Medea as a Border-Body [Part II]

To read PART I of this essay, go to this link. 

 

The snake that Medea uses to make her potion, which is a real snake on stage, is worn by her as a necklace around her own neck – showing that everything that she does, every choice and risk, is known intimately by her.

Ugurlu’s Medea is an agent in her own life, and in the lives of others. Creusa comes on stage too unlike the canonical tellings of the story, along with Jason in his confrontation with Medea.

Creusa appears as a young woman – performed by Mattie Barber-Bockelman, whom I watched before in the 2021 Kosova Showcase as Electra – pushed into this marriage, who doesn’t want to hold Jason’s hand, and feels ashamed in front of Medea. Ugurlu decided to give some of Medea’s lines in this scene to Creusa, who confronts Jason about the unethical basis of their coming marriage. The real snake that Medea uses for her spell is not just a mark of her dangerous power, but also her relationship to nature, her capability to understand the ecosystem, and heal what is already poisoned. In this set up we start to see Medea’s powers for the first time.

It is as if Medea has an electromagnetic field, has influence on other people’s bodies as she makes the entire chorus lie down to her will, and has the power to make the images on the screens move, showing the dangerous landscape of the US-Mexican border. This exposure prepares us for the third floor, where we are about to see the full extent of her powers.

In Ugurlu’s rendering, Medea does not kill Creon or Creusa, and it is left purposefully ambiguous if she kills her children or not. If it is carried out, Medea’s ritual to kill her children comes in as an act of brutal compassion in the face of a brutal world, an act of rescuing her children from the abuses of the border.

If she doesn’t kill them, then her magic serves a purpose to save them from this world, to make it possible for them to live freely elsewhere. The last frame in which we see her children after they exit the performance space on the second floor is as part of the projections on the parallel screens hanging over the audiences. In this video projection the children seem to be alive, as if they are asleep with eyes open, peaceful underwater. This part echoes the very last testimony we got to hear on the first floor, from the African mother who lost her twin babies on the sea journey. We are reminded once again that the border-body “can be found on land, at sea, in abstract spaces, in transformations of the air into light and vapor, both solid and fluid, lurking under optical fibers”. (Mbembe, 2024, 86) Under the pressure of her circumstances, in this last video that we see her on the second floor, her dark black hair turns to white.

This underwater death or life makes sense when we consider that the same projection screens held the testimonies of other border-bodies who crossed borders by taking high risks, such as Roberto H., and also showed those very landscapes and detention centers they crossed.

The third floor/dramaturgical layer is a fully metatheatrical one, we are greeted by the anxiety of a Mexican man, David G., who is put through an interrogation by a faceless migration official who is only made up of a voice coming from the sound system. David is pushed into telling his own story after his lawful entry to the United States with a visa. David tells the officer that he was a baby when his family crossed the border from Mexico to the United States, and to this day his family couldn’t get the documents that can make their stay legal in the country. David lived in the United States until his early twenties under these conditions, and even received his entire education there including a bachelor’s degree. Unable to continue living in this eternal limbo, under the purgatory of the system defined under the DACA – Consideration of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, he decided to return to Mexico, where nobody knows him except his elderly grandmother. His grandmother needed to be a witness against Mexican officials to prove that he is indeed the person declared in his own birth certificate. Through these absurd negotiations he finally received his Mexican passport, and applied for a visa to enter the United States, once he can manage to pay for the application fees of a visa. His visa was not only rejected but he got a travel ban for a decade, unable to visit his family in the US. Only in his early thirties he could apply again, this time receiving his visa. When he finally traveled to see his family, he was immediately taken under detention, which brought him in front of us, as we witness his interrogation. I am aware at that point that some performers disappeared between the floors of reality and metafiction, quite literally, throughout the performance. Similarly many people disappear and are never found again on borders all over the world; and I sense that this might happen to David in front of our eyes too. David G. is a real person by all means, whereas we do not see the officer, just as we were only exposed to a MetaHuman officer in the first scene.

Ugurlu’s Medea who doesn’t harm humans, has the power to break the global blanket of a racist and discriminatory ideology that is coded into an interwoven digital system with all its electric ankle restraints, face recognition technologies, border control points and detention centers. During David’s interrogation Medea hacks the system through its live video and sound systems, and the digital-bureaucratic system that has been perceived as impersonal and seemingly omnipresent all along starts to flicker, showing how frail it had been all along. Ugurlu’s Medea also subtly makes statements around the much needed heteroglossia of a more fair world, which materializes once again in the first encounter between Medea and David, when Medea briefly responds in Korean to David who speaks in Spanish, before they both switch to English. Slowly – to David’s surprise – the digital officer’s voice that he has been talking to cuts off.

On the screen above him Medea appears and connects him to a human rights lawyer – performed by Chris Wild, who is a real immigration lawyer (and real life father of the child actor Morgan Medina-Wild). After his brief talk to the lawyer, passing him his passport number, David gets to talk to his own mother briefly too, to say he is still in one piece and misses her. The screen then completely dies off. Then Edafe Okporo, the other real refugee who we met at the first floor, appears on the screen, and talks about kindness of strangers and what it means to have hope at the darkest of times; alluding to the kindness of Medea as a sorcerer and hacker, but also to the potential political power of the audience. After a moment of confusion, Medea joins David in person, and they sit next to each other, silently. They wait together for a while, as two immigrants, gesturing to the extended years, even decades of waiting that people go through, as they seek for a more secure life. Then, they open the heavy curtains that separate the terrace with the performance space, letting the fresh air come in, along with lively sounds and lights of New York City.

