Opened on November 14, Rafika Chawishe’s “Agamemnon: The Circle of Blood” at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club is not the Agamemnon as you know it. While this production still highlights the raw bloodshed and betrayal Clytamenstra faces which has interested theatergoers for a millennia, it goes beyond Ancient Greek mythology and investigates the cycle of bloodshed in the Middle East, as well as the West’s relationship to such cycle. Not only is the focus of the production more contemporary, but so is Chawishe’s means of producing theatre: cinematic and media technology. Yet, such experimentation with classical texts to find contemporary, political meanings is nothing new to Chawishe.
This interest in political theater was intrinsic to her upbringing. Growing up in Greece with the knowledge that both her father and her grandfather were Syrian exiles, the political nature of the world was something she grasped at a young age. And so was her grasp of her interest in performance. During her youth, she would also watch media with a preference to imitate. She would see something and aspire to imitate it. This simple child-like wonder into imitating things enlarged, and it turned into a larger passion for theatre.
After moving around different places, she faced solitude and decided to go back to Greece, where many of her closest friends were. In Greece, she performed in Bruce Myer’s production of The Maids at the National Theatre of Greece. After that performance, there was a pause in her career. And while such pause may be deemed as a negative, or as reflective of a career slowing down, Chawishe credits this period as the pivotal moment in her artistic career, as she grappled with what she was typically interested in. What interests me as an artist? What are the types of questions that I want to answer? And, as she was grappling with her questions, she realized that her desire for theatre was something more radical, contemporary, and political—again, her roots of understanding the political nature of the world tied with her grounded interest in performance.
As she was thinking, she realized that she wanted to break both the traditional theatre form and structure, and while breaking such forms, she wanted to incorporate tools from other arts. Hence, her idea of theatre wasn’t just a staged play, but rather a whole world that was interdisciplinary in its application of art. Another break she wanted to make with traditional theatre was the idea that a play was just a staged story with only a certain duration. In regards to it being a “staged story,” she considers the play to be a larger world, full of individual experiences and testimonies. Hence, theatre is not just understanding and putting on a play, but rather creating a world with its own community that has its own people. She seemed to want to diverge from the idea of scenography, as she wanted her performances to be more living, moving, and raw. She does this by minding the bodily impulses she feels at the moment. Because of her radical break from what theatergoers expect a play to be like, oftentimes her plays are labeled as “performances,” which she agrees with, but she believes that her art is theatrical and is theatre, and the word “theatre” should expand to encapsulate larger ideas of performance and interdisciplinary art.
Her performances also strike a rawness in bodily movement. When a lot of directors first research their plays, they think about the historical context of the piece or the motifs they’re looking for. But for Chawishe, what starts the research process with physicality. She previously mentioned how, when beginning research, one must not sit on a pedestal and ponder but rather actually get into the work by exploring it physically. She mentioned how the body comes first, and the mind comes last. Hence, even during a performance, there is always something new, as she follows her bodily impulses. For her, bodily impulses are not random movements but rather living answers to questions that her performance is asking.
In an interview with Chawishe, I asked her about how the body provides answers to political questions that her plays often ask. To respond to this, she described how “the body is a country,” and that “the body embodies all the memory, the pain, and happiness” as if these emotions were different islands of the country. Hence, when she follows a bodily impulse, it is not just a gesture but rather an answer to a question—an answer rooted in memory. While many would answer the question through the mind, Chawishe regards such attempts to use the mind to spew a lot of external information “full of noise.” She seems to describe that, while rhetoric offers style with no substance, the body offers substance through recollections of moments of pain, joy, trauma, and more.
Yet, there’s an incredible amount of intensity that comes with the physicality. In the long durational performance of Citizen Alien at E.K.O.M.E, a naked performer is searching for something on the barren ground for hours, exposing herself fully to the audience while getting busy in the grit. In the performance of Trojans-anima Cactus at the Greek National Museum of Contemporary Art, a shirtless man is tangled with ropes all over his torso and neck, as he follows his erratic movements. This sort of intensity stems from the performer’s answer to questions that the performance is asking, often times about collective memory, trauma, gender, race, and post-colonialism. And this sort of intensity also stems from Chawishe’s own feeling of life. She said that “since your infancy until you reach maturity, you’re in a state of shock,” and this constant state of shock, this constant pressing intensity of life bleeds into her performance. This makes sense, as she sees theatre as a unique art form, as it reflects the challenges of life. Like the performer is struggling with the rope around his neck, everyday people are struggling with their own sufferings and suffocations.
Yet, while she attempts to make a radical break from classical theatre, she’s often interested in adapting canonical and classical texts. For example, her performance of Wasteland in Brooklyn adapted T.S. Eliot’s famous The Wasteland. Yet, while she’s exploring a canonical text, she’s doing so by creating new meanings with the way she does art: physicality, intensity, and interdisciplinary. In this long-durational performance, a live, naked body is searching for meaning while stuck in an apparatus made out of ice that reflects the ever-changing nature of politics and society. While still in conversation with the themes of the original text, such as the outdated certainties that society holds, Chawishe creates new meanings with her method of performance. And, in order to have the audience be more active in the performance, they’re invited to place candles in the holes of the apparatus made out of ice, causing the ice to melt to reveal a collective reawakening.
Similarly, with her award-winning theatre-media project that adapted Henrik Ibsen’s Little Eyolf, she takes on the canonical work and makes it contemporary with her method of theatre. She still keeps the themes of the original piece intact but puts them in contemporary settings. For example, in Ibsen’s play, the parents have a kid who becomes paralyzed, and the parents do not accept this new identity. Chawishe makes this feeling of identity being challenged and of being unwanted reflective of all the unaccompanied minors living in Lesvos, Greece. While Greece is often heralded as a democratic, liberal country open to refugees, Chawishe challenges this notion by interviewing 150 refugee minors to hear their stories. This reflects her theatre practice in which she’s not just interested in scenography but rather in creating a world with its own individual stories. By deriving the stories of real, refugee minors into a classical text, her performance emerges to be more contemporary and lively.
With her production of Agamemnon, the audience can expect a similar process of applying a classical text to her own method of theatre, making the piece more lively, real, contemporary, interdisciplinary, and physically commanding. In this production, Chawishe’s own personal experience bleeds in. As a volunteer at the Greek borders helping children flee from war-infested countries, she has seen the human toll of a vicious cycle of violence and war. In particular, she’s seen children with nothing to bring, as well as children who were lost forever taken in by sex traffickers. In this adaptation of Agamemnon, she seeks to explore all the themes that the classical text poses but in a contemporary way that’s in dialogue with the Middle East.
While there is a great intensity that comes with Chaiwshe, there is almost a child-like wonder that dictates her practice. She’s not interested in the mind, but rather the movements of the body. She’s not interested in well-choreographed movements but rather bodily impulses. She believes that the best form of inspiration is to encounter mundane things in everyday life with eyes that pretend like they’ve seen it for the first time, just like when a child sees something for the first time. This child-like wonder she possesses, which stems from her early life in which she would often mimic things, leads to asking provocative, thoughtful, and very heavy questions that can only be answered with the body.
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