Director Miriam Ibrahim on Movement Theatre and Conversations without Talking
Inspired by Franz Xaver Kroetz’s Request Concert (Wunschkonzert), and conceived by Miriam Ibrahim, Piece/Peace of Mind takes up the question of suicide as a mute gesture within or against an existence trapped in the repressive ordering of a life shaped by repetitive ritualization of the mundane.
Kroetz’s Request Concert emphasizes the tidy nature of the act of suicide enacted in the same orderly manner as the conditions that provoke it, those of a life characterized in every action by the slavery of production. Through a highly realistic portrayal of repetitive, everyday activities unfolding in real time in an ordinary evening of the life of the only character—Fraulein Rasch—Kroetz highlights the structural resemblance of the suicide act to the life that provokes it, marking it as a definitive descent into the prison of an entirely ordered life. With ritualistic care, and caution, Rasch comes home from work, prepares her dinner, watches television, knots her carpet, smokes cigarettes, cleanses herself with lengthy precision, prepares her bed, takes a sleeping pill, and without breaking the bored regularity of her actions, counts the remaining sleeping pills and takes them. The play concludes with the faintest look of interest rising to her face.
Ibrahim’s Piece/Peace of Mine questions the central premise laid down by Kroetz in her characteristic minimalist, abstract, and conceptual approach to Kroetz’s themes. Working with the concepts of precision, repetitiveness, cleansing, silence, and ordered ritual action, she emphasizes not the naturalized exhibition of these actions in her conception but instead asks: what is Rasch thinking in the moments of inactivity punctuating her repetitive actions? Is the suicide act just an assimilation into the mundane regularity of existence, marking the inescapability of a repressed life? Or can it signal a kind of freedom, a bitter-sweet emancipation from the submission to an ordered existence?
Staged in a stark black space marked only by white tape—regulating the physical and mental space of Rasch’s life—the play’s character interacts with water, ice, paper, and the tape itself. Addressing the tension between thinking and acting, Ibrahim explores Rausch’s internal battle with her own thoughts through placing, movement, and space. Through the character’s interaction with the environment housing her, Ibrahim physicalizes degrees of anxiety in a mental struggle with the idea of rebellion, one that cannot quite be brought to external manifestation, to a breaking of habit, ritual, and order, to a moment of action.
Ibrahim’s attention to texture, color, and lighting—both on stage, and in the seats of uneven height in which the audience sit— emanate the feeling of the piece, exploring the multi-faceted capacity of a space to function in a theatrical work, a theme which Ibrahim has taken up in previous work as well with her theater company The Shades of Gray, which she co-founded in 2011, and runs as its artistic director. Its first production, “Sterntaler,” premiered on March 24, 2012, and is a movement theater piece in which the central character interacts viscerally with the space housing the performance, which ultimately almost takes on the role of a character itself. Staged in multiple locations, the performance changes each time, becoming reflexive to the environment in which it is manifested.
Ibrahim also continues, with Piece/Peace of Mine her exploration of the function of music within a dramatic context, a feature also of Sterntaler. Where Sterntaler features a violinist who’s penetrating accompaniment mirrored the central character’s emotions, Piece/Peace of Mine also utilizes a sole string instrument, but begins to explore other kinds of ways in which the music can interact with the actor and the setting of the piece.
In this way, each of Ibrahim’s works presents a meta-narrative, raising probing questions that reflect on, and play with the function and capabilities of the basic elements of theater itself: from the actors, to the visual and sonorous landscape in which they perform, and ultimately the audience itself. When asked what she wants her audience to walk away with after a
performance, Ibrahim replies:
“In Peter Brook’s ‘The Empty Space,’ he says that in France, one “attends” a play, one doesn’t merely “watch” it. To me, theater is like a conversation, a conversation without talking.”
Continuing to explore these kinds of questions, Piece/Peace of Mine seems set to start a very interesting conversation indeed.