Since she was a teenager Annet Henneman has been involved in
theatre, and it was theatre that took her away from her native Holland to
Poland, Germany and finally Italy where she was to settle for a while, acting,
working, learning. Here Annet spent much time with theatre practitioners
training her body and mind to bring the essence of what she was attempting to
portray to the stage with as little artifice and contrivance as possible.
Annet’s eclectic work often led her to working closely with those of the city
or town she was living in; teaching, performing and directing in a variety of
places including schools and prisons. When Annet set up Teatro di Nascosto or
‘Hidden Theatre’ her work was to spring from the local to the global.
Teatro di Nascosto
practise theatre reportage, focusing on personal stories of those unable to
speak out themselves. Although Annet’s work contains the love and celebration
of family and country, the joy and dancing and music of beloved cultures, her
productions often look at human rights abuses; the injustice, cruelty and
oppression in the world. Annet’s actors aim to bring their audience close up
against a reality that is too often avoided. Annet attempts to convey the fear
and grief to her audience and them to, just for a moment, ‘live and see how it
could be your lover, your fiancé, your mother, your daughter who is in this
prison, or could die in that war or could be on a boat and is not knowing if
they will make it alive to Europe.’
The drama of Teatro di Nascosto does not lie in the same
vein as the established form of theatre of the West. It has not been sanded
down but keeps its rough edges and raw intimacy, breaking down the fourth wall
in the theatre that separates and protects audience from performer. Some of the
practices and techniques of Annet’s work derive from the ideas of the theatre
practitioner Jerzy Grotowski whom she worked with in Italy in his Theatre of
Sources. Grotowski’s theatre is strenuous and exhausting, actors joining not to
supplement their theatrical toolbox but to give everything to the company,
baring themselves naked to the theatre. They are to, his Statement of
Principles reads, discard half measures for the sake or revealing and opening
up, emerging from themselves as opposed to closing up. There is no distortion
through the camera lens or disguise in the costume wardrobe. Grotowski’s actors
aim for the raw truth and strive relentlessly to capture it.
Through her work in theatre Annet was never far from the raw
truth, often working with those side-lined in society, or those, for whatever
reason, whose voices were stifled. Annet trained as a drama teacher at the
Academy of Expression and Communication in Holland and later worked as a theatre
therapist for two years at the psychiatry centre, Dercksen Centrum, also in
Holland. Outside of this she continued as a freelance drama teacher working
with young offenders and maladjusted children in cultural centres and primary
schools. In 1987 she co-founded the cultural association ‘Carte Blanche’ in
Italy with Armando Punzo whose work with the prisoners of high-security prisons
still continues with the ‘Compagnia della Fortezza’ which takes theatre into
prisons, schools and theatres inside and outside of Italy.
It was in 1997 when she was running her own theatre group
that Annet noticed things around her changing; at least, she noticed her
relation to them had altered. Her perception of the world had shifted and she
found herself waking up in the morning in tears. A friend of hers was dying of
bone cancer; there had been a huge earthquake in Guatemala; boatloads of Kurds
were arriving in Italy after fleeing oppression in Turkey … these things rose
up in front of Annet and her current project shrunk into insignificance and
triviality.
She was certain that she had to go and discover the stories
of these people and then tell them to others; to give them a voice. She wanted
to inform people of the atrocities across the globe that are so often shrugged
off when squeezed between the latest ‘-gate’ and the FA Cup. She wanted to walk
towards these people and listen to them, bringing what she found back to her
stage, a pulsing alternative to the television and newspapers. In essence,
Annet wanted to make what she now calls ‘theatre reportage’.
Annet
announced her idea to her theatre group, telling them she was to go and meet
the Kurds landing on the beach and ask them why they were coming to Italy; then
she wanted to go to Turkey, and find out why they were leaving. She asked them
to come along with her. One of the actors asked where they would sleep.
‘I don’t know, the beach.’ Annet replied.
But what would they do there?
‘I don’t know. We go and then we see!’
And so they did.
Annet went to that beach and spoke to the Kurdish refugees
from Turkey. After that, as she said she would, she went to Turkey and,
travelling sometimes hidden in a car, met with various Kurdistan organisations
including teachers unions and the People’s Democracy Party, HADEP. All the time
under the watch of the police and state authorities, she went to meet and spend
time with some of the refugees from the villages that had been razed by the
Turkish military.
Since then she hasn’t stopped; travelling to Iran, Iraq,
Jordan, Palestine, Kurdistan and India; following the people to the tears, the
cries, the laughs; down crumbling streets and into smoky rooms Annet feels the
dust and debris, hears the explosions and sees the pain.
‘I can’t stand injustice,’ she says, ‘and that is from when
I was very little. The more I see and the more I know, the less I can stand
it.’ Annet goes to listen to the stories of oppression and torment to return
home to an audience; bringing that world, to ours.
The request of an Iranian in the summer of 2010 led to
Annet’s production ‘Iran: Forgotten Stories’.
Specifically, the project was to
look at the aftermath of the 2009 presidential elections in Iran. Teatro di
Nascosto spent time with various Iranians who had been involved, listening to
their memories of the time and working towards an exploration of these stories
to be performed at SOAS University on the 23rd of July 2011.
