The first is what I've been calling the "burqa ballet" (although it wasn't really a ballet). The story behind this one is that I met the choreographer/dancer in my seminar on immgrants and spectacle. This is the seminar that is pretty interesting but is actually nothing like what I thought it would be (haha). I thought it was going to be about immigration debates as a form of spectacle (ie, how the debates are staged in the public sphere). It's actually nothing like that, it's about immigrants who choose to devote their careers to performance. Oh well, that's a cool topic too! And close enough to my diss topic that it's worth my time.
Anyway, the choreographer/dancer is a French woman of Tunisian descent, who has made her entire career in dance. She came from a fairly elite family, her father was a diplomat if I remember correctly. She never had any experience with the veil and in fact avoided identity politics entirely in her dancing career, but then recently she got the idea to choreograph a whole performance based on the burqa. In order to get the feel of how the burqa works, she went and bought one and wore it for a week. She told a funny story, which is that her partner is another dancer (white French), and she didn't tell him she was going to buy it. When he came home that night she greeted him at the door totally covered in it and apparently gave him quite a heart attack, haha. Anyway, I was intrigued by the prospect of this show, on multiple levels. And the poster announcement for it looked pretty awesome:
The subtitle says "What happens to a free body when it disappears under the veil?" (and I'm going to come back to this in a second)
Unfortunately, the show was pretty terrible. There were a few things wrong with it. The most basic problem was that it was a series of micro-dances that did not seem to fit together all that logically. So it was kind of hard to figure out what the point was. There wasn't a "fil conducteur" as the French would say (which is hard to translate, I guess I'd say like a "guiding principle" or something). Some parts were indeed cool, and as you can tell from the picture, the use of lighting and shadows was admittedly awesome. There were some cool parts that were backlit, for example, and you could see the outline of the body within the fabric.
But then the other problem, to me, seemed to be the ending, in which the dancer rips off the burqa and puts on tight hoochie jeans and a sexy red shirt and sings a whole jazzy song as if in a cabaret show. This scene came right after one in which the veiled woman was stuck folding a huge pile of sheets, so there was a transition from imprisoned veiled woman locked in the house to unveiled liberated woman baring her soul in the public sphere. Talk about Manichean.
I was hoping for a bit more nuance, but this is where I probably should have known better, based on the subtitle of the poster. Not only does it imply that the burqa is erasing the body, it's pretty clear from the start that it's a fairly negative connotation. And then you have to consider the word choice, "voile," which is really just a headscarf. Back in 2004 when all those insane debates were going on about the headscarves in schools, some people started attacking it as if it were the burqa, blah blah blah. There was a whole mixing of labels, basically to make the headscarf seem super dangerous and a sign of Muslim fundamentalism. All of that is of course crap, but the strategy worked. Now it's appearing even on announcements for the dance performance. So yeah, I probably should have paid more attention to that headline when I was all excited to see the show, haha. Then I would have had more of an inkling of what I was getting myself into.
So that was a failure. But then later that week Kari and I went to see the Philip Glass opera adaptation of Kafka's In the Penal Colony. I was pretty excited in general because the Penal Colony is my favorite Kafka story (yes, I like it better than even the Metamorphosis, that might make me a heretic, but it's true), but I was also concerned since, well, it's Philip Glass. The potential for some weird ass shit was pretty high, I think, particularly when you combine two twisted geniuses like Kafka and Glass. Fortunately, however, my fears were unfounded and the opera was BRILLIANT. Kari and I were totally blown away. The staging was fantastic (quite intense, of course), the libretto was rich and powerful, and the music was perfect. Melodic enough not to be jarring, but also well calibrated to the words. All in all, a VERY cool show.
So all that to say that apparently we're on a win one-lose one streak right now, haha. Every other performance has turned out to be good. And since the last thing I saw was that godawful horse show, hopefully that means that the next one will be good, haha. We're hoping to get into this one show based on a Stefan Zweig story, but it closes this week. When I was reading in one of my favorite parks today I ended up chatting with a woman who is hard core into theater (runs her own theater school and was a big actor/producer) and she told me it was excellent. So I figured that was a good endorsement!
No comments:
Post a Comment