Authenticity and theatre

But then, what did I expect from a theatrical performance? Is it not a contradiction in itself that the director Kaegi was making us implicitly believe–through the notion of “documentary theatre”, “docu-drama”, and that of “theatre of everyday life” as a programmatic goal of all Rimini Protokoll productions–that we could participate in the life of others, the lifestyle of these actors who lead real lives?

My anguish perhaps also derived from being treated to a show of otherness that bore an embarrassing affinity to orientalism and primitivism which were en vogue at the time of the “Völkerschau” experiments and world trade exhibitions, for example in Paris where Artaud grew lyrically ecstatic about the exhibited African villages with living people. But to do something akin to it in our postcolonial period of intertwined world cultures (the intertwining seen either within the framework of the benign and at times patronizing slogan of “multiculturalism” or the belligerent call to arms in a “clash of civilizations”) seems regressive at best.

When docu-drama and theatre serves as nothing more than as stage for a “folklorization” of otherness, the practitioners have evidently forgotten the masterful “docu-theatre” of Peter Weiss and his “re-creation” of the Auschwitz trials, to mention but one example. The present production thus also serves as a good example for failing to take into account the aims of the present research centre “Interweaving Performance Cultures“, as it does not address the problem of cultural interphase, and even on the level of aesthetic intervention remains opaque. For such self-reflexive theatrical productions, an anthropologist’s experience may serve as a useful guide for what Radio Muezzin lacked (even though the producer Kaegi is coquettishly playing with the notion of “ethnography”, it seems).

Thus, Elenore Bowen in her deservedly famous autobiographical work, Return to Laughter, describes how her indigenous informants one day performed several short scenes for her. In the first, they imitated her continually asking questions and writing everything down. In the second sketch, they portrayed a missionary instructing the native that according to the Bible, every human being descended from Adam and Eve. This fascinated the native, as everybody in that society considered themselves an “expert” on kinship, who sat down to discuss this matter at length through genealogical tracing. The missionary, however, angrily put the native in his place, insisting that he had better stand in front of a white man. The performers expected the anthropologist–their audience–to join in their merriment. However, she also pointed out that her feeling of being a part of the community ended abruptly when the performers began cracking jokes at the expense of a blind person (see Elenore Bowen, “Return to Laughter”, New York 1964, written by Elizabeth Bohannan under pseudonym).

There are innumerable performances using a range of media that have taken such an interactional, processual approach to matters of intercultural understanding as well as to the presentation of socially marginalized communities: from the activist stance of Jean Rouch and Jean-Luc Godard, equipping people in Mozambique with portable cameras for them to create their own television programs; the productions of African film directors such as Sembene, writers such as Achebe, Saro-Wiwa, or Wole-Soyinka; South American productions on slum children, such as City of God or the South African attempt in Tsotsi ); to South African versions of Porgy and Bess or Westside Story. These examples use what I would like to label the “ethno-docu” style. It describes indigenous productions that cover the conundrums of the economic, social, religious, and cultural global pulls and pushes in a widespread capitalist and post-colonial (often totalitarian) environment for a diversity of audiences, including ironic takes by African performers on the “strange, primitive” habits of Bavarian villagers (spanning the religious dimension) by using an “ethnographic” eye (or rather poking fun at ethnographic jargon about the strangeness of others). Rimini Protokoll, by contrast, does not seem to belong to this “ethno-docu” category that dramatically and dramaturgically points out pressing problems, but rather follows an outdated approach of “theatrical ethnography”, which is produced from outside and descriptively and authorially “presents” otherness without any intervention, except to claim that the theatrical treatment is close to life because it features “experts” as performers.

I therefore largely agree with the assessment of the London-based writer and artist Hassan Khan when he writes on the Qantara website about the production of Radio Muezzin: “The parallel to the tourist experience, where a tour group is treated to tribal dances, is inescapable”. However, as Rimini Protokoll aspires to something similar to the “ethnographic” enterprise, let me put a positive critical spin on the issue at hand. Maybe the theatre producers of Rimini Protokoll were experiencing the same dilemma faced by anthropologists before the reversal of the debate on “the crisis of representation” revolving around problems of “othering”, “authorship”, and “empowerment” regarding research subjects. Here the crucial question was how to translate the anthropological experiences of otherness onto the page and into a form of representation that would make the experiences of the other palpable for readers. The challenge lay in bridging the gap between the directness of living with and among others and the distancing mechanism of writing about it (or choosing to and transmitting that experience through some other medium).

I would like to examine these similarities or differences between the theatre production and “post-writing culture” ethnography by referring to the experiences of the Danish anthropologist Kirsten Hastrup. She became well known for her work Passage to Anthropology (London 1995), in which she advocated taking on the roles of performers in the field: she proposed doing anthropological work by “playing ethnographers”. However, she also devoted an entire chapter of her remarkable book to the primacy of the performative experience by relating her feeling of shock when her own field work and practices with Icelandic fishermen was put on stage by Eugenio Barba. I felt a similar sense of shock and embarrassment of recognizing myself as anthropologist and witnessing the persiflage on stage when encountering how Radio Muezzin exhibited the others to our gaze on the stage.

