Who's Afraid of Ideology? (part 1) // Marwa Arsanios

A woman is standing in the middle of a valley, a brown landscape of mountains and rocks. She walks towards the camera and starts to talk. The camera retreats, slowly and continuously, keeping her in frame as we listen to her voice. But something seems to be off. The movement of her lips doesn’t match the voice we hear. There is a kind of displacement, something that we still cannot fully understand. By disconnecting the voice from the body in the image, Marwa Arsanios seems to suggest that we need to slow down a bit, to escape immediacy, to pay attention and listen carefully. 

The body will be later replaced by landscapes. Snowy mountains from elsewhere. The words reverberate in that space, and when they come back to us, they seemed to be charged with something else. The connections are there but we need to jump into a space of contemplation and reflection in order to find them. It’s as if it’s not necessary to find answers, but to inhabit the questions in-between the silence and the landscape. 

The film is built from material - images, interviews, conversations and thoughts - collected by Arsanios during a period in which she stayed with the Autonomous Women's Movement in Rojava in northern Iraq. It presents a series of stories and reflections that are linked to the experience of the Kurdish people’s resistance, and to the relationship between ecology and feminism within it. 

To think about ecology, especially about an ecological consciousness developed within the frame of war, makes me think about the very idea of protection, and the spaces of protection that we have left, or believe that we do. A later voice talks about a common understanding of the liberal system, that individuals and groups must surrender the means of protection to the State. The State, therefore, has the monopoly of violence as the only one authorized to exercise it. It reinforces that the use of force is most frequently a tool for the maintenance and the support of the established geometries of power. That is still constituted today by the definition of the bodies that must live and of those who can die, an idea that the philosopher Achille Mbeme has developed under the concept of necropolitics. 

When the state no longer defends us, what kind of strategies can we use in order to defend ourselves? Where do we flee and where could we find protection when the experience of life itself cannot be separated from the mediation of the state? 

The idea of protection as a right granted to a citizen of a certain state becomes especially problematic when the very notion of nation-state is falling apart, and if we take into consideration the huge amounts of individuals that are continuously pushed out of this system. In the same way, the idea of peace, or of living in peace, has become a strategy of governance in the systems that we live in. To live in peace means not only that we should surrender the fight but also to accept the conflict that is imposed on us by others. This dynamic might also be what allows the transfer of violence to the red zone of the world, far away from the centers of power. Violence became then a distant idea, something that happens outside of the safety of the west, making invisible the mechanisms of control that operate or our societies.

When the idea of peace became a strategy to govern bodies within certain geographies, how can we understand resistance and radicality? Is it possible to operate under a different paradigm? 

A voice from the screen talks about how the state works to break the relationship of the individual with nature, as the only possible way to legitimise its power. And I’m led to think that this is no longer just about safety or protection, but about the individual's ability to establish relationships of survival without the State as their intermediary: “existence is based on the ability to defend yourself”.

Who is afraid of ideology? opens space for us think about ecology, not only in relation to nature, but in the very set of relations that individuals establish with all their surroundings, with communities, knowledge and territories. And the question that remains is, as artists and individuals, how can we learn from the experiences of those who live in different communities, under different paradigms, to build strategies of resistance? When difference is continuously threatened, can art still be a space of protection?

- Túlio Rosa

Links relevant to this diagnosis:

Who’s Afraid of Ideology? Ecofeminist Practices Between Internationalism and Globalism - E-Flux Journal

Kdo se boji ideologije? / Who is afraid of Ideology?

Thinking Projects - Marwa Arsanios

NECROPOLITICS - Warwick University

HOW IS UNCLE JOHN? // Creative Garage

Abuse often comes shrouded in code. It comes in signs. Physical marks and distress, eyes that won’t meet yours, garbled speech, a sort of radical shrinking. There’s the less obvious, mental iterations. Rapid and sudden introversion, anxiety, depression: another sort of radical diminishing.

How is Uncle John? is the show that deals with these codes. It’s a duologue dealing with sex as power and economic capital. It’s a show dealing with sex trafficking. Even more particularly it’s a show dealing with a mother and daughter attempting to discuss- allusively, brokenly- the shattering effects of its aftermath and trying to piece together something approaching a new start.

