10.13125/2039-6597/2695
application/pdf
2039-6597
2695
14
en
Franco Nasi
Between
identity of relation.
Interweaving Stories. <i>Hamlet in Jerusalem</i> by Gabriele Vacis and Marco Paolini
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between
7
The Tragic in the Contemporary Scene
2017-12-01
2017-05-06
2017-11-30
2017-12-01
1
Franco Nasi
2017/12/01
10.13125/2039-6597/2695
Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia
2039-6597
14
identity of relation.
en
Interweaving Stories. <i>Hamlet in Jerusalem</i> by Gabriele Vacis and Marco Paolini
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between/article/download/2695/2714
7
        Interweaving Stories:
          Hamlet in Jerusalem
  by Gabriele Vacis and Marco Paolini
                                Franco Nasi


                                    I’m not interested in doing “civic theater”;
                                    on the contrary, I think theater should be
                                    “uncivil”, like Pasolini said. It should
                                    stage conflicts that can’t be resolved
                                    ideologically, and should never dictate the
                                    good guys and the bad.
                                    (Marco Baliani)



 Brief prologue on the practices and poetics of dialogue
      Amleto a Gerusalemme (Hamlet in Jerusalem), written by Gabriele
Vacis and Marco Paolini, was first performed in March 2016 at the Teatro
Stabile in Turin. The pièce is a multilingual drama (Modern Standard
Arabic, Classical Arabic, English as lingua franca, Elizabethan English,
Italian) directed by Vacis, and performed by Paolini, with young actors
– five Palestinian and three Italian who were largely, but not exclusively,
stage interpreters. A few months later, a book with a similar title,
Aristofane a Scampia, written by Marco Martinelli, director and
playwright of the Teatro delle Albe, was published in Florence. The two
titles are akin not only because they begin with the same letter, are both
octosyllabic and refer to a Classic where author and protagonist have
been transferred to an unlikely place, but – as kin and kind – because they


Between, vol. VII, n. 14 (Novembre/ November 2017)
Franco Nasi, Interweaving Stories



point to similar aesthetic and ethic experiences, based on a common idea
of theatrical pedagogy that has very little in common with the norms
and methods of the Academies.
      For Martinelli, who in the book portrays 25 years of an innovative
theatrical laboratory of the Teatro delle Albe, programmatically called
non-scuola or non-school, “theatre cannot be taught”. The aim of the
company workshops, organized with adolescents in a wide variety of
different social and geographical settings (from Ravenna to Scampia,
Dakar, Chicago), is not the mise-en-scène of “classics in a canonical way,
reading them at the desk, assigning roles, distributing lines” (Martinelli
2016: 30). The aim of this non-school is the mise-en-vie of classics.
      Such pedagogy, common to Martinelli and Vacis, is not a Method,
with a capital M, i.e. a list of actions the students should perform, or
abilities they should acquire. It is more an attitude, a different way of
approaching art and theatre based on a declared and stubbornly
pursued practice and poetics of dialogue and listening, an open and
unprejudiced dialogue between the Classics and adolescents, guides
and apprentices. Such approach leads to a different dialogue of the
young actors among themselves, because theatre is also, and not
marginally, a community experience, a path toward “awareness”, a
“discourse” (Vacis 2014, and 2013; see also; Martinelli 2015; Martinelli
and Montanari 2014: 110-130). These dialogues give birth to a new
autonomous text, continuously interwoven with the hypotext. The new
text questions the source text, and is questioned by it, it moves it in
unexpected ways, performs the play, plays it and plays with it, instils in
it a new, different energy and perspective.
      Hamlet in Jerusalem is not a philological mise-en-scène of
Shakespeare’s tragedy. What the audience watches is the narration (or
better, a rivist after eight years) of an experience of theatrical bildung, a
pedagogical path which is an aesthetic and vital experience in se, a
creative and dynamic dialogue among actors, and between actors and
Hamlet. It is the story of how Hamlet by Shakespeare intermingled with
a theatrical school that Vacis and Paolini directed in Jerusalem in 2008,
and how the group (directors, professional actors, students) blend with
the tragedy of the Prince of Denmark. A book, edited by Katia Ippaso in


