Aesthetics of Staging Documents - Avignon Festival 2018 (4 case Studies)
Aesthetics of STAGING DOCUMENTS- Avignon Festival (2018)
(Essay written originally in English)
A simplified non academic version of this essay is published at Howlround
In its 72nd Edition, Avignon Festival highlighted vividly the most emerging causes of our Era. In a world where “numbers replaced words and letters, and where the economy of privatization and irrationalities of power struggles” around the globe prevail- enticing within unprecedented feelings of hatred, racism, chauvinism and fear of the other | different- there is still a small spot in the ancient village of Avignon to raise issues about what really matters these days. Since its inception by Jean Vilar in 1947, the festival had always been linked to a certain political engagement, a fact that somehow explains the overall theme of this year’s edition which focused on Gender Issues. In addition to the theme proposed by the festival, some of the plays highlighted other main ordeals around the world like the refugee crisis and other political matters that seemed influential to the daily lives of individuals wherever they are.
A significant attention was given among some of the plays to the “Document” as a substantiate essence for theatricality. What is implied by “Document” includes the use of real life events or people, individual testimonials while referring to facts and pre-existing documentary material such as interviews, newspapers, government articles, correspondences etc. Yet, caution is required when it comes to confining the totality of these plays into the genre of Documentary Theatre or to its subsequent forms such as “Verbatim Theatre” or “Investigative Theatre”, “Theatre of Witness” and other. “Documentary Drama” seems nowadays a term to question opposed to some limits of pure “documenting” and “documentation” where the quest for truth and awareness of information is essential. How can a truth be revealed in an Era where the immense flow of information disfigures reality, augments it or diminishes it, and thus, makes accessing a one and only truth almost an impossible task?
Whenever a document is used on stage, a quest for authenticity and veracity is somehow imposed: According to Derek Paget, the meaning of “fact” in the twentieth century is directly linked to an “unbiased interpretation” and the mere existence of factuality in a play renders it more real and more true than other created works. However, the montage, the choice and the positioning of different facts in the same play – on the expense of other facts- deny the existence of an objective interpretation. “A testimony” is found to “contain a Lacuna” according to Agamben: “those who can testify have survived and can thus not testify on the more common experience of not surviving. In a Holocaust situation, the survivor is the exception, not the rule, and 'this lacuna calls into question the very meaning of testimony and, along with it, the identity and reliability of the witnesses”.
In his book Post-Dramatic Theatre, Hans Lehman finds that documentary theatre is faced with the same problematic of historical drama that attempts to achieve the impossible: “to represent data historically known as uncertainty and as an event that is determined only by the dramatic procedure. Tension does not arise from the course of events, but is of an intellectual nature, most of the time of an ethical nature: it is not a question of telling the world [...] but rather commenting it” . Words like “intellectual, telling, commenting” are often doomed by a personal look: Therefore the quest for one final truth is of an impossible nature. Hence, I find that the term “staging documents” seems to give less expectation faced to the controversy and the diverse opposing views that relate a “documentary theatre” to the quest for truth and veracity.
The aforementioned tendency of staging documents is almost omnipresent in the following 4 theatre productions: “Il pourra toujours dire que c’est pour l’amour du prophète” (“He could always say that it was for the love of the prophet”) by Gurshad Shaheman , “Meduse” by les bâtards dorés collective , “Pale Blue Dot” directed by Étienne Gaudillère and “La reprise” (“The repetition: Histor(ies) of Theatre”) directed by Milo Rau . Each of these plays has delt with authentic documents in a different “Documentary Aesthetic”. Piscator was the first person who coined that term while working on his play “Despite Everything” (1925). He was dazzled with the power of such an aesthetic. Yet, it wasn’t until 1967, where a theory on Documentary Theatre is defined by Peter Weiss through his work “14 propositions for a documentary theatre”.
Both Piscator and Weiss were concerned with the power that theatre can have on contesting reality or changing it: While Piscator wanted to agitate through theatre highlighting classes struggle by using newspaper documents, Weiss wanted to create an alternative discourse of the Media that seems sometimes illusive or incomplete. Presenting the “Real” as “True”, “Faithful” in Weiss’s work that falls under the umbrella of a “Documentary theatre” becomes, in the four above-mentioned plays of Avignon, an act of “document performativity” presenting part of the reality and transforming it to reach other grounds that are not limited to the document’s interpretation as a “Fact” occurring at a certain time and which presence leads to the awareness of the audience. The awareness might be one of different outputs of the performances but not the one and only finality.
Each of the directors of the 4 performances worked with the Document using different aesthetics and tools on stage, ranging from transforming the space into bare darkness where an oratorio of monologues proliferated to using the form of the tribunal as an essential plot or referring to naturalism combined with a live video projection or exploding the stage with a spectacular flow of information .
