{"id":6580,"date":"2017-10-25T18:29:42","date_gmt":"2017-10-26T01:29:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=6580"},"modified":"2017-10-25T18:29:42","modified_gmt":"2017-10-26T01:29:42","slug":"bodies-pain-protest-resistance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2017\/10\/25\/bodies-pain-protest-resistance\/","title":{"rendered":"BODIES IN PAIN, PROTEST AND RESISTANCE"},"content":{"rendered":"
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October 22, 2017 (moc.media.com)<\/p>\n

No matter what the laws of physics decree, there is untold and explosive energy in resistance. Or such is the evidence of \u201cBurning Doors,\u201d the Belarus Free Theater\u2019s bruising exploration of the dynamics of resistance \u2014 the kind that occurs in the intersection of art and politics \u2014 at La MaMa.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

By BEN BRANTLEY,\u00a0The New York Times<\/a><\/b><\/p>\n

This galvanizing production, which runs through Oct. 22, finds a host of able-bodied young women and men subjecting themselves to, and transcending, a spectrum of trials and tortures. These include being wrestled repeatedly to the ground, interrogated in a circular infinity of verbal assaults, harnessed to bungee cords while running desperately in place, strung high in nooses and dunked again and again in a bathtub, while trying to recite a poem.<\/p>\n

<\/center>The woman in the bathtub knows whereof she speaks, or gasps. She\u2019s Maria Alyokhina, a member of the Russian punk group Pussy Riot who made international headlines when they were imprisoned for staging an anti-Putin performance (of 40 seconds\u2019 duration) in a Moscow cathedral.<\/p>\n

Then again, it seems safe to say that most members of the Belarus troupe, which is banned from performing in its native country, have firsthand knowledge of the repression they\u2019re re-enacting and responding to onstage. (Program biographies include references to arrests and prison terms.)<\/p>\n

Only blocks away from La MaMa, at New York University\u2019s Skirball Center, another set of visitors from abroad are channeling recent history into confrontational drama. There\u2019ll you find the Freedom Theater, a storied West Bank-based company that describes itself in the program as \u201ca platform for cultural resistance.\u201d<\/p>\n

The troupe\u2019s current production, which has met with protests in other parts of the world, is \u201cThe Siege,\u201d a speculative re-enactment of the 39-day event of the title, when Palestinian militants took refuge from the Israeli Army in 2002 in Bethlehem\u2019s Church of the Nativity, built in the fourth century and a longtime destination for religious pilgrimages.<\/p>\n

Created and directed by Nabil Al-Raee and Zoe Lafferty, this study of soldiers waiting out the standoff with diminishing supplies and stamina takes a more naturalistic and overtly didactic approach than \u201cBurning Doors.\u201d The characters here include a scene-bridging tour guide, who reminds us of the sacredness of the setting \u2014 summoned in crepuscular stateliness by Andy Purves (lighting) and Anna Gisle (set).<\/p>\n

But most of the play is devoted to conversation among six soldiers, who debate the existential toll of resistance and the historical value of martyrdom in dialogue that emphasizes exposition and theme over individual character. Despite the intrinsic suspense of the setup and the likability of the performers, \u201cThe Siege\u201d often registers as sincere but static, like an animated chapter from a partisan history book.<\/p>\n

The astonishment of \u201cBurning Doors\u201d \u2014 conceived and staged by the troupe founders and artistic directors (in exile), Nikolai Khalezin and Natalia Koliada \u2014 is its ability to translate political rage and impotence into an art of indirection that is often as complex as it is powerful. This is no trumpeting call to arms, or not only that, but an open-ended portrait of both the sociology and psychology of the artist as rebel in Eastern Europe.<\/p>\n

<\/center>At the production\u2019s center are three specific artists of the 21st century: Ms. Alyokhina of Pussy Riot; the Russian political performance artist Petr Pavlensky, whose widely reported acts of civil disobedience have included nailing his scrotum to Red Square; and the Ukranian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov, who is in jail in Russia for alleged acts of terrorism.<\/p>\n

