This brief article won’t attempt a history of the lecture-performance, a format many claim was founded in Lebanon; rather it is a brief outline of three performances recently held in AshkalAlwan’s Home Workspace. In fact, although Beirut audiences would popularly call all three works– RabihMroué’s Pixelated Revolution, MarwaArsanios’ Have you Ever Killed a Bear? or Becoming Jamila, and JessikaKhazrik’s The Influence of Prostitution on Tourism – ‘Lecture-Performances’, two of the artists, RabihMroué and JessikaKhazrik, prefer different terminologies. And although the three works are by three artists aged roughly between 50 and 20 the differences highlighted are not intended to set up generational paradigms. Rather, through these examples presented over the last two years at AshkalAlwan’s Home Workspace, I hope to explore the elasticity of the lecture-performance as a format, offering a commentary on the works themselves, and an outline of the lecture-performance without resorting to a definition.

In the case of The Pixelated Revolution, RabihMroué prefers the term ‘Non-Academic Lecture’ to ‘Lecture-Performance’. Which holds a certain degree of irony because of the three performances, his borrows the most from academia – from an academic lecture. In Pixelated, Mroué sits behind a desk on a raised platform, his face lit by his MacBook screen and a small desk lamp. The audience sits in darkness. As he talks about “death today in Syria”, he scrawls through a PowerPoint presentation juxtaposing images, still and moving, gleaned from YouTube with a cinematic manifesto. The images are made by ‘Syrian citizen journalists’ – basically anyone with a mobile phone camera trying to document any event from a protest to a funeral – from the ongoing Syrian revolution, while the manifesto, Dogme 95, was famously produced by a group of provocative young Danish filmmakers. The manifesto was an attempt to enhance the realism of cinema by spurning expensive techniques such as sets, special effects, postproduction or props in order to focus on narrative and performance – advice that Mroué passes on to the Syrians risking their lives in protests they attempt to document and disseminate with pixelated images from their mobile phone cameras. Mroué focuses on clips when the cameraman inadvertently seems to film his killer and his own death, particularly focussing on a moment that he terms ‘Double Shooting’ – a play on the ambiguity of the word to shoot in English, meaning both to film and to fire a bullet. The cameraman films, the soldier fires a bullet, and for a brief moment in the YouTube clip, the two are locked in the ambiguity of a verb – ‘Double Shooting’.

In its structure, the set-up is academic: the combined apparatus of the stage-desk-laptop, the pre-written speech printed on sheets of A4 read out to the audience in formal Arabic, the choice of computer programme, the amplified voice. And much like a lecture given by an academic to present colleagues with new research, the aim of RabihMroué’s non-academic lecture is to provoke debate. But after reaching the end of his sheaf of lecture-notes, Mrouéslips off-stage while the final YouTube-clip plays through. Only after the lights go up do the audience notice that Mrouéis no longer onstage. Unlike in academia, the debate must take place only outside of the lecture hall, and not directly with the performer who has presented his research.

But the point of using the structure of an academic lecture is not merely to stoke debate: it is also a tactic that places the performer in a position of authority. Inevitably, the audience debates the ethics of juxtaposing images of death with a cinematic manifesto, and doubts are aired over the timeliness of analysing aesthetic aspects of images, when, as the lecture begins, “The Syrian protestors are recording their own deaths.”But what are the consequences if that authority is used, even exploited, in order to build a fictional narrative? Because despite the academic apparatus and the academic techniques – the analysis of images juxtaposed with the analysis of a manifesto – Mroué is spinning a narrative. It is a narrative that ends in death – the death of the ‘Syrian citizen journalist’, the cameraman. But it is also a narrative that ends in transcendence –Mroué’s claim that that death is virtual, or aesthetic, existing only within the image – a happy ending. And perhaps this is the point where the academic apparatus becomes problematic, by leading to dead end questions around ethics – questions that cannot be asked or perhaps are not even worth asking – while the performance’s narrative and artistic content – provocative and problematic in their own right – go unexplored.

In MarwaArsanios’ Have you Ever Killed a Bear? or Becoming Jamila, the artist adopts the more common term lecture-performance. And in this case the performance borrows almost nothing from academia, and in fact, it is only appropriate to call it a lecture if we go back to one of the roots of the word ‘lecture’, meaning ‘to read’. In Jamila, a reader, rather than the artist, sits on a chair, no desk separating her from the audience, reading from an inexpensively bound booklet. In certain respects, the lecture resembles a storytelling session – the audience sit on chairs identical to the performer’s, surrounding her in a semi-circle. There is no stage or platform –audience and reader sit on the same level. In fact, the script itself of the performance is handed out to the audience as they enter the room, so if they wish, they are able to follow the text as the performer reads it. Since the reader is not the artist, there is also a sense that any member of the audience could just as well be sitting in the middle of the semi-circle, reading the text to what feels like an intimate and informal gathering.

During the lecture, given certain cues in the text, the reader raises an image to her face –at times the photograph of a revolutionary Algerian from the 50s, DjamilaBouhired, dressed like a female Ché Guevara, in the camo of guerrilla fighter. At others, she raises to her face the covers of an Egyptian feminist magazine, Al-Hilal, from the same period. These modest acts – the performer covering her face with an archival image –not only represent the attempts by the artist to become Jamila, but also the lost legacy of the left, an unattainable tradition she attempts to embody in vain – a dusty, two-dimensional mask. A mask perhaps reminiscent of the masks of classical theatre. Behind the reader, a screen projects clips from Egyptian cinema’s portrayal of the young guerrilla fighter.