Though many people in Britain will have some recollection of
the 2009 elections in Iran and the protests that followed, with the rapid rise
of instant news from a global and increasingly laymen media, a culture of world
narratives that sink from our conscience as they fall off the news reel has
evolved as ensuing developments are left unrecorded. Repercussions and
solutions are neglected and the perception of the world becomes warped as minds
begin to process the beginnings of the next crisis without regard to any
resolution to its predecessor. This is true for stories such as the Expenses
Scandal and ‘Hackgate’ as well as events such as the Arab Spring and the 2011
famine in Somalia.
In addition to this, people talk of ‘disaster fatigue’ where
a comfortable public tires of hearing of the next crisis; when one story simply
morphs into the next. Our skins harden and one more tragedy is just one more
article for tomorrow’s waste paper bin. One more explosion, one more picture …
‘I saw how difficult it is for people - and myself before I
started to travel - to feel and know what is happening to people so far away
from us,’ Annet says. ‘Now if you see it on the television and they tell you
that last week in Baghdad eighty people died because there were bombs, we
don’t’ feel anything, it’s so distanced.’ In such a climate the work of Teatro
di Nascosto is that much more challenging and that much more important.
The theatre group doesn’t claim to have the solutions to
these issues and is not out to simply shock anaesthetised living-rooms. They do
not work with a political agenda and are not a call to arms. Their primary
objective is to make us acknowledge what is continuing to happen in these
countries; to give comfort to those undergoing oppression and abuse that people
in other countries are listening to what is happening; to tell the stories that
are not being told, but are being re-enacted every day; to ensure that we
remain aware and conscious.
To the Iranians that the actors meet, to those who have
undergone torture and abuse and lived in a continuous state of fear and
apprehension, the knowledge that there are others far away hearing their story
is a comfort. That is all and that is everything.
I was to accompany the group for the week leading up to
‘Iran: Forgotten Stories’, July 2011, helping them promote the performance and in doing so
discover what exactly they do and see how they prepare for it. Having never met
Annet before but having heard much of her work, I travelled across London to
join them with unexpected and - most-likely - discernible apprehension. I had
been informed that Annet loved people coming to her rehearsals as long as they complied
with her one condition – there is to be no observation, only participation.
With this stipulation and Grotowski’s Statement of Principles buzzing around my
head my heart began to thump as I arrived.
I received a warm welcome from Annet and her team who were
dressed in their own clothes; bright and loose and slightly Middle Eastern
looking and so apart from the buzzing lap tops and piles of paper and books I
could have looked as if I was entering a session of Yoga or Chi-gong. They were
collected in a small and underground room at the London School of Economics
which served as both their headquarters and rehearsal space.
Despite the research I had done on the group before arriving
and their smiling faces I still felt wholly vulnerable to the theatre that I
was entering into and nervous that I would make a fool of myself and in doing
so insult the integrity of the work being done. But I was there now, so with
these thoughts in mind I took off my shoes and joined the circle.
*
The presidential elections in Iran, June 2009, were at the
time described in the UK by The Daily Telegraph as being ‘unusually open by
Iranian standards though highly acrimonious.’ There were three candidates
running against the incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, an
ultra-conservative who had been elected in 2005. The son of a blacksmith,
Ahmadinejad presented himself as a humble man of the people vowing to stand up
to the West. He had strong support from not only the rural population and
working classes but also the state police, army and media. From the start it
was apparent that he would be hard to beat.
Ahmadinejad’s most popular opponent was Mir-Hossein Mousavi,
Iran’s Prime Minister from 1981 – 89 and a presidential advisor from 1989 –
2005. Mousavi, whose support primarily came from the upper and middle classes,
adopted the campaign slogan ‘Together for Change’ and appeared to present to the
world a chance that Iran would change direction on the world stage. He
supported releasing the state’s control of the media and opening up
constructive dialogue with the United States of America, pledging to combat the
extremist image of Iran abroad. Mousavi adopted for his campaign the
traditional Iranian colour green. This was to later become synonymous in Iran
with the struggle for social freedom and change; the so called ‘Green
Movement’.
The other two candidates were Mohsen Rezai, a
self-proclaimed critic of Ahmadinejad and former leader of the Revolutionary
Guards; and Medhi Karroubi, who had come 3rd in the presidential elections of
2005 and afterwards accused them of being riddled with corruption.
On the
13th of June it was announced that Ahmadinejad had won the election by almost
two thirds of the national vote; Mousavi received just over one third. These
results were doubted in the West by the United States and the EU but were met
without objection from China, Russia, India and Brazil.
Mousavi, joined by Rezai and Karroubi, labelled the outcome
a ‘charade’ and rejected the results. With many Iranians feeling the same way,
the country was to see its biggest civil unrest since the 1979 Revolution.
Though the demonstrations began peacefully, clashes eventually broke out
between the police and protesters which were to escalate. As the latter smashed
windows, tore down signs and lit fires outside Ministry buildings in Tehran,
the state police fought with batons, pepper spray, tear gas and at times, firearms.
On the third day of the protests a pro-Ahmadinejad march formed shouting ‘Death
to America’ and ‘Death to Israel.’
