be said. If you want to create the evening Lardi dreams of – where everything is said – maybe there isn’t time for silence. At times the text washes over you, and as one section bounces and echoes around your skull, on the stage, Lardi and the production moves forward and moves on.
It is a production of more profound meaning than one anticipates when they first enter the theatre, everything is inscribed with meaning. The giant glacial rocks are placed on the stage resemble the boulders lying in fields where Lardi grew up and are actually copies of the rocks that Bedau collects, representing the rock-like tumour that’s killing her. The tolling bells heard when we enter the theatre are reminders of the booming echoes heard throughout Lardi’s mountainous homeland and a marker of death. The black lacquered piano promises to be played. The water on the stage that separates Lardi from her audience (the about two meters recommended) also, in the theatre lights, reflects Lardi upside-down on the wall in wavy shadows, conjuring images of a shadowy underworld. Music played on tapes – an outdated (perhaps even dead) form of technology that gestures to Bedau’s youth.
A poignant reflection on the strange present we suddenly and unwillingly find ourselves part of.
Déjà vu – A Horse Dies
Everywoman contains the markers of a Milo Rau production: A pre-filmed video projection that onstage Lardi interacts with (in increasingly clever ways). One particularly noteworthy instance of this intermedial interaction is when Lardi walks off the stage and seemingly into the garden with Bedau to bring her a glass of water. There is the classical music you anticipate in Rau productions (Bach) and the nostalgic, vaguely sentimental music that Rau always seems drawn to, in this case, Neil Young’s “Cortez the Killer.” Music also appears to be played onstage through the boombox “Cortez the Killer” is apparently played from.
Rau’s productions always open with a monologue performed directly to the audience. Everywoman is, of course, no exception. Lardi enters the stage and tells the audience a story about going to a racetrack to watch a horse race, where one of the horses falls and breaks its leg. She describes the look of pain and despair on the horse’s face as it rises and falls, ultimately – at least according to Lardi – gives in to the despair as it (and Lardi) come to understand that it is over. Lardi’s monologue – an apt opening for a production that deals with issues of live, death, and dying – describes a moment of betweenness (arguably the space this entire production occupies), where life and death meet. A tense moment of finality. When the horse makes eye-contact with Lardi, when it gives the hundred-yard stare just past her head, it is somehow dead while still alive.
Lardi does not have to tell us what happened to the horse because we already know what happens when a horse breaks its leg.
When Lardi began the monologue, I was immediately struck with a sense of déjà vu. From the moment she started talking about the “racetrack” (and the nature of the word in German, Rennbahn, Pferderennbahn), I recognized it. I was suddenly struck with the sense that “I know where this is going. I know this story.” Rau’s work is filled with Easter eggs, you don’t realize they’re there until you do. It’s these little Easter eggs that connect Everywoman with productions like La Reprise (which undertakes a similar discussion of the nature of theatre and also uses the rain effect), Orestes in Mosul (the use of snippets of classic text to access universal themes), and even Mitleid. Die Geschichte eines Maschinengewehrs (another Rau-Lardi theatre essay). Lardi’s racetrack monologue is an edited and adjusted version of a column Rau wrote on June 16, 2019, for the Swiss newspaper Tagesanzeiger, “Tod auf der Rennbahn” (“Death on the Racetrack”).[ii]
I mention this article because it is indicative of the collage-style of creation Rau employs in his productions, which often goes back and looks at how at the experiences (and writings) of Rau, his actors, and his productions team come together to create a finished text. I also mention it because of the interesting (perhaps unintentional) connection it establishes between Everywoman and Mitleid. Mitleid also pulls one of its most effective (and affective) monologues – the Merci Bien monologue – from “Sie wissen ja, wie es in Träumen ist…” (“You know how it is in dreams…”), an article published on Rau’s blog Althussers Hände.[iii]
“Where do you want to die?”; Ursina Lardi (at piano) and Helga Bedau (on video); Photo Credit: Salzburger Festspiele, Armin Smailovic
The Most Beautiful Conclusion
Having barely scratched the surface of Everywoman, I will conclude with what I thought was perhaps the most beautiful part of the production. In another of Rau’s favourite motifs, Lardi concludes the show by discussing what she considers to be the most essential part of theatre (we also see this technique in La Reprise and Orestes in Mosul). The moment after a performance ends, but before the applause begins: a moment filled with tense potential, or – as Lardi states – “the gaze that knows everything.” It is a frustratingly brilliant insight on Rau and his dramaturgs’ part. This pre-applause moment offers perhaps the best summation possible of what Everywoman examines and the existential space it occupies. Everywoman is a play about the space between being alive and dying, but, even more specifically, it is about that space where a person both is and isn’t (which is to a certain extent also the space theatre always occupies itself).
This is an in-between moment.
You know what is coming and what has already been.
It is a moment that always new, re-inscribed with each new audience and yet also expected and anticipated.
It is a moment of absolute clarity.
Ursina Lardi and Helga Bedau at premiere; Photo Credit: Salzburger Festspiele, Marco Borrelli
Premiere: August 19, 2020 Salzburger Festspiele (Austria)
Director: Milo Rau
Featuring: Ursina Lardi and Helga Bedau
Dramaturgy: Carmen Hornbostel and Christian Tschirner
Stage and Costume Design: Anton Lukas
Video: Moritz von Dungern
[i] If this response seems jumbled, it’s because it is. Everywoman struck an intensely personal chord with me at the moment I saw it. I’m not quite sure what to do with it all just yet.
[iii] “Sie wissen ja, wie es in Träumen ist…“ was subsequently republished in the book Althussers Hände. Essays und Kommentare (Berlin: Verbrecher Verlag, 2015), pp. 241-244.
A masked curtain call; Photo credit: Salzburger Festspiele, Marco Borelli
In 2007, in Calais, France, the Demeester family – René, Marie, Oliver, and Angélique – hanged themselves in their family home. In January 2020, Swiss director Milo Rau premiered his production about the strange case of collective suicide. “Familie” explores the existential struggles of raising a family, growing up, growing apart, and the uncertainty of the future in a ritualistic reconstruction of the family’s final night together with the real Peeters-Miller family.
The starting point for Milo Rau’s newest production, Familie (which premiered at NTGent on January 4, 2020), is the strange case of the Demeester family. The four members of the family, René (55), Marie (55), and their two children Olivier (30) and Angélique (28), in late September 2007, hanged themselves in their family home in Calais in a still unexplained case of collective suicide. It is easy to understand why Rau and his team were drawn to the event, because, from outside (the only perspective available), it is utterly inexplicable: the family was close-knit and happy, with no notable financial trouble, or history of mental illness (other than a few bouts of depression). Nothing about them seems to indicate suicidal tendencies.
The only clue left by the family in this odd case of collective suicide, where no motive is visible, was an enigmatic, unsigned note that concludes:
“On a trop déconné. Pardon.”
[“We screwed up too much. Sorry.”]
Familie is – despite the depth of its subject-matter – a small production. It is concise, self-contained, and beautiful.
It looks at the demise of the close-knit and intensely private family from outside the walls of the now-absent familial unit. It is, in many ways, utterly unspectacular (a troupe found throughout Rau’s oeuvre). The death of the four people was neither loud nor gory. Even at the time it garnered relatively little media attention (and no international attention), and it was two days before the bodies were even found. The family was there and then they were simply gone.
Leonce Peeters, Filip Peeters, An Miller, Louisa Peeters; Familie, Dir. Milo Rau, NTGent (Belgium); Photo credit: Michiel Devijver/NTGent
The whole event was small, strange, and quiet.
However, the case raises a number of practical and existential questions: Why the family decided to kill themselves? Why they all did it together? How had they “screwed up”? And what did that last evening together look like? Over a decade later, these questions remain unanswered and the only people who could answer them now lie in a small grave about ten minutes away from the former home.
Familie, as should be obvious at this point, is a family drama. One that breaks apart – as so many plays have before it – the Western European middle-class familial unit and lays its existential struggles and questions bare for all to see.
The production’s hook (so to speak_ is that this family drama is played a real family: a mother, a father, and their two children. Namely, the Peeters-Miller clan, a family made up of Belgium’s brightest stars: in Familie, Filip Peeters and An Miller appear for the first time onstage with their teenage daughters, Louisa and Leonce. Using the Peeters-Miller family, Familie reconstructs the family’s (the Demeesters… or is it actually the Peeters-Millers?) final evening together, while exploring what could drive a family (and for that matter individuals) to suicide.
In contrast to Rau’s larger projects (staging a tribunal in the Congo, The Oresteia in Iraq, and the passion story in Southern Italy), Familie feels notably smaller, while using the familial lens to explore deeper existential themes.
Employing the collage-style autoethnography that Rau is known for, the Demeester’s story –shrouded in mystery – is brought to life by overlaying their family unit with that of the Peeters-Millers. The production uses the private lives of the Peeters-Millers – their lives and experiences – to parallel that of the Demeesters. The absolutely unique experiences of its performers as a family in today’s world serves to explore what it means to raise and grow up (and apart) as a family in a world on the brink of destruction.
