AN ALIEN
AN ALIEN
“Are you doing too much? Am I a bad example?“ was a short email I got from Mieke Bal immediately after I sent around the newsletter from my performance-group andcompany&Co. And what a good bad example she is – especially for travellers: between theory and practice, art and science. And since theatre-people were always considered travelling people, this is what we did: We bought a red VW-bus to travel from Amsterdam to Istanbul and back again – just to cross the bridge over the Bosporus between Europe and Asia (Minor): “A bridge gathers as a passage that crosses.” europe an alien was the name of the performance which premiered at the Gasthuis (today: Frascati WG) on November 3rd, 2005. One could say that it’s a practical example of Mieke Bal’s theoretical concept of concepts “as a territory to be travelled, in a spirit of adventure.” The territory we travelled was Europe – but what does this mean, we asked at the beginning of the evening:
Hello, tonight you’ll accompany andcompany&Co. on a trip to the European outer-border.
But where does Europe end, where does it start – that’s the question to ask, when you go South-East, for example if you go to Greece over land, driving, walking or riding a horse. EXIT and re-ENTER the EU: On the way there you cross countries that are either soon-EU, No-EU or New EU. If we look at Europe from above, the claim to be a continent is quite absurd. This shore, which we used to call Western Europe, is nothing but a bump on the Asian West-Coast. One look at a world-map reveals: ‘You’re Asia, baby!’
“And off we went” – this is how the story goes: departure, passage, arrival. But isn’t this also a very European concept of travelling? The Spirit only goes out in the world to return to itself. The contrary concept to this kind of travel is the trip. This is also the fundamental difference between two kinds of literature: Johann Wolfgang Goethe vs. Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz. While Wilhelm Meister wanders through the world, joins a theatre-troupe only to find himself and to return home as a stabilized individual, Lenz wanders through the mountains to get away, to find an exit. The wandering lost soul is the European nightmare, a figure that keeps haunting a continent searching for itself: The European Spirit has gone out in the world on its ‘colonial adventures’ (as Frantz Fanon said) and the question remains if there is a place to return to? Or from the perspective of those left behind: What does return from ‘there’? EURASIA, EURABIA EURAFRICA EURAMERICA EURAUSTRALIA OCEANIA. SOUTH-EAST ASIA. Maybe meanwhile the Spirit has changed into a ghost – the German term Geist is open for both meanings (thus the Humanities in the German tradition of Geisteswissenschaft also).
He got up and left and came back and said it again, spoke it out loud, spoke it out in the world, putting the word from the O, from OROPA. Or from U: You are (UR): UROPA.
But this time it wasn’t new, but it was old.
The movement of exit and re-entry also reminds us of the theatre: “Exit and re-enter ghost” is a famous stage-instruction from one of the most famous European tragedies: The tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark by William Shakespeare. Thus Mieke Bal also connected her concept of concepts to the mise-en-scène or as she’d prefer: mise-en-pièce(s). The concept of theatricality allows concepts to travel through the mine-fields of false polarities and to transform from a container of content into a stage to make us see – that’s the affinity between theory & theatre (rooted in the ancient verb theasthai for seeing, viewing which is neither active nor passive, but in-between). In turn, it is important for practitioners of theatre to take this concept very serious, since it shows us that a stage is never just ‘there’, but has to be created first. In other words: one has to have a concept of a stage – hopefully a ‘working concept’: “a concept to work with and a concept that works” . In our performance, we wanted to work on exactly that: we wanted to stage a journey as well as the stage itself to travel: “We set the stage to show you how they crossed from there to there.” Thus the players entered the stage on mobile stations – an occupied zone, limited by an invisible ‘4th wall’. The stage became a land- and soundscape, the movements of the players were captured with pick-up microphones, alienated live and transmitted back into the room as acoustic spectres. But the players never left the stage, the system of entrances was abolished, instead we were interested in playing with being on or off on stage:
We are not there yet; we are here
or rather we are not here yet,
but back there and want to re-enter Europe.
The story of a great journey, of a daring departure, a difficult passage and a final arrival was interrupted before it could be told. The story was washed away to start again in a decaying landscape that was always changing and rebuilt: Boundary posts became trees, trees became boards and boards signposts that sent the performers into the desert. Or on a trip across the Styx – to ‘the other side’. The area that we crossed was the ancient Thrace, whose territory today belongs to Bulgaria, Turkey and Greece. The border between the three countries is a river with three names: Marica in Bulgarian, Evros in Greek and Mehric Nehri in Turkish. It is the same river that Orpheus’ head was floating after he was ripped in pieces by the maenads.
Stranded between night and day,
we were standing between two countries between two continents
at the border where there is neither war nor peace
and that’s the reality of this place.
But it’s not a real place, it’s the end of the land: no-man’s-land.
NO MAD LANDSCAPES ANYMORE!