2
                                   Between, vol. VII, n. 14 (Novembre/November 2017)



2009, accurately describes the first part of the project (Tam: Instruments
of Peace) – from the selection of 34 Palestinian students (aged 15-22) and
the three intense summer months of work in Jerusalem (2008), to the
international theatre workshop in Italy (within the “Biennnale di
Venezia”, October-November), and the final performance, On the
footsteps of Hamlet, staged in the Palestinian territories in spring 2009.
      Vacis and Paolini’s 2016 pièce, with five of the former students
(now professional actors) on stage, can be seen as a second part of this
experience, which is dependent on the 2008-2009 workshop. A thorough
evaluation of the play should probably move from a detailed description
of this first part of the experience. But since the 2016 performance is not
likely to be staged again, and there is no publication of the text, it is more
fruitful to focus on a close reading of the second part of the experience,
and to refer to the above mentioned works for the description of the
workshop. A close reading of the performance calls for a intratextual
multilayered analysis that has to take account of the narrative structure,
the linguistic dimension of the performance, characterized by the
presence on stage of a number of different languages and their
translations. Such analysis should also focus on the intertextuality of the
play, with direct citations and allusions to the Shakespearean text, the
very choice of the tragedy of Hamlet, especially owing to the role the
Prince of Denmark has played in Arab theatre as political drama, and
finally as a pretext for a reflection on vengeance, oblivion and “identity
of relation”. These topics will briefly be considered in this essay.

                 A polyphonic narrative theatre
     Amleto a Gerusalemme is first of all a polyphonic narration of a
theatrical-life experience1. Marco Paolini is both the leading storyteller


     Two micro-stories of the pièce (as well as few paragraphs of this article,
     1

though broadly revised) have been published in the Dossier, “Amleto a
Gerusalemme di Gabriele Vacis e Marco Paolini” (Nasi ed. 2016), in Prove di
Drammaturgia, entirely dedicated to Shakespeare. But see also the beautiful
documentary Diario di Amleto a Gerusalemme by Giulietta Vacis (2016),


                                                                                  3
Franco Nasi, Interweaving Stories



on stage and a stepfather, being the representative of the parent
generation in a drama that deals with a sons’ search for identity. From a
structural point of view, he is the voice that recounts the frame story, or
macro-story, in which the micro-stories told by the Palestinian actors are
inserted. After a prologue performed by Ivan Azazian, Paolini
introduces the frame story, with the narrations of his flight from Venice
to Israel in 2008 together with a hilarious group of catholic pilgrims from
Veneto, of his arrival in floodlit Tel Aviv like a middle-eastern Las
Vegas, and of his lonely first night excursion to the Wailing Wall in
Jerusalem. And finally he declares the reason for his trip: the creation in
Jerusalem of a school for young Palestinian actors, under the auspices of
the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, with himself and Vacis as Artistic
Directors, and Hamlet by Shakespeare as the text chosen to open the
school.
      As the pièce unfolds, the Palestinian actors take turns narrating the
stories of their own families. In many cases these stories are complex
genealogies marked by migration, uprooting, return. In all, four short
narratives are offered revolving around their families and the past.
While these stories are told and the audience begins to imagine how
Jerusalem used to be, the actors are patiently at work constructing a
model of the city with hundreds of empty white plastic water bottles,
used as if they were pieces of a gigantic Lego. Along the streets of the
miniature city, as wide as the whole stage, Bahaa Sous recounts his story,
which can be considered the turning point of the entire play. Bahaa tells
about a visit to downtown Jerusalem in the company of his mother who
was born there. She wanted to show her son the places where she had
spent her childhood. But the things she sees and points to exist only in
her memory; not even the water that used to run out of the many
fountains just a generation before can now be found. The only things
that Bahaa sees are ruins, decay, and empty plastic bottles. He does not
intend to deny the legitimacy of his mother’s memories, but is rather


broadcasted by RAI5 on April 23, 2016; see also Vacis, Paolini (2016). I’d like
to thank Gabriele Vacis who allowed me to work on the unpublished script of
the play, Gerardo Guccini and Marc Silver for their valuable advice.


4
                                  Between, vol. VII, n. 14 (Novembre/November 2017)



determined to free himself from those memories, memories that don’t
belong to him. In a sudden outburst of rage he destroys the model of
Jerusalem shouting “let it go”, let things go the way they have to. The
destruction of the city perpetrated by all the actors on stage is the
symbolic act through which they lay claim to the centrality of the present
against the nostalgic lingering of the past, the obsessive visiting and
revisiting a city that probably never existed if not in a problematic
narrative construction of a people’s identity.
      Paolini takes the floor again and recounts a story related to one of
the students of the workshop who was not allowed to leave Palestine
and join the company for the Italian premiere. His name is Habdel from
Hebron, the landlocked territory of the West Bank. From the outset he
had problems with the Israeli authorities, who would not allow him to
attend the workshop in Jerusalem. Thanks to the mediation of Italian
authorities, Habdel was not only able to be part of the school, but took
part as well in an adventurous and risk fraught “school trip” to the
seaside. He was finally able to see the sea for the first time in his life, a
sea that is only a few miles from his hometown, one that once belonged
to the Palestinians and is now precluded them. The same sea, as Paolini
says, that “Wants to See Palestinian Kids”, as much as “Palestinian Kids
Want to See the Sea” (which is also the subheading of the play). While
Paolini tells his story, the bottles/ruins of the city, gathered and folded
in a big transparent plastic sheet, are dragged to the back of the stage, to
form a wave-like sculpture of the sea.
      As we have said, this central sequence represents the turning point
of the pièce: the storytellers change costumes (the black clothes of
mourning are substituted with desert colored ones), and shift the
direction of their gaze. While in the first part with their genealogical
micro-stories they conjured up the past, in the hope of reconstructing a
city and an identity, now they seem to look straight at the present, at the
rubble, at what is there for them now. Four new micro-stories follow
symmetrically in the second part. They no longer deal with their
ancestors, but with the actors themselves, their love affairs, frustrations,
disillusions, doubts about the present. Paolini conducts all of them as a
discreet director on stage, who checks that everybody is doing his part


