Descrption: Can You Make a Pet of Him Like a Bird or Put Him on a Leash For Your Girls?
Can You Make a Pet of Him Like a Bird or Put Him on a Leash For Your Girls? (2015) 60’
Structured through the oratorical tradition of the Shiite ceremony of Ashoura, Rana Hamadeh’s immersive and cacophonous sound-play takes this ceremony’s political, military and legal expressions within the Lebanese/Syrian contexts as its field for commentary and research. An annual ritual during which mourners re-witness the slaying of al Imam al Hussein (626–80 AD), the grandson of Prophet Mohammad and an allegorical reference to the ultimate figure of the oppressed, Ashoura proposes aberrant and conflicting understandings of the relations of legality, justice and theatre. A militant form of theatre that has undergone a major shift in the past three decades in Lebanon, this ceremony is addressed within the sound-play as a structural dramaturgical framework from which to imagine the emergent notion of testimonial subjectivity, both outside the bounds of the court of law and in place of the notion of the legal subject.