The textual dramaturgy developed throughout facilitates a fascinating mixture of reality and fiction that clouds the boundaries between not only Peeters-Miller and Demeester, but also the experiences of the spectator. The evening – which if not for the suicide could be any evening – is meticulously reconstructed and Aptly, the concept of ethnography – the study of the customs, habits, rituals, and lives from within the specific society – runs through the production. An Miller even states that, before she became an actor, she considered studying ethnography.
Rau presents us with an ethnographic performance of the family unit. The family – either the Peeter-Millers or the Demeesters – is presented as a society, a sovereign nation unto itself. With each family possessing its own unique language and rituals, which mark its members’ victories, joys, disappointments, disillusionments, and fears. Familie examines what it means to raise a family in today’s world: the independence children long for combined with the intense loneliness that accompanies the increasing independence that comes with adolescence. We see children pulling away from their parents while simultaneously remaining intensely reliant on them, parents filled with fear for their children’s future as well as their own, and creeping regret for past actions and questioning of whether the right choice was made… lives not lived versus lives not yet lived.
Familie; Dir. Milo Rau; Photo credit: Michiel Devijver/NTGent
Familie is a play of existential doubt and ritualistic action.
The relatively short 100-minute performance has a fascinating dramaturgy. We are told in the opening moments of the performance how it will end: We know the family is going to hang themselves. Yet despite this inevitability, you hang on every word and action – even hoping that they may change their minds.
Even the actors themselves – who skillfully perform their roles with a compulsive energy, pulled with a sort of powerlessness towards their end as if by some unstoppable force – do not seem entirely sure of their decision. Still, they are utterly unwilling to abandon it.
Like an oft repeated ritual being witnessed for the first time but it is uncannily familiar. Although it is the last evening, nothing the family does – until they change into their Sunday best (designed by Louisa), hang the nooses, and step onto and then off the stools – is particularly out of the ordinary.
The evening beats on, slowly but steadily. It is all strikingly normal even banal and every day, it marches towards an inevitable conclusion (an ancient ritual that must be fulfilled): Filip cooks dinner (a very cool trick for the stage), An showers and calls her parents, Louisa helps Leonce study English, the family eats dinner together, watch old family movies, clean the house, and argue.
Over the course of the four acts – (1) Killing Time, (2) Family Dinner, (3) The Last Move, and (4) Final Preparations – each actor/family member is able to steps out of their Demeester performance (or are they just themselves?) to discuss their personal anxieties about raising children, starting a career, growing up, and growing apart. These elements come together to create a poetry for the mutual anxiety of our time. Parents question their decisions in the past, children wonder about uncertain futures, with everything steeped in that too familiar creeping existential dread.
A glass double of the Demeesters’ home in Calais (or is it the home of the Peeter-Millers?) sits center stage, complete with kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, dining room, and living room (garbage cans and lawn furniture outside). The set – brilliantly designed by Anton Lukas – is ingenious. It is closed and the audience is always outside what happens in the home (the sovereign nation of the family) and, therefore, much of what happens on the stage. Spectators can only access this action via the live film feed projected on the screen above the stage.
In short: We are always watching from outside, only ever really seeing what the camera shows us. Like nosey neighbours peering through a window, we watch from a distance. The set and staging serves as a constant reminder that we are not a part of this family and can, therefore, not be a part of their specific struggles: their shared fights, arguments, inside jokes, oft-repeated stories, memories, and history. The set highlight the voyeuristic quality that accompanies watching a family drama unfold, that accompanies watching someone else’s family as an intruder in their private space.
Familie; Dir. Milo Rau (NTGent); Photo credit: Michiel Devijver/NTGent
In Anna Karenina, Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy famously quips: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Rau and his team present their audience with an in-depth exploration of the anxieties of the Western European family unit, which prove to be far more complex than Tolstoy suggests.
Familie, through its brilliant staging, acting, dramaturgy, and design, presents (both textually and visually) the dualities of within each and every family: the contradiction of the happy family portrait alongside the internal struggles of its members. The production looks at the existential struggles of people living and co-existing together, who simultaneously huddle together and push apart. It examines how those same small, personal, and even abstract aspects of a shared life and shared experience, those things that often seem so pointless and banal in the vastness of the world are (in the end) the very same things that make life so terrifying and so worth living.
Familie is a very different production than what you normally see and expect from Milo Rau – who, in recent years, has been named the enfant terrible of the European theatre. It is smaller, softer, steadier than what one expects entering the theatre to see a play about suicide.
In the end, as Louisa says at the very beginning, it leaves its audience without the answers they so desperately crave: Namely, why did the Demeesters commit suicide in 2007 and why are the Peeters-Millers, on this and every other evening? It offers its audience a hymn composed of collective love and despair, and the desperate loneliness that accompanies them. In its performative treatise on suicide – the impossible co-existence of presence and absence – Familie shines a light on our own mortality, fragility, and collective madness.
What’s happening to the arts in Belgium? #thisisourculture
Last Thursday, hundreds of people demonstrated in front of the Flemish Parliament in Brussels to save Flanders’s world-renowned arts and the Belgian region’s booming cultural sector.
Jan Jambon, Flanders’ new Minister-President — whose legislative duties include responsibility for the cultural sector — had just announced broad cuts to the arts. Politically associated with the nationalist, separatist and extremely conservative New Flemish Alliance (Nieuw-Vlaamse Alliantie, or N-VA, which leads the conservative coalition that recently formed government), Jambon said his government would cut support for most cultural institutions’ operating costs by 6 per cent.
The only exceptions were seven well-known Flemish cultural institutions — KVS, Ancienne Belgique, Antwerp Symphony Orchestra, Royal Ballet Flanders, deSingel, Vooruit, Concertgebouw Brugge, and Vlaams Radiokoor — which will have their structural subsidies cut by “only” 3 per cent. In addition to these cuts to established institutions, the new government also said it plans brutal 60-per-cent cuts to project subsides, which are depended upon by young and independent artists, as well as new initiatives in theatre, music, and arts centres across Flanders. Reducing these grants from 8.5 million euros to 3.4 million euros may still sound generous by Alberta standards, but once they are divided among the artists and initiatives traditionally funded by the regional government, the impact will be devastating.
The new government apparently thinks artists will continue to create work, perhaps even more than they do now, for significantly less money. The reality is that less is less. As Jerry Aerts, director of the international art central deSingel in Antwerp, explained: “With less money, you cannot create more.” Aerts went on to say the seven cultural institutions whose budgets will “only” face a 3-per-cent cut cannot – no matter how much they scrimp and save –compensate the 5 million euros lost to young artists and independent projects.
The Flanders cuts hit a nerve with me. It’s the second time in less than a month that I’ve seen arts funding slashed by newly elected, right-wing governments — first in Alberta, my home, and now in Belgium.
The arts make an easy target for sweeping cuts by conservative governments. Maybe it’s because so many in the arts are often (although certainly not always) left-leaning and not the core of their supportive base. Maybe it’s because art – be it theatre, dance, visual arts, or music – is inherently about resistance and questions accepted norms and the status quo. Maybe it’s because art inherently gestures towards a future, while conservatism so often presents itself as a gesture to an idyllic, nostalgic, but ultimately fictive and unobtainable past.
But of course, it isn’t just conservative governments that attack the arts. It’s a reflection of the success of the neoliberal agenda, that even parties of the progressive left too often accept its logic that if something has any intrinsic worth then it must be able to fund itself through the market. Artists are left to themselves to find their own money.
It’s also because the arts are and must be dangerous to governments. They challenge power structures and neoliberal agendas They can mobilize audiences, pushing against what is politically acceptable for the government.
The reality of the situation in Flanders means a province world-renowned for its cultural contributions, a place that has sent out to the world such talented artists as Ivo Van Hove, Anne Teresa De Keermaeker, Miep Warlop, Jan Lauwers, and many more, risks losing its cultural and artistic standing.
This pits big-name artists and production houses against emerging artists without permanent funding sources.
The unpleasant reality is that young and independent artists across the cultural sector will be some of the biggest losers, unable to fund new projects — which will thus never be produced. Remember, all of the big-name artists named above — and most artists everywhere — were young and independent when their careers began. All them depended on the subsidies now on the chopping block. Many of them still do.
In an open letter published in the Belgian newspaper De Standaard, Ivo Van Hove and Anna Teresa De Keersmaeker stated: “The total budget for art in the Flemish government is only 0.35 per cent. That is peanuts. Nothing. We understand that more money is going to bigger productions, but where do you think the people from those productions come from? They also once graduated from an art school and started with small things. Only by supporting a multitude of voices, originality can be created. That basis is now being completely undermined.”
Here’s the thing: In situations where limited funding is available for artists, everyone ends up fighting for the same scraps. In a neoliberal cultural economy, everyone loses because artists (young, emerging, and established) don’t have the luxury of experimenting and creating avant-garde or new pieces of work if the art they create must attract an audience big enough to cover costs.
The result is monochromatic (lots of Hamlet), a cultural landscape that stands in stark contrast to the brilliant and diverse one in present-day Flanders. As someone from a place where everyone fights over the same tiny pot of money, I can say with certainty: You can only watch Hamlet so many times.
