[ ___ ]
The first was a series of Performance Actions, born of a simple premise: if I wanted to know what missing was, why didn’t I just ask? I collected stories and experiences from others living around me. I wanted content: conversations, images and anecdotes I could cut and paste like a scrapbook. But if I valued and respected that content, I would have to consider its value, and make an offer worth taking in return. I came up with a series of exchanges.
Enter AMANI ALSAIED. Friend, filmmaker, theater artist and classmate. All around bad-ass and excellent thrower of get-togethers.
Amani joined me in crafting the performance actions, with generous help from Debra Levine. Together, we spent a long time creating open-ended questions so that participants could structure the telling of their own stories. This was key, as I wanted to consider our interactions together as a collaborative performance, and their responses as content. As such, I had to treat them as collaborating artists, and to make exchanges with them with the attitude that I was making arrangements with them for access to their work. Because of this, I needed to allow them what Anna Deavere Smith has termed in her line of interviews “self-authorship.”
“Send a Letter or make a phone call to anyone, anywhere”
We came up with an exchange; we would offer to help the people we met post letters to anywhere in the world, or would give them five minutes of time on our international phone to call anyone they liked. In exchange, they would let me interview them about who they chose to call or write to . For the interviews, I thought talking about the letter or phone call and its recipient would be a safe and reasonable space to meet for conversation; I was knocking on the door of their personal lives, but the questions were still confined to the experience that we shared and that they the participants had agreed to. Amani and I made signs in English, Arabic, and eventually Hindi and Urdu, and visited a range of locations in the city, hoping to find comfortable spaces for people of many different backgrounds. Signs in hand, audio recorder on standby, and questions at the ready, we waited for someone to approach us and take us up on our offer:
Enter RASHID, PETER, JOHN, K. , BACHIR, S. , GEETA, AIHAM, LECT, MONA, ALY, STEPHANIE, ZIBIA, JONAS, ADRIENNE, AYA, MUSTAFA, A. , MAZAMMEL, SHAIKH MOHAMMAD, M. , MASUM, and SAIFAL.
My hope was by asking about the letter’s recipient , and by doing so after they had written it, participants would feel comfortable and connected to the question: “what does it feel like when you miss someone or something?” I assumed their answers about missing would form the core content of my devised theater piece.
But instead, the conversations about the letters generated a series of beautiful character portraits of the recipients, the writers, and, in flashes, of myself. Time and time again we fell into a kind of summoning of absent friends, lovers, and family . I realized that our exchange was something distinct in my experience of the city. Even though it is a given that for most people, the reality of being in Abu Dhabi is having left somewhere else, I had never before encountered a space where my interactions with others acknowledged and explored their past lives and experiences, rather than just their present reality and function. The result was an incredibly touching performance of affection and celebration in descriptions of loved ones far away. The performance actions produced no concrete answers; instead, they generated specific questions that I knew were grounded in the reality of a number of every day lives in Abu Dhabi and in the sacred details of the people we had come to know: “What happens when we need each other, but cannot be together?” “What happens when we don’t?” “How is meaningful contact made with those apart from us?” “How do words of love become an act of loving?” “Why are we separated?”
As it stands, I've done 23 exchanges across these three versions of these performance actions. Apart from the actions themselves, I re-performed them through the act of processing: uploading audio and contracts, transcribing each interview word for word, preparing excerpts for release and designing web pages where audiences can encounter these texts, and through them, these people. By these physical actions of writing and speaking and explaining, each interview passed through me many times, leaving marks both inexpressible and indelible. As I did more and more transcripts, I pushed myself to try and capture more and more detail: How long is the pause I just heard? What is its nature? How can I understand it to be not just empty space but another kind of text—not a blankness but rather a canvas filled with essential details? Creating my own vocabulary for transcription forced me to explain to myself the differences in what I was seeing, and the constant repetition of listening and transcribing allowed me to subconsciously access the archive present within my body as well: When did I feel uncomfortable? When did the person speaking feel fully present to me, and when did they withdraw into their own thoughts, or pull away from a line of questioning? The intangible feeling of being with each of these people returned, became reinforced and expressed in how they choose their words, and what they would and would not share with me. With time and repetition, these distinct archives of text, sound, and experience could be braided together within me.
Here was the research phase I needed, where my focus and precision and furious will to be correct could be put to productive, generative use, while my sensibilities as an actor and an artist had sufficient time to absorb and begin to express the essential nature of what I had experienced. All of the discoveries I listed above were not realized or understood while out in the city. Those interactions I had were their own moments, each distinct and shared between my collaborators and myself. But the things I share with you now—and the things that eventually most informed the devised theater piece—these came to me at the DVD rack of the Down Town Campus library, where I stood months later with my laptop and passed the hours typing and re-typing the score of hours past.
