Author Archives: Rebecca Nesvet

Lucien Bourjeily: 66 Minutes in Damascus

‘One of you is a coward,’ declares a deskbound functionary of the Assad regime in a dingy basement office in Damascus. Over his shoulder stares President Assad himself, from a paper poster. Assad is not the coward, at least, not according to his advocate. Someone in the audience is; one of the eight London theatregoers who have embarked upon this immersive tour of a virtual ‘Damascus’. The coward is an undercover journalist, posing as a tourist, who has given information to the anti-Assad Western press from the lobby of a Damascus hotel. The Syrian official wants to know who this coward is. Or, rather, the official already knows, and wants a confession. Immediately.

Such is the simple but effective plot of 66 Minutes in Damascus, an extremely immersive performance piece written and directed by Lucien Bourjeily, on commission for the LIFT Festival. Staged in the labyrinthine recesses of the Shoreditch Town Hall, 66 Minutes in Damascus is an unforgettable tour of Damascus in which the ancient beauty of the world’s oldest continually occupied metropolis remains as invisible as the vast majority of the Syrian people who have been detained or murdered by the Assad regime.

Bourjeily’s characters are individual and composite portraits of some of those ‘disappeared’ whose stories Bourjeily heard from refugees who had made it across the border to Lebanon. They include a history professor locked in a tiny room for twenty years, for being ‘the first to say “no” to the regime’. He revels bitterly in the freedom to criticise a sock puppet President and teaches history lessons to a wooden beam. Two women, pacifist demonstrator Layla (Laila Ali) and militant’s wife Imane (Farah Shaer) agree to disagree on methods though they share their desire for change, a cell, and experiences of humiliation and horror. These people are not cowards; some of them might be called heroes, depending on the historian.

The piece is partly improvisational. All the actors seamlessly segue between impromptu conversations with individual audience members to eloquently scripted bits, some of which complicate the regime’s villainy by having its collaborators make statements with which spectators might agree. Other countries do not tolerate rebellion, which is considered terrorism unless and until it succeeds. Assad was elected “democratically,” at least in theory. Why do we wish to give arms to the revolutionaries of Syria while only Iran will arm those of Palestine? And most importantly, “what is Syria to you? The titter of a leftist dinner party?”

It is also immersive, and Bourjeily’s immersion environment is one of the most pronounced imaginable. Spectators are moved through the space in a manner that is relatively true to the environment depicted and which it would be perverse to call ‘promenade theatre’. Jan McLeod’s soundscape of a trip across Damascus suggests the traversal of a chaotic city by an untraceable route. There are bloodstains on the crumbling walls, courtesy of designer Gary Campbell. The only way there might have been more verisimilitude, within the bounds of safety, would have been if the audience could smell the dust, sweat, and blood. Or if it were possible to forget that the context is a play, its venue is in Shoreditch, and it will be over in less than an hour. As is, this vision of ‘Damascus’ is real enough that one character’s mother’s telephone number is printed in the playbill.

Like the best theatre, 66 Minutes in Damascus also turns the mirror outwards, at the audience. In response to the official’s declaration that there is an illegal journalist in the tour group’s midst, one member of the audience interjected that he knows who it is, and named another spectator. The actors’ reaction brought the play back on script with plausible ferocity, but also raised a difficult question. If we were tourists in Syria, or citizens of Syria, what roles would we play? Would we be collaborators or rebels? Cowards or heroes? If Syrian events were to transpire in our own countries, how would we react? How, then, ought we to demand our politicians react now?

When one audience member was tied to a chair in the supposed torture chamber by a guard, the rest were marched out, abandoning him. Only one – the companion with whom he had arrived – dared to ask, ‘What’s going to happen to him?’ No one insisted upon remaining with him. Although his safety is assured by the knowledge that the situation is artificial, and that Shoreditch is really not Damascus, we ‘act’ what appears plausible, and, for the most part, do what we are told, which is telling. Such complexity might have been granted to the regime’s enforcers, as it is unclear why they support Assad, other than fear; whether anything besides temperament distinguishes them from the heroes in their custody.

