A Review of Israel/Palestine

by Taurie Kinoshita, Artistic Director, Cruel Theatre

Raging for decades, some would argue centuries, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a bitter battle that has seen unimaginable loss and destruction on both sides. What can we as individuals do to address this critical issue? What is an appropriate international response? What are the viewpoints of the Israelis and what are the viewpoints of the Palestinians? When facing a conflict mired in religious idealism with potentially massive political and economic implications, how and can we proceed to deal with this seemingly insurmountable problem? These are just a few of the questions explored in director Harry Giles’s ensemble-devised Israel/Palestine.

Using sections of text from Rachel Corrie, Caryl Churchill, Antonio Gramsci, Israel Horovitz, and Deb Margolin, as well as audience participation and improvisational theatre games, Israel/Palestine is a thought-provoking, entertaining and touching journey into the heart of the crisis. As the audience enters the actors seem to be warming up—though some were speaking to the audience out-of-character (very avant-garde and the only aspect of the performance I found inconsistent with the intelligence of the rest of the play.)

The actual performance begins with a section from Horowitz’ drama What Strong Fences Make. Itzhak Shiffman, played with a quiet intensity by Callum McGowan, approaches an armed soldier, Uri Ambramovich, played by Rosemary Sales with brilliant nuance. The scene progresses, Uri interrogates Itzhak, and the audience is mesmerized by the ensuing drama. Suddenly the palpable tension generated by the talented young duo is shattered with a hilarious meta-theatrical device: a third ensemble member, Kiirsi Viitma stops the scene yelling ‘Cut!’ The entire performance shares the frenetic and diametrically opposed styles of the opening sequence—alternating between serious and comic, texts and physical improvisation, realism and a meta-theatrical Brechtian self-awareness.

For me, this was the real genius of Israel/Palestine: the content and the goals of the performance matched the style in which it was performed. The audience is asked to think, is led without any trace of didactic aggression to question and explore, to try to understand the impact and meaning of the conflict. Both sides of the conflict are presented and the audience is never goaded or pressured to think in a specific way or do anything other than to simply reflect and truly consider the repercussions of this bloody war. To this end, the audience is warmly greeted by the director and asked to sit wherever they choose. The space is assembled—or rather dissembled—suggesting the chaos of war, the inherent imbalance of life in such a conflict: chairs are overturned, a smattering of random objects obstruct the room. The audience is informed that they may move whenever they want in order to gain a better—or different—view! At times, the single focus of a scene is split and multiplied so each actor performs for a different group of audience members, re-enforcing the idea that to even talk about the situation connotes a difference in perception. In addition to being directly addressed in small, almost private groups by different actors and being physically moved by actors, audience members are also drawn into the performance by two ‘talk sections.’ The first is a general discussion involving both actors and audience members. In the second section the audience members are asked to write something on a piece of paper—whatever they feel inspired to write. Audience written responses were then incorporated into a version of the improvisational game The Machine (a sound and movement piece).

The ensemble demonstrates not only the history of the conflict but also the history of humanity with stylized and side-splitting ingenuity. All of the young performers displayed a virtuousity in handling the texts, movement sections and participatory elements. The piece ends with a moment of silence and the announcement that the director was taking donations for humanitarian organisations in the region; this is theatre at its best—revealing, investigative and communal.The choice of an international cast (actors from Poland, UK, Estonia, Italy and France) gave the performance additional weight–underscoring the universality of the conflict. Shifting modes of perceptions and opposing points of view, typified through the use of different styles of theatre stressed the ultimately humanitarian concerns of Israel/Palestine, an inspired and provocative and moving piece of theatre.

(view a profile of Taurie here)

Parting With Such Tweet Sorrow

In case you missed the fanfares, trumpets and bemused press, Such Tweet Sorrow was a “live” improvised of Romeo and Juliet. Via Twitter.

That’s the sort of thing that gets me very excited. I’m enthralled by any attempt to extend the boundaries of performance to the digital and informational — recognising that the internet is now a platform not only for information sharing and art distribution but also for performance itself. The dominant form of internet performance so far has been the commercial advertising use of alternate reality games, but there have been  projects like the famous lonelygirl15, and the rise of the artistic or plot-drive indie arg, specifically fuelled by the growth of online arg communities. I’m talking here specifically about online performances — artwork with a live or real-time component — rather than simply internet-based art, though that too also offers extraordinary potential. (For many years my favourite site on the internet has been Nobody Here; We Feel Fine crosses the boundary between found art and performance by an artificial intelligence.) So a well-funded, well-promoted experiment in performing Shakespeare online got me all excited.

