Electra Street 02

ISSUE 02

A Journal of the Arts and Humanities

ELECTRA STREET A Journal of the Arts and Humanities www.electrastreet.net NYU Abu Dhabi 19 Washington Square North New York, NY 10003 Send inquiries to: Editor Electra Street NYU Abu Dhabi PO Box 903 New York, NY 10276-0903 electra.nyuad@gmail.com ISSN 2309-6012 © 2015 Electra Street

A Journal of the Arts and Humanities

PUBLISHER EDITOR MANAGING EDITOR CONTRIBUTING EDITORS

STAFF DESIGN EDITOR

Cyrus R. K. Patell Deborah Lindsay Williams Mohit Mandal Jennifer Acker / Marzia Balzani Lauren Horst / Sachi Leith Kevin Riordan / Brigitta Schuchert Darrin Strauss / Jamie Sutherland Dana Abu Ali / Gabrelle Flores Diana Gluck / Kristina Stankovic Darya Soroko

DESIGN CONSULTANT

Rebecca Pittam

FOUNDING EDITOR

Sheetal Majithia

Design Concept by the Design Collective at NYUAD Issue 02 | Fall 2015

Introduction Deborah Lindsay Williams and Cyrus R. K. Patell 7 The Pygmy and the Protoplasm Elizabeth L. Bradley 14 A Family Slides Jill Magi 30 An Interview with Slavs and Tatars Diana Gluck 40 What We Gained in the Fire Jason Tougaw 68 remembrance Rabha Ashry 78

Two Stories Jim Savio 96 Three Traditional Russian Fairy Tales Revisited Anna Kurkova 110 Hamlet / Ur-Hamlet: Beyond Hamletmachine Arianna Stucki 146 Becoming “Hamlet” Aysan Celik 156 UR Hamlet Rubén Polendo 164 Contributors 178 Image Credits 183

Anna Kurkova Untitled Acrylic on canvas, 110 x 115 cm

INTRODUCTION MY FIFTH-GRADE HISTORY TEACHER put up a poster in her classroom that featured an oft-repeated adage by the American philosopher George Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” History was my favorite subject in those days, so I took Santayana’s insight to heart.

In recent years, perhaps as a result of my shift in interest from History to Literature, I’ve come to value another famous one-liner just as much: “The past is another country; they do things differently there.” The first sentence of E. P. Hartley’s novel The Go-Between (1953) suggests how difficult the task of remembering the past can prove to be. Revisiting the past is like visiting another culture: we are forced to confront beliefs, customs, and practices that are remote from our own—even if the past that we’re trying to revisit is our own. Tinged throughout with a tone of nostalgia for a bygone era, Hartley’s novel dramatizes the fact that the our mental journeys backward are often made all the more difficult by the faultiness of our memories, which often omit or even suppress crucial facts and details.

I also like Hartley’s formulation because it suggests to me that a truly cosmopolitan perspective—the kind we seek to present here in the pages of Electra Street—requires us periodically to be retrospective, to think about how past experience colors the way we think about the present and the future. The border between the present and the past is absolute: we have no way of actually visiting the country called the past; the best we can do is to represent the past to ourselves through writing or images or works of art.

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The name “Electra Street” memorializes the unofficial name of the street where the faculty, students, and staff of NYU Abu Dhabi once lived when the school was in its infancy and housed in temporary quarters in downtown Abu Dhabi. In the introduction to Electra Street 01, we wrote that the work we published in the journal was intended to help us and our readers to “look at the past with fresh eyes, to examine the intellectual and academic histories that inform our present, and to explore the territories that rest outside the boundaries of official maps and conventional ways of thinking.”

Electra Street 02, the first to be published from NYU Abu Dhabi’s permanent home on Saadiyat Island, continues the project articulated in our first issue by presenting a set of pieces that articulate the difficulty—and the necessity—of traveling to that country called the past.

HARTLEY’S NOVEL PORTRAYS an older man’s attempt to use writing as a way of coming to terms with a traumatic event from his youth. The contributors to this issue also seek to uncover and make sense of traumas from the past. In “The Pygmy and the Protoplasm,” Elizabeth L. Bradley turns back the clock more than a century to lead us on a tour of that disturbing phenomenon known as the “human zoo,” in which specimens of “primitive” peoples were put on display for the edification of Western viewers in Europe and the United States. Bradley’s essay is an example of history-of-science writing that leads us to historicize scientific discoveries and thereby uncover the ideological assumptions that can sometimes undermine scientific reasoning. She investigates the ways in which “scientific racism” lurked in the shadows of the young disciplines of anthropology and ethnography and led to the emergence of another discipline: eugenics. Is it any surprise that the fascination with “aboriginals” might be linked to the idea that some peoples are

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“fitter” than others and to the creation of research centers such the Eugenics Record Office in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, which aimed to help society “protect itself” from what its director called “hopelessly vicious protoplasm”?

Bradley’s work makes use of the photographic record left behind by the creators of human zoos and eugenics programs. Photographs also serve as the impetus for Jill Magi’s personal essay “A Family Slides.” In writing about a box of slides that accompanied her from the United States to her new home in Abu Dhabi, Magi explores the idea that our access to the past is often mediated by artifacts, such as the photographic slide, which capture moments in time. Ultimately, however, slides are two-dimensional representations that require words to provide context and meaning, to bring the moments frozen in them back to life. Magi confronts what she calls “the drive to document” that often tyrannizes the “lay photographer.” Does a slide have meaning, we might ask, if it is never seen? If it is seen, can its meaning be understood without being embedded in some kind of narrative? And yet, Magi wonders, do we lose something in our rush to verbalize the past, to embed our artifacts and ourselves in narratives? Can our desire for meaning put limits on our freedom to think anew? What parts of the past should we take with us as we face the future?

In Magi’s piece, text and image are necessary complements to one another, each incomplete without the other. A similar idea animates the work of the Slavs and Tatars art collective, interviewed for Electra Street by Diana Gluck. Seeking to combat what it calls “the collateral damage of specialization,” the collective devotes itself to “in-between” spaces: geographically, the area east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China; disciplinarily, the intersection of Art History, Middle Eastern Studies, and Eastern European Studies. The collective’s projects typically involve

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both an art installation and a book, but Slavs and Tatars resists the conventional notion that the book should serve as a document or record of the installation: “For us, the book must always be a beginning, never an end.” Many of the sculptures and other works of art that they display are ultimately designed to be “ways to bring people back to the book.” The conversation between Gluck and the collective revolves around Mirrors for Princes, the show that they installed during their residency at NYU Abu Dhabi in Spring 2015. Describing “mirrors for princes” as “guides for future rulers,” the collective finds itself drawn not to the most famous example of the genre—The Prince (1513) by Machiavelli—but by earlier examples from the tenth and eleventh centuries. How, the collective asks, might a genre that has degenerated into today’s individually oriented self-hep manual be revitalized to once again be a forum for the exploration of public issues and identities, particularly those that concern faith? What we see here are artists who push past the conventional boundaries between word and image, practice and scholarship, past and present.

Images and text work together in “What We Gained in the Fire,” a piece of creative nonfiction by Jason Tougaw with illustrations

by Conor Williams and Kelly Williams. Tougaw’s piece looks back to a traumatic event that occurred a dozen years earlier, a fire that destroys precisely the kind of artifacts that prompt Jill Magi’s meditation on family. What was lost, Tougaw writes, was “a lot of the evidence for our lore—our shared memory,” a concept that he draws from the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, who argued that when stories about events are shared among different people the result is a set of reinvented memories that reinforce bonds of attachment.

The past, Tougaw’s story suggests, is never really past, because we keep reinventing it as we interact with those who share it with us. And sometimes it’s the objects that are missing, that are lost

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through traumatic events, that shape us most powerfully because they force us to use our imaginations to recreate them.

TRAUMATIC EVENTS lie at the edges of the poems and photos by Rabha Ashry that are collected here under the title “remembrance.”

Ashry creates a variety of poetic personae, each of whom is haunted either by the past or the future. The poems are seemingly averse to capitalization throughout, though significantly the all-caps of “DNA” prove too difficult to resist. The speaker of “my invisible city,” who juxtaposes the “fairytale windows” of the past with the “haunted staircases” of the present, “filled with only the ghosts we know,” introduces us to a set of speakers struggling to understand the ways that they have been shaped by family and social context.

Ashry writes movingly of the experiences of longing, absence, and grief, but also about how to move through these feelings to become a woman of strength.

Each of Jim Savio’s two stories is prompted by a photograph linked to traumatic experience. In the first, “My Friend Who Robbed a Bank,” Savio mourns for Michael, “a brilliant adult male, with an adolescent way of doing things,” whose response to his fatal illness is to rob a bank. Michael emerges as both ghost and muse, who (Savio tells us) “has appeared in many of my stories, in a variety of disguises.” It’s fascinating to see how “Michael” is transformed within Savio’s more overtly fictional story “Once I Took a Photograph on the Way Back to Paradise,” inspired by a picture taken by Savio’s wife, the photographer Joanne Savio. Once again, we have a character trying to escape from the pull of her past (suggestively embodied by an unseen ex-husband in prison in Tallahassee, Florida). The story’s narrator is a photographer, compelled by the “drive to document” that Magi describes, who finds a moment of liberation when her camera fails and renewed hope for happiness while

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driving home with her daughter. It’s a story about promises, about what it takes to fill the future with hope.

The issue shifts gears to present translations of “Three Traditional Russian Fairy Tales” by the artist Anna Kurkova, whose watercolor illustrations beautifully bring the stories to life. In “Vaselisa Prekrasnaya, the Lovely One,” we find a mixture of motifs familiar to readers of Grimm’s Fairy Tales: a young girl, tormented by her stepmother and two stepsisters and a menacing witch in the forest.

But we also have a magic doll, who provides Vaselisa with companionship and a helping pair of hands, an enchanted skull that serves as both torch and weapon, and a benevolent tsar. The resemblance to works by the Brothers Grimm is unsurprising, because the story is translated from an original by Alexander Afanasyev (1826–71), who was inspired by the work of the Grimms to collect and publish nearly 600 traditional Russian fairy tales and folk tales. Tsars, tsarevnas, and witches feature prominently in the two subsequent tales that Kurkova translates, which present protagonists who prevail because of their fidelity to those whom they love. These are stories filled with all of the traumatic experiences and violence that we have come to expect from fairy tales. Kurkova’s illustrations, which feature vivid watercolors splashed around figures drawn in black ink, capture the jarring juxtaposition between wonder and horror that so frequently marks the fairy tale. The illustrations represent a contemporary artist’s engagement with her culture’s past, and they were created as part of her capstone project at NYU Abu Dhabi.

The cover of this issue features a detail from Kurkova’s work, which also serves as the frontispiece for this introduction.

IN THEIR DIFFERENT WAYS, THE CONTRIBUTORS to this issue of Electra Street all draw on the idea that conventional modes of representation are sometimes not the most effective ways to provide

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fresh perspectives on the past, and their pieces make significant use of a dynamic interplay between text and image.

Electra Street 02 concludes with three pieces that document Theater Mitu’s convention-busting adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, performed at the NYU Abu Dhabi Black Box Theater in April 2015. Arianna Stucki’s article compares the production, with its seventeen “installations,” punk-rock music, and mash-ups of Shakespeare’s text with words from a variety of sources, to one of its inspirations: Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine. Actor Aysan Celik (who played Hamlet) and director Rubén Polendo take us through the methods that Theater Mitu used to create a version of Shakespeare’s play that seeks to dramatize what Polendo refers to as the “Ur-” moment. The term Ur-Hamlet is familiar to Shakespeare scholars, who typically use it to refer to a precursor text, now lost, that some believe to have been written by Thomas Kyd in the sixteenth century. Polendo and Mito reinterpret “Ur-Hamlet” to mean “the moment before Hamlet.” But as Polendo wryly notes, twenty-first-century students see the letters UR and translate it into the language of text-message shorthand to mean “you are.”

That mistranslation happily encompasses the goals of both the Mitu production and of Electra Street: to investigate unconventional ways of revisiting that foreign land called the past in order to learn new things about our present and our possible futures.

—Cyrus R. K. Patell

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The PYGMY AND THE PROTOPLASM

by ELIZABETH L. BRADLEY

THE SOUTH AFRICAN SLAVE Sarah “Saartjie” Baartman may not have been the first person to be exhibited throughout Europe, but she was among the first to become a scientific curiosity. The “Hottentot Venus,” as she was referred to by her promoters and in the press, was a Khoisan woman exhibited under coercive conditions from 1810 until her death five years later. The pronounced buttocks and elongated labia that were typical of Khoisan females made Baartman a titillating spectacle during her short lifetime, and a source of keen medical interest after her death: in 1816, she was autopsied by the French anatomist Henri Marie de Blainville and her skeleton, preserved genitals, and brain were placed on display at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris. The field of ethnography was just beginning, but it had already manufactured its first celebrity.

The impulse to display live human specimens was not limited to Europe, of course: nineteenth-century Americans also made celebrities out of “freaks,” as they were advertised, and while the focus was more likely to be entertainment than ethnography, the most sensational were nearly always those whose skin was darker than that of their audience. These included the African American slave Joice Heth, advertised by P. T. Barnum in 1835 as the 160-year-old nursemaid of George Washington, or the conjoined Chinese-Thai twins Chang and Eng Bunker, “the most wonderful and extraordinary of all human curiosities.” Unlike Baartman, the Bunker brothers,

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Sarah “Saartjie” Baartman, “The Hottentot Venus” (1811) Drawing by Frederick William Fairholt (1814–1866)

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who were genuinely conjoined, were free agents and naturalized American citizens. Joice Heth, on the other hand, was neither emancipated nor the real thing: she was not, of course, Washington’s ancient nanny, but Barnum’s earliest blockbuster hoax. Heth might have made the reputation of her young promoter, but like Baartman, she died a slave, and her autopsy was yet another publicity stunt.

By the late nineteenth century, imperial expansion on the part of Europe and America made it possible to gratify a Western appetite for ethnographic spectacle on a grand scale. A German zookeeper named Karl Hagenbeck is widely considered the first to recognize the Busby Berkeley-style possibilities of human display. Hagenbeck began his career as a menagerie-maker, procuring exotic animals for European zoos. In 1874, noticing that the “supply of wild beasts had begun to exceed the demand,” he decided to add a little human interest to his living dioramas, and ordered that his next shipment of Lapland (Finnish) reindeer be “accompanied by their native masters,” the Sami people. Hagenbeck was not looking to discover the next Chang and Eng, but rather their opposite, as he wrote in his memoir: “finely moulded ... unspoiled children of Nature” whose features and traits conformed to the Western expectations of their ethnicity, thus reassuring Europeans of the accuracy of their own racial typographies. The Sami who visited Hamburg-St. Pauli delighted the German public, which quickly developed an appetite for Völkerschauen, or human zoos.

Most of the invitations to prospective native groups were made through their colonial governments (such as the Danish governors of Greenland, home to the Inuit) or through missionary groups who could attest to the legitimacy of Hagenbeck’s project. (Whether they persuaded the prospective “actors” or spoke on their behalf, with their consent, is unknown.) But legitimate or not, the naturmenschen, as they were called, were there to perform, and the enclosure of the

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zoological garden that served as their stage only made their quotidian rituals seem more alien and their native garb more outlandish.

This intersection—of innocence and performance, to paraphrase William Blake—would prove to be a hallmark of the human zoo.

Hamburg’s original humans caught on quickly: within five years of the Sami visit, no patriotic exposition or world’s fair was complete without a living exhibition. The cities that hosted these exhibitions are today among the most cosmopolitan in the world, but at the turn of the twentieth century, the very idea of a nonwhite, non-Western person could inspire an intoxicating mixture of excitement and anxiety. Prior to the 1878 Paris Exposition and the Amsterdam International Colonial Exhibition in 1883, Victorian fairs had, of necessity, confined themselves to illustrating popular theories of “the races of man” in wax or plaster. By comparison, the colonial displays in Paris (1878 and 1889) and Amsterdam offered not just a lesson in ethnography, but the chance for a close encounter with an actual primary source, so to speak: a Caribe or Creole from Surinam, a Javanese gamelan player, or a Senegalese. These villages negres, based on Hagenbeck’s pioneering work, were a revelation: here, quite literally at arm’s reach, were entire, living tribes and families, all enacting their daily lives with studied naturalness, employing the props and tools of their home countries as if they had not just been dropped down from another continent. Without a cultural interpreter of their own, the native performers were easily objectified, and it didn’t help that they accepted gratuities in exchange for performing. The displays were little more than an opportunity for unfettered voyeurism, masquerading as field research.

From an ethnographic standpoint, the European expositions were just a dress rehearsal for the main—American—events, beginning with the Columbian Exposition of 1893. The Chicago World’s Fair, as it is more commonly known, was meant to prove once and

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Poster advertising one of Karl Hagenbeck’s Sami shows in Hamburg-St. Pauli, 1893–94

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for all that the young nation had earned its place among the capitals of the “Old World.” To this end, its monumental Beaux Arts campus was stuffed to the rafters with arts, innovations, entertainments, and more scientific exhibitions than had ever before been seen in one place. Exposition organizers had mapped two paths for those seeking an encounter with “primitive” people on the streets of the White City. The most popular was a trip down the Midway Plaisance, which the theater entrepreneur Sol Bloom had transformed into a kind of ethnographic Disneyland. Bloom, in concert with the Harvard anthropologist Henry Ward Putnam, and Putnam’s protégé, Franz Boas, an anthropologist from Clark University, had organized “Javanese, Egyptian, Moorish, Dutch, Japanese, Malay, Austrian, German, Irish, Dahomian, Algerian, Tunisian and Arabian pavilions, booths, villages, streets, and settlements,” scattered amid traditional Midway delights that included the first Ferris wheel and a captive hot air balloon. This was vaudeville anthropology, unburdened by progressive guilt or by science. “The scene, as one views it,” a contemporary reviewer wrote, “is one of striking curiosity. ...

[A]fter returning from a day spent in investigations of its wonders, one feels indeed that he has returned from a trip around the world.”

The Anthropological Building, on the other hand, was a kind of architectural rebuke to the polyglot, urbane chaos of the Midway.

As curated by Putnam and Boas, it was a place of decorous hierarchies, stuffed to the rafters with archaeological and ethnological artifacts, including the entire contents of Ward’s Natural Science Establishment, a private museum in Rochester, New York that offered “all forms of animal life from the sponges to man, all admirably classified and arranged.” Classification was critical to Putnam’s deputy, Boas, who made anthropometrics the hallmark of his exhibitions, and would later use biological statistics to disprove prevailing theories about racial types. But however forward-thinking the

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Anthropological Building may have been, it was overshadowed by the living exhibitions which had been plunked down just outside—a campground village of “the native people of America”—by which the organizers meant native Americans.

While the Columbian Exposition did not have an explicit village negre, the ethnic enclosures created by the displays of both Frederic Putnam and Sol Bloom had the same segregating and diminishing effect. Frederick Douglass, who made his headquarters in the Haitian Building, pointed out that the Dahomian natives were the only Africans represented at the Fair, and organized a Colored People’s Day at the Exposition in protest. The white director of the model Indian school complained bitterly when his students were forced to share space with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, as if educated Native Americans were “show Indians” like Buffalo Bill’s exaggerated theatrical troupe. These criticisms went largely unheeded, and the ethnographic displays both on and off the Midway in Chicago helped to attract nearly twenty six million visitors to the Fair in the space of five months.

The Midway, in particular, gave the United States an “exotic” celebrity to rival Sarah Baartman: Nancy Helene Columbia Palmer, an Inuit baby born in the “Eskimo Village” concession, just before the Exposition opened. The serendipitous arrival of baby Nancy, a photogenic “mite in seal skins,” was better than any publicity stunt, and the winsome infant quickly became the mascot of the Midway.