“Uncle John” is a code and a sign. It’s a safe-phrase, used so Hope (the daughter) can alert her mother to danger. Even with all of its generic masculinity, it is an incantation that can’t banish away male violence. Anxiety permeates the whole tone and mood. There’s a mother's evident and obvious anxiety. There’s the anxiety of the vulnerable, exploited Hope. And there’s the pressing anxiety that no simple safe code can expel a world of violence meted out to the vulnerable. It’s a dramatic microcosm of the ‘real’ world, one in which the use of sex, force and power rule, and the shattered lives of the weak stand as testimony. (FG)

How Is Uncle John? played at Assembly Hall - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/how-is-uncle-john

Modern Slavery in the UK- http://www.unseenuk.org/

Understanding the Language of Narcissistic Abuse- http://www.elephantjournal.com/2015/10/understanding-the-language-of-narcissistic-abuse/

Threatened Child (Extract)- https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=8VIg9STL-wUC&oi=fnd&pg=PP11&dq=the+rhetoric+of+abuse&ots=KFwjjP6uwF&sig=k76qR5vNR9QzvZj6KEb6j90ytcc#v=onepage&q=the%20rhetoric%20of%20abuse&f=false 

Trafficking Survivor Stories- http://www.equalitynow.org/campaigns/trafficking-survivor-stories

F*CKING MEN // King's Head Theatre

Ten interlocking scenes present separate sets of lovers, each semi-ironically riffing on different ‘aspects’ of love. The platonic ideal. ‘Simple’ carnal lust. Tortured archetypes (‘Actor’ and ‘Journalist’) playing out and struggling with their desires, counter-desires and the simple physical fact of their bodies. 

F*cking Men is a reflection on what it means to live out what could queasily be termed the ‘gay male experience’ surrounding sexuality and perception, commitment and relationships. The title is something of a red herring. Whatever nudity there is remains secondary to the ideas surrounding the aforementioned themes. The bodies are used as props, showing the way that the relationships depicted subtly morph and modulate under external and internal pressures and strains.

The way that sex and body can be subtly weaponised is also deftly explored. It’s a messy, fraught exploration that deals with the ugly, implicit guilt and repression in denied sexuality.  The one scene without any sex (the meeting between ‘Journalist’ and ‘Actor’) is a meeting point between paranoia, fear and self-loathing, all focused on the body and messy sexual desire. Yet resolution isn’t found in the act of sex, either. As each scene shows, it is the sheer multiplicity of desire that makes it such a complex field of enquiry. Whether it is denied or temporarily fulfilled seems to make no difference. Resolution is as far away as ever.

- Francisco Garcia

F*cking Men played at Assembly George Square Studios - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/f-cking-men

Being Gay: Politics, Identity and Pleasure- http://banmarchive.org.uk/collections/newformations/09_61.pdf

Homophobic? Maybe you’re gay?- http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/opinion/sunday/homophobic-maybe-youre-gay.html

Evolution of Gay Theatre- http://www.juilliard.edu/journal/evolution-contemporary-gay-theater

Fringe: Queer Art & Film Festival- http://www.fringefilmfest.com/

TRIGGER // Christeene

Christeene comes riding in on an inner pony, an imaginary animal representing self-esteem and unapologetic sexuality. Each night, working whilst a shedload of explosives erupt from Edinburgh castle above her, Christeene is at work to create the ambience of the kind of sex disco that you always wished you were invited to but are not quite convinced you’d know what to do at if you were. The inner-pony is a my-little metaphor of freedom, a call to abandon proprieties and niceties in favour of a new kind of holistic sexual transcendence.

The music is really good, and the audience shuffle their feet if nothing else. But the sections of funkenstein’s monster hallucinations are also accompanied by quiet monologues on Christine’s surreal version of mindfulness training. That’s when she declaims like a motivational speaker that we accept ourselves and each other. Christeene’s sex-positive pro-dirty celebration reminds me of the work of other incredible artists creating similarly dishevelled celebrations of sexual politics. It shares a joyous aesthetic and enjoyable seriousness with Annie Sprinkle and Beth Steven’s work on ‘ecosexuality’, and a messianic zeal with David Hoyle’s recent activism around mental health and political engagement. Like The Famous Lauren Barri Holstein’s work, and Lucy McCormick’s, it is unflinching in the bodily nature of its political undertow.

Christeene’s aesthetic and language is uncompromising, but its generosity is apparent – if you found your way into the room then you’re part of the tribe. The irresistibly catchy rap is one part of it, but it comes with a call to self-care and self-pleasure.

