Reza Abdoh Research Articles

A Visceral and Temporal Remix: Performing Reza Abdoh’s Archives

Abstract: This essay takes as its central concern the historical transmission of Reza Abdoh’s performance works via their circulation in the artist’s retrospective exhibit at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in 2019. I analyze two interlaced defining features in the KW exhibition—archival remixing and viscerality—that the curators used to honor Abdoh’s artistic legacy. Focusing on the exhibit as a medium of performance historiography in diaspora, this essay argues that the multimedia installation of Abdoh’s archival work in the exhibition format utilized performance archives to create a haptic and visceral site of historiography and memory.

The horrors of capitalism in Reza Abdoh’s The Law of Remains (1991)

Reza Abdoh’s The Law of Remains (1991) is a play replete with violence, cruelty, murder and gore. While many critics view the playwright’s horror-inflected plays as reflective of an Artaudian philosophy that attempts to uncover the essential human ‘truth’ underlying societal ills, I view The Law of Remains as an exercise in dialectical horror. That is, a play that harnesses the grammar of gore and excess to critique capitalism’s disempowering and rapacious qualities while highlighting how consciousness of such qualities could galvanize positive opposition to oppression. In this article, I examine some of the play’s key moments of horror through a Marxist lens to uncover an anti-capitalist structure of feeling that lay in stark opposition to dominant neo-liberal forces in the early 1990s.

Is This Ballroom a Bathhouse? The Promise and Peril of Coming Together

This essay examines queer responses to the first wave of the HIV/AIDS epidemic alongside public health practices at a recent ASTR conference held during the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors focus especially on the period between the identification of the HIV virus in 1983 and the first availability of protease inhibitors in 1996. Within this period, queer practices of care in the face of government neglect engaged with performance, and in retrospect were themselves a form of performance theory that literalized performance studies' fixation on liveness and mortality. As the authors revisit archives, including public health videos, memoirs, congressional hearings, and queer criticism from the 1980s and '90s, they reconsider the work of Cindy Patton, David Román, Douglas Crimp, Eric Michaels, Gary Fisher, Herbert Blau, and Reza Abdoh in the elaboration of performance as vital to the collective project of public health.

Violent Continuities and the Possibility of Hope

This brief essay is excerpted from my State of the Profession plenary presentation, delivered at the American Society for Theatre Research conference on October 28, 2021. Patrick Anderson and I reference this presentation in our essay, "Is This Ballroom a Bathhouse? The Promise and Peril of Coming Together," which also appears in this issue of the journal. I offer it here to expand upon our discussion on how Abdoh's politics and aesthetics are relevant to our current set of cultural crises. In the full version, I combined my analysis of Reza Abdoh with consideration of how decolonial theory by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson might offer transformative possibilities for university culture; these possibilities are touched upon at the end of this excerpt.

From Queer Necropolitics to Queer Eschatology: Reza Abdoh’s Unsettling Historiography

The theatrical oeuvre of Reza Abdoh has been lauded for its reinvigoration of the avantgarde, its formal and political daring and its astute commentary about the violence of the HIV virus (Fordyce, Carlson, Mufson, Bell). More recently, Abdoh’s work has been taken up as a commentary on neoliberalism—in part because of its politicization of bricolage and pastiche, recalling the more radical possibilities of theorizations of scholars such as Frederic Jameson (Zimmerman). Others have called out the modes by which Abdoh expanded the possibilities of queerness in the early 1990s. Yet no scholar has commented on Abdoh’s engagement of eschatology as a mode of historiography. That is the purpose of this essay. It is under this rubric, rather than an idea of generic postmodern milieu, that I read the multiple and discordant temporalities in Abdoh’s performances. While drawing on theories of the necropolitical (Mbembe) and gore capitalism (Valencia) in relation to conceptions of queer eschatology and capitalist violence, my inquiry emerges from consideration of the structural and theoretical aspects of the art works (“object’s”) themselves. I consider how Father Was a Peculiar Man (1990), performed in the Meatpacking District of Manhattan, exemplifies the historiographical possibilities of performance through its embodiment of an eschatological vision of the world in which the gender binary is performatively undone.

