Perhaps the 2024 production of La MaMa’s Medea, under Zishan Ugurlu’s direction and reimagining, is an ode to our times like Achille Mbembe’s Brutalism (2024), in which he developed the concept of the border-body, which means a person whose life is reduced to a state of no-value due to their precariousness in the face of borders. Medea is a border-body in this sense, since she is as a precarious border crosser according to the canonical plays about her written by Euripides and Seneca; she is never at home in any of the places she settles down after her first exile. Director Ugurlu elaborates on this subtle theme beautifully in this performance.
We enter through a fictional detention center’s door, one by one. Our faces are scanned. Some can pass with a green check that appears on the screen, some need to go through extra security with a loud beep of the red X. At the gates of the theatre we leave our legally documented selves in the face of the global world system and we are temporarily cast as asylum seekers. In the fiction of the performance, we are not only exposed to the story of mythical border-bodies, but are put in seats of border-bodies.
Medea by Theo Cote / First floor. Entering through the doors of the detention center. Performer John Maria Gutierrez as one of the asylum seekers entering the detention center.
They [the border-bodies] would be subjected to sorting procedures, not because they were to be considered as resources to be tapped into, but with a view to their possible elimination, since they were potential sources of nuisance. (Mbembe, 2024, 82)
The process of passing through the doors and being digitally checked transform who we are in the temporality of the performance; now we are potential sources of nuisance and therefore can be treated accordingly. We sit on the benches, waiting for something, until a MetaHuman, a simulated official appears projected onto the concrete wall that we are facing. He is the one who will examine us, to see if we are fit to pass or not. The more the system appears impersonal and digitalized, the more it comes off as omnipresent and impossible to defeat. MetaHuman is a mask for our very own 21st century, not used in different means then the Ancient Greek masks that depict Creon.
Within the setup of the detention center, the first floor introduces the audiences with the testimonies collected from real refugees. Each refugee speaks in their native language as they are questioned by the MetaHuman officer. The officer speaks in English, and his words, translated to the language of the detainee, are projected over the concrete wall above the MetaHuman. In return the detainee’s testimony is translated into English, and projected over the MetaHuman too, hanging over this fictional but seemingly omnipresent entity like Democles’ sword. This is also the scene where we are introduced to the heteroglossia of the world of Medea, of exile; where we hear Persian, Turkish, Spanish, Korean and English through the scene. As the audience – cast as the other asylum seekers/detainees – we wait for our turn as we listen to fellow detainees’ testimonies. There are people who died on the way who give their testimonies too, an Iranian trans woman, performed by Ali Arian Molaei in Persian, explains her story after she is asked if she has ever been involved in prostitution. There is a very young woman from Latin America, performed by Frida Guevara, who was given a three-year-old child in the camp to take care of, who can’t convince the MetaHuman officer to call the number written on her arm to reach her father. Then there is a queer Nigerian man, Edafe Okporo who is there to perform himself, who questions the hatred he faced at home and now here. Later I find out that Okporo is the writer of the book ASYLUM: A Memoir and Manifesto, and founder of Refuge America. Which of these people are telling their own stories, and which of them are performers who are voicing other border-crossers’ stories?
The last testimony that we are presented with is from a West African mother, who has baby twins. Her own mother insists she not make the deadly journey across water with her two babies. She takes the journey, feeling that there is more danger in staying, and one of her babies dies on the way. Human traffickers on the boat tell her that they should dispose of her dead baby into the water, which she fiercely rejects, wanting to bury her child in the land. When she falls asleep, they take her baby and dispose of him in the water. Only when she wakes up, she realizes that they got the wrong baby, which results in the death of both of her children. This real life testimony is the preface for Medea’s story to unfold in front of our very eyes.
Considering that the actual myth of Medea is based on the fact that she is an exile at every stop of her journey, it is fitting that she is in a detention center in the opening of the performance. In this interrogation room on the first floor, amongst these verbatim testimonies, some performed by people who actually lived them, we are introduced to Medea and her family, each speaking another language to the MetaHuman border officer.
Medea by Theo Cote / First floor. Medea (Mia Yoo) and her son (Ammiel Kaufman) being interrogated by the MetaHuman border officer.
Medea’s children, speaking English, are performed by two brilliant child actors, Ammiel Kaufman and Morgan Medina-Wild, who carry out a very difficult performance – they neither break their character, or fail to deliver a sense of natural naivety that many children have. Indeed, throughout the performance all of the questions asked to the asylum seekers are real documented questions that are asked in detention centers throughout interrogations. Therefore, the questions that are asked to children in their interrogations are real questions too, which are too difficult for them to comprehend and answer.
Particularly the shifts in the language allows the performance to be received through the personal backgrounds of each audience member thanks to a dramaturgy of carefully constructing various points of views and blindspots. For example, Mia Yoo as Medea speaks Korean, George Drance as Jason – to my surprise – speaks Turkish. Jason’s slightly accented Turkish marks – for me – that having an accent is the norm in Medea’s world of exile, where language is learned and not given; therefore it always bears the marks of the labour of learning. When Jason is asked by the MetaHuman officer if he has ever received paramilitary, military, or firearms training, he answers positively; to which I cringe knowing about the mandatory military service that all healthy men need to go through in Turkey, when no further explanation is asked or allowed. MetaHuman allows no explanations to Jason about why and how he received his paramilitary, military, or firearms training; which sustains a regime of institutional ignorance, allowing for assumptions, where any man migrating from a country where there is mandatory military service can appear as a potential criminal. “This is because, like knowledge, ignorance is a form of power.” (Mbembe, 2024, 40)
Medea by Theo Cote / Second floor. Medea’s two children (Ammiel Kaufman and Morgan Medina-Wild) playing on the performance area of the second floor as the audience is coming in. In the background the on-stage camera operator is seen.
