#especially among the child abuse victims within the target audience. so. regardless of him being a boy | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

rezaabdoh · 5 years ago

Text

King Kong

Reza Abdoh (1963-1995) was the fervent, tenacious and visionary orchestrator behind a pack of rabid dogs named 'dar a luz' who corralled audiences incessantly into the depths of hell.

The AIDS era director, playwright, company leader, and poet wryly deferred his biographical details to his own fallacies, a twisting of details and the strenuous efforts of researching journalists and critics. But, some of what we do know is that he was born in Tehran to parents well connected to diplomats, his father a violent former boxer and a member of the Shah's coterie. He was sent to school outside London, where he experienced British boarding school racism but also directed his first play, a youth theatre enactment of Peer Glyt, and published a book of poetry, 'The Sound of a Poet Breathing in an Imprisoned Air'.

Immediately after high school, he found himself in Los Angeles with his father who had fled exile due to the 1979 Iranian Revolution and was subsequently no longer a wealthy friend of the monarchy due to its' abolition. The family was there mere months when Reza was cruelly outed as gay by his step-sister via pornography he may or may not have owned. His father was furious and two weeks later, before Reza could speak with him, he died, leaving Reza and his siblings penniless in America.

The next few years are mysterious: possibly he dropped out of literature or film at USC, possibly he completed it, possibly he started a law degree and in 1981, possibly, he directed 'Darkness Visible', 'a compilation of meditations on Satanism.'... or not. For sure though, he continued to conceive new works and cultivate friendships that would grow into his production company. By the end, he had prolifically directed eighteen theatre works, ten of them his original productions.

There are three plays which Abdoh considered a trilogy; 'The Hip-Hop Waltz of Eurydice' (1990), 'Bogeyman' (1991) and 'The Law of Remains' (1992). Only he really knew why...

The first, genderswaps the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, placing the couple in a neglected domestic setting, bickering away, ambiguously following the plot twists of the ancient source material. The murder, the bargaining, and return from the underworld lie somewhere amidst resentful one-liners, exploding Statues of Liberty and banned eroticism. This was the calmest of Abdoh's works but contains the most explicit use of a theme that over-arched his work; the theme of descent, or a careening through, and, towards indefinite endings.

The result is a rebuke to the reality of forbidden love in America: to the imposed rigidity on gender, to censorship of private lives and the tragic evasion of public queer suffering under Reagan's non-existent AIDS policies. Abdoh's Hades is a disgusting lesion covered fascist, he appears in a white suit, has Eurydice decapitated and brandishes his repugnant rant of mockeries, vanities, and hypocrisies with confidence that they're the wisdom of an astute businessman. For Abdoh, gallows humour like the comical tyrant was a potent technique to scrutinize the widespread human paradoxes which he dramatised, 'the most important part of my aesthetic;'

“Eurydice: Suppose a burglar breaks into the house and finds me? Orpheus: It would serve him right.” - The Hip-Hop Waltz of Eurydice (1990)

In his often large-scale and always experimental performances he encompassed a scope of topics difficult to comprehend. Each different for he never wished to do the same thing again, and each holding precipitous, tense contradictions, moral ambiguity and never once a release or reconciliation. Any point one might like to pull out to draw a singular understanding from would have been violently negated by the preceding passage, or the screams of a voice from off stage, or subsumed in the chaotic invasion of pop, political and dramaturgic details.

He cut out the pastiching, plagiarising, deconstructing heart of the '80s and regarded it's many fatty details before he sliced them up and fed them to his actors for his audiences' entrancement, and then, he refused to license another to ever re-stage a single thing. A beautifully contrary act from a self-proclaimed 'receiver': to pillage culture then demand the results never be distorted? But, it makes sense, Abdoh thought his work existed outside post-modernity because he had a strong point of view. One which could easily slip away, like a line missing from a poem, and he considered himself like a 'symbolist poet' and his work like a poem; irreducible to its parts. Besides, he was more fascinated by contradiction than ambiguity.

Documentation of his work is rare and seems like a clandestine bootleg, but its still worth watching; how often do you see people or art explode like this? Today we're more likely to represent the onslaught of societal injustices privatised as things to personally overcome, threaded through some drama, or seeping through environs as familiar weeds. Unlike Reza, who's plays' furiously jabbed at every soft spot around them, like a virus eating through vitals from the inside out. Implicating everyone and seething with tears and laughter.

