Political Performance and the War on Terror

The Shock and Awe of the Real:

Political Performance and the War on Terror by
Matthew Jones
A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies
University of Toronto

The Shock and Awe of the Real:
Political Performance and the War on Terror

Matt Jones
Doctor of Philosophy
Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies
University of Toronto
2020

Abstract

This dissertation offers a transnational study of theatre and performance that responded to the recent conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and beyond. Looking at work by artists primarily from Arab and Middle Eastern diasporas working in the US, UK, Canada, and Europe, the study examines how modes of performance in live art, documentary theatre, and participatory performance respond to and comment on the power imbalances, racial formations, and political injustices of these conflicts. Many of these performances are characterized by a deliberate blurring of the distinctions between performance and reality. This has meant that playwrights crafted scripts from the real words of soldiers instead of writing plays; performance artists harmed their real bodies, replicating the violence of war; actors performed in public space; and media artists used new technology to connect audiences to real warzones. This embrace of the real contrasts with postmodern suspicion of hyper-reality—which characterized much political performance in the 1990s—and marks a shift in understandings of the relationship between performance and the real. These strategies allowed artists to contend with the way that war today is also a multimedia attack on the way that reality is constructed and perceived. The dissertation

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traces the historical antecedents of these aesthetics in postmodern criticism of prior generations of political performance and shows how these artists struggled to discover new aesthetic strategies to criticize war, racism, and violence.

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Acknowledgments

This project stretched across an unreasonable amount of time and completing it would not have been possible without the support of a great number of people.

First, I am deeply grateful to my dissertation committee. My supervisor, Barry Freeman, was level-headed, generous, and attuned to the importance of enjoying the process. From the very beginning, Barry showed great interest in the ideas I was developing and encouraged me to think of myself as a scholar and a professional, and that helped me get through the process. Thank you to Sara Salih for the many questions and to Antje Budde for her radical unpredictability. The project swerved in unexpected directions thanks to both of you. Thank you to Jen Harvie, my external reviewer, and Nikki Cesare-Schotzko, my internal reader and someone whose elliptical attitude to writing helped to temper my sometimes overly linear and encyclopedic ways of thinking.

Thank you to the faculty at the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies.
Stephen Johnson was generous and supportive throughout the process and helped me find a

platform for my next project. I’m grateful to Tamara Trojanowska for helping me set my sights

on the goal by continually asking when we would have a glass of wine to celebrate completing the dissertation. Thank you to everyone whose courses I took, especially Barry, Tamara, Stephen, Nikki, Bruce Barton, Veronika Ambros, Martin Revermann, James Cahill, and the late John Astington. Thank you to Xing Fan and Jacob Gallagher-Ross for valuable professionalization advice. I learned a great deal working as a Teaching Assistant and dramaturg

for Baņuta Rubess and Djanet Sears. I’m grateful to Rebecca Biason, Samiha Chowdhury, Colleen Osborn, Julie Philips, and the late Luella Massey for their support. I’m thankful to my

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students in Scarborough, on the St. George campus, and at the University of Windsor, especially the inspiring Grace Phan and Chelsea Dab-Hilke.

