Performances of Colonial Absurd: Tell Me Something by Ruth Kanner Theatre Group

Abstract

Abstract This article offers a close reading of Tell Me Something—A Spoken Exhibition by Ruth Kanner Theatre Group and introduces the term “rhizomatic dramaturgy” to describe a performative practice at once based in colonial reality and working toward its dismantling. Rhizomatic dramaturgy exposes how language both props up colonial structures and has the potential to erase or reimagine them. Tell Me Something is a postdramatic work constructed as a series of events with no narrative, thereby precluding any neat organization of knowledge about its venue, Beit Hagefen. Instead, it invites spectators to take part in the deconstruction of the historical-spatial narrative of Beit Hagefen, a municipal institution metonymic of Haifa’s coexistence ethos. The study of curatorial decisions, the relationship between Arabic and ­Hebrew, and the rhizomatic dramaturgy based on ethnographic materials and speech mechanisms—particularly focusing on repetitions and differences—reveals how this hybrid event, through its bare language, embodies performances of the colonial absurd within Haifa’s Beit Hagefen and its environment and offers spectators parodic moments that provoke “shared laughter.”