Art cannot reveal the truth about art without snatching it away again by turning the revelation into an artistic event. (Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production)

On February 26 at the Kule Theatre in Berlin, I saw Hotel Arabia by Carola Lehmann and David Merten, who performed their voyage to ‘Arabia’ in a way reminiscent of the early European narratives from Barbary land. The tendency of exoticising otherness was apparent, and the commodification of cultural difference was at times disturbing during the performance. Rimini Protokoll’s intercultural projects, on the other hand, are neither about sublimating otherness nor reversing the gaze, but rather about the possibilities of transferring the debate taking place in developing countries to the metropolis, through the deployment (rather than invention) of the tradition of docu-drama. Radio Muezzin, which premiered at the HAU 2 on the third of March, is a prime example of art that bridges the gap between cultures and reaches across the divide to the Other (the not I) during the ‘imperial’ present. The performance challenges the age-old division between art and public since it does away with barriers that emphasize contrived and constructed arenas of artistic production. In the process, live performance of al-adhan exposes the simulated and the genuine, art and life, to each other and to audiences as it conflates the divided spaces of artistic activity. The reconstruction of al-adhan , the call to prayer, fuses the memory-site of the mosque to memory narratives of the muadhinin (muezzins).

Moroccan theater exists in a liminal space, between East and West. It is a fusion of Western theatrical traditions and the Arabo-Tamazegh performance cultures. The hybrid nature of such a theater is evident in the way popular performance behavior such as manifested in performance spaces like al-halqa ( the circle) has been transposed from public squares and marketplaces like Marrackech’s jemaa-elfna into modern theater buildings.

The recent debates on the politics of intercultural theatre practice have not only critiqued artistic ‘syncretism’ and negotiations, but articulated an optimistic belief in the achievability of a common “interweaving” across worldwide performance cultures.  Erika Fischer-Lichte is justly acclaimed as an exemplary de-mystifier – the thinker who has provided unsurpassed critiques of Eurocentric intercultural performance elements that lurk in the work of various western theatrical enterprises that went East & South.