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)

Intoxicated by words and music

Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal was a set text at university and appealingly so with its themes of drunkenness, intoxication, love, beauty, ennui and anguish. A decade or so later and the collection crossed my path again as I saw an amazing performance directed by Frédéric Dussenne at the Théâtre Marni in Brussels.

I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect as I entered the theatre for “Baudelaire: music and poetry”. As it turned out, I was treated to a spectacle that combined drama, theatre, dance and music. The words were almost entirely taken from the Fleurs du Mal collection (the one exception was a prose poem by Baudelaire that was set to music by Benoît Mernier) and either sung by the soprano Sophie Karthäuser or spoken by the actor Angelo Bison.

Bison’s delivery was particularly powerful. He turned what could have been a straight poetry recital into a truly theatrical performance. The stage had little on it: on the left was the pianist David Lively at his grand piano with the soprano in front of him, on the right the actor dressed in black with a single chair as a prop. When the poems spoke of beauty and love, Bison looked imploringly at the soprano, when the poems raised questions, he turned to the audience. At times he was calm, at others he stormed into the audience or off the stage in a fit of rage or anger or desperation. He was totally in command of the audience’s reactions, orchestrating whether we watched in silence, allowed ourselves a little chuckle when asked what we should get drunk on, or made our skins crawl as he spat out the words of Une charogne (carrion). I was captivated.

The rhythm and metre of the poetry were brilliantly accentuated by Bison and at times it was as if he was almost singing. It was a natural transition between his poems and those sung by Karthäuser such as Harmonie du soir (Evening’s harmony) or La mort des amants (The death of lovers), both set to music by Claude Debussy. As well as the piano, song and spoken word, dance was also woven into the performance with a male dancer representing for example ‘evening’ and ‘the devil’.

According to the director, Baudelaire was “a musician of spoken French”. Well, that certainly came across in last night’s performance. Wonderful stuff.

Digital Words and Images

I took a peek at the World Digital Library, which was launched today, and found all sorts of curiosities.

As I’m currently studying the opera Carmen as part of a university course, I was interested to find an 1872 manuscript, handwritten by Bizet, of the ‘Havanaise’ from his opera Carmen as well as a short film dating from 1898-1899 by the Lumière brothers of a traditional bullfight in Seville, Spain.

I also stumbled upon a more amusing item: a letter to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, signed by three girls identifying themselves as “Elvis Presley Lovers,” begging the president not to allow Elvis’s sideburns to be cut off after he was conscripted into the army in 1958!

The digital library is an initiative between the Library of Congress, Unesco and 32 partner institutions. It’s a web site containing digitised books, journals, manuscripts, maps, motion pictures, prints, photographs and sound recordings from libraries and archives around the world. It’s free to browse, easy to search (by country, date, topic, type of item or institution) and you can share discoveries with others by any number of social networking tools (some of which I’d heard of, some I hadn’t).

You don’t get the same kick out of seeing digital versions of these cultural materials as you do from seeing the original. However, maybe you otherwise wouldn’t get to see the original at all – the site has items from national libraries ranging from Iraq, Brazil and China to Russia, Israel and Serbia -- or maybe this site may prompt a visit to one of the libraries or institutes.

One discovery I made for example was a beautiful illuminated page in Javanese script from a chronicle of a Javanese court in Yogyakarta. Since my travels to Java and other Indonesian islands, I do have a soft spot for Indonesian culture. And this particular item is at an institute in Leiden (Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies), which really isn’t that far at all from my current home town of Brussels.

Go and explore and see what you find at www.wdl.org!

A whole new world just waiting to be discovered

I’ve been converted. No, I haven’t had a religious epiphany, but more of a literary one. I have discovered the short story genre.

“Runaway”, a collection of short stories by Alice Munro, had been sitting untouched on my bookshelf for several months. I can’t recall exactly why I bought the book; it was just one of those chance purchases. The cover caught my attention, it had interesting comments by critics on the back and I liked what I read on the first page or so.