Nancy, who had been christened by the Exposition’s patroness, Mrs. Potter Palmer, proved to be a tenacious as well as charming ingenue: she traveled from fair to fair, first as a kind of Esquimaux Village Shirley Temple (Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, 1901) and later as a demure “Queen of the Pay Streak” (the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, 1909). Unlike her spiritual ancestor, Sarah Baartman, Nancy Columbia threatened no one with her sexuality

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Portrait of Nancy Columbia (1904) Photo by Charles Carpenter

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or her exotic-seeming features. Instead, Anglo-Saxon journalists deemed her “wholly feminine” and praised her “Eskimo trappings” for lending a dash of “novelty to her other charms.”

Putnam, Boas, and Bloom may have blurred the line between science and spectacle in Chicago, but by the time the St. Louis Worlds’ Fair took place, the line had simply ceased to exist. The Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904 was no rival to the Exposition in grandeur, size or scale, but it had a grand ambition for its anthropological exhibits. William McGee, the Director of the Smithsonian Institution and curator of St. Louis’s anthropological exhibitions, declared that “the aim of the [St. Louis Fair] Department of Anthropology ... will be to represent human progress from the dark prime to the highest enlightenment, from savagery to civic organization, from egoism to altruism.” McGee’s racial typologies were made incarnate during the St Louis Exposition’s most notorious event, which was formally referred to as “Anthropology Days.”

This two-day competition, also known colloquially as the “Special Olympics” (not to be confused with the contemporary events for disabled athletes), ran concurrently with the 1904 Olympics and pitted the international performers of the Fair against one another in a crude series of athletic events, for which these conscripted athletes received no preparation, instruction, or recompense. It was not a tournament so much as a large-scale experiment: the chance to illustrate the theories of scientific racism with living, breathing “exotics” from around the globe. Newspapers reported contests between “Patagonian giants” from Argentina and “hairy Ainu” from Japan, between the Mohawk and Seneca tribes, and between the Igorots and the Moros, so-called Aboriginal Filipinos. “Never before in the lives of living anthropologists had so varied a collection of primitive races been brought together, fresh from their wild and savage haunts,” rhapsodized The New York Times. These “primitive

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races” were asked to take part in an assortment of track and field competitions, as well as lacrosse and tug-of-war. In addition, the anthropologists took a set of comparative measurements of each participant, for their records. The experiment was a dismal fiasco.

The involuntary athletes were panicked by the Western-style starting gun and baffled by the finish line. Many had never seen a high jump, a shot put, or a European javelin before, and didn’t know what to do with it. Not surprisingly, participants resented being asked to do for free what they were each paid to do in their Fair enclosures, and they viewed the attendant request for biometrics as equal parts humiliation and insult.

“Anthropology Days” was an embarrassment by the standards of the day, as well as by our own—but not for the reasons that the contemporary reader might expect. The organizers of the Fair were not embarrassed by the bigotry of the spectacle they had created.

They were, instead, critical of the performance of their hastily assembled teams of “primitives.” The official report of the Fair admitted that the “Anthropology Days” were the “only disappointing feature of the season ... destroying the common belief that the greatest natural athletes were to be found among the uncivilized tribes in various parts of the world.” Not everyone agreed, however. “In no place but America would one have dared to place such events on a program,” Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the Olympic Games, would later write of the “Anthropology Days,” adding, “but, to Americans, everything is permissible.”

Like Chicago, St. Louis also offered visitors a number of “official” ethnographic villages to visit, the most popular of which was the government-sponsored Philippine Reservation, which more or less embodied the recent annexation of the Philippines to the United States: 1,100 performers worked (and in most cases resided full-time) on the Reservation, including representatives from all the

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tribal populations. Fairgoers found the Bontoc tribe particularly appealing, largely because they were marketed to the public as “Igorrote” [sic] headhunters and dog-eaters. The practice of eating dog meat garnered the tribesmen a large amount of disgusted press and drew them even larger crowds.

The St. Louis Fair created its own ethnographic celebrities, too.

Chief among these was Geronimo, the famous Apache raider and (by 1904) American prisoner of war. Guidebooks to the fair played up Geronimo’s reputation, calling him “the red devil ... [who] made every white settler tremble with fear.” Because Geronimo refused to wear anything but Western attire while at the Fair, the media spun that too, suggesting that Apache garb had been forbidden because it made the chief violent and ungovernable. In fact, many of the Native Americans who took part in the St. Louis Fair disappointed the anthropologists with their Anglicized manners—such as the Oglala (Sioux) Indians who performed their tribal dances in wigs made from their own hair because they preferred short, Western hairstyles for every day. Geronimo himself understood the Fair as a business opportunity: he sold feathers and autographs (making more than two thousand dollars over the course of six months), rode the Ferris wheel with journalists, and made appearances at the daily Wild West shows—at once the Fair’s unofficial mayor and its official prisoner.

Not all the celebrities of the St. Louis Fair were show-business professionals. The most famous—and tragic—amateur of St. Louis would prove to be Ota Benga, a Mbuti pygmy who had been recruited during a talent scouting expedition to the Belgian Congo. A hostage of the Congo Free State army, Ota Benga was “redeemed” by the missionary Samuel Verner in exchange for a pound of salt and some cloth, making him the first—but perhaps not the only— performer to technically be “owned” by the St Louis World’s Fair,

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Portrait of Geronimo (1904) Photo by Charles Carpenter

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much as the Hottentot Venus had been owned by her promoters almost a hundred years before. Ota Benga, along with four Batwa pygmies, was displayed at the Fair as an “emblematic savage,” representative of a “primeval dwarfish race,” and thus, if not precisely the missing link, then at least the poster child for scientific racism. Ota Benga’s story did not end with the Fair, however: in 1906 he was hired by the Bronx Zoo to live in the Zoo’s Monkey House, where he was to be “exhibited each afternoon in September,” according to the Zoo’s signage. This most literal of human zoos came to a speedy end after the Colored Baptist Minister’s Conference of New York City mounted a vociferous public objection to “making an exhibition” of the Mbuti man “to corroborate the [Darwinian] theory of evolution.” Interestingly, Ota Benga’s original chaperone, Samuel Verner, vehemently refuted these allegations, arguing for the “humanitarian” nature of his recruitment. Ota Benga is not meant to stand in for the “missing link,” he insisted to The New York Times, adding “the zoological and the psychological gap between the pygmies and the apes constitutes a cataclysm.” It was a surprising admission in 1906, and an early sign that anthropology was beginning to modify, or at least publicly censor, its race theories—possibly because it was being overtaken by the new field of eugenics. Progress did not come fast enough for Ota Benga, however: he committed suicide ten years later, unable either to integrate into American society or to return home to the Congo.

The spontaneous, well-publicized outrage over the treatment of Ota Benga, coming on the heels of the embarrassment of “Anthropology Days,” did not immediately put an end to the display of aboriginal peoples in the twentieth century, but it did serve as a catalyst for gradual change, particularly in the United States. This philosophical shift made sense in the new century: as imperial expansion diminished and immigration restrictions tightened between

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the World Wars, it grew more difficult to bring foreign performers into the United States—a sign of institutionalized racism, rather than increased civil rights, but the outcome for “exotic” natives was the same. Human zoos (such as the Igorots of the Chicago Fair) were moved to amusement parks such as Luna Park and from there to the ten-in-one sideshow, which often included “star” performers from the ethnic villages. One of these was “Chief Amok,” a Filipino actor whose 1924 pitch card for the Dreamland Circus Sideshow advertised him as a “Bantos Head Hunter” [sic], and offered to tell “The Story of Myself and My People.” Among the visitors to Chief Amok’s performance were field representative from a new organization: the Eugenics Record Office (ERO), a research center based at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories on Long Island. Cold Spring Harbor would later become famous as the academic home of James Watson, co-discoverer of the double helix structure of DNA, but for a time it was famously the American headquarters for research in the new field of eugenics, which looked for ways to improve the nation through education, selective breeding, and—when necessary—sterilization. “Society must protect itself,” ERO Director Charles Davenport insisted, “and annihilate the hideous serpent of hopelessly vicious protoplasm.” Field workers who visited the sideshow took the medical histories of so-called freaks, the better to determine (in the pre-genetic era) how to avoid such “vicious protoplasm” in future generations.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that eugenicists tried to advertise their faulty science with Coney-like sideshows of their own: doomsday exhibits on the pitfalls of heredity and, more colorfully, the program called “Fitter Families for Future Firesides.” Known colloquially as “Fitter Families Contests,” these competitions, which were held at numerous fairs throughout the United States during the 1920s, required competitors to submit an “Abridged Record of Family Traits”

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and to submit to physical and psychological exams. All contestants with a B+ or better received bronze medals bearing the inscription, “Yea, I have a goodly heritage.” Anthropology Days, all over again.

The flip-side of this celebration of eugenic achievement was its opposite: the new craze for perfect pedigrees led to a fascination with those deemed the most degenerate. For a long time, the most famous supposed degenerates in the United States were the Jukes, a pseudonymous family from Ulster County, New York, whose notorious criminality and licentious living made them the subject of several published studies. One, published by the Eugenics Record Office in 1916, concluded that “heredity with certain environmental conditions determines criminality, harlotry, and pauperism,” and that families like the Jukes were costing the nation $2 million dollars. How to prevent this moral and financial drain on the nation became the rallying cry of the eugenics movement, which found allies everywhere—in state governments, major universities, hospitals and philanthropies. Moral imperialism had replaced the old geographic one, and as eugenics field workers spread out across the country, distributing the flawed gospel of heredity and human breeding, the nation itself became the twentieth century’s most popular human zoo—and everyone an ethnographic celebrity in his or her own right.

An earlier version of this piece appeared in The Morbid Anatomy Anthology, ed. Joanna Ebenstein and Colin Dickey (Morbid Anatomy Press, 2014).

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A FAMILY SLIDES by JILL MAGI

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A SLIDE FALLS OUT of one of four boxes of a family archive, and the mover, from the Philippines, hands the slide to the new expatriate from the US, a culture worker and teacher who will now make more money than the mover and who accepts his kind gesture.

Tiny images in cardboard frames litter shipping containers, seas, roads to Abu Dhabi, and the appeal of that scatter.

Some slide boxes have titles crossed out; some are labeled but empty. Some carousel boxes have slips of paper taped to them, reading: Lake Secor ’58. Jean learning to drive. Joe’s Florida. Xmas Park Avenue ’61. Kids early years.

Some of the fathers’ filing systems appear to be intact. But I find two piles of slides wrapped up in newsprint and bound in tape: the bundled shape of giving up on order, narrative. What if this random bundle is the truth? What if there is no partiality to fill in, meaning

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to construe? If defying the act of interpretation gives new life, then why am I trying to make sense as I sort and look, wondering what story to listen for, to tell?

A family slides.

I hold each image between my fingers, handing them back to ghosts and siblings and a father far away.

My maternal grandfather took many pictures of his cars, houses, gardens. Hotels, historical markers, roadways before interstates were built. Prince Edward Island, Las Vegas, trips to Florida. This was 1950s white America. My grandfather, a patent draftsman without a college degree, made enough money to secure more than one mortgage and the best new car, had vacation time and disposable income.

Not just proof of class movement up, these slides show a slippage into class un-consciousness: how not knowing about or not

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speaking about redlining and race discrimination enable later deregulations and Reaganomics and where we all are now. This depression.

My grandfather photographed my mother often. I look at her face as she looked directly into the camera, into my grandfather’s gaze. She was a beautiful girl and teenager: her open smile, her tailored dresses and suits. Then my father becomes the photographer, and by the time my sister and I are in high school and our brother is in college, my mother is rarely pictured.

Looking at pictures of my mother as a child, I wonder which were pre-polio and which were after. Later, when she is hardly ever pictured, is this when her post-polio symptoms begin? Too tired to climb mountains with her kids and my father. Too tired to go skiing. She puts on weight. Does loving someone mean to not picture them sick or in a wheelchair or in decline? Was she in decline or always a survivor? Memory of my grandmother reminding me how lucky my mother was to be alive. Is love never looking away, taking the picture even as your beloved transforms into a person you never imagined?

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A family’s shame and biggest story is visible in its partial view.

In “The Persistence of Vision,” Donna Haraway calls for a feminist reclamation of vision, a much-aligned sense held responsible for hurtful objectification. Haraway clearly lays it out: “The moral is simple: only partial perspective promises objective vision.”

It is a lunar eclipse when I begin sorting through the slides. The photos are fatherly works. I revise. Surrounded by so much looking, the sun about to slip over the moon, I accept that what I was not supposed to see as a child was always right there, its truth glaring.

“Families are distinctly political,” said Rita Kothari, and I wrote this down in my notebook midway through this project and as I began to notice patterns. Men on mountaintops. Women feeding deer, ducks, or petting dogs, chicks, kittens. A mother slips out of the frame. There are more and more photos of flowers, trees, mountains—all without people.

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If the slides are preserved as slides they will rarely be seen. If I convert them to digital, how much longer will they last? How many operating systems later?

At first I think my task is to re-photograph them, print them, and bind them into books. But I begin throwing some of the slides out, sending plastic bags of loose slides down the garbage chute from the 27th floor. Too many pictures of bridges and coastlines, azalea bushes, Christmas trees, shots of the road ahead through another meadow.

What is the story of this refuse? One answer is in the tyranny of the lay photographer’s drive to document. This has been compounded by the tyranny of the contemporary digital and virtual.

There is no cost to snapping frame after frame and so you don’t have to wait for the best view. If you send your pictures to the cloud are you politely arranging for an uncluttered death? Will you leave

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someone your password for hours of looking? Looking for what— for something to print?

My siblings and I are all adults with no kids. Working with these slides, I wonder if the melancholy of “no next generation” is like grief, like a loss? Is the story of this decision found in the slides?

Probably not. And there are tender moments in these slides, and every time I see my father smiling, my brother holding my hand, my mother laughing as she looks toward my dad, the photographer, I am a bit surprised. I am shocked that the idea of legacy and progeny presses on me now with sadness. What will I leave behind? I decide that my family slides project does not answer this question.

Children do not necessarily provide an answer either.

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To date, I have not written a book that does not in some way hinge on fathers, mothers, family, arriving and leaving. I declare that this is my last family project. And as a new idea of family is born— one whose contours I do not have to trace or analyze—I literally dream, night after night, of working with paint, moving color around with a brush, embroidering geometric patterns on billowing white sheets. My beloved asks, “Did you dream about them after looking at so many of their pictures?” No. Instead, the night brings relief in the form of abstraction.

Projection. Onto what surface? Whose body, whose skin?

Hum of the slide projector fan, repeated click of the next slide.

The smell of the hot bulb and dusty cardboard. The wall space upon which the images appear is a chest cavity. A living room, continents away from “origin,” expands and contracts with ancestors, auras, loss and abundance, the old and the new.

Fade. Color turns to a buttery yellow and the contours of faces, landscapes, houses begin to disappear. The satisfying truth of this—the struggle to see meshes with the struggle to answer the question, “What do these images mean?” Form and content: twins, together blurring.

I attempt to differentiate my one-year-old image from my sister’s one-year-old image. Why does this matter, when I have a strong sense that I am a completely different person? Biologically, every cell I have is new, but contains as much of an imprint from others I have never known as the self I am looking for in this archive. I think of the rhizome rather than the root: there is no singular unified story, self, origin. Is believing in this rhizome madness or health or both?

I cleave to the image of a gangly tuber as I work through the third box.

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Fourth box. A finish arrives without a conclusion. I am a line of flight. We are. Until we use narrative to momentarily graft us back in. And what if we did not? Would we be pitied or envied, free or lost forever, orphaned or self-made, or all of it?

A father goes to art school on the GI bill and makes a filmstrip, a sequence of negatives documenting his projects. It is Pratt Institute in the 1950s, the height of modernism, industrial design, beautiful forms, and utopias. His forms show immense undergraduate talent.

But he never finishes the degree. My mother’s side of the story is that the critiques were overwhelming to him, and he took too long making each thing. That he failed. Another story is that he had to stop in order to take a full-time job as a draftsman.

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The filmstrip is wound tightly and snaps back often as I try to open it up in order to view the teapot he designed. The vase. The pitcher. There are process photos. I am studying a family’s desire for art, despite class. Under the magnifying loop, how beauty sometimes slips through one life and is implanted in the next generation.

I am a curator who wants to claim this particular aptitude and who feels free to leave other characteristics behind. Can I? When did I start seeing as my father saw? Idea of an aesthetic inheritance: I am rooting around for this.

In the late ’80s I told my parents that I wanted to go to the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City, and my father discouraged me vociferously. His possible regret, projected. His advice: go into law or sales. The mystery, to them, of my choices now. But I am not unhappy that I took his advice, and then I didn’t; art found me anyway.

Many walks away, many returns.

Walking away is deterritorialization, what Gilles Deleuze refers to when he says that the unimagined is possible. A route is made. The unmapped is the turn that matters, and this is political. When resistance is pushing off into flight, into open space that is a liberating space even if it is utterly unknown. We take all traces with us—even the fearful mother and father—into a future.

As family, I slip—feeling as though I am a “backslider,” like “apostate.”

As person, as artist, in community without territory—unlike a tree with roots and limbs and fruits in fall—I walk away and I fly—and as in Ilya Kabakov’s paintings, I join hands with others I recognize and they recognize me. I have come to believe that this vectoring view is the only one that lets me look with love, seeing without eyes, toward a future.

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AN INTERVIEW WITH SLAVS AND TATARS

by DIANA GLUCK

SLAVS AND TATARS IS AN ART COLLECTIVE that investigates issues of language, identity, and culture in the area east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China. As it engages with the region’s polemics, the collective works across disciplines and media. In Spring 2015, the collective was the inaugural artist-in-residence at the NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery on Saadiyat Island. When talking about its work, the collective’s practice is to have one member of the group speak for the whole: individual members of the collective do not give their names to the public.

The first two sections of this interview were conducted on the eve of the collective’s residency in Abu Dhabi. Part one of the interview sheds light on the collective’s origins as well as on the nature of its work and the conversations sparked by its installations.

The second part focuses on the collective’s current cycle of work, entitled Mirrors for Princes, a portion of which was shown at the NYUAD Art Gallery. In the final section of the interview, which was conducted shortly before the end of the residency, the collective reflects on the experience of coming both to Abu Dhabi and to NYUAD’s new campus.

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BEGINNINGS, BOOKS, and BAZAARS Diana Gluck: I read that you started out as a book club, could you tell me more about that?

Slavs and Tatars: Yes, we basically just started by translating small pamphlets, 10-, 20-page things, into English that had not been translated before, or republishing things that had been out of print.

We’d do editions of 10, 50, or 100, and we’d pass them around to our friends and charge nothing—perhaps ten bucks for an edition, most often gratis. We never expected to be artists. We thought— we’re going to continue to publish, maybe 1-2 books a year.

It’s a testament to the elasticity of art as a discipline. It’s really the only discipline we know of that is questioning its own boundaries all the time. It took a risk. The art world basically said, “Okay, these guys can do interesting printed matter. Let’s see if they can do an exhibition in three dimensions in space.”

Publishing remains so central to our practice, because it’s a reversal of normal hierarchy. Often the book in art is a type of documentation. A catalog. After the fact. You ask somebody to take pictures; you ask somebody to write about you. For us, the book must always be a beginning, never an end.

DG: But your books seem to be different from most “art books.”

ST: Exactly. An “art book” costs a lot of money, and you have to wear gloves. It’s a book as a piece. And for us, actually, all the kind of sculptures in these installations that you see are ways to bring people back to the book. For us, the book is the work.

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Pages from the book Naughty Nasals (2014) by Slavs and Tatars

And that kind of goes to our questions on knowledge production, which is why we got involved in this. We’re ultimately interested not in art as an end in itself, but how art can be a platform for asking certain types of questions, for investigating certain kinds of behaviors, certain kinds of affectivities or affinities.

DG: So you didn’t foresee a career in the art world at the beginning.

You mentioned in a previous interview that you worked in different mediums because doing so allows the work to maintain a notion of indistinguishability and perhaps be present in places where it is

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not expected. Even though you work in a lot of mediums, they are all still presented in a gallery or art space context. Have you ever thought of placing work outside of this context to reach a different audience?

ST: There’s a great quote about art from an interview in The New Yorker—a profile of the Iranian artist Siah Armajani by Calvin Tomkins.

