Hellraiser Essay Example For Students

Hellraiser Essay A chorus of nine naked males clog dance to bouncy rhythms of  THE Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B. A boy with green hair is immersed upside down in a fish tank and whipped, his nude body sparking with rings through his tongue, nipples, stomach and genitals. Somebodys Fairy Godmother is carried onstage: a four-foot-high physically handicapped half-man, half-woman. All joint in a chorus of Take Me Out to the Ball Game but not until a black man is castrated with a chainsaw and his severe organ ritually devoured. Welcome to the apocalyptic world of Reza Abdoh. For the 27-year-old enfant terrible director and writer, its poetic justice that the above scenes occurred in the final play developed by the Los Angeles Theatre Center, Bogeyman. And its equally appropriate that this multimedia extravangazas closing night was Oct. 13, 1991 the doomed theatres last day. The bogeymen unleashed in Abdohs work are at home on the edge, prophets in a society where apocalypse is just around the c orner. When youre HIV-positive and not superjock Magic Johnson, when youre an Iranian exile and revolutionary artist, when youre defiantly out of the closet and proud to be avant-garde, you dont retire with a smile and go ently into that good night. You range. You Assult. You add insult to injury. You work while the theatres lights go dark all around you. You push yourself and others to extremes, even while friends plead that you rest, that you not defy AIDS or alienate subscribers. You shove truth into societys face. Or at least you do if youre Reza Abdoh. The Hip-Hop Waltz of Eurydice and Bogeyman, tow parts of a projected trilogy on the themes of mortality and survival, were his 19th and 20th productionms not counting a horde of works conceived and directed during his adolescence. This month Abdohs bicoastal company, Dar A Luz Performance Works, premiers the trilogy;s final installment, The Law of Remains, in the ballroom of New Yorks abandoned Diplomat Hotel on 44th Street. Those who dont know his work should borrow advice from Heraclitus and expect the unexpected. They should also expect a shock of recognition. Abdoh is frequently but inaccurately compared with experimental auteur Robert Wilson, though his work is far less static than Wilsons and more crowded with the latest pop-culture icons. Another frequent comparison is with the irreverent, unpredictable Peter Sellars, but Abdoshs approach is more politically confrontational. However, like Sellars, Abdoh is at the forefront of employing progressive technologies in live performance, especially in his use of sound and video. In its extremes, his work mirrors the dissonant eclecticism of German choreographer Pina Bausch, and his fragmented, multi-layered texts resemble the writing of that nations iconoclastic playwright Heiner Muller. In a decade oppressed by economics and safe choices, Abdoch adheres to the experimental tradition of 1960s radical collectives like the Living Theater. Hes gathered a permanent ensemble of performers eager to stretch their limits of endurance (as well as an audiences tolerance). His style is that of an outraged and outrageous born-again Artaud, carring the French surrealists theatre of cruelty into the hot decade of the 1990s. Aloof irony no longer can suffice, Abdoh believes, while a society flirts with censorships. Just as Artaud ordered, Abdoh insists theatre artists must rage as if theyre burning at the stake, signalling through the flames. Inevitably, such work defies critical analysis. Consider the division of opinions among critics over Bogeyman. Los Angeles Times drama critic Sylvie Drake wrote a positive review: Abdohs witches brew is . . . designed to shock and wants to be absorbed by osmosis, throught he pores, the eyes, the ears, and no doubt other parts of the anatomy. But on the same day, reacting to the same performance, Orange Country drama critic Tom OConnor wrote a pan: Few cliche turns of performance art are left unstoned in Bogeyman. What poses as a surreal, visionary meditation on the disintegration of the tribal family emerges as a tedious, repetitive series of noisy temper tantrums about growing up gay iin an unhappy, repressive family. From another quarter, the alternative L. A. Weeklys Bill Raden anointed Abdohs work the most important single piece of theatre in L.A. this year. Simultaneously, the chief critic of the L.A. Reader, Cliff Gallo, mocked the show: Abdoh transforms his visual assemblage into a spectacle that, ironically, makes Bogyman as banal as anything produced by the commercial mainstream. In this light, Abdoh is the Andrew Lloyd Webber of the counterculture set. The controversy wasnt limited to critics. LATC subscribers demanded their money back, walked out of the theatre, threatened to call the mayor and the police, cancelled their subscriptions. The Los Angeles Times received dozens of angry or supportive letters. (One letter writer described Bogeyman as the play from hell.) The only theatrical personality indifferent to the controversy seemed to be its author. A slight, dark, gentle, thin youth with a pockmarked complexion and sensitive eyes, Abdoh fueled the hostility by calmly reacting, Im not in the business of pandering to the audience. There are much more important issues than satisfying peoples taste buds. People who are offended are afraid of their own demons. Who is this impossibly young artist with the old-fashioned bohemian values? To his devoteesamong them wealthy patrons and dedicated followers willingt to sacrifice far more lucrative careers for the chance to work with him Abdoh is a theatrical visionary. To his critics, hes a self-indulgent emperor without clothes ruling a bankrupt