There is Still Hope: The Perspective of an Albertan Abroad
Earlier in October, my home province of Alberta voted in a new conservative government, which quickly implemented brutal cuts to the art sector. It was a frustrating situation to watch from a distance. My Facebook feed was littered with outraged posts by artist friends.
But, in stark contrast to what is currently happening in Flanders, they did nothing.
Belgian artists and supporters of the arts simply did not accept the proposed cuts. People were up in arms. On November 12, 2,000 supporters protested in front of the La Bourse theatre in Brussels and, in an act of solidarity, the SMAK (Ghent’s Municipal Museum of Contemporary Art) closed its doors for the day.
Solidarity means people standing together and staying together. Success inges on solidarity, which it means you can’t just fight for a day or a week, or express outrage on social media for a day or two. It means sticking together, supporting each other and each other’s losses.
In Flanders, I see big name artists from across the cultural sector standing alongside art students and emerging talents.
Watching the last week of protests and outrage in Flanders actually made me all the more frustrated with Alberta and more hopeful for Flanders.
I don’t know if it is Albertan apathy, Canadian complacency, or a more sweeping general acceptance of neoliberal policies on the ground-level in Canada and North America, but no one actually fought Kenney on the arts cuts or much else. Everyone has (thus far) just sort of accepted it (although there is a growing protest movement).
In Flanders people are fighting and standing together. There is power in that and if they keep doing this (because protest is only effective as a continuous effort) they could really do something.
In Crises of the Republic, German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt states: “Power springs up whenever people get together and act in concert” (Crises of the Republic 151). If artists and artistic institutions in Flanders continue to fight and protest (to sign a petition click the link), I think there is real potential to prevent or at least reduce these cuts. If they maintain solidarity and refuse to be divided by the government they can implement meaningful change.
“It is the people’s support that lends power to the institutions of a country,” said Arendt in Crises of the Republic. “All political institutions are manifestations and materializations of power; they petrify and decay as soon as the living power of the people ceases to uphold them.”
Bibliography:
Arendt, Hannah. Crises of the Republic. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972. Print.
What’s happening to the arts in Belgium? #thisisourculture
Last Thursday, hundreds of people demonstrated in front of the Flemish Parliament in Brussels to save Flanders’s world-renowned arts and the Belgian region’s booming cultural sector.
Jan Jambon, Flanders’ new Minister-President — whose legislative duties include responsibility for the cultural sector — had just announced broad cuts to the arts. Politically associated with the nationalist, separatist and extremely conservative New Flemish Alliance (Nieuw-Vlaamse Alliantie, or N-VA, which leads the conservative coalition that recently formed government), Jambon said his government would cut support for most cultural institutions’ operating costs by 6 per cent.
The only exceptions were seven well-known Flemish cultural institutions — KVS, Ancienne Belgique, Antwerp Symphony Orchestra, Royal Ballet Flanders, deSingel, Vooruit, Concertgebouw Brugge, and Vlaams Radiokoor — which will have their structural subsidies cut by “only” 3 per cent. In addition to these cuts to established institutions, the new government also said it plans brutal 60-per-cent cuts to project subsides, which are depended upon by young and independent artists, as well as new initiatives in theatre, music, and arts centres across Flanders. Reducing these grants from 8.5 million euros to 3.4 million euros may still sound generous by Alberta standards, but once they are divided among the artists and initiatives traditionally funded by the regional government, the impact will be devastating.
The new government apparently thinks artists will continue to create work, perhaps even more than they do now, for significantly less money. The reality is that less is less. As Jerry Aerts, director of the international art central deSingel in Antwerp, explained: “With less money, you cannot create more.” Aerts went on to say the seven cultural institutions whose budgets will “only” face a 3-per-cent cut cannot – no matter how much they scrimp and save –compensate the 5 million euros lost to young artists and independent projects.
The Flanders cuts hit a nerve with me. It’s the second time in less than a month that I’ve seen arts funding slashed by newly elected, right-wing governments — first in Alberta, my home, and now in Belgium.
The arts make an easy target for sweeping cuts by conservative governments. Maybe it’s because so many in the arts are often (although certainly not always) left-leaning and not the core of their supportive base. Maybe it’s because art – be it theatre, dance, visual arts, or music – is inherently about resistance and questions accepted norms and the status quo. Maybe it’s because art inherently gestures towards a future, while conservatism so often presents itself as a gesture to an idyllic, nostalgic, but ultimately fictive and unobtainable past.
But of course, it isn’t just conservative governments that attack the arts. It’s a reflection of the success of the neoliberal agenda, that even parties of the progressive left too often accept its logic that if something has any intrinsic worth then it must be able to fund itself through the market. Artists are left to themselves to find their own money.
It’s also because the arts are and must be dangerous to governments. They challenge power structures and neoliberal agendas They can mobilize audiences, pushing against what is politically acceptable for the government.
The reality of the situation in Flanders means a province world-renowned for its cultural contributions, a place that has sent out to the world such talented artists as Ivo Van Hove, Anne Teresa De Keermaeker, Miep Warlop, Jan Lauwers, and many more, risks losing its cultural and artistic standing.
This pits big-name artists and production houses against emerging artists without permanent funding sources.
The unpleasant reality is that young and independent artists across the cultural sector will be some of the biggest losers, unable to fund new projects — which will thus never be produced. Remember, all of the big-name artists named above — and most artists everywhere — were young and independent when their careers began. All them depended on the subsidies now on the chopping block. Many of them still do.
In an open letter published in the Belgian newspaper De Standaard, Ivo Van Hove and Anna Teresa De Keersmaeker stated: “The total budget for art in the Flemish government is only 0.35 per cent. That is peanuts. Nothing. We understand that more money is going to bigger productions, but where do you think the people from those productions come from? They also once graduated from an art school and started with small things. Only by supporting a multitude of voices, originality can be created. That basis is now being completely undermined.”
Here’s the thing: In situations where limited funding is available for artists, everyone ends up fighting for the same scraps. In a neoliberal cultural economy, everyone loses because artists (young, emerging, and established) don’t have the luxury of experimenting and creating avant-garde or new pieces of work if the art they create must attract an audience big enough to cover costs.
The result is monochromatic (lots of Hamlet), a cultural landscape that stands in stark contrast to the brilliant and diverse one in present-day Flanders. As someone from a place where everyone fights over the same tiny pot of money, I can say with certainty: You can only watch Hamlet so many times.
There is Still Hope: The Perspective of an Albertan Abroad
Earlier in October, my home province of Alberta voted in a new conservative government, which quickly implemented brutal cuts to the art sector. It was a frustrating situation to watch from a distance. My Facebook feed was littered with outraged posts by artist friends.
But, in stark contrast to what is currently happening in Flanders, they did nothing.
Belgian artists and supporters of the arts simply did not accept the proposed cuts. People were up in arms. On November 12, 2,000 supporters protested in front of the La Bourse theatre in Brussels and, in an act of solidarity, the SMAK (Ghent’s Municipal Museum of Contemporary Art) closed its doors for the day.
Solidarity means people standing together and staying together. Success inges on solidarity, which it means you can’t just fight for a day or a week, or express outrage on social media for a day or two. It means sticking together, supporting each other and each other’s losses.
In Flanders, I see big name artists from across the cultural sector standing alongside art students and emerging talents.
Watching the last week of protests and outrage in Flanders actually made me all the more frustrated with Alberta and more hopeful for Flanders.
I don’t know if it is Albertan apathy, Canadian complacency, or a more sweeping general acceptance of neoliberal policies on the ground-level in Canada and North America, but no one actually fought Kenney on the arts cuts or much else. Everyone has (thus far) just sort of accepted it (although there is a growing protest movement).
In Flanders people are fighting and standing together. There is power in that and if they keep doing this (because protest is only effective as a continuous effort) they could really do something.
In Crises of the Republic, German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt states: “Power springs up whenever people get together and act in concert” (Crises of the Republic 151). If artists and artistic institutions in Flanders continue to fight and protest (to sign a petition click the link), I think there is real potential to prevent or at least reduce these cuts. If they maintain solidarity and refuse to be divided by the government they can implement meaningful change.
“It is the people’s support that lends power to the institutions of a country,” said Arendt in Crises of the Republic. “All political institutions are manifestations and materializations of power; they petrify and decay as soon as the living power of the people ceases to uphold them.”
Bibliography:
Arendt, Hannah. Crises of the Republic. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972. Print.
An inside response of to the first days of Rampenlichter Tanz- und Theater Festival von Kindern und Jugendlichen
First and foremost: What is Rampenlichter?
First, Rampenlichter is a biennial dance and theatre festival for theatre and youth at Schwere Reiter Theater in Munich’s budding creative quarter.
Second, Rampenlicht is the German term for spotlight or limelight.
LE SACRE DU PRINTEMPS Tanztheater, Theater Freiburg, School of Life and Dance, photo credit: Rebecca Walbrecker
Rampenlichter offers its young participants the opportunity to stand in the limelight, front and centre in a society that so often dismisses them, pushes them to the side, and doesn’t take them seriously. Rampenlichter offers them the opportunity to be taken seriously, to share their thoughts and feelings about the past, present, and future, about the world they inhabit and will inherit. It offers them a space to speak and be heard.