- Lewis Church

Trigger played Underbelly, Cowgate through August 28 - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/christeene-trigger

Christeene - http://christeenemusic.com

Christeene ‘Tears from My Pussy’ Video - https://vimeo.com/32751567

What’s Sex got to do with Mindfulness? - http://www.mindful.org/whats-sex-got-to-do-with-mindfulness/

Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stevens’ Ecosexuality - http://www.feministtimes.com/feminism-has-not-happened-yet-an-interview-with-annie-sprinkle/

David Hoyle Interview with Chelsea Theatre - http://www.chelseatheatre.org.uk/interview-david-hoyle/

The Famous Lauren Barri Holstein - http://www.thefamousomg.com

Lucy McCormick ‘Fringe Messiah’ - https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2016/sep/01/lucy-mccormick-triple-threat-comedy-autumn-arts-preview

MONOLOGUES OF A TIRED NURSE // Theatre for Thought

Stress-related mental health problems affect one in five primary care workers. Four in five have trouble sleeping. These are the realities of working in today’s NHS, according to mental health research by Mind, and they form the backdrop to Monologues of a Tired Nurse.

Two nurses step onto the stage, one an optimistic new recruit, Emily, and the other a battle-hardened and exhausted nurse-in-charge called Sally. Among the paraphernalia and body fluids of a normal day, a harrowing story unfolds, the characters’ interconnecting soliloquies showing how the most compassionate individuals can become casualties of an undoable job.

Sally says she came into nursing with a Superman complex, but soon realised there was no time to care. She feels broken – that she isn’t good or worthy, and is angry with people who say nurses are saints.

Emily is hopeful, almost angelic, but struggles to gain professional confidence. Sally’s attempts to toughen her up only seems to make things worse. Emily blames herself for the mistakes she makes under pressure, and sees the coping mechanisms she develops as inevitable.

Monologues is written by Stephanie Silver, who worked for eight years as a paediatric nurse and plays the hardbitten Sally. Her insider’s perspective shows a health service in which shortages have a direct impact on both patients and carers, and where the scrutiny of box-ticking bosses takes priority over the humanity of staff.

It's the issue of putting a brave face on things, and continuing under grinding levels of stress, that this play really addresses. Emily, lost in issues of her past and present, eventually leaves a note for Sally and takes her own life.

Mind’s research shows that one in three healthcare workers would never talk about their stress for fear of being seen as less capable - less able to take the heat of an NHS essentially on fire. Monologues starkly shows us the future we are facing if we are not prepared to care for those who work on the frontline of caring for us.

- Rebecca Mileham

Monologues of a Tired Nurse ran at theSpace @ Surgeon's Hall until August 27th - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/monologues-of-a-tired-nurse

Mind’s 2016 survey into mental health in caring professions: http://www.mind.org.uk/news-campaigns/news/mind-finds-worrying-levels-of-stress-among-primary-care-staff/#.V8b8vqI9p8o

NHS staff cuts and reduction in care quality ‘inevitable’, say King’s Fund: https://inews.co.uk/essentials/news/health/kings-fund-nhs-staffing-cuts-care-quality/

Student bursary cut 'may worsen NHS staff shortages': http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-36336830

Nursing Times article on a nurse's suicide being linked to work pressures: https://www.nursingtimes.net/walsall-nurses-suicide-linked-to-work-pressures-rules-coroner/1/5076937.article?sm=5076937

ANYTHING THAT GIVES OFF LIGHT // The TEAM & National Theatre of Scotland

Two Scotsmen and an American woman walk into a bar and... The set-up for fringe stalwarts the TEAM's collaboration with the National Theatre of Scotland might sound jokey, but that's not how the action or fiercely political argument plays out. All three characters are experiencing an identity crisis of sorts, and seek brittle refuge in each other as they attempt to navigate or make sense of their disquietude. One of the Scottish men is sunk in toxic fury following the twin referenda of Independence and EU membership; the other no longer knows how to connect to the land of his birth, having lived in London for years; while the American woman is plagued by anxiety related to climate change.

The question that roils across the stage is: what constitutes identity? When the three first start chatting, it's innocuous stuff: whiskey and cinema, commodities and popular culture. But their road trip in a caravan to the west coast of Scotland is also a journey deeper into history, to the events that scar the land and seep into a country's consciousness. What they find in history, inevitably, is violence: in Scotland, the Highland Clearances, during which small-scale farmers were forcibly evicted from their land; mirrored in the Appalachians, home of the American woman, by the mass clearance of native Americans – enacted in part by the Scottish diaspora. This intertwining of roots is underscored by the presence of a live band, the Bengsons, who dress like clans women and play songs redolent of both landscapes.

The events re-enacted might seem to have no direct connection with the trio on stage – except that all three of them benefit from the exploitative capitalist structure that violence brought forth. Can the dedicated Scotsman really claim Adam Smith as a national hero, when the philosopher was the architect of the modern free market, and “threw the left-wing on the pyre” by giving them hope of a sympathetic liberalism? The fact that his friend works in London finance is a wedge between them; asked why he's so angry, he replies, reasonably, that it's because: “our political system is sick”.

