Godot?! Where?!?!

February 2^nd 1999: Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías becomes President of Venezuela

People are happy. At last someone can bring about change and help the country move forward.

The country splits in half.

Half sees the corruption.

Half does not.

5^th of March 2013: Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías dies from cancer in Cuba.

Nicolás Maduro assumes his position as the designated successor to the presidency.

The economy crashes

The violence rises

The people are protesting

There’s no food in markets

Healthcare is rough

Everything is too expensive

People die

People leave

But most of all

People wait.

In the recent “times of crisis” the Venezuelan people have been doing more waiting than they are used to. They wait in lines for hours before the sun rises just to get their basic needs from the supermarket. They wait to see the day when everything will improve. They wait for the day they will be able to go back. “They are waiting for a miracle,” some people say.

It seems that right now, more than ever, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot would resonate more than ever with a Venezuelan audience. But Venezuela is a big country; so where to stage the play?

I would propose staging it in one of the “favela” areas in Caracas, the capital city. These places have high concentrations of low income people in them; the demographic from which most of the supporters of the current government came from. But now they are no longer the privileged “pueblo mismo!” (“town/people itself,” an expression unique to Chávez that does not really make much sense grammatically) that Chávez would grant most of his attention to. They too are now stuck in the limbo under a regime that does not know how to deal with the current situation. They too are waiting.

The performance would be free, a price that would not impede anyone from attending. A common space where everyone would feel welcome, something like a plaza, a park, maybe even a person’s house; but the play has to take place in one of the favelas so that the local community will feel more as if the play is about them; meant for them.

The performers would ideally be people from the same favela where it is being performed. This allows the audience to feel more easily connected to the performance and avoids the cynicism that the government has implanted in people’s minds when they see anything comes from the “bourgeoisie” (even if they are only bourgeois by comparison).

They would wear normal clothes instead of the costumes Beckett suggested; something like jeans and T-shirts and baseball caps. This is because it will allow them to see themselves in the play, rather than having to grasp a foreign story that does not seem to be so related to their home.

The play would be translated into Spanish and would include Venezuelan vernacular vocabulary in order to better connect with the audience.

There is still a question of what exactly would this play say to the Venezuelan people. They would observe this play about waiting and then think about what? My objective is not to get the lower income people from Venezuela to turn against the government, but I simply want them to understand the situation they find themselves in. I want to break the barrier of stubbornness that a lot of people still cling onto. Instead of just ignoring the situation that is happening, they should become self-aware of the condition that they are in; because it is not that different from that of the rest of the people in the country. When people wait in lines to buy food, they do so together. The next step beyond the realization of their condition is the inquiry of what to do about that condition. Will the people be compelled to go to the streets and protest? Or will they simply keep waiting? 

Time Changes. Time is Eternal.

                  Time.             What it is?                 What it does?                   What it means?

            How it governs us?                                   How it transforms us?

                                                                                                    How we capture it?

                 How we deal with it?                                         How we perceive it?

Why is it there?                     Is it more than just a construct?                   Is it out of our grasp?

                        What can we do to capture something like time?

They said this was a hard prompt to address.

                                                                                   And so far, it is.

Time just happens to be one of the most complex things probably any human being can understand, yet not really understand. As an intuitive concept we can all grasp it. An action does not only take place, it also takes time. One can’t be there without the other. And this is a notion that almost everyone has, and yet trying to define time is something that always eludes us.

            But asking what time is might just be the wrong question.

                        It is likely something that lies beyond our grasp.

                                    Or rather, beyond the grasp of words.

We all know what time is, even if we can’t put it into words. And that might just be enough to get by.

But if asking “what is time?” is beyond us, how can we show that we all understand time?

We can all understand the effect that time brings about.

                                    Change.                                  Things change over time.

Now take Tehching Hsieh’s One Year Performance 1980-1981. A man with a clock in a room who would punch the clock every hour for an entire year, which would cause a picture of him to be taken.  

He always wore the same suit.

He was always positioned on the same side of the clock.

He always kept the same facial expression.

He was always in the same room.

But he started his performance with his head clean shaven, and let his hair grow out as the year passed by. And when one looks at the images that he took of himself in a rapid slideshow it is impossible not to notice the spinning handles of the clock, a motion that has come to symbolize the passage of time for any individual that knows how to read a clock with handles, as well as to many others who don’t.

To me, the elements of the piece are in conflict.