Gurshad Shaheman’s play underpins endurances of the exiled – most notably those who belong to the LGBTQ community and the artists. After gathering many testimonials in Calais Camp from individuals who were exiled or who decided to flee the Middle East and Morocco, the director wrote diverse monologues that were diffused on stage by performers. The latter played the role of “depositaries of the texts” according to Shaheman who describes his work as an “Oratorio of voices” coming out of the darkness or sparkling through dim lit spots of the stage. What was considered a testimonial-document, transforms in this play to become a “litany of words, inspired by the poetics and eroticism of One thousand and one night” . Although different stories for many individuals from Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and other countries were highlighted, Shaheman unified all these voices into one transcendental process of unseen pain where movement rarely happens on stage. For him Theatricality starts with the sound and the music composed by Lucien Gaudion. In Shaheman’s work, the document rarely has a physical representation or a unique voice. The stage becomes a proscenium where only words can be produced rather than images of mimesis. No significance was given to the different nuances of pain, even when it comes to vocal nuances and intonations.
Around 20 performers on stage were sharing narratives and atrocities re-constructed into poetic words by the director. Their movement in space is minimalistic and their eyes are most of the times closed. Did Shaheman use this Gestus –i.e. eyes closed- to imply that the amount of suffering is unbearable by the victims themselves or is the suffering impossible to be seen and thus represented on stage (which explains the stagnant position of performers) or is it both? If we go back to Greek Tragedy, violence was represented as off-stage events although the plot was based on actions rather than narration. A narration according to Hannah Arendt is “a strategy to transform significances from the private sphere to the public sphere” . Yet this strategy is compulsive with the idea of excess: the more pain is represented with words, the closer Shaheman is to his aesthetization of an oratorio of voices. This aesthetization is illustrated with an excessive amount of grief and pains described and reiterated to make evidence of victimhood of those individuals. Unlike Shaheman who opted for void (except for the final scene) and minimalism in terms of scenic design and the performers’ movement in space, the other 3 performances witnessed a significant abundance when it comes to diverse visual forms and interpretations of the Document. In these works, the document or the real life event appears as a fact to be questioned and sometimes judged. It is sometimes a tool for ludicrous playful scenery. In other times, the document follows a certain transformation while being used in other contexts than the information underlying within it. The form of a tribunal, whether concrete or metaphorical, is often linked to documentary theatre works which entail real life events and mostly historical ones. “La Meduse”’s Structure as a play is built on the plot of a Tribunal. As well, one of the main essential scenes in “Pale Blue Dot” represents a court trial.
“La Meduse” is a frigate in the French Navy launched in 1810 and destined to go to Senegal on a Colonial mission. The frigate sank in the sea due to the inept navigation of the captain. 150 men were left in a raft, they all died except 14 individuals who remained alive. Today, nobody knows of the details of the frigate except for a very famous painting for Gericault.
The play is based on an extensive research made by the collective referring to an essay written by two of the survivors of the shipwreck (Alexandre Correard – Jean Baptiste Savigny, the doctor of the frigate). Due to hunger and loss of water, the 14 survivors started to hallucinate and ended up by committing acts of cannibalism. The collective somehow questioned the intentions of Dr. Savigny by introducing one of the sailors, Etienne Jacques, who emerged from one of the seats of the audience to contest the testimonial of Dr. Savigny. Diverse realities and truths about La Meduse were raised all along the play not only related to Savigny and the sailor. What is interesting, in addition to the magnificent interpretation of the actors, is the tri-frontal disposition of the theatre space. The audience surrounding the stage from 3 sides wouldn’t only see different angles for the same scene but they are metaphorically positioned in proximity with the different truths or points of views of the incident of La Meduse: Some are seated few centimeters in front of the judge, incarnating the jurors in the jury box where they face a live painting act, others are seated in the background of the stage where all testimonials of Dr. Savigny take place, while in the main seating space of the audience – sailor Jacques Etienne remains for a while until he moves again to stage.
That notion of space Tri-frontality is strengthened with the way time is perceived: Rather than imitating and mimicking the Era of la Meduse, the directors opted for a timeless visual representation of the incident while live painting, live music mixing, and direct interaction with the audience are taking place. As if those diversified disciplines introduced augmented NOW moments to examine further the different truths of real life tragedy with respect to the present time: The painting is an anti-composition of Gericault’s work “The raft of the Medusa”. Instead of having naked yellowish bodies agonizing on the ship, Jean Michel Charpentier painted morbid black and white portraits of men and women in an undefined space looking straight forward, with very sharp penetrating looks. At the end of the performance, actors asked for some of the members of the audience sitting in the jury box to give their final decision in court. Hence, the stage of “les batârds dorés” attempted to represent many layers of facts that were concomitant with the essential document (Savigny’s Essay) reconstructing and deconstructing the notion of truth itself and questioning ethical issues related to the incident itself without imposing any final point of view or judgment. All of the latter was occurring in physical settings that reflected continuously the now moment.