                                                                                 5
Franco Nasi, Interweaving Stories



properly, that everybody, with his narrative, contributes to building a
new image of the city of Jerusalem, as it is now, with cafés and
crumbling high-rises, restaurants and junkyards, walls and city doors,
streets and check points. Paolini closes the frame-story with the
narration of the flight back to Venice, and the presence on the plane of
the same group of catholic pilgrims from Veneto. They see him reading
Hamlet and ask him about the tragedy, and listen to Paolini’s final
reflection on the meaning of classical texts.
     If we were to reduce the play to a concatenation of stories, we could
easily talk of a polyphonic version of narrative theatre. A single
storyteller, as a modern Homer, could narrate the theatrical experience
on stage, inserting the micro-stories told by the young actors into the
frame-story during the workshop. Vacis, on the contrary, has assigned
the role of storyteller to the whole group. This new role required a
careful labor based on the patient reciprocal audition and harmonization
of the different voices.

                             Translations on stage
     Understanding is obviously the first difficulty one has to face in a
polyvocal narrative, where storytellers and audience do not share a
common linguistic code. Surtitles are a possibility; another is the
presence of a linguistic mediator on stage. In the performance both are
used: surtitles, in a very creative form, are employed for the
Shakespearian passages, but for the storytelling recourse is made to
mediators. Palestinian actors, who sometimes speak in English,
sometimes in Arabic, are flanked by three young actors who translate
into Italian. It is immediately clear that their function is not merely
passive, as an impersonal translating machine. The three Italian actors
play an active function and have great performative value. Short
consecutive interpretation is generally the technique adopted, centered
around brief speech segments. The speaker talks and the interpreter
translates immediately after. Or at least this is the case in the beginning
with Ivan’s story; but then little by little, the segments become shorter,
the interpreter begins overlapping the speaker, and the translation


6
                                 Between, vol. VII, n. 14 (Novembre/November 2017)



becomes almost simultaneous. The two voices reach the ear of the
listener as a full voice, doubled by a linguistic counterpoint.
      In Hamlet in Jerusalem, it seems that no text and therefore no
language is servile to a "source" text, but rather each utterance
contributes to the creation of the different rhythms that modulate and
lead the narration forward.
      During the performance, the vocal harmonies of the actor and
translator’s voices are recurrently followed by Paolini’s solos or by
powerful choirs, in which the Palestinian actors chant rhythmic poetic
lines in unison. This choral recitation is a movement of the more general
musical score of the pièce, but is also a phonetic analogon to “the
Schiera”, one of the techniques used by Vacis in his theatrical workshops
(see infra). It also calls to mind the in unison recitation of Martinelli’s
choirs both in his non-scuola experiences and his more recent staged
works, from Pantani (Nasi 2014: 8-18) to Vita agli arresti di Aung San Suu
Kyi and 2017 Va Pensiero.

                      Shakespearian inserts
      Elizabethan English and Literary Arabic, almost unexpectedly, join
standard Arabic, "international" English and Italian, in a multilingual
symphony of words. The intense passages from Hamlet are declaimed in
Elizabethan English and Literary Arabic. Shakespearean citations, often
repeated in more than one language or translated on a big screen, mingle
with stories told by the Palestinian actors, as a counterpoint or doubling
of the dominant note, establishing a dialogue with them. It is taken for
granted that the audience knows and is familiar with the quotations
since it is not possible to reconstruct the plot of Shakespearean play by
watching Hamlet in Jerusalem. The tragedy is not performed nor is the
plot told, but it is revisited through fragments with the post-modern
irony of one who knows that the audience knows. So the poetic
Shakespearian lines are perceived as already familiar motifs, known
lines that live by themselves, but that gain a new meaning when recalled
next to the Jerusalem stories told on stage. And thanks to their
exemplary poetic power they add new meaning to those stories.