Today marks the end of the fourth day of the fourteen-day festival (July 5 to 18, 2019): of hours spent adjusting nearly every light in the small theatre, of repeating the same gesture for hours on end, of nervous rehearsals, of early mornings, and eleventh-hour nerves in the hopes of creating something beautiful.
So, where am I in this festival?
I’m working as a stage manager, but not in the Canadian scene. In a different (maybe German, but probably specifically Rampenlichter) sense of helping in the theatre, helping the sound and lighting crew. This is now the third time I’ve done this job at this festival and my fifth time working at the festival in total.
So, I – sitting the theatre, waiting for the next opportunity to help – watch both the rehearsals and the performances. The festival’s Schirmherr – which roughly translates to patron (and not Umbrella Mister as I’ve been purposefully badly translating it) – Milo Rau stated in his video introduction to the festival that theatre (and dance… perhaps
performance in general) is what happens in the encounter between the performers and the audience. Yet as a “stage manager” at Rampenlichter, I find myself in a strange place to negotiate: I am there to help but am unable to do the actual technical work.
It is in the strangeness of this outsider position, where you are in the space but not as a part of the production or a spectator, that you see the transformative encounter of performer and spectator in its fullness. The forgotten lines, the imprecise movements, half-hearted gestures, the tepid line reads too quiet to be heard, and low (sometimes embarrassed) energy of young
people standing on a stage in an empty room that disappear and transform into a sort of perfection in the excitement of that encounter, of the togetherness of the performance with a laughing, living, breathing (responding) audience.
There is the additional encounter that hinges on the fact that at Rampenlichter a portion of the audience consists of the young artists from the other performances, who often seeing their festival colleagues in action for the first time. Leaning against the black metal rail of the audience, you hear and see these first excited responses to their fellow performers – whispers, giggles, that note-worthy and sudden shift between the starting half-interest and the mesmerized stares that follow those opening moments.
So, what is Rampenlichter?
Rampenlichter is an encounter, it is a moment to be heard.
It is young people critiquing the world they live in, the failures of past and present
3 VOR 12 – EIN KLEINES STÜCK UMWELT Sprechtheater, Integrative Montessorischule an der Balanstraße München, Umwelt Club, photo credit: Rebecca Walbrecker
generations, of the real issues in their lives.
It is a demand for change, because it is both their future and their present.
It is the extreme excitement of those first steps onto the stage.
It is the moment when the discomfort of standing in a small, sweltering hot theatre in the middle of summer, filled with over-heating stage lights and 165 people plus performers yet still giving into a suspension of disbelief, a moment of total engagement.
Rampenlichter is, for me, when the heat and stress of the day melt away (even if only for a second) to watch the magic that happens in this encounter, this mutual exchange of energy and ideas that emerge in the absolute potentiality of this single moment.
Rampenlichter is something I hold close to my heart, the festival team (Alexander Wenzlik, Elisabeth Hagl, and Sebastian Korp) have always taken me seriously despite – particularly in the early years – significant linguist (among other) struggles. They trusted me and my critical voice where others – even in English – have not. So, I, when it comes to Rampenlichter, have what I call festival amnesia, because every year there are inevitably days that are long and stressful, there are days when I’m exhausted and am just done. But still, after every performance, when I’m sitting at a table on the festival grounds the team (people I’ve known now for many years), when biking the 35 minutes back to my apartment, or lying in bed after drinking a far too strong cup of coffee, I think:
Today was a good day.
Temporary tattoo from NTGent’s 2018/19 Opening Weekend
What is tragedy today? Where is it located? Can tragedy only be found on the peripheries? An analysis-review-response to Milo Rau’s “Orestes in Mosul”
A Review-Analysis Milo Rau’s Orestes in Mosul (premiere: April 17, 2019)
Orestes in Mosul; Elsie de BRauw, Bert Luppes, Susana AbdulMajid, and Johan Leysen; Dir. Milo Rau; NTGent; Photo Credit: Fred Debrock
What is tragedy today? Where is it located?
Tragedy is certainly no longer found among great men… are there even any great men left?
No. Tragedy – at least according to the thesis put forth by Milo Rau and his team at NTGent – can only be found outside of its borders, on the peripheries, in those places torn apart by Western wars in the name of oil and power.
The West is blind to real tragedies.
This is precisely the thesis that brought Milo Rau and his team to Mosul, Iraq – a city torn apart by war, oil, and regimes – for their production Orestes in Mosul. Mosul has only recently liberated from ISIS forces and still lying in ruins and whose origins date back literally thousands of years (by 2025 BCE[i] the city was already an established metropolis), well before Greek society took its first shaky steps and over a millennium before the birth of Aeschylus (b. 523 BCE). This city becomes the stage for a drastic retelling of Aeschylus’s Oresteia trilogy. Oresteia – consisting of Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides – deals with fate, revenge, family, and justice, Orestes in Mosul transplants these themes into the real world.
NTGent April 17, 2019; Photo Credit: Me
Much like Lam Gods, the play reframes the city using a piece of classic art, but whereas Lamb Gods uses the Van Ecke brothers’ famous altarpiece, Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, Orestes in Mosul uses one of the canonical pieces of theatre from the European theatre tradition. Orestes in Mosul is therefore more a production about a city and its people than it is a staging of Oresteia – only employing about 20% of the original text – but the classic text serves as a framework to explore how religion, beliefs, family, and even justice remain contentious themes within the daily lives of the city’s inhabitants.
The story of the city is intertwined with the story of its people.
Its ruined monuments representative of the sorrows and losses of its people.
Mosul is itself surrounded by a mythology – a story far away from NTGent’s audience, one only accessible in snapshots found in newspapers, online, and on the news. It is a city divorced from the humanity of its people, from the splendor of its history, and is instead marked only by its images of violence to the extent that violence seems to be an almost natural part of the city. The production searches for humanity, using its actors to show the city through the stories of its people told in their voices and their language (with English and Dutch subtitles).
The story of Mosul is the story of its people and it is a story of occupation, invasion, intervention, and resistance.
Orestes in Mosul explores:
How does real-world experience fit into mythic structures?
What does a production need to do to present this experience in absolutely concrete terms?
Orestes in Mosul breaks the three plays of Oresteia apart, it rewrites scenes, re-inscribes characters, and seeks to find a way to articulate the realities of modern horrors (war, occupation, liberation, legacies of fallen regimes and international power struggles) within ancient tragedy.
Select scenes from Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides are enacted by the actors from Mosul, Ghent, and Bochum, as new scenes from the tragedy are created by Rau and his team. The adaptation works to show the heroic figures of the antique text in an almost uncomfortably human light. True to Rau’s mise-en-scene, Orestes in Mosul features actors both as themselves, in personal monologues about their experiences with the source material and in Mosul – as well as the figures from
Johan Leysen and Susana AbdulMajid; Photo Credit: Stefan Bläske
Greek mythology. The production employs a mix of live and pre-recorded material. The live actors – meaning those physically present in the theatre for the performance – portray many of the central figures of the trilogy: Agamemnon (Johan Leysen), Clytemnestra (Elsie de Brauw), Aegisthus (Bert Luppes), Orestes (Risto Kübar), Pylades (Duraid Abbas Ghaieb), and Cassandra (Susana AbdulMajid) with Marijke Pinoy portraying a housekeeper (a sort of amalgamation of the many servants who are present in the trilogy). While pre-recorded scenes feature the Mosul actors: Iphigenia (student actor Baraa Ali), the watchman (photographer Khalid Rawi – split with Bert Luppes in Ghent), Athena (Khitam Idress), and the chorus (Ahmed Abdul Razzaq Hussein, Hatal Al-Hianey, Younis Anad Gabori, Mustafa Dargham, Abdallah Nawfal, Mohamed Sallim, Rayan Shihab Ahmed, and Hassan Taha).[ii] Because the Mosul actors were not physically present – a point I will return to below – the production engages in a complex intermediality that attempted to negotiate the absence of Mosul and the Mosulians (which became one of the major problems with the production). Mosul is therefore marked by the filmic and bolstered by the two Europe-based Iraqi actors in the production, Duraid Abbas Ghaieb (Pylades) – who has lived in Europe since 2007, but is was born and raised in Bagdad – and Susana AbdulMajid (Cassandra) – a German-Iraqi actress whose family is originally from Mosul but who was born in Europe.
Intermedial interaction thus becomes key to how the actors speak and interact to their Mosul counterparts during the performance and is part of the piece’s internal choreography.
This intermediality results is some truly beautiful interactions marked by an almost undetectable shift from pre-recorded to live and back again – something I have come to expect from Rau. For example, in the Agamemnon section, the camera pans into the restaurant on the grounds of a hotel complex constructed by Saddam Hussein to house diplomats and guests, where Rau and the team from NTGent stayed[iii], to Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Aegisthus, and Cassanda eating dinner together. The
Orestes in Mosel; Khalid Rawi and Mosul Chorus (screen); Dir. Milo Rau; Photo Credit: Fred Debrock
video projected above the stage shifts to the actors live in the onstage recreation of the restaurant (switching to a live feed being filmed onstage) and shifting back again for Cassanda’s double (both live and pre-recorded) monologue and murder.
Almost all of the scenes from Oresteia where filmed in Mosul with minimal reenactment of the pre-filmed scenes on the European stage, which often employs doubling through live echoes of the pre-recorded monologues.
