“In societies dominted by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation” Guy Debord  1967  paragraph 1.

Personal impressions
As HAU’s stage went dark, four Egyptian muezzins illuminated by radiant white Klieg lights started their calls to prayer from the four corners of the auditorium. My first sensation, as I intently watched the dark stage from my seat in one of the front rows, was not determined by sight and vision, but by aurality: I felt pleasure mixed with unease derived from the suddenness of the sensory impact. While the voices were distinct, they produced a pleasant harmony of multivocality, reminiscent of choral or Gregorian chants.
However, even before the four muezzins in their different garb proceeded to the stage I realized that my unease had other roots than the surprise assault on my auditive perception. Evoked by the auditive impact of the performance, I remembered my first close encounter with a muezzin’s call to prayer: I relived my night in a clay hut where I slept with twenty odd Afghan tribesmen (the men in one room, the women in separate quarters) of a herding community in the province of Baghlan in the winter of 1978. We were huddling close on mats and sleeping bags in the bitter cold early one morning when the thunderous voice of the mullah, another nomadic herder sleeping with us in the same room, awoke us from our sleep. For a moment, I conjured up the feeling of this past horror (of being roused from sleep so suddenly) mixed with the pleasure of having experienced this lifestyle during my fieldwork where the warmth and company of these men sustained me and my family (including my 18-month-old twin daughters) as Soviet tanks rolled across the country about eighty miles away on the highway from Baghlan to Kabul.
While experiencing this sensory memory, I realized somewhat disconcertingly that I was sitting on a hard stool at the HAU (not squatting in a nomadic camp or prostrating myself on a carpet in the streets of Cairo). Instead of the smell of camel-dung and sheep’s milk I was inhaling the discordant perfume assaults of my co-audience–in short it struck me that I was attending a “theatre” performance. I was the passive recipient of an enacted performance by “real” muezzins, but I was not involved: I did not touch, talk to, or engage with them, neither in dialogue nor practice. I was only participating in a spectacle, a pseudo-participatory spectator in a pseudo-reality. I was not in a real mosque, my co-audience was not praying, and we were not in Cairo.

Authenticity and theatre
But then, what did I expect from a theatrical performance? Is it not a contradiction in itself that the director Kaegi was making us implicitly believe–through the notion of “documentary theatre”, “docu-drama”, and that of “theatre of everyday life” as a programmatic goal of all Rimini Protokoll productions–that we could participate in the life of others, the lifestyle of these actors who lead real lives?
My anguish perhaps also derived from being treated to a show of otherness that bore an embarrassing affinity to orientalism and primitivism which were en vogue at the time of the “Völkerschau” experiments and world trade exhibitions, for example in Paris where Artaud grew lyrically ecstatic about the exhibited African villages with living people. But to do something akin to it in our postcolonial period of intertwined world cultures (the intertwining seen either within the framework of the benign and at times patronizing slogan of “multiculturalism” or the belligerent call to arms in a “clash of civilizations”) seems regressive at best.
When docu-drama and theatre serves as nothing more than as stage for a “folklorization” of otherness, the practitioners have evidently forgotten the masterful “docu-theatre” of Peter Weiss and his “re-creation” of the Auschwitz trials, to mention but one example. The present production thus also serves as a good example for failing to take into account the aims of the present research centre “Interweaving Peformance Cultures”, as it does not address the problem of cultural interphase, and even on the level of aesthetic intervention remains opaque. For such self-reflexive theatrical productions, an anthropologist’s experience may serve as a useful guide for what Radio Muezzin lacked (even though the producer Kaegi is coquettishly playing with the notion of „ethnography“, it seems).