Firstly, we can “see” time passing by (or at least a quasi-universal symbol of it). Secondly, we can see it’s effect in Hsieh: his hair growing out. Thirdly, his position is not always perfectly the same; when watching the slideshow in rapid succession we can see that he shifts position, which is a reassuring sign that the pictures are real. Fourthly, he actually missed punching the clock 133 times. (http://www.tehchinghsieh.com/)                     All these elements reassure us of the passing of time. We see change, the principal effect of time on us. And we can see that Hsieh the human is still unable to really keep up with time. His piece is not perfectly clean. He missed punches. He isn’t always in the same exact place. This is because he too gets tired. 94 out of the 133 times he missed punching the clock were because he was asleep. (http://www.tehchinghsieh.com/) Just how I’ve been late to class because I oversleep, Hsieh was late to punch his clock because he overslept. He is human too! He too is unable to fully capture time!...

In a sense, the piece is about Hsieh’s struggle against time. A struggle that we all feel, against this “thing” that we cannot see, feel, hear, or fully comprehend. And yet it binds our life. We cannot keep it from moving forward. And if we don’t keep up, it’ll leave us behind. Only that you cannot be behind, because time is always sweeping you along. Only that because you haven’t kept up, you are in an uncomfortable position. Sort of like losing your balance on the metro because you aren’t able to hold onto anything. Or like falling asleep in the metro and missing your station, and being in a worse position because of it. No matter how hard Hsieh tried to keep up with punching the clock every single hour, no matter the fact that “to [him] […] art is not like a career, it’s [his] life” (https://vimeo.com/16280427) he still did not succeed in fully avoiding the fundamental challenge that time poses to us: that we must always keep moving.

But then there’s the conflict.

Things in Hsieh’s piece do not always change.

His costume. His face. His orientation from the clock. The room.

Time does not change these things.

He has succeeded in taming time, even if just a little bit.

I said that Hsieh did not succeed in avoiding the fundamental challenge of time, but maybe that was not his main objective.

Many things in Hsieh’s piece represent change, time in motion.

Many things in Hsieh’s piece also represent permanency, time in stillness.

The permanency is just as important as the change. They are both things that affect the way we see time. While nothing is permanent and neither Hsieh nor I are trying to state that, there is a certain element of the eternal that exists in the way we capture time. “La pasión eterna que duró unos días.” (Las Rosas de Ayer, Astor Piazzolla)

As soon as we experience a moment it has entered our memory, and that too is an important part of how we perceive time. The permanency of things gives us a sense that bodies are more than still images of a given instant. They remain through time. And so things that remain for a long time feel as if they will remain forever. “Nothing lasts forever” I heard somebody say somewhere. But that doesn’t mean we can’t believe it will. It isn’t conflicting with our observations, even if it is conflicting with logic, to assume that something may last forever.

            And so, the fact that several elements of Hsieh’s performance remain constant gives us a sense that that is the way things had always been. It can be easy to imagine that Hsieh – or at least the Hsieh in the images from the performance – had always existed in that room and will always remain there. It does not change with time. Maybe for the universe it will. Maybe we know it eventually did change. But in the moment, some things simply seem permanent, and it is not until we decide to consciously think about their end that we realize that nothing is eternal.

            Except for time.

                        Whose handles just keep looping and looping.

                                    Promising that the next day will come.

                                               That the next hour will come.

                                                           That there’s a future.

                                               That the handles will keep looping around the clock.

                                    And that we will keep moving through time.

                        For even if we change.

            Our existance remains.

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.

Rock Stew

Honestly speaking, I could not enjoy Stew’s Notes of a Native Song. I was exhausted from a long week of sleepless nights and a PE class that always leaves me with sore legs. So yeah, I was dozing off during the first half of the performance. Although I think one of the biggest reasons why I could not enjoy the performance is because I was expecting so much more. Something more like Passing Strange, of which I absolutely adored every single bit of. The witty writing. The melody and rock-style melody that weaved everything together. The engaging narrative. The expressions of the actors. All of it was just much more engaging for me than Notes of a Native Song, and I honestly don’t really understand why, because I’ve always been a fan of rock.

Although that might be a big part of the reason why, because while I have always been a fan of rock music, I was never the type to immediately pay attention to lyrics in music. As a matter of fact, a lot of the “rock” music that I listen to are purely instrumental. For me the melody comes first, and listening to, and understanding, lyrics on the first try requires an extreme amount of effort from me. The worst part (for me) is Stew actually made the songs in a way that emphasizes the importance of the lyrics. Especially in the first ones, the melody was not anything specific that was easy to get absorbed into. It was more of a musicalized speech than a song itself. In the later songs this was less the case, which I think is part of the reason why I became more engaged towards that part of the performance.