Radical Gesture and the Politics of Postdramatic Tragedy: Reza Abdoh’s The Law of Remains

AbstractDuring his short lifetime, Reza Abdoh (1963–1995) was hailed as a trailblazing theater artist in the avant-garde art scenes of both Los Angeles and New York, where he created a series of massive performance spectacles that sought to intervene critically in the American political status quo. His 1992 piece The Law of Remains stages a furious response to the US American AIDS crisis, depicting it through the allegorical lens of a film being made by Andy Warhol based on the life of queer serial killer and cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer. Performed in the ruins of an abandoned hotel ballroom, the piece drew attention in The New York Times for being “one of the angriest theater pieces ever hurled at a New York audience.” This article analyzes the political dimension of Abdoh’s theater by focusing on specific gestural elements that occur at key moments in The Law of Remains. Doing so, it brings together theories of gesture from Hans-Thies Lehmann, Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, and Walter Benjamin, and configures these viewpoints into a constellation through which the politics of gesture in Abdoh can be illuminated. What emerges in Abdoh is a politics of “hopeless hope,” one uniquely meaningful for our planetary present tense.

Short Circuit

Short Circuit Bishnupriya Ghosh (bio) Queer Cinema in the World By Karl Schoonover and Rosalind Galt Duke University Press, 2016 Long ago, there was VideoActive. Legendary in Silverlake, Los Angeles, which is a neighborhood known as the eastside LGBT counterpart to West Hollywood, VideoActive offered pleasures in LGBT cinema and gay porn, in international art cinema and cult classics. On my frequent jaunts to the store in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I found its curatorial creativity arousing in more ways than one. Collections titled "Antonioni" and "Herzog" rubbed shoulders with "Trashy Women" and "Teen Dilemma," while "Straight" sexual pleasures had their own niche and ceased to be the norm. Here was an encounter with "queer cinema" at the cusp of its emergence in media studies as a critical category (roughly dating to 1992). While VideoActive targeted LGBTQ consumers, in the adjacent Los Feliz neighborhood, Jerry's Video sported an eclectic selection of international cinema that included popular genres such as martial arts films that, at the time, had cult status. Cinephiles haunted both, thumbing videos, cruising whoever was around the corner shelf, surreptitiously peeping at what others were renting. At Jerry's Video, I encountered Tsui Hark's Peking Opera Blues (1986), a delightful feminist martial arts romp in which a general's daughter saves Chinese democracy from dictatorship. Played by the sassy Brigitte Lim, the butch character that enthralled, those erotic energies were inextricable from a fascination with Tsui Hark. This was well before Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) mainstreamed the martial arts genre in the United States. In the video store worlds, queer affects threaded bodies, looks, screens, and images, racing rhizomatically through established cine-cultures and emergent formations. [End Page 200] It is such circuitries, not to be found in canonizing accounts of LGBT, art, or international cinema, that are the subject of Karl Schoonover and Rosalind Galt's magisterial volume, Queer Cinema in the World (2016). The authors accomplish this expansion through their sustained theoretical engagement with "queer" and "world" as critical categories, which then define what one includes under "queer cinema." Queerness, they argue, is an inhabitation of the world: a disturbance of sexual norms that has world-making capacities. Queer cinema, then, is not an abstract category with its constitutive features but a part of larger queer public cultures. Therefore, a book such as this entails site-specific research into queer public cultures of production, distribution, and reception. Such situated study not only maintains the "active, incomplete, and contestatory" qualities of queerness in the cinematic domain but also ensures there is no one enunciation of queerness. When the research is as multisited as it is in this volume, it puts pressure on any normative or prescriptive articulation of queer; in this sense, the book commits to the axiomatic that queers are different everywhere. The "world" that appears in and around queer cinema is both cultural and social, as the analytic "life-world" suggests, as well as phenomenological and affective. This is why I began with a personal jaunt to now-vanished neighborhood video stores. My point is less nostalgic recuperation than an attempt to invoke through example the situated immersion of queer cinema. Embedded in larger queer public culture, VideoActive in Silverlake and Jerry's Video in Los Feliz were apiece with an eastside queer "world" in which one attended unadvertised screenings of Todd Haynes's banned Super-star (1987) or Reza Abdoh's experimental Bogeyman (1991) and where Mr. Dan at VideoActive transformed into Gina Lotrimin at the riotously joyful nightclub Dragstrip 66. Schoonover and Galt signal the disturbance theater of such worlds, of sexual pleasures and of living precariously, that remain foundational to queerness. And, of course, their focus is on the constitutive role of queer cinema in materializing those worlds. Yet they also attend to the travels of queer pleasures across contexts. Here, the world indicates, in Edward Said's sense of worldliness, connections across historical particulars: the world is a window beyond the situated frame. One of the great achievements of the book is a refusal to privilege granular, context-specific expressions of queerness [End Page 201] over those that circulate through global distribution and exhibition of queer...

