From Zoukak Theatre in Beirut

 In 2013, Border Crossings worked with Zoukak Theatre in the Lebanese capital Beirut as part of our development process for This Flesh is Mine. This post is their letter to international friends and fellow artists in the face of the Israeli invasion of their lands.

Zoukak Theatre

These are terrible days in our contemporary history. Decades of efforts to create laws, conventions, and agreements that uphold common human values and unite us as citizens of the world are being systematically trampled upon, violently disregarded, and dismantled by a monstrous machine of death, destruction, and dehumanization, reducing entire regions in Palestine and Lebanon to rubble—all under the pretext of Israel’s right to defend itself.

As we write these lines, surrounded by the sounds of drones, military aircraft, missiles, bombings, and the looming threat of embargoes and settler occupation in our country, we wonder how many more wars can we survive? What can be said and done today in the face of such horror? What can we, as artists who already operate on the margins of society, do to make any difference in the course of history? It might sound naïve, but we do know what to do. While a massacre is taking place in the street behind us, art can confront injustice, maintain connectedness, and reinforce a sense of shared existence. We know that individual efforts can influence public debate and rebuild values that bring about a potential for global change. 

Since our inception in 2006—during another brutal Israeli war on Lebanon—Zoukak has remained committed to working under difficult circumstances, both locally and internationally. Now, in 2024, eighteen years later, we find history tragically repeating itself, though on an even larger scale. We are witnessing an unprecedented level of armed aggression by Israel, compounded by the use of advanced military technologies, including artificial intelligence, cyber warfare systems, and internationally prohibited weapons.

A few days ago, we decided to cancel our biennial festival, Zoukak Sidewalks, which was a special edition this year, marking Zoukak’s 18th anniversary. We had considered it a milestone—a step into adulthood in terms of both responsibility and freedom. Responsibility, in the sense of our ongoing commitment to engage with society through art, and freedom as the ability to question, challenge, and continuously recreate the world around us through the active power of imagination.

The ongoing brutal Israeli war on Lebanon has forced us to halt our efforts to sustain this vital cultural encounter. We were looking forward to welcoming you - our international and local colleagues and audience members - and sharing reflections on this significant moment as part of our nearly decade-long tradition in Beirut. While circumstances have forced us to pause, we remain steadfast in our commitment to continue creating. Today, in the face of death and destruction, there is power in our gathering - to create art as an act of resistance and to support relief initiatives and the basic needs of those most affected by the attacks. As we stand on the edge, the act of listening becomes vital. It is through deep listening that we can shape practices toward togetherness and justice.

In this historic moment, we call on the international cultural and artistic community to stand united against colonialist atrocities, funded and co-produced by governmental and taxpayer money in the “West.” We urge you to raise your voice about the current situation, which has reached an irreversible point: daily massacres, widespread displacement, and the extensive destruction of civilian areas, all met with disturbing international complacency. This is not only about our own survival but about the future of human consciousness. We call upon your solidarity during these dark times for Lebanon, Palestine, and the world. 

We grieve our losses daily, even as we know the time for true mourning has not yet come—one that promises to be long and difficult, if we ever get the chance to mourn. Now, the urgent task is to stop this monstrosity!

Watching a young girl in Gaza carry her injured little sister on her shoulders, walking barefoot for two kilometers to give her a chance to live, we can’t help but find within ourselves that same strength to move forward. 

We await the day when we can share artistic work in the theatre again. Until then, we hope those living and witnessing this atrocity—whether up close or from afar—are able to stay safe and maintain their sanity.

Zoukak Theatre

The Question of Language

 

First Quechua Lexicon, 1560
Source: Wikimedia Commons

A few days ago there was a (positively) provocative exchange on our Instagram page, asking why our posts and other communications about THE MOUTH OF THE GODS were in English. The comment read: "No tiene sentido qué hablen de herencia latina, hablen de "descolonizar" y "festejen" el día de la invasión y pongan todos los nombres en inglés"; which translates "It makes no sense to talk about Latin heritage, talk about "decolonizing" and "commemorating" the day of the invasion and put all the names in English."

I take the point. English - the language of globalisation and conquest - doesn't seem to be the ideal medium in which to express anti-colonial sentiments. On the other hand, neither does Spanish, the language in which the comment was made! It may well be true that Spanish is the language through which London's Latin American communities communicate with one another, and so the marker of their difference in our local context - but it is every bit as much the language of colonial rule as English. If we're really going fully to "de-colonise" communication, then the languages we have to turn to are the Indigenous ones. But, while there certainly are speakers and learners of Quechua and Aymara in this city, the use of these languages in publicity would exclude all but a very small number of people. The purpose of Instagram posts is not to be our artistic statement in themselves, but to attract people to the performance, where the fuller statement is made.  I hope this performance will offer a much fuller and richer reflection on the language issue.

