kagablog

The Shooting Gallery
July 18, 2006
By Adrienne Sichel
Concept and direction: Catherine Henegan
Performers: Aryan Kaganof and Catherine Henegan
Sounds design: James Webb
Lighting design: Wesley France
Stage manager: Bongani Motsepe
Where: The Market Theatre Laager
When: Tuesday to Saturday: 8.15pm. Sunday: 3.15pm

“That’s beautiful,” remarked the young man fingering a colour photograph of a bloodied Aryan Kaganof talking on a cellphone, “How much does it cost?”

The answer: a theatre ticket. The image by theatre photographer Ruphin Coudyzer was not for sale, it was a production shot from The Shooting Gallery being offered to the reviewing media in The Market Theatre foyer.

That response from a passer-by sums up this site-specific theatre piece which is billed as a media performance. It is a collage of striking images and video, juxtaposed with Kaganof’s physicality, which bombards the senses. Art meets conceptual theatricality and intellectualised art wins.

These cerebral manoeuvres, in this digital ceremony for a war photographer as inspired by the book The Bang Bang Club, fail to ignite beyond the literal, the obvious. The theatre of war, so graphically presented in photographs, footage, graphics and sound, only sporadically translates into theatre on an emotional level.

This work says less about the psyche of a war photographer than it does about voyeuristic consumerism and callous sub-editors.

On entering The Laager the audience walks past Kaganof lying on the floor covered in a grey blanket as Henegan sits at a desk editing and laying out a newspaper on a PC.

The first results, of Reuters images of Lebanon under fire placed on the Internet, are projected on a large screen placed above a circle of lit tea lights. The naked man is hoisted by his ankles into the air against the backdrop of a sentimental SABC2 rainbow nation ad.

Irony fills the air. He remains suspended, for at least 15 minutes, talking from a war zone about going to his own funeral.

He calls his mother and tells her about the photographs that are going to make him famous. As he is lowered he blows out the candles and enters another heart of darkness.

Everything’s fair game as Dada goes digital. At one point we are photographed by Kaganof, and our faces appear on the edited pages uniting us with the reportage.

Robyn Sassen’s review, published in the National Arts Festival newspaper Cue, which slated The Shooting Gallery with its nudity and fake blood gets a lot of attention.

The borders between reality and performed reality, the critical and the personal, constantly blur which is perhaps the point of this carefully manipulated encounter.

Before Kaganof leaves the theatre he completes the graffiti on the wall. It reads: “There are no soft targets in the war of the mind.”

Click click, bang bang, I’m dead.