He says that it’s very important to rescue the term populism, as populism for many people means the lowest common denominator, but actually, he says, populism can mean making the highest achievements possible for the largest amount of people. And he distinguishes, interestingly enough, between two terms. He says it’s important to distinguish between availability and accessibility.

Making your work available for everybody is important—accessible depends on the person’s investment into the work. It’s available for everybody—it’s accessible if the person puts an effort into it—like anything in life, the more you put into it the more you take out. I think we subscribe to that.

The most rewarding lectures that we do are actually not in art departments at Yale or NYU or University of Texas, but actually in departments of Middle Eastern Studies or Eastern European Studies, first of all because there’s more of a sense of dialogue. There’s too often this assumption that because we’re talking about a region that very few people know about that we’re somehow experts on the region. And we’re really not. You can’t be an expert on a region that big, as you know. It’s ridiculous, right? Three-hundred-forty ethnicities and I don’t know how many languages. So when it’s an art audience our work often just sort of flies over everybody’s head. So there’s less of an understanding about the performativity— not how we’re performing when we’re giving a lecture—but the re-

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search performativity: how we perform across the material, how we can play with the material.

DG: You don’t know when the performativity starts and when what you started with, the raw material, ends.

ST: Yes. And to be honest we’re very proud of the feedback from the Dallas show [Concentrations 57, Dallas Museum of Art, 2014].

It was overwhelming, especially from the “lay person”—the non-art professional. They just gave incredible feedback to the guards, the invigilators, the curators, and online. This is important for us because there’s a risk we run … when art … when any kind of medium … attains a critical mass, enough so that it can delude itself into believing that it’s big enough to speak to itself. Then you can think, “Okay, it’s big enough to be self-sufficient” and that you don’t need to speak to outside your own discipline because it’s so big now.

What was maybe 5,000 people ten years ago is now 50,000 people.

But that’s still not enough.

We always think about the lay person because we ourselves go to many exhibitions and read the texts and don’t understand anything.

And we think to ourselves, well if we don’t understand anything then how does … your uncle? … who is an educated person, not necessarily interested in art, but you know.

It was either Nick Serota or Chris Dercon (from the Tate) who said that museums today occupy the role that libraries did in the nineteenth century. They are places where people go for education and entertainment. That’s super important, but the third element that is perhaps the elusive one for all of us is the question of transcendence. How does it affect or spark a questioning that can lead to a

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Love Letters No. 3, woolen yarn, 250 × 250 cm, 2013

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different way of being as opposed to just thinking about something the viewer didn’t think about before. That’s why, for us, the most rewarding venues are places where there isn’t a critical mass of art, actually. It’s not necessarily New York or London, but it’s Abu Dhabi, Istanbul, Bialystok in eastern Poland. You know, those are the places that for us give the most rewarding feedback.

DG: Places where you are creating these dialogues where they might not otherwise be happening. How might your practice relate to that of a scholarly institution?

ST: There is that kind of transversal, cross-disciplinary investigation. It’s something that is obviously central to our practice. Our books—you can see it’s not journalism. There are journalistic elements, but it’s not journalism. There are scholarly elements but it’s not academic, it’s not purely analytical and objective and as rigorous of research as let’s say an academic publication would be. It’s intimate but it’s not a memoir, because it’s not about our lives. So there’s this kind of in-betweenness. Much as our region. Our region is in-between. It’s not the Middle East; it’s not China; it’s not Russia: it’s in-between these regions. And this sort of in-betweenness is an interesting, if difficult, space to straddle, and we think that in parallel institutions of higher education, all kind of lay claim to that holy grail of interdisciplinarity. They all say that they’re interdisciplinary, but the ones who are able to implement it are rare. We haven’t seen many, if any. Because there are so many entrenched interests. It boggles the mind. There should be almost like a Hippocratic oath of scholars. How could you be a linguist if you don’t study religion, psychology, and history? The history department won’t give you tenure if you want to spend three years studying faith in language politics, because they’ll say go do that in the religion department or

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literature department. It’s the collateral damage of specialization in some sense, which is fine—which is important, but there’s obviously negatives to the positives as well.

DG: You’ve mentioned the interdisciplinary nature of your practice.

In one article on the recent Lichtgrenze installation commemorating the 25th anniversary of the Berlin wall, I found the following quote: “Unlike a history textbook or an article on Wikipedia, art has the inherent benefit of showing, not telling.” I thought this was an interesting statement in dialogue with your work because your pieces often involve text alongside visuals. So in a way your work is another gray zone in that it’s showing and it’s telling. Or, it’s manipulating the showing of that telling.

ST: That’s a good point. It’s something that we ourselves sort of struggle with. We do show and tell, but you’re right, we don’t tell what we’re showing. A lot of times there are reading spaces with our shows and as you’ll see, our books don’t actually explain the work at all. We never talk about our work in the lectures. They’re investigations of our research. So our work disrupts this question of what it means to have text near a work, what it means to read near a work. We use the example of a bazaar in the sense that in a bazaar there’s something for everybody.

Some people want to read; some people want more formal elements; some people want the performative elements; some people want some kind of text. This runs counter to this very precious, solemn, self-important tradition we have in art. A sort of notion that fine art is, “I put one thing here [motions with cup on table] and then it’s up to you to kind of understand … or not.” We try to create many levels of entry to the pieces. There’s not one. If somebody comes

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into one of our installations and just takes a nap, it’s just as valid and legitimate as someone who has read everything and knows the entire discourse around it. There’s no hierarchy of access to the work.

MIRRORS FOR PRINCES DG: What are you planning for your residency at the NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery this Spring?

ST: When we do a residency, a lot of the research that we’ll do at the residency won’t result in work that you’ll see at the venue. It’ll be for the next chapter. With our research we generally work in a cycle of roughly three years. We do a couple years of bibliographic research bookended by field research. For this current project, Mirrors for Princes, we went to Xinjiang in western China, the Muslim region of China, and then there was about a year of production work to form or give shape to those ideas. Then the series of works that result from this research and production travels to different venues, adding new elements at each stop, by accretion. It was unveiled at the Kunsthalle Zürich. The next iteration will be at the GfZK Leipzig, and the iteration after that is in Abu Dhabi. In each iteration, it will accumulate.

For the residency, we’ll have a seminar that will pursue the editorial direction of Mirrors for Princes by combining the macro and micro scales and registers of the millennial genre and its contemporary stakes by looking at self-presentation as a form of governance.

Identifying the individual as a polity, the self as an assembly of multiples will allow for an effectively multidisciplinary research as well

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best leverage the expertise of the diverse faculty. It will be run like a salon: we’ll meet once every week or two, with three or four faculty members, four or five students—on a different component of these “mirrors for princes.”

DG: Can you talk more about the larger themes present in this current project, Mirrors for Princes?

ST: Essentially, mirrors for princes were guides for future rulers in the tenth to twelfth centuries. The most famous one is Machiavelli’s The Prince, which was later, of course, during the Renaissance, but actually, they first arrived in and most of them happened during medieval times. It was a first attempt by scholars to put statecraft on the same level as religious jurisprudence and theology, because until the tenth or eleventh century, most scholars either wrote about religion, or they didn’t write. It wasn’t considered worthy to talk about secular matters. Today, what’s interesting is that a thousand years later or a millennium later, we have a completely different situation. The pendulum has swung to the other extreme, because now everybody and their grandma is a political pundit of some sort, and there’s very little intelligent writing about faith in the public realm.

Basically if you’re an intellectual, you don’t talk about religion. You can talk about it sort of with gloves on and say something anthropologically, but religion is the kiss of death for an intellectual or professional person today.

So what we’re looking at is, in a way, the latter day version of mirrors for princes: self help books. Like, How to Lose 15 Kilos in 10 Days or How to Marry a Millionaire …

We’re thinking about how we can re-invest this genre that’s become

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sort of individually focused—self betterment—into the question of self-presentation, but as one would imagine oneself as a multitude or as a corpus of pluralities. So thinking of oneself as a nation of many. The different factions within yourself. Different belongings, different allegiances, different affinities. Take the example of one of our own—a Russophile from the United States who’s originally from Iran. Those are three areas or spheres of influence that are in complete conflict.

This negotiation of allegiances, of multiplicities, of identities, of behaviors, is a necessarily urgent practice—it’s quite relevant to what we found at NYU Abu Dhabi, from the student body to the curriculum itself. It was the first time we’ve seen a school that has a truly global student body in the sense that diversity isn’t a token. [In one of our experiences] as an undergrad at Columbia, there were the international students, but then the bulk is American. If you’re at Sorbonne, the bulk is French; if you’re at Oxbridge, it’s British; if you’re in Heidelberg, it’s German. But, at NYUAD, everybody’s from everywhere. Perversely, the tabula rasa that the United Arab Emirates is often misconstrued as, actually works to its benefit.

DG: So you’re looking to write the same sort of self-help mirror for princes texts but for the Emirates, or as individuals with multiple identities?

ST: The idea is to present the exhibition that would address these themes of self-presentation.

In the works from Zurich there are a lot of different elements about grooming. Grooming of course has a double meaning in English.

How to present oneself, in terms of hair and hair-care, but also

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grooming in that you groom a child—not for pedophilic reasons— but more to prepare, to raise, to elevate, to guide. Hair in a sense is a perfect example of de-sacralization, because hair used to be, until 200 years ago, always a sacred, ritualistic thing, and today it’s purely aesthetic or at best tribal. The question is how to de-profanize or re-sacralize or reconsider these. One chapter is grooming, and in Abu Dhabi we’ll think about perhaps another chapter … possibly “reading,” as kind of sacred activity. Reading used to be a group activity. You didn’t have a book per person; you had a book for 50 people, 100 people, 1,000 people. Books were precious objects.

So it can re-activate some of these ideas.

DG: Interesting—on that topic, the Qur’an is constantly recited over Sheikh Zayed’s tomb at the Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi.

ST: The reciting, the orality, of language is super interesting because the Muslim world came relatively late to print, actually, around the late-nineteenth or early-twentieth century. Not because it didn’t have access to it—it was a decision that dates back to the fifteenth or sixteenth century. All religions were very suspicious about print because there’s a loss of authority with print, of interpretation.

And ironically our Not Moscow, Not Mecca project [2012] looked at this idea of how normally people think that Islam needs to be “modern” or needs to be “modernized.” You hear it a lot, “Oh, Islam needs a reform movement and needs to be modernized”—which is actually quite Islamophobic. In fact, it is counterintuitive—it was Islam’s modernization which contributed to its radicalism. Meaning that it’s only since print arrived in Islam that someone can decide who is Muslim, who is not or what Islam is or isn’t—because before, it was completely communitarian and largely ritual-based.

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Hirsute Happily with Hairless (White),

dichroic glass, tinned copper, 25 x 10 x 8 cm, 2014 Hirsute Happily with Hairless (Green),

dichroic glass, tinned copper, 25 x 10 x 8 cm, 2014

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Each village, each town, would have its oral tradition of Islam, and few in Bukhara or Samarkand cared what someone in Al-Azhar mosque in Cairo said. There wasn’t this type of dialogue. So ironically, in Central Asia and the Soviet Union, they missed out on modernization—because print arrived during Communism and nothing could be printed that was religious—Jewish, Christian, Muslim— nothing. So they strangely maintained that ritualistic, oral approach to Islam, which has maintained quite a Sufi, almost more esoteric approach that’s been relatively resilient to things like Saudi attempts to radicalize or Wahhabi funding.

DG: In addition to thinking of a new chapter for Abu Dhabi, you mentioned that your work accumulates, and that some previous work from Zurich will be shown in the iteration for the NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery. So far, are there any pieces that are part of Mirrors for Princes that you will add to or somehow alter in Abu Dhabi?

ST: In particular there’s a large sound installation in Zurich that had an excerpt from a mirror for prince being read. You have a four-channel video, and there is an excerpt from this mirror for prince from the eleventh century, and each time it’s presented in a different venue, there’s a new language added for that venue. So the original was Uighur, then it was shown in Turkey, so Turkish, and then Polish, German, and now it’ll be Arabic.

DG: Will it loop first in one language then in another language?

ST: It’s actually interesting. In Poland and Russia, they have this phenomena of Gavrilov translation, which we utilize in this piece: instead of dubbing where you just turn off the original and just dub (as they do Germany or France), in Gavrilov you just speak over

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Speculum linguarum (installation view),

4 channel sound installation (in Uighur, Turkish, Polish, and German),

16 mirrored plexiglass rahlĂŠ with speakers, each 30 x 30 x 50 cm, 2014

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the original voice. So this is Pulp Fiction. [Plays an excerpt from Pulp Fiction with Gavrilov translation, one voice dubbed over the original]. All one voice. It is an interesting phenomenon, because it’s maximalism of means, meaning that it’s cheaper obviously to do that—that’s the origin of the practice. But it’s also maximal in the sense that the audience gets to listen to the original and yet understand. So instead of canceling the original, which is normally done, where you don’t get to see the original acting—you just have some new person’s voice on top of it, you get the best of both worlds. But it’s schizophrenic, right? Where you have to split your brain basically.

What we like about it is that there’s a respect and disrespect of the material, meaning that you’re respecting the original source because you’re translating it, but you’re also disrespecting it because you’re speaking over it. If you’re reading poetry, and I am tasked with translating, usually what happens is you read a line, a verse, and then I translate. And then you read. And then I translate. But here, you’re reading, and I’m translating over your voice. So it’s a very strange push and pull of both respect and disrespect.

DG: Under the umbrella of themes explored by Mirrors for Princes, in addition to the changing associations held with regards to grooming, the connection to modern day self-help books, and the mix of respect/disrepect present in Gavrilov translation, earlier you mentioned briefly the role of faith in law. What are you particularly interested in concerning the role of faith in law in the Emirates?

ST: From what we understand, at NYUAD you can discuss anything.

There’s a real freedom of discussion and expression within the university. The question is, Can it then be broadcast outwards to the

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larger community? For us it’s crucial to make the exhibition relevant not only to the student body and faculty, but also to the larger community. This exhibition is not really a commentary on the Emirates, just like it’s not a commentary on Swiss law. There’s just as much to object to with Swiss law as there is with Emirati law. Especially recently, whether it’s the prohibition on foreigners being able to work in Switzerland, or the ban on minarets being constructed.

Our work doesn’t really prescribe anything: it’s more a reflection that allows for other questions to bubble to the surface. We don’t take a singular position. For us, the real interesting moments happen when you work on a subject matter or exhibition for a couple of years, and you still don’t really know where you stand on it. That resistance to your own determination is interesting because it confounds you, and if it confounds you after so much time spent on it, then there’s a chance there that it has layers of complexity that can’t be reduced to a polemical statement.

Regarding the question of faith in government—we’re somewhat suspicious of this very modernist rhetoric, or what Charles de Foucauld, a Catholic scholar and monk, called “secular rage,” which you see among elites in Western society. It’s the natural extension of Cartesian thought, of modernity, of homo modernicus, who has survived homo sovieticus. The idea, according to Marx, Weber or Durkheim, that there is a new man that no longer has tradition, that no longer has religion or faith, and that no longer has a need for these—because now the world is industrial, it’s secular, it’s rational. We’re suspicious of this break.

We don’t obviously believe in throwing one out or the other. We’re not suspicious of technology or rationalism, but we equally don’t

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ascribe to the philosophy of either one. Also we believe that … if you look at the most successful acts of civil disobedience over the past century, they’ve always been led by people for whom faith played an extremely important role. Martin Luther King, Gandhi, the Solidarność in Poland against Communism—the Catholic church played a huge role.

But now, we as intellectuals appropriate these people as secular individuals. We whitewash them of their religious role: we claim Martin Luther King as a civil rights leader, Gandhi as a human rights leader, but actually you can’t disassociate the role that faith played in any of these struggles—and it would go a long way towards creating a cohesive society. In Turkey, today in America, same thing—you have this partisanship of people yelling at each other but not listening at all to each other. It’s because, “We believe everybody who is religious is stupid” and they believe, “Anybody who is secular is godless and sinning.” We’re maximalists. We believe it’s a question of “and,” not a question of “or.”

THE NYU ABU DHABI RESIDENCY DG: What has it been like living on campus for the residency?

ST: Because we’re different people, both of us we have very different affinities. I for example, liked the campus resources, people, conversations, library. And my partner is somebody who has never been particularly fond of pedagogical systems per se, and so we had very different approaches to it. To be honest, I think that Saadiyat is 40 to 50 years away from being a viable place to live, in the sense of having any relationship to its immediate surround-

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ings and community. We underestimated that in the sense that we thought, like everybody, “Of course, it’s new, we understand it’s all under construction.” We believe in the larger mission of offering this type of education, especially here in this particular spot, but living here was challenging because bread is a hotel away. Unfortunately, I think that it tends to reinforce the cliche of the academy being an insular environment. I think the biggest drawback or failing is the idea of putting a university like this, or any of these museums that are being built, on a luxury island—because once that decision is made, it doesn’t matter how well you do it, the cards are stacked against you. Financially, because a luxury island never will really be open to the public—we all have to be frank about that. As for debates about security, they’re just one small element of a larger question which is that—you’re on a luxury island—it doesn’t matter, even if there is that security; normal people won’t be driving here.

If they do, they’ll be driving through on the highway to get to Dubai because it’s shorter, but they won’t get off on the exits.

DG: How often did you go into the city of Abu Dhabi, and what were your interactions with people who were not affiliated with NYUAD? ST: What was interesting for us was also to experience Abu Dhabi as opposed to Sharjah and Dubai, which is where we’ve spent previous periods of time. There are certain elements of Abu Dhabi life that definitely resonate with us beyond the Saadiyat or campus life. It’s a more dinner-at-peoples’-houses place than Dubai is, which is more public space or dinners out in restaurants. It’s not a restaurant culture here, which is good, because we don’t believe in automatically eating out all the time. We were lucky enough to meet some quite interesting people from film and media, and people from museums, like the Guggenheim group, and even local people and

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professionals who do think tanks in the city. There’s obviously a very interesting group of people living in this city that are from other emirates, the region—and beyond—but to be honest we spent most of our time during the week here [on the Saadiyat campus] working, and then the weekends we would head out to different parts of the immediate gulf region—every long weekend, a different destination.

DG: Were those trips a part of your research for this cycle of work or for possible future cycles?

ST: I think both. We don’t really draw a line between where one body of work ends and another body of work begins, but we made a concerted effort to visit all of the manifestations of national identity that we could in the different countries of the GCC. In particular, not so much the current iterations of advertisements or billboards as manifestations of national identity, but mostly this attempt to construe it through the past—through folklore, heritage, crafts, religion, or other forms. The last trip—we just got back from Salalah— was interesting because it involved Ibadi Islam.

There was a great lecture here, at the NYUAD Institute about Ibadi islam, which is a tradition of Islam in Oman that is supposedly a rather democratic tradition of Islam. There is an Imamate, an Imam and a hierarchy of sorts—kind of the equivalent of a Pope, let’s say.

They are Sunnis, and this Imam is selected by a council of elders, but the Imam can be replaced if the people voice their displeasure with the Imam. So it’s particular strand of Sunni Islam, and it’s quite interesting for us also because there were certain parallels with the kind of Islam that we studied in central Asia. There were a lot of tomb or shrines of mystics, which was sort of the basis of our work

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in Central Asia for Not Moscow Not Mecca. For example, in Salalah we saw a 15 meter tomb of Nabi Umran, a fourteenth-century Yemeni mystic. We also went to visit the tomb of Job that is there.

Quite a lot of more vernacular type architectures of these shrine cultures are open, which runs counter to this very stark, Wahhabi idea of Islam which is not about paying attention to anything beyond the oneness of God, so this would all be sort of considered marginal or heretical even. Back to your question, I think that our trip to Ethiopia last year first sparked an interest in East Africa, and in Oman you really see the influence of East Africa, in Salalah. Not in Muscat, but in Salalah—in a way that you don’t really see anywhere else in the Gulf. I mean, I’m sure you would see it in Yemen but unfortunately we haven’t been to Yemen, and we can’t go given recent events.

Again, it’s that syncretism of local pre-Islamic traditions and how they meld with later Islam.

