Firing shots into the air, a group of Chechen rebels storm a theater in Moscow and take roughly 700 theatergoers hostage. Terrorists blow up commuter trains in Madrid. Two planes plow into the World Trade Center's twin towers in New York, killing nearly 3,000 people.
Terrorism, whether directly experienced by the few or seen on television by the many, is a fact of contemporary life. It is also the central theme of La Fura dels Baus docu-drama Boris Godunov, which begins next Friday at Taipei's National Theater.
"The show is a reflection on global terrorism, [with] archetypal characters," said director Alex Olle in a recent interview with the Spanish-language newspaper Barceloca.
PHOTO COURTESY OF TAIPEI ARTS INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION
Boris Godunov fuses a true-life event, the attack on the Moscow's Dubrovka Theater in October of 2002, with Alexander Pushkin's play, which takes its title from the Czar of the same name, who gradually sinks into madness after murdering the Czarevich Dimitri to usurp the throne.
By blending the historical with the contemporary, the real with the fictive, La Fura creates a tragic parable about the quandary between means and ends and how corruption often breeds violence.
"Many times violence is used to gain power, not only through terrorism but also through states," Olle said.
PHOTO COURTESY OF TAIPEI ARTS INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION
But the play doesn't so much analyze the causes of terrorism as it shows how terrorism radically alters the people who perpetrate it, and the consequent effect on how we perceive the world.
The troupe's objective with Boris Godunov is to immerse the audience in an extreme experience and, in the process, return theater to its cathartic roots.
The play opens with Godunov brooding over the prince's murder. Preoccupied with bad omens, the Czar fails to notice the balaclava-clad figures sneaking through the room and filling it with explosives. Gradually, the terrorists begin to move out into the audience, shifting the action from the Czar's lodgings to the Dubrovka Theater.
From this point on the audience experiences a simulation of the horrors suffered by the hostages in the Moscow theater: the appearance of the militants, the planting of bombs, the tension of the kidnapping and the arguments among the terrorists.
"[W]e give the terrorists some motives … from the most mercenary terrorist - who could be on either side, to the widowed terrorist - acting more out of vengeance, or hate, or the person who [is doing it] for some ideals," Olle said.
Though the spotlight shines squarely on the individual motives and internal disputes of the terrorists, La Fura's Boris Godunov suggests that the rationale for acts of terrorism have their roots in the foreign and domestic agendas of nation-states. As such, terrorism and its opponents are simply two different sides of the same tarnished coin.
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