Frustratingly, critical comment on the project — a genuine reflective appreciation of it — has been really limited. Googling for reviews, I can mainly only find the British press’s initial reaction to the project — a predictable mixture of redrafting the press releases, knee-jerk complaints from stuffy fuddy-duddies, and bright-eyed lauding from trendy new arts types. There have been a few insightful (and mainly critical) reviews from various arts sites and bloggers, but no widespread critical engagement. Which is a real shame, because as an early experiment in a new medium, there’s a great deal to learn from the project.

I followed it religiously, and loved every moment, while still thinking it could’ve been a helluva lot better. I loved the playful reinterpretations of key moments of the play — Romeo met Rosaline playing Call of Duty online; Juliet’s 16th birthday party had a Facebook event and a Spotify playlist; Mercutio met his end at a football riot. It was at its best when it spread its wings across the internet — when videos, photos, audioboos and blogs were combining to give a multi-perspectival picture of events — and at its most touching when events were obliquely inferred rather than turgidly typed (Mercutio’s death scene, alone in hospital, was exquisite).

Those reviews I linked to are a mixed bag of criticism (Hannah Nicklin’s to my mind is the most in depth and insightful) and divide mainly into two camps: those who think the medium doomed the project to failure, and those who longed for it to be better to really do the most the medium could offer. To my mind, those in the former camp were mostly cynical about the possibilities of the medium to start with, and not au fait enough with the grammar of its performance; the most irritating criticism was of a lack of verisimilitude — as if actors playing on a stage have anything but the most passing resemblance to reality! Those in the latter camp point out the project’s genuine flaws — the acting and writing veered all over the place in terms of quality; the production had a tendency to try and be cool in the way your brash uncle does, not quite getting it; the ARG elements were mostly a thin veneer rather than a deep world; the characters were kind of irritating — while recognising that this is an early experiment in a young medium, that it has made discoveries, that the next such project will be much better, and the next, and the next.

So my message to the creators: don’t be disheartened. I’m a little sad there hasn’t been a massive online celebration, an after-party to celebrate the close of the play, and I rather fear that maybe those involved think it’s failed because of the lack of critical applause. If it failed, it was a glorious failure! — and we can look at what did succeed. Hundreds of followers were engaged and enjoyed themselves, a medium was explored and brought to wider attention, there were some damn good jokes. So — where next? and what does this mean for groups like mine, looking to expand the digital to the stage and the stage to the digital, looking to genuinely bring audiences into performances? Can we expect more well-funded experiments from British institutions? Will we plunge on through sea of myopic naysayers? Or will experiments fizzle out, too worried to push things further on, to real success? We’l see.

HAGGLE: day three

Vital Statistics

• Performance time: 150 mins
• Number of performers: 1
• Number of audience members: 20 participants (approx.), 25 voyeurs (approx.)
• Items sold: Novels, play texts, clothes, an interpretive dance, a love song, a rocket lamp
• Clashes with the authorities: 0
• Money earned: £35.47
• Student debt offset so far: 0.013%

Significant moments

I discovered the tactic of throwing in performances to material sales to sweeten the deal — so, for example, I got a better price for a book on offering to do an interpretive dance on the current state of British politics. This allowed me both to work in more absurd performances (ably demonstrating my saleable performance skills) and to get more money.

I was given the useful challenge of targeting my pitch to each passing potential customer, by guessing what kind of thing they would like, or which I could persuade them they needed. Love or hate? Stuff or song? Hat or scarf? My patter and amiable sales pitches have got more refined; I can now get money out of 1 in every 5 people I make stop (as opposed to those who stop of their own accord), and I can ruthlessly ditch people when I realise they have no money they’re willing to spend, rather than waste performance on them. One difficult probably is successfully spinning more than one person along at once: often I’ll be working a mark, only to try and grab another and lose the first. Very frustrating.

As expected, my prices are starting to drop considerably as it becomes more and more urgent to get rid of stuff. I have two weeks left, and come next fortnight it’s going to be crazy.

HAGGLE: day two

Vital Statistics

• Performance time: 90 mins
• Number of performers: 1
• Number of audience members: 15 participants (approx.), 20 voyeurs (approx.)
• Items sold: Novels, play texts, clothes, a love song, a tarot deck, a poem
• Clashes with the authorities: 0
• Money earned: £19.22
• Student debt offset so far: 0.009%

Significant moments

One person was buying the tarot; another offered to pay me more, upping the price. This turned it from a haggle into an auction. Objected my participant: “Are you willing to change the concept just because someone offers you money?” Answer: “yes”.

