Between Homeland and Exile: Witnessing the Homo Sacer at the Heart of Hotel Medea
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Julia Boll
Abstract
Based on the Medea-myth, Zecora Ura Theatre’s and Para Active’s Brazilian-British co-production Hotel Medea (2010–2012) is an overnight promenade performance which actively involves the audience. It turns them into, alternatively, party guests, Medea’s children, her closest friends, soldiers, and the focus group of Jason’s political campaign. Medea herself, the archetypal refugee, represents the figure of the homo sacer, whom Giorgio Agamben describes as the one whose life is sacred, defined purely by her exclusion from the polis and stripped of all civil and human rights and of social and legal status. What is left is the bare life, the contact with which is taboo. The figure presents itself as an important parallel to the function of the scapegoat in tragedy and appears in contemporary theatre as a victim of war and conflict or as a person or group of people that have been legally ostracised from or have never been part of the community (such as asylum seekers, refugees, illegal immigrants, unlawful combatants, and displaced and stateless persons), by official decree turned into homines sacri. Agamben points out that Western politics is based on this simultaneous exclusion and inclusion of bare life into its legislation. Mostly, the bare life has remained invisible – the taboo status of the homo sacer demanding a shielding from the public eye. As the central political taboo on which, according to Agamben, Western society is founded, it has also remained the last taboo to be brought to the theatre. Drawing from Kelly Oliver’s theory of an ethics based on witnessing, on enabling the other to form a subject’s identity by not only allowing for a voice, but also by witnessing the other’s act of speech, the theatre might be seen as the art form best suited to enable “witnessing beyond recognition.” This essay discusses how Hotel Medea’s unique inclusion and physical engagement of the audience allows for both the witnessing of and responding to the homo sacer, for an experience that goes far beyond spectatorship and successfully enables the audience to establish a relationship with the politically and socially excluded that might overcome the exclusion.
Acknowledgment
I thank photographer Ludovic des Cognets for his permission to reproduce pictures that he took of the production in 2009 and 2010.
Works Cited
Primary Literature
Hotel Medea. By Zecora Ura and Para Active. Dir. Persis Jade Maravala and Jorge Lopes Ramos. Perf. Persis Jade Maravala. Arcola Theatre, London 2009–2010, Summerhall Fringe Venue, Edinburgh 2011. 15 Aug. 2013 <www.medea.tv>, <http://vimeo.com/hotelmedea>.Search in Google Scholar
Sleep No More. By Punchdrunk. Dir. Felix Barrett and Maxine Doyle. Beaufoy Building, London, 2003; American Repertory Theatre, Boston, 2009; The McKittrick Hotel, New York, 2011–2012. 15 Aug. 2013 <sleepnomorenyc.com>.Search in Google Scholar
The Artist Is Present. By Marina Abramović. Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2010.Search in Google Scholar
Secondary Literature
Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998.Search in Google Scholar
Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Schocken Books, 1951.Search in Google Scholar
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© 2014 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Special Issue: Theatre and Politics: Theatre as Cultural Intervention
- Articles
- Intervention, Interaction, Insufficiency: Theatre’s Critical Repertoire?
- From Theatre & Everyday Life to Theatre in the Expanded Field: Performance Between Community and Immunity
- Between Homeland and Exile: Witnessing the Homo Sacer at the Heart of Hotel Medea
- Gob Squad’s Act of Rebellion – Revolution Now!
- Remixing Politics: The Case of Headphone-Verbatim Theatre in Britain
- Navigating New Patterns of Power with an Audience
- “This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England”: Staging Treatments of Riots in Recent British Theatre
- Bola Agbaje’s Off the Endz. Authentic Voices, Representing the Council Estate: Politics, Authorship and the Ethics of Representation
- Staging the unsayable: debbie tucker green’s political theatre
- (Sub)Versions of the Them/Us Dichotomy in Iraq War Drama
- Going Straight: The Politics of Time and Space in David Eldridge’s Incomplete and Random Acts of Kindness
- New Plays of Ideas and an Aesthetics of Reflection and Debate in Contemporary British Political Drama
- Howard Brenton and the Improbable Revival of the Brechtian History Play
- “Surreal and unbelievable and fantastical”
- Reviews
- Elżbieta Baraniecka. Sublime Drama: British Theatre of the 1990s. CDE Studies 23. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2013, x + 270 pp., € 82.95.