The script tells the story of a young actress cast as DjamilaBouhired for a film inspired by La Batailled’Alger that will recount the story of her infamous trial. She was apparently cast because the original actress panicked and dropped out because of moral objections to portraying a “criminal”. The scripts cuts between research the actress undertakes into contemporary leftist movements in preparation for her role and moments when she becomes Djamila, acting out episodes from her biography – first her military training, then the moment of her most famous act: placing a bomb in a crowded café – and finally moments of dialogue between the young actress and the now-nonchalant veteran fighter.

It is clear that this script, a literary narrative that blends biography and fiction, is not intended to spark debate – at any rate, the topic isn’t newsworthy in the way that Mroué’s Pixelated undoubtedly is. The exploration of an iconic figure’s biography is really a quest by the artist to understand her own position with regards to the legacy of a now-buried left. The decision to defer the reading of the text to a performer is interesting, matching as it does the original actress’s moral objection to portraying the iconic “criminal” in the narrative. Is the artist playfully suggesting she holds similar moral objections to portraying Djamila? However, something is also lost by the decision. The limited elements of theatricality– images covering face, snapping fingers, stamping feet of performance in a static set up – struggle to compensate for not seeing the artist herself perform this personal exploration.

For her work The Influence of Prostitution on Tourism, JessikaKhazrik prefers the simple ‘Performance’ – though her work is in fact based on a piece of academic research: her mother’s MA thesis submitted in 1979, written when she was a student at the Lebanese Institute of Tourism, and called “The Influence of Prostitution on Tourism.”Dropping the word ‘lecture’ also seems precise, since Khazrik neither reads, nor borrows the set up of an academic lecture. During the performance, Khazrik sits on a chair with a back but no legs, her own legs stretched out in front of her. The audience sits either on cushions or on similar chairs-with-no-legs, spaced out irregularly around her. In her lap lies an iPad mini with which she manipulates the photographs beamed onto the wall behind her, and in her hand she holds a stack of iPad mini-sized, paperclip-bound revision cards. The images show Georgette Karam, the artist’s mother, posing provocatively against various backdrops. As she slides her fingers to swipe between the photos, pinching to zoom in or flipping the tablet over to switch between portrait and landscape, Khazrik recounts the story of her mother, the airhostess who authored the eponymous thesis.

The performance is unscripted, and as she comes to the end of an anecdote, Khazrik flips through her stack of notes before moving onto the next speculation. After selecting her next card, she flicks through her iPad’s photo album to find the appropriate image. The performance is built around questioning the reliability of a document – an academic thesis. In this way it shares a documentary element present in both the other works. Through a series of teasing speculations, she hints at possible fictions contained within that document. As Khazrik recites a series of ‘What ifs…’ the doubts about the reliability of the document, and her interpretation of it, begin to grow. At first, we doubt whether or not Karam actually interviewed any prostitutes during her research. Did her mother simply transcribe her fantasies? Then, we begin to think that perhaps Khazrik is insinuating that her mother’s thesis was autobiographical. And this is where the work’s tension lies: Khazrik examines so many possibilities to explain the thesis’s many inconsistencies, so many speculations as to why her mother switched jobs from one airline to the next so often, but always stopping just short of asking whether perhaps her mother had worked as a prostitute. All the while, she flicks through yet more provocative photographs, showing her mother in various stages of undress, against kitsch, then suggestive, then tourist backdrops. The audience can clearly see the elephant in the room that Khazrik is playfully skipping around. We begin to think that she might be in denial over her mother’s seedy past, that she is constructing a host of fantasies to avoid confronting the issue – Khazrik’s mother must have been a prostitute.

The anecdotal structure of the performance is held together by this unspoken explanation. Through the various fragments collaged together, the audience, conversely, builds this simplified fantasy. It is an intriguing technique, playing on the ease with which an audience resorts to an obvious and prurient explanation. The informal set up – Khazrik sitting on a legless chair with no barrier between her and audience – helps Khazrik lure the audience into a false sense of superiority, of both understanding and interpretation. The treatment of fiction and fantasy without adopting a traditional narrative arc is brilliant. The language is difficult – often heavy on critical theory jargon, at times impossible to follow – but even this gives the impression of a rococo flourish, an ever-more-elaborate and misguided fantasy that the performer can’t come to terms with. In the end, it is the audience alone that has built an elaborate fantasy, an easy fiction.

Despite the differing terminology, these three performances share common features – they examine documents of various kinds, always images and often texts. Granted, those images are much more different than they are similar, ranging from Mroué’s YouTube clips of newsworthy concern to Arsanios’s dusty archive of magazines from the 50s. The performers rarely adopt overtly dramatic techniques – the performer always sits, largely immobile. But the drama is stored up, subtly, in the set up of the pieces themselves – be that the presence of a desk, the positioning of the audience, or whether or not the performer’s chair has legs. And the relationship to narrative varies greatly – from Mroué’s conventional arc concealed behind academic-style image analysis, to the loose, fragmentary approach of Khazrik that undermines the notion of narrative, revealing it to be an audience-constructed fantasy. In any case, the works all confirm the immense possibilities contained within the lecture-performance, possibilities not yet mastered even by the most established practitioners of the format in Beirut.