This careful shift between human and mediation also allows for a complex exploration of the trilogy’s central themes such as revenge and justice
The difference between revenge and justice are called into question, as are the simple classifications of heroes and villains. Clytemnestra is no longer the unfaithful monster and unnatural woman of so many productions, she is hurt. She is mourning the loss of her daughter, she hates her husband for killing Iphigenia, she is hurt by his relationship with Cassandra, and she finds comfort during her ten-year abandonment in the arms of Aegisthus. The murder of Agamemnon is both an act of justice and revenge. Similarly, Orestes, the great hero of the trilogy, becomes more complex and problematic: a young man filled with anger at the feeling of rejection, sent away from his home by his mother. Although the murder of Clytemnestra is a form of justice for his father, it is also an act of revenge for himself on the mother who rejected him. The actual murders – which in Aeschylus and all Greek tragedy occurred off-stage – always occur onto on stage, on screen, or on both simultaneously. But these murders are neither grand nor heroic. We watch the slow death of someone strangled to death (Iphigenia), someone left to bleed out (Agamemnon), and someone shot in the head (Cassandra).
Tragedy happening in real time is less monumental and more uncomfortable.
Orestes in Mosul; “The death of Iphigenia”; Sara AbdulMajid and Johan Leysen; Dir. Milo Rau; Photo Credit: Fred Debrock
These more complex relationships are revealed through the new scenes created by Rau and his team – an awkward family dinner with Clytemnestra, Aegisthus, and Cassandra upon Agamemnon’s return home or an aged Aegisthus and Clytemnestra preparing for bed while Orestes and Pylades prepare their trap outside.
None of these characters are monsters and their motivations are never simple.
So, in this new complex adaptation:
What is the difference between justice and revenge?
Who gets to decide?
Who is responsible for implementing justice for the people?
Orestes in Mosul uses the murders of Agamemnon by Clytemnestra and the murder of Clytemnestra by Orestes to look at war and civil conflict. It is interesting to note that these characters whose actions create so much strife and suffering are played by European actors, while the Furies unleashed by the death of Clytemnestra, the chorus of Athenian judges, and the goddess Athena are the Iraqi actors from Mosul. The final judgement of Orestes is thus returned to the people of Mosul, a people whose nation has been torn apart by war and are ready for peace. Beyond the simple enactment of The Eumenides, the production asks what justice actually means within the context of modern-day Mosul and doesn’t attempt to offer a simple explanation, but rather reveals the impossibility of finding justice while standing in a city ruined by war. And although questions of justice are certainly present in the Global North, they don’t ever really effect and involve the entire society; whereas in Mosul they stand entirely and undeniably at the fore. These decisions are immediate and impact people across the society, because the crimes and atrocities committed affected the entire society.
Mosul was only liberated from the IS in July 2017. During the occupation, countless atrocities were committed by the IS: young women were kidnapped to be the fighters’ brides, public executions became commonplace, and people lost their rights and freedoms: music became illegal, women had their rights taken away, gay men were thrown from roofs[iv]. The story of Mosul is thus a story of survival and the necessary concessions, sacrifices, and uncomfortable collaborations its people made to survive.
Thus, the liberation of Mosul is inevitably accompanied by the judgment of the ISIS fighters –young men from the West as well as those from Iraq who joined them and committed these atrocities. But it is also marked by the dual impossibility of justice and forgiveness. It is about how do we judge those people responsible for deaths of thousands of people (many of which were also caused by the liberators)?
The people who collaborated?
By choice?
By force?
To survive?
Post-ISIS Mosul (aerial view); Photo credit: Felipe Paiva/Al Jazeera
So who do you punish and how do you decide? When everyone has been effected and everyone has lost someone, you are faced with an impossibility because tragedy on a singular basis is manageable, but tragedy en masse… well that’s another story.
One of the most powerful scenes of the production is when – following the performance of Orestes’ pardon by the goddess Athena and her Athenian judges in The Eumenides – Khitam Idress (who plays Athena) asks the members of the chorus what they think should be done with the former IS fighters: Punishment or pardon? The group’s opinion, like in Eumenides, is divided but only when it comes to the question of who should be responsible for completing the punishment: everyone wants justice, but no one wants the blood on their hands.
Orestes in Mosul is also a story of about witnessing. People like Khalid Rawi, the Mosul photographer who plays the Watchman (a figure wearily waiting for a signal for the fall of Troy), describes how he risked his life taking and sharing photographs of what the IS was doing in Mosul during the occupation. To a certain extent, the Western spectator is forced into the position of witness – although Rau is merciful to the extent we only see performative moments of violence enacted in Oresteia, and we do not see the video of the car bomb the actors watch on their cell phone at the end of the piece or anything too unbearable – looking at previously unseen images of the city.
Orestes in Mosul is scenically beautiful production it incorporates the careful interaction of live and pre-recorded action, including music played by a group of Iraqi musicians[v] that swells off the screen and into the theatre. Beautiful scenes of Mosul are projected onto the screen. It is o an incredibly ambitious project that seeks to close a gap that exists between Europe and the Middle East: Rau’s global ensemble. It embraces the long history of Mosul. It sees Rau and a team from NTGent travel to Mosul. I think it attempts to do something very important, particularly in a theatre that describes itself as a city-theatre of the globalized world, it attempts to extend outwards, outside of Belgium and Europe, and make actual contact with the people out there. However, in the case of Orestes in Mosul, I’m not sure that the production was entirely successful in what it attempted to do for an absolutely concrete reason:
The Problem:
I’ll begin with a quote from Rau:
“How can we consume the Iraqi oil and the media images, with the help of cheap
Susana AbdulMajid, Milo Rau, and others; Photo Credit: de Standaard
labour force, without creating a direct, human contact? A global economy also needs a global artistic solidarity, as problematic and questionable as it may be.”[vi]
Rau’s productions and his entire mise-en-scène are presence-based, this was precisely what worked so well in Lam Gods and what was so strikingly missing in Orestes in Mosul:
the presence of the actors… of the city.
Watching Orestes, I was immediately struck by this absence, by an overwhelming sense that something was missing, that something wasn’t quite right…
it didn’t feel complete…
it felt problematic.
Orestes in Mosul is a play about Mosul – about its history, its inheritance, and its people a city – but it is a play that had to negotiate the troubling absence of the city and its people. The problem is that, in Europe and the West, our primary experience with Mosul is through the media and, therefore, the vast majority of us only see Mosul on television and computer screens. The problem is that these medial representations are (largely) carefully controlled and moderated by Western journalists and expectations, and this production didn’t feel like it challenged or countered this. It still felt like Western theatre-makers controlling what was seen and it didn’t create that sudden striking reduction of distance that comes with the physical presence of people onstage – that confrontation on a very human, eye-to-eye level – which is what I think the dramaturgical concept demanded…
Or what I wanted…
The European actors thus had to take a more central role in the staging, which made the production almost too easy for European audiences to watch, because they – to an extent – become the heroes.
This critique is difficult for me because the idea of Orestes in Mosul is so filled with potential and promise. This difficultly comes from having seen seen what Rau’s work can do when it’s functioning at top capacity. How effective and jarring the revelatory dramaturgy of the productions are when you, as a spectator, are suddenly confronted in absolutely concrete and undeniable terms by the actor. So much of Rau’s mise-en-scène centers around the question: What does thisbody mean in this role at this moment? Why this actor? Why this scene? Why now? So much emerges from this convergence of time, place, and situation, and it subverts our expectations. Rau’s work always deals with absence (missing images) but it does so by finding a way to fill in the gap in material terms, by creating a materiality to fill in the void[vii]. However, this sort of convergence can only exist under certain conditions and it just wasn’t possible for Orestes in Mosul because of the impossibility of acquiring visas for the Mosul actors (“So great is the governments’ fear that they might apply for asylum or go underground”[viii]).
After the production, I had a long discussion with Mahdieh Fahimi, a freelance reviewer and writer in Ghent, who also felt this frustration. She made an excellent point: Any production about Mosul (or anywhere outside Europe for that matter) created for and produced by a city-theatre in Europe is in some way about Europe and its European audience.
So, what does Orestes in Mosul tell us about Western Europe?
What does it say about its audience?
What about Mosul?
I’m not entirely sure. I’m resistant to say that the figure of Orestes represents IS fighters and his love affair with Pylades representative of disenfranchised young men in Western Europe’s infatuation with the acceptance promised by extremist ideology and Clytemnestra the West, overthrowing the previous regime and taking power for themselves… this analysis kind of works but it just feels too easy, because, in my experience, Rau is never easy, his mise-en-scène is always layered and merits a second viewing.
Then we come to the problem of the centrality of the white, European actors:
Maybe in telling the tragedy of Mosul, you have to have people representative of the beginnings of the ISIS tragedy: i.e., white Europeans… Belgians. Because in one of the first videos from ISIS – the one where they beheaded a European journalist, British I think – you can hear Flemish in the background. In Oresteia, the tragedy begins with a war between Greece and Troy, a foreign invader who sacrificed his own daughter for the destruction of a city. The European actors are the murderers, they enact their justice-revenge, tearing cities apart, killing each other and bystanders (the chorus) in the process: a desperate pursuit of power (and oil).