The
government was to later announce thirty protester fatalities though opposition
supporters calculated the number to be twice as high. Thousands were arrested
and since then stories have emerged of many being put under torture and forced
to sign false confessions to be traitors to the state.
On the one year anniversary of the election, Mousavi made a
statement against the regime demanding that ‘a fair trial of those who
committed the election fraud, tortured and killed protesters, must be held.’ He
called on the political prisoners of June 2009 to be released and the end of
police involvement in politics. He asked
his supporters not to take to the streets so as to avoid bloodshed, and by and
large there was little conflict.
The regime had warned the public that and
protesters would be charged as criminals if they protested or held contact with
foreign media.
Iranians who have met with Teatro di Nascosto in the
preparations for ‘Iran: Forgotten Stories’ project describe Iran to be a
country of phone tapping and spying, secret police and night time abductions.
They say that this state of surveillance reaches beyond Iran to the United
States and Europe, where Iranian nationals are watched and followed as they
study and travel abroad. Some have been detained on arrival in Tehran due to
acrimonious pictures on Facebook or the people they have socialised with when
abroad.
Annet has been to Iran a couple of times creating
performances and actions centred around Iranian women. In a ‘period of hope’,
Annet was asked by a friend of hers who was a journalist to tell the stories of
the people of the 'Green Movement.’ Since making this
request, this friend was never to make contact again, whether by choice or not.
In making ‘Iran: Forgotten Stories’ Annet and her team were in contact with a
number of Iranians, listening to their stories and building up relationships in
the process. In many cases it is highly dangerous for these Iranians themselves
and their families back home for them to be associated with Teatro di Nascosto.
Yet there have still been some who have worked with the group and are likely to
continue doing so in the future. Some of the Iranians approached will decline
involvement to the extent of refusing to attend the performances, despite
expressing support for the work being done. Fear of government spies tracking
their movements is widespread; the fear of their passport being taken by the
government when they return to Iran, or for reprisals on their family that are
still there. Annet is also aware that some of the Iranians pledging their
support for Teatro di Nascosto are affiliated with the regime themselves.
*
Annet had five young actors working with her on ‘Iran:
Forgotten Stories’ each of whom had become involved with Teatro di Nascosto in
a different way. Valentina for instance, an Italian, had found out about Annet
and her work when studying Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. She
travelled to Sardinia to work with Annet on a performance there and to gather
research for her thesis on theatre reportage and social anthropology.
Valentina’s boyfriend Pascal, half-English, half-French, had always held an
interest in theatre and joined Teatro di Nascosto through her. Pascal’s first
performance with Annet was part of the ‘Still Human Still Here’ campaign in
London, organised by STAR and Amnesty International. This performance took the
shape of a twenty minute improvisation on homeless immigrants in Britain, after
which the group spent the night in sleeping bags on the ground outside St
Paul’s Church in Covent Garden.
Like Pascal, Arabella’s first performance with the group was
the improvisation on the homeless. A graduate from Oxford University, Arabella
first heard of Teatro di Nascosto when employed in a café there. A colleague of
Arabella’s had previously worked with the group teaching English to some of the
refugees involved. She described it to Arabella as the most daring and
effective social/political theatre she had ever seen. Intrigued, Arabella got
in touch with Annet and has been working with her ever since. Valeriy, a Ukrainian student at London School of Economics
heard about the group through the Drama Society there. ‘Iran: Forgotten
Stories’ was his second project with the group, having also been involved in
‘Still Human Still Here’. There was also Guendalina, a friend of Annet’s from
Volterra, for whom ‘Iran: Forgotten Stories’ was to be her first production
with Teatro di Nascosto.
But I didn’t know any of this when I first arrived and there
was no time for comprehensive introductions as I joined the circle of this
merry band of thespians; shoes and jumpers began to fly off in all directions
and the group prepared to warm up. Shoes off I hastened to empty my pockets and
make my stance and expression appear as keen and prepared as possible; I didn’t
want any hesitation to be misconstrued as reluctance. Led by Annet we began to
warm up, beginning by slightly extending our necks working up to attempting to
straddle the floor and I began to feel a little ridiculous in my corduroys and
stiff shirt.
Warm-up smoothly slipped into rehearsal as Annet softly
announced, ‘Now, dance,’ and clicked the music into life with a few taps of the
computer. ‘You use the actions and movements we have just made, and make them
into a dance!’ she told us as she began dancing on the spot with grace. Following her example, the six of us began
extending our own arms, legs and necks as we had done before, now in rhythm and
flow with the music.
This is
an essential and integral part of the success of Teatro di Nascosto’s work. The
group strive towards accuracy and honesty in each of their productions so to
attain the greatest integrity possible. The audience has to feel assured that
what they are seeing is close to the truth and the actors have to feel as
immersed in that truth as possible if they hope to succeed in making the
audience feel. This means that the technical side of their performances has to
be mastered before they can hope to portray the emotional. Annet describes the
actors’ bodies and voices as their tools by which to display their stories with
as much force and truth as possible, and it is in exploring and training these
that they begin.