One thing that I think made it really hard for me in the beginning had to do with the assumption that the audience would immediately grasp the concept of the performance through the songs. I did not realize the performance was about James Baldwin at the beginning, even though I had actually heard about that beforehand. In the later songs, when Stew started to introduce each new song, I started to become more engaged in the whole show. I felt like I was actually getting something, some ideas, other than listening to rock music that, for some reason, did not really appeal to me. Because as Stew said, “ideas matter.”

But speaking about the music, it was not all just unappealing sounds. I was absolutely amazed by the skill and energy of the drummer, and it’s the moment I remember most vividly from the performance. His solo, I mean. Which came in at a moment that I cannot really recall right now. Because the rest of it was hard to focus on. I also adored the violin, but that is probably because I really like listening to violins in general. People always seek to find comfort in familiarity, and I think the fact that the parts of the performance that I found more enjoyable were the more instrumental ones is a clear example of that.

Other than that, visual aesthetic elements in Notes of a Native Song did not ever seem to be very meaningful. There was a moment in which Stew changed the hat he was wearing, but I had no idea why he was doing that and what he did afterwards did not tell me anything about that. There was also a moment when Stew changed the part of the stage he was positioned in, but that also did not strike me as very interesting. Possibly, it is only because of the space he performed in. Maybe in a more intimate setting, these changes in position would have been more impactful. But with the distance from the stage that was in place in the black box at NYUAD, this did not come across very effectively.

But then something that really threw me off was the whole idea of dealing with the “indexical present” (as Adrian Piper defines it, “the concrete, immediate here-and-now”). I had heard already twice (both in Stew’s playwrighting workshop and when he came to talk to our class) about the way that he would perform. He always spoke about his rock concerts being something that feeds off the way the audience reacts to it. He spoke about changing his performance according to the general mood of the audience. And I had heard twice about the frikkin Kanye allusion to explain the relationship between Wright and Baldwin. And of course, I found it amazing how he said he one day decided to stop the show mid-way and just explain the whole thing to his teenage audience and the teenagers’ response of awe.

But then when that happened in the performance at NYUAD I was severely underwhelmed by the way it was done. The halt in the middle of the performance seemed to well rehearsed. All of the musicians stopped almost at the same time right when Stew was telling them to just stop the music. And then he proceeded to tell the story, but it did not feel as impactful as he had told before.

Although there was a moment where I could notice that he was almost just speaking as he pleased. He was explaining a song and was about to put on his glasses to start playing a song, but he arrested the gesture and went back to speaking to the audience for a few more minutes. That moment caught my attention. It seemed like a genuine attempt at following his own gut. Maybe it is just because I had already heard him speak twice about his performance style, but when Stew did that I really felt like he was living in the “moment,” in the “indexical present.”

I think that this performance was an attempt at being something it did not accomplish. Not for me at least. The performance was trying to be something that would bring together an audience and that would at the same time tell some stories about James Baldwin. In the state I was in when I saw it, the latter did not connect very effectively, and it didn’t feel as if the performance really managed to accomplish the former. There is a divide that takes place as soon as the performers are separated from the audience through the use of a specific staging form, like the proscenium arch-like setup in the black box. I remember how back in high school, me and some classmates would sometimes sit in a classroom, someone would start playing a tune on the guitar, and somebody else would start to sing or tell a story. That was engaging. That was something that flowed with the reactions of the audience then present. The safe environment that is created when you know the people who are performing is something indispensable. Something that Stew did not have under his belt when performing here. And something that was difficult for me to give him, because I, like many others, simply want to watch a performance for afar sometimes. Sometimes don’t have the energy to fully and emotionally engage with a person we don’t fully know. And of course, simply because how are you going to meet over 100 people right before the start of a show? This is why making full use of the “indexical present” is difficult: it’s not practical for commercial performances. At least not in the case of music (because I have seen improvised shows that are created on the spot with only some input from the audience, and stand-up comedy is something that always must keep the “indexical present” present). But then again, maybe I’m wrong about that. Maybe a lot of the music that took place on that stage was improvised and actually was reacting to the audience. I would never know though, since I only saw the show once. And even if that was the case, perhaps I was simply not in the same mood as the rest of the audience. It’s tough to be a spectator in a sea of many.

Accepting Queerness and Musical

I don’t quite remember how the conversation came about.

