Búi Rouch

Imagine the heart-gripping thrill of uproar and demonstration against an oppressive regime, you fight with your bare claws with the risk of loosing everything. The brutal regime answers back violently, but you have pride and stubbornness, you get back on your feet and continue fighting. The regime hits against you once again, this time harder than before, numbers of dead civilians are on the rise, your everyday is turned upside down, one day your cousin is suddenly missing out of the blue, the next day you suddenly have no home and are forced to flee into exile, with remnants of war lingering in the back of your head, slowly creeping its way into your consciousness.

How do you deal with it? How does one's consciousness deal with that, and how does that look like deep down in your subconscious in the shape of dreams?

Dreams are often said to be like pieces of art, a collection of recollections, set up in your very own universe, which doesn't follow any logic of everyday life. Mey Sefan's work in progress- piece "Zerstörung für Anfänger" deals with the themes of the Syrian uproar based on a huge collection of real dreams from Syrian people.

The opening scene included a dystopian soundscape, with the three performers playing around with a balloon, evoking a sense of longing for nostalgic innocence. Slowly the scenes turned into bizarre sceneries. The scenes created by the three performers were continuously contrasted by a silent observant male figure, sitting in a chair. This turned out to be Amar Matar in real person, the Syrian journalist, human-rights activist and documentarist, whose activities have gotten him into conflicts with the Syrian Assad regime. Amar Matar, who has been forced into exile and whose brother has been missing for 3 months.

Gradually the audience got drawn into a dream-like performance landscape, mixing sinister acts contrasted with cheap looking toys, balloons in flashy colours, giving an almost pitch-black humorous edge to the activities. We had a surreal birth, producing off-springs in form of cheap toys, which were carelessly thrown around, accompanied by a loud bang as the landed on the floor.

In one scene, one of the female performers was posing towards the rear wall of the scenes, with the other one drawing the outline of the body with crayon, creating frozen images of human beings. Later in the performance, these drawn figures would act as victims for a shooting massacre with paint guns. The fact that the journalist Amer Matar sitting there in real person acted as a reminder that even-though dreams are disconnected with everyday, it comes from real people and real experiences.

Even though the scenes didn't follow any logic, the props were cleverly connected and made the sceneries look almost childish and naive, but together with the rituals, bordering up towards sadism, it created a spine-chilling atmosphere., such as when one the women was sitting on a chair, being force fed with coloured fluids, letting them drip out of her mouth. Through this and the soundscape, the audiences’ mind was weaved into blurry impressions of war, hope, injustice and inhumanity.

Although this is piece-in-progress with quick decisions being made under a lot of time pressure, − which already looked promising − so do look forward to the more elaborate follow-up piece by Mey Sefan named "Zerstörung für Fortgeschrittene".