As with the dancing, knowing the words and their meaning of
each Iranian song is integral to its subsequent power on the stage. ‘I have to
know what the songs are about,’ Annet says. ‘I choose them for precise reasons;
I have to learn them very well. It takes me sometimes half a year before I know
the text and melody of a song well enough to stand in front of the audience and
not only to give my speaking and singing but a song also filled up with the
emotions. But first I’m learning it technically. I have to remember it.’
Thus the strenuous technical and intellectual aspect to
their drama is fundamental grounding to each production. The Persian dancing
was very much part of the rehearsal and not the warm-up, as much the Arabic or
Farsi they practised weren’t only loosening the vocal cords, or an attempt to
simply mimic. Instead it is an attempt to reflect, and if possible, reproduce,
the rhythms and melody of a culture.
‘Slow,’
Annet called out into the rehearsal after a few full minutes of dancing. We
slowed our dancing as Annet softly called ‘slower … slower …’ and continued
until we were each barely moving, our figures falling into statue, before we
were called to ‘slowly … slowly …’ sink to the ground.
There was no more music and Annet came to join us. We had
formed another circle on the floor. She turned to Valentina and said,
‘Valentina, tell us about 'N's story.’ We all looked towards Valentina as she
spoke as if we were sitting around a campfire sharing memories, or listening to
a story at the end of the day at school.
Valentina began by telling us about when ‘N’ was
little in Iran. How Ramadan was her favourite time of the year, the time she
looks forward to most. She told us how she would set her alarm in the morning
earlier than the rest of her family, on the first night, so she could creep
down and see the Suhoor - the meal before dawn - being prepared. She told us
how she would wrap her dressing gown tight around her as she stepped outside into
the cold morning and hopped down the path to the outer building where all the
family would later come together to eat. Whenever Valentina stopped Annet would
urge her to tell us more, to give us more details: What did you hear? What did
you see? What did you feel?
So Valentina went on. She said how she would peek through
the window into the darkness and attempt to catch a glimpse of the food inside.
She told us how she remembers the exact feeling that the little cool pebbles
made on her feet as she scuttled over them; the sounds of the insects and the
trees on those dark mornings. Valentina said how she remembered that as she was
so eager to get there before her family, once she was there, she was equally as
keen that they would hurry and join her in the excitement and celebrate the
beginning of the festival. She remembered one year in particular when her and
her family had been living in the north of Iran, in a holiday house that they
had usually only used in the summer, but had been forced up there due to the
war with Iraq. She had loved it there, she chuckled, though her sister had
hated it as she had to attend an overcrowded school, struggling to learn in a
class of eighty children.
When Valentina stopped now Annet did not ask for more but
turned and nodded to Valeriy, who was to tell the next story. He told about a
father, whose children would always remember habitually nursing the wounds on
his back when he returned home from yet another demonstration against the
regime. Growing up through those experiences it is perhaps not surprising,
Valeriy said, that he and his brothers were out protesting against the regime
in 2006.
One
evening, after getting home safely, Valeriy’s grandmother was to open the door
to a group of men asking for him; they were secret police out of uniform. His
grandmother, unaware of their true intent directed the men up to her grandson’s
bedroom. When he saw the men coming down the corridor he guessed who they were
and rushed to lock the door, hoping to climb out the window and escape through
his neighbours’ garden but the men crashed through the door before he had time
to lock it.
He was
taken to an underground secret prison where he was handcuffed and told to stand
on a tile of about a foot squared. He was told that he couldn’t step off the
tile as they began to beat him with their fists. He remembered with a laugh how
at first he had tried to protect his face with his hands which meant that one
guard’s fist crashed into the hard metal of the handcuffs and not his face. Of
course this infuriated the guards inciting them to take out batons and hit him
with those instead. They beat him for hours. The next day he was taken to an
above ground prison where he was given food and permitted to smoke. Here he
stayed for a few days before being released.
Along with one of his brothers he is now in England
attempting to secure a long-term visa. He can no longer return to Iran, fearing
fatal consequences for himself and his family, and even in England has to be
careful about what he does and who he speaks to. Back in Iran, as he cannot be
with them, they will always place a photo of him at his usual seat around the
dining table on special occasions.
His story drew to a close and when he had finished no one
said anything for a few moments until the girl next to me took a loud breath in
and said, ‘I was never part of the protest. I was aware of it, of course, everyone
was, but I was never part of it. All I had done was vote for Mousavi – and that
vote wasn’t even counted.’ She wasn’t looking at us but up at the corner of the
room breathing loudly and keeping her eyes fixed on the same point; she tilted
her head up a little as she carried on speaking.
‘I was returning from university when I was grabbed by two
men and thrown in the back of a van. In here
there were several other women.
They looked at me but said nothing. Some of them were crying or looked as if
they had just stopped crying. But they didn’t say anything to me. There was one
guard in there with us. A boy, just a boy a few years younger than me. I remember he came up in the van and began
putting his hands everywhere; waist, stomach, legs, breasts. His upper lip was
moist with sweat and the bristles of his moustache coarse. We were taken to a
kind of warehouse. Here the guards presented us with papers to sign. I saw the
seal of the regime at the top corner. We were forced to sign these documents
professing that we had demonstrated against Ahmadinejad, that we were enemies
of the state, that we were terrorists. I didn’t even have a pair of nail
clippers in my bag – just pens and a few books. We were blindfolded and
separated. I remember the boy who had groped me in the van put me in his line.