Thus, Elenore Bowen in her deservedly famous autobiographical work, Return to Laughter, describes how her indigenous informants one day performed several short scenes for her. In the first, they imitated her continually asking questions and writing everything down. In the second sketch, they portrayed a missionary instructing the native that according to the Bible, every human being descended from Adam and Eve. This fascinated the native, as everybody in that society considered themselves an “expert” on kinship, who sat down to discuss this matter at length through genealogical tracing. The missionary, however, angrily put the native in his place, insisting that he had better stand in front of a white man. The performers expected the anthropologist–their audience–to join in their merriment. However, she also pointed out that her feeling of being a part of the community ended abruptly when the performers began cracking jokes at the expense of a blind person (see Elenore Bowen, „Return to Laughter“, New York 1964, written by Elizabeth Bohannan under pseudonym).

There are innumberable performances using a range of media that have taken such an interactional, processual approach to matters of intercultural understanding as well as to the presentation of socially marginalized communities: from the activist stance of Jean Rouch and Jean-Luc Godard, equipping people in Mozambique with portable cameras for them to create their own television programs; the productions of African film directors such as Sembene, writers such as Achebe, Saro-Wiwa, or Wole-Soyinka; South American productions on slum children, such as „City of God“ or the South African attempt in „Tsotsi“ ); to South African versions of Porgy and Bess or Westside Story. These examples use what I would like to label the “ethno-docu” style. It describes indigenous productions that cover the conundrums of the economic, social, religious, and cultural global pulls and pushes in a widespread capitalist and post-colonial (often totalitarian) environment for a diversity of audiences, including ironic takes by African performers on the “strange, primitive” habits of Bavarian villagers (spanning the religious dimension) by using an “ethnographic” eye (or rather poking fun at ethnographic jargon about the strangeness of others). Rimini Protokoll, by contrast, does not seem to belong to this “ethno-docu” category that dramatically and dramaturgically points out pressing problems, but rather follows an outdated approach of “theatrical ethnography”, which is produced from outside and descriptively and authorially “presents” otherness without any intervention, except to claim that the theatrical treatment is close to life because it features “experts” as performers.
I therefore largely agree with the assessment of the London-based writer and artist Hassan Khan when he writes on the Qantara website about the production of Radio Muezzin: “The parallel to the tourist experience, where a tour group is treated to tribal dances, is inescapable”. However, as Rimini Protokoll aspires to something similar to the “ethnographic” enterprise, let me put a positive critical spin on the issue at hand. Maybe the theatre producers of Rimini Protokoll were experiencing the same dilemma faced by anthropologists before the reversal of the debate on “the crisis of representation” revolving around problems of “othering”, “authorship”, and “empowerment” regarding research subjects. Here the crucial question was how to translate the anthropological experiences of otherness onto the page and into a form of representation that would make the experiences of the other palpable for readers. The challenge lay in bridging the gap between the directness of living with and among others and the distancing mechanism of writing about it (or choosing to and transmitting that experience through some other medium).
I would like to examine these similarities or differences between the theatre production and “post-writing culture” ethnography by referring to the experiences of the Danish anthropologist Kirsten Hastrup. She became well known for her work Passage to Anthropology (London 1995), in which she advocated taking on the roles of performers in the field: she proposed doing anthropological work by “playing ethnographers”. However, she also devoted an entire chapter of her remarkable book to the primacy of the performative experience by relating her feeling of shock when her own field work and practices with Icelandic fishermen was put on stage by Eugenio Barba. I felt a similar sense of shock and embarrassment of recognizing myself as anthropologist and witnessing the persiflage on stage when encountering how Radio Muezzin exhibited the others to our gaze on the stage.
Key concepts here are those of “authenticity” and “participation”. Rimini Protokoll stresses the first by using the label “experts” for actors, insisting that the actors simply transfer their usual occupations to the stage–as politicians, truck-drivers, phone-operators, or muezzins (to refer to a few recent productions of the group). The claim is that when experts perform their real lives on stage, theatre becomes more “authentic” and true to real life. The authenticity of lived life serves as yardstick here. Did the performance live up to its claim? Probably not, because the experts were only showing, telling, and performing parts of their routine and ritual lives and talking about the connection between the two; they were re-enacting their ongoing lives theatrically within the framework of the stage and in front of a non-believing audience which was not part of that life.
