kagablog

Cut to the bone. That’s what happens to people in wars, whether by bullets, shrapnel or bits of flying debris: this is the end result.
There are plenty of such gory images in Aryan Kaganof’s and Catherine Henegan’s play the Shooting Gallery, a commentary on the role of the media in the depiction of war.
the Shooting Gallery cuts to the bone too. The opening scene has Kaganof suspended upside down and nude, in front of a screen of shifting killing field images, gleaned from war correspondents like Joa da Silva.
The visceral imagary continues as, once lowered to the floor, he smears himself liberally with fake blood, coffee, Sunlight soap and Zambuck. Kaganof loves to shock, but without shock treatment, we are not jerked out of our reverie, and we will not question what we take for granted.
If you agree with a press review of the play, also projected onto the screen, that “we deserve light entertainment and fun because we have democracy” then you are missing the point Henegan and Kaganof are making.
They question if democracy – labeled as “demonocracy” in Kaganof’s graffiti scene - is indeed the solution to the conflicts in which we find ourselves continually enmeshed.

Kaganof puts it plainly when he states at the play’s conclusion, that standing in a queue once every five years has left the “previously dissed” off no better, because they still don’t own the ground they are standing on to queue.
Could it be the puppeteers of “democracy” are asking us to accept that war is inevitable, that our daily dose of war footage should be as ordinary a thing to us, as drinking a cup of coffee each morning?
Gallery questions how we can put such images at arm’s length and continue with our daily lives as if this were something that is normal, merely part of life, that happens “over there”. Similarly, the ragged Kaganof seems to ask, should we really assume it is normal that we pass people daily who have no homes or income?
‘Its Ok mom, I get shot at here while I cover this war, but I get shot at in Joburg too,” says Kaganof over a phone. Is it a natural state of affairs that South Africans face gunfire every day? “I’m making good bucks here, getting some great shots.” Why should the misery of war be a source of income to anyone?
How immune have we become of the mind-numbing repetition of violence in the media? Does Shooting Gallery make us yet more immune, or does it make us shift uncomfortably in our chairs, and make us wonder if we are, like the Kaganof is at one stage in the play, also gagged and blindfolded, unable to see what is truth, and unable to express it?

Henegan’s sole action in the performance, aside from operating two laptops which control the screened images, is to offer succour to the bloody Kaganof, who is at that stage, ranting off about Telly Tubbies and cancer into a bucket on his head.
She offers him grapes and wine (yes, there is other religious iconography in Shooting Gallery, including an extended worship of the “tell lie vision”) and comfort, while he reclines in her lap, a la Michalengelo’s Pieta. He appears to relax, temporarily.
But when she returns to her desk, smeared with second-hand gore, has she appeased the bewildered and frantic victim of war and war media coverage, only to feed him some more? What role has she assumed and lost? Make up your own mind and watch the play. Don’t expect to drive home humming merrily.