conversations in ten questions 84: Rabih Mroué

© Housam Mcheimech

Lebanese theatre director, actor, visual artist and playwright Rabih Mroué's performances of Taking the Road with a Cloud and Make Me Quit Smoking met with audiences for the first time in Turkey on 24 and 26 April at the Beykoz Kundura Stage. We invited Mroué to our series of conversations in ten questions.

What is the essence of performance in your opinion?

The essence of art and the theater and performance in my opinion is like to open a platform where artists, performers, theater makers can share their thoughts, their questions, their doubts with audience made of individuals, and to open a discussion maybe after the performance, and dialogue. 

Do you believe in the transformative power of art andhow do you think it achieves it? 

Yes, I believe with this magic of performing arts and art in the sense that it really can ignite discussions, debates, new ideas, new concepts in this sense. Like it looks like for me like the philosophers role in life, thoughts. But there is also a part of entertainment and entertainment here like in the sense of Bertolt Brecht and how he writes about entertainment. So in this sense also that is this value of entertainment as well.

When you are working on a piece what sources inspire you? 

Of course what inspires me is the actuality, what's going on around me and the world, especially I come from a region where is like a non-stop crisis of all sorts, so mainly if you want, it’s my daily life. Very simply, my daily life. That’s it. 

When you decide to give a title to a piece you are working on, if it already does not have one, when do you decide? Do you usually start in the beginning or at the ends or in the process?

There is something that I talk about in one of my works, Make me Stop Smoking which I will present now. I will tell you now what I say. It's like I have a problem finding a good title every time I do a work. So, with time, I decided to make like a special notebook where I put like titles for upcoming projects. And as upcoming projects it means that, I don't know what they will be in the future. So they could be a lecture, they could be performance, could be an article, could be a video… I don't know. But like, whenever I find a good title, I write it on the notebook and keep it in the special notebook. Because I actually discovered with time that the titles, they do not have to be related to the work, they could be anything. It’s like our names. So my name is Rabih. Rabih means in Arabic, spring. So, do I look like spring? No. So, the title is not necessarily related to the work. This is why I thought like titles could be anything. When you decide on a title than the relation between the name and the holder of the name they give meaning to each other. So this is my concept. It’s like you can choose whatever title for any work and it works.

Are there any artists or person whom you think influenced your art the most? If there is one?

No, not really. There are maybe writers, philosophers. But not in doing art or in how to think and to find my ways. But if you want like an artist, someone who is still influencing me in different ways, I will maybe choose someone in the cinema. One person in the cinema like Jean-Luc Godard for example. He is someone that is fascinating me with his diversity from the beginning to his death, he is really amazing and he is a really inspiring person.

When you consider the current state of the world in every sense, what is the most important and urgent issue for you as an artist?

The main issue for me as an artist is the freedom of speech, the freedom of expression. And the freedom from the market as well but mainly the freedom of expression. So like, the main topic is, if we lose that as artists, and like people who work in the cultural scene and artistic scene, then we lose art, we lose the concept of art and theater. So this like a fight, it is a struggle to keep as much as freedom as possible. You have many different hats within the realm of theater and acting, play-writing and you also engage with a wide range of media besides theater such as installation art. 

How do these interactions with different mediums inform your performance work?

I would always answer that my main profession is theater. I studied theater and then when I started the question this career, this field, what is theater? why am I doing theater? how we can do theater? everything started to open to me and this is how like all the other things started to come to theater .So, I opened the theater, my theater, my mind. I opened to everything. So now I do a lot of things but there is always the theatrical carrer that I have. It’s always in the background. So, you tell me, if you ask me are u an artist? I would hesitate. I would say maybe I am an artist, maybe I am a musician maybe I am a video maker. but I'm sure I do theater. I am a theater-maker. Maybe I am a bad theater-maker. But this is my profession, this is what I studied. 

You use both fiction and real elements in your works in order to present the reality that surround you. How do you work with this dynamic between what fiction is and the real?

I think this is rumour that started to spread from my early works. and now its like following me in every interview, in every article about my work, and I don't know why. Like what fiction and reality is. Like I see fiction and reality in all works of all the artists and the filmmakers and the theater-makers and I see it in every work. And for me I don't.. I mean I do this but its not like a something like a strategy or something that I always deal with. It comes naturally. Like now I am with you, I don't know if I am now playing a character or if I’m real. I don't know. So it's like something with life and objectivity, subjectivity. But together it's not like something binary between fiction and reality. So it’s together.

You will be presenting at Beykoz Kundura Riding on a Cloud and Make me Stop Smoking. Can you tell a bit about these two works? 

Make me Stop Smoking is a non-academic lecture, it is not a lecture performance, it is not a theater performance. It’s a lecture but it's a non-academic one. It's about the archive that the artists create during his life. So, it's about my personal archive and just how this artist relation with this archive and material. It goes also to the history of my country through this archive and materials. Its like a pretext to also talk about the history of my country. 

And the other work Riding on a Cloud is about my brother, it is a story about my brother, and it is a theater piece, not a lecture. It is a theater performance, and it is about my brother who had a severe injury during the civil war, and he became a aphasic. He has aphasia which is the loss of language, so he could not speak anymore or write. So, he started to learn how to read, how to speak and how to write again. So, it talks about his relation with language and his relation mainly with representation, and representation you know it’s theater. So, it talks about theater in a different way thorough this story of my brother and he is on stage.

Any particular thing that you would like to tell the Istanbul audience before they experience your works?  

Hmm…nothing, just like, I would love to see them if they come then we can meet also after the shows, we can meet, maybe have a drink or something...

[Turkish version of this interview was published in Art.unlimited on April, 5th 2024.]