While “La Meduse” relied on a simple modest scenography where the actors’ bodies, words and movements are the source of every creative act, Etienne Gaudillère, in his play “Pale Blue Dot”, opted for a spectacular dazzling scenery with singing, intermittent music, multiple screens, party favors all over the theatre space. The stage was divided to two levels and two spots (horizontally and vertically) and where often 2 complementary scenes were taking place at the same time. The latter were tools to dispose on stage a huge flow of information about Wikileaks where facts, speeches, videos, advertisements were all put together through a very dynamic montage of events occurring since 2010. The play of Gaudillère traces, in a chronological path, the instances of Wikileaks while referring to satire. Etienne built the text of his performance basing on 3 main axes: 1- transferring the events of wikileaks from an informative news-oriented perspective, 2- focusing on Julian Assange as a public figure where dealing with Media in its diverse forms seems to be a manipulative process and 3- presenting the personal life of Bradley Manning- the intelligence Analyst known today as Chelsea - the main source who lead to the leaking U.S government classified information. Except for Manning’s scenes, every fact was represented on stage in an attempt to contextualize the information –i.e. the document, as a tool for achieving pleasurable spectacular scenery rather than only being a process of evidence. Real life instances such as the exact words of Hillary Clinton and the interviews Assange had – inspired by verbatim theatre- were represented on stage through a dynamic montage that was leading with the bias of spectacular funny scenes to a certain consciousness and righteousness to what Manning represented. This authenticity of the exact words of Hilary Clinton is being subject to an intended subversion through caricature mimicry, whereby another discourse is suggested and I would say another type of performance is put on trial: the performance of the media which was manipulative on many occasions.
On the other hand, Manning all through the play was presented through dialogues displayed on screen. He only appeared as a physical character in the final scene. Manning to a certain extent escaped extreme means of theatricality and spectacular representation as opposed to the other factual information of Assange’s story and Wikileaks that were represented in a playful ludicrous manner which paved the way for the audience to make an act of consciousness and then, empathy towards the other flip of Assange’s Story: Bradley Manning. As if- by escaping extreme means of theatricality until his appearance at the final scene, the character of Bradley gained appreciation by the absence of a physical embodiment replaced with words as opposed to all the chaotic scenes marked with caricatured characters embodied on stage. As per Milo Rau’s “The repetition: History(ies) of Theatre”, the director used the murder of Ihsan Jarfi to ask questions related to the representation of a crime on stage. Milo Rau referred to the homophobic homicide of Ihsan Jarfi, a young homosexual from Liege (Belgium) who happens to be Muslim and who was brutalized and killed in 2012. Milo Rau, disciple of Pierre Bourdieu, is not only a theatre maker, he is a researcher and a sociologist at the same time. While preparing for “the repetition”, Rau, along with the actors, made an investigative research where they met one of the murderers in prison .
The play starts with a narrator asking how to represent a Tragedy on stage. He refers to the scene of Hamlet’s Ghost: Who would believe such a scene with the presence of artificial fog?
Not a single moment is left for imagination at “The repetition...”. Every single scene seems to be very raw. Referring to a highly realistic representation reminding us, in a certain way, of the naturalism movement of European drama which also focuses on the social environment and background. The play retrospectively reenacts the events that lead finally to the scene of the appalling murder of Ihsan Jarfi: the man was just going out of a pub when a car of 3 individuals appeared. They ask him a question. He goes with them in the car and then he is beaten and mutilated to death. All the dreadful details of the murder appear on stage. After his death, one of the actors pisses on the corpse of the dead body. Violence, torture, nudity, are reenacted in the coldest forms, even the car of the crime, an old golf, was on stage. In parallel to that reenactment, Rau, built the elements of this highly realistic representation of an unexplained murder, with an other reenactment of a side of the preparation for the performance itself, focusing on the recruitment of the actors: After the Hamlet scene, 3 actors are casting 3 amateurs (who are amateur actors in real life). The camera in the middle of the stage is linked to a huge screen where the audience sees close up of faces most of the time all along the performance. As if, facing this high-realism, in representing the crime itself, there is another high-realism in representing in a very cold discrete manner the position of the re-presenters of the crime. What is meant by the position of the re-presenters doesn’t necessarily highlight their position towards the crime itself. On the contrary, it reaches the position of these amateurs towards their life choices: why did they choose acting? Would Coco, the woman who plays the role of Ihsan’s mother, perform Nude? Some of the real-life details of the amateur actors coincide with the details of the murderers: One of them had the same car, others suffered from unemployment like one of the murderers.