Key concepts here are those of “authenticity” and “participation”. Rimini Protokoll stresses the first by using the label “experts” for actors, insisting that the actors simply transfer their usual occupations to the stage–as politicians, truck-drivers, phone-operators, or muezzins (to refer to a few recent productions of the group). The claim is that when experts perform their real lives on stage, theatre becomes more “authentic” and true to real life. The authenticity of lived life serves as yardstick here. Did the performance live up to its claim? Probably not, because the experts were only showing, telling, and performing parts of their routine and ritual lives and talking about the connection between the two; they were re-enacting their ongoing lives theatrically within the framework of the stage and in front of a non-believing audience which was not part of that life.

This brings us to the second aspect of Rimini Protokoll’s claim of breaking down the barrier between performer and audience, theatre and life, and pretense and reality. Here the performance failed utterly, as there was no way of interacting, touching, eating, drinking, praying–in short living with–the experts. In contrast to ethnographic work (to which Kaegi repeatedly referred by saying that the hardest part of the production was the prior “extensive research” on the experts’ lives), this form of docu-theatre does not achieve the intimacy of ethnographic research experiences that requires the “immersion” into a foreign linguistic coding system, indeed the adoption of the gestural routines, tastes, attitudes, and outlook of that foreign community (coming close to the requirements of early Stanislavsky requests that an actor should “fuse” with his role).

Written ethnography is, of course, as detached from the source material as a producer’s artistic interpretation. Yet, the ethnographer is also obligated professionally to comment on the experts’ lifestyle. A theatrical production could achieve this artistic break with the banality of routine experiences (of the actor-experts as well as the audience) by any of the well-known forms of rupture. However, the production limited these interventions and ruptures between experts and producer to the now common and stale practice of giving it a “real feel” by ritualistically showing endless film projections of mosques or–as counter-point to the competing muezzin-voices seen in light of Egypt’s cultural policy to centralize the calls to prayer–the cacophony of Cairo’s traffic. Another such intervention pointing to the rehearsal or planning stage was the written declaration above the screen that the Egyptian Ministry of Culture did not permit the display of donkeys, rubbish, or dog shit.

Before referring to other instances of authenticating the performance for the audience, one should also question the very idea of life as basis for authenticity in “docu-drama”: does this not imply that creating fictional, illusory worlds through theatre (and other media such as film) are inferior forms of performance? And what does this tell us about the concept of mimesis? Even if it is true that, as Goffman and his followers in the social sciences pointed out, we are all playing theatre, it does not automatically or logically imply that theatre should be nothing but the re-play of the play to be good theatre. In that case, there would be no difference between the theatre of real life and that enacted on stage. Similarly, there would be no difference between docu-theatre and voyeuristic reality shows and their ethnic extensions of “ethno-shows” in tourist-villages: “docu-theatre” as “ethno-theatre” or the theatre of the everyday life of others thus is not unlike the touring zoos of former times that exoticized and, by extension, catered to the voyeurism of the everyday at home. I highly doubt that Rimini Protokoll’s theatrical strategy could bring about the transformation of an audience (which would require revising closely held or unquestioned biases that I shall address in the following section on the politics of the aesthetic).

It may–to speak with Schechner–transport the audience to someplace else. This may be the most appropriate metaphor for their Cargo Sofia production in which the audience sat in a real truck with real truckers and was made to experience the bumps on the road in a “simulation” of Bulgarian roads while only crossing the Swiss border. Yet, the audience members were spared feeling like “human cargo”, getting harassed by the police, having to pay road tolls, or being put behind bars for a few nights in Macedonia. The production did not challenge the audience’s comfort zone by addressing issues such as organ trade or human trafficking. Thus, the audience’s vicarious journey replaced real travel, exploration, reading, or dialogue as a form of experiencing. Rather, the spectacle itself, the performance, took the place of experiencing otherness. This was mimicry, not mimesis as poiesis, and lay closer to simulation than to transformation.

Instead of “being in there” (to use the Australian ethnohistorian Greg Denning’s term about good ethnographic representation) as indigenous people would be, we are given only a map of a territory which others experience with their bodies (in reference to Bourdieu’s point about praxis as lived in space).
As for the concept of the expert as actor (or rather non-actor), one does wonder whether this speaks to authenticity at all. I shall not discuss this point at length here, but I would like to critically insert Genet’s observation quoted by Jean Kott that the problem of representing otherness can be seen in a different light: only white actors painted black can perform the role of blacks (presumably for black audiences, he meant). Or, as the psychiatrist and anthropologist Georges Devereux once remarked: the fact that one is married does not make one a good marriage counselor. Acting theories in Japan–from Bunraku puppet theatre to Kabuki and Noh theatre–rely entirely on this assumption, known since the 14th century. As such, it is believed that the perfect female can only be performed by a male.