                                                                                7
Franco Nasi, Interweaving Stories



     The architecture of the narrative that, as we have seen, is balanced
but complex, becomes even more composite with the Shakespearean
inserts, which force the audience to move back and forth between the
actors' stories and the story of Hamlet. The stories, told with a
continuous variation of recitative and linguistic styles – using a
generally informal and discursive register, sometimes with comic
digressions or animated discussions – find a lyrical complement in
Shakespeare's quotes. During the workshop in Jerusalem these passages
were the fuses that ignited the micro-stories.
     Let us take a closer look at a couple of examples of interconnection
between the micro-stories and the Hamlet quotations. Ivan Azazian’s is
the first story, told in English and translated into Italian by Marco
Valpengo. Ivan retraces his family genealogy – from his Armenian great-
grandfather who escaped the genocide perpetrated by the Ottoman
government in 1915-16 and moved to Jerusalem, to his grandfather who
migrated to the United States, to his father, born in America, but who
went back to Jerusalem because Ivan’s Palestinian mother was afraid to
raise her children in a dangerous place like the USA for its lack of moral
values and the frequent use of drugs among teenagers, finally to Ivan,
who was born in Jerusalem and is ironic about his mother’s fear,
knowing very well that drugs and danger are anything but absent in
Palestine.
     Ivan’s genealogy is followed by Paolini’s first monologue, at the
end of which he remarks that everywhere in Jerusalem, from the Wailing
Wall to Golgotha, it is easy to feel the weight of his fathers' legacy in the
air. Here is the first Shakespearean insert in which Claudio invites
Hamlet to throw off his mourning dress. The text is recited by Alaa Abu
Gharbieh in Arabic (I, II, 87-110) and translated by Paolini.
     The second story is also a genealogy. Nidal Jouba tells of his
grandfather, a wealthy trader from Hebron, the two uncles he lost
during 1967 war, and his father, born in 1966, who was entrusted by his
own father to find his missing brothers. So, over the years, he moved
with his family from Hebron to Jordan, Syria, Jerusalem, and then to
Egypt and again to Jerusalem, in search of the lost brothers. They
searched for their bodies and sought revenge. Parallel to Nidal's moral


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                                   Between, vol. VII, n. 14 (Novembre/November 2017)



commitment to shed light on the family members is Hamlet's decision
to take revenge on his father’s murderer (I, v. 92-112): “Thy
commandment all alone shall live / Within the book and volume of my
brain […]”.
     The pièce goes on by alternating stories of the young actors and
quotations from Hamlet. In the first part of the play the stories seem to
accompany the narrative of the Prince of Denmark as they tell of the
knowledge of an unbearable truth, of the abuses suffered by Israeli
politics, and of the urge to action as one’s hereditary duty. But in the
course of the play the stories change direction, and tell of the desire,
shared by the young people on stage and by many Palestinian and
Israeli peers, to close with that parental legacy. Paolini says, toward the
end of the play:

        Hamlet is definitely endowed with a responsibility, he has the
     truth, he is the one elected ... Whoever is endowed by the truth, the
     elected one, is a non-judgeable judge. […] In Palestine, [...] so many
     people are convinced that they have the truth. But luckily there are
     many other people who ask themselves: what can we do?

     The stories told by the actors in the second part of the pièce intend
to suspend this endowment, bracketing the duty of heritage, and let
things be free to go as they have to. "Let it go" screams Bahaa, to his
mother, at a central "turning" point of the performance, who wants
instead to stop the transformation of the city, and thus freeze her own
identity with it.

                     Hamlet in the Arab world
     Hamlet, then, as pretext and hypotext (Genette 1997: 7-8) of the
workshop. Gabriele Vacis, in his essay Le città più illuminate sono quelle
che hanno paura (The most well-lit cities are the most frightened, and the
reference in the title is above all to Tel Aviv), describes the role attributed
by his Palestinian colleagues of the Jerusalem school of theater, namely




                                                                                  9
Franco Nasi, Interweaving Stories



that they did not care much about "art for art’s sake, but art for change".
He continues:

         I thought they meant to work on an author with solid certainties,
      one of those who know where the truth is, I do not know ... Bertolt
      Brecht. But no ... when I asked what they would like to work on,
      they said: Shakespeare. Hamlet. (Vacis 2016: 5)

     At this point, it would be interesting to pose the question: “Why
Hamlet?”, or better “Who is Hamlet for a middle-eastern playwright?”
In the western world, particularly since Romantic readings, Hamlet has
been seen as the Hegelian “Schöne Seele”, the extremely meditative
mind who knows, but who cannot carry out the decisive act: aware of
his responsibility to seek revenge, but hesitant. Perhaps this
interpretative tradition that sees Hamlet wearing a black robe of
mourning, an existential brother, poet and philosopher, who talks to
himself in moments of solitude, might seem to be the exact opposite of
the stubborn hero who is determined to put “The Time” that “is out of
joint” in its place, the symbolic character of a theatre resolute to
“change” things. In the western interpretative tradition from Coleridge
and Schlegel onward, Hamlet is not Spartacus. But in the Arab world,
and it has been this way for a long time, Hamlet is a different kind of
hero, and even today his symbolic political meaning is still important.
     In Hamlet's Arab Journey, Margaret Litvin (2011) describes the
reception of Hamlet from its first musical happy ending adaptation of
1901, through the more edifying and moral versions of the years
following the end of colonialism in the area, to the most recent parodic
and post-modern rewritings. Hamlet’s reception has been so
widespread that Shakespeare’s tragedy is now a sort of proverbial text,
the source of quotations for political speeches and newspaper articles of
people coming from different political orientations, and second only to
the Koran for number of quotations.




