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DDF News — 26 Apr 2018

Lebanese Lament: Ali Chahrour on how professional Shiite mourning became a political tool

Lebanese Lament: Ali Chahrour on how professional Shiite mourning became a political tool

Keening, the traditional Irish practice of wailing in lamentation at funerals, died out in Ireland around the middle of the last century. The keener, usually a woman (the bean caointe), would cry and wail while rocking back and forth, often kneeling. She would sing words about the deceased, what they meant to their community and their family. It was a cathartic outpouring of emotion, channelled through the cells of the body and through inarticulate sounds, to ease the grief of the bereaved. She would often be paid for her service, though not always in money – sometimes in whiskey or food. It’s thought the tradition died out partly because of the influence of the Catholic church, partly also because some Irish people became embarrassed of this practice that was viewed as ‘primitive’ and curious by outsiders. American tourists would come seeking this unique and ‘weird’ Irish custom. It came to be believed that there was no place for keening in a modern Ireland.

Keening has a cousin in the Arab world, where there is also a tradition of professional mourners. In Shiite culture, it’s a convention that’s only recently on the wane. Lebanese choreographer Ali Charhour brings his 2015 work exploring this fading tradition, Leila's Death, to the festival next month. I spoke to Ali this afternoon over Skype – he in his home in Beirut, me in mine in Dublin. Contemporary dance is still a curiosity in Lebanon – there are no schools or colleges devoted to its study and the religious context is not particularly sympathetic to any art that deals with questions of politics or faith.

“It’s not easy to be a choreographer or a dancer in Beirut, so if you’re not doing it from a real need to go on stage and say something about this context, there’s no sense in entering the battle. We have a lot of religious sects that can decide to forbid you to perform. We have a system of censorship. If you’re talking about religion or politics in your show, they can come and stop the show and take you to jail. You’re supposed to make an application when putting on a show, but I have never applied and I will never apply because I don’t believe in censorship in dance, or in art.”

Ali is interested in making work that reflects the social and physical experience of living in Beirut, which of course takes in the political and religious context. Leila’s Death is the second part in a trilogy exploring funeral rituals in Arab culture. Professional mourners are mainly women – they research the lives of the deceased so they can write or select poems appropriate to them. Like the keener in Irish culture, they wail and sing at funerals for a fee – it’s their job. The Leila of the title in Ali’s piece is a former professional mourner who made her living by it – she is also the central performer in the show itself. The recent decline in the tradition has meant Leila found herself jobless. It seems though that the practice of vocal lamentation has not died out altogether, but been replaced by lamentation of a different kind.

“There are very few mourners left, they don’t really have jobs. It’s very linked to the relationship between politics and religion here. The mourner used to research the deceased person, write poems about them, talk about them and their history at the funeral, really insist on the value of the person themselves. We don’t have this any more. We have what I call ‘the political mourner’, a person who comes to the funeral and tells stories of religious figures instead. So now you have to mourn your own dead person through the tragedy of a religious figure. And it’s all towards trying to make people excited to go and fight for their religion, die for these religious figures.”

When the idea of appearing on stage was proposed to Leila, she was ‘very excited’ at the chance to once again practice her work, the tradition that she loved. But Ali and the rest of the team were careful to introduce her slowly and thoroughly to a context that was very different from her previous one. Leila had never been in a theatre before, never seen a play or a piece of dance before. She didn’t have a passport and had never travelled outside the country (the show has toured around Europe). Bringing her into this new context with open eyes was important for the choreographer, to allow the team and Leila to be able to work collaboratively on the transformation of the tradition.

“We’re proposing this not as a ritual, not as a tradition, but as contemporary material that we’re dealing with now. What she’s doing in the theatre is not the same as what she was doing in life. I think if there is a similarity it’s in the idea of representation. For me, she’s a professional actor. If you’re not crying in front of her, she will do her best to make you sad and cry.”

As a choreographer, Ali is interested in working with everyday gesture, in how it can ‘reflect a whole context’. This is how he worked with Leila to create a piece that draws on the tradition of the profressional mourner but makes it contemporary and relevant. He thinks the practice of mourning in this way is still needed today. In his trilogy of works exploring death rituals in Arab culture (Fatmeh (2013), Leila’s Death (2015), May He Rise And Smell the Fragrance (2017)), one of the main areas of research was into the freedom from social and religious constraints on the body that these moments of emotional outpouring allowed.

“Funerals are one of the only doors to freedom of expression for the body, in such an intense religious or social context, where the body is maybe… censored. Within such an intense situation the body gets his freedom to express and everyone can forgive the person because of the sadness of the situation. They forgive them when they express loudly with their bodies. Shiite women can take off their veils and dance and move with their veils, which is something that is usually totally forbidden in a religious or public space. It’s like the body uses this extreme moment of sadness to break these rules or taboos.”

Ali wants to explore the possibility of a ‘local’ contemporary dance language. He feels that Arab culture has not developed its own form of contemporary dance, but rather borrowed from European and American traditions. For this reason, he works often with non-professional dancers.

“I’m researching how a body lives in Beirut, with all the histories and memories of the daily life of the city. So that’s why I started to work with non-professional dancers who have to create their own techniques. To see if it’s possible to create the kind of movement that relates to a local audience and makes them question the presence of their bodies and their beliefs and their daily life practice.”

Leila's Death shows at Project Arts Centre in Temple Bar on May 19 and 20. Book tickets here.

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Words: Rachel Donnelly

Rachel is the editor of DRAFF and arts editor for Totally Dublin.


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