Young Jean Lee Tackles Black Identity

Playwright and director Young Jean Lee said of audiences’ reactions to her latest play “The Shipment”:  “Whether they loved it or hated it, they were still thinking about it long after the show was over. I feel really happy about that response.” 

I saw the play earlier this week during its run at the Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels and it’s true, I can’t stop thinking about it. The play deals with “black American identity politics” and is performed by an all-black cast. The audience is confronted with stereotypes and clichés of black identity, which are sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes funny, always thought-provoking.

“When starting a play, I ask myself, ‘What's the last play in the world I would ever want to write?’ Then I force myself to write it. I do this because I've found that the best way to make theater that unsettles and challenges my audience is to do things that make me uncomfortable”, Lee says on her website.

“The Shipment” is divided into two parts, the first being a bombardment of stereotypical black images. A young, black man tells his grandmother of his dream to be a rap star; he is then enticed into the world of drug dealing by a friend; he ends up in jail where he meets a record manager who turns him into a star. There’s music, there’s dance, there are hip-hop and rap rhythms, there’s street lingo and strong language. It’s fast-paced and funny.

About half-way through the 90-minute play, the tempo suddenly drops as the house lights go up and three of the actors take centre stage to sing a powerful a capella song (the lyrics are from Dark Center of the Universe by Modest Mouse). I can still hear the rhythms, words and harmonies. As Lee said in an interview with the festival organisers, “the audience is laughing at these stereotypes, and suddenly they see the performers as people, not stereotypes, and the performers are looking at them”. It acts as a transition to the starkly contrasting, naturalistic setting of the second part of the show.

The play is not about making white people feel bad about being white, but it is about raising questions about black identity and subverting stereotypes. It makes us, the audience, question our own attitudes towards and preconceived ideas of race, ask why we associate certain images with black people and others with white people, and wonder whether we all have some ingrained racism in us.

The show, which has so far been performed in New York and Brussels, is doing a worldwide tour. Click here to see where the play will be showing.

(Photo credit: © Academie Anderlecht - Tracy Richards)

Queen Elisabeth violin competition – waiting for the finals

I might be wrong, but I don’t think I heard this year’s winner of the Queen Elisabeth International Music Competition in Brussels last night.

There's no denying there was drama, as one of the violinists broke a string as she was tuning up in between pieces, and there was also charm, as another semi-finalist added a cheeky smile to win over at least the audience (who knows if that kind of thing has an effect on the jury). There were also painful facial expressions and hunched shoulders at times, neither of which looked conducive to making a beautiful musical sound.

Don’t misunderstand me, these young musicians have an enviable ability. But I’m not convinced I heard the violinist who will join the ranks of David Oistrakh and Vadim Repin, previous winners of the competition. After all, this is one of the world’s top violin competitions, aimed at musicians aged between 17 and 27 who have completed their training and are ready to start an international career. Expectations are high.

If I had to pick one of the four violinists performing yesterday to go through to the final, I’d go for Moldavia’s Ilian Garnet. His performance was the only one, for me at least, that added an extra bit of magic and went beyond technical perfection.

Only on Saturday night though will we know for sure which of the 24 semi-finalists will stay in the competition. And then the 12 lucky finalists will be whisked off to the Queen Elisabeth College of Music where they will live a rather isolated week until their final performance.

Bring on the finals!

Enjoy Poverty: Renzo Martens

The lasting image in Renzo Martens’ documentary-style film, set in the Congo, is a neon sign saying “ENJOY please POVERTY” that he sets up in a remote Congolese village. As the Dutch artist starts the portable generator and the letters light up, the children look on in delight, and the parents are happy that a little joy has been brought into their children’s lives. It is quite clearly the event of their year, if not their lifetime.

But the message it carries is a stark one: be resigned to your life of poverty and don’t believe in the hope offered by western charity workers, you have been poor for decades and in reality this probably won’t change, be satisfied with your lot, enjoy your poverty.

This uneasy pairing of, on the one hand, seeming to want to better the Congolese people’s lives and, on the other, concluding that there is no hope of a better life for them runs throughout the film. It makes uncomfortable viewing as you wonder what Martens’ true intentions are.

The film seems to mock the way the western world exploits the poverty in Africa: the white journalists and photographers seeking the worst atrocities so they can sell their ‘story’ to the western media, the United Nations peacekeepers keeping designated areas safe so that overseas companies can fly in and out to search for gold, the western palm oil and cocoa plantation owner whose local workers don’t earn enough to feed their children, and the NGOs who drive around in jeeps and plaster their logos on everything to increase visibility and help secure more funding.

Martens travels around the Congo describing this situation to the Congolese people, telling them how their poverty is a resource that the west exploits to make money, little of which is returned to those in need, and to make themselves feel good. But isn’t Martens complicit in this too?

At one point, Martens sets up a makeshift classroom where he puts basic calculations up on a board to illustrate to local men how photographing malnourished children and raped women and selling these photos to foreign media would bring them more money than taking pictures of weddings and celebrations. They set out to put the theory into practice.

You sit there squirming, as these men are encouraged to point their cameras into the faces of their own suffering people and get a ‘good’ picture that will sell well. Martens and the men go to a hospital to see if the (white) Médecins sans Frontières representative would allow them to take pictures and if he’d be interested in buying their photos. The answer is no, the reason first being that it would be inappropriate, and then, when Martens points out that western photographers are permitted to do so, the reason is because the locals’ work isn’t professional enough.

Martens tells the men bluntly that their plan won’t work, they won’t be able to sell their photos and that they should go back to selling happy, wedding pictures for a pittance. You feel like Martens has used them for his own personal experiment, and then abandoned them once he has made his point and obtained his documentary material. They had put their trust in him and are left disappointed, exploited even.

It’s a contradictory film, which initially made me question the point of my monthly contributions to Médecins sans Frontières and by the end had me questioning what Martens really hoped to achieve with his documentary.

The film is showing at the KVS in Brussels until May 10 as part of the Kunstenfestivaldesarts.

(Photo credit: © Renzo Martens)