I was fortunate to be part of an excellent cohort of creative and hilarious people: thank you Jenn Cole, Catie Thompson, Jimena Ortuzar, Allison Leadley, Alex McLean, David Janson, Kelsy Vivash, and Michael Reinhart for going through this with me. Much of this writing emerged from writing groups I was involved in. Thank you to Ashley Williamson and Joel Rogers for organizing them. I also enjoyed writing alongside Catie, Allison, Marjan Moosavi, Isabel Stowell-Kaplan, Will Fysh, Johanna Lawrie, Julianne Doner, Dolon Chakravartty, MarieAnnick Prevost, and Jacquey Taucar. Thanks also to my various reading circles, especially Greg Cook, Jesse Gutman, Mae J. Nam, Meryl Borato, Sean Mills, and Octavie Bellavance. I learned a lot about academic writing by teaching it at the Graduate Centre for Academic Communication. Thank you to Jane Freeman, Rachael Cayley, Peter Grav, Lauren Pais, and Tina Nair for your collegiality. Thanks to everyone at the Graduate Conflict Resolution Centre, especially Heather McGhee-Peggs, Rebecca Hazell, Jesse Adigwe, Priyanka Manohar, Margeaux Feldman, Terence Lai, Sam Filipenko, Kimberley Todd, and Tony Luong for helping me develop skills in both empathy and racquet sports. Thanks to Seika Boye for recruiting me to act as an undergraduate mentor. Thank you to everyone who was involved in the epic project that was my Death Clowns in Guantanamo Bay show, especially Natalia Esling, Myrto Koumarianos, Christine Mazumdar, Leslie Robertson, Laura Lucci, Annie Crowley, Gina Brintnell, Paul Stoesser, Alain Richer, Allison, Johanna, Ashley, Catie, Isabel, Jenn, and the clown minstrels. Thanks to everyone who worked on ASMRtist, especially Sarah Marchand and Chelsea. Thank you to Mohammad Yaghoubi, Aida Keykhaii for introducing me to A Moment of Silence. Thanks, Jenn, for making

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me Wolfboy and Nikki for imagining me as Buckminster Fuller playing a an out-of-control Baron.

Thanks to everyone who made comments on this material at conferences, much of which set my thinking on new courses, especially Patricia Ybarra, Rustom Bharucha, Jenn Stephenson, Kirsten Sadeghi-Yekta, and Laura Levin. Thank you to Natalie Alvarez for drafting me into the unexpected role of police trainer and giving me new angles from which to think about war and performance. I’m grateful to those who acted as mentor to me at conferences, especially Ric Knowles, Gwyneth Shanks, and Amy Cook. Thank you Frederik Byrn Køhlert for the feasts, the Chromecast parties, and for shadow editing many things I wrote.

To all my friends and family who supported me through this long process, I am deeply grateful for your love and hilarity.

To my mugole, Jacquie Kiggundu, writing was never a solitary endeavor when you were around. Thank you for sticking through it with me.

This project was a much more modest and conservative one when it began, but my thinking was continually opened up and, frankly, revolutionized by my encounters with all of the people above. What is more, I am forever indebted to the artists and activists whose work I have written about. To all those who struggle against war, terror, and racism, you are teaching us to imagine a better world.

This research was supported by scholarships from the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada, the Ontario Graduate Scholarship program, and the University of Toronto.

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For Joki

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Table of Contents

Contents

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5.3 The shock and awe of the unreal ................................................................................260
Bibliography ...........................................................................................................................264

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I propose then a theatre in which violent physical images crush and hypnotize the sensibility of the spectator seized by theatre as by a whirlwind of higher force.

— Antonin Artaud (83)

The basis for Rapid Dominance rests in the ability to affect the will, perception, and understanding of the adversary through imposing sufficient Shock and Awe to achieve the necessary political, strategic, and operational goals of the conflict or crisis that led to the use of force.

— Harlan Ullman and James Wade, Jr., Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid
Dominance (19)

This is all theatre.
— Saddam Hussein before the Iraqi Special Tribunal, which ordered his

execution in 2004 (qtd. in “Iraqi Court”)

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Chapter 1

1 Introduction: Truth Structured Like a Fiction

When I went back [to Baghdad ] in 2003, I didn’t recognize it. I asked my

brother to bring me back to my primary school and he took me in a car, and he

stopped. He said, “We are here.” I said, “Where? I don’t see it.” I made a re -

calculation: back to the river, back to the bridge, and I closed my eyes and

brought myself to the same place. And I looked and it’s not there. Indeed,
[Iraq] doesn’t exist. It is virtual.