Taken to a cell, they grabbed my hair and shaved it all off, all the time their
hands all over me.
‘Left alone, not after long I heard the clacking of a man’s
boots walking towards the cell. He came inside and shouted at me, ‘You were
demonstrating weren’t you? You want to bring down the government?’
‘I told him I wasn’t at the demonstration, that I was just a
student. For this I received a kick in the stomach. I remember the shock of the
blow more than anything else. I found myself on the floor as the pain spread up
to my chest and down to my groin. I gasped empty air writhing on my back –
unsure what had happened. I could taste blood in my mouth.
‘The next thing I remember was the guard shouting again.
‘Get up. Get up now, faster!’ I staggered up.
‘’You are not student! From now on, do not say you are a
student. Only speak when I say something to you.’
‘He didn’t say
anything for a while. Just stood there. There was the click of a lighter and
the smell of smoke drifted over to me.
‘He came closer, ‘Why were you at the demonstration?’ I said
nothing, it was of no use. Then suddenly I screamed, feeling a searing pain on
my hand. I felt the burn of the cigarette go right to my bone. I heard him
light another. ‘Why were you at the demonstration? he asked again. He didn’t
wait for a reply as I felt the burn of a second cigarette on my cheek. He kept
doing this, marking my body all over with his cigarettes.’
The girl went silent. When she began again, she spoke
slower, her words falling from her mouth heavy. ‘I was curled up on the floor.
He rolled me over on to my back and sat on my legs. He lent forward and his
sticky breath on my face. He stayed in that position for a while, until I felt
his tongue on my cheek and let out a little cry. He got up and I heard him open
up his trousers. He pulled mine down as I writhed to get away. He held me down
and when it began I just lay paralysed on the floor. When it was over he
finished off by urinating on me. I remember the acidic smell still.
‘Another guard came in. ‘You have a boyfriend?’ He asked. I
didn’t. I stayed silent. ‘You have a boyfriend – when you came in here we see
you must have a boyfriend. Or what? What are you a prostitute? How many men
have you slept with? What whore-house have you come from?’ And this went on.
‘I had never been with a man but he kept calling me a whore,
again and over again. It was to happen so much that I got infected. My uterus
began to smell and had little bumps on it. It was never treated.’
The girl as she continued to stare at the ceiling. Her eyes
had teared and her cheeks were red. Her whole body was rigid and her hands
clasped themselves in tight balls on her knees, as her body contracted.
Occasionally she raised a brittle hand to brush back a stray hair in a jerking
jarring movement, knocking her fingers against her face and bumping back down
to her knees. Apart from this she was fixed in that posture as if she had been
sat like that since that day she left the prison up until the moment she sat
before us now.
‘After about three
days I was taken to a detention centre. I wasn’t there long. They got in touch
with my father and told him what I was accused of, and what I had admitted to.
And he came to pick me up and drove me home.’ She stopped now and didn’t speak
again. After only a few moments the shouting began.
‘Get up. Get up now, faster!’ The two boys were on their
feet and shouting at us. We begin to stumble up but one of the girls is taking
too long. I see her grabbed by the arm by one of them and thrown towards the
wall.
‘Up!’
they continue to shout over and over. ‘Get up and stand against the wall!’ We
do as we are told and stand next to the girl who was too slow. There are five
of us there but then one of us has been grabbed and is out in front with the
two guards. ‘Stay there!’ One of them shouts.
The
woman is kneeling down in front of us and the second guard is leaning down and
pushing his face up to hers. She stares at the floor her arms hanging straight
down and her white hands trembling.
‘Tell
me why you were at the demonstration?’ the guard asks her. There is no
response.
‘Tell
me why you were at the demonstration!’ he screams at her.
There
is still no answer from the woman but her lips have begun to move up and down
forming silent words.
‘What
are you saying?’
Her
mute response continues.
‘Why
were you at the demonstration?’ he asks again as she continues to mumble.
‘Get
up,’ the second guard says to her and pulls her up by the arm. She stumbles up; her eyes still down on the
ground and her lips moving faster over her murmuring.
‘Run.’
One of them says. ‘Run to that wall.’
She
begins a slow jog to the wall, feet scuffling along the floor.
‘Faster.’
She
moves faster and now her mutterings can just be heard.
‘-motherfuckermotherfuckermotherfuckermotherfucker
…’
‘Faster.’
And her stiff body stumbles faster back and forth across the room, her breath
is laboured and the ‘motherfuckers’ coming broken and stilted. But she is still
not going faster enough, not fast at all. One of the guards makes to chase her
and her body breaks forward towards the wall and back and again and towards the
wall and back – and this goes on, her breathing becomes heavier and raspier and
her face turns red as we watch.
‘-motherfucker…
motherfucker ... motherfucker … motherfucker …’ has mostly sunk underneath the
noise of the breathing and panting as the woman runs back and forward.
‘Stop.’ She stops.
‘Sit
down.’