DG: It’s interesting that you did such extensive travel to these sites in the GCC. On breaks, a lot of students go on trips further from the region, or if they stay, seem to undertake a more local UAE or Oman road trip that isn’t focused on shrines or museums as much as nature.

ST: It’s very difficult to see a lot of these places. Bahrain was easier, but it’s difficult just finding the places that exist, and they’re not always in the same place across books, and some of the places, because they are religious shrines, wouldn’t be in your guidebook because it wouldn’t suit or doesn’t speak to a Western tourist. Why would a Western tourist go see a shrine that doesn’t speak to them at all? What are they going to do there? So it’s quite a bit of footwork just to get the addresses and then find them in the city. Once you know it exists, then you have to find it. How do you get there?

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Mirrors for Princes (installation view) Sharp Eye (hazel), fibreglass, acrylic paint, polyester resin, 125 x 100 x 100 cm, 2014 Zulf (brunette), oak wood, hair, 82 x 60 x 30 cm, 2014 Sheikha, steel, textile, fans, 125 x 80 x 130 cm, 2014

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You do a shotgun approach. You try everything [laughs]. You Google, you find the person in the hotel who looks a bit like a local, which is difficult, or if not a local, somebody who is religious, who is going to know these shrines, and can tell you a little bit about it.

Then there are all kinds of bonkers websites that you find as well, that tell you about what sort of landmarks [the given place] is near.

It’s a little bit like a treasure hunt in a way, but having said that, the Job shrine really reminded us of some of these places in Central Asia. One of the things about saints you have to respect is that they had a great nose for real estate, because they always had these incredible places.

Job’s shrine is in the middle of the mountains, 15 or 20 kilometers above Salalah overlooking a valley, and there are always birds around. So you know, whether you want to believe there is something sacred about this place or not, there is definitely something properly feng shui-ed about the energy or whatever in the space.

The shrines are always located in quite beautiful spaces, very full of birds and very serene. What was nice about Job’s shrine is that there were lots of Hindus there who were just hanging out. It wasn’t particularly just for Muslims or Christians or “people of the book.”

DG: That’s different than the Sheikh Zayed mosque, for instance.

It’s not a place people would or could go and loiter.

ST: That’s another thing about Oman—you could see that because it’s been a port or coastal country for such a long time, there was more continuity of identity between East Africa, through to the Gulf, and then all the way to South Asia. It felt less segregated than other places in the Gulf we’ve been to.

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DG: You did some work with classes as well. How were your interactions with students, and do you feel like you got to know students outside of classes as well?

ST: Not enough. I think that because it was early, and we were really the sort of guinea pig of the residencies. Since this is the first time that NYUAD is doing this on campus, there wasn’t maybe enough of an opportunity to engage with students generally, beyond the class. Even for the classes, the way it was initiated was I would just go to the bookstore and look at the reading list and then decide who I should contact based on the reading list. So it was kind of the other way around—”Okay, this is what they’re reading?” and then we would contact them. Otherwise looking at the Excel files [of course offerings] tells nothing—it’s like “Okay, there’s the time.”

At least if you see something on a bookshelf, you can say “Okay, I want to be part of this class.” I think that Fiona Kidd’s class, “Object and Identity” which was a Core class, was particularly fruitful, because it always interests us to get to interact with people who are not particularly interested in art. There were a lot of people who never would have engaged with artistic practice, much less our kind of work.

And again, having students, especially from the region, dealing with what it means to forge a national identity, and how one does that through modes of investigation that are not top down or are not initiated by the government—that was interesting. We got really nice feedback from one student who talked about how the tea room reminded him of majlises when he was a kid, and how it made him feel that it was possible to be in a modern campus and still retain one’s own identity. [The final room in the exhibition at the NYUAD Gallery was a tea room with majlis seating where visitors were able

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Mirrors for Princes (installation view) Lektor (speculum linguarum), multi-channel sound installation, mirrored plexiglass, speakers, 2014 Mystical Protest, luminous paint on silk-screened fabric fluorescent lights, 2011 Nose Twister (in the center), veneer, faux leather, foam, paint, 2014 Both Sides of the Tongue (English), book, acrylic paint, 21 x 30 x 5 cm, 2015

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to congregate and peruse texts used by the artists in their research for the exhibition.] That seems so simple, but it’s something that the campus is sort of lacking—those reminders that it fits into this particular place. In a way, Masdar does it much better. It uses certain leitmotifs in its facades, and even the wind tower it uses in its architecture.

DG: Do you know what is going to happen to the furniture in the tea room once the exhibition is over?

ST: No, but you should claim it! I would have liked the students to use the space more. When we did a residency at Yale, one of us noticed that maybe a by-product of these elite schools is that students and their schedules are so taxed already, that anything that doesn’t fit—that is not already either a requirement or some clear form of further self-development—sort of gets pushed aside, which I understand, because people are in those years where they feel like they have to soak everything up. So I don’t know how much space there is for down time, but it’s something that I was talking about with one professor as well: there don’t seem to be spaces where people can just hang out, even just—and of course the professor was being a bit provocative—make-out. And they were right, there are not really places to just be, other than the place right by the palm, which is the most central place—it’s basically like you’re onstage. Everybody sees you, you’re too exposed. The place where the video games are [the Student Activity Center] is the most successful place on campus. It’s always happening there. There are always people hanging out there, and that’s for me a testament to the fact that there aren’t enough of these places, because there’s always somebody there no matter what time. … I wonder how many of these things are growing pains and how many are systematic.

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WHAT WE GAINED IN THE FIRE

BY

JASON TOUGAW

THE PARADISE FIRE THAT BURNED LAKE WOHLFORD in 2003 was international news. Over three days, Paradise and two other major fires ate large chunks of Southern California. Sixteen people killed, more than 3000 structures consumed—including the bucolic trailer my mom had been living in with her husband Billy.

DAVE AND I—we’ve been together eleven years now—are standing beside my mom and Billy on the charred hill where their trailer used to be. The trees are bare, amputated mid-branch, like they were freeze-dried, limbs straining to uproot their trunks and float above the flames and heat. The plateau where the trailer sat is a series of chalky black piles, fragments of recognizable objects sticking out here and there.

“See the birdcage?” my mom says. “Over there? On its side?”

“Oh God,” I say. “You’re right.” Dave walks over to look at it, poking to see if he can stand it upright. We met in 1993, right after I moved to New York. He met both my maternal grandparents, Ralph and Nanny, before they died. The objects we’ll miss belonged to them.

I can see in Dave’s eyes how awful this is. He’s snapping his camera, for something to do and so we can revisit what we can’t take in now.

It’s been three weeks since the fire, almost four months since my mom and Billy’s wedding. In high school, everybody knew him as

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Kelly Williams, ink on paper.

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the one black guy in a big group of white surfers. He’s always been known as a nice guy, even when he was using. The wedding was in the “canyon” right beneath the trailer. My mom planted the hill with flowers. My uncle Gary and some of his buddies played. They were married by a huge Samoan woman. I gave my mom away, which meant I walked her down the hilly dirt aisle. She’d already had a couple of glasses of champagne. Halfway to the altar, Gary started to play a song, and she tore her free of my arm and ran over and started yelling at him. They buried a whole pig, and we ate it. My mom fell on the dance floor at least twice. Looking down the blackened hill, it’s hard not to imagine the wedding in a blaze.

Now the whole place is soot. Smoke still rises in some spots.

But I had this fantasy that I’d find something precious, something everybody else had overlooked, maybe a knob from Nanny’s apothecary chest, maybe a cache of photographs or a reel of super 8 miraculously preserved, maybe Nanny’s thirty-ish smile beaming next to Betty Grable’s. Maybe Ralph kissing a beauty queen square on the mouth.

The birdcage is all that remains, jutting at a sooty diagonal.

When the evacuation was called, my mom panicked. She called for the cats. She grabbed her wedding album, a bottle of wine, and a pork loin she’d just roasted. I got her call from Sue Ellen’s house, where she stayed almost a week before FEMA set them up in a temporary cabin at the base of the hill. “I keep telling your mother to calm down,” her friend Sue Ellen said. “Will you tell her?” I tried, but this time a little hysteria seemed warranted.

They wouldn’t know until the following day that the trailer had actually burned. The path of the fire was chaos. Some trailers burned while their close neighbors were untouched. The film of my grandparents’ glamorous heyday in the forties and fifties would have melted with the heat. Photos would have curled before they caught

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flame. Nanny’s apothecary chest was such dry wood it would have gone right away, the porcelain knobs probably melting later. Her big ceramic giraffe would have fallen when the loft bed gave out.

Nanny lived right here for three or for months while she was dying. A helicopter landed in the middle of this charred little canyon, to

Conor Williams, ink on paper.

fly her down to Palomar Hospital. Its propellers blew up a wind storm. The lights made the place look like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, my mom said. Nanny lasted at Palomar two days. Nichole, my mom, and uncles were there when she died. I was in New York.

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“She loved that bird cage,” Billy says. “Even I knew that.” (Nanny hated Billy.) We stand around it, staring through the charry little bars. You can see the round swing in the center. Nanny kept a wooden parrot in there, teetering on that swing.

“It’s intact,” Dave says. “I wonder how you can get the soot off.”

“Why didn’t it melt?” I ask.

“The same reason the trailer next door didn’t burn,” Billy says.

“Fire is random.”

A LOT OF THE EVIDENCE for our lore—our shared memory— burned in the fire. The film reels, photos of my mom and uncles dressed up for big races and fancy parties, the furniture and art Nanny held onto until the end, refusing to sell them even when she needed rent or food. Objects are vulnerable to the forces of their environment. Eventually, they dissolve back into particles of matter.

Fire sped that up, but it would happen sooner or later. Our bodies will follow. Nanny’s and Ralph’s already have. The particles end up in other objects, other bodies, but do they carry traces of what they’ve been into their new forms?

If they do, the traces are imperceptible, as much as I’d like to hope you can tune your senses to the ether channel and find them.

It’s a hope I don’t count on, though, so I’m left with memory. I’m preoccupied with my own memory, but also with comparing my memories with others’, both people who shared my experience and people who didn’t.

It was a sociologist, not a psychologist, who made the idea of collective memory famous. Early in the twentieth century, Maurice Halbwachs argued that memories are social, not simply personal. A memory, he suggested, records interactions between people, where stories about x. y, or z event are shared, compared, and adjudicated. Everybody involved in the sharing comes away with rein-

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vented memories. A family is like a petri dish for collective memory.

Halbwachs puts it this way: despite the “opposition of temperaments” and “variety of circumstances,” members of a family have lived a constant “exchange of impressions.” That creates a bond that’s difficult to break: shared identity. Communities and nations do this too, but more loosely.

Halbwachs observes that consciousness is a prison. We are all prisoners, cut off from the people around us, who will never get inside our heads, never know what it feels like in here. We know each other through the visible evidence—gestures, words, inflections, actions, stories. We imagine what these mean, what it feels like to be the people around us. But we never know for sure.

Most neuroscientists will tell you, these days, that consciousness is not a single thing. In fact, it’s not a thing at all. It’s a process, an experience, and it’s composed of various parts and emerges from a variety of brain systems. One of these neuroscientists, Antonio Damasio, has proposed an elegant explanation of these parts. He calls them “core” and “extended” consciousness. Core consciousness is the moment, everything you might perceive in an instant.

It’s sensory, and it lacks story. Extended consciousness relies on memory and a sense of autobiography to connect one instant to other instances and make us feel whole, continuous, like people with autobiographies. Damasio makes the point that the objects around us make us who we are. We become conscious of ourselves when we are changed by the objects around us. These changes are literal, cellular. We can feel some of them in your private consciousness, but only some. Our awareness of ourselves responding to the felt objects enables us to be aware of ourselves.

So we are always people without stories, imprisoned in core consciousness, interacting with the air we breathe, the sounds of trucks and birds, the feeling of the keyboards we tap, the colors

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Conor Williams, ink on paper.

Conor Williams, ink on paper.

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Kelly Williams, ink on paper.

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of summer sky and foliage—and most fundamentally, our sense of our own bodies, bounded in the instant. And we are always people with stories, people who live with others, exchanging impressions, building memories, becoming each other’s “objects.” And the objects, remember, make us who we are. That’s where Damasio’s ideas converge with the ones Halbwachs proposed almost a century earlier. We are each other’s objects, and we build each other.

My family’s collective memory tells a story of resilience just barely achieved. Great Grandpa Ralph ended up institutionalized.

Diagnosis: schizophrenia. But his jockey son Ralph found a vocation that made his mania okay. Our lore tells us we are people on the verge of disaster, but we survive. We find ourselves in deep shit, and we dig our way out. That’s the spine of our story.

Family stories are always unfinished, because we need them to live, to be. For most of my childhood, my mom and I shared a fatherless life. Hers was married to a younger woman, living just two hours away, and mine was in and out of prisons, mostly in other states. But they were equally absent, until they returned. They were objects missing from our lives, and missing objects are more easily mythologized than the ones we see and touch on a regular basis.

Missing objects shape us differently from present ones. They require more imagination, they grow in vague and untouchable ways, and they seem impossible to evade. When they return, interacting with them becomes a bewildering negotiation. The mythical creation we’ve invented is more real in some ways than the flesh and blood person with a mind and a self who intrudes up that investment. Like us, our fathers are aging organisms and unfinished stories. We make them, and they make us. But that doesn’t make living them easier.

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remembrance

by Rabha Ashry

my invisible city part i Dusty sunlight sand colored buildings built with cracked bricks, exposed and vulnerable.

Fairytale windows, framed in wood painted off-white with age and experience.

The beds resting against the walls, the fat black flies buzzing over them, dizzy in the heat, drunk on juicy mangoes and watermelons.

The vintage 1960’s TV, un-ironically poor and well used, with satellite antennae and dials to change the channels, watching grainy black and white movies on its tiny screens, missing chunks of the action because we keep losing the connection.

The dirty Internet cafes full of chunky computers with oversized processors and loud creaky keyboards, with sleazy porn in the history folder and Facebook accounts logged in and forgotten.

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The sugarcane juice and the loud gray metal juicers.

The juice sickly yellow in color, sickly sweet, the taste of gentle sunlight and even more gentle breezes, lifting our hairs from our foreheads, meekly caressing our sunburnt shoulders.

Skinny boys with curly hair, prepubescent girls in young lady hijabs with wife-to-be manners. part ii Sadness hovers like ghosts on the empty street corners.

Loss is our song, memorized in utero, sung every evening to lull us to sleep.

Memories hang like cobwebs in the corners of our ceilings, spiders spinning webs of our despair, our nightmares gray and dusty.

The doors creak when we open them, the doorbells are always too loud.

We twist garlic around our windows like wreaths to keep out our fears, keep our haunted staircases filled with only the ghosts we know.

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I miss a place I don’t know there was a beautiful sunset every evening that summer I would sit in our beach chair in the balcony my eyes closed, my hair brushed back from my face the sun would kiss my cheekbones, my shoulders, my legs the light breeze would smooth over the sun’s touch I would let my favorite music play and sink back like I’m floating in water letting the waves lift me up and pull me down listening to them hit the shore one after the other gentle careful not to wake me I would open my eyes watch the clouds chase each other and then slowly drift across my vision waving hello waving goodbye and the sun would paint those clouds in shades of orange and red till the sky is on fire bleeding blue and purple indifferent to the city spread out under it with its small streets like the veins mapped out under the transparent skin of my wrists trying to reach my fingers wrapping itself around my arms finding its way to my heart and I’m not in the water I’m not in the balcony I’m in class sitting with my back to the window

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feeling the sun’s warmth on my back drawing its light and its shadow on my paper ignoring my math teacher scribbling poems over the equations and formulae still in the balcony still in the water under the sun

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sleep paralysis During my last year of high school my home country, Egypt, went up in flames. At that point, I hadn’t been to Egypt in two years, and I only thought of the country as home in the sense that that’s where my passport was issued. But, as my people took to the streets to protest the tyrannical rule of Hosny Mubarak, my patriotism woke up with a gasp, and I found myself following the news avidly. I was proud to be Egyptian, and then as the news of the terrifying number of women who were sexually harassed and assaulted on the streets came to light, I was ashamed of being Egyptian. lost in the etherland of here and home a graveyard of fear with monsters in mausoleums lost in the limbo of red eyes infected with grief and lack of sleep no gravestones to hide behind because we don’t worship the dead lost among friends the hostile in the familiar nowhere to hide because the saviors have become the aggressors on the street of celebrations stolen peace with anger misdirected and discouraged

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where do we go when home is the site of fear? found the next day unable to speak no comfort to seek with their hurt pride and our broken hearts

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a sonnet for strong girls Girl, they won’t give you the justice you need these bearded old men with their piety and hypocrisy They won’t save you from the grave they put you in you have to claw your way out Girl, don’t be afraid to use your teeth Let your anger fuel your words Let your mouth and your nails be your weapon Save yourself, because it’s you against the world Girl, don’t let them take this away from you— your fierce intelligence and your cautious optimism Don’t let them take you from yourself Girl, their laws and their customs will try to silence you Be a monster in your own defense Save yourself, save me.

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women I know women so powerful they could annihilate the world with a flick of their fingers Goddesses that walk by my side and tell me I’m strong I know women so strong they could create craters so cynical they lose love so steady they survive typhoons I know women so intelligent they can tell you the meaning of life in a sentence I know women so beautiful they blind me I know women so kind they steal my heart and keep it safe for me but break their own I know women so dangerous they could kill with a look tear this world apart and put it back together in seconds And they tear themselves apart

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and refuse to put themselves back together I know women whose bodies have been invaded like houses left abandoned in the middle of the night broken into and vandalized I know women who have been violated and picked themselves up with their heads held high– walked away with the steps of queens I have loved women who taught me what it means to be a woman

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grieving (morning) curled up in bed, pretending I don’t exist the sunlight is always a tad too bright everyone is a tad too loud and I’m dark and mute (afternoon) the streets are full of ghosts strange faces leering at me as I pick up my pace the music isn’t enough to keep me safe and I’m small and terrified (evening) putting together dinner is much too difficult the knives in the sink are too sharp the stove is too hot and I want to cut and burn (night) playing connect the dots with the bumps on my ceiling with your favorite song on repeat till its words are tattooed on the back of my lids and I cry myself back to sleep (dawn) you have become a permanent feature in my nightmares I wake up with one hand on the phone, dialing your number my throat dry, my arms shaking you’ve taken everything away again

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to dad (1953–2013) we never had much to say to each other we were far too much alike, far too stubborn to listen I have spent months trying to find you in the empty streets of new york, and I found you in early morning abu dhabi— when a black car that looked like yours passed me by, and I thought dad, oceans had separated us, now life and death is between us I tried to find you in the songs you loved, the perfumes you wore, and I found you in an early morning cigarette break and a black car that you would’ve loved I thought I would never get my goodbye not in new york, on the long nights when I would listen to your songs and write angry letters to you not here, on the long nights when my mother would tell me stories about you but I found you in the early morning breeze and a black car you would’ve loved.

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DNA the DNA for hangovers laid dormant every other generation activated by this rebel offspring symptomatic of deviant behavior and random violent outbursts this insanity is hereditary encoded in our protein nucleus cell by cell, stacked one over the other the on switch flipped up to haunt the recesses of our genetically fuelled intelligence our chemically imbalanced brain our overworked organs and phantom limbs we lie about words we pick up and carry the burden of we yawn through this microbes class about cheese and feet and the cancer that killed my father

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typewriter musings #2 sometime ago she fell through the mirror

no one knew where to look

she’s your reflection that strange glimmer isn’t yours the shift out of the corner of your eye

is her still trying to get out

she can see you making love

she has notes and pities your poor girlfriend

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MY FRIEND WHO ROBBED A BANK: A REAL LIFE STORY

I WAS IN MAINE WITH MY DAUGHTER, rescuing her car. We settled into a Super Eight near the service station that towed it in, and I called my wife.

“Are you sitting down?” she asked. “I was just about to call you.”

The tone of her two clichés implied surprising news, not a tragedy, but I did sit down.

“Mike robbed a bank,” she said.

“What?”

“Mike. Robbed. A. Bank.” she repeated.

I tried to place the Mike in my life she might be talking about.

“Michael?”