This mythological story has an uncanny resonance in the political presence: While Bulgaria had cleared all mines after the fall of the iron curtain, Greece keeps a death-strip: The Greek river bank is still a mine-field (against EU- and NATO-law). Crossing it frequently ends deadly for refugees & migrants who try to enter EUrope here: 10 adults drowned forced to swim, 3 men drowned, 1 woman body found, 1 man 1 woman drowned, 2 in minefield near river, 3 men 3 woman 3 children drowned near island, 1 man beaten to death, 1 man hanged at detention centre, 32 drowned, 1 body found drifting in boat, 2 men 1 pregnant woman drowned, 9 decomposing on island, 1 found floating by beach, 3 children frozen in truck, 15 forced to walk back and forth over border, 1 skeleton found in minefield, 1 man liquid forced into lungs by police, 2 burned alive in car, 1 woman frozen in mountain, 5 drowned, 1 youth died of cold and exhaustion, 1 man beaten to death not having transition visa…
At the same time this area harbours more than 366 different kind of birds: The delta of the river is a resting & nesting place for all the migrating birds on their way to & fro Africa: Little Grebe, Great Crested Grebe, Continental Cormorant, Eurasian Spoonbill, Greater Flamingo, European Honey-buzzard, Egyptian Vulture, Eurasian Griffon, Vale Gier Eurasian Hobby, Common Coot, Eurasian Oystercatcher Black-winged Stilt, Eurasian Thick-knee, … This species classifies as vulnerable … as nearly threatened … as critically endangered …
This leads to the absurd situation that ornithologists from all over the world travel there to watch birds, while on both sides of the river soldiers are watching each other. With the theatre-scientist Maaike Bleeker one could ask: Look who’s looking? Maybe the fundamental question that theatre can raise undermining the distinction between stage vs. auditorium, actor vs. spectator. But only if the theatre has a concept of theatricality, of the meaning of staging as an activity that is neither active nor passive, but both at the same time: theasthai.
Don’t count on me, people is a plural:
Not he, she, it IS but they ARE. ALL of THEM!
The themes of migration & escape did not only form the content of the play, but also blasted the form. The concept of travelling concepts implies that form & content are not stable, eternally given categories, but have a dynamic, historically changing relationship, which includes the possibilities that a change of content could implode the form. The reality of mass-migration is such a change in content that can not leave the form of drama untouched. We should not forget that the high time of drama was the time of the nation-state, of the national theatre in which the travelling theatre-troupes were made to settle down and become a standing ensemble of a playhouse. Today the theatres have to refuse to play their role as providers of national identity builders, of reassurance that we-are-we.
Stop this
WE are YOU and YOU are WE.
Because: we are not.
We are not nothing, but we are not.
We are neither WE nor WHO or WHAT.
We’re just there.
And that’s were we ARE.
And there we’ve been for quite some time
A long Hello for a short Good-Bye.
In our performance the European outer-border became the limit of representation: The stage was treated as a room under a spell, which enabled the perception of the ‘invisible fourth wall’. Because borders are not always walls, fences or a mine-field, but consist in a complex mechanism of in- & exclusion. The theatre-situation as such has to be put in question taking into account what Bertolt Brecht had said about modern audience-members in 1936: They don’t only come into the theatre “as customers, but also like refugees.” In that time, Brecht had already been a refugee for three years. The antifascist emigrants like Brecht, Walter Benjamin or Hannah Arendt are the avant-garde for a development that had just begun then according to Giorgio Agamben who links the disintegration of the nation-state (and thus the production of millions of state-less people) to his concept of homo sacer. This figure originated in ancient Rome for a group of people without rights, travelled through modern times until it became a fitting description for people imprisoned in nazi death-camps. Important to note is that this condition of ‘bare life’ is not a state of nature, but a condition produced by technologies of power. Or as is said in Brecht’s Refugees’ Talks: “The passport is the most noble part of a person … like a patient is important for a medical doctor to carry out his surgery.”
You’re not a number, you’re not the mechanical holder of a passport.
You are a blind passenger between night and day. You’re Asia, baby!
Where you’re crossing two continents are kissing! You beautiful
BRIDGE!
We also became refugees in the course of the travel: While we tried to re-enter Europe over a tiny post in Greece, the computer-system (SIS – Schengen Informationsystem) made an alert. The temporary passports of two of our travel-companions were reported as stolen refugee documents. We tried to explain them that we were all European citizens and these only temporary passports, but in vain. We had to camp at the border and stay overnight until the issue was cleared: It was a mistake by the federal printer, the temporary travel passports had the exact same number than a set of documents for refugees for temporary stay which were stolen a while ago! So the situation was serious: the group could have been split and the two deported back to Turkey: “In Istanbul their options were either a false Dutch or German passport and one-way plane ticket for $8,000, or a passage by ship to Greece or Italy for $4,000 per adult or $2,000 per child, or walking to Greece, crossing the Meric River on the Greek-Turkish border for $1,500 per group of six to 15, payable in Athens.”
You are not alone, you are not at home, you are not you.
You are you are you are you are your own I am, your own I am.
I am too an I am or am I mad just like you too?
Instead we had to travel to an embassy and get new passports in order to be allowed to continue our travel. If anything this shows one thing: the return, since Homer & Hegel the main movement of the European spirit, is not as easy as the tradition says it is. In the course of the travel, one might has changed, might have become an alien. That this travel, this alienation might be worth it, this is the message of Mieke Bal.
I AM AN OTHER
Another one
I am one
All but one
I am alone
Long gone home