What is significant in Rau’s staging of a very recent controversial real life tragedy, is this juxtaposition of two reenactments\realisms while offering the audience a triple sense of voyeurism: In addition to the general feeling a member of the audience gets as a voyeur while watching any life on stage, the spectator will be a voyeur of the life of the actors as well as a voyeur of very violent scenes reenacted. The sense of voyeurism becomes more and more intense with the screen that offers double representations of the same scene or action on the stage while everything on the screen looks magnified with the use of close ups or medium shots most of the time. Sometimes, voyeurism in theatre may cause feelings of guilt in the “audience as they become self aware that they are complicit in the culturally shameful act of watching forbidden pleasures on stage” . The feeling of guilt, in “La reprise”, becomes more and more controversial when faced with the contemporaneity of the document or the real life event that is being staged. How can one make another violent representation of the murder of Jarfi in a very cold way and showcase it as a normative daily theatre exercise? Having a deeper look into his work, Rau, to challenge the hidden rules and norms of a static theatre, created the Ghent Manifesto supposed to lay the grounds for "city theatre of the future". The first rule among 10 rules is: “it's not just about portraying the world anymore. It's about changing it. The aim is not to depict the real, but to make the representation itself real.”
How would an authentic representation of a crime on stage change the world? I argue that Rau uses the same principles used in homeopathy and apply them to theatre: In Homeopathy, sick people are given very small amounts of natural substance, that, in healthy people, would produce the same effects as the diseases produce. In Rau’s work, Audience is given small amounts of violence reenactments on stage, that in reality, would cause real damage. Is it an attempt of him to provoke the audience hoping for a possible change in the world? The analogy made with Homeopathy effects is a metaphoric unrealistic interpretation. Yet, it might a very possible one, mostly, when we take a look at the end of the performance: Jarfi stands up. He is the amateur actor now, mentioning one of the passages of Wajdi Mouawwad’s texts where an actor stands on a chair behind a rope. He wraps it around his neck and pushes the chair with his feet, waiting for someone to save him from the audience.
This process of representing violence on stage as a normative theatre exercise and creating a metaphorical link with homeopathy reminds in a way of the derridean concept of theatre as Pharmakon i.e. as a remedy, poison and scape goat at the same time. Through the incident of Wajdi Mouawwad’s actor, it can be inferred that theatre can be perceived as a ritualistic scapegoat for the audience. However, Derrida, in “Plato’s Pharmacy” sees that pharmakon can never “be simply beneficial” . The pharmakon is acting, then, not only as a bridge between two supposedly opposite elements, but also as a subversive device which erases the distinction between the two elements it bridges and assumes both their identities simultaneously.
Through those 4 examples of 4 performances where authentic documents were staged for the audience, many questions may arise. Perhaps, the two most important questions would be: After being shared on stage, who has the ownership of the authentic document and who has the legitimacy of representing it? The subjects directly concerned? (The artists who created the work? The audience after reflecting on what they saw?) Once made in the hands of more than an individual, does the document itself remain the same?
While trying to respond to the second question, it would be more likely to find a probable answer for the first question. A document never remains the same, even if it is owned by one individual: the same person relates to the same real life event or document differently with the passage of time. Any document is subject to many transformations whereby it becomes capable of creating or being part of other realities. Thus, even before reaching the stage and being accessible to the audience, a document would have had already transformed. Henceforth, no one has the exclusive ownership or legitimacy of agreeing on the representation of an authentic document. An authentic document doesn’t belong to itself anymore. And once it relates to time, space and different people, it produces different meanings. Thus, it would be better to ask what sorts of meanings it produces. As one cannot disregard factors that might be demeaning to the production of meaning itself like some aesthetical or even ethical choices: Stereotyping the LGBTQ community in the Middle East is demeaning on both aesthetical and ethical levels. The LGBTQ community doesn’t need that much of an effort on stage to proof every second that its individuals are victims. What kind of aesthetic representation are we adding by repeating the same prototype of victimhood that consists of gathering testimonials, transforming them into teary-eyed monologues? How does that produce a different meaning than what had been seen many times before on stage? On another Ethical level, how painful would it be for the parents of Ihsan Jarfi to see in every little detail -– what they haven’t seen before- the murder of their son?
Yet, these are questions that exceed the boundaries of the latter two performances...to an extent that one might ask: “Is art an ethical process and if so, it is an ethical process towards whom?”. Here is another question seeking possible answers. After all, this essay is nothing but a small exercise whereby the reflection about theatre is a never-ending journey of questions.
