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).

The overlapping calls for prayer that crisscross each other at the outset of Radio Muezzin illustrate this explosion of the performance space. The sacred aesthetics of voicing the text of al-adhan are inextricably linked to sacred symbols and forms, and are thus reflected in the laying-out of space. The scenographic dispositif, screened everyday life of Cairo, and the wise deployment of professional muadhinin rather than professional actors, renders the performance a site-specific intervention. The relationship between the performance of the five professionals/non professionals and the morphology of the surrounding atmosphere (be it indoor or outdoor) is complex and intriguing since there is no ‘outside’ of the text. In the performance, the muadhinin performers themselves become the text to be read. The performance becomes a space for these professionals to be seen as they wish to be seen – as functional agents of the society of the Islamic Spectacle that uses non-traditional media such as theatre for preaching. Their narratives and little histories convey to their audiences how their present situation derives from the past, and how the signs that structure and signify the world around them bear witness to the inextricable connection between past and present. It is precisely at this point that conflicting expectations (of director Stefan Kaegi, the technician he selected, and the four muadhinin) threaten the whole project.

The different meanings of this docu-drama are less likely to be found in the experience of its various performances at the HAU, or the different intentions and expectations of the artists and professionals involved in the project, or the reactions of the audiences, than in the mapping of its elements and the discovery of the intersections and interstices that result.

Crossing Islamic and Secular Spaces

The performance displays an aesthetics of collage along with decentered vectors of influence that demonstrate strong affinities with minimalism. The red carpet with its demarcating lines is a strong indication of the inside of the mosque as a ritual space that is now transformed into a performance space. The carpet is purposely tangential to conform to the qiblah axis. The projected images and sounds that reveal everyday life are deliberate extensions of this ritual space. As an example, the practice of prayer in the streets is common, particularly on Fridays, and transforms public space into praying areas. Radio Muezzin reflects different layers of the religious institutionalization of Mosques as strong markers that have unleashed a more significant debate about the position of Islam in Arab nation-states. The mosque is more than a religious place where prayers are performed five times a day: it is also an administrative category connected to urban planning, bureaucracy, and legal arrangements. The mosque is also a discursive contentious field of agency: it is the most important ISA if controlled by the rulers, and a dangerous site of subversion and resistance if seized by opposing forces.

In the world of Islam, al-adhan is a sacred ritual that is performed live, five times a day from all Mosques. The decision of Mahmoud Hamdi Zaqzouq, the Egyptian Minister of Religious Endowments, to implement a unified adhan in Greater Cairo in cooperation with Cairo Radio, aims to replace thousands of muadhinin with 25, who were selected to call in turn (two for every call). The main objective behind this decision, according to Zaqzouq, is the elimination of the “cacophony of overlapping adhans and microphone wars” between neighboring muadhinin, which violate the sacredness of such a ritual practice. The call will be transmitted from the mosque of al-azhar to all other official and semi-official mosques of Cairo and its neighboring areas. The mufti of Egypt, the greatest religious authority, endorsed this decision, putting an end to a heated debate in Cairo. However, through Radio Muezzin the debate is now transposed to another arena (theatre) and beyond national borders. Unifying al-adhan is also a political decision since the new urban Islamic culture in Egypt is gradually being fueled by various processes of secularization. With the growing modernizing zeal, human amnesia, and the persistent assault of hypereality and simulation over real experience, the ritual practice of al-adhan as an important cultural heritage becomes more and more vulnerable and at risk. The new ‘radio muadhin’ will be like other simulated arenas that reflect nostalgia for a lost or vanishing ‘deep Islam’ that peppers the urban sprawl of modern Egyptian society.

In retrieveing this performance tradition, theater in Moroccoo has become more and more improvisational and self-reflexive, even as such retrieval is still negotiated within the paradoxical parameters of appropriating and dis-appropriating the Western models of theatre making that were introduced to the country by the turn of the twentieth century. The Europeanization of Morocco’s performance cultures happened as late as 1913, the date of the creation of ‘Teatro Cervantes’ (its architecture is similar to the Berliner Ensemble) in Tangier and other theatres in big metropolitan centers such as Casablanca, Rabat, Tetouan. The first Arab theatre company visited Morocco in 1923. By the year 1926, Moroccan Amateur companies started to perform in Fes, Tetouan, Tangier, and Casablanca. Famous Moroccan political figures of the independence movement not only encouraged theatre activity, but also utilized theatre’s intricate ability to subvert as a means of empowering the majority of illiterate Moroccan subjects under the Franco-Hispanic colonial administrations. In 1950, the French colonial administration decided to render theatrical activity in Morocco less progressive, for Moroccan theater during the colonial period was generally a theater of resistance that paid more attention to the political rather than the aesthetic. Professionals were called from France in order to orient Moroccan theater toward the direction designated for it by the colonial administration. Thus, André Voisin and Charles Nugue assisted by two Moroccans, Abdessamad Kenfaoui and Tahar Ouaziz supervised theatrical workshops in the Mamora Center in Rabat. As a result of such theatrical training, the first professional Moroccan theater company was created under the auspices of the ministry of Youth and Sport bringing together Tayeb Saddiki, Ahmed Tayeb Laalej, Fatima Regragi, Abdessamad Dinia, Driss Tadili, Mohamed Afifi and others.