‘Stand
up.’
‘Sit down.’
The woman obeys each command.
‘Roll over.’
‘Again.’
‘Get up. Faster!’
‘Run.’ Not once does she look at the guards but the
mutterings gain confidence again as her lips move over the words once more.
‘Now stop. Sit down.’ One of the guards goes up to her face,
his pale against hers bloodshot. ‘Why were you at the demonstration!’
‘Motherfucker!’ She screams back followed by a dart of spit.
He wipes his face and spits back in her face.
He grabs her wrists and begins
slapping her with it.
‘Slap yourself.’ He commands her. ‘Slap yourself, harder,
faster.’ I can hear one of the girls next to me quietly crying as another puts
a tentative step forward towards the woman. One hand is slightly raised and her
eyes are wide and fixed on her as she sits on the ground, legs sprawled,
slapping herself in the face. I don’t
move even to turn my head or adjust my gaze.
The woman is dragged on to her feet again.
‘Sing!’ she is commanded. Her mumblings become a tuneless
string of loud ‘motherfuckers’.
‘A nursery rhyme. Sing a nursery rhyme!’ And she sings a
nursery rhyme as they tell her to do star jumps on the spot and to smile while
doing it.
She is
left there and their faces turn to us. We are now with her doing star jumps on
the spot, all five of us, are singing and smiling and jumping. Our legs and
arms are springing to the walls of the room as the guards watch us, unsmiling.
We are
now running back and forth, like she was. Running to the end of the room and
then turning and running back to the other hand. Back and forth between the
walls. We keep running until my breath becomes haggard and mouth begins to dry
up. There is pain in my legs and in my shoulders and a stitch begins to form
just under my heart. There is screaming around me as I run back and forth.
I am
being told to stop and am in a corner with one of the guards. He spits into my
face. He is asking me something but I ignore him as I try to regain my breath.
I want to double up or sit down but he is in my face and saying something
again.
‘Why
were you at the demonstration?’ I begin something unintelligible to even
myself.
‘Why
were you at the demonstration?’ I don’t know what to answer him so mutter, ‘I
wasn’t there, I didn’t go …'
‘Look
at me!’ and I look at him. ‘Who were you with?’
‘No-one. I wasn’t
with anyone, I wasn’t there …’
‘Was she there with you?’ He points behind him but I don’t
see who he’s pointing at and so simply shake my head. The stitch in my chest
has got worse since I stopped running and I began to sink to the floor but he
drags me up.
‘What about if I go over and see your sister? What do you
say then?’
I don’t answer this, thinking about my sister.
‘Would you like me to go and see your sister?’ I think of my
sister and I think of the guard and try to answer the question but only manage,
again, ‘I wasn’t with anyone, I wasn’t there.’
He picks up my hand
and begins to slap me with it.
‘Slap yourself.’ I do this; it’s unnatural and I feel like a
fool. My cheek is hot and quickly starts to sting.
‘Faster. Faster!’ It then
begins to go numb. The guard watches me do this and I carry on answering. At
one moment I point at someone and at one moment I stop slapping myself and he
spits in my face again.
And then in another moment, music is blasting out through
the speakers: ‘Now slow …. slow…!’
My cheek is burning and my ears are watering with the pain.
My arm aches too as well as my legs and feet. I drop to the floor breathless as
I see a scene of the others rising and moving gracefully, stretching and
swaying and tiptoeing across the floor. Their arms, and legs and necks are
extending out to each far window and door of the room. In my corner I stumble
up to join them. I see Valeriy next to me, eyes focused on some indefinite
point in the distance, his fingers no longer around my wrist but spinning in
slow-motion in the air. Thoughts of my sister and the guards and that damn
demonstration ebb and fade as I hear the music and with them extend my arms
upwards and out.
*
Iran has been an Islamic State since the Safavid dynasty
beginning at the start of the 16th Century. However when Reza Khan took over
the country in 1925, the Western-looking Shah began to push back longstanding
Muslim social conventions. Traditional Islamic clothing was banned and the
separation of the sexes ended, these policies being implemented by force. In
1935 dozens were killed when the Shah brutally putdown a riot of traditional
Shi’ites. All opposition was crushed and other political parties were banned.
Due to his support of the Axis Alliance in WWII he lost the support of many in
the West and Anglo-Russian occupation led to his removal in 1941. His son, Reza
Pahlavi, later took his place.
Shah Pahlavi was abhorred by much of the country as he began
to follow in his father’s footsteps. In 1963 he launched his ‘White
Revolution’, a radical reform and modernisation (what was seen as simply
‘Westernisation’ to many) of the land, social and economic structure. The oil
boom in the 1970s failed to bring prosperity to much of the country but instead
drastically widened the gap between the rich and the poor. It soon became clear
to many that the states wealth was becoming increasingly synonymous with that
of the Shah.
Vocal activists against the Shah’s reign such as Ayatollah
Ruhollah Khomeini were exiled from the country. Khomeini continued criticising
the Shah from abroad and after the 1979 Revolution, when the Shah fled to the
USA, he returned to Iran with a hero’s welcome. After a referendum, the
Government of National Unity was created with Khomeini elected as Supreme
Leader in December of that year. This government, it was announced, was to be
based on Sharia Law. It was proclaimed as ‘God’s Government’, therefore any
opposition to it would be an opposition to Islam and to God.