While Bourjeily’s shockingly belligerent immersion does not make for a pleasant 66 minutes, it does fulfil a vital purpose. I am not convinced that Bourjeily exploits the incomprehensible suffering of the people of the real Syria. Critiquing the theatre scene of another autocratic tyranny, Louis XV’s France, Jean-Jacques Rousseau condemned ‘the need to occupy the heart’ with a theatre of delightful distraction ‘as if it were at ease inside of us’. Rousseau, whose ideas posthumously fuelled a revolution that reverberates in the structures of modern Europe, would have appreciated Bourjeily’s uneaseful yet insightful expedition on the road to Damascus.

Tanztheater Wuppertal / Pina Bausch: …como el musguito en la piedra, ay si si si…

As part of the World Cities 2012 series Tanztheater Wuppertal’s response to Chile is infused with a lightness of spirit. Even the name, ‘…como el musguito en la piedra, ay si, si, si…’, seems to mischievously wink at you. Take a look at a picture of ‘el muguito’ and you’ll see what I mean. Whilst the English translation ‘like moss on a stone’ may bring up rather soporific images of a carpet of green, this Chilean moss shoots off from the rock with the audacity of a punk’s Mohican; an optimistic flurry of life perched on the contours of a wasteland.

It’s a fitting image. The final World Cities piece that Pina Bausch completed before her death, this 2 hour 40 minute piece is a gloriously alive monument to the choreographer.

In this unbridled celebration of movement Bausch provides us with a vivid carousel of physical mini narratives. Whilst in keeping with her usual style of mixing dance, speech and autobiographical storytelling, what gives this piece its exuberance is the sheer level of dancing Bausch unleashes onto the stage.

Perhaps it is the warm South American air or playfully modern Chilean soundtrack, but there is a vivacious ease to …como el musguito en la piedra, ay si, si, si… that marks it apart from earlier pieces. Dancers who have been encased in structured evening wear for years are given free rein in loose summer dresses. From the off we find ourselves becoming swept up in their skirts, their bodies and free flowing hair becoming silken ribbons as they move around the stage.

For the most part it is an empty stage. Free from the large-scale set pieces with which long-time collaborator Peter Pabst usually astonishes us, it is left to the dance (and some deliciously subtle projection) to do the talking. There’s something deeply affecting about a lone figure moving in such an expansively empty space. This affinity is all the more potent with choreography that has its genesis in everyday movements. With her eerily simple repetitions, curves of each arm, limp flicks of the hand, sharp turns and low sighs Bausch manages to imbue each action with the feeling that in these prosaic moments you are glimpsing something bigger, a universal human truth.

But I’ve become too pompous. At every moment Bausch asks us to laugh at ourselves, delighting in pulling this rug of sacred thread from under us. At one point a chorus of girls and men lie on their tummies performing a ritual which leads to a courtship and returns to the floor. It looks effortless, graceful, beautiful. At the end the music stops and we hear the counting, the unsteady breath of these athletes; the water disappears and we see the frantically moving legs of the swan. Life is always a struggle Bausch invites us to acknowledge, but the struggle is always worth it.

…como el musguito en la piedra, ay si, si, si… again reveals Bausch’s fascination with sexual politics, her choreography moving fluidly from boldly drawn solos to passionate couplets. The women are beautiful, merry but sad; the men powerful, forbidding and cheeky. They play together and taunt one another. But though this is a continuation from earlier works, the balance between the sexes is closer in Chile than ever before, a truce seems to have been called.

Here women control the hearts of fickle men with knowing winks; a red headed temptress flings her arm up only to let it drop languidly into the eager palm of her suitor, repeating it again and again at her leisure. A girl gently curls onto the floor inviting her partner to lie with her cheek to cheek, only to slide away when he arrives, beginning a gentle game of cat and mouse that the mouse determinedly controls.

But for all its joie de vivre and apparent equanimity, Bausch’s disturbing darkness has not quite dissipated. She begins and ends the performance with a woman being lifted and flung from man to man, her limp body becoming just an object to be taken and given. It speaks strongly of friction and violence, of movement as a weapon. For all of the joy that marks …como el musguito en la piedra, ay si, si, si… this is the image Bausch begins and leaves us with.