Orestes in Mosul in Mosul; Chorus, Johan Leysen, Elsie de Brauw, Bert Luppes; Susana AbdulMajid, band, and production crew; Dir. Milo Rau; Photo Credit: Stefan Bläske
The chorus of Iraqi actors remain silent throughout the enactments until the final Eumenides enactment, when the chorus (the art students from Mosul University) and Ahitam Idress’s Athena (who was herself a part of ISIS for six months and now works in the camps where the ISIS wives are being kept) decide to pardon (but not unanimously) Orestes. Agency is thus apparently returned to the people of Mosul, but I’m not sure… You have to be aware that at the end of the day it’s still a European theatre going to Mosul and inserting a European structure and a beloved classic of the European theatre into a city that’s past twenty years have been marked (and I mean the city has been physically scarred) by the attempted insertion (and continuous failure) of Western structures through Western intervention[ix]. (I think it’s important when we discuss this sort of theatre to be aware of and engage with this kind of issue, because too often we as critics and spectators don’t look past the good intention of this sort of art to see how it could be problematic and can potentially uphold a colonial/Eurocentric system.)
But maybe that’s the point?
Maybe it’s the point that Agamemnon (played by Leysen, a white actor) is killed by another white actor (de Brauw’s Clytemnestra), while AbdulMajid’s Cassandra and several chorus members are mere causalities in their feud. Perhaps the point is that Risto Kübar’s – who was born in Estonia, who suffers from chronic pain, and who felt like an outsider in Estonia because of his sexuality – Orestes returns from his exile to kill Clytemnestra both for his father but also in the hopes of alleviating a personal pain – a hurt, a rejection. Maybe it’s the point that the European actors play characters who kill each other and bystanders with little regard, while Mosul actors are just witnesses to the violence brought onto them.
Perhaps all these perhapses are part the problem, it just wasn’t quite concrete enough.
Perhaps the finger wasn’t being pointed back on the audience quiet enough.
Perhaps it felt too much like a group of white actors going to over the “teach” Iraqi actors how to act? (which inevitably falls into the uncomfortable colonial and neo-colonial rhetoric)
Perhaps it was.
I don’t know…
Maybe the tragedy of a progressive and globalized theatre is the impossibility to represent these issues and performatively engage in this discussion without – at least in some way –falling back into the system it tries to critique.
The physical absence of both Mosul and its people was just a huge obstacle for Rau and his team, because watching the production
I wanted to hear more from the Iraqi participants.
I wanted to learn more about Mosul and the people there.
I really longed for something outside mediality.
Film was the only way to show the actors and the city, but it meant that, in a production about Mosul, we could – as always – only access Mosul and its people through video. Therefore, there remains a very real and problematic wall between the play’s intended European audience and those people it tries to represent that even the time spent filming in Mosul couldn’t overcome. But, in all fairness, it really couldn’t.
And this isn’t to say that there weren’t some absolutely beautiful interactions between screen and stage: the watchman’s monologue as it jumps, is shared, is doubled, and echoes between Luppes live on stage and Rawi in the video, or Cassandra’s execution (again a doubled monologue between AbdulMajid live on the stage and in the video) in which she collapses on the stage, blood trickling down her chest, after she is shot in the video.
I mean, when it worked it really worked, but when it didn’t, it was frustrating because I wanted it to so badly.
Daniel Demoustier and Johan Leysen; Photo Credit: Daniel Demoustier
Orestes in Mosul is an image-based production. It is about creating images of a real-world tragedy and showing its audiences images that stretch beyond what they expect and what they have seen before.
And in this creation of images, I would say the production is extremely successful.
We do see a city that – despite its destruction – is still very much alive,
And still fighting to survive.
Returning to the question about what this production does for Western Europe, Orestes shows its audience the story of Mosul is far from over.
Just because the city has been freed from ISIS doesn’t mean we’ve reached the end of the story.
The city is still very much alive and moving forward.
We become witnesses to its perseverance.
The most powerful moments of the production are not the enactments of the source text[x], but the stories we hear from the actors in Mosul and the images of the city itself: Images that by-and-large do not exist outside of the occasional sensational snapshot. We see image upon image of the ruined city: bombed out shells of buildings, ruins of historical sites. But just as scenes from Oresteia are performed in these crumbling buildings and rubble-filled streets (art seems to find a way), we also see people continuing to exist and trying to negotiate their existence within the city.
The strongest scene is, in my opinion, a direct plea to witness from the recording of a conversation with an ISIS bride – the kidnapped friend of Baraa Ali mentioned in the first interview of the show. Ghaieb and Kübar listen to the audio of a talk recorded while visiting a camp far outside Mosul, where former ISIS women are being held. She talks about what happened after she was taken, her husband, and how she’s sent her two children away. In the recording, she tearfully pleads her visitors to tell people what is happening in the camp, about people like her “without a future”, about the inhuman conditions she faces in the camp, she sobs “When will this end? […] Please help us. Tell others what happens.”
Her words echo through the audience.
“Suffer and learn, that’s what Aeschylus writes. But what can we learn?” says the production.
The final section of the play is titled Exodos and it is, to a certain extent, a rather surprising reflection on the nature of the production: Namely, at the end of the day, while the Ghent team left Mosul, Mosul keeps happening.
In the final moments of the production, Ghaieb and Kübar watch a video of a car bomb on their cell phone. One of the two actors – Kübar I think – comments that when watching the video, it doesn’t feel like he’s watching something that really happened: “It’s so immense that it doesn’t reach me.” Perhaps this is the message that needs to be taken from the production and also the main critique of the production: the immenseness of the destruction, of the loss of life, of the sheer scale of tragedy surrounding Iraq and Mosul in everything that has happened since Saddam Hussein, the American Invasion, and most recently ISIS is just so immense that video and medial documents – the medium through which we access it – becomes utterly insufficient.
We become numb to it, because it feels so far away, so immense, and so unrelenting that when we watch it, it just doesn’t feel real.
We are disconnected.
We accept it and become blind to it.
But we have to see it.
We have to understand it in its immenseness.
So, maybe in response to the question, “What does tragedy look like today,” the only answer is that real, non-theatrical tragedy is like Kübar’s chronic pain. Just a constant hurt that never really lets up. It is not a single easily definable act, but a chain of many moments with many actors. It is the sorrow of a destroyed city that doesn’t dissipate. Today’s tragedy is largely out of sight for us in the West (despite our role in it): It is easy to ignore because it seems so very far away.[xi]
The production is undeniably important in that it attempts break down this blindness and this emotional blockage that surrounds this sort of massive tragedy and destruction[xii], but it also inevitably falls short of its lofty goals. It is in this way clever that the production is staged as a making-of (about the staging in Mosul). The distance between Ghent and Mosul is extremely difficult to overcome when its Mosul actors remain so far away and trapped in the video. I applaud the actors and the entire team for what they accomplished both in Ghent and in Mosul. This is a fine piece of theatre that is worth watching, but we owe it to the lofty aspirations of the production to be critical of it.
I think my concern with Orestes in Mosul is: Without the actual actors what do we learn?
Is it too easy to watch and then leave behind as theatre?
I’m not sure, but I am – by nature – optimistic. I am optimistic that this production is more than just a gesture and will lead to future collaborations and creations between Ghent and its Mosul actors, that this single act will lead to more acts. It may not be perfect, but it is something and it is certainly a place to start.
But then again, maybe I just have too much faith in the theatre to start the conversation…
Orestes in Mosul Credits:
Onstage: Duraid Abbas Ghaieb, Susana AbdulMajid, Elsie de Brauw, Risto Kübar, Johan Leysen, Bert Luppes, Marijke Pinoy
Musicians on video: Suleik Salim Al-Khabbaz, Saif Al-Taee, Firas Atraqchi, Nabeel Atraqchi, Zaidun Haitham
Actors on video: Araa Ali, Khitam Idress, Khalid Rawi
Chorus: Ahmed Abdul Razzaq Hussein, Hatal Al-Hianey, Younis Anad Gabori, Mustafa Dargham, Abdallah Nawfal, Mohamed Saalim, Rayan Shihab Ahmed, Hassan Taha
Text: Milo Rau and ensemble
Direction: Milo Rau
Dramaturgy: Stefan Bläske
Set: ruimtevaarders
Costume: An De Mol
Licht: Dennis Diels
Film: Moritz von Dungern, Daniel Demoustier, Joris Vertenten
[i] According to Wikipedia, so… take with grain of historically inaccurate salt
[ii] It is interesting that Rau and his team chose to cut the character of Electra in favour of the addition of Iphigenia, who isn’t present in the original source text (she’s sacrificed prior to Agamemnon’s opening and therefore only discussed and never seen). Although Electra is one of the most beloved of all tragic characters, you don’t miss her in the production as her dialogue is partially combined with Pylades and only a small portion of the original text is actually used (about 20%).
[iii] Again, there is technically lots to be unpacked there but not enough time to do so…
[iv] This is a specific example mentioned in the production where a group of gay men were killed being thrown from the roof of a former luxury mall that used to be where the people of Mosul could buy all the goods available in the West.