– Belgian-Iraqi playwright Hazim Kamaledin (interview)

1.1 Betroffenheit in Kabul and New York

Heartbeat: Silence After the Explosion is a dance-theatre piece about suicide bombings created by the Afghan theatre company Azdar Theatre. The play combines Dari poetry with improvised scenes created by students at the Afghanistan National Institute of Music. By mixing abstract movement and poetry, the play aims to create a vivid sense of the horror and trauma that suicide bombing has inflicted on the country. But midway through a performance at the Institut-Français d’Afghanistan in Kabul in 2014, the performers found themselves upstaged when an explosion ripped through the auditorium as a teen suicide bomber detonated his explosive vest, killing at least one person and injuring twenty others (Rasmussen). Witnesses describe how, for a moment, the audience was uncertain whether the attack was part of the show. Ahmad Nasir Formuli, the

Artistic Director of Azdar Theatre, recalls that “whistling was heard, with some audience members amazed by the theatrical effects” (qtd. in Chow 152). Another witness describes his own reaction in similar terms: “Smoke is everywhere. Seeking Bibi Jan. I get up to go to her. [She’s] still sitting. ‘It’s part of the show?’ [she] asks incredulously and confused, like me. ‘No,

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Bibi Jan, let’s get out’” (qtd. in Chow 152). Like the play the audience was watching, the attack worked affectively on those who survived to witness it, muddling their sense of what is real.

A similar sense of confusion about what is real was faced those in New York City who witnessed the attacks on the Twin Towers on September 11^th, 2001. In her book about creating theatre after 9/11, Ann Bogart finds that no English word truly encapsulates the way that people in the United States lived with their trauma after the attacks. She makes recourse to the German the word Betroffenheit to describe her sense that the attacks had left people with a “profound and palpable silence” (2). As she puts it:
Simply translated, the word means shock, bewilderment, perplexity, or impact.

The root of the word treffen “to meet” and betroffen is “to be met” and

Betroffenheit is the state of having been met, stopped, struck, or perplexed. I see it as the shock of having been met, stopped abruptly in the face of a particular event. (2)

This notion of being “stopped abruptly” by a traumatic event goes some way to describing not only the shock of the attacks in Kabul but also the cognitive disorientation that followed it, which caused those who were watching the play to misperceive the attacks as art and continue to cling to their seats. But perhaps no response to trauma is ever without an aesthetic aspect.¹Borrowing from the theologist Don Salier, Bogart explains that: the silence that follows a violent event is similar in quality to the speechlessness of a powerful aesthetic experience. He [Salier] describes a space and a time engendered by the shock of the event where language ceases. We are left only with an awareness of the limits of language and the limits of what can be taken in. In this gap definitions disappear and certainty vanishes. (2)

¹The aesthetic potential of the notion of Betroffenheit was explored by Jonathon Young and Crystal Pite in their

successful show of the same name, which examined Young’s experience of PTSD following the loss of his daughter

in a house fire (Morrow).
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Since real trauma impacts us like an aesthetic experience, it is only a small stretch to confuse an attack with a work of art.

The common structures shared by real violence and certain kinds of performance are at the heart of what I am calling “the shock and awe of the real.” Violent aesthetics often serve to shock an audience in order to move them. As an audience is disorientated, they may come to feel overwhelmed and, ultimately, transported by a shocking aesthetic experience. As Bogart and Salier point out, a shocking event breaks down language and sense, leaving a subject uncertain and vulnerable. For some, this condition reflects the politics of our age, in which a state of permanent insecurity reigns. Jenn Stephenson describes the feeling of “epistemological

insecurity” of living in a postmodern age in which there is no objective way to discern what is

real and “all realities are representations” (“The Thing That Doesn’t Fit”).²Such postmodern anomie can be a fertile breeding ground for reactionary politics. Bogart notes that the disorientation caused by 9/11 was filled in first by patriotism, providing Americans with a sense of certainty that fed the drive to war in Afghanistan and Iraq (3). But shock and awe do not lead inevitably to reactionary responses. Bogart also suggests that the moment of Betroffenheit is one of radical openness. Without certainty, “Anything is possible—any response, any action or