I don’t even quite remember if it was in one of those long empty main streets in Khalifa City, surrounded by dirty sandlots and residential compounds, or in that one long empty avenue in Margarita Island, surrounded by trees and sculptures which adorned the space between the two ways of the road. I remember the sky was a calm after-school blue.

But the banality of the setting is irrelevant. What’s really relevant is that I was talking to my mom in the car. I’ve always seen my mom and I still see her as a very progressive person. She always speaks of not being able to identify with the things that other Venezuelans usually talk about and not being able to identify with it all. I always saw her as somebody who was progressive and accepting. Because of that what she said on that day actually shocked me. The conversation that afternoon drifted towards sexuality and I was mentioning the case of somebody that I knew who was bisexual. She snapped. She said “that’s not natural.” The way biology works, is to support heterosexual couples. That’s how we reproduce. That’s how the human race survives. I then mentioned how at one point I thought I was homosexual. She murmured and kept looking at the road. “That’s not natural.”

Every time a conversation about how Latin American societies are not very open to the idea of non-heterosexual couples I think back to this incident. I still think my mother is a really progressive and open-minded person, and in fact, if I asked her about this topic now, after the rise in LGBTQ movements that have happened over the last two-to-three years, and in a setting different drive in a lazy afternoon, she might say something different. But it shows how ingrained heteronormative relationships are in the collective mind of the society I’m from. While in Venezuela I don’t remember meeting a single person who was not heterosexual, and to this day the idea of someone who isn’t is something that strikes me as hard to deal with. Not because I reject the idea of a non-heterosexual orientation, but simply because I’ve never had to deal with it and it’s just different. Unusual. Queer.

In Stacy Wolf’s book A Problem Like Maria about the possibility of interpreting the famous musical The Sound of Music from a lesbian or feminist point of view, she first provides an overview of how throughout history, musical theater has mainly focused on heteronormative narratives. “The musical appears to reflect the dominant values of the culture: conservative, sexist, and homophobic.”¹ “In most cases, the message of musicals is that heterosexuality is both natural and mandatory and that women should know their place.”¹ (p9) This is the common interpretation of the narratives of many popular American musicals, including The Sound of Music. But as Stacy Wolf says, it is possible to interpret things in a different way. “There is no ‘natural’ way to read a text”^2­ (p25) People will always find different meanings in things, according to their culture, their personal history, and the ideas they have been exposed to; and Stacy Wolf wrote a 200+ page book about how it is possible to interpret The Sound of Music as a lesbian/feminist narrative, as opposed to the traditional heteronormative interpretation most viewers would associate with it.

In her book, Stacy Wolf discusses more than just the way in which The Sound of Music can be interpreted as a queer narrative through the strength of the main character Maria. I found it really interesting that Wolf quotes Alexander Doty and Corey Creekmur saying that “queerness is ‘at the core of mainstream culture even though that that culture tirelessly insists that its images ideologies and readings [are] always only about heterosexuality.’”³ (p31-32) She mentions that “many men in musicals are constructed as feminine, if not gay.”⁴ (p41) These ideas lead to the idea that musicals provide a stage for performing queerness. Song is not something that is limited to a stage. Song is something that invades our everyday life, something that any human being with a voice can engage in if they wish to. And this allows us to impersonate things that we would normally not. This does not necessarily make much difference; I remember singing the song “I Feel Pretty” from Bernstein’s West Side Story and clearly enunciating the line “I feel pretty and witty and gay,” literally saying “I feel gay” when I was still 15 and me and my friends from school would obviously laugh at that stuff. But the song was catchy, and so we would sing that. We would impersonate Maria (from West Side Story), a female character singing about how she is in love with a guy. It does not necessarily affect us; me and my friends still remain heterosexual (as far as I know), but that does not remove the fact that we did that. In a sense, one starts to become more accepting of things like queerness, by doing in a performance that allows you to engage with it. Wolf has convinced me that musicals are really a central part of queer expression and culture.

Except that according to Wolf it isn’t. As she said, it’s mainly heteronormative narratives. But the point is that one can see it differently. Regardless of whether or not being heterosexual is truly the “natural” thing to do, non-heterosexual orientations exist, and it is a fact that we can no longer deny. Because of that, it is important that we become more accepting of these perspectives. We cannot force such a large group of people (LGBTQ) to hide away their desires. Becoming more accepting of LGBTQ people is a well-marked step towards global acceptance of people. Towards world peace. Ok, maybe not that far. But it certainly allows for the creation of a more open-minded world to live in. This is why it is important to be able to view certain narratives as being from a group that is less represented. We learn more about the group, and eventually become more accepting of the group.