This marks the end of the performance, when we are invited to the third-floor terrace of La MaMa by Medea/Mia Yoo and David G. There is no bow for anybody involved in the performance. Then the ensemble serves us soup to be shared, gives us cards and pens to write notes to people prisoned in detention centers – which the ensemble promises to send later, and provides us with ribbons made from the fabric of ripped life jackets where the names of the asylum seekers who died trying to cross borders are written.

We tie these ribbons to the fishnet that is hung on the terrace wall, which is an installation that is part of the performance. This is when members of the ensemble take their time to talk to audience members genuinely.

For a moment on the terrace, the old experimental theatre serves its ancient-rooted ritualistic purpose of gathering a temporary community. In a time of extreme human rights abuses, what does it mean for a small group of people, coming from different walks of life and different levels of abuse at borders, sharing soup just after Medea, as a compassionate mother, has been through her multiple tragedies, which in our time, does not take place under special and exceptional conditions but simply everywhere and too common? The soup we share is more than an act of creating a temporal community, it is also a reminder of how dependent we are as a species to food and to trustworthy people. The performance does not leave the audience in a bleak sense of uselessness in the face of such grave injustices, but it doesn’t offer an easy solution to soothe the heaviness that we are feeling. We share the soup, talk about the performance, talk about what can be done, and get informed about neighborhood communities in East Side, and communities across USA, working with incoming refugees and what their needs are^[1]The communities and organizations that we are informed about are as follows: Artists Athletes Activists, At Otro Lado, East Village Neighbors Who Care, East Village Loves, and Refuge America..

Weeks after experiencing the performance, I talked to my friend, fellow theatre scholar and border-crosser, Burcu Yasemin Şeyben, about her perception of the play in its online version. Through her narrative I see that there is actually a fourth layer to the performance, which the online audiences get to see. In the liveness of the performance in the house, every action of the camera is choreographed with the actors, the camera operator does not intervene with the live audiences’ experience. The camera operator sometimes brings in-person audience’s faces on the screen too, provoking the idea that these theatre-goers in NYC in 2024, are either already asylum seekers, refugees or immigrants; or one day can become such border-bodies under the current global regime of the world. The on-stage movement choreography that the camera operator is a part of also reminds us that there is a quality of documentary within the live performance itself. Through Şeyben’s narrative, I learn that there are moments of live interaction for the online audiences too. For example, while in the second floor, when Medea puts the snake on red fabric to cast her spell, the likes – in the form of bubbling hearts – of the online audiences are projected onto the floor of the magic ritual. This serves as a special moment of engagement for the online audiences, as if they are adding to the magic of Medea through their collective online presence, supporting her. In-house audiences only sometimes get glimpses of what the online audience might be seeing, but it is clear that we are served with different details of a brutally fragmented story. Online audiences get to see parts of the story that in-house audiences cannot get, such as the monologues of characters at the staircases; but the in-house audience passes through the scans at the beginning, gets to experience being present with the live snake, and has soup with the cast at the end. The vulnerability of being physically present with the characters constructs a different experience compared to the experience of online audiences with their in/visible presence and more bird’s eye point of view of the performance. If the in-house audience is cast as asylum seekers once they enter the space, the online audience is cast as witnesses and potential activists just as the human rights lawyer we get to see at the third floor helping David G.

The director, Zishan Ugurlu, blends many languages through the show, creating a tower of Babel just before its collapse, a heteroglossia that we need collectively today, a fragmented landscape of language dotted with islands – not silos – that are connected by bridges of translation and semi-translation, through gesture, voice and body. As Medea’s little boy asks the immigration officer, “Birds, fish, dolphins pass through the sea and land all the time. Do they have papers too?”, which is a valid question by all means. Ugurlu’s Medea is not only an important note in the performance history of La MaMa, or even New York City, but in the global world of the early 21st century; for it questions the meaning of borders today as migration is becoming the only route to safety for so many people. Medea of Ugurlu is a compassionate mother, who reminds us, put into words by the Somali-British poet Warsan Shire, that “no one puts their children in a boat / unless the water is safer than the land”.

 

* The quotes are from:

–       Mbembe, Achille. Brutalism. Translated from French by Steven Corcoran. Duke University Press. 2024. (First published as Brutalisme by Éditions La Découverte, 2020.)

–       Haas, Bridget. Suspended Lives: Navigating Everyday Violence in the US Asylum System. University of California Press. 2023.

* I thank Zishan Ugurlu for organizing the opportunity for me to see Medea twice, and I thank Burcu Yasemin Şeyben for editing and suggesting important ideas at the early stages of this piece.

* For a detailed program of the show, see: https://cdn2.me-qr.com/pdf/21646842.pdf?time=1714156622