Nearly twenty years after the revolution, Iran appeared to
the world to be heading in a moderate direction under the presidency of
Mohammad Khatami who was relatively liberal. Khatami appeared to believe in
freedom of expression, tolerance, a civil society, building constructive and
diplomatic relationships with Western countries and other Asian states and a
free market which allowed room for foreign investment. Khatami however did not
turn Iran into a more liberal state. In 1999, the closure of the reformist
newspaper ‘Salam’ led to student protests in Tehran. A year later 16 more
newspapers were banned. It was in 2002, under Khatami’s presidency, that
President George W Bush of the United States was to label Iran part of the
‘axis of evil’, alongside Iraq and North Korea. In 2005 Iran elected the
conservative Ahmadinejad as president.
Due to its nuclear programme and controversial positions on
world affairs, under Ahmadinejad’s Iran is certainly not returning to the role
of America’s lap dog. Instead Iran is striding through the world stage causing
increasing concern and anxiety for its fellow players. For many Iran is just
Ahmadinejad, plutonium, funded terrorism ... Not to many is it simply the
people. But it is rarely simple.
*
I only rehearsed with Teatro di Nascosto that one day,
though I popped in to see the group a couple of times after that to help with
their research and promotions before that weekend’s performance. On the tube
journey back from that rehearsal however, and after that still, I thought about
it all. I thought about the questioning I was put under and my response, in
particular when he brought up my supposed sister. I do have a sister and would
like to think that I would endure a lot of pain and hardship before I allowed
her to be raped. During the rehearsal, in response to the rape taunts, I had
pointed at one of the other girls to direct attention away from me and I
wondered later whether that was something the actors often did; betray another
for their self-preservation. Surely there must at least consider it, each time.
I was to learn later on it is not really about playing a role, constructing
character or making decisions. It is about feeling a certain way and
confronting the prospect of having to make such choices in the first place.
For Annet, who has been to these places and both seen the
aftermath and experienced the pain of the violence that haunts these countries,
it is very different. I thought of her stubborn ‘motherfuckers’. Is she always
resilient and brave or does she sometimes display timidity or quiet despair?
Would that make the performance more of less powerful? I asked Annet about the
difference between playing a role and acting as a medium, and how much the
artifice of theatre and acting sabotages the quest for bare emotional truth.
‘It is a whole mixture. You saw us training – you should be
a good actress, my whole body should be ready, my voice, everything; if I don’t
train them I cannot be a medium. If I don’t know how to free my emotions you
will see a blocked person in front of you who simply tells very harsh stories.
If I would be a musician, I would train my fingers my hands, to play the piano,
and the moment I give the concert I should forget all the techniques. I should
feel all what I have trained, so I know the piece I have to play, but it should
be filled up with feelings - that people can be taken by the music. So in the
theatre, my body my voice is my instrument. In acting you learn how to open up,
everything should be trained.’
As a piece of drama, Annet of course recognises that their
performances are full of theatricality in a way that, for instance, a news
report is not. ‘It is theatre because we change the rules of the reality of
that moment. We say ‘Oh, we are now in a prison in Iran, or in a demonstration
in Tehran.’ So we make new rules, a new behaviour that is not our daily
behaviour. But because I have been traveling, because I have friends that were
in prison or have died or disappeared. Because I went to a funeral – funerals -
of people who died in bomb attacks. Because I lived in Baghdad and heard the
bombs, because I have slowly a family … of course what I tell becomes a mixture
of their story and my experiences.’
Such an answer took me back to Grotowski and what he called
the ‘double game of intellect and instinct.’ Annet says, ‘If I would
intellectually tell how many refugees there are and what they suffer you don’t
get involved emotionally. But if I make you involved in the stories of some
individual people and after I tell you ‘there are about 20 000 000 refugees’ –
this 20 000 000 suddenly has a feeling. The whole information has a different
significance. It should be both the emotional and the intellectual.’ For this
reason, at the performance of ‘Iran: Forgotten Stories’ there was a board
standing at the entrance to the performance space, displaying a list of the
tyrannical punishments inflicted on Iranians for what are to Western citizen menial
offences, if offences at all. Teatro di Nascosto allows the intellectual to
fuel the instinct, and vice versa.
In the performance, the six of them including Annet told
both the stories I had heard in the rehearsal and others I had not heard. They
danced, both like they were in Iran and then as if they weren’t. They cried at
times, and laughed, played footage and read aloud. They charted patches of the
demonstration; they acted, and spoke to us as themselves. It was a patchwork of
stories and ideas and emotions and information designed to make the audience
sense what had been felt that day and is being felt every day since and many
before.
Some Iranians who came to see the production described their
own actions as masochistic. A couple of them were in tears as they relived
their own experience of the 2009 protests in reflection to what was on stage.
Watching Annet and the group brought back the thoughts of the people they knew
two years ago and what has happened to them since. People they had studied with,
eaten with, danced with, slept with, marched with. One of them said that he
felt guilty and like a coward that he was not back there in the protest,
smelling the flames and seeing the blood.