We are very aware of the complex questions surrounding Indigenous languages in relation to colonisation.  As Franz Fanon argued, someone "who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language" - so the maintenance and promotion of Indigenous languages is essential to the preservation and resurgence of Indigenous cultures, with their distinct and hugely helpful ways of thinking in relation to community, spirituality and environment. This is why the UN has decided to designate a Decade of Indigenous Languages, of which our work is a part. In his hugely important book about writing and theatre-making in post-colonial spaces De-colonising the Mind, the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o makes a powerful case for the avoidance of English (and other imperial languages) on the grounds that they exclude those who are already marginalised in post-colonial societies by a lack of educational opportunities. He is, of course, entirely right. 

In performance THE MOUTH OF THE GODS will actually represent a complex engagement with these very questions. There will be some use of English, in the spoken scenes performed by actors, but these will be deliberately distanced from the audience by their framing through the observation of an Indigenous community, offering a Brechtian estrangement from the language we tend to assume is "normal". The power and dominance of English will be deliberately distanced and questioned. There will be some Spanish, probably spoken and certainly in some of the sung texts from the Codex Martínez Compañón; but the dramatic context will not allow Spanish its cultural dominance either. "O dolce Jesú mio" feels much less Catholic when used to mourn an Indigenous leader executed with the endorsement of the Church. 

The final sections of the show are entirely in Indigenous language. The powerful aria Hanaq Pachap Kusikuynin, written in  Quechua, leads us towards the short opera San Francisco Xavier, which is in Chiquitano. The title is its only element in Spanish, and the only overt reference to the Jesuit order on whose missions it was originally created. Otherwise, the anonymous 18th century Indigenous writer used Chiquitano words for "god", "heaven" and so on: words which were in use long before colonisation, and so liberate the music from the Catholicising constraints of imperial evangelism. My hope is that the piece will move closer and closer to an assertion of Indigenous cultures and their value. It's just that you have to cut through the accretions of colonial language and dominance in order to get there. 

Premier in Adana - Radical Empathy

From Suppliants of Syria

Lucy and I went back to Turkey last week, for the premier of the film version of Suppliants of Syria.  The film is feeling like an ever more important part of this project, not least because of the huge challenges of raising the funds to perform the play in the region where it's set. I'm determined that we will get it to Adana, where we can share it with the Syrian women who took part, but that goal is still a long way off, and in the meantime we owed it to them to impart some sense of how we've been responding to their offer and their work.

It had been some time since I'd looked at the film, so I was able to be more objective about it than is usual when my work first goes in front of audiences.  I'm pleased to say that I was very moved by it - the women's sharing of personal stories, intercut with the Choruses from the Greek play Suppliants, is really searing in its honesty. Their acting, the cinematography and the music feel so rooted in that experience that it's impossible to resist its emotional force. And it's very exciting to have that put into dialogue with more political and structural considerations - there's a very theatrical, I guess Brechtian, interplay between the emotional truths and the objective frames around them.

Which said, my own emotional response pales into insignificance beside the reaction of the women themselves. In the Q&A that followed the screening, one of them, Iman, said that the film was "an incredible achievement - but I have been crying all the way through." I had thought that this was rhetorical, but Lucy, who was sitting amongst them, told me that all of them had been in tears from very early in the film. I suppose there was a lot being re-visited for them all; and there were also new stories they probably did not know, about the personal journeys of their friends who were sitting beside them. There's a moment in the film where some of them share with me that they had never told the stories before. The frame of the creative project was essential to draw out these incredibly important truths.

Another audience member was a Turkish NGO worker, who said that the film would bring out empathy in its audiences, and this was really important for the ongoing refugee work of her organisation.  I found myself responding that what is needed everywhere - not just in Turkey but also in Europe, America and global - is a new radical empathy as the way past the politics of prejudice.  It's very hard to hate somebody when you have heard them tell stories like these.  

