GOG / MAGOG 2: Syria

Syria

Syria. Whom shall we ask for directions? The Syrians. Which ones? The ones with Syrian identities, families, tribes, ethnicities, religions. Sources. Elders, warlords, faction leaders, NGO representatives, agents of regional and global powers. Maybe we better ask the dead? They are so hard to reach. Surely the internet knows where to go.

On our second stop, we spin narratives surrounding the Syrian war zone and let their contradictions unfold. Fragmentary overviews, personal tales of woe, partisan reporting, spectacular propaganda, moving songs, old myths: At the cosy fire place many paths open themselves for the audience into the camp of burning truths. Take care though, every truth builds a barrier. Or it goes to war.

GOG / MAGOG 2 starts from a classical black-box theatre situation, with the seated audience being introduced to the performers and their ways of narrating: cultural representation with singing and reading from the Quran, biographical storytelling, multimedia disinformation, literary reportage, pseudo-scientific lecture, emotional songwriting.

After giving those examples, we lead the audience into the larger backstage space. There, audience members have to decide between simultaneous stories, delivered in a fixed time frame of 3 x 15 minutes: Do they want to learn about the conflict through a fable based on ornithological observation, through a map-based retelling of the region‘s history or through biographical stories of flight and migration by our (supposedly) Syrian guest performer? Inbetween the three chapters, everyone gathers around the camp fire to hear songs amidst a digital landscape of desert ruins, conducted by a mocap-driven avatar of chieftain GOG.