The Mamora theatrical circle, then, was created at the turn of independence (1956-1975), yet still under the influence of the French colonial policy of containment and assimilation. The aim of such Francophone policy was to absorb the nationalist subversive actions that were manifested in the early theater of resistance, and to establish, instead, a mystifying theatrical apparatus that would smooth conflict and resolve social tension through the implementation of a Moroccan version of the French Comedy. Thus the Mamora was established as an official theatrical company. Upon the independence of Morocco in 1956, the National Theater Mohammed the Fifth was created in Rabat, along with the Moroccan theater Research Center under government auspices. From 1956 until 1974, a period covering postcolonial administration, the Mamora group (under the supervision of the ministry of Youth and Sport with the playwright Driss Tadili as artistic director) performed a series of adaptations from the Western repertoire, mainly from Molière as a landmark of French theatre. Shakespeare occupied a secondary position. In brief, the Mamora theater company that occupied a hegemonic space within the Moroccan theatrical map since 1956 exemplifies the collaboration that was effected between the State and the Stage, for theatre was utilized as a means of indoctrinating people and depoliticizing them.

Colonial politics of theatre added more comlexities to the emerging Moroccan stage. Hybridity has become quite apparent in the works of Tayeb Saddiki – Morocco’s most notorious theatre man – and others like Ahmed Tayeb Laalej, Abdessalam Chraibi, Driss Tadili, Abdessamad Kenfaoui up to Zobeir Ben bouchta. Saddiki’s play titled diwan sidi abderrahman al-majdub (The collection of Master Abderrahman al-majdub, 1967) is conceived in an open public place that is also hybrid in the way it holds up a mirror to the performance itself almost in the same way as the Commedia dell’arte. The play’s structure is circular rather than linear. It is situated in Jemaa – elfna, an open site of performance cultures that is also a space of hybridity. The first scenes of al-majdub production are designed to draw our attention to the making of al-halqa and its circular architecture. On-stage actors incribe the circular morphology of al-halqa through a series of comic acrobatic games and mimetic body language. They serve as audiences for each other as the narrator (the story teller) gives space to his little halqa. The halqa of al-majdub represents the Moroccan popular poet as a Shakespearean fool, giving voice to wisdom in a corrupt social order. The effects of such an absurd situation are sharply comic, yet leading to a collective questioning of the status quo.

Saddiki‘s play, Maqamat Badia Ezzamane El-Hamadani (The Assembly of Badie Ezzamane El-Hamadani) marks another turning point in Moroccan theater as it restores the performative qualities of maqamat’s narrativity back to the Moroccan and Arab stage. The play takes place in an open public square. At the outset, Saddiki’s narrator announces that it can be any of the famous Arab squares: it can be Al-Halfaouin of Tunis, or Harun Arrachid’s square in Baghdad, or the Green Ataba of Cairo, or even our magical Jemaa-elfna in Marrakech. Then the two prominent bsat (a semi circular performance event that appeared in Morocco in the mid 19^th C in the cities of Marrackech and Fes) personae playfully call the attention of their audiences. Other actors play audiences too while preparing to adapt to the roles. Like most halqa’s of the bsat tradition, the performance lacks an organic thematic unity, for it is fragmented into little furjas (performances) or halqas (circles) that have only one common aspect: that is the master narrator. In the first furja (performance) Issa Bnou Hicham tells the story of his friend, poet Abdoul Fath Al-Iskandari whom he surprisingly runs into in one of the halqas of Baghdad. Aboul Fath justifies his present situation as a performer and condemns the decadent spirit of his society. The second furja is composed of five maqama wherein the two friends Issa Bnou Hicham and Aboul Fath Al Iskandari have more stories performed in the bsat’s halqa. All these stories are derived from the maqamas, yet theatricalised as fragmented little performances. Saddiki’s fragmentation strategy is rooted in the dynamics of the halqa and its fluidity as far as the unity of subject is concerned. In sum, Saddiki’s two plays described briefly above exemplify the postcolonial dynamics of retrieving tradition as a form of interweaving with past performance cultures.

However, the most recent Moroccan improvised theatrical projects engage in what Abdelkbir Khatibi calls ‘un dialogue en abyme’, that is a self-reflexive dialogue with the actual theatrical apparatus in Morocco. Mohamed El-kaghat remains the best representative of the subversive Moroccan murtajala (L’Impromptu Théàtrale/the Improvised play). He is an academic, playwright, director, and actor who is well acquainted with the Western Impromptu and its comic yet ironic representation of theatre problematics since Molière’s L’Impromptu de Versailles (1663), and Critique de L’école des Femmes, Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search for an Author (1921) and Tonight We Improvise (1929), Eugene Eunesco’s L’Impromptu d’Alma (1956), or Samuel Beckett’s Catastrophe (1982). El-Kaghat realized the intricate ability of such a theatrical genre to communicate the Moroccan tremulous performance body through self-reflexive performance semiosis. In his prologue to Murtajalat Fes (The Improvised of Fes), El-kaghat not only legitimatizes his practice of the Impromptu, but also our need for such a theater practice: “Because our theatre suffers from all kinds of problems, I have adapted the Impromptu in order to expose them to the audience after I realized that discussing problems is not as effective as performing them on stage. Through irony and the exaggeration of comic situations I desire to create a dark comedy.”