This brings us to the second aspect of Rimini Protokoll’s claim of breaking down the barrier between performer and audience, theatre and life, and pretense and reality. Here the performance failed utterly, as there was no way of interacting, touching, eating, drinking, praying–in short living with–the experts. In contrast to ethnographic work (to which Kaegi repeatedly referred by saying that the hardest part of the production was the prior “extensive research” on the experts’ lives), this form of docu-theatre does not achieve the intimacy of ethnographic research experiences that requires the “immersion” into a foreign linguistic coding system, indeed the adoption of the gestural routines, tastes, attitudes, and outlook of that foreign community (coming close to the requirements of early Stanislavsky requests that an actor should „fuse“ with his role).
Written ethnography is, of course, as detached from the source material as a producer’s artistic interpretation. Yet, the ethnographer is also obligated professionally to comment on the experts’ lifestyle. A theatrical production could achieve this artistic break with the banality of routine experiences (of the actor-experts as well as the audience) by any of the well-known forms of rupture. However, the production limited these interventions and ruptures between experts and producer to the now common and stale practice of giving it a “real feel” by ritualistically showing endless film projections of mosques or–as counter-point to the competing muezzin-voices seen in light of Egypt’s cultural policy to centralize the calls to prayer–the cacophony of Cairo’s traffic. Another such intervention pointing to the rehearsal or planning stage was the written declaration above the screen that the Egyptian Ministry of Culture did not permit the display of donkeys, rubbish, or dog shit.
Before referring to other instances of authenticating the performance for the audience, one should also question the very idea of life as basis for authenticity in “docu-drama”: does this not imply that creating fictional, illusory worlds through theatre (and other media such as film) are inferior forms of performance? And what does this tell us about the concept of mimesis? Even if it is true that, as Goffman and his followers in the social sciences pointed out, we are all playing theatre, it does not automatically or logically imply that theatre should be nothing but the re-play of the play to be good theatre. In that case, there would be no difference between the theatre of real life and that enacted on stage. Similarly, there would be no difference between docu-theatre and voyeuristic reality shows and their ethnic extensions of “ethno-shows” in tourist-villages: “docu-theatre” as “ethno-theatre” or the theatre of the everyday life of others thus is not unlike the touring zoos of former times that exoticized and, by extension, catered to the voyeurism of the everyday at home. I highly doubt that Rimini Protokoll’s theatrical strategy could bring about the transformation of an audience (which would require revising closely held or unquestioned biases that I shall address in the following section on the politics of the aesthetic).

It may–to speak with Schechner–transport the audience to someplace else. This may be the most appropriate metaphor for their Cargo Sofia production in which the audience sat in a real truck with real truckers and was made to experience the bumps on the road in a “simulation” of Bulgarian roads while only crossing the Swiss border. Yet, the audience members were spared feeling like “human cargo”, getting harassed by the police, having to pay road tolls, or being put behind bars for a few nights in Macedonia. The production did not challenge the audience’s comfort zone by addressing issues such as organ trade or human trafficking. Thus, the audience’s vicarious journey replaced real travel, exploration, reading, or dialogue as a form of experiencing. Rather, the spectacle itself, the performance, took the place of experiencing otherness. This was mimicry, not mimesis as poiesis, and lay closer to simulation than to transformation.
Instead of “being in there” (to use the Australian ethnohistorian Greg Denning’s term about good ethnographic representation) as indigenous people would be, we are given only a map of a territory which others experience with their bodies (in reference to Bourdieu’s point about praxis as lived in space).
As for the concept of the expert as actor (or rather non-actor), one does wonder whether this speaks to authenticity at all. I shall not discuss this point at length here, but I would like to critically insert Genet’s observation quoted by Jean Kott that the problem of representing otherness can be seen in a different light: only white actors painted black can perform the role of blacks (presumably for black audiences, he meant). Or, as the psychiatrist and anthropologist Georges Devereux once remarked: the fact that one is married does not make one a good marriage counselor. Acting theories in Japan–from Bunraku puppet theatre to Kabuki and Noh theatre–rely entirely on this assumption, known since the 14th century. As such, it is believed that the perfect female can only be performed by a male .