10
                                  Between, vol. VII, n. 14 (Novembre/November 2017)



     For Litvin2, Hamlet's reception in the post-colonial Arab world can
be divided into three distinct phases. The first – from 1952, the year of
the Egyptian Revolution that dethroned the monarchy, to 1967 –
coincides with the revolutionary optimism of Nasser. Hamlet, staged by
the Egyptian National Theater in 1964, represents the hero as a symbol
of moral integrity, a model for the new political class that had to
radically reform the corrupt monarchical institution. The second phase
begins shortly after the defeat in the Six-day War of 1967 and continues
until 1976. Here Hamlet assumes the role of the militant hero, more
concerned with putting time back in place than philosophically
reflecting on the essence of being – a sort of Arab Che Guevara,
influenced by the image of the 1964 Soviet film by Grigori Kozintsev
(based on the translation by Boris Pasternak, with music by Dmitri
Shostakovich). The third phase, which refers to the last thirty years,
coincides with what Litvin calls "the bitter phase of the Arabian tradition
of Hamlet." Here knowledge of the text is taken for granted, and the
playwrights play ironically with the hypotext, adopting strategies
typical of postmodern culture (play within a play, concurrence of
different styles, intertextuality, etc.). Hamlet often seems hopeless,
absolutely incapable of setting the world back into “its joint”; and all this
because his efforts (even the self-sacrifice) in stopping the endless cycle
of history and its eternal recurrence of crime and revenge are useless
(see Al-Hamlet Summit, by Al-Bassam 2007, and its critical analysis by
Faini 2009), and also because he is confronted with an enemy, a deaf and
dumb political power, that doesn’t even understand what he is alluding
to.

                   A post-post-colonial Hamlet
     A prime example of this interpretative direction is the 1984 pièce A
Theatre Company found a Theatre and theatred Hamlet, by Nader Omran.


     2  See also Litvin’s lecture delivered at Cornell University in
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgpHrJbBlO4



                                                                                11
Franco Nasi, Interweaving Stories



The Jordanian playwright creates a frame in which the story told by
Shakespeare is duplicated. On stage there is a royal Arab family, with a
young prince, his despotic uncle/king, his mother – who, needless to say,
is the widow of the former king killed by his brother. On stage there is
also a director, a censor, and other actors who constantly switch the
character they play. Everyone, except for the prince, is drinking and
seems to be completely taken by his/her main goal: to have fun. In this
context, the play within the play is inserted: but it is Hamlet's tragedy
itself, not “the Murder of Gonzago”. The Arab prince tells the tyrant
about the plot of the Shakespearean tragedy. The king is skeptical
because the tragedy is written by an English, colonial poet, which seems
to be his main concern: “It seems my boy, that you want people to say
we encourage colonialists and read their culture! No…. No… my boy,
we shall not have this colonialist poet. Down with colonialism!” (Omran
in Carlson – Litvin 2015: 172).
      The prince defends the text by saying that it was written many
centuries before middle eastern colonialism, in a completely different
cultural context, and that, after all, the author's intention was to
denounce the corruption of the English world. He then recounts the
Hamlet plot that, obviously, reflects the frame situation. (Actor 1 is the
Arab king, the Actor 2 is the Arab prince)

         ACTOR 2: As for Shakespeare’s play that we will “theatre”
      tonight, it is called Hamlet. (to the audience) He is a prince from
      Denmark, who, upon returning to his homeland, discovers that
      (with dramatic gestures) his father has been murdered and that his
      uncle has married his mother. (ACTOR 2 wails) And that this
      traitorous uncle is none other than… the murderer of his brother,
      Hamlet’s father.
         ACTOR 2 stand at the center of the stage. He turns toward ACTOR
      1, raising his bottle.
         ACTOR 2: Can you imagine having such a treacherous uncle…
      my dear uncle?
         ACTOR 1 (slyly): Sounds like an amusing premise, my dear
      nephew. Pour me another cup, page! (laughs) Continue…
         ACTOR 2: Does this premise not remind you of anything, uncle?