- Jeanne Colleran. Theatre and War: Theatrical Responses since 1991. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, 241 pp., $ 90.00.
- Astrid Haas. Stages of Agency: The Contributions of American Drama to the AIDS Discourse. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2011, 334 pp., € 38.00.
- Barbara Ozieblo and Noelia Hernando-Real (eds.). Performing Gender Violence: Plays by Contemporary American Women Dramatists. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, vi + 198 pp., $ 85.00.
- Patrick Duggan. Trauma-Tragedy: Symptoms of Contemporary Performance. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2012, ix + 214 pp., $ 88.00.
- Philip C. Kolin (ed.). Contemporary African American Women Playwrights: A Casebook. London and New York: Routledge, 2012, x + 207 pp., £ 80.00 (hardback, 2007), £ 28.00 (paperback, 2012), £ 28.00 (ebook, 2007).
- Helen H. Lojek. The Spaces of Irish Drama: Stage and Place in Contemporary Plays. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, x + 181 pp., £ 55.00 (hardback).
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Special Issue: Theatre and Politics: Theatre as Cultural Intervention
- Articles
- Intervention, Interaction, Insufficiency: Theatre’s Critical Repertoire?
- From Theatre & Everyday Life to Theatre in the Expanded Field: Performance Between Community and Immunity
- Between Homeland and Exile: Witnessing the Homo Sacer at the Heart of Hotel Medea
- Gob Squad’s Act of Rebellion – Revolution Now!
- Remixing Politics: The Case of Headphone-Verbatim Theatre in Britain
- Navigating New Patterns of Power with an Audience
- “This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England”: Staging Treatments of Riots in Recent British Theatre
- Bola Agbaje’s Off the Endz. Authentic Voices, Representing the Council Estate: Politics, Authorship and the Ethics of Representation
- Staging the unsayable: debbie tucker green’s political theatre
- (Sub)Versions of the Them/Us Dichotomy in Iraq War Drama
- Going Straight: The Politics of Time and Space in David Eldridge’s Incomplete and Random Acts of Kindness
- New Plays of Ideas and an Aesthetics of Reflection and Debate in Contemporary British Political Drama
- Howard Brenton and the Improbable Revival of the Brechtian History Play
- “Surreal and unbelievable and fantastical”
- Reviews
- Elżbieta Baraniecka. Sublime Drama: British Theatre of the 1990s. CDE Studies 23. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2013, x + 270 pp., € 82.95.
- Jeanne Colleran. Theatre and War: Theatrical Responses since 1991. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, 241 pp., $ 90.00.
- Astrid Haas. Stages of Agency: The Contributions of American Drama to the AIDS Discourse. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2011, 334 pp., € 38.00.
- Barbara Ozieblo and Noelia Hernando-Real (eds.). Performing Gender Violence: Plays by Contemporary American Women Dramatists. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, vi + 198 pp., $ 85.00.
- Patrick Duggan. Trauma-Tragedy: Symptoms of Contemporary Performance. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2012, ix + 214 pp., $ 88.00.
- Philip C. Kolin (ed.). Contemporary African American Women Playwrights: A Casebook. London and New York: Routledge, 2012, x + 207 pp., £ 80.00 (hardback, 2007), £ 28.00 (paperback, 2012), £ 28.00 (ebook, 2007).
- Helen H. Lojek. The Spaces of Irish Drama: Stage and Place in Contemporary Plays. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, x + 181 pp., £ 55.00 (hardback).