Pehlwani in Dubai

Anticipation had been building up for weeks. But it wasn’t too high. After all, it was only a trip to Dubai. Having lived in Abu Dhabi, I had already been there enough times to feel as if a trip to Dubai was the same as a trip to eat KFC at the mall just down the road from where I live. Only fancier. There was still anticipation though. This trip was to “the fish market” which sounded more exciting; still Dubai though. I kept telling all my friends who had never heard about Pehlwani that I was busy on Friday because I was going to go watch Pakistani men wrestling in thongs with my theater class. I have to say, I got less laughs than I expected.

At last the day came and with it the two-hour long ride to get to Dubai when you aren’t in a fast, 5 person vehicle. Same road as usual. Some buildings and trees. Then just trees. Then sand. And then some buildings, but without the trees. That’s when you know you are in Dubai. We drove through the city and after a bit the skyscrapers began to dissipate. We weren’t going to downtown Dubai. We stopped at a hotel for a toilet break; apparently the final “decent” stop before our destination.

The bus took off and drove for a few minutes and left us at the side of a sandlot that seemed straight out of Sharjah (the emirate next to Dubai, which is often mocked by people from Abu Dhabi and Dubai for being the less developed emirate of the three). We were on the edge of the metropolis; only a few palm trees, the road, and a small building that looked like a power plant surrounded the place, with buildings in the further vicinity.

The place was bustling with brown men dressed in shalwar kameez, although some of them were wearing jeans and a T-shirt. On one rectangular space on one corner of the larger sandlot, it seemed like three games of cricket were crammed into the space of an indoors football court, and on the other corner people played volleyball, although it also seemed like they were cramming their players to fit on either side of the net. The place was lively, but it also felt hostile. We weren’t tourists contributing to the Pakistani economy by visiting their country.  We were the privileged students of NYUAD intruding in the space where these men, probably all workers, came to have fun and escape the stress of their tough migrant life. There wasn’t the slightest sense of danger, but we didn’t belong there.

In the larger sandlot, there was a circle marked by stones (cement blocks, bricks, plain rocks) which was wide enough to comfortably fit a troupe of thirty dancers. Inside there was a small, circular, elevated patch of sand that was wide enough to comfortably fit maybe only one. A middle-aged man in a shalwar kameez began spraying water on it to make sure that the sand was moist. That was the ring, the arena where in minutes two men would be struggling against each other for some sort of glory. There were a few brown men – who could easily be distinguished from the rest because of their bright western clothing and bigger bellies – who were talking to people. Them and another white man, with a camera equipped with an expensive looking lens, as well as ourselves were there, trying to document the event.

As the twilight began to settle I sat on one of the rocks that made up the big circle. I was trying to fit in, by keeping a straight, very slightly scrunched up face, and by sitting with my knees apart and the heels of my feet on the floor. It was painful and it was futile, because my light blue hoodie and brown shorts would never blend into this place. Without any sort of calling, only by the presence of the man spraying water on the small circle, people began to congregate around the big circle. Some sat on the rocks, others stood huddling right behind. There were a few men that were likely to be the organizers of the event. Somehow, they seemed wiser than the rest, an illusion created by old age and a position of power. One of these men stood in the middle and began to shout something in Urdu towards the side where the most audience had gathered. He never bothered to turn around, so I could not see his face. But the event had now started. Something was bound to happen. Anytime soon.

From behind the circle three young men suddenly jumped out, fists in the air and on one leg, asserting their presence with their loud voices. They weren’t dressed in any way that was particularly different from the others. They were dancing. They kicked their heels up right after the other and moved their fists up and down like in the opening of Johnny Bravo. One of them was slim and sported sharp, rectangular glasses. He looked like he had studied engineering, and I was suddenly reminded that all these men could well be highly educated citizens, forced to come work here to earn the money they need for their families back home. The three men danced their way to the middle circle, where they stopped, touched the ground, and remained silent for a moment, as if in prayer. They were probably praying so that the fighter they were supporting would win.