[v] Suleik Salim Al-Khabbaz, Saif Al-Taee, Firas Atraqchi, Nabeel Atraqchi, and Zaidun Haitham
[vii] Think La Reprise, where the void surrounding the actual murder of Ihsane Jarfi is examined and then reconstructed using physical evidence, witness statements, and fictionalization of certain impossible elements.
[ix] And this applies to not only to the American invasion, but also to the powers that put Saddam in power as well as ISIS itself (many of whose fighters came from Europe and the wider West).
[x] Although I must admit – as someone who has also worked with Oresteia – I am not actually a great fan of the source text.
[xi] Shameless plug of my ideas: there is certainly something to be said about the idea of “global tragedy” (which I think I heard Rau recently used somewhere, but I maintain is my term) that counters the form of tragedy that exceptionalizes tragedy within Western spaces and approaches tragedy as normal and somehow less tragic in “non-Western spaces” (again… think Notre Dame).
[xii] I mean really this is the fundamental question as to why the Notre Dame fire is a considered a great tragedy and within hours hundreds of millions of euros collected for its rebuilding, while the steady destruction of an entire city like Mosul (literally thousands upon thousands of years of human history) is just accepted and shrugged off.
About a week ago I did an interview with the Mitch Dexter’s Edmonton-based podcast Wenghtalk Radio about theatre, controversy, and the theatre of Milo Rau. Follow the link here, or available on Spotify and I-Tunes.
A critical response to Luk Perceval’s newest production “The Sorrows of Belgium I: Black”. How do we come to terms with our past? How to we represent horror? When is it time to apologize?
Luk Perceval’s The Sorrows of Belgium I: Black offers a performative exploration of Belgium’s troubling, unreconciled colonial past. The production uses the relatively unknown (and uncelebrated) figure of William Henry Sheppard – the oft-forgotten African-American missionary who spent around twenty years working in the Congo Free State and whose work was hugely influential in publicizing the atrocities being committed by the Belgians in the region – as the productions through line. Black explores this bloody colonial past as well as confronting the small nation’s
Aminata Demba and Andie Dushime; Black; Dir. Luk Perceval; Photo Credit: Robert Lebeck, NTGent
continued failure to acknowledge its “shared history with the DRC[i]” and the uncomfortable internalized racism underlying both Belgian and European[ii] society. The fragmented scenes of the play use bits and pieces of Sheppard’s texts and speeches as well as various other sources (Joseph Conrad, Jef Geeraerts, William Shakespeare, etc) and the actors themselves[iii]. Black is a complex production that presents its audience with the horrors unleashed by the Belgians onto the Congo in the name of empire and King Leopold II[iv] (1835-1909).
Black is a difficult production to unpack in its entirety.
It features a beautiful soundscape consisting of live music, various languages and dialects, breath, and sound. It features an impressive ensemble made up of Chris Thys, Peter Seynaeve, Tom Dewispelaere, Andie Dushime, Yolanda Mpelé, Aminata Demba, Nganji Mutiri, and Frank Focketyn. The production also features the extraordinary talent of musician Sam Gysel, who remains seated in the corner of the right side of the stage and provides the heartbeat of the production (drums, guitar, and instruments I couldn’t make up from the second balcony). The cast is neatly divided into half black actors – Andie Dushime, Yolanda Mpelé, Nganji Mutiri, and Aminata Demba – and half white actors – Chris Thys, Peter Seynaeve, Tom Dewispelaere, and Frank Focketyn – with each actor playing various roles throughout the production.
The evening has an undeniable pulse, with music, speech, and movement carefully intertwined. It jumps from utter madness – the actors dancing, singing, running, screaming, swinging from the ceiling, collapsing, crawling, hurtling themselves (or chairs) across the stage – to serious descriptions of murders, atrocities, and hands being chopped off. Languages and dialects fill the stage, overlapping, distracting and overpowering each other – it is noteworthy that the majority of the languages spoken onstage are the
William Henry Sheppard (Left)
languages of the colonizers (English, Dutch/Flemish, and French). Yet it also celebrates the necessity of silence. The silence that surrounds so much of Belgium history, particularly the colonial period. This silence is exemplified when, in the midst of the horror – in a stark break from the chaos that previously filled the stage – the eight actors huddle together for shelter from the rain on the pool table, for about one to two minutes, we listen to the pounding rain.
Isn’t that a beautiful metaphor for Belgium as colonizers?
A small pool table that barely takes up an eighth of the stage and yet somehow dominates it.
The production jumps at breakneck speed between scenes, but remains united through the figure of Sheppard (played with remarkable dexterity by both Yolanda Mpelé and Nganji Mutiri). It opens with the declaration “Ladies and Gentlemen!”, which recalls Sheppard’s cross continent speaking engagements about what was happening in the Congo. The early scenes of the performance inform the audience about the remarkable figure who carries them through the evening.
Sheppard – the cast tells us while singing a beautiful rendition of Fred McDowell’s blues classic, You Gotta Move[v] – was born in Waynesboro, Virginia in 1865 (the same year as the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment) and whose early life and education took place in the deeply segregated American South. He attended school in Alabama (Tuscaloosa Theological Institute) and preached in Atlanta, Georgia before leaving on a mission in the Congo with Samuel Lapsley (played by Seynaeve), a young white man from a wealthy
William Henry Sheppard (center)
family. We are immediately aware that Sheppard’s experiences as a black man living in the South are vastly different than his fellow missionaries. The nickname given to Sheppard by the locals was Mudel Ndom (the Black white man) – indicative of his in-between-ness – and was more pragmatic than his white counterparts, he shot hippos to help feed those people he wanted to convert: “If I can save them from starvation, it will be easier to talk about Jesus”.
Sheppard was an outsider in the United States and when he left for the Congo (accompanied by primarily white missionaries) he remained an outsider: he did not fit into the conventional image of the white explorer or missionary. It is perhaps because of his experiences in the United States that he desperately wanted to escape from, that explains how while Lapsley and other missionaries give into despair, Sheppard is able to keep moving forward.
The play opens with a giant black curtain with a map of the Congo drawn on it in what looks like chalk and ropes snaking out towards the audience from underneath. This opening image is reminiscent of a blackboard in an old schoolhouse – which, within the context of colonialism holds its own nefarious implications. When Sheppard and Lapsley depart for the Congo, this curtain drops to the ground to reveal hundreds[vi] of ropes hanging from the ceiling and covering the stage. A lone pool table stands centre-stage and several wooden chairs.
The ropes are a powerful image. They evoke the image of vines in a jungle, but they also become whips with which the actors beat the ground. They recall the whips used by the Belgians (and by slave owners in the States). They recall scarred backs. And, they recall the terrible images of
Nganji Mutiri; Black; Dir. Luk Perceval; Photo Credit: Robert Lebeck, NTGent
lynchings in the American South: The beaten black bodies hanging from thick ropes[vii] like these ones, lynchings that happened in the very states where Sheppard grew up and worked as a young man. It is a powerful image when you consider Sheppard left the States to get away from the segregation and violence that these ropes represent only to enter a new forest filled with the same ropes and new cruelties.
The white actors provide an slice of the imperialistic brand of violent racial hatred as well as rhetoric and racial assumptions still heard today. Focketyn offers the most overtly brutal form of this racism. He fetishizes and violently eroticizing the black bodies he encounters. He explains the nickname given to him “Mbomo Fimbo” (which refers to his use of the whip), as part of the inherent laziness of the people
Whipping in the Congo
under him: “without a whip you couldn’t achieve anything at that time” (a direct quote from the Flemish author Jef Geeraerts). Although he offers the most overt and explicit example, each of other white characters eventually reveal themselves to be equally problematic: Seynaeve’s (as Lapsley) impassioned declaration that he will “civilize this place!” is revealed to mean that he wants to build a European city and just transplant European values into the Congo. Or Thys’ nun[viii] whose monologue about the finding a woman who’s been raped by a Belgian soldier that Dushime’s monologue counters with her own reflection on the callousness of these white women who worked with the church who – after she is raped her foot cut off – tell her, “you should be happy you are alive”.
The production does move slightly too close towards the white saviour[ix], but it always the good sense to swing back with a sudden striking blow of that good old-fashioned causal, everyday racism. Humour is key to the subversion that Perceval and his undertake of the comforting device of the white saviour. It serves as an entrance into the more
uncomfortable aspects of everyday racism, highlighting, without undercutting, them. Humour both breaks from the extreme tension and discomfort of previous moments –detailed descriptions rape, massacre, atrocity – but the joke is held just too long and shifts into the racist. It is extremely funny, until it is not.
Thys’s nun, who seemingly pulls the figure of Sheppard out of despair after his companion’s death, pulls the cast together encouraging them to join her in song and begins singing “Wimba Way” – which Fockeyn subsequently refuses to stop singing. The moment is condescending and steeped in a type of everyday racism (that this is “African Music”). But it was also just so typical – I actually laughed, covered my eyes, and audibly muttered “Jesus Christ!” from my seat.