In Praise of KAOS

Janet McTeer as Hera in KAOS

The internet has gone wild with fury at Netflix's decision not to commission a second series of KAOS. Actually, most of the protest has been about KAOS being "axed", which isn't really what has happened, as there only was ever one series actually commissioned. But the world of TV, and especially streamed TV, is such that anything that doesn't make it into Series 2 is deemed to have "failed". Commercially, which is the only context in which the language of "success" and "failure" has any meaning, I can only assume that Netflix were right, and that the series hadn't achieved the viewing figures that would make another iteration seem a sound business proposition. The fans who are up in arms don't measure the work's worth by its audience figures, of course - and neither do I. And I loved this series. But, on reflection, I'm actually rather glad that there won't be a second run.

Why? KAOS, to my mind, was a superb drama, and that is not the same thing as soap opera. It was a beautifully crafted, wonderfully insightful and provocative work of art, and as such was self-contained. That makes it astonishingly difficult to repeat. I can't think of any TV series (or film, or play) that has managed it, and of course many "successful" franchises have tried. Netflix's own version of The Handmaid's Tale was a superb adaptation of the novel (with some judicious changes) in its first series, but was left with nothing to adapt in series 2. As a result, it just resorted to more of the same, which is the opposite of dramatic. Gilead carried on being oppressive, Offred carried on being oppressed. So what?

Aurora Perrineau as Riddy

It was precisely because KAOS was such great drama that it resolved itself in an entirely satisfactory way. Again, I'm departing from online orthodoxy here. The prevailing view is that there were lots of loose ends and unresolved plot lines, doubtless deliberately set up by creator Charlie Covell in order to facilitate the longed for series 2. Maybe there was an element of that, but Covell is much too skilled a dramatist to leave their drama hanging in the air, its meaning incomplete. Any drama will leave its audience with the sense that further events might evolve, but that is part of its meaning, not a bid for further attempts to finish. The Handmaid's Tale is a case in point: at the end of the novel Offred is captured, and the reader is left puzzled and disturbed at what may have happened to her, and how the tapes on which she tells her story have survived. But a sequel that answers these questions diminishes, rather than augments, the original work. In Shakespeare's great tragedies, the audience leave thinking about the deaths of Hamlet, Macbeth or Cleopatra, but they also leave imagining what life might be like under the regimes of Fortinbras, Malcolm or Octavian. 

In KAOS, what we are left to imagine is the chaos itself. The whole series, from the moment in Episode 1 when Jeff Goldblum's paranoid Zeus spots a wrinkle, is about the imminence of chaos, a sense that the old order of the gods is about to collapse. Covell's gods are an elision between classical Olympus and today's mega-rich, constantly indulging their appetites at the expense of mere mortals. The threat to their everlasting decadence is that mortals learn of how their deaths (Eurydice descending into a stark black and white Underworld) are not, as their religion suggests, a step towards reincarnation, but an absolute destruction as they are turned into the "Meander water" that feeds the gods and ensures their immortality.

Isn't this exactly what is happening in the world? Aren't we dominated by a few extremely wealthy people whose "success" is built on the oppression of all others, and the destruction of the planet?  Aren't the people who have long been lulled into submission finally working out the mythology of centuries, and moving to overthrow them? We are living in the last generation before the revolution - before the chaos that characterises social and political meltdown, but which is the only way for new structures to emerge.

Misia Butler as Caeneus and Aurora Perrineau as Riddy

It's crucial to KAOS's power as drama of the current moment that its casting embraces "diversity".  Covell's approach, unlike most directors working in mainstream media, is not tokenistic but very carefully considered and central to their work's meaning. Eurydice (Riddy) is a mixed race woman with feminist credentials. Her companion in revealing the reality of the Underworld is Caeneus, a trans man. In each case, and elsewhere, the casting itself illuminates both the original mythology and the way in which it is being used here. The myth of Caeneus has always seemed to me particularly unpleasant and problematic: assigned female at birth, Caeneus was raped by Poseidon, who then granted his wish to be made male so that he would never be raped again. He was, however, murdered by the centaurs as they taunted him over not "really" being male. In KAOS, Caeneus is assigned female at birth in an Amazon community, but is aware from the start of being trans, and is supported by his mother, for whom he waits in the Underworld. His sexual encounter with Riddy is natural and simple, although socially transgressive, and it is this love affair that allows them to understand the reality of the gods, and to begin the process of undermining their power. At the end of the series, Caeneus remains in the Underworld, able to survive beyond the moment when he's supposed to become Meander water, and Riddy is on the surface, carrying her revolutionary knowledge.  

So yes - there could be a series in which they proclaim the truth, get ignored, then persuade, and either triumph or not - but we don't need that.  KAOS, utterly brilliantly, has arrived at exactly the moment in world history for which it was made. We will look back in wonder at its prescience.