Another highlight of the Xchanges Festival (16-19 May) at the Kampnagel Theatre in Hamburg, Music for Unstageable Theatre is a performance for one actor-dancer (Mohamed Fouad, who is also the choreographer) with original music by the German artist Alexander Paulick-Thiel (who also initiated the concept of the production), directed by Adel Abdel-Wahab (who also wrote the text). Having been presented in Berlin and Cairo in 2017, before going to Theater Werkstatt Hannover in 2019, Music for Unstageable Theatre was presented at Kampnagel for two consecutive nights. Compared to the performance that I saw in Cairo at the Goethe Institute (Dokki), the Kampnagel performance looked clearer. Apparently the context of presentation, the collective energy within the performance space, and the organisational style have an effect on our perception of a performance and its clarity in our eyes. At Kampnagel, the performance seemed solid and clear, while in Cairo I felt a certain disparity and confusion that emerged not from the performance or the performative style but from its contextualisation, and my own gaze being affected by the surrounding confusion and chaos. For a moment, I wondered about the context for which Abdel-Wahab — an artist who is fascinated by context and focused on its effects — created his performance. I imagine that when a theatre maker creates a transcultural-transnational production, they are aware that this is already an endeavour to deconstruct space and cultural references or, at least, to interweave them. Therefore, Abdel-Wahab might have not set any specific location or context for the presentation of his performance. He may have intended to create something that is valid anywhere. And it was indeed valid anywhere and almost at any time. Nevertheless the spectatorship can never be free of its own cultural and socio-political references, for this is how one's system of knowledge is shaped, and this is how one's perception is referenced. While Music for Unstageable Theatre could be valid for spectatorship anywhere, the spectators themselves locate and ground it within their own references. The collective references of the audience in Cairo created a horizon of expectation and of projections that eventually fed confusion and chaos into the channeling of the performance, whether among the spectators themselves or from them to the stage and vice versa. Music for Unstageable Theatre is rightly so called, for what Abdel-Wahab has written is “unstageable”. As the performance's director, he remained loyal to the unstageability of his own text. In the publicity material, the performance is presented as dealing with the topic of auto-censorship, besides other sub-topics like confusion, fear, isolation and vulnerability. Nevertheless one should have absolutely no expectation when stepping into a performance directed by Abdel-Wahab. He is an artist of his own kind, with whom you can find no solace, no release. He does not make theatre, he makes performance. In his work, you will never find a coherent and sustainable narrative. He is against narratives. He deconstructs and dares to brea h the abyss of non-meaning. When compared to all other theatre makers belonging to Egyptian state theatre, he looks as though he belongs to a totally different time and culture of performance. His previous performances carry the same imprint of deconstructing performance narratives and delving into the chaotic world of violence, aggression and absurdity. Having recently become the writer of his own productions — he is also a theatre critic sometimes — Abdel-Wahab challenges authority in all its forms, whether as a narrative discourse of alleged truths, or as a tradition of aesthetics. He even challenges himself while insisting on preserving the dignity of confusion and fragmentation within his artistic creations. It is worth mentioning that he has also created an independent theatre festival in Alexandria, his hometown, to present works that reflect the relationship between performance and political-social criticism. To date it remains the only surviving independent international theatre festival, affirming the fact that wholly independent theatre is a must. The piece may be categorised as a music and dance in-stallation, and it deeply respects the style of performance art. Dancer-choreographer Mohamed Fouad has a special talent for performing conflict and pain. A unique artist who has recently invaded the international performance arts scene while residing in France, Fouad preserves the impact of his lifelong practise of karate within his choreographies and his physical language. The set and props are intelligently employed as tools for a choreographic language that insinuates veiling, hiding, masking and eventually self-censorship. Besides this opening scene you will find no sign of the main topic announced to the public. But, again, we shouldn't be searching. We should only experience. One of the most important moments in the performance is when Fouad prepares to deliver a speech in the mic. He holds a lot of white paper as if it is the script of some official address. Yet no words come out of his mouth, and instead the sheets of paper keep flying in the air, dispersing all over the ground, while he frantically attempts to gather them and lend some coherence to the absurd situation. Such a scene can be seen as iconic of Abdel-Wahab's work. On the one hand, it captures the issue of expectation as we expect a speech that will never be delivered. And, on the other hand, it grasps the image of public speech: what does public speech mean now in Egypt? Who is saying what? Is everybody equally provided with the right of free speech and free expression? And what is the current content of those speeches? For Abdel-Wahab, the content seems to be void, pure and utter void. For him the expectation can also kill whatever content may potentially come. Expectation recycles modes of power and of collective discourses and projections that end up muting the lone speaker. Or maybe he is already self-muted by his own expectation of the expectations and framings of the others. As Fouad brilliantly tries to collect the blank sheets of paper, he creates a physical metaphor that expresses and re-expresses the collecting of those fragments of emptiness as if they were fragments of an endless history of absurd speeches, speeches of void that speak to a collective expectation of power recycling. While he ends up failing to collect his papers, he also ends up retrieving his free fragmented self. From that moment on the images become more dispersed and more shocking. He goes to a table and performs a ritual of torture. The table looks like an autopsy table. Although this ritual is disguised as a cooking recipe, the verbal description and the physical gestures confront us with the miniature of a torture operation. Fear is in the air. Suicidal thoughts are in the air, cooking our own dead and tortured body, all with a sticky smile and a distant robotic attitude of negligence and indifference. Do not look here for connections between scenes, narratives, structural coherence. For how can one perform the loss of meaning and the ritual of his tortured and suicidal body while preserving the traditions of the construction of meaning, aesthetics and structure? Music for Unstageable Theatre seems to have been inspired by a war zone. Somehow our spectatorship is also deconstructed by those performative acts. Somehow we lose our sense of community and togetherness. We disperse and untangle. As the music envelops the performance and grounds it in the style of an art installation, Alexander Paulick-Thiel appears on screen as if delivering his own speech too, or rather being interviewed. Yet he can only say that he can say nothing. Another facet of the void. His “saying nothing” is set against his music as an act that says something, if not all. In the same sense, the final scene comes as an absolute proof of loss, vulnerability and decomposition of the verbal medium. The solo performer undresses in front of the audience, his action connects the dots of his previous physical actions/metaphors. As he literally takes his clothes off, he insinuates taking off his history, his appearance, his image, his labels and all the visual traces of socio-cultural references that frame him. Nonetheless he also appears to be taking off his own protection, shedding off his shield, coming to terms with his vulnerability, and with the nudity of his symbolically wounded body. At this moment we do not actually see what could be defined as a male body, there is no pushing forward of the labels of gender. The solo body looks just like a human body with traces of conflict and vulnerability. Even in semi-nudity, that male body does not project masculinity but rather isolation and mortification. But does he insinuate colour? If gender can be transformed and placed almost neutrally within the essentiality of a human body, can colour follow the same path within a transnational-transcultural context of spectatorship? A certain courage shines through in a split second towards the end, the strange courage of giving up hope, embracing despair, or not caring about the vulnerability and the disintegration of one's own body. Is it the courage of welcoming death? Or is it the courage of having already encountered death and survived beyond it? The courage of losing one's power, gender, meaning and history and becoming just a material and fragile body? If such a body can exist in the first place it would be confronting us with our own potential death and loss of meaning, it would be a ritual announcing the disintegration of humanity and humanism. Such a multi-layered yet void and nude body can only exist in performance, inside an unstageable discourse about dehumanisation accompanied by music.