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                                   Between, vol. VII, n. 14 (Novembre/November 2017)



        (…)
        ACTOR 1: It does! It reminds me of Denmark. Ah, what a
     beautiful country, renowned for its dairy products. There I’ve seen
     types of dairy that I haven’t seen anywhere else in my entire life
     (…) What a country! Continue my dear boy. (he stands up) But
     remember to deride colonialism as much as you can! (Ibid: 172-173)

      Nader Omran uses Shakespeare's text as a pre-text for ironically
and mockingly taking position against an ideological theater, that
pretends to be the spokesman for absolute values, such as a declared and
stubborn opposition to colonialism or a pure post-colonial identity, but
that only becomes a screen behind which a perverse and corrupt power
tries to hide itself.
      The text is provocatively presented for the first time at a Moroccan
theater festival whose central theme was the search for the roots of Arab
theater. The result is that this text, as Litvin writes, “is an authentically
Arab play drawn from a foreign source”. The “happy ending” of the
play, “after the prince and king kill each other” consists in the fact that
the actors rebel against their director, refusing to enact a didactic theatre.
“The play both engages and critiques the Brechtian model of
consciousness-raising plays prevalent in Arab theatre throughout the
1980s. Besides being a kind of tyranny, Orman’s play suggests,
allegorical political theatre is also just plain ineffective” (Carlson – Litvin
2015: 157). Hamlet plays the role of the ironic postmodern protagonist
who looks with irony (the gnoseological faculty of the romantic
tradition) not only at the theatrical fiction, but at power itself, a despotic
power that uses a presumed idea of a people identity to maintain its own
status quo of privileges. The way in which Hamlet intertwines with the
narratives in the play by Vacis and Paolini presents interesting analogies
with the "ironic", savvy, detached and disenchanted postmodernism, to
which Litvin refers in relation to Omran's text.




                                                                                 13
Franco Nasi, Interweaving Stories




                               Identity of relation
     One of the most effective features of Vacis and Paolini’s play is this
radical change in perspective. In the prologue, Ivan recounts the
genealogy of his family. Following the direction of the gaze of a
speleologist, Ivan is looking downward, vertically, at the foundation of
his ancestry. He is looking for his roots, and from it he tries to construct
his identity, tie himself and remain faithfully fastened to it. But at the
end of his second story, in the second part of the play, Ivan starts singing
a moving, slow and dreamy interpretation of I’m a poor wayfaring
stranger, a piece of classic Afro-American gospel. Ivan’s parents had
been migrants to the USA but went back to Palestine. Ivan feels that his
promised land is somewhere else, perhaps in America, the land
abandoned by his parents. His singing describes that longing better than
any words. The direction of his gaze changes radically from vertical to
horizontal. The identity that Ivan is seeking is not tied or rooted to a
single place (real or imaginary), it is not an identity laden with a heritage
of unsolved problems he has to take care of, an identity that can
dangerously turns into closure, monism, deaf and dumb nationalism,
singular and self-referential rooting.
     Maurizio Bettini recently wrote an interesting essay on the critical
reconsideration of the concept of “root”. For Bettini such a notion has
often been used to artificially construct a collective narrative so as to
reach and maintain political consensus. In his essays he also deals with
the “case” of Jerusalem:

         The extreme case of Jerusalem, where we see a multiplication of
      divergent traditions and roots in relation to a single city – or even
      in relation to the same areas within the same city –, can be seen as
      the paradigm of how traditions develop by the reconstruction of
      their own memories according to the needs and impulses of
      individual groups. And this is also and especially true when those
      traditions try to make their own partial corner of the world
      absolute, by opposing the claimed truth and authenticity of their
      roots to the usurpatory falsehoods of others’ roots. How much



14
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     easier it would be to live, especially in similar harsh and conflicting
     areas, if the idea spread that traditions are not vertical but
     horizontal, that they don’t emanate from the land, but from
     education and the continuous reconstruction of a collective
     memory. (Bettini 2016: 61)

      Mahmoud Aboudoma is an Egyptian playwright and director (b.
1953). In 1989 he staged an interesting adaptation of Hamlet with the
title Dance of the Scorpions. A brief and enjoyable narration about his
work entitled Gamlet is Russian for Hamlet, closes the collection of Arab
Hamlet Plays edited by Carlson and Litvin. Aboudoma recounts how he
met Hamlet for the first time. He was ten years old, and Khruschhev was
in Cairo to seal a new alliance with Nasser. Two huge pictures of the
political leaders were hanging on the entrance wall of the Russian
Palace, on Shafiq Street, as proof of the new friendship between the
Egyptian Republic and the Soviet Government. In that building
Aboudoma watched the projection of Gamlet (1964), the movie by
Kozintsev (for a contextual and political analysis of the film see
Lehmann 2013). Since then the impressive sentence “Something is rotten
in the state of Denmark”, written across the screen, has remained with
the playwright, who repeatedly refers to the movie as an inspiring
model. But Hamlet in Dance of the Scorpions has nothing of the resolute
hero of Kozintsev’s movie. In Dance Claudius plots with Fortinbras to
start a fake war to extort money from the rich, neutralizing and
excluding the apolitical Hamlet. The political situation in Egypt has
radically changed since 1964, and Hamlet represents here the apathy
and inability of the Egyptian people to act at the end of the 80s,
disenchanted after the defeat with Israel and the Post-Nasser political
crisis. But regardless of the performance, that signals as we have said a
different season in the Arab reception of Hamlet, the final part of
Aboudoma’s story is quite significant:

