In contrast to the participants, the reporter narrates the Ta’ziyeh with a level of passivity and emotional detachment, focusing on the factual background of the tradition instead of the experiences of the individuals involved, which is in reality central to the success and understanding of the Ta’ziyeh. The introductory remarks about the historical significance of the Ta’ziyeh contrast starkly with the historical relationship that the participants have to the performance. A performer at the very beginning emphasizes their “Love for Imam Hossein” (min 1:02), illustrating their emotional attachment and the intimacy they feel to a figure that lived more than 1000 years ago, thereby elucidating that they place an emphasis on their personal relationship with the figures in the performance. Contrary to the participants, the narrator achieves a level of distance to the events relived through her emphasis on the era that the performance fictionally lives in, while the performers speak of Hossain, and their Imams in general, like close relatives – individuals they share a strong bond with. This especially materializes within the comment “Tazieh allows me to express my feelings for my Imams” (min 6:38), which stresses the notion of familiarity, personal connection and a sharing of experiences across generations through the performative act. Time no longer becomes a reason of emotional distance and separation. For the reporter, the temporal distance leads to a distance in attachment to the events that unfold, which is revealed in the passivity of the vocal intonations and pitch. Furthermore, the reporter focuses on ‘it’ – “the Persian passion play” (min 0:26), “the Ta’ziyeh”, “the epic drama” (min 2:12) – rather than the performers, the participants, and their emotive experience. Instead of treating the Ta’ziyeh like an inanimate thing, the performers believe the core of the experience is dictated by the subjective feelings of the individuals involved, and thus place value on highlighting their collective intimate experience. Yet during the few occasions when the individual emotional reaction is placed at the forefront of the narration, the focus is purely on grief, suffering, and trauma, with a disregard for their relationship to empowerment and resistance of oppression, a fact underscored by the participants towards the end. In essence, while the narrator focuses on the factual temporal separation of the historical events and present-day performances, the participants highlight the intergenerational intimacy achieved through the Ta’ziyeh, thereby placing heavy emphasis on personal emotions, while not disregarding the strength the collective sharing in mourning lends everyone. 

The Ta’ziyeh is a combination of mourning, protest and remembrance, as well as guidance, that aims to create a space for collective commemoration of the injustice of Imam Hussain’s murder, and thereby draw power from this knowledge of tyranny experienced by their people. The main reason why one of the performers stressed “This is not entertainment” was because he aimed to underscore the seriousness, value and gravity the Ta’ziyeh had for them. Entertainment focuses around the central aim of letting the audience amuse and enjoy themselves, thereby denoting pleasure as the end goal of the experience. Not only is pleasure entirely absent from the performance, considering it as such diminishes the value of the experience to their community. This is because entertainment has a connotation of being supplementary – it may enhance experiences, yet it remains peripheral and dispensable for survival and coping with life. In contrast, for the Shiite, the Ta’ziyeh is essential to their culture and way of life, which is defined by the trauma of the martyrdom of Hussein (Dabashi, pg. 189). Their entire existence and belief is anchored around the tragedy of Hussain’s death. Furthermore, the Ta’ziyeh is a tremendously active event, that engages all participants (performers and viewers). What I mean by this is that entertainment or “being entertained” can be considered to be very passive on the side of the viewers: someone is doing something to them. However, in the case of Ta’ziyeh, viewers suffer and mourn with the performers, and it becomes a reciprocal interaction, a fact illustrated by the self-flagellation that viewers often partake in. The Ta’ziyeh is a collective experience, in which audience members participate in the creation of the performance, rather than simply passively awaiting to be offered something by the performers. 