The aesthetics of gaping
Much has been written on the „imperial gaze“ (to paraphrase Marie Louise Pratt’s title „Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation“ of 1992, a critique of imperiallist hegemonic seeing and writing about „Others“) of European societies encountering and subduing as well as subverting other cultures, imposing the colonialists’ views on the whole world. Included in this condemnation are notions of the imperialistic cultures’ indulgence to project their fantasies (of the “savage”, the “natural”, the “cannibal”, the “uncivlized”, etc.) onto the reality of others, blinding them to the truth of that reality or the indigenous views of the world. This imperial gaze also incorporates the concept of the marvelous, including that of the uncanny and the occluded (either in terms of a lurking horror or the paradisical state of origin or the wisdom of the ages/sages/of the East etc.). However, taking theatre and performance as a means to inscribe and inculcate an audience with a certain viewpoint and by perceiving the audience as a passive recipient, the instructive or pedagogical aim and result of performing otherness may become a tool for understanding: by having the audience marvel at the unknown and thus satisfying the audience’s desire for new and spectacular experiences, forms of exoticizing the other or the self may have positive effects.
I have chosen the metaphor of gaping, as it indicates a close reference to perception and recognition through the image of jaw-dropping wonder. It also captures the experience of something unheard of, unseen, or unexpected–indeed miraculous. This unmediated attitude of amazement and astonishment, of leaving behind one’s habitus of thinking and feeling, may at first overwhelm me, but I will soon be able to control and compare it to familiar things. An audience might react tearfully to a sentimental melodrama, which in my opinion serves as a good indicator for the potential of a transformative attitude: the person who empathizes with a beggar’s or a cripple’s fate in a performance might recall this experience during their next encounter with the thus afflicted (neurological research would bear out this reflex of an emotive memory inscription from the performative to the social action domain). The question relevant to the performance under discussion remains: does it have to be an expert, a real beggar or cripple, to move us thus?
To continue this trajectory of the emotive future reflex and transformative power of amazement: a now famous case has been reported and much discussed in relation to the Christian theology of body organs effecting emotional stances. Greenblatt in his Marvelous Possessions (1991, with this old-fashioned spelling intended) refers to the Huguenot travel writer de Lery, who in the late 16th century observed the possession rituals of South American Tupi groups. He reported that at first he was annoyed by the ungodly wailing noises of women during certain rituals. However, he found himself taken aback and enthused over their fantastic dances and singing, ultimately hailing rather than demonizing these practices. He also described how he was carried away emotionally (echoing the writings of Michel Leiris about women’s possession in the zar-cult of Ethiopia where he felt a much stronger impulse to have intercourse with the possessed–blatantly ugly old women–rather than to write about them). Greenblatt relates de Lery’s diary entries to the notions of amazement that church fathers such as Albertus Magnus already read as a movement of the blood capillaries leading to the heart. Thus, the feeling of amazement became (in the form of miracles) a tool for leading believers to practice the “right” way.

My point here is that even the much maligned spectacularization along the lines of exoticizing or orientalizing performance practices (an anonymous voice labeled all such endeavours of the collective theatre directorship “poornography”, meaning to make the poor parts of the spectacle, to heap injury upon injustice, as it were; see Qantara website) may not just cement old prejudices or lead to the satisfaction of desires born from our own imagination of otherness, such as of the savage, the native, the oriental, the woman, etc. Of course we are always on the look-out for new sensations–sensory and spectacular–if the super-ego does not intervene in the form of the admonition: „but as intellectual, you better not have such thoughts, emotions, or desires“. Yet, all such censoriousness obeys the laws of the taboo, which exists only to be broken, as Freud and Bataille have shown us.