       When the years went by and changes came, and the tree itself
     abandoned its roots, Shafiq Street and Heliopolis filled up with tall
     buildings, but the Russians’ Building stayed as it was. Except that



                                                                                  15
Franco Nasi, Interweaving Stories



      they put a new banner on it, red like the other one: a picture of some
      guy smiling for no reason, with the words “Kentucky Fried
      Chicken”. (Aboudoma in Carlson- Litvin 2015: 291)

      That in place of the USSR flag there is now a red flag with the
smiling face of a confederate Colonel advertising an unhealthy fast food
chain might not be comforting, for some at least, but it is a fact. And,
through the metaphorical statement that "the tree itself has abandoned
its roots", a fact is also that the city is now a composite of pieces of
different puzzles, which are ordered and put near one another in
unexpected ways, despite the aspirations of some to maintain a
completely arbitrary loyalty to a rooted tradition that exists only in
reconstructed tales.
      The identity emerging in Vacis and Paolini’s pièce reminds us of a
city in movement with a composite, horizontal identity. The theatrical
experience of the school was a poetic education in reciprocal listening.
One of the techniques used by Vacis in his theatrical workshops,
elaborated for the first time with the 1984 performance Elementi di
struttura del sentimento (Elements of structure of feelings), is “la schiera”
(the rank). The actors who take part in this "collective movement"
exercise must walk within a space in unison, and seek with the utmost
naturalness and economy to make themselves into a single moving
body, without having previously defined their steps. To do this one
needs first of all to pay attention to the rest of the group, to look and
listen carefully, to find unity in variety. It is a way to build a community
on stage, beginning with a body movement that is respectful of the
others (see Vacis 2009: 215-16).
      Theater can build an environment, create a contemporaneity in
which it is possible to comprehend (cum-prehendere), in the sense of
catching hold of or seizing in one’s mind at that moment. In the
theatrical city of Jerusalem, built with tales and bottles, with emerging
memories and the walls of the city as ruins, restored and destroyed
again and again, comes the awareness of being "an environment"; an
environment made of relationships among people: Palestinian and
Italian actors, Israeli soldiers, Armenian grandparents, centuries-old


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                                   Between, vol. VII, n. 14 (Novembre/November 2017)



migrants, characters of Elizabethan tragedies; an environment made of
foreign languages in relationship to one another or varieties of the same
language overlapping and in counterpoint. It is not a monolithic
identity, but an "identity of relation" as Ėdouard Glissant defines it,
replacing the image of the root with the more vital one of the rhizome:

        Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari criticized notions of the root
     and even, perhaps, notions of being rooted. The root is unique, a
     stock taking all upon itself and killing all around it. In opposition
     to this they propose the rhizome, an enmeshed root system, a
     network spreading either in the ground or in the air, with no
     predatory rootstock taking over permanently. The notion of the
     rhizome maintains, therefore, the idea of rootedness but challenges
     that of a totalitarian root. Rhizomatic thought is the principle
     behind what I call the Poetics of Relation, in which each and every
     identity is extended through a relation with the Other. (Glissant
     1997: 11)

      Such rhizomatic identity seems to be one of the main mooring
points of Hamlet’s journey in Jerusalem: a vital identity that lives in and
of relations and movements. Together with the image of a multiplying
root, the journey has also brought the poetic image of the seed of a "new"
gesture. The Epilogue is entrusted to Mohammad, who in Classic Arabic
recites the monologue where Hamlet reflects on the meaning of the war
the King of Norway is moving against Poland for “ a little patch of
ground / that hath in it no profit but the name” (IV, iv, 18-19). To those
lines he adds a few adapted verses from Shakespeare (IV, iv, 30 ff.) and
from the Book of Isaiah (43, 18-19: “Forget the former things;/ do not dwell
on the past./See, I am doing a new thing!/ Now it springs up; do you not
perceive it? / I am making a way in the wilderness / and streams in the
wasteland.”). Here the translation of the closing lines of the play:

        It is worth living only if you have something for which to die,
     they say
        I would have those reasons, yes, to act,
        And instead?


                                                                                 17
Franco Nasi, Interweaving Stories




         I’d want to live in Jerusalem, instead, because I love her…
         I won’t let me be driven, instead, by revenge, anger, foolishness.
         And I’m no hero for this… I do not want to be a hero.
         And I’m not a victim.
         I’d want to live in Jerusalem, because I love her…
         And so I’m doing a new thing:
         Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?
         I’m Hamlet and I want to live.