A few of them recognised aspects of themselves and their own
stories and found it difficult to watch it being performed in front of them and
in front of complete strangers. Many of them found the performance impressive
but were disappointed that more people didn’t attend. ‘Everyone should see
this,’ they said.
As noted above, the power of the production relies on the
extent to which the audience believes in and invests in it. Some had
criticisms, mainly on the grounds of authenticity. Teatro di Nascosto answer
that they are retelling stories, not recreating reality, and count on their
audience making this distinction, allowing for a margin of error.
But how much of an effect did it have on the rest of the
audience? Watching the performance, I was impressed, but I was not as engaged
or as affected as I had been in the rehearsal. Indeed, it is for this reason
that this article is based around that one rehearsal and not the performance. I
would recommend everyone to go to a rehearsal, more than a performance. Or I
would urge the group to make their performances yet more inclusive, more
direct, and more visceral, as the rehearsal has been for me.
I will never forget the rehearsal. Maybe many of the
audience will never forget the performance. How much of a success is that? ‘I
don’t think I can change the world,’ Annet says, ‘but I cannot do nothing.’ She
believes that where she is now in her life she is at her strongest on the stage
and spreading this message through theatre. However this does not mean she
works only through theatre. She writes diaries when she goes to countries
inflicted with war and poverty, living and working with the locals there, and
the diaries are then publicised and circulated. She attempts to involve
politicians as much as possible, securing the Charter of Volterra (2008), which
looked to improve the treatment of refugees in Europe, signed by 30 politicians
from across the continent. She also mentions the possibility of a film, perhaps
the most effective way of reaching large amounts of people.
Annet says that many who see the productions of Teatro di
Nascosto do want to find out how they can help. When performing ‘Don’t Forget
Us’ (a collection of monologues and songs from Baghdad, Kurdistan, Palestine,
Iran, Turkey and Argentina, from and about the people she has met, known and
loved) to schools in Italy, pupils would come up to her afterwards asking what
they could do.
‘I have to give them a little answer for what they can do in
their life. Not a big thing - they are going to school or they are students, or
they go to university - but I tell them always if they were touched by what
they heard or if we teach them something, to tell immediately at home what
happened to them, so that the parents can also be involved. And then I speak a
little about Amnesty International or even if you see some lonely foreigner
sitting somewhere, maybe just say ‘hello’ and what it can mean for someone who
is alone and doesn’t speak the language if someone smiles and just says ‘hello’
… so it is the very little things I think I can do.’ It is in remembering and
retelling where the success lies.
Sitting down with one of the actresses, Arabella, in a
London café, I ask why she is with Teatro di Nascosto? ‘It’s about an
awareness,’ she says. ‘It’s about meetings, and people, and human connection.
For example, after having been part of ‘Incontri Meetings’, a series of
meetings, performances, concerts, conferences, film screenings and exhibitions
in October 2011, in which ‘Iran: Forgotten Stories’ was performed again as was
‘Voices of Baghdad’, (Teatro di Nascosto’s recent production telling true
stories of the people of Iraq) by four young Iraqi actors beside Annet, Iraq is
no longer just a name, or space on the map, or collection of news clips and
headlines. Now Iraq is Ali, Mostafa, Foaad and Yasir, the four Iraqi actors who
we trained with, lived with. There is a connection built there which leads to a
greater feeling, closeness, awareness and appreciation for the country and its
people.
‘If Teatro di Nascosto’s productions are able to offer this
to our audiences, even just slightly, if they are now just on the way to seeing
these places differently, then we have achieved something. These are real
places with real people and that often doesn’t come across.’
Annet says a similar thing. ‘I try to make the people live
for a moment and hoping - because I cannot tell them to change but hoping -
that it will make a little, little seed inside of them a thinking or a feeling
that the word ‘refugee’ has a significance or the world ‘oppression’ becomes
concrete, like something of your life for a moment. I know it is very important
the sharing. Also because in our culture the real sharing, the sharing of real
emotions, of pain, of happiness, is very difficult to happen between people.
It’s a kind of culture where you are so full of information and there is very
little education about sharing life, about sharing emotions, about sharing what
you really are. I know that when I do this theatre I make a road to come to
this sharing.’
‘It’s a medium of communication,’ Arabella says. ‘It enables understanding; spreading stories
in this way is an appeal from one set of people to another for care and for
demonstrating (even if only by listening) solidarity, as they struggle to
defend their human rights. Theatre reportage works to open a channel of access
between different cultures, societies, worlds – Annet working between cultures
has a lot to teach the actors – from all over the world – about how to make the
stories understandable to the different audiences. It finds the common
interests and joys: it’s not only drama, but also the happiness of family, of
the home, of parties.’
The road to sharing that Annet mentions is a road of
empathy, not necessarily comprehension, and that in itself is a road of hope to
those who are in need of it most. As Arabella says ‘a value is given to the
lives of the people in difficulty by putting it on stage and by giving it an
audience: the knowledge that someone outside my situation is listening, is like
a lifeline to a world outside the one of oppression, imprisonment, conflict –
of hope, reason to survive.’
Bertie Digby
Alexander
