"My short and quiet life as a woman is to end in a noisy death and questions I never managed to answer: Is this a heroic act that ends with my suicide, or is it a suicide hidden behind a heroic act?" (Woman-bomb)
My performance is a lecture aimed at assessing the line between self and the character being portrayed, together with the multiplication of the voice on both ideological as well as musical levels. The strategies employed while writing the text are also used in the creation of the performance.
The creation process of Woman-bomb, an auto-referential reading performance, began in 2004 while taping a conversation with my friends on terrorism-related issues:
- Is suicide hidden behind the heroic act, or is the heroic act transformed into suicide?
- Do the remaining 12 minutes and 36 seconds before the explosion go by faster or slower?
- Is it possible to make a 12-minute-and-36-second performance that could incorporate and relate such concepts?
The conversations used in my lecture are replies to the questions directed to the people on my mailing list while I was working on this piece: What would you do if you had only 12 minutes and 36 seconds left? It was my intention to move the focus of interest away from the heroine-terrorist who is the barrier of ‘the clock’, and make visible the various aspects from which we can speak, not only about terrorism, but also about art.
The reason behind the deconstruction of my own text and the process of its creation is that I wanted to publicly confront myself with the essential body of the work which I had drafted with reference to documents, interviews, polls, newspaper articles as well as my own insanity. I also employ those same methods that define terrorist methodology, such as use of media for portraying the symbolic nature of a suicide attack. I wanted to deconstruct what I once constructed because I believe that this provides a new performance potential outside that of a standard theatre presentation. Discussion of art is also art. I have provided one such method.