(Essay written originally in English)
A simplified non academic version of this essay is published at Howlround
In its 72nd Edition, Avignon Festival highlighted vividly the most emerging causes of our Era. In a world where “numbers replaced words and letters, and where the economy of privatization and irrationalities of power struggles” around the globe prevail- enticing within unprecedented feelings of hatred, racism, chauvinism and fear of the other | different- there is still a small spot in the ancient village of Avignon to raise issues about what really matters these days. Since its inception by Jean Vilar in 1947, the festival had always been linked to a certain political engagement, a fact that somehow explains the overall theme of this year’s edition which focused on Gender Issues. In addition to the theme proposed by the festival, some of the plays highlighted other main ordeals around the world like the refugee crisis and other political matters that seemed influential to the daily lives of individuals wherever they are.
A significant attention was given among some of the plays to the “Document” as a substantiate essence for theatricality. What is implied by “Document” includes the use of real life events or people, individual testimonials while referring to facts and pre-existing documentary material such as interviews, newspapers, government articles, correspondences etc. Yet, caution is required when it comes to confining the totality of these plays into the genre of Documentary Theatre or to its subsequent forms such as “Verbatim Theatre” or “Investigative Theatre”, “Theatre of Witness” and other. “Documentary Drama” seems nowadays a term to question opposed to some limits of pure “documenting” and “documentation” where the quest for truth and awareness of information is essential. How can a truth be revealed in an Era where the immense flow of information disfigures reality, augments it or diminishes it, and thus, makes accessing a one and only truth almost an impossible task?
Whenever a document is used on stage, a quest for authenticity and veracity is somehow imposed: According to Derek Paget, the meaning of “fact” in the twentieth century is directly linked to an “unbiased interpretation” and the mere existence of factuality in a play renders it more real and more true than other created works. However, the montage, the choice and the positioning of different facts in the same play – on the expense of other facts- deny the existence of an objective interpretation. “A testimony” is found to “contain a Lacuna” according to Agamben: “those who can testify have survived and can thus not testify on the more common experience of not surviving. In a Holocaust situation, the survivor is the exception, not the rule, and 'this lacuna calls into question the very meaning of testimony and, along with it, the identity and reliability of the witnesses”.
In his book Post-Dramatic Theatre, Hans Lehman finds that documentary theatre is faced with the same problematic of historical drama that attempts to achieve the impossible: “to represent data historically known as uncertainty and as an event that is determined only by the dramatic procedure. Tension does not arise from the course of events, but is of an intellectual nature, most of the time of an ethical nature: it is not a question of telling the world [...] but rather commenting it” . Words like “intellectual, telling, commenting” are often doomed by a personal look: Therefore the quest for one final truth is of an impossible nature. Hence, I find that the term “staging documents” seems to give less expectation faced to the controversy and the diverse opposing views that relate a “documentary theatre” to the quest for truth and veracity.
The aforementioned tendency of staging documents is almost omnipresent in the following 4 theatre productions: “Il pourra toujours dire que c’est pour l’amour du prophète” (“He could always say that it was for the love of the prophet”) by Gurshad Shaheman , “Meduse” by les bâtards dorés collective , “Pale Blue Dot” directed by Étienne Gaudillère and “La reprise” (“The repetition: Histor(ies) of Theatre”) directed by Milo Rau . Each of these plays has delt with authentic documents in a different “Documentary Aesthetic”. Piscator was the first person who coined that term while working on his play “Despite Everything” (1925). He was dazzled with the power of such an aesthetic. Yet, it wasn’t until 1967, where a theory on Documentary Theatre is defined by Peter Weiss through his work “14 propositions for a documentary theatre”.
Both Piscator and Weiss were concerned with the power that theatre can have on contesting reality or changing it: While Piscator wanted to agitate through theatre highlighting classes struggle by using newspaper documents, Weiss wanted to create an alternative discourse of the Media that seems sometimes illusive or incomplete. Presenting the “Real” as “True”, “Faithful” in Weiss’s work that falls under the umbrella of a “Documentary theatre” becomes, in the four above-mentioned plays of Avignon, an act of “document performativity” presenting part of the reality and transforming it to reach other grounds that are not limited to the document’s interpretation as a “Fact” occurring at a certain time and which presence leads to the awareness of the audience. The awareness might be one of different outputs of the performances but not the one and only finality.
Each of the directors of the 4 performances worked with the Document using different aesthetics and tools on stage, ranging from transforming the space into bare darkness where an oratorio of monologues proliferated to using the form of the tribunal as an essential plot or referring to naturalism combined with a live video projection or exploding the stage with a spectacular flow of information .