…como el musguito en la piedra, ay si, si, si… is not the work of an innocent school girl blindly humming ‘What a Wonderful World’. But its invigorating and hopeful energy is breathtaking. In a piece which is a poignant reminder of just what the arts world has lost, you are at least left with one happy certainty; by the end of her life Bausch was a woman at peace with her demons.

www.pina-bausch.de

Odd Doll: The Trick

Odd Doll Theatre of Puppetry, based in Leeds and making its London debut this month at the Roundhouse, is aptly named. The hero of Odd Doll’s showThe Trick, a large bunraku puppet, is an uncanny figure. He is pale and gaunt, with deep, dark, hollow eyes set in his pale, skeletal head. Bony fingers distinguish his outsized hands, and below his white nineteenth-century style waistcoat hangs a shopkeeper’s apron, on which red stains are visible in spite of what seems to be centuries of bleaching. This weary, searching, inexplicably guilty figure does not look human. He looks like humanity itself, at least in the imaginations of the self-torturing writers Hans Christian Andersen and Franz Kafka.

Two of their short stories inspired the plot of The Trick. In Andersen’s ‘The Shadow’ a man’s shadow turns against him, and in Franz Kafka’s ‘Beyond Law’ a man waits his whole life to be admitted by a cabalistic Gatekeeper to the hidden realm of The Law. Odd Doll’s mashup of these tales locates the nameless hero in a kitchen, where an unseen power has begun making his crockery clatter and leap, and his scissors grow ballerina feet and pirouette in the glowing proscenium of his chiller box. Alternately annoyed, frightened, and intrigued, the cook soon comes face to face with an unnerving alter ego. A ghoulish shadow in a sleek black satin tailcoat; the gatekeeper of the realm inside the chiller.

Initially, this brought to my mind Robert Lepage’s company Ex Machina’s object-theatre rendition of ‘The Shadow’ in The Andersen Project, in which a deeply closeted Paris Opera administrator tells the story to his daughter, illustrating it with an ordinary table lamp. The Trick is not at all derivative of this; in fact, it is more than the sum of the works it adapts. Is an object only a pot, the shadow demands of the man, or has it a hidden life, and why? This question has haunted puppeteers for centuries. Perhaps it is the law that governs such magic to which we desire admittance whenever we present our ticket at the entrance to an auditorium.

The two puppets, hero and shadow, are adeptly manipulated by puppeteers Kathleen Yore and Rebekah Caputo, the latter of whom won a Total Theatre Award in 2006 with the company Chotto Ookii. The characters’ head, hand, and body movements are clearly defined yet subtle enough to seem real, with the man moving cautiously and carefully, and the shadow often spinning and lurching in whimsical glee. Yore and Caputo hide themselves in black costumes, in keeping with bunraku tradition.

Odd Doll’s drapery skills are also impressive. The black satin tails of the Shadow’s coat float like a pair of runaway wind socks and the hero’s apron makes him statuesque.

The set clarifies the story without overwhelming it. Its prominent features are a clothesline adorned with clacking wooden pins and the chiller, which is fixed on top of a black monolith, making it seem an icy planet floating in space. The metal kitchen equipment provides fantastic sound effects during the object-theatre.

The dialogue is absolutely minimal, but the tension between the man and his shadow is boosted by a jittery piano score, played by Paul Mosley.

Slightly less impressive is Odd Doll’s transposition of their touring show to the Roundhouse’s Studio. The seating is not raked, and some of the action takes place on the floor downstage. From the second row, the objects they were manipulating were not at all visible. In these moments, what was going on had to be inferred from sound alone. This is unfortunate because in a nearly-wordless show, it is vital that every moment be visible, and engaging.

However, with The Trick Odd Doll establishes itself as an important voice in puppetry. Yore, Caputo and Mosley venture well beyond mere adaptation of Andersen and Kafka to make their own compelling mythology.