In her book Depression: A Public Feeling, academic Ann Cvetkovich gives a cogent argument for tracing the roots of individual depression back to “histories of colonialism, genocide, slavery, legal exclusion, and everyday segregation and isolation that haunt all of our lives”. Anything That Gives Off Light brings the ghosts of those histories to crude and noisy life; the characters might not be exorcised of their grief by it, but they at least find a new accommodation with each other.

- Maddy Costa

Anything That Gives Off Light is on at 19.30 at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre until 26 August. See venue for accessibility information - http://www.eif.co.uk/2016/light#.V73Ji45LUfo

On identity crises among adolescents and adults: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/fulfillment-any-age/201203/are-you-having-identity-crisis

Poet Harry Giles on identity and writing in Scots: https://harrygiles.org/2014/04/17/hou-writin-in-scots-maiters-tae-me/

How to fix America's identity crisis: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/07/a-new-american-melting-pot-214011

On depression as a response to anti-blackness: http://www.forharriet.com/2016/03/depression-is-political.html#axzz4I9SB3Wsn

Choosing action over despondency: http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/05/dont-give-angry-population-hard-govern-depressed-population-easy

Ann Cvetkovich's website: http://www.anncvetkovich.com/

HOT BROWN HONEY

First impressions of Hot Brown Honey are misleading. There's a merchandise stall selling earrings made of guitar plectrums, a honeycomb of beige lampshades forms their set, the show begins with a noisy hip-hop call and response: all the signs seem to point to an irreverent, high-octane, low-content pop video of a show. But then DJ/MC Busty Beatz does three things: she declares it time to “heed the mother”, shouts “fuck the patriarchy” and soberly reads out a feminist statement by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Those first impressions are overturned, the assumptions underlying them challenged, the tone of radicalism set for the rest of the show.

Based in Australia, Hot Brown Honey are a collective of all-sizes women of colour on a mission: to deliver “black feminist truth” and “cultural awareness training” while subjecting received white feminism and unconscious colonial-supremacist thinking to close interrogation. That they do all this using the tools of irreverence and high-octane pop culture ensures that their message can reach further, to a general and age-diverse audience who might not even be fans of Beyonce, let alone poet and activist Audre Lorde. The group take a historical approach to burlesque, which was used to lampoon modern politics before it mutated into a general word for striptease. Bodies definitely appear almost-naked and sexuality is rampant, but there is always a clearly articulated political purpose behind this flaunting: one that bypasses individual parties or leaders, and instead digs to the very foundations of capitalist-patriarchal structural oppression.

At the lighter end of the scale, there's a song about black women's hair that goes through a number of musical styles before finishing with thrashing, head-banging hair metal. At the most poignant, there's an aerial routine which uses the bondage of looped ropes to inspire empathy with the women silenced by their experience of domestic violence. In between they debunk romanticised fantasies of the African motherland, condemn the ease with which white holiday-makers vomit entitlement over other countries, and reject the hollow chatter of those with “two cents to put in but not common sense”. Throughout, erudition and entertainment are kept in balance, with quotes from other key black feminist thinkers, including Indigenous Australian Lilla Watson, demonstrating the group's respect for and solidarity with their intellectual foremothers. Hot Brown Honey's work might never be catalogued in the library of feminist academia, but as long as the female body – especially the body of colour – remains objectified, their expression of radical politics will be no less essential. (MC)

Hot Brown Honey are on at various times at Assembly Roxy until August 28th (not 22nd). Wheelchair Access, Level Access, Wheelchair Accessible Toilets - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/hot-brown-honey

Excerpt from 'We Should All Be Feminists' by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: http://www.feminist.com/resources/artspeech/genwom/adichie.html

Excerpt from Audre Lorde's 'The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action': https://iambecauseweare.wordpress.com/2007/06/26/the-transformation-of-silence-into-language-and-action-excerpt-by-audre-lorde/

A potted biography of Lilla Watson: https://lillanetwork.wordpress.com/

Beyonce's Formation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfMlFxrMb18

Dita von Teese's brief history of burlesque: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/features/a-brief-history-of-burlesque-471288.html

A basic reading list on race and racism: http://citizenshipandsocialjustice.com/2015/07/10/curriculum-for-white-americans-to-educate-themselves-on-race-and-racism/

On the hideous whiteness of Brexit: http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2733-on-the-hideous-whiteness-of-brexit-let-us-be-honest-about-our-past-and-our-present-if-we-truly-seek-to-dismantle-white-supremacy