This event reminded me of the shows that boxers and MMA fighters often put up right before they walk into the ring. With great energy, they fire up the audience and excite the support that they need to win the match. Since nobody who looked like a fighter came out after the silence came back to the circle, I was expecting another show to come out as well. And indeed, coming from the other side of the circle a single man screamed and danced his way into the circle for a prayer. I guess not everyone can have the dedicated support of three people. The organizer man kept saying some more stuff in Urdu, out of which I managed to make out the word “pahlwan.” Now I could be sure somebody would start. While he spoke, it was possible to catch a glimpse of a man behind the audience who was stripping behind the audience and putting on a red thong over his underwear. A pahlwan; a Pehlwani wrestler.

Around this time, I could no longer bear the pain from my legs from sitting down in the position I was, and in an effort to not look too foreign, I decided to stand with the other Pakistani men. Some of my classmates told me I blended it quite well. I from the moment the man next to me began eyeing my clothes while trying to avoid my gaze that I still stood out. I decided to change my location in the circle to escape the complaints of a couple of my classmates trying to get the people with cameras to move out of the way so they could take good pictures and maybe win themselves 100AED from the university. After I had moved the organizer man once again began shouting something in Urdu. This time he faced in the direction of where I had been sitting. It was not my day.

The wrestlers finally went into the ring. The fit guy wearing a red thong and his opponent - a less fit guy wearing a light blue thong with a pattern on it. The two went into the circle and their heads connected. Held hands and after a sign from the organizer, they both began to push. They struggled against each other and for a moment the fit guy seemed like he was going to lose. His opponent had managed to get a hold of his back and he lay on his knees, his torso curled down, right next to the floor. They had strayed close to the edge of the circle, and so the referee stopped the match. They both stood up, walked towards the center of the circle. The fit guy went back on his knees and the man in the blue thong went back on top of him, and after the referee spoke once more, they began to struggle against each other once more. The fit guy pushed his opponent and heaved his opponent of his back. One could feel the crowd agitating, clapping and cheering. The man in the blue thong had been pushed down and was on his back. He had lost. The two wrestlers went back into the circle and stood side by side. The referee held their hands and lifted the hand of the fit guy. People cheered.

The winner then proceeded to go around the circle of the audience with his hands out and people would give him some money. Mostly just coins, although some 5 or 10 dirham notes were pulled out. This was really the only reward he seemed to get. The audience’s reaction to the winners was far from some intense cheering or recognition by the community. Straight faces, although now peppered with smiles and laughter, still dominated the circle of migrants. Not many people seemed particularly excited or happy of the man’s victory. But one could feel the satisfaction. The fit guy put on some stylish read and black sweatpants and for the rest of the event lingered around, shirtless and proud.

After this moment, the rest of the event seemed to be much less organized. More men came into the circle, doing the same dance and with their voices equally high, made their way into the circle and more men in thongs went in to fight. The inside of the wide circle became a hodge-podge of prayers, sweat, and excited photographers. At one point, during a fight, less than a meter away from the action, a man had danced his way in and was in the middle of touching the floor and praying, completely oblivious to the action occurring right next to him. I was probably more worried about him than he was of himself.

As the fights progressed many things became apparent, both from the organization of the event and the way the wrestlers fought.

The event, even though run by a specific group of men who had the last say on who came into the ring, was something the entire community there present was involved in. At one point the men standing next to me began shouting so that one of the organizers would come to where they were in the middle of a fight. When I asked them what was happening, they feigned not being able to speak English and while their inhospitable faces articulated something that sounded like “next Friday” they pointed at another man right behind them who seemed younger and kinder than them; and who was also much bigger. I deduced that they had just registered their friend to take part in next week’s Pehlwani match.

The matches got more interesting as they went on. The men would engage in the fight always in the same way: foreheads touching and one hand holding the opponent’s hand. I believe there was only one time that I saw them wish good luck to each other before a match. But the crowd became more and more engaged in the battles as the event went on. The brown and vicious sweaty bodies that pushed and turned in the middle arena were playing as if they were playing cricket, like the men from the smaller sandlot who kept batting the ball inside the Pehlwani ring. It was intense and exciting, and one could clearly see more than just their muscles being put to work. All their efforts were directed towards keeping their back away from the ground. Even if it meant giving up an advantageous position, the wrestlers would push up with their head and feet to arch their backs up, because everyone knows that as soon as some sand sticks on their back, it’s over. The fun is over, and the loser must take the walk of shame while the winner gets to collect his prize money. The audience became more and more excited with each fight, clapping and screaming and laughing and talking to each other. I could feel people pushing behind me and smiling and chatting while the tussle of wrestlers and cameras kept turning inside the ring. Then suddenly, a battle ended without anyone’s back touching the sand. Everyone got up and left. I asked, and I didn’t understand what I was told. But when I asked if it was over, they said yes. It was time to go back to the world of straight faces and foreign feelings.

