VALENTINA

Day 4
Morning session
Dylan's workshop: sequences of movement working on rhythm and contre-points, followed by improvisation exercise focusing on phobias. Relation between fear and phobia, when fear is acknowledged as a medical/psychological problem, as something the patient could get over following organised steps. Pushing phobia themes (from list of common phobias we picked rats, pigeons, balloons) to become topics of condemnation, praise, and warning (beware of ...). Difficult for Elodie, Nour and Shona to get themselves to switch from praising a certain phobia to warning the audience against it, moving from a position of happiness and delight in talking about a subject to approaching it as something that is feared and expressing that fear, warning the audience to be careful of it, to brace themselves. Perhaps this difficulty came from the fact that it takes a while to reach inside and draw out the right energy to express fear. Perhaps there is something about fear that requires a bit more time to settle into, compared to emotions related to condemnation and praise. Also couldn't help thinking that pigeons might be less of a phobia in a country like Tunisia where they are seen as pets. Phobias as cultural.
Thoughts from the group that emerged from this exercise: la peur de ne pas assurer, de ne pas réussir à faire les choses "bien", fear of not being "good"; la peur par rapport au théâtre, being out of comfort zone and being vulnerable, having to improvise is a huge bloquage because of over thinking and again the fear of not doing things right, need someone to push you otherwise curl back in shell; avant les exercises de théâtre je suis dans le seuil, j'arrive pas à la franchir; overthinking causing fear; the judgement eye; la société c'est un combat.
We then started working on creating soundscapes for our memories of fear, starting with trying to recreate actual sounds and then layering them with more abstract ones related to the mood/atmosphere/emotions of the memory. N lead us through the realistic soundscape of his first image: a demonstration during the 2011 revolution. Taught us slogans they used to chant in the squares, the sound of tear gas being shot by the police and landing either close by or far ahead, the sound of small groups of people discussing politics in circles in the midst of all the slogan chanting in the square, the sound of the heart beating faster and faster as chanting mounted or when running away from the police. Creating a crescendo of all these sounds. Sounds much bigger and overwhelming, possibly more "juste" to the actual memory than the image we had created yesterday.

Afternoon session
Musée du Bardo. Faire les choses dans les règles. En souriant: "La peur, c'est non". Première mosaïque du musée: deux hommes qui font de la boxe, nus apart from the gants - echo of image created by the hands of D and N in rehearsals. Le palais in itself: incroyable. Only one obvious sign of past violence: una vetrina spaccata, il segno di una pallottola, cracking from bullet like zigzagging ripples in the glass. Sea monsters and animals of all sorts, looking cartoonesque in the mosaics. A boat qui a fait naufrage on its journey from Greece to Rome recovered with its treasure thousands of years later. Des nains, des têtes sans corps qui font la grimace, des corps sans tête - mais ce n'est pas les islamistes, attention, c'est les romains qui construisaient les statues avec les têtes démontables, comme ça quand un empereur mourait ils pouvaient juste replacer la tête des statues avec celle du nouveau. Les chrétiens cassaient les nez des statues païennes pour leur enlever la dignité et la sainteté. Casser le nez c'est toujours une expression dans le dialecte tunisien: Kassarlu khashmu. Briser le nez. Déshonorer quelqu'un.
Après, mémoires et photos. Eyes behind glasses showing what really happened. Nuits blanches et puis pas invités. Togas et ribbons sous invitation. Il faut repeindre le blanc et rouge du trottoir pour la presse internationale. 1000 euro pour photos chock. Les chaises en plastique sont rangés par les autres. Pas de comment allez vous? Je ne sorts pas d'içi si ce n'est pas un de mes collègues qui m'appelle. L'apprendre à la radio. Nettoyage benevole à la vapeur. Pas de gants. L'odeur très prénante. Following the traces on walls and floors, hoping they lead outside the museum, hoping they lead to safety. Erasing the traces of what happened felt like erasing the person. Museum visits by international experts bearing suspicion and guns. We are coming up to the second commemoration, it has been two years and it is still a difficult subject, a frustrating subject. "Il dit toujours non à tout, qu'est ce que je fais?" asks mother on the baby help line on TV. Si ça arrive une fois, la porte est ouverte. Si la porte claque trop fort, tout le monde sursaute. Personne n'est à l'abris.