avant-garde. To friends, hes a broke, compassionate, compelling, vulnerable reincarnation of Jean Cocteau. Abdoh was born in tehran to an  Italian mother, Homa, and Iranian father, Ali Muhammed Abdoh, who met in Europe whne she was 15 and he was 33. Ali Muhammed, who had graduated from the University of Maryland using the pseudonym Alan Morgan, was a naturalized American, star boxer and volleyball player whose familys agricultural holdings provided considerable wealth. After marrying, he returned triumphant with his teenage bride to his homeland in 1961, and on a hunch, built Tehrans first bowling alley. Bowling revolutionized the citys nightlife, quickly becoming the in activity among high-society Iranians. Soon Ali Muhammed owned numerous sports businesses and even purchased a popular soccer team. Such prosperity did litle to improve family harmony. My mother had a poets soul inside a housewifes body, Abdoh recalls. Wives of wealthy Iranian men became automatons. Listening to him describe his childhood impressions, one sense elements from his productions. His parents had a relationship based on fear rather than mutual respect (as do the perversely abusive members of the shattered nulcear family of Bogeyman); theirs was a patriarchal, domineering authoritarianism (a central theme of Father Was a Peculiar Man, Abdohs 1990 environmental spectacle mounted in the Manhattan meat-packing district under the aegis of En Garde Arts); his father projected this image of a demi-god (an image made literal in The Hip-Hop Waltz of Euryddice, a gender-switched hallucination based on the Orpheus myth, staged first at LATC, then at the Festival of the Americas in Montreal). Although he denies creating art as therapy, the extreme imagery of Abdohs later work must reflect scenes from his childhood. There was a lot of physical violence toward both my mother and me, he says of his early years. If my spirit is filled with these demons from the past and it is then this violence, this dominant enslavement of other people in order to empower oneselfall this is coming through in my art. His family took up residence in London. Living in England was the thing to do for rich Persians, he remembers. It was decadent because there was a lot of money, and they didnt know what to do with it. England exposed him to art that spoke to his private fantasies. At age seven, Reza was taken by his governess to Peter Brooks A Midsummer Nights Dream, and the experience seared itself into the childs imagination. The productions acrobatic choreography, the sudden bursts of wild spectacle, the direct address to the audience all these qualities characteristic of Abdohs work can be traced to that initial exposure. Young Reza also saw Martha Grahams productions and exhibitions of Jackson Pollock and Giacometti. But the biggest impression on me as a kid was religious iconography, Abdoh says. I was born to a Catholic and a Muslin, then I grew up going to the Protestant Church of England while all my friends were Jewish. Id go to a bar mitzvah one day, then the next day to an Islamic wedding, then the next to a Catholic funeral. (Such an eclectic background also provided Abdohs linguistic skills: he speaks French, Farsi and Italian as well as English.) A public life EssayAbdohs personal manifesto is less fierce and more philosophical. He bases his world outlook on the ancient mystic poet Molanah, who he says truly celebrates the mysteries of life, who writes about the struggle between light and dark forces. My plays are dreams. Abdoh explains. My dreams are dreams of a better future whee we can live in true perace rather than simulated peace. But to get there, theres a whole process of purging . And thats why my work is often so dark. There are moments of complete mayhem, unforgiving and relentless violence, passionss that are like excrement. Its not because Im cynical. Its a form of purge that needs to occur. After minamata, abdoh decided to  take his visions to Manhattan. His assault on the East Coast came via the adventurous site-specific company En Garde Arts, which invited Abdoh to stage an environmental piece. An abandoned warehouse and a four-block area in the citys meat-packing district became the setting for Father Was a Peculiar Man, his Off-Offf Broadway interpretation of Dostoeveskys The Brothers Karamazov. Astonished audiences trailed after the Walter Thompson Marching Band as jazz rhythms led them from slaughterhouse to street corner to a gigantic banquet table occupying a half-block of West 12th Street; while characters pursued one another with chainsaws, a beauty queen (Miss Arizona) stalked up and down the table pursued by video crews, lecturing on toxic waste; inside the crumbling warehouse, shoulder-to-shoulder with some 45 cast members, audiences witnessed a shower scene with naked men kissing, another nude male dangling upside down from a meat hook, and yet another p ainted green and hanging on a cross as Christ. Its not about bare skin, Abdoh says of his aesthetic. Its about exposing our psyche. We have to celebrate the visceral, celebrate the androgynous, celebrate the Dionysian forces, and not just be trapped in this kind of an Apollonian mayhem, which we are. Buoyed by praise from the New York Times (which called Father exhilarating and exuberant), Abdoh rushed back to Los Angeles to answer Peter Sellars invitation to take part in the Los Angeles Festival. Abdohs Pasos en la Obscuridad (Footsteps in the Darkness) seemed like a perfect event for the Festivals theme of multiculturalism. But Abdoh miscaalculated. Mounting a more-than-three-hour parody of telenovellas, in Spanish, using Latino transvestite entertainers, with only two-and-a-half weeks of rehearsal, proved too much too soon. The result was wildly