In the Eruptive Mode

Al-Bassam presented to us a unique example of how art might successfully approach the open wound of the contemporary Arab world. His production fuses artistic maturity (text, mise en scene and the direction of the brilliant female duo: Hala Omran and Rebecca Hart) with a technical mastery that harmonizes the tragic carnival (lights and scenography by Eric Soyer; sound and music by Brittany Anjou) and, if this were not enough, he adds into the mix a heavy dose of political courage and mental clarity.

Through In the Eruptive Mode, a piece that has been fermenting since 2012, when it began its life as a reading at Sciences Po in Paris and picked up its surtitle ‘Voices from a Hijacked Spring’, Al Bassam confronts us directly with the question of ‘what is truth in art?’ delves once again into the depths of the nightmarish reality of the contemporary Arab world.

Through six scenes, presented as narrative monologues, he lines up the faces of tragedy that besiege today’s Arab and Muslim worlds, with no clichés and no added special effects. Al Bassam does not beseech the sympathy of his audience: rather he shocks them and attacks major aspects of their taboo structures and prejudices. He builds scenic architecture through nervous tension, cries, images and stories; through tears and sweat; through shadows, sonic and gestural explosions that accompany his dense, difficult text; a text built on echoes, drenched in poetry and abstraction: in this way he moves the surgeon’s knife through our communal wounds: Yugoslavia, Syria, Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon, the Gulf.... He names the murderer with courage, goes against what’s fashionable and subverts the dictatorship of mediatic truth, sidesteps the poisons of political correctness- poisons that so many Arab artists feel obliged to swallow in order to gain acceptance in the West.

In The Eruptive Mode, by Sulayman El Bassam, has the effect of a seismic shock. The Anglo-Kuwaiti artist, who directed a learned and conventional version of the Ritual for a Metamorphosis by the Syrian Saadallah Wannous in 2013 at the Comédie-Française, reveals himself here to be an exceptional author and director. Built around six monologues for women, played by two actresses and a formidable musician, it creates a real aesthetic surprise. On stage, within the inspired scenography and lighting of Eric Soyer, a massive wall symbolizes all the walls of separation that are growing more and more in the world. A window - material and mental - is cut out, where the American musician Brittany Anjou and her piano are placed. In the playing area we find two fascinating actresses, the Syrian Hala Omran, who lives in Beirut, and the New Yorker Catherine Gowl. Their bodies and voices play both separately and intertwining. In alternating scenes, they embody an American journalist caught in the trap of a war report, who first loses her right hand under a shell and recounts her last moments of live dismemberment; An Israeli soldier seduced by a Palestinian at the foot of a grave, who pays the high price of rejection and humiliation; A Yezidi refugee, violated and sequestered, who revolts against her martyrdom. Here women are the battlefield of the devastation of the world. However, they are not victims. Their language is thought in action.

“The work delves into the deepest psychologies of people, surgically opens up the phenomena of revolution to paint images riddled with bitterness, fear, loneliness and violence. In this way, the production moves between the noise of wars (civil ones, interstate conflicts, ideological wars) tracing the fate of women pulled into the wake of violence.”