Review: "Crying of My Mother"

Stripped of their galabayehs, they stand quietly with their backs to us under the soft blue light, their breath drifting like smoke in the frigid air. The expansion-contraction of their torsos is deep at first, but it slowly gives way to calm. Simple and ethereal, the closing stillness of "Crying of my Mother" is pregnant with a serene abandon that left us in the audience molten.

Choreographed by Muhannad Rasheed and featuring Rasheed and Duraid Abbass, the twenty-five minute dance performance ran December 1st through 3rd at Teatro in Damascus, Syria. The only private performance space in the city, Teatro is an old Damascene house cum theatre institute and production venue founded and directed by May Skaf, a well-known television and film actress in Syria. The performance took place in the central courtyard whose grand two-story arch has been rendered a proscenium.

The piece opens with Rasheed and Abbass in khakhi galabayehs cradled together before a fire. Rasheed's hand stretches forth taking in the heat while Abbass combs through his companion's afro. Their bodies, twin fetuses in a womb, are barely distinguishable from one another, and the moment denotes a sense of isolation as if the two worn men were resting for a night in the midst of a taxing journey.

But they are not desperate, not hopeless; rather, a tranquility, albeit one loaded with heavy fatigue, colors the scene. They have each other. The unbridled intimacy, at once brotherly and romantic, establishes a pianissimo, legato foundation from which the performance evolves. The movement takes on a staccato dynamic, and the bodies become disfigured and even corpse-like. Afterwards, the piece crescendos into a scene of mourning and concludes with a moment of ethereal peace.

As such, "Crying of my Mother" broaches the subject of death as metamorphosis. The transformation is, however, twofold: we witness shifts in the corporal and the gender identities of the dancers. After the theme of corpsed bodies builds momentum, the men slowly lift their galabayehs over their heads and clench their collars shut under their chin in silhouette, evoking images of mourning women in a chador, burqa, or jilaabah.

The quaking intensifies, and the performance climaxes as the men slowly pull the galabayehs off their bodies, shedding their skin and letting it fall to the ground. So, mourning entails the man's adoption the body of the woman--the mother--as a surrogate. Whereas the male body is the site of physical pain and death, it is the female body that carries the burden of emotional suffering, and it is the female body that has transformative agency, taking in the dancers--tortured, murdered, and left for dead--and bearing forth reborn, naked bodies.

Duraid and Abbass and their families were displaced by the 2003 American invasion of Iraq and subsequent civil-war and are refugees in Syria. Throughout the next couple weeks, "Crying of my Mother" will travel to the Netherlands and to Italy. The migration of the art and artists is a testament to the paradoxical realities of the military industrial complex which serves to colonize and to ravage peoples on the one the hand and to foster and to circulate the cultural production of pillaged societies on the other.