Due to the war, or the post-war situation in Lebanon, we have not been able to bring Lina Saneh and Rabih Mroué from Beirut to Warsaw. So we invited Olga Stanisławska to provide us with material and information on the Lebanon and the current situation in the Middle East including its historical
aspects in order to work on our knowledge and non-knowledge in this context:

Olga Stanisławska

– Reality and Fiction -

“Guided or misguided by images and texts, feature films and art videos, poems, songs, historical analyses and breaking-news reportages, postcards from places burdened with national symbols and excerpts of transgressive novels, we will try to navigate the dangerous waters of the Imaginary Lebanon.

We will begin with the beginings of the Lebanese statehood, trying to recognize different founding myths and to map their symbolic territories. We will also get a glimpse of the Arab Image Foundation, a Beirut archive creating a mosaic image of the collective past.

With the outbreak of war in 1975, we will follow different attempts to preserve some sense in the apparent chaos. Among other texts: a journalistic testimony by a foreign war correspondent; a poem by another foreigner, a Palestinian refugee in a besieged city; an autobiographical account of an Israeli activist; a literary theory where the war is the time of transgression, a liberating force dismantling the conservative society and empowering women’s literary creativity; and finally excerpts of novels stemming out of powerlessness of those who are hiding in the cellars, but “gnawing at the foundations like rats”.

As the shooting stops, we will try to see how one can deal with the dead who are haunting the living. What is necessary for them to rest at peace? Knowledge? Justice? Reconciliation? Remembrance? Forgetting? We will get a psychiatrist’s opinion, and watch the fictitious documentary sources of the Atlas Group, which undermine the self- evident character of any historical documents. Does the serious doubt about the possibility of gaining access to any “reality” and establishing any “truth” mean that any moral judgement has to be suspended?

Rich with these reflections – or may be deeply confused – we will turn to the present. Here we will listen with particular attention to individual voices. We will encounter a new narrative form – the blog, with its wild stream of official and semi-official reports, rumours, political analyses, personal stories, outbursts of emotions.

What to do with this accumulated knowledge and non-knowledge? Is there a way to respond to the mass of flowing information? What kind of exchange/communication is possible between here and there now? How can we address Lina Saneh and Rabih Mroué, whose absence has shaped three days of our lives? Is there a message we can send out to Beirut? Can performance, acting, directing offer a language to formulate this message?”

Lina Saneh & Rabih Mroué
25th of August - 2nd of September

Reality and Fiction

Documents are essential to any power. They reaffirm its authority and make it official and legitimate. Documents are also symbolic of the need of any authority to authenticate its discourse, to establish its institutions, to root them, to stabilize the system, to control the situation, and to give itself an everlasting existence. In the face of this, there are various facts and events that perturb and disturb this power and its pretensions, such as ghosts, vampires, rumours, monsters... not only because they are insubordinate to certain strategies and injunctions, but simply because they can be neither captured with cameras nor consigned to documents. They have the capacity to leak out from any rational, unique, and unilateral explanation.

Consequently, one should ask about the role that documents might play between these two poles: 'power,' and those irrational 'dissidents'? Can we consider documents as a demarcation line between reality and fiction? And is it true that, by essence and nature, reality and fiction are condemned to opposite poles in an irreconcilable dichotomy? Does the absence of documents therefore mean that something is 'unreal' or fictional? How can one distinguish documents from non-documents? What kind of stories, discourses, narratives and daily life experiences cannot be considered as documents - and why? Reflecting on documents means to analyze their role in political discourses, and to examine how, through documents, the authorities can interfere with the personal and intimate details of our life (or lives) in order to control or even orchestrate them.

This course will work on scenes and sketches based on anything considered as a 'document' or as 'scientific evidence' (statistics, plans, images, diagrams, photos, films, scans, laboratory analysis reports, official papers, texts, etc.) and work on a performance style between fake authenticity and real acting: playing on the notions of truth and untruth, reality and fiction, trying to blur the traces, passing from one side to the other without borders, reversing the signs, stirring up the norms and shaking up certainty, discovering the role of politics in order to create a new 'unreal' reality or a virtual one. This course will address these questions: how much reality can the stage take? How should we frame reality in an artwork? How much authenticity, polemic, and/or falsity is needed for the 'real' to show its face?

The city of Beirut and Lebanese artworks will be presented to give some ideas and information on how to deal with war, memory, disappearance, rumours, death and ghosts.

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Catherine Sullivan
3rd of September - 10th of September

The Ouija Board

Ouija (pronounced wee-juh or wee-jee) is a letter and number board for spiritualistic séances, where the fingers of participants move over the board generating messages from the dead.

The course will produce a performed choreographic work, which in some sense will interpret the theme of the topic 'Ghosts, Spectres, Phantoms, and the Places They Live' as it relates to notions of the 'after-effect' generated by strategies for composition and content. Originally interested in compositional methodologies from the 1960s, composer Sean Griffin and artist Catherine Sullivan recently generated a series of performed sequences by teasing ambiguity out of very reductive scoring strategies (for example The Chittendens, Audimax/Neustadt Manifestation, 2004 and D-Pattern, 2005) It is a performative strategy that is interested in questioning reduction - working on units, individual actions, separate poses and gestures, and rhythmically combining/translating them into compositional strategies. The ambiguity lies in the sense in which reduction leads to greater possibilities for recombination and paradoxically, accumulation.

This choreographic work automates the dramatic tasks (physical or emotional circumstances or 'attitudes') of actors using numerical sequences combined with interpretive treatments, which would ergo vary the execution in size or intensity. Gestural and emotive content is rendered in repeatable units similar to a percussionist playing phrases of beats.

The Ouija board - a conjectural machine spelling out something that isn't really there - generates psycho-social connotations at random; so too our choreography which will change at random as one phrase of a character's attitude encounters another.

Specifically, the course will work to advance the function of the 'historiographic after-effect': those autobiographical, cultural or sociological details which, when combined with an overtly self-conscious attitude toward composition, can be likened to the pretenses of the Ouija - to invite the dead to converse with the living.

The course Performing / Acting / Directing will be realized in cooperation with Teatr Narodowy

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