“Yes.” She was one of three people who called him “Mike.” Before I could ask for more details she said: “He went into the Key West Federal Credit Union to make a car payment, but instead of giving them the money, he asked for some.”

“How much?”

“He slipped the teller a note and got away with an undisclosed amount of cash.”

“Damn.”

“That night he called for a taxi, a dozen times. He tipped the drivers fifty to a hundred dollars on ten and twenty-dollar fares.”

“Where did they take him?”

“They just drove him around town. A city worker claimed that a man who looked liked Mike was observed burning something in a barbecue grill at Monroe Beach.”

“Isn’t that what you typically do in a barbecue? If it was Michael, it was a fat rib eye, not a pile a cash.”

“A tourist said she saw a man at the post office, who fit Mike’s

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description, whistling and exaggerating his gestures, as he addressed, weighed, stamped and stuffed several thick padded envelopes into the out-of-town mail slot.

“Nothing else?”

“A kid who delivered newspapers seemed sure it was Mike he had seen, hiding something in the trees and bushes around the cemetery.

“That sounds like Michael.”

“It all does,” she said, “but nothing, not a penny, has turned up.

“Where is he?”

“In jail.”

“Key West?”

“Stock Island. He surrendered to the Key West police on Friday,” she said, with a hint of defeat in her voice. “He was waiting in line at the Quick Mart on White Street when two cops walked in to order sandwiches. He went up to them and confessed that he had robbed a bank and felt really bad about it.”

“That doesn’t sound like Michael,” was all I could muster, remembering several occasions when Michael had expressed a disquieting interest in robbing a bank. “A socially conscious crime,” he had said. “No one gets hurt except the banks and the insurance companies—the archenemies of the poor. It’s for the cause, dude.”

It was ironic and sad to discover that Michael remembered little of what happened that day. The good news he had called about earlier that month with regard to his treatment paled in the light of what my wife just told me. There’s no getting away from our past, ever, and Michael’s was relentless.

Six months before, with a cirrhotic liver functioning at only fifteen percent of its capacity, weakened further by Acute Hepatitis C, Michael applied for a transplant against any decent odds of getting one. Admitting he’d been a drinker and cocaine user didn’t help his

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chances, but he’d been clean for a year and was determined, at least in his mind, to stay that way. A gambler, he was aware of his odds; he had nothing to lose and everything to gain. We encouraged him, and wanted to believe he was a contender too.

BEFORE YOU QUALIFY to stand on the liver line, there’s months of testing, screenings and evaluations, because livers are in short supply, and the demand is high. When one comes on the market and your number is called, all bids are in, and you have to move fast. A liver has a short life span between bodies. Michael was approved and issued a beeper. A stunt pilot he was friendly with agreed to fly him to Miami in an open cockpit biplane when the whistle blew.

Everything was in place; it was a waiting game. This was a month before the bank teller who knew Michael by name from years of long and short-term loan payments, smiled when he handed her a note. She grew serious, I imagine, when he apologized and told her to please take it seriously. He didn’t wink at her as he normally did, and had something concealed under a handkerchief.

“My other hand,” he told me over the phone, months later.

“Be careful what you say,” I reminded him. “You’re on a pay phone, and you’re in jail.”

“It’s the truth,” he said. “There’s nothing to hide anymore. Yes, I was going to blow her away with my forefinger.”

MICHAEL KNEW MOST EVERYONE in Key West, or they knew of him. He was a dear friend of mine—when he wasn’t drinking. It was not unconditional love. When he drank, I didn’t want to be around him. You couldn’t know Michael and not have a memory of at least once when he really pissed you off, or made you laugh so hard you nearly pissed your pants. In his late fifties, he was well-read

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and well-traveled and an extraordinary craftsman. He could fix anything and sail anything, and he wrote beautifully. The houseboat he designed and built was a jewel. The way he tied up his boat, maintained his steak skillet, and sharpened his knives—brought a measure of art to everything he did. Michael was sophisticated and street savvy, but he was still a boy, reluctant to grow up.

Jung used the term puer aeternus, eternal youth, for men like Michael—a brilliant adult male, with an adolescent way of doing things. Like Peter Pan, he was loath to accept adult responsibility.

It was not uncommon at his small house on Canfield Lane, to have the kids come by and call from the gate: “Hey Michael, can you come out and play?”

He didn’t play by society’s rules though, nor could he subscribe to the recognizable signatures of mature behavior. This set him apart. He had worked as a shepherd, living by himself from May till August in the mountains of Idaho; hunted crocodiles in Darwin, Australia, in a flat-bottomed boat, alone at night. Michael made several Pacific passages on a large catamaran, and sailing single-handed from New Zealand to New Caledonia he ran aground on a reef. After twenty-four hours floating in a half-inflated inner tube, he washed ashore on an island settled by a shipwrecked crew and its passengers a hundred and fifty years before. Michael was fond of quoting Marlow from Heart of Darkness: “We live as we dream, alone.” It was never Michael’s intention to take anyone down with him.

OUR FRIENDSHIP WAS A RIDDLE of opposites attracting each other during a reckless time in the late seventies. Ours lives were like stories we were acting in, until things became decidedly real. I was on a run of some appalling decisions, and Michael was in the same race. When the time came to stand back and take stock of

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our indiscretions, we went our separate ways to figure out how to do that, but we remained friends and stayed in touch. In that madness, we both began to write.

Michael was a devoted reader of the crime page in the Key West Citizen and had gone back and collected the most bizarre and hilarious articles he could find since the paper’s inception. He had this idea of editing them under one cover in a book titled—All the Crime That’s Fit to Laugh At. Was he aware that he became one of those stories when he robbed that bank? I asked myself that question when I later read his obituary, and began to suspect that Michael may have planned the whole thing as the ending of a life he knew a liver couldn’t save. But you can’t discount the brain fog, or PSE, Portal Systemic Encephalopathy. Acute liver dysfunction causes toxins like ammonia to remain in the blood, spinal fluid and the brain, producing severe mood swings and affecting a patient’s equilibrium, ability to concentrate, and in some cases, judgment.

Either way, he had reached that point of no return, for there is that moment when redemption as we know it, has no meaning anymore.

Paul Simon nailed it: You’re simply tumbling into Graceland.

When I spoke with him in jail, I told him he finally got what every writer dreams of, but will rarely go to such extremes to get.

“That’s right,” he stopped me before I could finish, “three squares a day, a decent medical plan, and not having to wake up and go to work.” He had an idea for a novel set within the sub-culture of prison infirmaries, and he asked if I could send him some lined paper, a dictionary, and a pair of socks. His feet were cold.

I had taken some photos of Michael back in October of that year and when I sent them to him, before any of this happened, he threw them in the garbage telling his girlfriend, Linus: “Don’t think these are going to be the last pictures anyone takes of me, okay?”

He was right, intuiting his own mug shots.

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After having his charges dropped by the state of Florida and picked up by the Federal Government, a sympathetic prosecutor recommended that he be released from jail on his own recognizance. A few days after he got home, he began to bleed internally.

With Linus by his side, my friend who robbed a bank died in a Miami hospital, and someone moved ahead on the transplant line.

Michael has appeared in many of my stories, in a variety of disguises and locales. His was the sort of life you can’t sum up in one book; an anti-hero who allowed me to explore freely the complexity of the human spirit, and the gray areas we have little tolerance for outside the pages of fiction. You see, Michael would not let go of that mischievous boyishness, that confusing, carefree, passion-driven time of adolescence that most of us are reluctant to give up. But then of course we do, knowing that our lives will never be the same again, and wishing that wasn’t so.

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ONCE I TOOK A PHOTOGRAPH ON THE WAY BACK TO PARADISE I often find inspiration for my stories in the newspaper, in conversations I overhear, in the faces and in the lives of others, and in my own life. Sometimes I find stories in photographs. This story was inspired by a photo that Joanne took back in 1980.

ONCE I TOOK A PHOTO of my daughter, Rose, standing on the side of the Florida Turnpike. She was six, and we were coming back from seeing Zeb, her father, my ex-husband, who was in prison in Tallahassee. We had spent the night at a migrant’s motel near Okeechobee. My credit cards were maxed, and I had only enough cash left for something to eat and the gas we needed to get back to Key West. It was dark when we left that morning, and I drove fast for a hundred miles, as if the small, slender Indian woman who ran the motel might chase us for the twenty dollars and change I owed her. “I’ll send it to her,” I told Rose.

“As soon as we get home?”

“Yes.” “You have their address?”

“Of course,” I answered, handing her the business card I had slipped into my bag when we checked in, as if it were part of the plan. She looked at it, and I saw her squint trying to make sense of it all.

“Okay, good,” she said.

THE LAST REST AREA WE PASSED was closed for repairs, and Rose begged me to stop. I pulled into the breakdown lane so she could go off into the woods and pee. She wasn’t too keen on that

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as a rule, so I knew she was out of options. It was dawn. Still cool. I took out my camera and checked it for film. Last frame, maybe two.

I cleaned the lens.

“Come with me mom,” she said through the car window.

“Go on, you’ll be fine. I’ll be right here.”

She walked off reluctantly. I put the camera around my neck, got out of the car and lit a cigarette. Rose stopped and turned, twenty feet from the car. She was barefoot, and with one hand she held LuLu, her baby doll, tight to her chest. There was a tissue crumpled in her other hand.

“Why don’t you leave LuLu with me?”

“I want to take her,” she said.

“Okay.”

Just then the sun punched through the haze and through the trees, and blew out the road behind her. Her eyes for that moment were my mother’s eyes and mine, intertwined with our difficulties, and the fragility that marked my relationship with my mother until she died, and with her death, the chance to ever change things between us. I opened the shutter once on a long exposure. I had no desire to confront that sadness in an image of Rose ever again, but I needed it then. I needed it to remind me. Rose hesitated then stepped off the road into the grass and tiptoed towards the woods to keep the dew off her ankles.

“A snake, a snake!” she screamed, and then turned and ran toward me, grabbing me about the legs.

Every few minutes a car passed. She wouldn’t let go, and I stroked her hair, then I felt something wet where her body pressed against me.

“I’m sorry mom. I really had to go and I ... I got scared.”

“It’s okay,” I told her.

“I won’t be scared anymore.”

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“Don’t worry about scared, sweetheart,” I said, the two us clinging to each other on the gravel shoulder of a highway somewhere in South Central Florida, “We’re all scared of something. Everyone one of us is.”

“Are you?”

“Yes, I am.”

She looked up at me, and I was glad she didn’t ask me to explain.

We walked back to the car, and I opened the passenger door so I could take off her wet pants. She stood there half naked and put her hands on my shoulders, and I dried her off and helped dress her like I did only two years before. Soon we were laughing.

“Let’s go,” I said and kissed her forehead.

Rose got in and closed he door. She laid down on the seat and rested her head in my lap. Soon she was sleeping with her doll under her arm. An hour later she opened her eyes. It’s funny how a mother knows things like that without even looking.

“Don’t forget, mom, you have to send that woman the money we owe her.”

“As soon as we get home, I’ll write her a check,” I assured her, though I had no money in the bank, and it would be another five days before I got paid from my job at the Half Shell Raw Bar. “I’ll add in a little something for the worry it might have caused her.”

“That’s a good idea,” she said, and the voice of my conscience went back to sleep.

JUST OUTSIDE OF HOMESTEAD a state trooper pulled us over, and I watched him adjust his hat and sunglasses in the side view mirror as he walked toward our car. It was a slow, uneasy walk and I saw that he stopped and looked at the back of my car. He came up to the window and keeping some distance from the door, he bent

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down and said: “You’ve got a brake light out young lady.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Hard to know ya’ got a brake light out ’less someone tells ya’.

Get it fixed, okay darlin’,” he said taking off his glasses. His eyes were blue. He was not a young man.

“Sure. I will. Thanks, officer.”

“I won’t write it up, but get it fixed, okay?”

“You have my word.”

He tipped his hat, and at the moment he turned to leave, Rose woke up. All she saw was his pistol.

“We’re going to send her a check,” she hollered kneeling up on the seat. “My mom said we’re going to send it, and even a little more as soon as we get home.”

“Rose, honey. It’s okay.” I said. “It’s our brake light, sweetheart.

That’s all. The officer here was just letting me know so we could get it fixed.”

The officer bent down and took off his glasses again. He and Rose faced each other.

“Where are you goin’ Rose?” he asked.

“Home.”

I decided to let them talk.

“Where’s home, honey?”

“Key West.”

“You like it there?”

“Yea, it’s nice. “ “A little bit of paradise from what I’ve seen of it. Where you coming from?” he asked.

I could hear Rose hesitate. “I went to visit my, dad.”

I waited for her to say more, but she left it at that.

“Now what lady is it you were talkin’ about, Rose?”

I felt her hand slip into mine.

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“The lady at the motel. We just didn’t have enough money with us. That’s why we left so early.”

“I see,” he said, and never took his eyes off of her. “Well, I’m sure your mommy’s goin’ to take care of that honey,” he said.

“She will.” I could feel her squeeze my hand. “Right, mom?”

“Of course, sweetheart,” I said and my face felt warm. My eyes held the weight of every bad decision I’d ever made, and the love I felt for Rose at that moment made the burden of those memories all the more difficult to stack up and hold.

“I don’t doubt it, Rose,” he said, and I felt his hand move to my forearm, which was resting in the open window. “Ya’ll be careful.

Drive safe on your way back to paradise, okay?”

He was looking at me by then.

“I will.”

“I don’t see much of the promised land from my perspective,” he said, patting my arm. “But I keep lookin’ for it.”

“You gave me a glimpse of it,” I said, and he lifted his hand away.

I hesitated, and then asked: “Do you mind if I take your picture? I think I have one frame left.”

“Sorry, miss, it’s against regulations.”

“Of course. I understand.”

“Wish I could oblige you.”

“Actually, you already have. Thank you.”

We looked at each other for a moment, and he stepped back.

“There’s weather comin’ in from the north. You best be goin’.”

I nodded and pulled out, watching him stand there, growing smaller and smaller in the side mirror. Resting the camera on the window frame, I aimed it at the mirror with one eye on the road.

I was betraying our agreement. When I went to advance the film, there were no shots left. I was glad. At that moment, I felt something from deep inside me just lift away.

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“Is he following us?” Rose asked.

“Yes and no,” I said reaching over and taking her hand. I could see the concern in her eyes. “No silly,” I assured her, “no, he’s not following us. Now go back to sleep.”

“All right,” she said.

After a while I said out loud: “You gotta’ remind me to write that check when we get home, okay, Rose?” But Rose was asleep. Behind us the sky was the color of a bad bruise but it was getting lighter. I made a left off A1A, onto Carlsbad Sound Road, and before the bridge and Alabama Jacks, I pulled over and watched the clouds in the southwest move across the sky and pass in front of the sun. The light kept changing out on the water and in the mangroves. I started to cry, and I kept crying till Rose woke up.

“What’s wrong mom?”

“Nothing sweetheart. I’m happy, that’s all.”

“Then why are you crying?”

“Sometimes the things that make us sad and the things that make us happy ... well Rose, they’re so darn close to each other that we get a little confused and ...”

“Mom, I gotta pee again.”

“We ... we don’t know how to react. We just ...”

“Mom, I gotta go.”

“Go?” “I gotta pee, bad.”

“Me too,” I said, realizing I did, and that Rose wasn’t listening to me.

“Hey,” I said, “Jack’s is just up ahead. Wanna split a fish sandwich and a Coke? We can use the toilet there.”

“Can I bring, LuLu?” “Sure. She doesn’t eat much, does she?

Rose shook her head. Leaning toward her doll, she whispered something.

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“Put on your flip flops, okay?”

“Mom, are you really happy?”

I didn’t say anything as I pulled into the parking lot.

“I hope so,” she said, “because I am, and I don’t want to be happy alone.”

“Happy as I’ve ever been,” I assured her and hid a burst of tears in a laugh.

“Let us pee,” I said, backhanding my eyes, and she followed me into the rest room with LuLu under her arm.

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THREE TRADITIONAL RUSSIAN FAIRY TALES REVISITED TRANSLATED AND ILLUSTRATED

by ANNA KURKOVA

VASELISA PREKRASNAYA, THE LOVELY ONE ONCE UPON A TIME, in a land far away, lived a merchant. He was happily married for twelve years and had one daughter. The girl was such a beauty that she became known as Vaselisa Prekrasnaya— the lovely one. Sorrow comes in uninvited: when the girl was eight her mother fell sick. Before leaving this world she called for Vaselisa, handed her a doll and said: “My love, do not cry for me. I have little time left on this earth. I am leaving you this doll and my blessing. Always keep the doll by your side, but never show it to anyone.

If anything ill happens to you, feed the doll and kindly ask for advice. She will help you.” The mother kissed Vaselisa and soon died.

The merchant wept and grieved for a year and a day and then remarried. He was a man of good character and fine wealth, thus he could have any bride his heart desired. He chose a widow with two daughters of the same age as Vaselisa. The merchant judged that, with the children of her own, she would be a skilled housekeeper and a loving mother. His heart was mistaken. Vaselisa’s radiant beauty became the envy of the new wife and two stepsisters. Every morning the stepmother woke up thinking of new ways to torment the girl with work, in hopes that the hard labor would break her young body and the sun would burn her fair skin.

Vaselisa never complained and completed every task dutifully.

To the stepmother’s astonishment Vaselisa only grew plumper and

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lovelier with each day. Meanwhile the stepmother and two sisters, consumed by black jealousy, were growing thinner and nastier. How could that be? Vaselisa’s little helper, her doll, finished the work for her. Even on the nights when Vaselisa was left hungry, the girl kindly saved a piece of bread for her doll. As the stars appeared in the sky and the house fell quiet, Vaselisa sneaked into a tiny lumber-room, fed the doll and whispered: “My angel, taste this bread and listen to my sorrows. I am an orphan in my own father’s house, and I know no happiness. My wicked stepmother wishes to see me dead.

Teach me what I should do.” The doll consoled Vaselisa: “Be brave and do not let fear nest in your heart. We shall see what tomorrow brings.” Vaselisa cried herself to sleep. In the morning the vegetable garden was rid of weeds, the cabbage patch was well watered, the wood chopped, water brought from the well into the house, and the brick stove stoked. The little helper had worked all night.

In a few years time Vaselisa became a fine young woman, graceful as a swan. Every bachelor in the village tried his luck requesting her hand in marriage, while the mean stepsisters were ignored. The stepmother was furious. She declared: “Vaselisa is the youngest sister. It is unheard of for the youngest to wed before the older sisters. Get out of my house!” Every time suitors left empty-handed, the stepmother beat and cursed Vaselisa.

One day the merchant had to sail to a faraway land to find new trade partners. The stepmother decided to move to a smaller house on the edge of an old forest. In the darkest corner of that forest stood a small wooden hut on chicken feet. In that hut lived Baba Yaga. The witch caught and ate any poor soul who was lost in the forest. Hoping to get rid of the girl, the stepmother often sent Vaselisa to gather firewood or pick berries in the forest. However, the girl returned home safely every time, because the doll patiently guided her way.

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Autumn came. Leaves turned golden and red, cold winds started to blow, and rain poured from the gray gloomy skies. One evening the stepmother gave each of the girls a task: one sister had to weave lace, another knit stockings and Vaselisa was to spin wool.

Before going to bed the stepmother extinguished every light in the house except for a single light where the girls were working. After an hour one of the stepdaughters leaned to the light pretending to fix it, but instead she put it out, just as the stepmother had secretly ordered.

“What are we going to do?” whined the two sisters. “Our work is unfinished. Someone has to go to Baba-Yaga and ask for some light.”

The sister who was weaving lace protested: “I do not need to go, for I have moonlight reflecting from my weaving pins.”

The other stepsister yelled: “Me too, my knitting needles reflect enough light.”

“You will go get us light,” yelled the two, and then kicked Vaselisa out of the house.

Vaselisa sat on the ground, took a slice of rye bread from her pocket and burst into tears. She turned to the doll: “You were a good friend to me and helped me many times, but this time I may not get away alive. I am headed to Baba Yaga to ask for a spark to light our house. I fear Baba Yaga will eat me.”

