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The Performative Utterance “I” Theatricality and Subversion of Identity in the Works of Eyal Weiser Sharon Aronson-Lehavi

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The Performative Utterance “I” Theatricality and Subversion of Identity in the Works of Eyal Weiser Sharon Aronson-Lehavi The Performative Utterance “I” Theatricality and Subversion of Identity in the Works of Eyal Weiser Sharon Aronson-Lehavi Eyal Weiser is an Israeli playwright and theatre director whose works complexly interrogate and explore constructions of Israeli identity, first and foremost by addressing Israeli identity/(ies) as constructions. His works thus offer a critique of historical, social, and cultural processes that were (and are) intended to instigate and naturalize an idea of a collective Jewish-Israeli identity. By unmasking identity as a construction — as a result of ideological, educational, and political mechanisms — Weiser’s works destabilize the borders between lies and truth, fiction and real- ity, and fabrication and authenticity. Over the past decade, Weiser has emerged as a significant Sharon Aronson-Lehavi is Chair of the Department of Theatre Arts at Tel Aviv University and Academic Director of the TAU Theatre. She is the author of Street Scenes: Late Medieval Acting and Performance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) and Gender and Feminism in Modern Theatre (Open University Press, in Hebrew, 2013), editor of Wanderers and Other Israeli Plays (Seagull Books, In Performance series, 2009), and coeditor with Atay Citron and David Zerbib of Performance Studies in Motion: International Perspectives and Practices in the Twenty-First Century (Bloomsbury, 2015). TDR: The Drama Review 61:4 (T236) Winter 2017. ©2017 22 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00690 by guest on 01 October 2021 creative voice in Israeli alternative theatre. His works have been performed internationally and he has won many prizes for his productions.1 The aesthetic vocabulary Weiser has developed in his recent works, three of which I shall discuss in this article (Mein Jerusalem: A Performance by Sabine Sauber, 2011; Zohi Ha-Arretz: Salon Dchuyei Ha-Yetzira Ha-Tzionit/Tochnit Bet [This Is the Land: The Zionist Creation Rejects’ Salon/Program B], 2013; and Ma Shlom Ha-Chaya? [How’s the Beast?] 2015a),2 is based on a play- fulness with the genre of autobiographical performance. Weiser does not perform himself; rather, he writes fictional characters who are artists (performance artists, photographers, danc- ers, choreographers, spoken-word poets) and are played by actors whom audiences often mis- takenly believe are really the characters they enact.3 Weiser relies on the authority and authenticity that are associated with and ascribed to the truthful and sincere space of performance — autobiographical performance specifically — in order to subvert this assumption. Regarding autobiographical performance, Deirdre Heddon writes: Integral to the here-and-nowness of autobiographical performance is the visible pres- ence of the performing subject — their here and nowness too. Though the notion of “presence” or “aura” that adheres to performance and performers might have been thor- oughly challenged following Derrida (the performer is not, cannot be, “authentic” or unmediated, even if they are “there”), nevertheless the fact that the performer is in this space with me might well have an impact on my reception of his/her autobiographical stories. (Heddon 2008:5–6) Weiser, in other words, builds on a performance aesthetic that signals “truth,” “realness,” and an embodied assertion of presence and subjective identity in order to reveal identity itself as a masquerade.4 1. For a full list of Weiser’s works and awards see www.eyalweiser.com. Mein Jerusalem: written and directed by Eyal Weiser; photography and visual concept by Rami Maymon; stage design by Yinon Peres; performed by Michal Weinberg (Tmuna Theatre, Tel Aviv).This Is the Land: The Zionist Creation Rejects’ Salon/Program: B written and directed by Eyal Weiser; photography by Rami Maymon; space designed by Yinon Peres; costume and prop design by Tamar Levit (Muslin Brothers); creative partners and performers in order of appearance — Efrat Danon, Natalie Fainstein, Neta Weiner (Tmuna Theatre, Tel Aviv).How’s the Beast?: written and directed by Eyal Weiser; artistic consulting and video by Hinda Weiss; visual concept (part 2, “White Lie”) by Rami Maymon; costume and prop design (part 2, “White Lie”) by Tamar Levit (Muslin Brothers); costume and prop design (parts 1 and 3) by Adam Kalderon; creative partners and performers in order of appearance — Tamar Lam, Sylwia Drori, Max Wagner, Adili Liberman (Israel Festival Jerusalem, Beit Mazia Theatre House). 2. Mein Jerusalem is the original title (in German) of this performance; in Hebrew publications it appeared as a and was not translated into Hebrew or English. Translations into (מיין ג’רוזלם) transliteration of the German words English of the titles of the two other performances (This is the Land and How’s the Beast) and quotes from Weiser’s performances in English were given to me by Weiser. All other translations into English are mine. 3. This technique has been used by other artists as well. See for example Heddon (2008:29–30). 