Just as I understand the untold assumptions that come forward when Jason is not given the opportunity to explain why he has military training, I understand – at least some of the – twists and turns of how Ugurlu’s Medea differs from the patriarchal canon of Medea when we are exposed to Ancient Greek and Latin in the second floor. This is the floor in which Medea’s own mythological story unfolds. Text is created by Andrei Serban decades ago in La MaMa, in 1972, by mixing Seneca’s Latin version and Euripides’ Ancient Greek version. The entire text is composed in its initial adaptation, by Elizabeth Swados, which is used in Ugurlu’s 2024 version too. The self-referential nature of the performance in relation to La MaMa’s own history is striking in many dimensions, for example the mask of the Creon used in the performance is originally created for this 1972 production.
Medea by Theo Cote / Second floor. Arthur Adair as Creon with the mask from the 1972 production of Medea, directed by Andrei Serban in La MaMa.
If the lingua franca of the first floor was English, now in the second floor it is Ancient Greek and Latin; where – in 2024 – no one is a native speaker. This marks the labor of linguistic adaptation for most immigrants, the labor of learning another language out of need. Therefore, the second floor opens the story of Medea as if it is going to be told the way it is canonically told in its canonical languages, but then twists the way that this patriarchal canon framed this mythical woman with a contemporary feminist sensibility.
The language of the second floor, Ancient Greek and Latin composed into music, is also meant to serve as an epic song, it is sung and choreographed to vibrate in the body. Through these vibrations we are served a deeper meaning of Medea’s conflict, as a large body of chorus surrounds the main characters, serving as a crowd that always sides with power. There are parallel screens, each of them eight meters long, above the audiences who are placed to face each other with their backs on the walls, and these screens show stories of border crossers, told in their own voice. There is one particular story in this episode, told by a young man whose face is blurred and we get to hear his own narration of crossing the US-Mexico border. While in the jungle he was with his mother, who fell sick on the way, and asked him to continue without her, which he couldn’t. The rest of the group decided to stay with them, not to leave his mother behind. This is Roberto H.’s own lived experience, who consented to share this with the artistic team through the trust that is built through the youth workshops they got to do together. Roberto H. starts telling this beyond-tragic experience in a suppressed, flat-toned voice, which breaks as he continues his narration. The choice of blurring his face is more about protecting him legally; but in dramaturgical terms I am glad that we don’t see his pain without the filter of the blur, which brings our attention to listening to his voice.
One performer among the chorus is also a teller of such an experience, in Spanish, and she does not conform with the unity of the chorus that sides with power.
Medea by Theo Cote / Second floor. Screens show detention centers.
Medea and her children are surrounded by power, embodied by the collective body of the chorus, and their bodies are marked by the power though being chained by digital ankle restraints.
All these forces are about wearing bodies down. This is the case, for instance, with “electric ankle restraints” or “electric shock anti-riot forks,” which are designed to impart “electric shocks to the thighs,” or with tear gas launchers. But we must also include facial recognition devices, identity management systems (which are supposed infallible and made of interoperable components), integral biometric modules able to bring together registers of civil and social security status, identity cards, passports, and geolocation and body-tracking technologies. (Mbembe, 2024, 90)
When the time comes, the chorus, including the tutor of the children who seemed to have a compassionate relationship with them, surround Medea and her children and forcefully put electric ankle restraints on them.
Medea by Theo Cote / Second floor. Chorus puts electronic tracking devices – unremovable digital anklets – on Medea and her children.
“While the paradox of visibility is magnified via the heightened surveillance of programs like ISAP [Intensive Supervision Appearance Program], the violence of in/visibility is evident across the asylum system’s practices and institutions, impacting all asylum applicants.” (Haas, 2023, 36) The institutional system makes the asylum seeker momentarily visible, by making them seen, documented, interrogated and processed at the entry level. After their entry, just when Medea, Jason and their two children are immigrants ready to start a life of somewhat safety and security; Jason is seduced by Creon’s offer to marry his daughter Creusa. Creon is motivated both to get Jason as a son-in-law due to his royal lineage, and to get rid of Medea who he sees as a threat to his governance due to her sorcery. Under these circumstances Jason’s decision to marry Creusa seems much more like a political act, motivated to access power more so than the desire to have a younger wife. Creon comes with his mask, which he only wears when he speaks on behalf of the state, and puts down when he is speaking on behalf of his own greed. Therefore Creon, when wearing the mask, orders their exile and the putting of the tracking devices on Medea and her children, and threatens to kill them if they do not leave the next morning.
To read PART II of this essay, go to this link.
This post was written by the author in their personal capacity.The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect the view of The Theatre Times, their staff or collaborators.
This post was written by Deniz Bașar.
The views expressed here belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect our views and opinions.