The doll finished eating and said: “As long as I am in your pocket, no harm will come to you.” Vaselisa crossed herself, murmured a prayer, and stepped into the dark forest. Suddenly a snow-white rider crossed her path. He was dressed in all white with a white horse and white harness. As he passed the skies got brighter.

Vaselisa kept going. Suddenly a red rider passed her on the left. His horse was blood-red with a red harness. As soon as he appeared, the sun lit up in the sky.

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After walking a whole day and an entire night Vaselisa reached the hut, which was propped up on chicken legs and slowly swayed from side to side. The fence around the hut was made of human bones decorated with dried skulls. Instead of doors there were human legs, instead of locks—human hands and mouths with sharp teeth. Vaselisa stood there terrified and unable to move. Suddenly, a third rider appeared: dressed all in black, on a black horse. The horse jumped over the fence and completely dissolved in the air.

The night fell. The darkness did not last; the skulls’ eye sockets lit up.

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Baba Yaga emerged from the forest in her flying wooden mortar with a pestle. The old witch had a long crooked nose and a wicked grin on her face. She turned around in the air and exclaimed: “I smell a Russian soul! Show yourself.” Vaselisa stepped out from the shadow and bowed to the ground: “Kind grandmother, my name is Vaselisa. My stepsisters sent me to request a single spark of fire from you.” Baba Yaga nodded: “You will have to stay here and serve me. If you work well I will thank you with a fire. If you work poorly, I will eat you.”

Together Vaselisa and her doll worked hard all day long. The girl swept the yard; scrubbed the hut clean; sorted through an entire bushel of wheat, picking out the rotten grains; and prepared dinner.

Vaselisa made enough borscht, cutlets, pies, pancakes and meat dumplings to feed ten people. Upon her return Baba Yaga was disappointed because she found not a single fault in Vaselisa’s work.

She said: “Now Vaselisa, why do you stand here silent as if you were mute?”

“I dare not to speak, but if you would allow me I have some questions to ask you.”

“Ask, child, but remember, not every question has a kind answer: the more you know, the faster you age.”

“Who are the three riders that I saw on the way to here?”

“Those are my loyal servants: the Bright Day, the Red Sun, and the Dark Night.” Baba Yaga paused: “Now is my turn to ask questions. How did you manage to complete all the work on time?”

Vaselisa smiled: “My mother’s blessing helped me.”

Baba Yaga’s face went gray: “Get out at once, blessed child. I have no need for blessed souls in here!”

She kicked Vaselisa outside, handed her a skull and said: “You came here for the light. You can have it.”

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Vaselisa took the skull and ran back home as fast as her feet could carry her. As she was approaching her house the sun was already high in the sky and she wanted to throw away the light. Suddenly, a voice from inside the skull warned her: “Take me home with you!” Vaselisa obeyed. It turned out that since Vaselisa’s departure no light would burn inside her house. Vaselisa presented the skull, but the light from it burnt the stepmother and her daughters. Everywhere they went the light followed them, and by the next morning the three had turned into coals. Only Vaselisa was left unharmed.

The girl took her doll, left the house and made her way out to the capital. She lived with a kind old woman and spun wool all winter.

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When the spring came there was enough fine yarn to begin weaving fabric. When the work was finished, she asked the old woman to sell the delicate fabric and take the money in exchange for her kindness and hospitality. The old woman objected: “This material is too precious, as if it is made for a tsar.” The old woman took the fabric and went straight to the royal palace. There, the tsar liked the textile, and paid her handsomely. He then demanded that the same skillful artisan that had spun the wool use it to tailor his royal clothes. Vaselisa worked until her hands went numb and before long she finished twelve splendid shirts.

The tsar was so impressed with the work that he wished to thank the tailor in person. He came to Vaselisa’s home and bowed to the ground. When Vaselisa appeared before his eyes, his heart skipped a beat. He said: “I have never seen a maiden more fair and gifted than you. Would you be my lovely wife?” The two were engaged the same day. Soon thereafter Vaselisa’s father returned from his voyage and rejoiced at his daughter’s good fortune. Vaselisa invited the old woman to live with her in the palace and always carried the doll in her pocket for the rest of her long happy life.

ELENA PREMUDRAYA, ELENA THE WISE A LONG TIME AGO, in a faraway kingdom, lived a tsar. That tsar had a fine army. Among the ranks of the army a soldier named Ivan was doing his service—he was a good youth, indeed a fine fellow.

The tsar took note of Ivan and took a particular fancy to him. For this reason, Ivan moved up in rank faster than his comrades. In a short time, Ivan became a Colonel. Ivan, meaning no ill, took pride in his goodness and service to the tsar. It is said, however, where happiness emerges, there envy is born. Ivan’s chiefs grew jealous of

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his success. A black jealousy, darker than the feathers on a raven, settled in their hearts. They grumbled: “Why did we sweat blood for thirty years, while Ivan does not have to move a finger?”

The army commanders settled on a devious plan—to rid themselves of him, before he drove them out of their comfort. Now unified in their malcontent, the high generals and boyars went out to the sea and took our Ivan along with them. Wind filled the sails and the company sailed all day and into the evening, until the stars and the moon came out. Ivan got tired, found a quiet corner and fell asleep. The generals and boyars were awaiting just such an opportunity. They put sleeping Ivan onto a dinghy and let it drift with the current while the ship turned back to the shore. Soon after their departure, heavy clouds filled the sky, lightning struck, while the waves grew larger and a big storm brewed. Ivan, all the while unawares, slept soundly through the rain and the noise as the dinghy rocked in the waves. In time the little boat reached an unknown island far away. The moment the nose of the boat dug into the white sand, Ivan woke from his sleep. He looked around. He saw a raging sea and no sight of the tsar’s ship.

He was deeply saddened by what he saw: “It is clear as day that our ship was smashed in a storm and all my companions have drowned. Thank God I am still alive!” Ivan quickly got out of the boat and set out to explore the island. He looked in the hills, the forest and the seashore: complete silence filled the air. No wild beast, no fast flying bird, no man nor woman lived on the island.

Perhaps a long time passed on that island, or it may have been but a short time—but eventually Ivan found a tunnel leading deep underground. He bravely went down the tunnel through a dark abyss into a subterraneous kingdom. In the darkness Ivan saw the snowwhite walls of a colossal palace. He walked inside and checked through chamber after chamber until he stumbled upon a sleeping

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serpent. Indeed it was this six-headed snake, with glittering eyes, that was the tsar of that kingdom. Next to the monster, on the floor, lay a massive book. Ivan opened the book and began reading until he found a page where the rules of the kingdom were marked. The book stated: “no present tsar may father a tsar king, only a tsaritsa can give birth to a tsar.� Ivan took a knife out of his pocket and scraped those words from the book. Instead he wrote that a tsaritsa may not give birth to a tsar, only a tsar has such power.

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Soon the six-headed serpent began tossing and turning restlessly and all of a sudden passed gas so loudly that he woke himself up. Ivan, acting quickly, gasped: “Dear father tsar, it is the time for you to get up!” The serpent heard a human voice, turned all six heads to Ivan and roared: “Where do you come from and how did you get here? In all my thousand years governing the island I have not seen a single man here.” Ivan replied: “What do you mean? I am your natal son. As you rolled over in your sleep I popped out …”

The serpent was unconvinced: “Let me consult the book whether a tsar may father a tsar.” The six-headed serpent opened the giant book and read the rules that Ivan changed earlier. The serpent exclaimed: “The truth is on your side, my son!” He took Ivan and led him around the palace showing every secret room, chamber and larder. There were uncountable riches in that palace and Ivan, with the serpent, lived in peace and plenty.

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PERHAPS A LONG TIME PASSED as such, or it may have been but a short time, and the six-headed serpent tsar told Ivan: “Beloved son, here are the keys for every lock in my kingdom. You can enter any door you please with a single exception. I forbid you to go to one chamber that has two locks on the door: a golden and a silver one. The serpent left Ivan all alone on the island. Now surely several years had gone by, and Ivan, growing weary and lonely, was tempted by fate. One night while wandering the palace he found the forbidden door. The good youth could not endure the mystery, his hand reached out for the keys and before he knew it Ivan opened both the golden and the silver locks and pushed a heavy oak door.

In that room, were two fair maidens with iron shackles attached to their feet. One of the girls was a tsarevna—Elena Premudraya, the wisest queen who ever lived. The other girl was her loyal maid. The pair had wings on their backs—gold wings for the tsarevna and silver for her maid. Elena Premudraya pleaded with Ivan for a single glass of spring water to quench her thirst. Struck by the unspeakable beauty, Ivan forgot himself, and his promise to the serpent and poured two glasses of water. As soon as the water touched their lips their heavy shackles fell to the floor, their irons melted, and newly formed wings started clapping as the maidens turned into birds and flew away through an open window. Here Ivan realized his mistake, and locked the empty chamber. He sat on the porch with his head hung low, bemoaning his foolhardiness.

All of a sudden the wind picked up, a storm came and the six-headed serpent came back. As Ivan broke the news the monster exploded with fury. He heated a metal rod until it was red and smashed Ivan thrice across the back. “Your luck is in that you are my flesh and blood! Else, I would devour you alive on this very spot.” As soon as his body healed, Ivan begged for permission to go out and find Elena. The serpent objected: “You are nothing but

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a pup. I was searching for her for thirty-three years, and in a mere moment you have robbed me of her.”

Yet, Ivan was persistent. In the end the serpent agreed. “Do as you please, my son. Take this flying carpet, for it will take you wherever you want to go. Yet, I pity you. You should know that Elena is too cunning for you—she will trick you, and have you circled around her finger.”

Ivan sat on the magic carpet, got in the air and in a blink of an eye he was in a magnificent garden far away. There was no sun in the sky or wind in the air, yet it was bright and peaceful as if time had stopped. Ivan came to the edge of a pond, sat under a green willow and for a while watched silver and golden fishes play in the water. Little time had gone by when Elena Premudraya with her loyal maid appeared. Immediately they shed off the feathery wings, took off brocade and silk gowns, and jumped into the clear waters. Ivan lost no time: he snatched the wings. “Now you are in my hands!” he announced in a loud voice. The fair maidens, startled, turned to the good youth, and prayed and begged to him to let them leave. “My decision is firm and now your wings belong to me.

Besides, Elena Premudraya, I love you more than the sun. I want to take you to my father and mother, and make you my lawful wedded wife.” The maid protested: “My Lord, you may wish to marry the tsarevna, but you do not need me. Give me my silver wings and let me go in peace. Only God knows, maybe in time I will be useful to you.” Ivan judged her words to be fair. He returned the silver wings and the maiden vanished.

Soon thereafter Ivan made a wooden chest, placed the magic wings inside and locked the chest with a heavy iron lock. Together with Elena he traveled over to his native motherland on the flying carpet. Ivan showed his betrothed bride to his dear parents and asked for their blessing to be wed. Ivan asked his mother to look

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after the key to the chest while he was preparing for the ceremony.

When Elena went to get the wedding gown out of the chest, Ivan’s mother handed her the key—without Ivan’s knowledge. Quickly the tsarevna opened the chest, put on the wings, clapped them a few times and disappeared into the clouds. Ivan looked for her all day long asking: “Where is my bride?”

Ivan took a deep breath, said goodbyes to his parents, hopped onto the magic carpet, and headed back to the serpent’s island.

The six-headed serpent laughed as he saw Ivan: “What do you say now? The girl tricked you.”

“You are right—I may have lost this time but I want to try my luck once again. I will go to her kingdom and ask for her hand.”

The serpent mocked Ivan: “What a restless soul you are! You must know that she has a rule: anyone brave enough to ask for her hand will be put to a test. You will have to hide yourself up to three times and if she can find you she will chop off your head. Many noble men came to her full of hope, yet every one of them lost their lives trying to win her heart. This is the fate you want? Yes? Well, listen then, I will give you a flint and steel. Once Elena asks you to hide, make a fire with it and burn some dry reeds. With God’s help something will come out of it.” Ivan took the flint and steel, thanked the serpent and flew away.

Ivan traveled to the end of the earth in search for Elena Premudraya’s kingdom. Soon he saw a beautiful palace radiating light from its walls made of pure silver and gold. A tall gate with sharp iron tips wrapped around the palace. On the spears hung eleven men’s heads. Ivan, the good youth, thought to himself: “Eleven courageous men lost their heads, I fear I will become the twelfth!” He pushed that thought aside, remembering her beauty, and landed on the central square in front of the palace.

Elena greeted him coldly: “I see your life is of no value to you,

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Ivan the colonel. Yet, of course a man who shows no courage, knows no happiness. I dare you to hide from me so that I cannot find you. If you succeed, I will become your loving wife and if you fail, you will pay with your own head. “ Ivan went out into an open field, took out the flint and steel, made a small fire and burnt some reeds. At once a gray-winged eagle appeared and spoke in a human voice. The eagle commanded: “Quickly get on me and hold onto my feathers so you don’t fall down.” The eagle swung his great wings and in a blink of an eye took Ivan above the puffy clouds. Ivan’s heart filled with joy, for such a good hiding place is hard to discover. Meanwhile Elena Premudraya was looking in her mirror. That was no ordinary mirror: it showed the whole universe and whoever looked in its crystal depth immediately knew of anything happening in the whole wide world. It took her no time to see where Ivan was hiding. She laughed: “That is enough! Did you think that you could trick me by burying yourself in the clouds?”

Ivan came back to the ground and once again hit the flint against the steel. This time a giant pike rose from the bottom of the sea.

The fish spoke: “Ivan, climb into my mouth and I will hide you at the bottom of the sea.” Ivan did as he was told and the pike dived with him to the darkest corner of the sea. One glance in the magic mirror and the tsarevna discovered Ivan and shouted: “This time you can not fool me, for I can see you are inside a fish, under the sand, at the bottom of the sea. Come out.” Ivan came back to the palace with his head hung in despair.

Just at that time the very maid that Ivan let escape with her wings was walking down the stairs. She inquired, “Tell me, good youth, what sorrow is eating your heart?” Ivan replied: “These may be my last hours with my head still on my shoulders. If I fail to hide myself from Elena for the third time I am doomed.” She said, “I

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did not forget your kindness. Come with me, I will hide you.” The maiden took Ivan by the hand and secretly took him inside the palace, to Elena’s bedroom. The girl put him behind the magic mirror.

Soon Elena Premudraya came and examined the mirror, but however hard she stared she could not spot Ivan. In anger, the tsarevna hit the mirror and the glass shattered into a thousand little pieces.

Then Ivan, triumphant, appeared in front of her.

A promise is a promise, thus Elena Premudraya took Ivan as her lawful husband. That same day a wedding feast took place. Ivan and Elena lived together for the rest of their lives and cherished one another as the apple of each other’s eyes.

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ALENUSHKA AND HER BROTHER IVANUSHKA ONCE UPON A TIME in a far away land there lived a tsar and a tsaritsa, and God blessed them with two children: a son named Ivanushka and a daughter named Alenushka. After the tsar and tsaritsa’s sudden death, the children were left all alone in this world, and although they came from a royal family, it happened that they were forced to wander like gypsies without a place to sleep at night.

The pair journeyed for many days and after walking countless miles, they felt weary and lonely. It often rained, and when it did, Alenushka said: “Look, dear brother, our parents see our misery and weep from the heavens.” One day as they were walking, the sun was burning especially bright. The pair crossed a wide meadow, where a herd of cows were grazing, and came upon a small pond full of blue water. Little Ivanushka rushed to the pond to quench his thirst. Alenushka forbade him from drinking from the lake. She said: “Do not touch this water, for it is cursed and every unfortunate soul who drinks it will turn into a cow.” Ivanushka obeyed his sister and they kept on walking.

In a few hours they saw a flock of sheep, and next to them ran a stream of crystal clear spring water. The little boy cried: “Sister, I am dying of thirst.” Alenushka shook her head: “Be patient, my love, stay away from the stream, or you will turn into a sheep.”

Ivanushka frowned, but listened to his sister. Next, the two found a fast river and a herd of pigs grazing around it. Again Ivanushka tried to quench his thirst, but Alenushka stopped him, for she knew that the water could turn anyone who drank from the river into a pig.

The day was hot and the road was steep. When Ivanushka noticed a fresh stretch of water on the horizon, he ran forward and gulped it before Alenushka could do anything. A herd of goats were grazing

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nearby, and as soon as the water touched the boy’s lips he turned into a kid himself.

When Alenushka saw this, she fell to the ground and cried bitter tears, and the kid wept with her. After shedding every tear she had Alenushka kissed the billy goat and promised to never leave him.

The girl tied a silk scarf around the goat’s neck and they slowly continued on their way.

After a few days the two of them came to a tsar’s palace. The fawn bounced around the royal gardens ate fresh green grass. The tsar spotted the beautiful maiden in his garden and came out to speak to her. He asked: “ Fair maiden, what family do you come from and what brings you into my lands?” After Alenushka told her

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story to the tsar, he became captivated by the girl’s kind and courageous heart, and resolved to marry her. The same day a lavish wedding feast was thrown where every citizen was a welcome guest.

The newlyweds lived altogether in the palace, and the fawn ate from the same table with them.

One day the tsar left the castle to go hunting in the dark forests of his empire. As soon as he left, an evil sorceress, who craved tsar’s affection, snuck into the castle and put a dark spell on Alenushka. The girl fell ill and grew thinner and paler every hour. The palace grew grim with her: flowers in the garden stopped blossoming, apple trees died and even the grass stopped growing. The tsar came back but soon had to leave again. This time the evil sorceress approached Alenushka’s bed and told her: “I alone know a way to cure your sickness. Trust me, my child, come to the seashore at midnight and drink a little of the water.”

Alenushka believed the witch and when the night fell she made her way to the sea. The sorceress jumped on Alenushka as a wild beast, tied a heavy rock to her neck and pushed the girl into the deep blue sea.

She then assumed the likeness of Alenushka, put on the girl’s dress, and went back to the palace. Upon her return the tsar did not suspect a thing and was delighted to see his dear wife in good health again.

The very next day, as soon as the tsar went hunting, the witch found Ivanushka, and beat him: “I will make a soup made out of you tomorrow!” Once the tsar returned, the disguised witch complained to him that the kid smelled terribly and demanded to butcher the poor little goat. She said: “I am so sick of the stinking fawn; he pains me worse than a fish-bone in a throat.” The tsar felt great pity because he had grown very fond of Ivanushka, yet he did not want to go against his wife. He soon gave in and sent the fawn to the kitchen.

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The sorceress kindled a large fire and put a giant pot to boil, while a butcher sharpened his long knife. Ivanushka hung his head and cried. He went to the tsar and begged to allow him take a walk down to the seashore for the very last time, to drink a little water, and cleanse his innards. The tsar gave his permission, but decided to follow the fawn in secret. Ivanushka ran the shore as fast as he could, sat on the yellow sand and cried out: “Alenushka, who I adore, I beg you, sister, come ashore, Hot flames are burning, Big pots are turning, Sharp knives are ready.

The witch craves to eat My sweet, soft meat.�

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Alenushka heard him and answered from within the river: “Oh brother, you see I am in a watery grave, Of weeds and dark waters forever a slave.

Heavy sands now bury my chest, Murky waters conceal all the rest.”

The tsar was stricken by what he heard. He jumped in the water, swam out to Alenushka, tore the heavy rock off her white chest and pulled the girl’s numb body to the shore. After Alenushka was washed in the spring waters and dressed in fine clothes, she came back to life and told the story of what happened. As the girl smiled every tree and flower bloomed again. Ivanushka was overcome with joy. He flipped over his head thrice and turned back into a boy.

The sorceress did not escape unpunished. She was tied to a horse’s tail and the horse galloped into an open field. Alenushka, Ivanushka, and the tsar were reunited and lived together happily ever after.