Empathy?

In his essay Aristotle’s Coercive System of Tragedy, theater practitioner Augusto Boal describes the way in which the structure of Greek tragedy with its elements as defined by Aristotle. He describes how the system created by applying the Aristotelian structure of a tragedy, which involves a character that possesses both a certain amount of social ethos (so that one may relate to them) and hamartia – a “tragic flaw.” The character then undergoes peripeteia, a “reversal of fortune” where the character’s situation changes for the worse. Then there is anagnorisis, a “recognition” the character undergoes where they realize the reality of their situation. There is then an inevitable catastrophe that takes place, which causes the audience to experience catharsis. The idea Boal describes is that of a plot structure where the audience identifies with the main character, being seeing themselves in it. Boal states in his conclusion that when seeing a “Western” film, “[The villain] does all the evil he possibly can, and we empathize with him and vicariously we do the same evil,” while relating “Western” films (through the perspective of the villain) to the Aristotelian structure of tragedy. He also mentions that “‘Westerns,’ like children’s games, serve the Aristotelian purpose of purging all the spectator’s aggressive tendencies.” Which demonstrates that his understanding that through the feeling of sympathy towards the “tragic hero” we are “purged” (catharsis) of our immoral desires, because we see ourselves in the catastrophe.

In his conclusion, Boal also makes a point of saying that Aristotle’s “coercive system of tragedy” can never be used during a social revolution. He states this because during a revolution there is no clearly defined social ethos that the audience can identify with and thus it is not as effective in this situation.

Empathy can to a great extent be used to make a performance more engaging and more impactful. For instance, Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya is a play which relies foremost on the audience feeling empathy for the characters in the story. Louis Malle’s film of André Gregory’s production of this play is an interesting example of techniques used to increase the level of empathy felt by the audience. The production itself has a generally realistic performance style: the movement of the actors are naturalistic, and the costumes are realistic (according to a contemporary era). This allows the audience to empathize more easily with the, as they would be more capable of seeing themselves in the situation of the characters, since it is portrayed in a realistic way. The film makes it easier to empathize by allowing us to observe the detail in the actors’ expression. While the typical un-naturalistic change of viewpoint of film may make the experience less realistic, the closeness to the actors’ faces allows an immersion into the scene which would not be possible if the audience was simply sitting in front of the performance like in a typical proscenium arch stage.

However, the production also has various elements that make it more difficult to empathize with the production. In the production, any element of comedy in the script was enhanced to the point that the performance felt like a tragicomedy. The comedy detracted from the seriousness of the performance, but did not do so in the same way that comic relief does, where it “refreshes” the audience’s mind in order to make it easier for them to be involved in the more dramatic parts. The comedy in the production felt out of place, since uncle Vanya and Aastrov were the only ones who seemed to carry it out, and the rest of the characters did not react so positively to it. In the film, the performance space and the cut between acts was also a problem when it came to empathizing. In the live performance, it is possible that the setting – the run-down theater in 42^nd street – could have given a sensation of nostalgia to the audience, thus priming them to feel more emphatic towards the performance. Through the film this is not the case, as it is much more difficult to grasp that “atmosphere of nostalgia” that would be perceived in real life, where one is completely surrounded by the theater. Between every act in the film, there was an explanation from the director to a woman, explaining that between each act there is a time lapse. Through these explanations the audience gets a sense of this time lapse, but they are far too short for this purpose, and at times simply seem to be intruding the performance itself. They take the audience out of the narrative, which makes it difficult to get back into the narrative and empathize with the characters. 

Don't Follow the Yellow Brick Road.