Reza Abdoh Today: Posthumous Reflections Fifty-Five Years after His Birth

Reza Abdoh Today: Posthumous Reflections Fifty-Five Years after His Birth

The Captain in LA: Reza Abdoh's Bricolage and the Rise of Neoliberalism

The Captain in LA: Reza Abdoh's Bricolage and the Rise of Neoliberalism

FromBogeymantoBison: A Herd-Like Amnesia of HIV/AIDS in Theatre?

Queer theorists from across a broad range of disciplines argue that we are in a ‘normalizing’ or ‘homonormative’ period, in which marginalized subjectivities strive to align themselves with hegemonic norms. In terms of LGBTQ rights and representation, it can be argued that this has resulted in an increased visibility of ‘desirable’ gays (monogamous – ideally civil-partnered, white, financially independent, able-bodied) and the decreased visibility of ‘undesirable’ gays (the sick, the poor, the non-white, the non-gender-conforming). Focusing specifically on the effects of this hierarchy on the contemporary theatrical representation of gay HIV/AIDS subjectivities, this article looks at two performances, Reza Abdoh'sBogeyman(1991) and Lachlan Philpott'sBison(2009–10). The article argues that HIV/AIDS performance is as urgently necessary today as in the early 1990s, and that a queer dramaturgy, unafraid to resist the lure of normativity or the ‘gaystreaming’ of LGBT representation, is a vital intervention strategy in contemporary (LGBT) theatre.

Berlin's Holy of Holies

January 01 2007 Berlin's Holy of Holies Daniel Mufson Daniel Mufson Daniel Mufson is a writer and translator living in Berlin. He edited the PAJ title Reza Abdoh and has also written for The Wall Street Journal, The Village Voice, American Theatre, Theater, and TDR. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Daniel Mufson Daniel Mufson is a writer and translator living in Berlin. He edited the PAJ title Reza Abdoh and has also written for The Wall Street Journal, The Village Voice, American Theatre, Theater, and TDR. Online Issn: 1537-9477 Print Issn: 1520-281X © 2007 Daniel Mufson2007 PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art (2007) 29 (1 (85)): 53–64. https://doi.org/10.1162/pajj.2007.29.1.53 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share MailTo Twitter LinkedIn Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Search Site Citation Daniel Mufson; Berlin's Holy of Holies. PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 2007; 29 (1 (85)): 53–64. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/pajj.2007.29.1.53 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAll JournalsPAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art Search Advanced Search This content is only available as a PDF. © 2007 Daniel Mufson2007 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

De bruits et de fureurs : excès queer du théâtre d’Abdoh

In the 1990s, American theater appeared to have engendered major “epistemological trouble” when it came into close contact with queer practice and theory. Reza Abdoh’s theater work erupted into what is the closure of representation. His queering of performance reasserts the disruptive values of the production process taking place on stage. By focusing on excess, violence, proliferation, and fragmentation, this queer Iranian-American playwright and director questions the notion of the subject ’s stable identity. Abdoh ’s art thwarts reification and ventures into the unfathomable at the price of facing death and destruction. Queer performance thus acts out an epistemological slippage across the stage and through the vacillating actor ’s bodies. It formulates drama as an exploration of uncharted territories across and between the fields of politics and esthetics.

This Is Home, This Isn't Home: Reza Abdoh's Tight Right White

This Is Home, This Isn't Home: Reza Abdoh's Tight Right White

This Is Home, This Isn't Home: Reza Abdoh's Tight Right White

"It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining". The aesthetics of aporia and failure that Beckett ushered in has been an unlikely legacy to try to build back from, especially for artists with an interest in the sociopolitical. Likewise, Artaud 's lucid madness and his mockery of the world 's mad pseudo-lucidity have seemed no less vital for late twentieth-century theatre artists to struggle with, but as with Beckett's aporia, Artaud's madness has seemed relatively intractable when applied to political theatre. In recent years, the Italian company Societas Raffaello Sanzio (SRS) has been one of the few companies to scramble successfully across this paradoxical terrain of aporia and madness and to retain a sense of perspective on the sociopolitical.ln the late 1980s and early 1990S in the United States, the director and writer Reza Abdoh was also one of the few artists able to acknowledge the potentially solipsistic deconstructions of identity furnished by Beckett and Artaud while still holding onto a sense of social engagement.

Richard Foreman. Edited by Gerald Rabkin. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999; pp. 260. 23 illustrations. $38.00 hardcover, $19.95 paperback. - Reza Abdoh. Edited by Daniel Mufson. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999; pp. 184. 20 illustrations. $38.00 hardcover, $19.95 paperback.