The essence of what Ta’ziyeh is can already be found in its name, which means ‘to mourn’: it is about keeping their cultural memory of great loss and injustice alive from generation to generation. In that sense, Ta’ziyeh is a schooling, education and guidance for the next generation of Shiites, inducting them into the way of life of their culture. This may lead one to consider the Ta’ziyeh as a ritual, however that description would not do justice to the amount of ownership individual performers have over the manner in which it is performed. Rituals tend to live mostly in the past, while the Ta’ziyeh remains an intergenerational accomplishment that is adapted as time passes. Nevertheless, suffering is not equated with helplessness. On the contrary, the Ta’ziyeh is seen as a vehicle of protest and a fight for freedom, being used as such during times of political unrest (Dabashi, pg. 186), and aiming to instill in the younger generations a resistance against oppression and injustice. Overall, the Ta’ziyeh can be considered a a cultural protest performed through the act of mourning that functions as a schooling for the next generation of Shiite. It remains a way of actively remembering the injustice and tyranny experienced, in an attempt to do justice and remain faithful to Imam Hussein even hundreds of years later. 

References

“Taziyeh as Theatre of Protest | TDR/The Drama Review | MIT Press Journals.” Accessed February 18, 2019. https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/105420405774762925?journalCode=dram&.

Antigone in Ferguson constitutes of drama, theater and performance, however the boundaries and place of performance within the piece remain ambiguous and open to several possible models. 

Antigone in Ferguson uses a 2500-year-old play, Antigone, and fuses it with gospel music and community interaction to initiate healing within a broken community. The evening can be split into two parts: 1) The adapted theatre Antigone 2) The community conversations. Given that in part one there is a heavy reliance on text, which provides a “tight, verbal, narrative” which “allows for little improvisation (Schechner, pg.24), it implies that based on Richard Schechner’s definition there is a clear element of drama in part one. This is also underscored by the fact that the text relied upon is based on text written 2500 years ago, which could be performed without the need of an active messenger. This fact underpins Schechner’s stipulation that the “written text, scores scenario, instruction, plan, or map … can be taken from place to place or time to time independent of the person who carries it.” (Schechner, pg. 8). Unlike for part 1 though, in part 2 there is no stipulated text for the audience and performer interaction. Instead there exists a significant amount of “improvisation” or unplanned action. 

However, while drama is clearly present in part one, there appears to be no script for either parts of the evening. For Schechner, scripts are “patterns of doing, not modes of thinking.” (Schechner, pg. 7), which “act as a blueprint for the enactment” (pg. 6). Essentially, in Antigone in Fergusson, no major movements transpire within the actors, as they mainly read off of a text presented, and for the minimal amount of movement present no “teacher, guru, [or] master” (Schechner, pg. 8) would be necessary. Communication, as Schechner says, replaced manifestation (pg. 7).

On first glance, one would classify the first part of the evening as consisting of only theatre with minimal to no performance aspect present, given the orthodox nature of the play Antigone. Schechner defines performance as “The whole constellation of events, most of them passing unnoticed, that takes place in both performers and the audience ….” (Schechner, pg. 8), but given that there is little to no audience participation during the play, it implies that the contribution of performance to the event remain minimal. However, the intertwining of live music from a contemporary gospel choir complicates matters. This is due the fact that Schechner notes that “in American society musicians are performers, not actors” (Schechner, pg. 12). This therefore questions the act of “characterization” within the rest of the play, in the same way that it did in TPG’s The Tooth of Crime (Schechner, pg. 12). Nevertheless, unlike in TPG’s Tooth, the characters are not also the musicians. The two casts are entirely separate from each other, thereby detaching performance and theatre from each other. Instead of bleeding the two into one, it appears to make the seams between performance and theatre even more apparent. Within the same vein, the discussion towards the end of the evening can be considered an extension and continuation of the conversation started with the audience by the gospel choir. This is further emphasised by the fact that we see singers engaging directly in the conversation with the audience (ALL ARTS, 48:44 min), which provides a smooth transition between performers and spectators. Now the question remains where the performance aspect of the evening ends. Schechner wisely notes that “the boundary between the performance and everyday life is arbitrary” (Schechner, pg. 9). Hence, the conversations that people continue to have after the theatre surrounding the thematic could still be considered part of the performance. In fact in this special case, I would argue that the performance can be considered to never end, or at least end somewhere in the far future. This is because the Theater of War Productions intended for the evening to be a segue into hard conversations surrounding the killing and disrespect of Michael Brown and his body, in order to catalyse healing and generate sizable ripple effects into the community. Hence, the performance in a way continues to flow far beyond the temporal boundaries of the “orthodox” performance. 

