(toSkanews) – A show that can also act as a semiotic device, which intertwines stories and words, around the theme of the language and the dynamics of power that also preside over the use of language. Marah Haj Hussein is a Palestinian artist who now lives in Belgium and Santarcangelo Festival has brought the performance Language: No Broblem. A job set up as a work of visual poetry, with the signs of words to be physically protagonists, but on unusual supports, together with her, actress on the stage of a long multilingual story.
“The theme of the language – said Marah Haj Hussein in Askanews – is something with which we literally grew up. Since children we have known our Arabic language, but for seven years we have been studying Jewish at school. And this is truly used as a tool of power, and you believe that knowing Jewish well offers Palestinian to you many more possibilities, a feeling of greater equality, compared to the Israeli citizens with whom you live in the same land ».
The piece combines Hussein’s story with audio testimonies and stories that come from the occupied territories: and the way in which the dominant language slowly supplants the dominated one becomes evident: even in the speeches transcribed in Arabic, some terms appear only with the Jewish characters. “It is a strategy, sadly known -added the artist -: the Hebrew began to infiltrate the Arabic: today there are many words that in Arabic have simply lost themselves, replaced by Jewish words, which is the language of power, progress, technology. It has become the language of success ».
The show, which lives on its strong internal cohesion, also combines dance, both that of written words, and that of the artist, who, around geometric structures builds a physical story of the forms of oppression, as well as, is to be thought of, of the ways in which it is possible to at least imagine a perspective of liberation. “When I started to think of uniting the dance and theater – concluded Marah Haj Hussein – I found that both disciplines could have an abstract component: I tried to remove this abstract element and let themselves be spoken. Then I wanted to move the entire abstraction component in writing and I tried to put a strong component of reality inside dance ».
The exchange is perceived, just as the size of the theater of his work is perceived, the scenic strength of his posture, the very precise vision of what is the stage. And this thing, in a certain way, perhaps too abstract especially at the time of Gaza, however, reminds us that alternatives exist, that there are other spaces. That there is also another narrative. To say more would be an empty rhetoric, but forgetting it appears equally wrong. (Leonardo Merlini)
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