Enter AMANI ALSAIED. Friend, filmmaker, theater artist and classmate. All around bad-ass and excellent thrower of get-togethers.
Amani joined me in crafting the performance actions, with generous help from Debra Levine. Together, we spent a long time creating open-ended questions so that participants could structure the telling of their own stories. This was key, as I wanted to consider our interactions together as a collaborative performance, and their responses as content. As such, I had to treat them as collaborating artists, and to make exchanges with them with the attitude that I was making arrangements with them for access to their work. Because of this, I needed to allow them what Anna Deavere Smith has termed in her line of interviews “self-authorship.”
“Send a Letter or make a phone call to anyone, anywhere”
We came up with an exchange; we would offer to help the people we met post letters to anywhere in the world, or would give them five minutes of time on our international phone to call anyone they liked. In exchange, they would let me interview them about who they chose to call or write to . For the interviews, I thought talking about the letter or phone call and its recipient would be a safe and reasonable space to meet for conversation; I was knocking on the door of their personal lives, but the questions were still confined to the experience that we shared and that they the participants had agreed to. Amani and I made signs in English, Arabic, and eventually Hindi and Urdu, and visited a range of locations in the city, hoping to find comfortable spaces for people of many different backgrounds. Signs in hand, audio recorder on standby, and questions at the ready, we waited for someone to approach us and take us up on our offer:
Enter RASHID, PETER, JOHN, K. , BACHIR, S. , GEETA, AIHAM, LECT, MONA, ALY, STEPHANIE, ZIBIA, JONAS, ADRIENNE, AYA, MUSTAFA, A. , MAZAMMEL, SHAIKH MOHAMMAD, M. , MASUM, and SAIFAL.
My hope was by asking about the letter’s recipient , and by doing so after they had written it, participants would feel comfortable and connected to the question: “what does it feel like when you miss someone or something?” I assumed their answers about missing would form the core content of my devised theater piece.
But instead, the conversations about the letters generated a series of beautiful character portraits of the recipients, the writers, and, in flashes, of myself. Time and time again we fell into a kind of summoning of absent friends, lovers, and family . I realized that our exchange was something distinct in my experience of the city. Even though it is a given that for most people, the reality of being in Abu Dhabi is having left somewhere else, I had never before encountered a space where my interactions with others acknowledged and explored their past lives and experiences, rather than just their present reality and function. The result was an incredibly touching performance of affection and celebration in descriptions of loved ones far away. The performance actions produced no concrete answers; instead, they generated specific questions that I knew were grounded in the reality of a number of every day lives in Abu Dhabi and in the sacred details of the people we had come to know: “What happens when we need each other, but cannot be together?” “What happens when we don’t?” “How is meaningful contact made with those apart from us?” “How do words of love become an act of loving?” “Why are we separated?”
As it stands, I've done 23 exchanges across these three versions of these performance actions. Apart from the actions themselves, I re-performed them through the act of processing: uploading audio and contracts, transcribing each interview word for word, preparing excerpts for release and designing web pages where audiences can encounter these texts, and through them, these people. By these physical actions of writing and speaking and explaining, each interview passed through me many times, leaving marks both inexpressible and indelible. As I did more and more transcripts, I pushed myself to try and capture more and more detail: How long is the pause I just heard? What is its nature? How can I understand it to be not just empty space but another kind of text—not a blankness but rather a canvas filled with essential details? Creating my own vocabulary for transcription forced me to explain to myself the differences in what I was seeing, and the constant repetition of listening and transcribing allowed me to subconsciously access the archive present within my body as well: When did I feel uncomfortable? When did the person speaking feel fully present to me, and when did they withdraw into their own thoughts, or pull away from a line of questioning? The intangible feeling of being with each of these people returned, became reinforced and expressed in how they choose their words, and what they would and would not share with me. With time and repetition, these distinct archives of text, sound, and experience could be braided together within me.
Here was the research phase I needed, where my focus and precision and furious will to be correct could be put to productive, generative use, while my sensibilities as an actor and an artist had sufficient time to absorb and begin to express the essential nature of what I had experienced. All of the discoveries I listed above were not realized or understood while out in the city. Those interactions I had were their own moments, each distinct and shared between my collaborators and myself. But the things I share with you now—and the things that eventually most informed the devised theater piece—these came to me at the DVD rack of the Down Town Campus library, where I stood months later with my laptop and passed the hours typing and re-typing the score of hours past.
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