As a consequence of these new findings, I propose an adapted model to describe Antigone in Ferguson, which incorporates the idea of distinct elements of performance and theater that only partially bleed and the idea that the performance, not the theater, extends theoretically into the infinite (see below). 

In contrast, Antigone Sr. appears to constitute almost entirely of script and performance with very small aspects of drama and theatre strewn in. In Antigone Sr., unlike Antigone in Ferguson, movement dominates over communication in text format. It can be considered to be a version of a Tanztheater, not in the strict sense of the format that Pina Bausch pioneered, but rather as an extension of that form, which includes other aspects of performance (in this case drag and voguing). While there does exist some drama in the form of fragmentations of Antigone lightly peppered over scenes and the score for the music of songs, the text is not given the spotlight. Instead the performance element is put in the foreground by allowing Greek theatre to meet Harlem voguing and drag queens. Drag is in and of itself performative, as defined by Schauchner, as there are elements of singing, interaction with the audience through shouting, strutting and acknowledging the looks of audience members. An example of this audience interaction is the singing act in a clip of Antigone Sr. (Maillon Théâtre de Strasbourg, 0:58 – 1:29) where the performer sings a section of “… Baby One More Time” by Britney Spears. At the end of the short tribute, the singer mutters “Thank you. I will be right back.” This acknowledgment of the audience, and the audience’s acknowledgement of the performer through shouts, laughs, and clapping, illustrates why Schechner said that “in American society musicians are performers, not actors” (Schechner, pg. 12). It also underscores how the segregation between audience and performers is torn down slowly, and the audience’s experience and actions become an important element of the action. Trajal Harrell, the choreographer of the piece, extends the boundaries of what is and is not part of the performance by having a very minimalist set that allows the audience to see the dancers adjust their costumes before heading “on stage” (Boynton, 2012). This meant that what was included in the performance was being expanded, as the audience was being included in elements that were normally hidden to the viewer. 

Pivoting to the element of script, it is conspicuous that script plays an inherently significant part given that dance and movement is central to the piece. If we accept that dance and movement can never be fully expressed and passed on in the form of drama, but require a script, “a blueprint for the enactment” (Schechner, pg. 6), which inherently necessitates a teacher to communicate it, then script becomes essential to any form of dance. 

Furthermore, while theater is a sub-element of performance, it is present here given the fact that the performers are in ways characterized through drag and through the backdrop of Antigone. 

In essence, all four elements are present within Antigone Sr., however some may be more profound or significant than others. In order to account for this differing levels of importance, the model to display Antigone Sr. should be revised to include relative size within the individual elements. This implies that there could be some rearrangement of the concentric circles based on importance. 

References: 

Schechner, Richard. “Drama, Script, Theatre, and Performance.” The Drama Review 17, no. 3 (1973): 5–36.

Boynton, Andrew. “When Drag and Modern Dance Collide,” May 1, 2012. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/when-drag-and-modern-dance-collide.

Maillon Théâtre de Strasbourg. ANTIGONE SR./TWENTY LOOKS OR PARIS IS BURNING AT THE JUDSON CHURCH (L) / TRAJAL HARREL SAISON 14/15. Accessed February 11, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0LFrsfUxb8.

ALL ARTS. S1 E1: House Seats: Antigone in Ferguson | House Seats. Accessed February 11, 2019. https://allarts.wliw.org/programs/house-seats/house-seats-antigone-in-ferguson-vzpdg7/.