Gurshad Shaheman’s play underpins endurances of the exiled – most notably those who belong to the LGBTQ community and the artists. After gathering many testimonials in Calais Camp from individuals who were exiled or who decided to flee the Middle East and Morocco, the director wrote diverse monologues that were diffused on stage by performers. The latter played the role of “depositaries of the texts” according to Shaheman who describes his work as an “Oratorio of voices” coming out of the darkness or sparkling through dim lit spots of the stage. What was considered a testimonial-document, transforms in this play to become a “litany of words, inspired by the poetics and eroticism of One thousand and one night” . Although different stories for many individuals from Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and other countries were highlighted, Shaheman unified all these voices into one transcendental process of unseen pain where movement rarely happens on stage. For him Theatricality starts with the sound and the music composed by Lucien Gaudion. In Shaheman’s work, the document rarely has a physical representation or a unique voice. The stage becomes a proscenium where only words can be produced rather than images of mimesis. No significance was given to the different nuances of pain, even when it comes to vocal nuances and intonations.
Around 20 performers on stage were sharing narratives and atrocities re-constructed into poetic words by the director. Their movement in space is minimalistic and their eyes are most of the times closed. Did Shaheman use this Gestus –i.e. eyes closed- to imply that the amount of suffering is unbearable by the victims themselves or is the suffering impossible to be seen and thus represented on stage (which explains the stagnant position of performers) or is it both? If we go back to Greek Tragedy, violence was represented as off-stage events although the plot was based on actions rather than narration. A narration according to Hannah Arendt is “a strategy to transform significances from the private sphere to the public sphere” . Yet this strategy is compulsive with the idea of excess: the more pain is represented with words, the closer Shaheman is to his aesthetization of an oratorio of voices. This aesthetization is illustrated with an excessive amount of grief and pains described and reiterated to make evidence of victimhood of those individuals. Unlike Shaheman who opted for void (except for the final scene) and minimalism in terms of scenic design and the performers’ movement in space, the other 3 performances witnessed a significant abundance when it comes to diverse visual forms and interpretations of the Document. In these works, the document or the real life event appears as a fact to be questioned and sometimes judged. It is sometimes a tool for ludicrous playful scenery. In other times, the document follows a certain transformation while being used in other contexts than the information underlying within it. The form of a tribunal, whether concrete or metaphorical, is often linked to documentary theatre works which entail real life events and mostly historical ones. “La Meduse”’s Structure as a play is built on the plot of a Tribunal. As well, one of the main essential scenes in “Pale Blue Dot” represents a court trial.
“La Meduse” is a frigate in the French Navy launched in 1810 and destined to go to Senegal on a Colonial mission. The frigate sank in the sea due to the inept navigation of the captain. 150 men were left in a raft, they all died except 14 individuals who remained alive. Today, nobody knows of the details of the frigate except for a very famous painting for Gericault.
The play is based on an extensive research made by the collective referring to an essay written by two of the survivors of the shipwreck (Alexandre Correard – Jean Baptiste Savigny, the doctor of the frigate). Due to hunger and loss of water, the 14 survivors started to hallucinate and ended up by committing acts of cannibalism. The collective somehow questioned the intentions of Dr. Savigny by introducing one of the sailors, Etienne Jacques, who emerged from one of the seats of the audience to contest the testimonial of Dr. Savigny. Diverse realities and truths about La Meduse were raised all along the play not only related to Savigny and the sailor. What is interesting, in addition to the magnificent interpretation of the actors, is the tri-frontal disposition of the theatre space. The audience surrounding the stage from 3 sides wouldn’t only see different angles for the same scene but they are metaphorically positioned in proximity with the different truths or points of views of the incident of La Meduse: Some are seated few centimeters in front of the judge, incarnating the jurors in the jury box where they face a live painting act, others are seated in the background of the stage where all testimonials of Dr. Savigny take place, while in the main seating space of the audience – sailor Jacques Etienne remains for a while until he moves again to stage.
That notion of space Tri-frontality is strengthened with the way time is perceived: Rather than imitating and mimicking the Era of la Meduse, the directors opted for a timeless visual representation of the incident while live painting, live music mixing, and direct interaction with the audience are taking place. As if those diversified disciplines introduced augmented NOW moments to examine further the different truths of real life tragedy with respect to the present time: The painting is an anti-composition of Gericault’s work “The raft of the Medusa”. Instead of having naked yellowish bodies agonizing on the ship, Jean Michel Charpentier painted morbid black and white portraits of men and women in an undefined space looking straight forward, with very sharp penetrating looks. At the end of the performance, actors asked for some of the members of the audience sitting in the jury box to give their final decision in court. Hence, the stage of “les batârds dorés” attempted to represent many layers of facts that were concomitant with the essential document (Savigny’s Essay) reconstructing and deconstructing the notion of truth itself and questioning ethical issues related to the incident itself without imposing any final point of view or judgment. All of the latter was occurring in physical settings that reflected continuously the now moment.