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HAMLET/UR-HAMLET Beyond Hamletmachine

by Arianna Stucki

THEATER MITU’S HAMLET/UR-HAMLET was staged at NYU Abu Dhabi’s Black Box Theater and featured seventeen “installations” situated around a central performance space situated in a Plexiglas cube. Upon entering the theatrical space, the audience of Hamlet/Ur-Hamlet was confronted with a statement from the company: “What do we do with all the Hamlets throughout time? We dig them up to look at their bones. They reveal our cycle of life, love, and death. How do we make something that remembers everything? By seeking the harmony of rebellion and the collisions of history. This is a theatrical experience about Hamlet. We are not Hamlet.” There were no chairs in the space, forcing spectators to walk around viewing the installations, until a punk band called The Othermen began to play at the bottom of the cube, summoning the audience to the center of the space to view scenes acted by the cast. This happened four times.

The conclusion of Theater Mitu’s statement, “We are not Hamlet,” alludes to one of the production’s precursors, Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine (1977), which dramatized what one critic calls Hamlet’s intellectual “prevarications, hesitations, and rationalizations in the face of tyranny and terror.”1 Müller’s dense and discontinuous text provokes an inquiry into the failure of intellectual life by reframing Hamlet’s prevarications as the intellectual impotency of the privileged. Like Hamletmachine, Hamlet/Ur-Hamlet studies Hamlet’s prevarications, his indecisions before action, and his process of rationalization. Hamlet/Ur-Hamlet, however, frames Hamlet not only as an individual character, but as a cultural archive that can only be understood through the visceral experience of oppressive rule and fear created by the production’s installations.

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Watch a documentary about the making of Hamlet-Ur Hamlet at https://vimeo.com/128693596 Prevarication, rationalization, and fear of tyranny operate in both Hamletmachine and Hamlet/Ur-Hamlet, but in different ways.

Hamletmachine portrays the absurdity of our inability to do anything about the devastating tyranny and terror of the modern world.

The play presents Hamlet, and by extension the theater itself, as an agent of tyranny: THE ACTOR PLAYING HAMLET: I’m not Hamlet. I don’t take part anymore. ... My drama, if it still would happen, would happen in the time of uprising. ... My place, if my drama would still happen, would be on both sides of the front, between the frontlines, over and above them. I stand in the stench of the crowd and hurl stones at policemen soldiers tanks bullet-proof glass. I look through the

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double doors of bullet-proof glass at the crowd pressing forward and smell the sweat of my fear.2

This passage implies that traditional productions of Hamlet actually have nothing to do with what Hamlet means to us today. Hamlet, Müller’s play suggests, should be about revolution. This assertion indicts every other Hamlet, staged or otherwise, for failing to portray Hamlet’s true dilemma: rebelling against oppression while facing extreme fear.

Hesitations are important in Hamletmachine, a fact made evident in the format of the text, which is sometimes presented in a mixture of regular type, italics, ALL CAPS, or boldface, without designating characters as speakers of specific lines. Here is the opening of the play: I was Hamlet. I stood at the shore and talked with the surf BLABLA, the ruins of Europe in back of me. The bells tolled the state-funeral, murderer and widow a couple, the councillors goose-stepping behind the highranking carcass’ coffin, bawling with badly paid grief WHO IS THE CORPSE IN THE HEARSE/ABOUT WHOM THERE’S SUCH A HUE AND CRY/’TIS THE CORPSE OF A GREAT/GIVER OF ALMS the lane formed by the populace … 3

Hamlet talks to the surf, but by saying, “BLABLA,” he dismisses his own speech as something ultimately insignificant. The text in ALL CAPS after the description of councillors marching in military goose-step behind the coffin dramatizes the irony of mourning the death of a tyrannical ruler, a “great giver of alms,” in a performance of allegiance to fascism. The text in ALL CAPS interrupts the speaker’s sentence, but continues the speakers’s thoughts. Hamlet here deprecates his own thoughts even as he states them. The flow of the text is thus a parody of the mind of the intellectual, which

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is constantly producing ideas that cannot be sustained. Müller’s Hamletmachine captures how Hamlet’s indecisiveness exists in the context of his trying to formulate thoughts, resulting in inaction: a constant state of talking to the waves, while looking behind on the ruins of Europe.

In Müller’s play, Hamlet also uses his personal privilege to rationalize the tyranny and terror he experiences: In the solitude of airports I breathe again I am A privileged person My nausea Is a privilege Protected by torture Barbed wire Prisons4 Hamlet’s privilege is both what gives him awareness and imprisons him. In an allusion to Richard III, Müller’s Hamlet identifies corporatism as devouring individuals with endless desire: “Hail Coca Cola / A kingdom / For a murderer.”5 The text exposes the absurdity of intellectual rationalizations in the face of the devastating wars of the twentieth century, as well as the numbing manipulation by politicians, mass media, and consumerism itself.

In a discussion of Hamlet/Ur-Hamlet at NYU Abu Dhabi’s conference “Shakespeare as Global Cultural Heritage,” director Rubén Polendo described Theater Mitu’s production as an unearthing of many ideas about Hamlet. This image of exhumation resonates with the aims of Hamletmachine, but Theater Mitu’s opening statement suggests that Hamlet/Ur-Hamlet aspires to a broader reach than Müller’s play. In Hamletmachine, the Actor Playing Hamlet states, “I’m not Hamlet.”6 Theater Mitu’s revision—“We are not Hamlet”— frames all Hamlets, including Müller’s, as prevarications of history,

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Installations from Hamlet/Ur-Hamlet

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who lose track of the complexities of their own times. Theater Mitu’s aim is to dig up the layers of meaning attached to Hamlet in order to suggest that reinterpretation of Shakespeare’s play must be an archeological project. In the installation titled “Drawing Hamlet,” actor Justin Nestor, restrained by a bungee cord and harness, tries over and over to turn the pages of a Hamlet comic book, often falling in the process. His reaching is a metaphor for both grasping and not grasping the meaning of Hamlet. The play is as accessible as a comic book, while at the same time always being out of reach.

By presenting Hamlet as both a character and a cultural archive, Hamlet/Ur-Hamlet widens the lens of Hamletmachine, which focuses on European history and intellectual life, to include contemporary references to such diverse cultural icons as Marina Abramović, N’Sync, Frankie Avalon, Night of the Living Dead, film adaptations of Hamlet, the confession of BTK serial killer Denis Raider, and popular YouTube videos. Like Hamletmachine, Hamlet/Ur-Hamlet is centered on hesitation, even in its title. “Ur” means “before,” and “Ur-Hamlet” typically refers to a now-lost precursor play thought to have been authored by Thomas Kyd.7 In Theater Mitu’s production, “Ur-” refers to the moment before Hamlet or, in reality, all of the moments before Hamlet. Hamlet/Ur-Hamlet portrays Hamlet as being in a constant state of creation. The production, therefore, is a moment of hesitation, a moment of thought before the action of examining associations with past Hamlets. This hesitation is a direct response to Hamlet’s iconicity in theater today, which can be its own form of tyranny. Hamlet/Ur-Hamlet makes the play and its titular character what Carol Martin has described as “a global cultural property with which everyone has some familiarity.”8 Unlike both Hamlet and Hamletmachine, Theater Mitu recasts Hamlet’s hesitation as positive. In this production, it is not Hamlet who hesitates, but rather the spectators, in reaction to the company’s proposal

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that we pause to comprehend expanded notions of and associations with Hamlet today.

Hamlet/Ur-Hamlet is similar to Hamletmachine in the way that it depicts rationalization as a reaction to oppression. Rationalization is a way to hide or ignore the reality of intensely oppressive situations. In Hamlet/Ur-Hamlet, the trial of the BTK serial killer, Denis Raider, was replayed by the actors via a verbatim feed of portions of the trial in their ears, which enabled them to mimic Raider’s tone as he calmly, even nonchalantly, describes the murder of entire families. At the same time, as the actors mimic Raider’s testimony, they mirror a televised performance of Frankie Avalon, the popular 1950s singer, whose suave and contained movements create a complete disjunction with the testimony of the murderer. The melding of murderer and teenage idol short-circuits logical reasoning in

The Plexiglas box

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a way that speaks to the acts of killing that are the core of Hamlet.

From this vantage point, the central question of Hamlet is not “to be or not to be,” but rather “to kill or not to kill.” Like Hamlet, audiences often treat Polonius’s death with nonchalance. When Hamlet kills Polonius, he does what most hurts Laertes and Ophelia, and yet he shows no sign of remorse: “This councillor / Is now most still, most secret and most grave / Who was in life a foolish pratting knave. ”9 He speaks calmly and even jokes with the corpse. Frankie Avalon’s movements paired with Raider’s confession of murder forces the audience to confront this same sense of disturbing nonchalance in the face of murder.

Above all, Hamlet/Ur-Hamlet forces hesitation, murder, and existence into a physical space that captures the feelings of tyranny and fear. After viewing the show, several participants at NYUAD’s conference “Shakespeare as Global Cultural Heritage” expressed the discomfort that they felt during the production. Confronting what he called an “infinity of ignorance,” Richard Schechner described Hamlet/Ur-Hamlet as one of the most opaque performances he had ever seen, even though it took place in a transparent box.10 Though there was freedom in choosing exactly what installations one saw and for how long, spectators were actually just walking around in circles. In this random selection of scenes to view, spectators were made to physicalize their own prevarications, hesitations, and rationalizations. The effect was to make desire, tyranny, and terror felt rather than understood. Spectators knew that they were trapped, even as they had the freedom to move in the space.

Theater Mitu’s Hamlet/Ur-Hamlet revises Hamletmachine into something that belongs to everyone and to no one at any given point in history. From this vantage point, Hamlet becomes not an oppressive authority in a theatrical setting, but a personal gateway to cultural, theatrical, and temporal associations. Ultimately, this

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production offers a new understanding of the celebrated timelessness of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and an advance in our understanding of the play’s relevance today.11 Theater Mitu’s Hamlet /Ur-Hamlet was performed at NYU Abu Dhabi, April 16–18, 2015. A short documentary about the making of the production is available at https://vimeo.com/128693596.

NOTES 1 Jonathan Kalb, “On Hamletmachine: Müller and the Shadow of Artaud,” New German Critique 73 (1998): 51.

2 Heiner Müller, Hamletmachine and Other Texts for the Stage. ed. and trans. Carl Weber (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1984), 56.

3 Müller, 53.

4 Müller, 57.

5 Müller, 57.

6 Müller, 56.

7 Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, “Introduction” to Hamlet by William Shakespeare in The Arden Shakespeare: Third Series (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), 44–46.

8 Carol Martin, “Hamlet/Ur-Hamlet.” Shakespeare as Global Cultural Heritage. New York University Abu Dhabi. 19 Apr. 2015.

Conference presentation.

9 Hamlet 3.4.211–13 in The Arden Shakespeare: Third Series.

10 Schechner, Richard. “Hamlet/Ur-Hamlet.” Shakespeare as Cultural Heritage. New York University Abu Dhabi. 19 Apr. 2015.

Conference presentation.

11 This study is deeply indebted to discussions with and advice from Professor Carol Martin.

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BECOMING “HAMLET”

By Aysan Celik

BECOMING “HAMLET”

by Aysan Celik

IN HAMLET/UR-HAMLET, ALL OF THE PERFORMERS whom you see, as well as some designers whom you don’t see, are makers.

We all created everything under the direction of Rubén Polendo.

We went through a couple of years of workshops, experimenting with moments of performance that we now refer to as “autonomous installations,” which are usually led by one artist.

We first experimented with this form in our previous piece, Juárez: A Documentary Mythology. What does it mean? Every artist who may be in the room—actors, designers, director, assistant director, choreographer—creates a moment of performance. They create it from the ground up: text, visual, music, movement. Initially, in Juárez, it was about the actors initiating this work, with other collaborators, such as our sound designer, and our assistant director, and our director Rubén, merging in. We started with a common set of materials and approaches from which to select: text (interviews, in the case of Juárez), visual/music/video references, and performance style/approach. Combining those givens with our own individual taste, references and even personalities—we created something that became a performance event, anywhere from 30 seconds long to several minutes.

In Hamlet/Ur-Hamlet, those installations became richer and more complicated in terms of the aesthetic range and production scale, our evolved sense of risk coupled with more developed and nuanced feedback from the company on each creation, and of course the agency of the audience members. In rehearsal, we vid-

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eo-recorded every single “creation” or “autonomous installation”— we made hundreds. We pulled moments or elements that “worked” and continued revising, or even used each other’s work to build something new. Some installations went in the “YES” pile and ended up in the show just as they were made. Many installations ended up in the “MAYBE” pile—and elements of them got worked into a new piece or were developed and revised over and over again until they became a piece that ended up in the show. Some of the “NO” pile fought its way back.

One of the most fascinating talks I had with Rubén during the Hamlet/Ur-Hamlet process was about what exactly was the measure for judging what “worked” and what did not. I think we’re still figuring this out, but it seemed to us to be a delicate combination of a few things: first, having practically everyone in the company be compelled by the piece in some way; second, knowing instinctively what serves the ethos of the entire show, and what doesn’t. Sometimes we don’t know how or why, but we do. We discover what that ethos is in process, as we share proposals, look at things, react to them, and can then articulate what works and what doesn’t.

It is an incredibly demanding and thrilling practice to make these autonomous installations over and over and over again, to get criticism, to revise, to let go, and then to bring something to fruition.

It feels pretty amazing to make something that compels the entire group—we are all so incredibly different—that it becomes so satisfying to actually engage and move everyone in the group. Another beautiful thing that comes from the the installations: each one has the “feel” of the person who led it, so the pieces are all very different, even though they belong to the same world. I experienced the most delightful and satisfying “growing pains” as an artist in the past four years with this kind of new work we’ve been doing. In the studio we flit back and forth from an instinctive artistic creative

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In the box. Left to right: Scott Spahr, Denis Butkus, Aysan Celik, Justin Nestor, Michael Littig

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“Backlit.” Left to right: Attilio Rigotti, Aysan Celik

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space, to an analytical one where we examine what we’re doing to understand the system or world we are creating. It’s empowering as an actor to have such authorship, to have a voice in this way.

In approaching Hamlet/Ur-Hamlet, I tried to use Shakespeare’s text as an anchor: I tried to find pieces in Hamlet to which I responded. As an actor, being classically trained and having performed Shakespeare quite a bit during my career, I wanted to root myself in the text. But, after listening to Stephen Greenblatt talk about working with the playwright Charles Mee to create a version of Shakespeare’s lost play Cardenio, I now wish that I had pictured Shakespeare in my mind as Chuck. I have worked with him and he is this kind, funny, impish, playful genius—I loved being in a room with him. Chuck makes all of his texts available on his website, so that you can take them and use them however you like. To have imagined Shakespeare as Chuck Mee would have been so freeing!

Instead, I felt this tremendous sense of preciousness, of the un-touchability of the text and of that character, Hamlet. In addition, I was surrounded by men who knew the character Hamlet very well, while I had never worked on him. I got to the place I needed to be eventually. I had to figure out a way to crack the character of Hamlet open in my own way and to have license to respond to it in the way that I ultimately did. I had to play different mental tricks on myself in order to do it. Our approach to the piece initially was that I wouldn’t think about performing a “male” character, that I wouldn’t really focus on performing gender cues. I have done that in the past in some all-female productions.

So, first and foremost, I had to clear that from my mind even the thought that I would be portraying a man. I was simply looking at this character called “Hamlet.”

At the same time, all of us—all of the creators of this piece—

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were looking at the entirety of the text, so I was also looking at the character of Ophelia and the lines she speaks. I was trying to identify the things in the text that resonated with me in terms of gender, so that paradoxically, I was ignoring Hamlet’s gender, but staying attuned to gender more generally. I felt that the best thing I could do for this production was to bring myself and my own experiences completely to the table, which, of course, does include gender.

I remember the evolution of one particular moment. We were rehearsing in the black box for the first time, practicing going from the installations into the Plexiglas box in the center. And I had the impulse to be the one to open the door, as if, by virtue of the idea of my embodying Hamlet—me, as an actor, as a woman—I needed to

Left to right: Denis Butkus, Justin Nestor, Aysan Celik

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go through this ritual in some way. It was a way of creating a small but overarching picture for myself as an actor, through these small tasks.

When I did that, Rubén responded, “I love it, I love it, I love that it’s you opening the door.” I felt this kind of ownership over everything that was happening, even though when I’m in the box, I don’t seem to be in control: things seem to be happening to me. But I wanted to create the sense that I—as both Hamlet and as an actor—am choosing to go through what the audience sees as a loss of control. So that was a really cool discovery.

Here’s something I wouldn’t normally share with an audience: my “actor secret” when I’m opening that door is that I’m actually Ophelia. But in another sense, I’m not: I’m Aysan—a woman, female performer, theater-maker—encountering, interfacing with Hamlet, the human being. Both of those things were happening.

And I did pick the Ophelia monologue from Hamletmachine to use in the installation that I co-created, which we called “Backlit,” in which you saw me from the back, shirtless. In that moment—and in other moments during the production—I was Hamlet and I was Ophelia at the same time.

This piece is adapted from comments delivered during the NYUAD Institute conference “Shakespeare as Global Cultural Heritage” (April 2015).

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UR HAMLET

by Rubén Polendo

I AM FIRST AND FOREMOST A SCIENTIST. I have a graduate degree in biochemistry, and I worked as a biochemist for many years.

Hence my interest in experimentation, my interest in combustions and collisions, and my interest in puzzles and mysteries.

Puzzles and mysteries are not the same thing. In a scientific framework, particularly in biochemistry, there’s a notion that scientists sit in a mystery but investigate puzzles. In other words, a mystery is something that we all understand to be unsolvable, so we can sit in that tension and somehow be at ease. But a puzzle is something that you want to solve and address. I think those ideas have really shaped me as an artist.

It’s also worth noting that I like breaking things. My mother has this very funny story that she always shares with people. In grade school, I was told to build a little toothpick house and bring it to school. I spent all this time building it. And then I broke it and reglued it back together in different pieces. I was so proud of it. I took it to school, and of course I failed the assignment. I got an F. But I remember looking at it and thinking, “But what would it be like to live in this kind of broken-up, insane house.” And my mother, who was always a little apprehensive, asked me, “Why do you make things so hard for yourself?” She still asks me that.

Just like the little kid with that toothpick house, I like breaking Shakespeare. I have no reverence for the words. I want to turn them upside-down. That said, there are plenty of artists on the opposite side of the spectrum—my collaborator Aysan Celik, for exam-

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ple—who have a very different relationship to Shakespeare. Doing Shakespeare by myself—that’s too easy: I would just break it, reglue it, and say, “What do you all think?” What I like is having to collide with a response like Aysan’s, which is essentially, “Wait, don’t break that part, because that’s the part I really want to solve.”

That’s what’s great about Theater Mitu: it’s a spectrum of people, artists, personalities. I was having a conversation with my NYU

Still from a short film by Chani Gatto and Adam Pivirotto about the creation of the creation of Hamlet/Ur-Hamlet Left: Rehearsing in the Plexiglas box. Right: Rubén Polendo

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colleague Una Chaudhuri after one of the performances of Hamlet/ Ur-Hamlet, and she said that in the piece you can feel many heartbeats. I think that’s a beautiful statement, and to me those are the heartbeats of the artists who make up this company. My goal as the director of the production was to nurture those heartbeats and to bring them into juxtaposition, into cacophony, or into harmony. So Hamlet/Ur-Hamlet is indeed co-authored by the company—yes— but not in the sense of, “We agreed on this,” but rather in the sense of placing all of our agreements and disagreements next to one another. It is this arrangement that really represents the spectrum of the company.

After college, I studied abroad and ended up getting myself involved with a group of theater-makers. It completely changed my life. I ended up traveling to India and living there for the better part of a year. That journey enabled me to start crafting a different kind of experimentation, an exploratory procedure that has formed the core of Theater Mitu’s work. When I came back to the U.S., I went through my graduate school program and started investigating directing in a more concrete way. In the middle of that, my company was born. At its center is the idea of experimenting with and attempting to create what we call Whole Theater—a theatrical experience that is rigorously visual, aural, emotional, intellectual and spiritual. All in the same moment.

For us, the question became, “How do you train for that experience?” That started my research, which is to investigate training methods around the world, to investigate how people train their focus, how they train their emotions, how they train their spirit, how they train their physicality. And the company, which is a permanent group of collaborators, came together in an attempt to research that, to codify it into a contemporary training methodology, and then to create work from there. We’ve been able to create two kinds

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of works; explorations of narratives that exist, be it a poem, a play, a musical. Our production of Death of a Salesman in 2011 is an example of engaging with an existing narrative.

