Arabian Night

Presented by Max Mueller Bhavan in association with KHOJ International Artist’s Association
translation: Rajesh Tailang
Cast (in alphabetic order): Jitender Kumar, Mandakini Goswami, Manish Choudhari, Sujith Shankar Supriya Shukla
Physical preparation & Instruction - Rashid Ansari
Direction and Design: Zuleikha Chaudhari

On a hot summer night in a Berlin apartment house, the mythic and unexpected nightmares of five tenants twist into a dreamscape that is part fantasy and part urban thriller. The world of Arabian Night is described in spare and provoking terms. Rather than being overly philosophical, this play keeps us grasping at the experiential details of everyday life. These details have an easy tendency to morph into the surreality of dreams.

The Arabian Night by Roland Schimmelpfenig succeeds in evoking the muggy and heavy heat of the Orient that turns each movement into a titanic effort and drives the unleashed spirit back into the abyss of the unconscious. Fear and desire are no longer speechless. They well up in pictures out of Thousand and One Nights. For this dream-dance in the form of a classic drama, Schimmelpfennig has created five characters (two women, three men) and a high-rise building. Hans Lohmeier is a caretaker in search of water damage and a woman, who is probably moulded from the picture of his former wife. Fatima Mansur and Franziska Dehke share an apartment on the seventh floor. Fatima expects her Lover Kalil. Franziska is not aware of the lover, as every evening, an attack of sudden fatigue puts her to sleep on the couch. Before that, she always takes a shower, and is watched through the open window by Peter Karpati from his flat in the block on the other side. Franziska observes the observation. The play is a study in the phenomenon of observation. The characters mainly use monologues to express what they observe. Their own actions become visible in the objective description of an observer, distanced, obviously, firmly embedded in the context of the observers. Everything becomes an object for the observer. When they meet, they rarely converse; most of the time fragments of their inner monologues clash with each other. Their worlds are single cells, filled with stories and events, incapable of integrating with other perspectives. Through an imperceptible process of diffusion through their seemingly impenetrable cell walls, Schimmelpfennig creates a cosmos of unreality. It emerges step by step, camouflaged as a dramatic dialogue, through a factual description of the events.

Karpati feels strong enough to visit his distant shower-girl in her flat. At the same time Kalil is on his way to Fatima. He gets stuck in the elevator, while Karpati takes the stairway. Fatima, who has heard Kalil's scooter and wonders about his continued absence, takes the stairs down and meets Karpati. Lohmeier decides to check the water pipes on the seventh floor. Therefore Karpati and Lohmeier both approach the open apartment door with the sleeping Franziska inside. Schimmelpfennig generates suspense through a kind of cinematic editing technique. How do Karpati and Lohmeier behave in the presence of a sleeping female body? What kind of sleep is Franziska sleeping? She knows of Karpati and is invisibly interconnected with Lohmeier as well. Will Fatima and Kalil find each other after all? Will the caretaker take care of the defective elevator?

One after the other, they all arrive in the apartment. They see each other, touch each other, pause, and still remain in their own specific reality. Franziska imagines herself as the blonde favourite wife of a sheik. Lohmeier is with his wife on a cruise through the Bosporus. Karpati is a spirit caught in a Cognac-bottle. Only Fatima understands. When she finally arrives back in the apartment she sees Kalil with the naked Franziska and wants to stab him. She hunts him through many apartments and across many beds. Lohmeier discovers in Franziska the reincarnation of his wife. Karpati drops from the balcony in his bottle, and while flying around, reports on the events in the lower-level apartments. Dripping with perspiration, we are startled out of the dream, which is now over. However, all senses are still numb from this dark ride.

Roland Schimmelpfennig (*1967) worked as a freelance journalist and author in Istanbul before studying direction at the Otto-Falkenberg-Schule in Munich in 1990. After graduation, he joined the Munich Kammerspiele as assistant director. Since 1996 he is a freelancing playwright. In 1999/2000 he worked as dramatic adviser and author at the Schaubühne in Berlin. Schimmelpfennig is one of Germany's most important voices in contemporary theatre.

One of the most significant questions that come up when open tries to develop a critique for Zuleikha’s rendition of Arabian Nights by Roland Schimmelpfennig is to be able to locate the play in the programming structure of KHOJ. Institutions and individuals, positioning themselves on the margins, often realize that ‘the edge’ often is an un-definable space and margins, and working with inter-cross disciplinary practices often lead the individual/institutions to cross disciplines in their own practices too.

When one sees a staging of an experimental play at the premises of KHOJ, one begins to question whether the agenda to explore boundaries from within the confines of visual arts has been expanded to include and support various ‘cutting edge practices’ across boundaries within the larger realm of artistic practice. However, Zuleikha Chaudhari renders the play more in the manner of an installation using the cast and set to transcend the descriptive category of theater. Therefore at the end of it one sees a theater artist, working in (essentially a ) visual arts space sucessfully transcending disciplinary frontiers.

The play (Performed on the 21 – 23 April, 2006) was an adaptation of Roland Schimmelpfennig’s Arabian Nights, a heavily loaded text greatly influensed by European readings of the oriental heat and sensuality, though Zuleikha’s rendition of the play subtantially subverts the Orientalist bias. The format of the script is centered on constructs of ‘laid down and available oriental woman’ who is there to be obtained by the ‘active mail’, provided the ‘HE’ goes through his assigned journeys, and encounters with ‘fantasy fate’.

The narrative revolves around five characters (two women, three men), a high-rise apartment building and the male gaze. Heat, water and brandy are the recurring motifs in this play about mystery, lust, love, agony, ecstasy and hallucinatory visions. However what really arrested me throughout my many viewings of Arabian Nights, is how the core narrative centers around an ancient story telling tradition about harems, jealousy, revenge, curse and redemption; yet attempts to contextualize it in a contemporary urban setting...not letting go of the ‘oriental fantasy’ that informs and inspires its root narrative.

What also intruged me is when the essentially ‘male’ script is used and appropriated by a ‘female’ director how she handles the male gaze and sexualization of the female body. Zuleikha does a brilliant job in subverting the male gaze without changing the script...but by using entirely formal devices. The gaze is still a motif of sexual desire but is stripped off its sensuality. However, I am still unable to pinpoint the point at which our gaze is subverted...does Zuleikha ride on the element of ‘torture’ inherent in the script and formally exaggerate it in a manner that disallows it to settle in ? or is it through a different take all-together? The voyeurism is subverted within the narrative by the manner in which adultery is punished...without any empathy to whether it is intentional or not...perceived or real...in this play breaking sexual barriers lead to death.

Certain uses of formal devices stand out in the play.... the first thing that struck me was that there was very little acting in the traditional sense of it. The play is more choreographed than directed (in the manner theater defines direction). The play begins with a sanitized all white setting.... and gradually unfolds into the white being disturbed by the grime and sand, which the actors pick up in the course of the performance. This parallels the loss of sanity and the increase in the ‘muck’ that unfolds in the lives of the characters.

Like all Zuleikha’s plays... this work is hyper pitched and seeks to maintain a (nearly) one and a half hour crescendo. The result is there is very little room for modulations, resulting in the ‘high’ tending to ‘plateau’ and become an extended flat. This necessarily put a lot of onus of modulation on the acting...requiring them to be high energy throughout...but still be very careful about how they pitch. As it is as an actor it must have been very difficult to employ the traditional modes of maintaining cues as Zuleikha consciously broke the ‘traditional’ links between actions and words...having the audience sitting so close to them. One must admit they did a brilliant job.

Rahul Bhattacharya 2006