The discomfort of privilege – Magazine Teatre Barcelona
Discomfort is a key ingredient in performance poetry, it is the dart of the speech that is built in the performance and the core of the aesthetic experience of the viewer; Performance does not seek beauty – at least not the kind of beauty we are used to – but looks perform a truth –share which is called now-to make it present through the same actions. These actions may include all kinds of languages, be it body, text, sound, image, etc. In this sense, the radicality of performing action – which completely breaks the scheme of theatrical representation – becomes the vehicle of radically political speeches that denounce the very structure of our life in common, be it capitalism, patriarchy or cultural domination.
Into You give yourself Look Arab, The center of the target is white supremacism, without concessions or funnels: “You offend when we say that you are white is pure white fragility.” This is the last show of Queer FalafelQueer Lebanese artist, decolonial and multidisciplinary Anthony Kmeidestablished in Barcelona since 2014, to what we have seen in the Phoenix with The papers (2018) and Technocrat (2021), in the Barcelona Cultural District or to the Mercè Arts de Carrerin the latter with the work Mourning (2019). His pieces have also been seen in Berlin, Paris, Athens, Amsterdam, Ho Chi Minh (Vietnam), Nida (Lithuania), and also in Beirut, capital of his land. You give yourself Look Arab will land at theOld theater From September 4, after having been in the Cimarronas periphery rooml ‘Ehz festival of Bayonne and the Avignon Festival (France), which is called soon.
In this solo, recommended by over eighteen, Kmeid unfolds all its artistic facets: Visual arts, live music, body and text. The artist behind Queer Farafel’s mask He trained in classical dance and ballroom dancing, pursued audiovisual career at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts, pursuing a master’s degree in Cinema in Paris and the Dramatic Corporal Theater Laboratory in Barcelona. All these languages, in addition to his life experience and their concerns about the issue of identity-from a non-binary perspective of the genre and anti-racist and decolonial of ethnicity-have led him to rediscover as an artist and reaffirm his way of expressing himself on stage. We could say that You give yourself Look Arab It is the culmination of this process.
Knowing how to be Arabic, immigrant and artist who in a world dominated by Europeanocentrism and patriarchy allows him to expose himself to the public as such, and thus expose the misery of the West through him. Thus, Showing the public through performing action we are uncomfortable because it makes us feel exposed to ourselves: expression, exposes our privileges. This is also that all Queer Falafel’s publications and texts end with a Free Palestine.
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