Ms. Alyokhina \u2014 whose book \u201cRiot Days,\u201d published in English this year, is in part a memoir of incarceration \u2014 is here to testify on her own behalf. She becomes a participant in the ensemble\u2019s impressionistic re-creations of an outcast childhood, a brutalizing stint in prison (in which cavity searches were common events) and the bewildering early days of freedom.<\/p>\n

She even appears in a drolly self-conscious question-and-answer session, in English, with the audience. (The questions on the night I saw the show included, \u201cWhat do we do about Trump?\u201d Her answer, delivered tentatively and almost shyly: \u201cI would resist. But it\u2019s you, not me,\u201d who must make the decision.)<\/p>\n

The words of Mr. Pavlensky and Mr. Sentsov, who have been highly articulate in state psychiatric exams and court statements and testimony, are spoken \u2014 and projected \u2014 here as well. (Most of the performance is in Russian and Belarusian, with English supertitles.)<\/p>\n

As for the opposition, it is given comic voice by two actors, embodying Russian fat cat apparatchiks (Pavel Haradnitski and Andrei Urazau), who discuss how to deal with the incomprehensible behavior of subversive artists while sitting, face to face, on toilets. (That scene has a triumphant visual punch line, involving women dressed in signature Pussy Riot balaclavas, wielding flashlights and rolls of toilet paper.)<\/p>\n

The production also summons the lyricism under duress of the French poet Paul \u00c9luard (whose \u201cLiberty,\u201d a totemic work for the French Resistance during World War II, is recited by Maryia Sazonava in a noose and harness, suspended agonizingly above the stage); and the ruminations of Michel Foucault (delivered by Maryna Yurevich as a circus ringmaster-cum-judge) on subjugation and punishment.<\/p>\n

The twisted human forms of the art of Egon Schiele are conjured in haunting ballets of what might be called defensive masochism. The performers coil their bodies increasingly inward, as if to squeeze their own flesh into invisibility.<\/p>\n

The punishment of one\u2019s own flesh is notoriously the specialty of Mr. Pavlensky, whose performance pieces of protest include \u2014 in addition to the scrotum nailing \u2014 setting fire to the doors of the Russian Federal Security Service building, sewing his lips together and wrapping his body in barbed wire.<\/p>\n

\u201cBurning Doors,\u201d which has been designed as a sort of prison cell of the mind by Mr. Khalezin, makes the subliminal case that such painful activities are of a piece with a longstanding, specifically Russian sensibility. In the 19th century, Dostoyevsky wrote about the phenomenon of self-laceration, as both a physical and spiritual form of torment, a naturally unnatural response to the divisive absurdities of self and society.<\/p>\n

Two of this production\u2019s most haunting vignettes are set to Dostoyevsky\u2019s words. A naked performer slowly dresses himself while reciting Prince Myshkin\u2019s account from \u201cThe Idiot\u201d of a man awaiting his execution, counting down what he believes to be the final moments of his life.<\/p>\n

The actor here, Kyril Masheka, is steeped in a raw, empathic fear and sorrow that make putting on clothes a fraught and irrelevant-seeming business. And in a scene from \u201cThe Brothers Karamazov,\u201d a dialectic debate on viciousness and goodness between Ivan and Alyosha (Mr. Haradnitski and Mr. Urazau) becomes a furniture-upending wrestling match.<\/p>\n

Philosophical issues of immortal import assume a mortal \u2014 and moral \u2014 urgency. And Dostoyevsky\u2019s questions about persisting, and resisting, in the face of institutionalized inhumanity glow with an infectious fever.<\/p>\n

The show\u2019s visual epilogue is (literally) writ in flame, but the bonfire that lights up \u201cBurning Doors\u201d is from the friction of artists as arsonists \u2014 in motion, at war and determined to scorch.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

October 22, 2017 (moc.media.com) No matter what the laws of physics decree, there is untold and explosive energy in resistance. Or such is the evidence of \u201cBurning Doors,\u201d the Belarus Free Theater\u2019s bruising exploration of the dynamics of resistance \u2014 the kind that occurs in the intersection of art and… Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6580"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6580"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6580\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6581,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6580\/revisions\/6581"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6580"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6580"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6580"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}