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                                   Between, vol. VII, n. 14 (Novembre/November 2017)




                              Works Cited
Aboudoma, Mahmoud, Gamlet is Russian for Hamlet, Carlson – Litvin
    2015: 289-291.
Al-Bassam, Sulayman, The Al-Hamlet Summit, Hatfield, University of
    Hertfordshire Press, 2007.
Baliani, Marco, Pinocchio nero, diario di un viaggio teatrale, Milano, Rizzoli,
    2005.
Bettini, Maurizio, Radici. Tradizione, identità, memoria, Bologna, Il Mulino,
    2016.
Carlson, Marvin – Litvin, Margaret (eds.), Four Arab Hamlet Plays, New
    York, Martin E. Segal, 2015.
Faini, Paola, “The Al-Hamlet Summit”, Postcolonial Shakespeare, Eds.
    Masolino D’Amico – Simona Corso, Roma, Edizioni di Storia e
    Letteratura, 2009: 121-132.
Glissant, Ėdouard, Poetics of Relation, Eng. Trans. by Betsy Wing, Ann
    Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1997.
Genette, Gérard, Palimpsestes (1972), It. trans. by Raffaella Novità
    Palinsesti, , Torino, Einaudi, 1997.
Ippaso, Katia (ed.), Amleto a Gerusalemme, Spoleto, Editoria & Spettacolo,
    2009.
Lehmann, Courtney, “Grigori Kozinstev”, Great Shakespeareans, Vol.
    XVII, Wells, Kozinstev, Kurosawa, Zeffirelli, Mark T. Burnett –
    Courtney Lehmann – Marguerite H. Rippy – Ramona Wray,
    London, Bloomsbury, 2013: 92-140.
Litvin, Margaret, Hamlet's Arab Journey: Shakespeare's Prince and Nasser's
    Ghost (Translation / Transnation), Princeton, Princeton U.P., 2011.
Martinelli, Marco – Montanari, Ermanna, Primavera eretica. Scritti e
    interviste: 1983-2013, Pisa, Titivillus, 2014.
Martinelli, Marco, Farsi luogo. Varco al teatro in 101 movimenti, Imola,
    Cuepress, 2015.
Martinelli, Marco, Aristofane a Scampia, Firenze, Ponte alle Grazie, 2016.
Nasi, Franco (ed.), “Amleto a Gerusalemme di Gabriele Vacis e Marco
    Paolini”, Prove di Drammaturgia, 21.1-2, 2016: 16-24.



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Franco Nasi, Interweaving Stories



Nasi, Franco, “Pantani di Marco Martinelli: una narrazione polifonica”,
     Between, IV.7, 2014, http://www.betweenjournal.it/
N. Omran, A theatre Company Found a Theatre and Theatred “Hamlet”, in
     Carlson – Litvin 2015: 160-218.
Vacis, Gabriele, “Scuola per attori a Gerusalemme. Lettera”, Teatro e
     storia, 30, 2009: 211-221.
Id., Il racconto e la consapevolezza del tempo, in Marco Paolini, Gabriele
     Vacis, Il racconto del Vajont, Nuova edizione con due saggi inediti,
     Milano, Garzanti, 2013: 13-16.
Id., Awareness. Dieci giorni con Jerzy Grotowski, Roma, Bulzoni, 2014.
Id., Le città più illuminate sono quelle che hanno paura, in Amleto a
     Gerusalemme, libretto di sala, Reggio Emilia, I teatri, 2016: 5-8.
Vacis, Gabriele, Paolini, Marco, Amleto a Gerusalemme, libretto di sala,
     Torino,                Teatro               Stabile,               2016,
     www.teatrostabiletorino.it/book/amleto_a_gerusalemme.pdf
Vacis, Giulietta, Diario di Amleto a Gerusalemme, a documentary directed by
     Giulietta Vacis, produced by Jolefilm, 2016.




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                                 Between, vol. VII, n. 14 (Novembre/November 2017)




                              The Author
Franco Nasi

      Franco Nasi teaches Translation Theories and Anglo-American
Literature at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. He has
written extensively on Romantic aesthetics, twentieth-century poetry
and theater, and translation theory, and has translated contemporary
American and English poets into Italian. His most recent publications
include Traduzioni estreme (2015), Translator’s Blues (2015), and L’artefice
aggiunto. Riflessioni sulla traduzione in Italia 1900-1975 (2015, ed. with
Angela Albanese).

      Email: franco.nasi@unimore.it



                               The paper
Date sent: 15/05/2017
Date accepted: 30/09/2017
Date published: 30/11/2017



                     How to quote this paper
Nasi, Franco, “Interweaving Stories. Hamlet in Jerusalem by Gabriele
Vacis and Marco Paolini”, Maschere del tragico, Eds. C. Cao, A.
Cinquegrani, E. Sbrojavacca, V. Tabaglio, Between, VII.14 (2017),
http://www.betweenjournal.it/




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