Authenticating incidents, strategies, and contingencies
For a start, the performance of Radio Muezzin does not indicate any intention of empowerment of the expert-actors. Thus, the flyer announcing the docu-play gave only a title and then the director’s name. This marks the first obstacle to realizing any claim to authenticity. The production then tries to authenticate the experience of these foreign, Islamic prayer practices by letting the muezzins talk about their day-to-day lives. Here the rupture is enacted through a form of ritual on stage showing one of them vacuuming the carpet–indicating the prayer space on stage–while another mimics his weight-lifting exercises behind a prayer screen. This suggests to the audience that a muezzin is actually something like (or nothing more than?) a church verger, warden, or sextan in the Christian context along with the cantor of a church choir. While the leaflets on the play did not empower the performers by listing their names, the stage production tried to individualize the four performers by having them monotonously and didactically recite (tritely illustrated with slides on video projection screens), one after the other, information about their families, day jobs, and hobbies, interspersed with demonstrations of the learnings of the Koran by children or other people intending to become muezzins. The authentication strategy was aimed to induce a sort of recognition effect in a diverse audience ideally composed of recipients of unemployment benefits, poet laureates, or migrant workers–though it addressed a very different audience, of course. Thus, the resulting identification came closer to a voyeuristic view into ways of life with which–thank God–one did not have to become involve.
The stories and film clips seemed to have been assembled randomly on all kinds of topics, and a certain artistic indifference and artlessness pervaded the entire performance. This patchwork approach to a foreign culture and how to display it for a foreign audience may be fashionable and easily consumable, but one certainly misses the skilfulness of certain ethnographers such as Oscar Lewis (i.e. The Children of Sanchez, autobiography of a Mexican family, 1962), in depicting slum life in Puerto Rico or Mexico as well as in New York through the medium of the novel, or filmic representations of the same environment such as in Tsotsi. Otherwise, the anticipated engagement of the audience with this otherness may remain too close to the commodification, branding, fetishization, or–as in the present case–an orientalizing attitude. Having said this, it may also be true that Rimini Protokoll’s productions generally cater not only to the voyeurism of an audience to see how others live but to the brand “Rimini Protokoll” that is now synonymous with reality shows. Their most participatory piece, Calcutta Calling, catered to the imaginations of the telephone-operator spinning off stories about India which could not be fact-checked, as well as that of the recipient who imagined getting true insights about life in India (never mind the reality of violent politics or chauvinistic nationalism). The notorious Big Brother spectacles are not too far removed here. The pretense of being present, not to speak of being at the centre of something, remains a form of spectacle feeding off the lowest common denominator that displays no ambition to be the other, understand otherness, or the other within oneself: for the latter version of audience participation one would have to take the risk of losing oneself in the other, as it happened in Schechner’s famous Dionysos in 69 production, in which actors and audience members exploded the frame of the play by adopting each other’s roles following the best of the Polish acting tradition. Here, the participants entered into a close physical and emotional relationship with the actors, having to reconceive performative strategies as theatre ethnography, as vividly described by Schechner.
A final surprising instance of authentication–albeit possibly unintended by the producers–emerged from the reaction of the audience on the evening I attended the performance. When the audience clapped at the end to show their appreciation for the performance, the screen at the back stated that the actor-experts would not do a curtain-call as their performance was a ritual act and forbade theatrical praise for calling upon Allah.1 This had not been the case on the premiere of the production, as I was told by other members of our research group who attended it. I am presuming that the explanation for this lies in a struggle between the producers and the performers or among the different performers. Here, an ethnographer’s account would be warranted. This stage production can certainly not aspire to ethno-theatre, as we do not participate in these negotiated contingencies of life, in this case stage-life. What at first sight seemed like a ruse of the producer to evoke authenticity for the audience, revealed itself as a rift between producer and performing experts upon closer examination.
This kind of attitude on the part of the producer may well indicate Rimini Protokoll’s downhill trajectory: for their last production they labeled a share-holders’ meeting of eight thousand people and the entire twelve-hour proceedings a theatrical event without undertaking any aesthetic intervention whatsoever. This can at best be described as a banal attempt to theatricalize Goffman’s theories (or the average theatregoers’ insights or those of ritual scholars who have long known that different arenas and domains of public life are nothing but theatre or ritual–from church services to political conferences, from birthday parties to government statements or even declarations of war). I did not buy Rimini Protokoll’s shares this time, but of course I shall faithfully attend their next production because, as the film critic Roger Ebert says, one might be rewarded by finding a gem among the rocks.
- There is scope for a critical assessment of Rimini Protokoll’s mistaken notion of the authenticity of putting real rituals on stage as this refers to a long-standing critical discourse between theologians, ritual specialists, ritual as well as theatre and ethnographic practitioners. The naivety of the directors and their callous assumptions about the dupability of the audience should be of grave concern. [↩]