Authenticating incidents, strategies, and contingencies
For a start, the performance of Radio Muezzin does not indicate any intention of empowerment of the expert-actors. Thus, the flyer announcing the docu-play gave only a title and then the director’s name. This marks the first obstacle to realizing any claim to authenticity. The production then tries to authenticate the experience of these foreign, Islamic prayer practices by letting the muezzins talk about their day-to-day lives. Here the rupture is enacted through a form of ritual on stage showing one of them vacuuming the carpet–indicating the prayer space on stage–while another mimics his weight-lifting exercises behind a prayer screen. This suggests to the audience that a muezzin is actually something like (or nothing more than?) a church verger, warden, or sextan in the Christian context along with the cantor of a church choir. While the leaflets on the play did not empower the performers by listing their names, the stage production tried to individualize the four performers by having them monotonoulsy and didactically recite (tritely illustrated with slides on video projection screens), one after the other, information about their families, day jobs, and hobbies, interspersed with demonstrations of the learnings of the Koran by children or other people intending to become muezzins. The authentication strategy was aimed to induce a sort of recognition effect in a diverse audience ideally composed of recipients of unemployment benefits, poet laureats, or migrant workers–though it addressed a very different audience, of course. Thus, the resulting identification came closer to a voyeuristic view into ways of life with which–thank God–one did not have to become involve.
The stories and film clips seemed to have been assembled randomly on all kinds of topics, and a certain artistic indifference and artlessness pervaded the entire performance. This patchwork approach to a foreign culture and how to display it for a foreign audience may be fashionable and easily consumable, but one certainly misses the skilfulness of certain ethnographers such as Oscar Lewis (i.e.“The Children of Sanchez, autobiography of a Mexican family“,1962), in depicting slum life in Puerto Rico or Mexico as well as in New York through the medium of the novel, or filmic representations of the same environment such as in Tsotsi. Otherwise, the anticipated engagement of the audience with this otherness may remain too close to the commodification, branding, fetishization, or–as in the present case–an orientalizing attitude. Having said this, it may also be true that Rimini Protokoll’s productions generally cater not only to the voyeurism of an audience to see how others live but to the brand “Rimini Protokoll” that is now synonymous with reality shows. Their most participatory piece, Calcutta Calling, catered to the imaginations of the telephone-operator spinning off stories about India which could not be fact-checked, as well as that of the recipient who imagined getting true insights about life in India (never mind the reality of violent politics or chauvinistic nationalism). The notorious Big Brother spectacles are not too far removed here. The pretense of being present, not to speak of being at the centre of something, remains a form of spectacle feeding off the lowest common denominator that displays no ambition to be the other, understand otherness, or the other within oneself: for the latter version of audience participation one would have to take the risk of losing oneself in the other, as it happened in Schechner’s famous Dionysos in 69 production, in which actors and audience members exploded the frame of the play by adopting each other’s roles following the best of the Polish acting tradition. Here, the participants entered into a close physical and emotional relationship with the actors, having to reconceive performative strategies as theatre ethnography, as vividly descibred by Schechner.
A final surprising instance of authentication–albeit possibly unintended by the producers–emerged from the reaction of the audience on the evening I attended the performance. When the audience clapped at the end to show their appreciation for the performance, the screen at the back stated that the actor-experts would not do a curtain-call as their performance was a ritual act and forbade theatrical praise for calling upon Allah.¹  This had not been the case on the premiere of the production, as I was told by other members of our research group who attended it. I am presuming that the explanation for this lies in a struggle between the producers and the performers or among the different performers. Here, an ethnographer’s account would be warranted. This stage production can certainly not aspire to ethno-theatre, as we do not participate in these negotiated contingencies of life, in this case stage-life. What at first sight seemed like a ruse of the producer to evoke authenticity for the audience, revealed itself as a rift between producer and performing experts upon closer examination.
This kind of attitude on the part of the producer may well indicate Rimini Protokoll’s downhill trajectory: for their last production they labeled a share-holders’ meeting of eighthousand people and the entire twelve-hour proceedings a theatrical event without undertaking any aesthetic intervention whatsoever. This can at best be described as a banal attempt to theatricalize Goffman’s theories (or the average theatregoers’ insights or those of ritual scholars who have long known that different arenas and domains of public life are nothing but theatre or ritual–from church services to political conferences, from birthday parties to government statements or even declarations of war). I did not buy Rimini Protokoll’s shares this time, but of course I shall faithfully attend their next production because, as the film critic Roger Ebert says, one might be rewarded by finding a gem among the rocks.