Richard Foreman. Edited by Gerald Rabkin. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999; pp. 260. 23 illustrations. $38.00 hardcover, $19.95 paperback. - Reza Abdoh. Edited by Daniel Mufson. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999; pp. 184. 20 illustrations. $38.00 hardcover, $19.95 paperback.

Reza Abdoh

Reza Abdoh

Moi, Feuerbach

Alternative theatre in the latter half of the twentieth century has tended, by and large, to be a medium dominated by directors, whether auteurs in the style of Robert Wilson or leaders involved in the development of collective creations with stable ensemble groups. While it is certainly possible to point to exceptions in this trend, a list of landmark productions by experimental artists in recent years (leaving aside the work of solo performers) would tend to highlight the work of a number of extraordinary metieurs-en-scene whose names often function as a type of metonymic representation for the ensembles under their direction. I have in mind such artists as Robert Lepage, Elizabeth Le Compte, Reza Abdoh, and Anne Bogart, among others. With the exception of notable figure s such as Ryszard Cieslak and Yoshi Oida, who develop a quasi-iconic status in their own right, the work of individual actors is rarely a primary focus of attention.

Montreal: Festival de Theatre des Ameriques, May-June, 1995

The Festival de theatre des Ameriques is remarkable for the range and quality of the performance spaces that it has available and deploys to such good effect. This is partly due to an extraordinary proliferation of performance spaces in Montreal over the last ten years, unequalled in any other city in Canada in this respect; and it is partly due to the enterprise of Marie Helene Falcon, the Festival’s Director, in acquiring the use of a variety of venues and matching them to specific productions. Her programming has always brought the spectators into performance spaces of various kinds, shapes and sizes and she has often exploited not only the physical attributes of the locations but their local cultural resonances. In 1991, for example, Hip Hop Waltz of Eurydice, the late Reza Abdoh’s brilliant, postmodern reworking of cultural icons for an AIDS-conscious spectatorship was performed in the Clarke Theatre of Concordia University, an all-purpose assembly hall, with few of the markings of a traditional theatre. Similarly, in 1993, Robert Wilson’ s production of Gertrude Stein’s When Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights was performed in UQAM’s newly-completed Salle Pierre Mercure, which architecturally reinforced the spatial rhythms of Wilson’s mise en scène. By contrast Tadeusz Kantor ’s production by Cricot 2 of La Classe morte, featured during the 1991 FTA, was accommodated at the historically significant Theatre Denise Pelletier, where an exhibition of the company’s posters was also mounted. In 1991, when the FTA took the relationship between theatre and dance as one of its themes, it featured Marie Chouinard’s first choreography for a troupe of dancers at the Monument-National, while Falcon also introduced Festival audiences to the possibilities of more intimate dance performances in the new Agora de Danse at UQAM, with Rebis, Alvaro Restrepo’s ritualized dance exploration of space and the spoken word, done in homage to Garcia Lorca.

Correction: AIDS and Avantgarde Classicism: Reza Abdoh's "Quotations from a Ruined City"

Correction: AIDS and Avantgarde Classicism: Reza Abdoh's "Quotations from a Ruined City"

"Theatre Is Not about Theory": An Interview with Reza Abdoh

I first discovered Reza Abdoh's work in 1991 when he was invited to present his Hip-Hop Waltz of Eurydice at Montreal's Festival des Ameriques. Of all the plays presented that year, Abdoh's was both the most astounding and the most original. The imagery, the narrative, the acting, in fact the whole production had a strange quality to it, one that subverted the spectator's customary point of view. I was intrigued as well as fascinated by Abdoh's combination of high-tech and classical elements, modern life and mythology, violence and tenderness. It was clear from the start that his style of theatre was absolutely unique. After Hip-Hop Waltz, I saw Abdoh's Law of Remains in New York. On this occasion, I expressed my desire to interview Abdoh, but this was unfortunately impossible to arrange as he was extremely busy rehearsing Tight Right White in preparation for a European tour. A few months later, while at a conference in Brussels, I discovered that Abdoh was presenting Tight Right White at the Vlamms Theatre Festival. I repeated my request for an interview. Since Abdoh was on his way to France, I decided to make a stopover in Paris on my way back to Canada, and that's where this interview took place on 4 June 1994. We met in Abdoh's Paris apartment, and although he was quite tired, he very generously agreed to take the time to answer my questions.