Aftermath

We performed our piece last night in front of over a hundred people, nearly all students of the school. From nine that morning, we'd been at the performance space creating new scenes, writing new dialogue, changing our minds, arguing, reconciling, rehearsing, panicking, and ploughing through. We ended up keeping parts of the poem that made the choice to be a suicide bomber somehow soft, beautiful, glorified. But we also added closing narration that (hopefully) made any message much more ambiguous; spoke about the Israeli people that were killed as a result of that choice - the men, and women, and children. We added a scene in Jerusalem towards the beginning, but ended up reverting to our original scene because we didn't feel comfortable in the new one - we hadn't had enough time to rehearse it with all the other new material and dialogue, and it seemed too much to add yet another change. (I wonder now how the piece would've been different if we'd kept it.) At half past seven, the audience arrived, and we began the presentation.

Halfway through our piece, a girl from the morning group, who was Israeli, walked out.

Some of my classmates, from other groups or classes, saw this as something to be proud of - not because we offended someone per se, but because we presented something strong enough to provoke strong reactions. But being onstage and hearing the footsteps out of the audience and the closed door in the back of the room was difficult. In that moment, all I could think of was that, on some level, art that I had helped to create had hurt someone.

In the feedback session afterwards, even though I think our piece was arguably one of the least notable on a theatrical and technical level, nearly all the comments were directed to us, many of them highly critical. Some, I felt, were even gratuitous. But there were also the people who said, regardless of how they felt about the subject, that they thought we were brave to even attempt it, and that they wanted to commend us for choosing the challenge.

Last night, with that very charged performance and very intense feedback coming at the end of a very long day and term, I was pretty exhausted and devastated. I nearly didn't go out with the rest of the school after the performance - I didn't know how to speak about the piece and was scared of what others might say to me about it in closer, more personal proximity. We stirred up something very visceral in a lot of people. Understandably so: we chose a highly political, controversial subject, and we attempted to give a voice to a perspective and choice which is in many ways inconceiveable to those of us outside of the situation. But I did go out, and I'm glad I did, because it gave me more perspective as other's shared their perspectives with me. More than that, I'm glad we chose this subject, this viewpoint. I'm glad we tried. Now, the following morning, I'm more forgiving of myself, our piece, the choices our group made than I was in those first shell-shocked moments after the performance. I know that, as an artist who is interested in contemporary issues and socio-political concerns, I cannot allow myself to become paralyzed by speaking too close to someone's heart. In a way, I feel immensely fortunate to have been able to perform this (very rough, incredibly imperfect) piece to people who know the situation much more personally and disagreed violently with what we had to say, or how we said it. (I didn't get the chance to talk to her after the performance, but some of other members of my group did, and it sounds as though that conversation was an enriching, mutually respectful one.) I feel fortunate to be at a school that lets (even encourages us) to push into risky territory, and who support us even when we fantastically fail. I don't think there's any place we could have worked on and presented this piece that would have been nearly as safe and supportive as this school, while still being honest about the dangers and the strengths of what we showed.

I don't think we've finished with this work, with this piece in particular. We've only just scratched the surface of a subject that is obscenely tangled and complex, and I think that at the end of the day, every member in our group was galvanized by the feedback we received last night, whether it was criticism or praise. At the beginning of the fourth term, the class will be given three weeks to rework and revisit projects they'd begun earlier in the year - I think this will be one of them.