While “La Meduse” relied on a simple modest scenography where the actors’ bodies, words and movements are the source of every creative act, Etienne Gaudillère, in his play “Pale Blue Dot”, opted for a spectacular dazzling scenery with singing, intermittent music, multiple screens, party favors all over the theatre space. The stage was divided to two levels and two spots (horizontally and vertically) and where often 2 complementary scenes were taking place at the same time. The latter were tools to dispose on stage a huge flow of information about Wikileaks where facts, speeches, videos, advertisements were all put together through a very dynamic montage of events occurring since 2010. The play of Gaudillère traces, in a chronological path, the instances of Wikileaks while referring to satire. Etienne built the text of his performance basing on 3 main axes: 1- transferring the events of wikileaks from an informative news-oriented perspective, 2- focusing on Julian Assange as a public figure where dealing with Media in its diverse forms seems to be a manipulative process and 3- presenting the personal life of Bradley Manning- the intelligence Analyst known today as Chelsea - the main source who lead to the leaking U.S government classified information. Except for Manning’s scenes, every fact was represented on stage in an attempt to contextualize the information –i.e. the document, as a tool for achieving pleasurable spectacular scenery rather than only being a process of evidence. Real life instances such as the exact words of Hillary Clinton and the interviews Assange had – inspired by verbatim theatre- were represented on stage through a dynamic montage that was leading with the bias of spectacular funny scenes to a certain consciousness and righteousness to what Manning represented. This authenticity of the exact words of Hilary Clinton is being subject to an intended subversion through caricature mimicry, whereby another discourse is suggested and I would say another type of performance is put on trial: the performance of the media which was manipulative on many occasions.
On the other hand, Manning all through the play was presented through dialogues displayed on screen. He only appeared as a physical character in the final scene. Manning to a certain extent escaped extreme means of theatricality and spectacular representation as opposed to the other factual information of Assange’s story and Wikileaks that were represented in a playful ludicrous manner which paved the way for the audience to make an act of consciousness and then, empathy towards the other flip of Assange’s Story: Bradley Manning. As if- by escaping extreme means of theatricality until his appearance at the final scene, the character of Bradley gained appreciation by the absence of a physical embodiment replaced with words as opposed to all the chaotic scenes marked with caricatured characters embodied on stage. As per Milo Rau’s “The repetition: History(ies) of Theatre”, the director used the murder of Ihsan Jarfi to ask questions related to the representation of a crime on stage. Milo Rau referred to the homophobic homicide of Ihsan Jarfi, a young homosexual from Liege (Belgium) who happens to be Muslim and who was brutalized and killed in 2012. Milo Rau, disciple of Pierre Bourdieu, is not only a theatre maker, he is a researcher and a sociologist at the same time. While preparing for “the repetition”, Rau, along with the actors, made an investigative research where they met one of the murderers in prison .
The play starts with a narrator asking how to represent a Tragedy on stage. He refers to the scene of Hamlet’s Ghost: Who would believe such a scene with the presence of artificial fog?
Not a single moment is left for imagination at “The repetition...”. Every single scene seems to be very raw. Referring to a highly realistic representation reminding us, in a certain way, of the naturalism movement of European drama which also focuses on the social environment and background. The play retrospectively reenacts the events that lead finally to the scene of the appalling murder of Ihsan Jarfi: the man was just going out of a pub when a car of 3 individuals appeared. They ask him a question. He goes with them in the car and then he is beaten and mutilated to death. All the dreadful details of the murder appear on stage. After his death, one of the actors pisses on the corpse of the dead body. Violence, torture, nudity, are reenacted in the coldest forms, even the car of the crime, an old golf, was on stage. In parallel to that reenactment, Rau, built the elements of this highly realistic representation of an unexplained murder, with an other reenactment of a side of the preparation for the performance itself, focusing on the recruitment of the actors: After the Hamlet scene, 3 actors are casting 3 amateurs (who are amateur actors in real life). The camera in the middle of the stage is linked to a huge screen where the audience sees close up of faces most of the time all along the performance. As if, facing this high-realism, in representing the crime itself, there is another high-realism in representing in a very cold discrete manner the position of the re-presenters of the crime. What is meant by the position of the re-presenters doesn’t necessarily highlight their position towards the crime itself. On the contrary, it reaches the position of these amateurs towards their life choices: why did they choose acting? Would Coco, the woman who plays the role of Ihsan’s mother, perform Nude? Some of the real-life details of the amateur actors coincide with the details of the murderers: One of them had the same car, others suffered from unemployment like one of the murderers.