By juxtaposing the Western genius with the perceived primitivity and simplicity of the performative gestures and expression of the indigenous people, Guillermo Gomez-Pena and Coco Fusco illustrate how the very notion of performance, its perceived quality and virtuosity, are all constructs of Western civilization that cast an absurd light onto any forms that deviate from its pre-established code of conduct. As N’gugi Wa Thiong’o discusses in “Oral Power and Europhone Glory: Orature, Literature and Stolen Legacies”, performance, and art per se, was (and is) a way of asserting dominance by forcing those conquered to express themselves in ways predetermined by their rulers. Hence, the colonizers established vertical relationships between mediums of literature (Thiong’o, Oral Power and Europhone Glory, page 118) and religiously avoided horizontal intermingling that would taint the pure forms of art. This view is also echoed in the Fairview Interview, where on page 48 Kaneeza Schaal asserts “Calm down with all of this siloing of our disciplines, thats so fricking Western.”  Returning to the film Couple In A Cage, this implicit hierarchy is evident through the contrast between the orature of the indigenous male (minute 8:53 – please see video below) and his intent listening and infantile cradling of the boombox at other timepoints (minute 04:36 – please see video below). The oral performance when viewed through the gaze of Western civilization primes thoughts of primitivity, magic, and superstition (Thiong’o, Oral Power and Europhone Glory, page 107), which is amplified by the relative complexity of the music heard previously, as evaluated based on Western principles of genius. Hence, by having indigenous people perform within the confines of the scaffolds erected by Western culture, it does not permit for the performance to unfold and flourish. Instead this inherent metastructure stunts and filters their expression, splicing it together in strange ways that macerates the original art form, and thereby transforms it from a respectable performance into a clowning spectacle. This idea of a spectacle is underscored by the jeering laughter heard in the background during the orature, and more obviously by the smirking laugh of the audience member standing behind the cage. Thus, it is no longer a display of the performer’s mastery, but rather becomes a parade of their inferiority and imbecility, a fact that strips them from their power of self-expression and instead hands the audience the authority to write their story for them – the essence of which is colonialism. 

However, the question remains, how it is possible that such a performance, without active and obvious voicing of the fact, can be so easily forced into the boundaries of the Western gild of art. This is where the significant role of the audience and its composition comes in. 

The audience viewing a performance determines the context in which the piece is received, and thereby dictates the position that the performers occupy within society. As Kaneeza Schaal so aptly recognized, “for the many languages in the piece to live, to be rendered visible, [it] requires an audience that’s bringing many different perspectives.” (Fairview Interview, page 53) In the case of Couple In A Cage, the viewers were predominantly from non-indigenous background, and therefore, ignoring their personal viewpoints, they represented the oppressors within colonialism by carrying that historical baggage of thought with them. As such, intentionally or not, they were viewing the performance with a Western gaze, and therefore only understood a fragment of the “languages” communicated in, thereby taking away a distorted portion of what was being expressed. This subconscious Western gaze is clearly evident by a comment made by an audience member: “The fact that he is so interested in things that he doesn’t appear to understand …” (minute 04:18 – please see video above). It illustrates how he immediately interprets the body language of the indigenous person within the patterns laid out by his society, and makes a judgement based on it, without giving much thought to the possibility of different meanings within a different culture. As a result, the monocultural audience, which is dichotomous to the originally intended audience of the performance, places the piece out of its original context, into one where it is ridiculed by being at odds with the unspoken rules of this society’s performance and behaviour. This causes a gear shift from performance being a two-sided exchange, to one where the performers are only giving, and the audience only receiving and then proceeding to take more at the expense of the performers, by reducing their whole value as a complex human being to their limited understanding of their cultural background. As said in Globalectics by N’gugi Wa Thiong’o’, “for civilisations, exchange is oxygen” (page 2), however if this becomes a one-sided action then it leads to the oxygenation of party at the expense and suffocation of the other. Thus, the performers lose their face and individuality, being treated like one horde, akin to animals, and thereby being shunned into the lowest sector of society. Essentially, such performances then become a microcosm of the colonial thought and action process, which is then widely perpetuated and enforced through the rapid permeation of performance through all hierarchical layers of society.