I came home, put it on my bookshelf in the pile of “books to read” and then forgot about it. Until last week that is. And now I can’t put it down. It has been a while since I’ve read a book where I am so absorbed by the characters and the writing that although you know you should really put the light out and go to sleep, you tell yourself that another few pages won’t do any harm and you simply keep on reading.

I just hadn’t expected this from short stories because, by their very nature, you’re not with the characters for many pages. This particular collection differs perhaps in that one character returns in three stories, albeit at completely different stages of her life i.e. in one she’s a young woman, another a mother and another a grandparent. But other stories are totally distinct.

What’s most compelling is the way the episodes are distilled down to their very essence, not a word is wasted. I feel like I am simultaneously being told a story, in the most straightforward sense, and gaining an insight into human behaviour and the human condition. And all this in so few words. The experience is intense and a joy.

Surely in this age where everyone claims to have so little free time, this is the era when the short story should come into its own. I haven’t seen any sales figures for short stories to know what the trend is and how it fares against the novel or poetry, but anecdotal evidence tells me that it is an unpopular genre and a hard sell. It shouldn’t be, it really shouldn’t. Or is Alice Munro one of the few brilliant short story writers out there?

Have you discovered a great short-story writer? If so, please share! I want to read more.

The freedom to write

Every now and again I’m reminded of how lucky I am to be able to write what I want, more or less, about whatever interests me. That unfortunately isn’t the case for everyone across the globe.

I recently heard four writers speak in Brussels about their personal experiences in their native countries of Syria, Zimbabwe, Afghanistan and Serbia and why they have sought refuge in other nations.

Syrian poet Faraj Bayrakdar explained how we was sentenced to 15 years in prison for, as he put it, being against the Ba’ath principles of Freedom, Unity and Socialism. The irony of being put in prison for opposing freedom was not lost on him. As he said though, “the freedom within us is larger than the prison that holds us”.

After being released in 2000, he travelled regularly to Europe and always returned trouble-free to his homeland. The situation changed, however, while he was in Sweden. He heard how many writers and journalists had been arrested for signing the so-called Damascus Declaration, which called for Lebanon and Syria to set up embassies in each other’s countries. His friends back home warned him not to return as he would either be arrested or “an incident” would be arranged. “For the first in my life I felt that my life was in danger”, he said.

He still lives in Stockholm, writing poetry and speaking out in favour of freedom: the freedom of expression and the freedom to be silent.

Zimbabwe’s Chenjerai Hove read out two of his poems, written in English, about the death of Ken Saro-Wiwa, a writer and activist who was executed by the Nigerian government in 1995. Hove made the point that freedom after expression is just as crucial as being allowed to express oneself. As the authorities told him, there’s no problem in having the books published. The difficulties come afterwards, Hove said, giving as one example that the state might buy all his books and then throw them into a lake.

Afghanistan’s Kamran Mir Hazar said he had been detained several times in what he termed an “Afghan guantanamo” for writing articles about war crimes and corruption by high-ranking officials on his website kabulpress.org.

Dejan Anastasijevic, the first Serbian journalist to testify against Slobodan Milosevic at the Tribunal in The Hague, also spoke about Afghanistan. During the war in Afghanistan, the Arabic-language news network Al-Jazeera was blown up in the name of the “war on terror”, and there was no protest from journalists, Anastasijevic said. He warned of how the independence of journalists is being eroded and how the current financial crisis “will be used by enemies of the freedom of expression as a cover”, how the publications that survive will no longer be independent but be run by governments or banks.

“The fight for freedom is never over”, Anastasijevic said.

The writers were speaking at events organised by the Brussels international literature house Passa Porta, together with Shahrazad - Stories for Life, a place where writers persecuted and silenced in their own homelands can tell their stories, and PEN, a worldwide authors' association that stands up for free speech and opposes any form of censorship.