The other work kind of work we’ve done has been the creation of non-narrative, conceptual productions, based around a theme or a thematic idea. Hamlet/ Ur-Hamlet is a hybrid of both types of work. Our conception of “ur-” meant trying to investigate not just precursor texts, but rather what you might call “the moment before Hamlet,” the impulses that lead to the play. To investigate that, our production was filled with a range of non-dramatic texts— contemporary poetry, performance art, crime narratives, theoretical texts—that we aligned with the Hamlet narrative. So, for example in one of the installations, a man (played by Justin Nestor) is reaching for a Danish comic adaptation of Hamlet, but he’s restrained by a bungee cord. If you watch the piece for an extended period of time or look at it and then revisit it, you realize that he takes quite a beating. That installation actually came out of looking at the Amleth tale from Scandinavian legend, in which every character is subjected to violence. We took this idea and abstracted it.

Interestingly, both Death of a Salesman in Abu Dhabi and Hamlet/Ur-Hamlet grew out of conversations that the company was having. The first was a conversation that I now call our “negation conversation.” I sat with the company, and as an exercise, we began making a list of all the things that our company doesn’t do and doesn’t like—things we don’t have an affinity for, or have a negative judgment about.

It was a long list. It was a very joyful meeting, filled with laugher, as we went on and on: “Oh, and I hate this.” “Great.” It went on the list. And someone said, “You know what I really hate? You know, I hate Eugene O’Neill. Put him on the list.” Then Arthur Miller came up—and he made it on that list as something Theater Mitu would

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Justin Nestor as Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman (above) and in Hamlet/Ur-Hamlet (below)

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never do. You know, it’s old. It’s stodgy. It has a kind of dust on it that we aren’t interested in. And at the end of that “negation meeting,” I had an immediate realization, so I turned to the company and said, “This list has to be what we do for the next few years. Because if we sit as artists asking our audience to open and engage and grow, then why would we allow ourselves to be on safe territory and say, ‘We don’t grow. We don’t push.’” We all sat there in agreement looking at this list.

In another conversation,I asked every company member what it is that he or she would be most afraid of doing. Justin Nestor, the actor who played Willy Loman in Salesman said, “Oh, I don’t know.

I wish that there was something like Medea for a man. I would totally say that.” And I’d say, “Well, you know, there’s Macbeth.” And he said, “No, that’s not the same.” And then, Aysan Celik, a female actor, said, “I wish there was something like a Hamlet for a woman.”

And I said, “Well, you know, there’s Medea.” And she said, “That’s not the same.”

And then I went to the whole company and said, “I’m going to announce what we’re going to work on this season. It’s Medea.”

And Aysan, said, “Oh?” And then I said, “And after that, Hamlet.”

And, Justin, said, “Oh?” And then I said, “Except that Justin is going to play the role of Medea, and Aysan’s going to be playing the role of Hamlet.” The reaction was excitement—a kind of inspired terror.

By the time we finally reached Hamlet, we were in a moment in our company where we were really challenging the traditional role of the actor in a process. I am not interested in the notion of the actor as an untrustworthy collaborator, someone whom you bring in at the very end of the process. In the most conservative engagement of an actor, they are simply there to interpret words. They have a small orbit of control and opinion, and that’s it. I’m interested in

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the performer being there from the beginning. There are certainly other artists who work in this way, but the actor being present at the very first table of a project continues to be shocking to many theater-makers. With Theater Mitu, we go one step further: we bring in the designers and let them have an equal voice about everything that is being created.

The notion of devising a piece to me is not only about creating something, but also about devising a process. To me, that is where the real experiment happens. With Hamlet/Ur-Hamlet, one of the first interrogations that we had to make had to do with the idea of space. We’ve worked with a set of remarkable Indian artists and collaborators, whose belief system around space is powerful: it’s Vedic and focuses on how different energies affect how you travel through space and how you move in relation to each other. In our global field research, we’re not interested in colonizing or co-opting those specific aesthetics, but rather in allowing the philosophical premises to challenge our own notions and belief systems.

Most people don’t think about the beliefs about theater that they bring with them when they attend a production. The mere fact that we called Hamlet/Ur-Hamlet a “theater piece” meant that the audience members were walking in and looking for their seats. Despite the fact that I’d said at the outset: “You’re going to be walking.”

They would still ask the staff inside, “Are the seats that way?” Because seats are still part of a belief-system about what the event of theater is. Despite all of the great work that has happened to challenge this, the predominant expectation remains the audience in seats and the actors on stage.

We’ve really learned a lot about space from our Indian collaborators. The Vedic architectural premise involves ideas of a calling to witness, which really affected how we engaged the space in the production and how we thought about the flow of people and

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ideas through the space. As a side note, I had the great privilege of watching the production from high above, walking around the catwalk like a crazy person, unbeknownst to the spectators below.

From there I could see the range of audience behaviors. I could see the audience member who went through every installation really quickly, checking them off. I could see the audience member who really visits each one. I could see the person who was trying to figure out, “Did I miss something,” and then backtracked. I could see someone telling another person, “Come see this!” I could see some of the students fascinated by the technologies we were using, spending fifteen minutes at just one of the installations. I thought to myself, “I couldn’t look at that screen for that long!”

What I realized is that our spectators were actually taking control of the space and becoming the authors of what they were witnessing. That was nuts, for me as a director, because I’m usually such a control freak. I just had to trust in both our work and in our audience.

Some of the audience members didn’t have any kind of context for Hamlet. When I think about what the idea of “Global Shakespeare” might mean, I realize that my entry point into Shakespeare is actually not the language, which has always been very inaccessible to me personally. My native tongue is Spanish. I didn’t learn English until I was older. So I have an odd relationship to English, as if I’m hearing it in translation a little bit. So when I see Shakespeare, it’s as if it isn’t quite in my “ear palette” to pick up the nuances of the languages. But then when I study it, when I read it, when I investigate it, I’m consumed by it. Ultimately, what moves me are Shakespeare’s images. Of course, those images come from his language, but for me it’s the images that enable Shakespeare to spark global conversations.

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Michael Littig in Hamlet/Ur-Hamlet

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Why, you might ask, would this Elizabethan man’s work mean anything to a Mexican director working in the Middle East? Perhaps, it’s because the death of a father, which sets Hamlet in motion, is not just Elizabethan. It’s Mexican. It’s Arab. It’s Indian. It’s anyone. In the loss of a young girl’s life due to this madness brought about by love, I can recognize is the fear my father had about his three daughters.

So I think that what is brilliant about Hamlet is actually not Hamlet. It’s actually the human species, and how well the play reflects it. That’s what moves me. So when some suggests to me that in Mexico, in Cairo, in Chile, in the United States, there are people who may not know about Hamlet, I say, “But they do.” They know about the loss of a father. And they know about love.

To have students at NYU Abu Dhabi who don’t “know” Hamlet, who don’t have context for the play, engage in meaningful conversations about the deep themes and core subjects of the play was a very, very moving experience. And some of them “misunderstood” our title, because in texting language “UR” means “you are.” So they kept saying, “Hamlet/You Are Hamlet.”

I love that. Because it’s absolutely true.

This piece is adapted from comments delivered during the NYUAD Institute conference “Shakespeare as Global Cultural Heritage” (April 2015).

HAMLET/UR-HAMLET NYU Abu Dhabi Performing Arts Center, April 16–18, 2015 Conceived and created by Theater Mitu Source text by William Shakespeare Authored by Denis Butkus, Aysan Celik, Jocelyn Clarke, Alex Hawthorn, Lizzy Lee, Michael Littig, Justin Nestor, Candida K Nichols, Rubén Polendo,

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Attilio Rigotti, Scott Spahr Directed by Rubén Polendo Cast: Denis Butkus, Aysan Celik, Michael Littig, Justin Nestor, Attilio Rigotti, Scott Spahr Associate Director: Scott Spahr Lead Sound Designer: Alex Hawthorn Lead Technology Design: Justin Nestor Installations, Additional Technology & Sound: Denis Butkus, Aysan Celik, Alex Hawthorn, Michael Littig, Justin Nestor, Candida K. Nichols, Rubén Polendo, Ellen Reid, Attilio Rigotti, Scott Spahr Lead Architectural Install: Justin Nestor, Rubén Polendo, Walter Ryon, Scott Spahr Original Songs by The Othermen Lead Text Architecture and Dramaturgy: Jocelyn Clarke Additional Text Architecture: Denis Butkus, Aysan Celik, Alex Hawthorn, Michael Littig, Justin Nestor, Candida K. Nichols, Rubén Polendo, Attilio Rigotti, Scott Spahr Stage Management: Lizzy Lee Associate Producer for Theater Mitu: Tyler Penfield Production Manager for NYUAD: Walter Ryon Associate Producer for NYU Abu Dhabi’s Theater Program: Gaar Adams Practical Research and Archive: Kayla Asbell, Denis Butkus, Aysan Celik, Jocelyn Clarke, Adam Cochran, Jef Evans, Alex Hawthorn, Elizabeth Hess, Lizzy Lee, Michael Littig, Justin Nestor, Candida K. Nichols, Rubén Polendo, Ellen Reid, Attilio Rigotti, Gurukkal Sivakumar, Swapna Sivakumar, Scott Spahr, Liam Torres, Thanapol Dtam Virulhakul The performance style and approach was developed by the following performers: Kayla Asbell, Denis Butkus, Aysan Celik, Adam Cochran, Elizabeth Hess, Michael Littig, Justin Nestor, Attilio Rigotti, Gurukkal Sivakumar, Swapna Sivakumar, Scott Spahr, Liam Torres, Thanapol Dtam Virulhakul.

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CONTRIBUTORS Rabha Ashry is an Egyptian poet and freelance writer based in Dubai. She spends most of her time reading, writing, or watching reruns of cancelled TV shows. She is mother to Ganoush the cat.

She can be found on twitter on @rabha_ashry.

Elizabeth L. Bradley is the author, most recently, of New York, a short history of and guide to the city from Reaktion Books, as well as Knickerbocker: The Myth Behind New York, a cultural history of New York’s first mascot that Philip Lopate hailed as a “delightful contribution to urban studies.” She edited the Penguin Classics Editions of Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories and A History of New York, contributed chapters to the Morbid Anatomy Anthology, the Cambridge Companion to the Literature of New York, Exploring Historic Dutch New York, and The Who, The What, and the When: 65 Artists Illustrate the Secret Sidekicks of History, and wrote numerous entries for the Encyclopedia of New York City (Second Edition). Bradley’s work has been featured in Salon, Smithsonian Magazine, The New York Times, Gothamist, Edible Brooklyn, Edible Manhattan, McSweeney’s, and Underwater New York. She is on the editorial board of the New York Observer and consults for the Knickerbocker Hotel in New York City and for Historic Hudson Valley.

Aysan Celik is a founding member of Theater Mitu: 25+ projects as a maker, performer, teacher, composer, or musician. Off-Broadway highlights: The Black Eyed (NYTW), Attempts On Her Life (SoHo

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Rep), Faust (CSC/Target Margin), Pericles (Red Bull), Spinning the Times (59E59). Regional favorites: Bob: A Life in Five Acts (Humana Festival), Antigone (ART), 9 Parts of Desire (ATL). Celik is an Associate Artist of The Civilians, with whom she has performed most recently Paris Commune (BAM, The Public), Be the Death of Me (Irondale), and Let Me Ascertain You (Joe’s Pub). Screen credits include the web series Dog Days, Downsized, and the award-winning films Mr. Lamb and The Brooklyn Heist.

Diana Gluck is an undergraduate student at New York University Abu Dhabi. She is a double major in History and Art, and is often mistaken for an Art History major. She is currently working on undergraduate capstone research projects in her two majors, both of which focus on labor and migration in the United Arab Emirates.

Anna Kurkova was born in Grodno, Belarus in 1994. Kurkova completed BA in Visual Arts with distinction at the New York University Abu Dhabi in 2015. For her final thesis Kurkova translated and illustrated a book of Russian fairytales. She works with acrylic and oil paint on canvas, as well as watercolors and ink on paper. In the past Kurkova completed art projects in Scotland, Italy, Vietnam and the US, and has had work commissioned on an international basis.

She currently lives and works in Abu Dhabi, UAE. Jill Magi is the author of over five books, the most recent of which is LABOR (Nightboat). Other projects include the scholarly monograph Pageviews/Innervisions (Rattapallax), and two e-pamphlets Labor Poetic Labor! Projects 1 and 2 (Essay Press). Jill wrote a weekly commentary for Jacket2 on “a textile poetics,” and her essays have appeared in The Force of What’s Possible: Accessibility

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and the Avant-Garde, The Racial Imaginary, and The Eco-Language Reader. The NYUAD Project Space gallery mounted a solo exhibition of her work in 2015, and she teaches writing through the study of textiles, as well as poetry and art electives at NYUAD. Rubén Polendo is a theater director and the founder and artistic director of the permanent group of collaborators, Theater Mitu. He and his company work towards expanding the definition of theater through experimentation with its form. Polendo and his company research and investigate global performance as a source for their training, work, and methodologies. In addition to his scholarly work, Polendo has written and directed a great many works with his company that have premiered in theaters in New York City and around the world, including: Mansion (Beirut, Lebanon), Black Box (Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia), Visthar (Bangalore, India), Manarat al Saadiyat (UAE), Baruch, New York Theater Workshop, CSV, The Public, INTAR, Blue Light, Lincoln Center, A.C.T., McCarter, The Perseverance, NAATCO, Mark Taper, Alliance, ETC and South Coast Rep. His awards and recognitions include the MAP Fund Grant, the CEC Arts Link Grant, the Rolex Protégé Arts Initiative, Company in Residence at New York Theater Workshop, a New York State Council for the Arts Grant, The Rosenberg Foundation Grant, Alpert Award, Greenwald Foundation Grant and The Mental Insight Foundation Grant, The Watermill Center Resident Artist, and a residency at the Sundance Theater Lab. Slavs and Tatars is an art collective that investigates issues of language, identity, and culture in the area east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China. The collective works across

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disciplines, media, and covers both high and low cultural registers while engaging with the region’s polemics. In Spring 2015, Slavs and Tatars were artists-in-residence at the NYUAD Art Gallery, where they exhibited their show Mirrors for Princes: Both Sides of the Tongue.

Jim Savio has been a member of the writing faculty at NYUAD since September 2012. After more than twenty years of designing, building, and renovating homes, Jim received his MA in Creative Writing at the City College of New York in 1998. From 1999-2011, he taught in the Critical Studies Department, then in The School of Art and Design History and Theory, at Parsons, where he directed the freshman writing program from 2002 to 2005. Jim works primarily in the genres of fiction and essay. His collection of short fiction The Fairy Flag and Other Stories was published by Spuyten Duyvil Press in December 2001. He is currently working on a collection of essays and a novel, and recently completed a multimedia project called Home Sick with his wife, photographer Joanne Savio.

Theater performer, creator, and researcher, Arianna Stucki is an active part of NYU Abu Dhabi’s performing arts community. Arianna is a sophomore majoring in Theater, and plans to continue her studies in both theater performance and theory. Having a deep interest in Shakespeare since she was seven years old, she was thrilled for the opportunity to work closely with Theater Mitu on their recent work, Hamlet/Ur-Hamlet. She has also worked with prominent companies around the world, including Zoukak Theater Company and the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards. She is currently the president of the Shahrzad Storytelling Collective.

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Jason Tougaw is Associate Professor of English at Queens College and The Graduate Center, The City University of New York. He is the author of Strange Cases: The Medical Case History and the British Novel (Routledge) and co-editor, with Nancy K. Miller, of Extremities: Trauma, Testimony, and Community (Illinois). Currently, he finishing two books, a memoir, “The One You Get: Portrait of a Family Organism” (represented by Donadio & Olson), and a monograph, “Touching Brains: Literary Experiments in Twenty-First-Century Neuromania” (to be published by Yale University Press). He blogs about relations between art and science at www.californica.net.

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IMAGE CREDITS Cover and Page 6: “Untitled” by Anna Kurkova. Acrylic on canvas, 110 x 115 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Page 10: “Man showing pointed teeth, Africa, 1947,” photograph

by Jessie Tarbox Beals. American Museum of Natural History Library, Image # 299134. Used by permission of American Museum of Natural History Library.

Page 12: “Sartjee, the Hottentot Venus” by Frederick William Fairholt. New York Public Library, George Arents Collection. UUID: 2bef0230-c601-012f-dc0c-58d385a7bc34. Used by permission of NYPL. Page 15: “Poster advertising one of Karl Hagenbeck’s Sami shows in Hamburg-St. Pauli, 1893–94” by Adolph Friedländer (1851-1904).

Public domain.

Page 18: Photograph of “Nancy Columbia.” Field Museum Library, Image No. 550760017. Used by permission of the Field Museum Library and Getty Images.

Page 22: Photograph of “Geronimo, Seated.” Field Museum Library, Image No. 550758571. By permission of the Field Museum Library and Getty Images.

Pages 26–35: All images courtesy of Jill Magi.

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Page 36: Detail from Love Letters No. 3, woolen yarn, 250 × 250 cm, 2013, by Slavs and Tatars. Courtesy of the artist.

Page 39: Pages from the book Naughty Nasals (2014) by by Slavs and Tatars. Courtesy of the artist.

Page 42: Love Letters No. 3, woolen yarn, 250 × 250 cm, 2013 by Slavs and Tatars. Courtesy of the artist.

Page 49: Hirsute Happily with Hairless (White), dichroic glass, tinned copper, 25 x 10 x 8 cm, 2014; Hirsute Happily with Hairless (Green), dichroic glass, tinned copper, 25 x 10 x 8 cm, 2014. All works by Slavs and Tatars. Courtesy of the artist and Kraupa Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin.

Page 51: Speculum linguarum (installation view), 4 channel sound installation (in Uighur, Turkish, Polish, and German), 16 mirrored plexiglass rahlé with speakers, each 30 x 30 x 50 cm, 2014, by Slavs and Tatars. Courtesy of the artist and Kraupa Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin.

Page 58: Mirrors for Princes, installation view of Sharp Eye (hazel), fibreglass, acrylic paint, polyester resin, 125 x 100 x 100 cm, 2014; Zulf (brunette), oak wood, hair, 82 x 60 x 30 cm, 2014; Sheikha, steel, textile, fans, 125 x 80 x 130 cm, 2014. All works by Slavs and Tatars. Courtesy of the artist and the NYUAD Art Gallery.

Page 61: Mirrors for Princes, installation view of Lektor (speculum linguarum), multi-channel sound installation, mirrored plexiglass, speakers, 2014; Mystical Protest, luminous paint on silk-screened fabric fluorescent lights, 2011; Nose Twister (in the center), veneer,

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faux leather, foam, paint, 2014; Both Sides of the Tongue (English), book, acrylic paint, 21 x 30 x 5 cm, 2015. All works by Slavs and Tatars. Courtesy of the artist and the NYUAD Art Gallery.

Page 64: Detail from a drawing by Kelly Williams. Ink on paper.

Courtesy of the artist.

Page 65: Drawing by Kelly Williams. Ink on paper. Courtesy of the artist.

Page 68: Drawing by Conor Williams. Ink on paper. Courtesy of the artist.

Page 71: Drawing of Maurice Halbwachs by Conor Williams. Ink on paper. Courtesy of the artist.

Page 72: Drawing by Kelly Williams. Ink on paper. Courtesy of the artist.

Page 65: Drawing by Kelly Williams. Courtesy of the artist.

Pages 74–91: Photographs courtesy of Rabha Ashry.

Page 92: Detail from a photograph by Joanne Savio. Courtesy of the artist.

Page 98: Photograph by Jim Savio. Courtesy of the artist.

Page 105: Photograph by Joanne Savio. Courtesy of the artist.

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Pages 106–41: All illustrations watercolor and ink pen on paper by Anna Kurkova. Courtesy of the artist.

Pages 142–71: All images of Hamlet/Ur-Hamlet and Death of Salesman courtesy of Theater Mitu.

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