4. It is worth mentioning two other artists in the Israeli context who similarly manipulate invented autobiographies: Roee Rosen and Hagai Levi. In 2016 the Tel Aviv Museum of Art featured “Roee Rosen: A Group Exhibition,” which included works created by various artists that were all invented by Rosen himself (see Tel Aviv Museum of Art 2016). And in 2013, film and television director and writer Hagai Levi created a fake documentary television series, The Accursed, about real Israeli literary figures, [re]constructing their homes and lives in seemingly real yet fabricated sets and enactments (see Gum Films 2014). Figure 1. (facing page) Polish choreographer Agnieszka Tz’zak (Sylwia Drori) in How’s the Beast? written Eyal Weiser and directed by Eyal Weiser. Beit Mazya Theatre House, Israel Festival, Jerusalem, 2015. (Photo by Gadi Dagon) 23 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00690 by guest on 01 October 2021 This baseline is further complicated in Weiser’s works by the fact that his fabricated per- formance artists respond to real events and debate issues that are central to Israeli cultural and social discourses, such as post-Holocaust Israeli-German relations or the ongoing Israeli- Palestinian conflict. The world beyond the stage more than filters into his faux autobiographies; it generates them. For example, one of the first characters Weiser created, Sabine Sauber, is a German photog- rapher and conceptual artist who reveals and shares with her audience private recollections and experiences as they found expression in her works of art, beginning with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 through her visit to Israel in 2011 (the date of the performance), where she faces another wall. In order to (re)construct her history (and identity), Weiser and his collaborator, Rami Maymon, created Sauber’s 20-year body of photographic works, which she presents to the audience as she performs her life story. All of Weiser’s invented characters are young artists who are deeply engaged with the pres- ent and with reality as much as they are absorbed in their own artistic creativity and per- sonal lives. This kind of constructed “performance-subjectivity” enables Weiser not only to give voice to a multitude of “individual” identities rather than dramatic characters that repre- sent the social stereotypes that compose the Israeli society, but also to subversively reflect on Israeli metanarratives. “Subversive” is an adjective frequently used to signal that a performance under consider- ation is political. The etymon of the verb “subvert” is derived from the Latin subvertere, “to overturn,” from sub “under” + vertere “to turn” (versus).5 For a work of art, an act, or an event to be designated as “subversive,” this etymology suggests that “overturned” as an aesthetic quality would qualify. “Overturned” is useful in thinking about the aesthetics of political performances such as Weiser’s. As a concept, it takes us beyond the ideological content of a work toward its inner workings, language, and aesthetics. In the case of Weiser, his fictional theatricality in the guise of performance art creates a world that is overturned and other to itself, a world in which spectators are asked to attend to what Erika Fischer-Lichte terms “perceptional multistabil- ity” (2008:87). With this phrase Fischer-Lichte identifies theatrical experiences that disori- ent spectators, leaving them confused about the referent for the performing body facing them. She examines cases in which “what in one moment is perceived as the actor’s phenomenal body is perceived as a dramatic figure in the next and vice versa” (87). Whereas performer/character dialectics in cases such as cross-gendered enactments or body art performance emphasize the duality and doubleness of the theatrical subject, Weiser does it the other way around, creat- ing seemingly unified stage subjects.6 In doing so he reconnects realistic “slice-of-life” theatre to its opposite: theatre conscious of its own theatricality and the seemingly unmediated space of performance. For this reason, the question of the identity of the performing body is further complicated in Weiser’s works. One of the defining markers of performance or performance art as opposed to conventional theatre is the highlighting of the subjective, corporeal, and individual body of the performer her/himself. Weiser’s fictional performance artists, that is his fictional “subjec- tive bodies,” are performing bodies that do not refer to the bodies of the actual performers, but rather to embodied metaphors for the political realities Israeli society faces. They turn, in other words, into what could perhaps be termed “body politics.” At the same time, however, their bodily characteristics — how they look and sound — become attached to the individual perform- ers who play them. Unlike conventional dramatic characters who can be played by any number of actors, because Weiser’s works rely on forms of documentary theatre and extensive use of Oxford English Dictionary 5.
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