'Bogeyman' (1991), Part II of the trilogy, towards the end features a severed head, among falling feathers, freshly plucked from a crow, the head is bitten and swung like a pendulum over a mother and the sycophantic metropolitan reincarnation of her original pig of a husband. A coming-out story of sorts, the son's narrative is subsumed in the action of the many other characters spread across nine settings within a three by three grid construction which contains apartments, an upturned hospital room, a field of wheat and video screens.

The maniacal parents fume and berserk throughout the play dragging the sex and intermittent dancing undertow to their abusive relationship with delirious speed. At any moment various scenes play out beneath the shouting, all on view simultaneously in different boxes: a demarcating structure constantly undermined by the intermingling characters scaling the set. In real life, behind the scenes, the complicated set resulted in many minor injuries and once an actor screaming at a colleague 'Don't touch my blood!' The truncated lives of queer persons flow beneath the hypocritical tirades of heteronormativity. From the disclosure, to taboos and to a hospital bed with rapid speed 'Bogeyman' fits lifetimes into its short span, rampaging across the stage to confront people with a raucous and angry work of art-imitating-life.

Abdoh abhorred theory, the term 'avant-garde', and the word 'radical.' He explained, he thought art was not radical; 'what is radical is what is in the streets, what is radical is the war in Iraq.' Drawing comparisons to his work leaves you with insufficient and reaching declarations. It has been compared to a massive array of artists and writers from Bosch, to Burroughs, to Shakespeare, Edgar Allen Poe, Bach, Rimbaud or Marquis de Sade. Much is written also on the influence of the permanently evolving, mournful and unstable Shi'ite theatre/ritual called Ta'ziyeh which does away with such unities as time or place, and the detachment of the audience, as fundamental requisites for it's staging. How important he considered these influences we don’t often know. If he ever saw Ta'ziyeh in his life it may have been from the window of a limousine as a child, but regardless with art this complex, comparison shines a light, coincidental or not. In his own words, however, his biggest inspiration was life in America, and included cryptic notions like the 'multi-layered realities' of MGM musicals, or the performance from L.A.'s 'Club FUCK!', and especially, pop culture and TV, specifically, the way 'popular media is, to me, abusive.'

“I ignore 99% of all information, 99% of all products. The tiny amount that I do absorb subjects me to perpetual electrocution. There is something so disgusting about this endless uselessness. It’s the disgust for a world that is growing, accumulating, sprawling, sliding into hypertrophy, a world that can’t manage to give birth.” -'Quotations from a Ruined City' 1993

In part III of the trilogy, 'The Law of Remains,' the audience is moved around from setting to setting, co-conspirators in the consumption and exposition of the 'story.' The story is the making of a movie and furthers a line that recurred, like a fugue, in many previous plays, repeating the idea of finding a star for a movie or being that movie star. The star here, however, is Jeffrey Snarling (a.k.a. Dahmer), the serial killer, necrophile and cannibal who targeted young boys of colour until he was caught in 1991. The director is Andy Warhol, the tyrannical auteur who literally framed pop-culture and controversially exploited his muses. What follows is an hour and half of cruelty and fascination, examining and complicating the function of a gay serial killer in American culture.

The show is as usual loud and unrelenting. This time with more dance breaks than previous pieces -which serve to punctuate Abdoh's plays- but in this most cacophonous one, the punctuation is with speed and force. Replacing traditional silence with noise and flitting between creation and destruction, there is no room for pause, for as in real life death is not an end. Whether you are spiritual or not there is the macabre fact -remember physics class- that energy cannot be created or destroyed but only transmuted to new forms. We watch processes begin at death: 'boy toy chilli cheeseburgers' for example, potentials like making 'a heap of money out of this movie', or interviews which begin as the victim is dying, a microphone held out to grab the story or just the anxiety that grows in Snarling and permeates the cast and audience as Dahmer's psyche riled a culture. Like an endless loop, everything seems inevitable and interconnected. Dahmer is a dark star in American mass media, his nefarious story, racially and sexually charged, far crosses the boundaries of taboo but it was foremost his taboos and not his evil that made him an American star. After all he's far from the only serial killer of that time. In the end, Snarling writes a letter from heaven in a typically twisted scene that questions the authority and innocence of the moralisers, both in the audience and society at large;

“Dear Bridget, Do you remember Ronald Reagan in 'The Killers'? He's here now in heaven. Dressed in the old glory he's become a fuckable doll. I study his moves. We drink tea and sympathy with an avid swig of joy. We yelp the baseball scores over the radio. I tap the channel changer: multiple pile-ups, head-on collisions, motorcade attacks and the simulated anus of Reagan post-colostomy surgery - which generates spontaneous orgasms in me. I love him. I wanna fuck him. Time to go do, Bridget.” -'The Law of Remains' 1992.

