Maps. Performances. Abu Dhabi. NYUAD.

2pm Sunday, November 14, 2016.

If you read Atoka’s blog you know the story.

If you haven’t then go read that (https://wp.nyu.edu/atokajothinkingtheater/), there’s no point in repeating what’s already been said.

One thing I would like to add, is that we do acknowledge that the “official” performances typically take place in the Arts Center or right outside the Arts Center, but as Atoka has already said, there were no public official performances that we could have noticed at the time we walked around the campus.

Now as for the two paragraphs about my contribution (Atoka was amazing at saying things that I did, but nonetheless):

While making observations on campus, I think my main contribution had to do with coming up with potential definitions for performance. Thanks to a meeting I had had with professor Debra Levine the previous week, I had already considered some ideas for defining this term. One of them can be found in Richard Schechner’s “Performance Studies An introduction.” He says: “’doing’ is the activity of all that exists […]. ‘Showing doing’ is performing: pointing to, underlining, and displaying doing.” (page 28) I felt a little hesitant while sharing the definition, because in a sense it’s an unfair advantage that I casually happened to have… or perhaps it is a disadvantage to not be able to frame one’s own definition out of nowhere. Regardless, when I told Atoka about the definition, I said something like “It’s to bring attention to action” and Atoka misunderstood the word “attention” for “tension,” which is how another definition came about, which Atoka wrote as “Action with tension,” where the tension is simply energy consciously put into doing the action. By this rule, we discarded the possibility of something as banal as walking (unless one walks in a particular way to draw attention) as being a performance. Lastly, the definition that Atoka mentions as “Debra Levine’s definition” was something that she loosely stated while I met with her: that “all expressive behavior is performance.”

When marking important locations in Abu Dhabi, what I mostly provided was my knowledge of the city’s layout, having lived here for 4 years. I pointed out the where the National Theater (the one near Abu Dhabi media) is and how close it is to the Ministry of Culture and Knowledge development and how there is a branch annex to the theater itself. I also mentioned how the Abu Dhabi Education Council (ADEC) lies between the center of the city (what is often called the “Hamdan street area”) and the Khalifa City area, which allows it to be close to the high concentration of schools in both Khalifa City and the actual city. This, as well as the fact that the ministry of presidential affairs is very close to the presidential palace, seems to indicate that the government institutions that regulate other institutions usually lie close to something relevant to their job (which is not always strictly the case, since the ministry of culture is far from, for example, the National Theater of Abu Dhabi (also known as the “Breakwater Theater,” to avoid confusing with the National Theater) is quite far from where it is, despite being one of the most active “official” performance venues in the emirate). I mentioned how isolated areas like Khalifa City, Masdar City and Yas Island – which are all typically spaces for high-income residents – are far from the Hamdan street area where a lot of lower income immigrants live. I also mentioned how even further apart (towards the Khalifa City area, but a bit more south) is Mussafah, Abu Dhabi’s industrial area and a neighborhood of even lower income people.

Now that the contributions are there, just something I wanted to comment on:

About Saadiyat: this island almost exists in a different dimension from the rest of Abu Dhabi. The island is not only physically separated from the city, but ideologically as well. While criticism of the UAE’s highly successful government is still something that is not mentioned, the fact that NYUAD is an American institution seems to allow for the engagement of topics of study that involve topics which are usually banned in most official institutions (sex, transgenderism, swearing, etc), which in spaces like my school would be heavily scrutinized until it is made sure nothing that could be offensive to the UAE’s culture was being stated. I rule out the possibility of this being due to the fact that NYUAD is a higher education institution, because for instance ACS (the American Community School) also often goes “unfiltered” with things such as performances, as I’ve heard there are performances that have been shown there involving swearing and kissing (which in my school would be completely banned; we would have to resort to simply alluding to these things). There is an unspoken rule about spaces like NYUAD and ACS, but especially NYUAD as being places with their own set of rules that do not conform fully to the general rules of Abu Dhabi. It is interesting that such a place would exist in Saadiyat, a man-made island; a land that was not supposed to be there. It will be interesting to see how the development of the cultural district of Saadiyat takes shape: whether it will look more like NYUAD or like the rest of the city.