I don’t usually envy people. But having just seen the extraordinary documentary on Reza Abdoh I feel the strange, unfamiliar, prickly feeling that is, by all appearances, the envy. I am jealous of the people who knew this extraordinary man, and I covet the kind of experience they describe when talking about how it was like to work with him. The intensity, the incredible ballsy-ness and uncompromising honesty of what the work seems like – even seen just on film, in snippets, frozen, preserved like the living art should never be, it is something one does not forget. It crawls under one’s skin, dilates one’s pupils, makes the heart pump faster. Was it the awareness of his own inevitable and quickly approaching end that made him who he was, as a man and as an artist? It must have been important, but there is something much more stunning that emerges from testimonials of the actors, artistic collaborators, stage crew, producers, colleagues.
“We all were giving him much more than we were in a position to give,” says one of the performers. It is awe-inspiring to realize there are, once a generation, maybe even less often – people whose vision is so compelling that others trust them completely, blindly, beyond reason. There was much talk in the film of how Abdoh was capable of exposing, perhaps even exploiting, dark sides of people who entrusted him with their bodies and souls. They shake their heads when reminiscing on what he has made them do, how far he has pushed them beyond what they believed were their hard limits.
If this expression sounds like something from a BDSM site, it probably touches right on a subtle but powerful thing about theater when it is at its greatest. It is supposed to be a power exchange. It is supposed to be about complete, blind trust that makes one delve into a space unreachable except for this special, intense, vulnerable and incredibly empowering experience. A collaborative living art, when it really is what it should be – brave and uncompromising and transformative – is possibly even more intimate than sex, more overwhelming, more all-encompassing. In the context of what Abdoh’s oeuvre must have been like when experienced directly, the sexual analogy does not seem far off. Who knows, perhaps this is exactly what he was doing in the deepest, spiritual plane of his theatrical work.
The documentary directed by Adam Soch is an extraordinary piece of work, even from a perspective of someone – like yours truly – who watched it with little knowledge about the work of the late theatre visionary whose name is in the title. Its unabashedly emotional approach to the man and his work allows the unsuspecting audience to experience, if only second-hand, the urgency, the authenticity, the truth-ness of what Reza Abdoh’s theater must have been like. In some ways, it feels like a documentary on an extinct, ancient civilization (who could possibly dare produce and present a work like this in our era?) – but also brings to mind the line that indeed comes from the ancient times, but occasionally rings true, and that makes the lives of artists bearable, and at times rewarding: Exegi monument aere perennius.
Bad news: so far, the film has no US distribution. Can we please have this film in theaters? Do I know anybody who can make it happen?
Good news: video recordings of Reza Abdoh’s work will we made available online. I never expected to say that about a recording of a live performance – but I can’t wait.
https://vimeo.com/93815467