Abdoh's plays draw together a vast network of details for audiences to get lost in, but pull back to view the bigger picture and you're similarly lost. His genius did not lay in a tortured theorisation or an orderly effort to understand, but rather, in the illumination of the emotions which propelled his obdurate drive to live. He would compound a barrage of information into a single heavy emotional mass via very complex pieces that used their complexity to delve down to a place where artistic creation can express that which is beyond the individual and cannot be reached sufficiently with rationality or logic. The sheer complexity of events is embraced fully and details of contradictions, injustices, and pleasures are played out without sentimentality so they may commit their energy to the communication of what it felt like to live these lives. Instead of offering an interpretation of interpretations he had, like everyone else, received, he got right to the point of why humanity had to do better.

“I have a lot more to say, but I have a plane to catch. And the ruined city will follow me wherever I happen to go. 'I carry the ruined city under my skin, in my belly, in my underbelly. And so do you motherfucker. And so do you motherfucker.” -'Quotations from a Ruined City', 1993

The final work Abdoh staged was 'Quotations from a Ruined City' (1993), co-written with his brother Salar. Staged between barbed wire and a picket fence, it takes a broad view of the violence exerted by the lives we live, by capitalism, identity, and war. It takes the themes of power/powerlessness and justice/injustice to caustic hyperrealism. With a pair of narrators who stand with only their heads showing through hatches in re-purposed elevator cars placed like watchtowers, screaming 'DON'T DO THAT!' intermittently between a script of quotes blasted over the lip-syncing cast.

The setting is a post-apocalyptic ruined city where brutality proliferates. Characters dressed from the future, or as Puritans, '50s & '60s Americana, Victorians, mummies, or the Civil War era, stream through the stage conversing across time at a blistering pace. The scene always changing, the characters pulling up new props and evolving their persona to new realities. Pummelled through changing circumstances they go through mutations in their lives exerted by the regularities of American power, and an emerging 'New World Order' that charged the components of that power with a new and terrifying edge. Whether religious fundamentalism verses/in politics or economics, the effect of folk culture vis-à-vis mass media or brutality exerted through the body-politic on politically dispossessed bodies he offers a searing critique on our culture, showing us what he sees but preferring not to apportion any blame unless its inhaled by all like the air we breathe.

In this final play, before Abdoh was killed by AIDS, we glimpse the complexity of the concerns the director of dar a luz (which means 'bring to light' i.e. 'give birth') had, tempered with rage, find an eloquent reciprocity between dark and light. Amongst the noise of existence, the most unmissable aspect that runs through every moment of Abdoh is the depiction of the nature of queer identity and its role against normative society. He has been called a queer prophet, which still stands true today as his works expose the deep origins that shaped our culture, on both human and inhuman scales, with far-sighted and stinging sophistication.

On an (often difficult to draw) autobiographical note, we see in 'Quotations' perhaps one such moment; when living bodies are as if mummified and stuffed into coffins lain upstage behind two gauze-wrapped, wreathed and garlanded women who's heads have emerged from trap doors. It is the way of AIDS, and viruses, that you wouldn't know from whom you contracted the illness and likely they wouldn't know where theirs came from either. This multiplicitous nature meant that one could not apportion blame, rather the cumulative injustices of the world had conspired to act upon your body. When considered in such terms what differentiates that from anything else? There are more trap doors than doors with money behind. There's no doubt he saw that life is cruel, and perhaps, he felt that a trap door had opened beneath him when at only twenty-one he was given a diagnosis of a terminal illness itself slathered in taboo. One writer, John Bell, thought that in 'Quotations' he had detected a political philosophy more so than in previous works and when he asked Abdoh about it his response was more succinct and encompassing than any that've been figured by critics:

“I believe that one has to not be a victim.” -Reza Abdoh

0 notes