The performance took place near a drama school, and at the moment some students are undertaking a Living History, in which they spend a fortnight living as a particular social group, roleplaying and being as far as possible. In this case, they’re Mormons. As they passed me, I would occasionally accost them, try and hook them in, if I didn’t spot that they were in their own world. The collision between these performance ontologies — one pretending to actually be in alternate world, one actually being in this pretend world — was fascinating.

The prices I offer are determined by how much I think I can get for the product, and how much I want to get rid of it. Towards the end of the month, as I get increasingly desperate to get rid of stuff, the meaning of this exchange relationship will change utterly, the valuation will be different — the prices will plummet. This will be a strange performance moment.

The performance is partly very enjoyable and playful, and partly cold and vicious. I am actively engaging in manufacturing desire — and there is a moral quandary. I am deburdening my life by deliberately burdening other people’s.

HAGGLE: first day reflections

So this all happened pretty quickly.

Last week I decided that, given that I might be moving pretty soon, I had way too much stuff in my life. I also had way too much debt. And maybe because of the work on STEAL THIS PLAY and the resultant obsession with property and theft, and maybe because of this episode of This American Life which fascinatingly exposed the role of haggling in the retail economy, I thought it might be a good idea to make a haggling performance out of the process of dematerialisation.

So HAGGLE happened: an interactive performance / fire sale. The initial performance was deliberately unprepared and spontaneous: I decided to set up a stall in public, packed with books, music, DVDs, clothes and oddities, along with a (half-ironic) catalogue of performances that were also for sale (including poems, songs, hugs, arguments and apologies), a sign which said HAGGLE, and waited to see what happened.

Of course, the performance turned out not only to be lucrative but also to be incredibly fruitful. It was a success, and I’ll be repeating it several times over the next few weeks to see how it develops. Some vital statistics and notes follow; I’ll provide these after each performance, so that you can see how the performances develop, and compile them into a performance report at the end of the month.

Vital Statistics

• Performance time: 150 mins
• Number of performers: 1
• Number of audience members: 35 participants (approx.), 50 voyeurs (approx.)
• Items sold: Graphic novels, play texts, CDs, a ukulele, clothes, arguments, a poetry performance, books, a directing session
• Clashes with the authorities: 0
• Money earned: £74.37
• Student debt offset: 0.007%

Significant moments

As I initially laid out my stall, there was immediately a twenty minute long rammy to buy things. This took me rather buy surprise: there was sudden and large-scale enthusiasm to just buy my shit. I barely had any time to explain the premise of the performance; it just happened. I never achieved the same critical mass of audience members, though the flow remained steady. I am glad it started as something which just happened, with energy, rather than as a laboured event — it enriched the whole experience for me, gave it a reality.

It was difficult to get people to pay for performances. While I was able to use offering “apologies, hugs, arguments, adoring glances” as a hook that took people by surprise and brought them over to the performance, only two audience members paid me for performances rather than material objects. (Except that, of course, because every object was haggled for, every object came with its own performance: was part of a performance process.) Each of these, however, was enthralled and entertained by the idea: the one who paid be for arguments kept coming back for me, enjoying the idea of an argument as a purchasable performance.

I became a capitalist. I began to understand the draw of retail, the pleasure in converting material to lucre. I also felt liberated as the physical and performative elements of my life became the possibility and potentiality of cash. There was nothing radical or political about what I was doing (the ironies only supplied a distance from the cruel realities of capitalism, rather than criticising them): it was pure money-making.

I didn’t successfully explore the meaning of haggling and the exchange relationship with enough audience members. How can I introduce this philosophical and conversational element?

One older audience member offered to give me more than the RRP for a book, “in order to see how my guilt would react”. Intoxicated by lucre, my guilt vanished at the sight of a ten pound note. Only later did I have qualms about accepting this. But not very strong ones.

How does what I’m doing relate to the realities of haggling? For me, I don’t have as much of a stake in the specific price I offer as a professional haggler: I need the most I can get for any item, but there is no fixed relationship here to my debt. I thus go lower than a market stall owner would; there is less urgency about what I’m doing. I am a dilettante haggler. How can I insert a greater element of desperate reality to what I’m doing? Through the way I perform, or my internal attitude to the performance?

How will this performance change as the returns get lower, the hours get longer, the stuff gets tackier and cheaper? I imagine it will get less exhilarating and more depressing. Or will it get more liberating as I shed my material skins? Will I have the willpower to push it to its conclusion? And, as one friend commented on my initial announcement, what is the morality of dematerialising myself by burdening others? — relieving them of cash only to increase their weight in life?