A coda on the politics of the aesthetic
Having discussed the potential of the method used by the performance to gain a better understanding of another culture, I want to finally look at the politics of the docu-drama genre. While the success of changing an audience’s attitudes largely depends on how effectively the feeling of amazement is aroused, the audience’s background knowledge is also of key importance. It remains to be discussed whether the director gave any indication about the reason why he put this particular piece on stage.
Summarizing my arguments, which are built around the problem of authenticity by having experts perform in the theatre, I partly agree with the critic of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung when she indicated that the aesthetic value of Radio Muezzin was negligible. However, while it may be true that the unmediated experience of lived life as authentic reality cannot simply turn into theatre or be transferred into the realm of the aesthetic without being distorted, it is also true that the notion of performativity may increase the authenticity of lived life.
The aestheticization of life has had a truly transformative impact on society as a whole. The influence of the Bollywood film industry on Indian life serves as an example here: people’s expectations of marriage and the wedding ritual–some would say theatre–are visibly changing due to the influence of that imagined world portrayed in Bollywood films.
Herein may lie the hidden power of the performative: reality becomes authentic by being performed. This contains the political dimension of theatricality, viewed through Austin’s lens: reality becomes authentic not in spite of performance, but because of it.² Radio Muezzin’s political dimension alludes to the Bollywood example mentioned above. As Kaegi repeatedly indicated, the motivation for his play was the intention of the Egyptian government to centralize the call of the muezzin in order to end the cacophony of competing and discordant voices in Cairo’s neighborhoods. At one point during the performance, the electrician-muezzin referred to the centralization by voicing a plea for retaining the multiple, individual calls. However, in the same sentence he also said that he would not oppose the government’s decision.
Kaegi’s example is appropriate if his point is to illustrate a ritual shift by referring to the disappearance of multivocality. However, what does this achieve? Our reflexive judgment about multivocality in the Orient would have to be applied to our own practices: yet, no comparison is drawn to, let us say, the tolling of church bells. If all he inteded was to show the aesthetics of multivocality, why choose an Oriental (i.e. foreign) example?
The impact of multivocality or, to put it in de Certeau’s terms, of everyday life (maybe most appropriate to many of Rimini Protokoll’s agenda pieces), may easily be lost in the performance, not becoming the centre of aesthetic intervention at all. But what impact will wrenching this issue from its place of origin to our stage have? Probably none–the muezzins were obviously taking care not to offend anyone back home, to where they wished to return. An interesting–if unintended–political commentary did emerge for me during the play: at one point, the weight-lifting muezzin, appointed a government representative along with thirty odd others, showed slides of him winning trophies for Koran singing in different countries ranging from Libya to Indonesia. The naive selection of photos, which the muezzin proudly presented, showed a number of heads of state who are well known for their totalitarian cultural and religious politics or their questionable legislations on state support for the construction of mosques, etc. What about Kaegi’s wish to show a different image of Islam? Here we have a religion whose ritual practices unite its followers on a global scale, in spite of and beyond all cultural peculiarities? As Qantara’s London critic reveals, the Cairo audience did not applaud the performance (Kaegi does not mention this): maybe they remained stony-faced as they understood this implication about the terror or blasphemy only too well (a sacred ritual on stage!). Be that as it may, what good does it do to bring this issue to us? Does it give us a more balanced view of Islamic societies (whatever that generalized term may mean)? Does globalizing such a question invite us to write letters to the Egyptian government to protest about their treatment of the muezzin by Egyptian state decrees? That would certainly kill any chance for the muezzins to re-integrate into their home societies. Out intervention should certainly occur at another place, in our home environment.
