Performing Exiles festival in Berlin

The Berlin festival directorate “Berliner Festspile” has come up with and is currently holding a new festival called Performing Exiles – it is dedicated to the exiled artists of the modern world. The topic is relevant, so Esther Steinbock couldn’t miss the event.

Among today’s emigrants there are many obscure activists, but there are also unconditional stars. Perhaps the most famous of the participants in the new festival is Iranian director Amir Reza Kukhestani, who has been living and working in Europe for a long time. He has his own independent troupe, which is well known in the festival market – in Berlin they showed their new play “The Blind Runner”. Kuhestani tells the story of a married couple who plotted to escape from Iran. Their only chance is to have time to run through a multi-kilometer railway tunnel during a night break in train traffic, just a few hours. Therefore, they constantly train – they run together. But then the wife is imprisoned, apparently for political reasons. And then the husband and wife agree to continue training anyway, at the same time she runs along the prison wall inside, and he outside.

There is no need to ask what kind of prison this is, and even in Iran, where prisoners and their husbands are allowed to run along the walls, albeit from different sides. Amir Reza Kuhestani does not stage a documentary story, but a poetic drama. As usual, it is short, minimalist and heavily uses video projection: on an empty stage, only actors, an invisible camera and screens. Short replicas, pauses, expressive faces torn out of the darkness with almost no facial expressions, geometric lines of movement and “geometric”, strict video editing. The Persian language emphasizes – or perhaps creates – a very restrained, devoid of open emotions drama of the plot. At some point, reality blurs altogether; whether they really run, or are they just other people’s dreams, ceases to be clear. And only the ending leaves no doubt about the tragic outcome of the plot – the two run through the tunnel, and the morning train rushes towards them.

It is not by chance that the Performing Exiles festival appeared in Berlin, a city that for refugees more than once in modern history has become both a destination and a place of exodus – it is not without reason that among the languages ​​spoken by the festival participants, of course, there are both Russian and Ukrainian. The experienced curator Matthias Lilienthal, who was invited to assemble the program, knows the art of refugees well, he himself worked in Beirut for several years and now invited the Lebanese director Rabi Mrouye as an adviser, who, in turn, showed a triptych performance he recently invented together with Lina Majdalani ” Hartaqat (Heresies).” These are three short documentary stories, three portraits created by three Lebanese immigrants based on different texts. In each of these stories, some kind of formal device is used – in the first, for example, the performer accompanies the text with sounds extracted from bizarrely used musical instruments – but the main ones are still the human stories themselves, full of artless bitterness and everyday absurdity. Moreover, “exile” can be interpreted very broadly in the play, not only as a forced flight from the homeland, but also as a change in gender identity.

The name of the festival itself can also be understood in different ways – both as “playing exiles” and as “a game of exiles”. And even as a “game of exile.” In the theater playbill on such a hot topic, a fair share of the products of political activism is understandable, often replacing creativity with carelessly made-up conjuncture. When it comes to another culture, especially an exotic, new one, it is not easy, if not impossible, to separate a sincere personal confession from an ordinary dish with a quick-cooking sauce. It seems you have to be on the alert – but then the viewer’s immediacy is lost.

On this swing, your correspondent spent most of Ancestral Visions of the Future / Pageantry of Wailing, the theatrical debut of Berlin-based Lesotho-born director and video artist Lemohang Jeremiah Moses. The lack of a coherent theatrical experience interfered with the drama and, so to speak, the presentation of his performance. But the power of several visual images of the evening (for example, the spinning drum of a washing machine illuminated with red light as an image of a life-giving mother’s womb) and the hypnotic effect of plastic studies (for example, the seemingly endless rolling of a muscular naked body) did their job – the audience gave up and in the finale gave a standing ovation. Moreover, the obvious attribute of adherence to the anti-colonial agenda, the head of the monument to a certain “white European general”, looked only as one of the details of a modest scenography.

There is also an educational program at the festival – they talk about the show-review “Sunrise in the East”, staged in 1930 in one of the ballrooms of the Kreuzberg district by Berlin actors of African descent. So today’s work of the Afro-German diasporas inherits a great tradition. Not only art, but also a way of life. So the former box office of the Berlin Festival House turned into the Penguin Bar for the duration of Performing Exiles, a kind of reconstruction of the famous bar on Berlin’s Bülowstrasse, which served as a meeting place for African artists at the turn of the 50s and 60s of the last century. But also a place that especially annoyed the Berlin racists, of course, too.