Two traveling eulogists meet on a dire tableau: something like our contemporary moment or crumbling epoch. First-person monologues oscillate between formal registers towards a performance within a performance, that of a commissioned funerary text. Who or what is being mourned against a backdrop of incommensurate cruelty?
Permanent Trespass (Beirut of the Balkans and the American Century) is a script-based performance jointly authored by Sanja Grozdanić and Bassem Saad that contends with the possibility and mutability of mourning through protracted catastrophe. While the performance begins with two discrete roles—that of traveling eulogists—the frame of who or what is being mourned appears to shift and unsettle as the work unfolds. The duo recalls both the recent and distant past as if from a discontinuous identity and temporality. Their memories and musings are recurrently interrupted by the spectral presence of a third voice invoking what is called “the American Century” (1948-present). Did the Century end in Afghanistan, Syria, or Bosnia? Is it unending? A digressive back-and-forth builds toward an uncertain eulogy.
Across numerous iterations since 2021, the work has developed a distinct formal language through a process of continuous re-writing. Ultimately, Permanent Trespass gives form to the double exposure of past and present occurring at moments of historic transition, altogether refusing a stable ground, and shifting tenor from the comic to the nostalgic, the melancholic to the absurd. To quote the first lines of the performance—everything must go.
Photo credit for performance documentation at Teatro Bastardo: Stefania Mazzara, and at EMPAC: Michael Joseph Valiquette (both October 2024).
The script of Permanent Trespass is currently being made into a film, to be released in 2025.
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EXCERPT:
Professional Mourning
[EULOGIST 1 and EULOGIST 2 sit on a white couch, uncomfortably close. The two begin “talking shop”; they are traveling eulogists sharing occupational inspirations and resentments.]
EULOGIST 1: It says here that everything must go! Every single sofa, armchair, piano, manifesto, every airborne pamphlet, leaflet, booklet, novella, and operetta. It’s a kind of …clearance sale on language itself… but I don’t know, or I’m not sure, I am still jet lagged. You’re here for the ceremony too?
EULOGIST 2: Yes, I’m the traveling eulogist. They didn’t tell me it was also an estate sale. Had I known, I would never have come. I’m very superstitious, and certain kinds of death are contagious—
EULOGIST 1: I learned that a long time ago, yet here I am. [pause] I’m charmed that you retain taboos — cynicism is the real occupational hazard in our line of work. How was your hotel room?
EULOGIST 2: Terrible. They always are! It's one provincial town after the other, barely a hotel between them. God forbid someone dies in proximity to a Hilton. In the presence of death, one imagines dignity as if that were a condition for life itself. Instead, in come the auctioneers and lawyers!
EULOGIST 1: You would’ve been better off an auctioneer, I mean at least better compensated.
EULOGIST 2: Too late to retrain. Anyway, the task we’re commissioned for is comparatively benign; morally ambivalent. What I’m saying is, I can live with it. I can even shuffle together a case for it. What need could be more profound than humanizing the common death? Do you remember The Asthenic Syndrome? The widow—whose deceased husband looked more than a little like Stalin—was disturbed and then infuriated by the two men who appeared to be having a casual conversation.
EULOGIST 1: But grief makes us unstable, unreliable witnesses. So what if the laughing men were laughing?
EULOGIST 2: So what if the men were insolent? You can’t just throw a body into the earth; there are codes and ceremonies. That’s what we’re here to practice… Anyway, it was 1989. The “short-twentieth century” was over. The question was how to contain loss-ness. And our question?
EULOGIST 1: Now it feels like everything is always being settled at this very moment; almost like a simmering that will never boil over. I find myself wishing that it would finally boil over!
EULOGIST 2: Enough catastrophism! You have to make the best use of the minibar.
EULOGIST 1: Oh, the minibar. Another casualty of our era. They’ve put me in an Airbnb. Does it feel like everything has been downgraded? [pause, shuffling around the stage]
These days I keep returning to The Arab Dream—I mean the operetta, not the pan-nationalist dream itself. The operetta was basically a long music video with the biggest Arab pop stars of the time that played on TVs across the Arab world during the Second Palestinian Intifada. It contained horrific archival footage, starting with the first Palestinian expulsion through the rise and fall of Jamal Abdel Nasser, complete with wailing women after every massacre.
What was being mourned remains unclear: the loss of Arab unity, the loss of a Palestinian home, or, more so, the loss of the pan-Arabist father. The wailing women were put in the service of this ill-defined mourning.
EULOGIST 2: Making meaning out of something that makes no sense is betrayal or an art, or simply life itself. In a professional eulogy, you bring death once again to the market; you make one more paper trail for that life. In a courtroom, in a murder trial…
EULOGIST 1: Whoa, whoa! You’re getting ahead of yourself.
EULOGIST 2: Sorry! In my attempt at stepping over my own feet, I end up tripping and falling.
EULOGIST 1: Yes, you do. But go on.
EULOGIST 2: In a courtroom, in a murder trial, you return the deaths to the law; you say they don’t belong on the trading room floor. But they do belong on the trading room floor. It’s a question of honesty.
EULOGIST 1: [mockingly] Oh, honesty?
EULOGIST 2: Yes, honesty!
EULOGIST 1: I suppose. I am rarely “honest” when speaking of the dead, but I am honest when asking for my salary.
EULOGIST 2: Okay, okay, I get it: us, the vulgar materialists.
Now! This is more a question of professional practice, almost a technicality: in your speeches, do you still include the dates?
EULOGIST 1: The dates?
EULOGIST 2: The dates. Like the landmark years, milestones, …
EULOGIST 1: [assuredly, abruptly] Oh, I’ve stopped.
EULOGIST 2: [in vigorous agreement, shaking head] I’ve stopped as well. The searching quality gets so tedious after a certain point: 1945 this, 1948 that, 1968 that, 1967 that, 2023… this.
EULOGIST 1: I’ve always preferred a more strictly virtuosic narration. Cause and effect are—by definition—consequential, but do you absolutely have to know when someone’s husband was assassinated, when the flood took everything, when Yasser Arafat [Side lighting dim QUICKLY and fully] had his firstborn and only child?
EULOGIST 2: Hey, this is getting difficult.
EULOGIST 1: What is?
EULOGIST 2: This back and forth…
EULOGIST 1: You’re right. We need to set up a code. If you approach me, I’ll say: It looks like it’s going to snow in the country. To which you reply: It’s freezing outside. Then, if the coast is clear, I’ll say: The ice is melting. If it looks like there’s going to be an escalation, or, a movement on the side of the enemy, I’ll say: hell is freezing over.
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Written and performed by Sanja Grozdanić and Bassem Saad.
Performed at:
- EMPAC - Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute / Troy, NY / October 2024
- Teatro Bastardo / Palermo, Italy / October 2024
- Poetry Project’s Alien and Ordinary: A Poet’s Theater Symposium / New York, NY / September 2024
- Live Works 11 - Centrale Fies / Dro, Italy / July 2023
- Reenactment Symposium / Stroom, The Hague, NL / October 2022
- Sunflower Theate, Beirut, LB / December 2021
- Künstlerhaus Mousonturm / Frankfurt / September 2021
First commissioned as part This is Not Lebanon Festival, curated by Matthias Lilienthal, Rabih Mroué, Anna Wagner, Christine Tohme.
Images from Centrale Fies performance below by Alessandro Sala.