When we turn the gaze back on ourselves: perhaps we ought to reexamine our responses to encyclicals or our legislation of Sunday as a sacred day of rest, for that matter. This would follow the spirit of Malinowski’s ethnographic approach of seeing another society through the eyes of the natives and subsequently seeing our own societies with new eyes. If the play wanted to go beyond dazzling the audience and demonstrating the power of vocal performances by exoticizing, or even orientalizing it, it should have included pointers for where to direct our gazes. Ranging from Gregorian chants to the notion that a composer like Bach used to pray before putting a note down, music has always been closely linked to religious sentiment in our own cultural traditions as well. Yet, we only casually remember this fact when we romantically think of musical performances as transporting us to a realm that transcends daily life. It is of course true that our sensibilities and our knowledge about our own heritage have become so fragmented that even these performances would be and are applauded tout court when put on stage (though not during a church service, we may add), not much different from exoticizing spectacles; this is the feature of self-exotization which has become part and parcel of that spectacularization of which Debord speaks in the quote given at the outset of this critical essay.
Alternatively, the performance might have questioned the notion of the power and place of prayer in our own society: we do not perform this ritual on the street, but we might locate it in our daily lives, where it becomes a very private interlocution between ourselves and God. As the Austrian film-maker Seidl’s documentary, Jesus, you know, shows, this practice is also prevalent among Catholics. This might come as a surprise to some, since Mary Douglas, for example, like many adherents of Anglicanism during the Renaissance, held that the Catholic Church was one great theatrical play in their public splendour of rituals and thus lacked actual religious rigour (“Christ is not an actor” was the slogan in England when Anglicanism established itself against „popery“ during the reign of Henry VIII). Those filmed performances indeed have the power to move, as each individual presents us with the problems of daily life which we can all relate to, be it the education of children, wayward husbands, or financial and health problems. We realize that these prayers are also confessions of individuals and their private thoughts in the form of voicing the monologues we often have with ourselves and the thoughts that we don’t dare to utter in front of interlocutors. Interestingly, Seidl’s film opens with a sermon by a bishop of the church blessing the documentary enterprise as a pious piece of the power of God in the world.
While Seidl’s film and the performance of Radio Muezzin have much in common in terms of preying on our voyeuristic desires to see how others cope with the problems of life, the spectacle of the “Oriental” other fell flat in comparison. In the worst case, it catered too closely to a form of self-authentication as an exercise in nostalgia for a lost culture. The context of an Islamic society trying to come to grips with the changes of a globalized world and its effects on the lives of individuals, or the nexus between history, society, and individual was completely eclipsed, while the issue of centralizing the ritual voice could have but did not give rise to an aesthetic intervention about censorship at the crossroads between modern state and religious tradition. This would have taken an Egyptian production of Murder in the Cathedral. How close to the bone such issues of centralization and censorship are becomes clear in one of the world-renowned film-maker Chahine’s films, in which he critically reflects on the figure of the eminent philosopher and Jewish-Arab sage Averroes (Ibn Rushd). Despite cushioning his critique of the connection between religion and state in the historical context of the 14th century, Chahine’s film was banned in Egypt. Radio Muezzin aspires to address a key question for the cultural conditions of the other, in this case Egyptian muslimic practices, but it does not come to terms with it. The muezzin were good as professionals, even engaging, in presenting their voices, but contrary to the hype of Rimini Protokoll, it was not their daily lives we were having the privilege to participate in, while at the same time that hype of the staging directors was putting forward the dissimulation as the „authentic“ but not even succeeding to aesthetically or critically engage with that notion. There was then much spectacle, but not much enlightenment.

1. There is scope for a critical assessment of Rimini Protokoll’s mistaken notion of the authenticity of putting real rituals on stage as this refers to a long-standing critical discourse between theologians, ritual specialists, ritual as well as theatre and ethnographic practitioners. The naivety of the directors and their callous assumptions about the dupability of the audience should be of grave concern.

2. I reached this conclusion with my colleague Burkhard Schnepel within the framework of Erika Fischer-Lichte’s program, “Theatre as Cultural Model”.