What is significant in Rau’s staging of a very recent controversial real life tragedy, is this juxtaposition of two reenactments\realisms while offering the audience a triple sense of voyeurism: In addition to the general feeling a member of the audience gets as a voyeur while watching any life on stage, the spectator will be a voyeur of the life of the actors as well as a voyeur of very violent scenes reenacted. The sense of voyeurism becomes more and more intense with the screen that offers double representations of the same scene or action on the stage while everything on the screen looks magnified with the use of close ups or medium shots most of the time. Sometimes, voyeurism in theatre may cause feelings of guilt in the “audience as they become self aware that they are complicit in the culturally shameful act of watching forbidden pleasures on stage” . The feeling of guilt, in “La reprise”, becomes more and more controversial when faced with the contemporaneity of the document or the real life event that is being staged. How can one make another violent representation of the murder of Jarfi in a very cold way and showcase it as a normative daily theatre exercise? Having a deeper look into his work, Rau, to challenge the hidden rules and norms of a static theatre, created the Ghent Manifesto supposed to lay the grounds for "city theatre of the future". The first rule among 10 rules is: “it's not just about portraying the world anymore. It's about changing it. The aim is not to depict the real, but to make the representation itself real.”
How would an authentic representation of a crime on stage change the world? I argue that Rau uses the same principles used in homeopathy and apply them to theatre: In Homeopathy, sick people are given very small amounts of natural substance, that, in healthy people, would produce the same effects as the diseases produce. In Rau’s work, Audience is given small amounts of violence reenactments on stage, that in reality, would cause real damage. Is it an attempt of him to provoke the audience hoping for a possible change in the world? The analogy made with Homeopathy effects is a metaphoric unrealistic interpretation. Yet, it might a very possible one, mostly, when we take a look at the end of the performance: Jarfi stands up. He is the amateur actor now, mentioning one of the passages of Wajdi Mouawwad’s texts where an actor stands on a chair behind a rope. He wraps it around his neck and pushes the chair with his feet, waiting for someone to save him from the audience.
This process of representing violence on stage as a normative theatre exercise and creating a metaphorical link with homeopathy reminds in a way of the derridean concept of theatre as Pharmakon i.e. as a remedy, poison and scape goat at the same time. Through the incident of Wajdi Mouawwad’s actor, it can be inferred that theatre can be perceived as a ritualistic scapegoat for the audience. However, Derrida, in “Plato’s Pharmacy” sees that pharmakon can never “be simply beneficial” . The pharmakon is acting, then, not only as a bridge between two supposedly opposite elements, but also as a subversive device which erases the distinction between the two elements it bridges and assumes both their identities simultaneously.
Through those 4 examples of 4 performances where authentic documents were staged for the audience, many questions may arise. Perhaps, the two most important questions would be: After being shared on stage, who has the ownership of the authentic document and who has the legitimacy of representing it? The subjects directly concerned? (The artists who created the work? The audience after reflecting on what they saw?) Once made in the hands of more than an individual, does the document itself remain the same?
While trying to respond to the second question, it would be more likely to find a probable answer for the first question. A document never remains the same, even if it is owned by one individual: the same person relates to the same real life event or document differently with the passage of time. Any document is subject to many transformations whereby it becomes capable of creating or being part of other realities. Thus, even before reaching the stage and being accessible to the audience, a document would have had already transformed. Henceforth, no one has the exclusive ownership or legitimacy of agreeing on the representation of an authentic document. An authentic document doesn’t belong to itself anymore. And once it relates to time, space and different people, it produces different meanings. Thus, it would be better to ask what sorts of meanings it produces. As one cannot disregard factors that might be demeaning to the production of meaning itself like some aesthetical or even ethical choices: Stereotyping the LGBTQ community in the Middle East is demeaning on both aesthetical and ethical levels. The LGBTQ community doesn’t need that much of an effort on stage to proof every second that its individuals are victims. What kind of aesthetic representation are we adding by repeating the same prototype of victimhood that consists of gathering testimonials, transforming them into teary-eyed monologues? How does that produce a different meaning than what had been seen many times before on stage? On another Ethical level, how painful would it be for the parents of Ihsan Jarfi to see in every little detail -– what they haven’t seen before- the murder of their son?
Yet, these are questions that exceed the boundaries of the latter two performances...to an extent that one might ask: “Is art an ethical process and if so, it is an ethical process towards whom?”. Here is another question seeking possible answers. After all, this essay is nothing but a small exercise whereby the reflection about theatre is a never-ending journey of questions.
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