uneven. Then came another blow. LATC, in a cancerous financial condition, could not afford to present his next scheduled project, an epic on AIDS titled Bogeyman. Either come up with a less ambitious alternative, he was told, or wait until next year. Abdoh suffered a personal crisis, careening from the ecstatic success on one coast to a crashing collpase on the other He had been diagnosed as HIV-positive. There might not be a next year. Abdoh awoke at 3 a.m. with a line from William Blake echoing in his head: He who desires but acts not breeds pestilence. Abdoh visualized an Orwellian society in the 21st century where sex is punished by death. He heard a monstrous vice cop screama at a married couple named Orpheus and Eurydice, Were gonna bore desire right out of you! He had his next project, The Hip-Hop Waltz of Eurydice. With only five characters, he could explore and illuminate Americas flirtation with censorship, a theme that was increasingly haunting his daydreams. In addition, Hip-Hop would be the first play of an ambitious trilogy, followed by Bogeyman and ending with The Law of Remains. LATC enthusiastically agreed to produce all three. At Montreals Festival of the Americas in June, Hip-Hop was praised as jarring unexpected, inspired, and Abdohs emerging international status led to the creation of his own permanent company, Dar A Luz. The literal translation from Spanish means to give light, but Abdoh chose it because Ecuadorean women also use the phrase as a synonym for birth. Dar A Luz soon had an office on New Yorks Upper East Side and an enormous midtown rehearsal loft, donated by a New York board member, plus a Hollywood movie executive, Adam Leipzig, senior vice president for production at Touchstone/Disney Pictures, on its board. One of the most inspiring aspects of Rezas work, says Leipzig of his reasons for serving on Abdohs theatrical board, is the way he is able to blend cultures and traditions simultaneously on the stage, drawing from ancient Eastern and African rituals and completely contemporary facets of our culture. But when the time finally came for Bogeyman, Abdohs artistic home was in turmoil. By last summer, LATCs financial crisis loomed ominously. Staff members argued against doing Bogeyman because it required a dozen Equity performers as well as one of the most expensive sets in LATCs history. But producer White echoed Abdoh when she countered: If not now, when? How can we not do this work? Bushnell defiantly announced: If this company is going to close, then its going to close swinging. Its not going to close whimpering in a corner doing a two-character play. In the midst of imminent collapse, teh staffs dedication to Abdohs visions required heroic struggles. White paid for props out of her personal bank accounts. Rehearsals were interrupted by last-ditch press conference during which LATCs personnel pleaded in the lobby for funding. Even the indefatigable Abdoh suffered despair. I have never, ever been so depressed, he said during rehearsals of Bogeyman. LATC was a family that nurtured this prodigal son. It was a family that didnt hesitate to cast tattooed, pierced dancers Abdoh had found at an L.A. afterhours haunt called Club Fuck. It was a family that didnt hesitate to encourage his furious indictment of venal love. It was a family that gave him whatever he wanted, even if it meant condemning societys avoidance of the AIDS epidemic, even while fearful that staging simulated homosexual acts might provoke consevative politicians into cutting funds. It was a family believing, as Bushnell said, that Abdoh was a theatrical Picasso. Bogeyman erupted in the midst of the fiscal debacle like a heroic last stand. The shadow of death hung over the theatre and over Abdoh himself; decay oozed from the savage ceremony on stage. It became the talk of the town and would still be running if LATC had not been forced to darken its stages. His home gone, Abdoh began to contemplate relocating to New York. Before he could make a permanent transplant, he wrote and directed a low-budget movie, The Blind Owl, for producer and video artist Adam Soch, casting many of the Bogeyman misfits. Then, in advance of a spring commitment to direct for the Long Beach Opera, he could fly to his East Coast base for the The Law of Remains. According to Abdohs synopsis, The Law of Remains, on one level, traces the seven stages of a journey that the soul embarks on the in Egyptian Book of the Dead. On the second level it explores emotional, spiritual and physical cannibalism. On the third level it is a love story between an assassin and a holy man, a car salesman and a hustler, a junkie and a sailor against a decaying background. The text will be in English, Spanish and Arabic. How will a frigid New York, besieged by debt and oppressed by recession, greet such a private spiritual expression? There are those who believe Abdoh is over-extended and increasingly surrounded by sycophants; more and more you hear his young followers refer to Abdoh as a genius. Hes less and less open to outside advice, increasingly meditating with his private muse. Dangers of a guru or cult mentality shadow this Persian mystic. Yet Abdoh wont compromise his vision. Hes determined to make art for a society where even the word artist is suspect. In an era when theatre is manipulated by media and marketing concerns, when playwrights are taught how to write characters out of their plays, when artistic directors calculate how to hold on to shrinking subscription audiences, Abdoh courageously picks up the avant-garde banner last held by Artaud, Cocteau, Grotowski and the Becks. He waves that flag with a ferocity our geriatric theatre so desperately needs if it, too, is to survive. We dismiss his visions at our peril.