Expectation is a tricky thing to tamper with. When going to watch Yellow Brick Road the audience should have been told to completely let go of any expectations of similarities to the source material, which the audience is told beforehand is The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. As the play unfolds, the audience is taken through a journey which at first glance is very similar to one’s expectation of what The Wizard of Oz should be like: it starts with Dorothy in Kansas, then there’s the tornado, she lands in a place with “munchkins,” she meets the scarecrow, then the tin-man, then the lion, then they fall asleep under the witch’s spell in the flower field; but after this point the events no longer matches the storyline that was preset in my mind, whose only experience with The Wizard of Oz had been in performing an adaptation of the film in a theater in Venezuela. The events that follow after the scene with the flowers (from which there does not seem to be a logical transition, as Dorothy and the lion are simply left asleep) were a problem for me the first time I watched the play. After having seen the production once, I felt obliged to see it one more time, because I felt as though in my attempt to relate what I was seeing to what I knew as The Wizard of Oz I had completely missed out on the play. The frustration that my situation caused was enhanced by the fact that, while the events no longer matched the storyline of the source material, subtle elements – such as the green lights in the entrance of the waiting room, which alluded to the Emerald City of The Wizard of Oz – kept reinforcing the idea that, somehow, this was still the same story I was expecting. This was something that likely happened to more than one person in the audience, whose expectations – similar to mine – were not met. This, I find, was an issue with the way the play was presented, because an average audience would then have been unlikely to enjoy the play for what its true worth. Perhaps if the play had been introduced differently, by telling the audience not to expect The Wonderful Wizard of Oz then this could have been avoided, while still preserving the possibility for links to be made back to the source material due to the unequivocal similarities in the events.

The “true worth” of this performance dawned on me once I decided to let go of any expectations I had. The production is more of a simple sequence of scenes that allude to some sort of journey, which just happens to have a striking similarity with that of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. This sequence, however, appears to be more symbolic than narrative. Through impeccably accurate sound effects to accompany the movement on stage and visually stunning movements, lighting, and costume, the audience is made to feel three identifiable stages of a narrative. The first, where the colorless, simplistic depiction of Kansas, the intruding loudness of the tornado and the inhospitable attitude of the munchkins, give the impression that the character Dorothy, denoted by a plush dog and an apron, is unsafe in a cold, foreign world. There is then an immediate break as music that one would relate to a jolly farm environment, a warm light, and the silly expression of the scarecrow create a humorous atmosphere. The humor and relative light-heartedness continues throughout the following scenes, as they meet the tin-man, the lion, fall asleep through the flower fields, and are then seen singing a happy song around a campfire at night. The light-heartedness of the scenes and the underlying humor of the scenes gives a feel of friendliness, and even without words, there is a sense that these four characters are now friends. This friendship is then reassured through the next two scenes where the group (together) does a slow walk in a warm light and exciting music, endures a barrage of fruit that apparently gets Dorothy all bloodied up, and together are rejected by the cold people in white at the waiting room. The formation and reassuring of this friendship constitutes the second part of the journey. The final part is one where Dorothy is left back alone as she started, and are simply the next two scenes, where Dorothy’s friends are each “captured”, one by one, by a chorus of abstract, inhospitable beings and then throws water at the witch to make her “melt,” and then is taken back to a circle of rubble which, by the fact that the house lights are turned on, one gets the impression that it is over (and thus she is back to Kansas). While the progression of the scenes does not seem to have a logical progression, the audience can still get a sense of a story being unfold, and thus empathizes with the situation of the characters, creating an emotional experience. There is a question, however, of whether or not the audience would be able to recognize the narrative sequence if they had no previous knowledge of The Wizard of Oz, or how effective the performance would have been in that case.

Technically, the play itself is also very well carried out. The movements of the actors are very precise, and the auditory elements that go along with the movement is consistent with the visual action. The way that it was carried out is also very interesting, since there is no spoken dialogue and the actors and the people doing sound are constantly visible to the audience, even when they are not directly involved in the action. The lack of dialogue and, instead, the heavy emphasis on physical movement in order to tell the narrative might be an attempt to create a sort of etic theater, a theater that transcends cultural barriers, an idea I have encountered once while reading The Art of Stillness, The Theatre Practice of Tadashi Suzuki by Paul Allain. Allain wrote about how Tadashi Suzuki attempted to create, through heavy emphasis on physical movement and not so much on language, a type of theater that could transcend cultural barriers, as movement is a form of communication that is much more visceral and direct than language, which is interpreted differently by every individual’s own perspective of the world. It appears to me that the endeavor to rid Yellow Brick Road of spoken language was a step in this direction. The fact that the actors and the sound production are always visible by the audience at reminded me of Bertolt Brecht’s “Alienation Effect” and when during the talkback session on Friday evening people began to mention that they saw similarities between the production and the real world refugee crisis, this directorial choice made sense. The fact that the performance is made in the round, and that the intimacy of the space and the texture of the seating makes one more aware of the audience also adds to this effect of alienation from the events of the “narrative.”  The audience becomes more aware of the fact that they are watching a performance. However, the effect is not as pronounced and may not even have even been intended, as the effect does not detract much from the emotional experience of the play itself, which overall amounted to an enjoyable and very interesting experience.