Likewise, Lapsley’s energetic breakdown after finding the remnants of a terrible massacre is extremely funny. He sprints desperately around the stage crying screaming, throwing himself onto the stage, onto the pool table wearing nothing but in his underwear (and eventually with his underwear dragging around his ankles behind him). He declares that he will “civilize this place” and begins planning the new European city he will build here, naming parts of the stage: “This here will be Rue du Louise!” The hysteria cumulates in a call-and-response with the audience (“Rue du” points to audience “Louise”), but the absurdity takes sudden shift as Seynaeve screams a new call-and-response in Dushime’s and Demba’s faces, but this time screaming “I am a stupid black girl” (definitely more inflammatory) and making them yell it back before turning to the audience who this time do not respond (“Fine!”). Suddenly, the fundamentally good and positively represented Lapsley reveals his own racist assumptions and his underlying sense of superiority: Lapsley still believes that by bringing European society (language, religion, and institutions) to the Congo it will prevent such massacres and horrors. He fails to recognize that the party responsible for these “uncivilized” horrors are not the Congolese, but the Belgians, the Europeans, and their business partners.[x]
Black; Dir. Luk Perceval; Photo Credit: Robert Lebeck, NTGent
White characters always approach the Congolese as less than: not European and therefore quite human, the savage foil to the civilized Europeans, erotic and overly sexual women against prudish white women (“who could learn a thing or
King Leopold II
two from these black girls”). The violence perpetrated by the Belgians is somehow always turned back around on the Congolese. It is never quite the Belgians’ or Europeans’ fault. They never really interact with the Dushime and Demba (who play the locals) and when they do it is condescending and unhelpful. Although it is harsh, it is in many ways an accurate portrayal of white society:
Although some of the characters may have good intentions, they are still part of the system and are therefore complicit in the atrocities that surround them.
It illustrates the relationship between Europe and its former colonies… between Europe and the DRC.
Dewispelaere[xi] yells “Rubber … Colbalt…” in the background of an early scene and Dushime stands on a chair and lists the terrible statistics of the transatlantic slave trade…
Congo has always had the misfortune of having those materials (Rubber, Labour, Colbalt) that Europeans wanted regardless of the cost in human life.
Dushime and Demba portray intelligent, self-aware characters. They respond logically to changing world around
“In the Rubber Coils”, 1906
them. They reflect on what is happening as the Belgians and Europeans enter their world. They feel the pain inflicted upon them. They reflect on the identity placed upon them: How the African identity was given to them by Europeans, how Africa and African is a word invented by Europeans. For each white saviour-esque monologue presented, these actors provide a counter-monologue that pushes against the colonizers’ insistence on black ignorance and instead reveal white ignorance.
Mpelé and Mutiri play Sheppard with a fantastic intensity. They are the ever-present figure that brings together the fragmented pieces of the production, who remain calm in the madness swirling around them. They are not unaffected, but they are calm (particularly in comparison to the white hysterics). Sheppard only loses control after the death of Lapsley. It is an incredible moment of anger, outrage – but
Belgium became famous in the Congo for chopping of hands… literally millions of hands
never the despair we have seen before. Something has to be done. When Sheppard finally breaks it is because he knows that something needs to happen, but it has to be about the visibility of horror. People need to know what is happening in the Congo and who is responsible. And, unlike Lapsley, Sheppard knows these atrocities being committed by the Belgians and King Leopold.
The final scene is arguably the most important part of the production and it is a natural progression from Sheppard’s story about shining a light onto the horrors of the Congo. Mpelé, Demba, Mutiri, and Dushime directly confront the audience about the past and the present. The actors talk to the audience about the racism that still exists today, the legacy of colonialism.
They ask: What has really changed?
The language has changed.
But the conversation that needs to happen still hasn’t.
Because Belgium and the Belgian monarchy has still not apologized to the Congo.
Sheppard has been cut out of most history books, only recently resurging. And while we cannot change history, and we might be ashamed of it, we still have to tell it.
Throughout the evening Black presents its audience with a detailed record of just some of crimes committed during the colonial period and while it is shocking, these stories are not just now emerging, they have been floating around for years – it’s just that people didn’t (and to an extent still don’t) want to listen.
The actors ask the audience: “Do you really see me?”
“As more than my skin?”
“As more than my hair?”
“As more than a symbol?”
The uncomfortable truth is that even the ensemble cast of Black is a political statement. It breaks away from the predominately white (i.e., homogenous) model of the European city-theatre ensemble. A structure that contains an undeniable systemic racism. All too often non-white actors are only brought on to play a specific role or to take part in specific projects. It is refreshing to see a diverse cast because European society as well as Belgian society is diverse. This is what Belgium and Europe actually looks like in 2019 and I’m really tired of watching old white men perform Shakespeare at city-theatres! Dushime, Mpelé, Mutiri, and Demba are phenomenal and are – as actors – a BIG win for the NTGent ensemble. On top of their talent, they mark the possibility of a younger, more vibrant ensemble that actually represents the society it is reflecting upon.
Isn’t that the whole point of theatre? To hold a mirror up to us as a society?
Black is – based on my understanding of theatre – good theatre. It is engaging and fun to watch, it makes you think, it says something, and it also does something – pushing against the existing ensemble-structure.
However, as is the case in so many of NTGent’s recent projects, the potential for a sustainable systemic shift is entirely dependent on the future – and NTGent has called itself The City-Theatre of the Future. On what happens next, on whether or not we get to keep seeing these actors in productions that aren’t not just about racism and blackness, but that feature these actors as actors. While white actors almost always perform and take on roles that are not about their whiteness, non-white actors aren’t given this option so much. As informed spectators, we also have to be weary of the segregation that happens in theatre, because as an institution and, therefore, susceptible to systemic racism. We have to be willing to engage with our theatre and with uncomfortable conversations to make sure we are not seeing the duplication of colonial discourse that we’ve been hearing for centuries years. As spectators, we are responsible for facilitating theatre that both says and does something:
Passivity on the side of the oppressors is still oppression (to poorly quote the production)!
Black is named after the first colour the Belgian flag (Black – Red – Yellow), but it is also a term riddled with colonial, imperialist rhetoric. Africa – a nation that, as the production itself points out, was given its name by European and whose own inhabitants had no say or control in the name given to their continent or themselves – was referred to as the “Dark Continent” (a foil to the “Enlightened” Europe). Black – as an outsider, an Other, a foil to European whiteness – is a European invention (just like, as the production states, the N-word was). Black is excluded, segregated, pushed out of sight, out of history, and off the stage. But Perceval’s Black places the very construction of blackness front and centre. Black is a fearless production and while it might not always go far enough in its confrontation, it is excellent starting point in a necessary and long overdue conversation.
The final act of Black asks its audience: “Do you really see me?”
And it’s about time that Belgium officially answered.
[i] I am borrowing “Belgium’s failure to acknowledge its shared history with the DRC” from the Congolese choreographer Faustin Linyekula
[ii] In many ways, as the heart of the European Union (Brussels is the capital of the EU and houses its headquarters) and with its three official languages and dark past, Belgium serves as an apt metaphor for Europe – serving as a miniaturized version of it.
[iii], Text by/from: Wiliam Shappard, Steven Heene, Fiston Mwanza Mujila, Luk Perceval, Nganji Mutiri, Aminata Demba, inspired by James Baldwin, Kate Tempest, Lucas Catherine, Gil Scott-Heron, Léonora Miano, Pagan Kennedy, Joseph Conrad, Jef Geeraerts, Giordano Bruno, William Shakespeare, Jean-Paul Sartre, Aimé Césaire and sister Adonia. (Program)
[iv] Yet Leopold himself is completely absent from the production.
[vi]This could be an exaggeration, but there are a lot of ropes.
[vii] I remember being shown these images very clearly in high school.
[viii] might not be a nun, might be a female missionary
[ix] White Saviour Complex: “The white savior is a self-confirming and narcissistic narrative pattern in which people of colour in or originating from non-Western societies are saved form the perilous situations by white people. It can be seen in such films as ‘Cry Freedom’, ‘Mississippi Burning’ and even ’12 Years a Slave’ (Brad Pitt saves the day!). Also in Instagram shots of white NGO volunteers surrounded by photogenic African children. Closer to home, we associate it with the fact that it is above all white men who tend to speak out against Muslim women’s headscarves, without knowing what the women themselves them.” (The fabulous definition in the program for Vooruit’s Same Same But Different festival)
[x] This scene parallels an earlier scene with another missionary played by Dewispelaere who chases the actors around the stage – hurtling chairs at them[x] – screaming “Fuck the Belgians!” Eventually turning his malice onto the audience, storming towards them yelling “Fuck the Belgians” (and I have to admit this made me laugh but I might have been the only one). Unlike Lapsley, Dewispelaere’s missionary understands the Belgians are responsible for these atrocities but accepts his inability to actually change things and instead gives into madness and despair.
[xi] If I have mixed up which actor did what in the ensemble – particularly the white, male actors – I apologize, there’s a lot happening in this show.
The play opens with a giant black curtain with a map of the Congo drawn on it in what looks like chalk and ropes snaking out towards the audience from underneath. This opening image is reminiscent of a blackboard in an old schoolhouse – which, within the context of colonialism holds its own nefarious implications. When Sheppard and Lapsley depart for the Congo, this curtain drops to the ground to reveal hundreds
Lost Dramaturgin International 