The Life & Death of the Tabouli Performer: March 20th, 2009

The Tabouli Performer will be performing at the ArtDubai Fair on March 20th at the Art Park. 

She will not be in her best form. She will not be wearing her best outfit. She will not be serving her Tabouli on a spiffy clean and silver plated platter. She will not be her usual self. 

She would love to see you there.

Tabouli in present tense one

Tabouli in past tense three

The Tabouli Performer is under siege in her hometown of Beirut and will not be able to be with you tonight to perform the third part of her tabouli service.

While hiding out in the northern mountains of Lebanon, waiting for the Israelis to stop their bombardments, and for the UN to announce an official cease fire, she made and served lots and lots of Tabouli, not to you unfortunately, but to many other healthy-minded, and 'news' addicted adults.

Tabouli in past tense two

TABOULI PERFORMER II
The rebirth of the Tabouli Performer took place just a few weeks before the birth of my first child, Zeynoun. I returned to my original text and Salwa, my hysterical house wife played the starring role. Lying on a long kitchen table looking up at the audience I told Salwa's story. With a lot of help from Irigaray, and my mum's excellent Tabouli the tale was told once again. Looking very pregnant and sounding very hungry, my mouth uttered a noise, a language, a silence.
My body is a map, one that leads to nowhere.
They map out my body and
carve it into strategic borders.
Here comes the knife.
A border divides my head from my body.
Cartesian dualism has done its share.
For security purposes, another border will form,
a
perpendicular line with the first
as it progresses all the way down to my
belly-button.
Finally,
my feet are fenced off into separate parts.
I am now
ready to be served
on a spiffy clean and silver-plated platter.
as an appetiser Tabouli is always preferred.
but for today i guess,
I
will do.

tabouli in the past tense

TABOULI PERFORMER I
The Tabouli tale was born while I was living in Jeddah. It grew out of a long and difficult struggle that I had experienced as a un-Australian child in Sydney and as a un-Lebanese adult in Beirut. Tabouli gave me hope for a brighter future and I embraced it wholeheartedly. Facing a very 'cool' Danish audience, who were sitting in beanbags and sipping on natural energy drinks I started to prepare Tabouli. I chopped badly all my ingredients, homemade slides of me waxing in the background. What was I going to tell them? About my identity crisis, or about the Qana massacre that took place the day before? Reciting the name Qana and all the other southern villages bombed that day, took my breath away. That evening, my Tabouli tasted as bad as I felt. Hooray for the brave Danish girl on roller-skates who was daring enough to try it!

Let's make the show more entertaining?

How can I make my work more entertaining?
How about playing a Sting tune or maybe an Abba song?
How about I use some visuals, yeah get the audience to look at something else besides my bent out of shape mouth and the black bags under my eyes.
Something colourful and bright.
Something fast and furious.
How about I include some kinesthetic activities in there just to make sure I hit all those wonderful multiple intelligences?
We can sit in a community circle and talk about all the love that is happening in the world around us.
we can hug and smile and then
we can make tabouli together, we can eat it too... together.
Now does that sound more entertaining? Does it?
Does it?

BUT

that's not it
It, has nothing to do with that
It, has nothing to do with anything.

I don't want to share with you my tabouli anymore.
I really don't
I want to share with you my rage.
I want to scream like a lunatic,and swear like a hysteric, I want to show you my rage.

now tell me this, if you had agreed to stop fighting with someone and had set the date for after the weekend, would you then spend the whole weekend beating up this someone?
Would you decide to spend the weekend dropping 200,000 cluster bombs on a city as a going away present?

Please humour me and entertain the idea just once, just for today, just for a minute or two?

liverpool 08 performance video