Hi, Abed --
I taped this morning's showing of Dr. Said's talk on RETN for you. I also let the tape run and I got probably 62 minutes of the Children performance before the tape ran out. That program runs maybe 115 minutes and includes both your opening and closing remarks, audience questions, and the curtain call dances from the kids.
I can't imagine that Kris [since she is the credited Executive Producer] or someone else at RETN has *not* already sent you a tape of the show, but I am going to make another tape of all 115 minutes for my own use, when it rebroadcasts ---- and I will certainly copy it for you if needed. I could bring it with me to New York?
>>> Dr. Said:
His program runs 37 minutes and is followed by a Q & A from the audience, it was taped at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1998 at the time of Rosh Hashanah [which is now] in front of a lecture audience. Said has written a book [or more] and the general tone of his talk is that it's required to denationalize educational systems so that the West and the Near East can share truths about what unites us rather than share falsehoods about what divides us. He has some specific things to say about broken Israeli promises --- and, in fact, about the poor leadership of Arafat. The Q parts of the Q & A are printed in English on the tape, it looks like they only had one or two cameras and did not film the audience except in longshot.
He quotes Aime Cesaire twice, one of them is :"There is a place for all at the rendezvous of victory", meaning a victory of understanding and tolerance rather than nationalistic and economic aggression on behalf of ANY nation or culture....citing the 'ethnic cleansing' in Bosnia, apartheid in South Africa, and aggression against Native Americans by "Americans" in the West in the nineteenth century. He also comments on the bloodthirstiness of Netanyahu and the moral bankruptcy of putting billions of American dollars into the Israeli war effort against the Palestinian nation while embargoing a few million in humanitarian aid to ... well, actually to those who include the families of the Children of the Camp.
>>> Children of the Camp:
I think you will be excited at the English subtitles of the Arabic dialogue and songs, Kris and Mousa and the RETN team have done a terrific job in composing and printing them. The tape contains a couple of subtitles of the RETN station logo for the viewing audience, and there are a couple of black gaps [in the show I viewed] but that might just be a problem with our cable signal provider. There are also rumbling noises in the background of the ending sections, perhaps this arises from raising gain to pick up the audience members.
If they were to re-do it [or if it's taped again sometime / someplace in the future] the English supertitles which appear in the video projections on the upstage screen might be re-edited in as videofilm subtitles, they are muddy and hard to see, I surmise that it comes down to just what the TV film cameras could and could not pick up effectively as they tried to get projection graphics, performers, and captions all at the same time.
One of the best things at Contois was the backstage brick wall, I know you had no choice about that, but it certainly stands as a symbol of the Wall inside Aida Camp --- and this struck me even more than when I was sitting in front of it --- that the white blank projection screen is a metaphor for a large hole in that wall and that Wall where children can one day walk through and make another life and another future.
As you see, a powerhouse image is the projection of all the war video footage where the stage is dark except for the reflected light from that screen as it hits the mounds of bodies of the Children lying downstage of it, as we watch the film and see that there are real children as corpses in front, it's not a film anymore ...... and it is so close, in the program, to the images of smiling politicians [think these were Begin, Arafat, Clinton] shaking hands while the killing goes on.
As a sometime teacher / director of choral speech pieces myself, I'm more in awe than ever ---- about how precise and how well-rehearsed those scenes are, especially in the newspaper-reading scene: what you and the students have been able to achieve. It goes right back to what Dr. Said asserts in his talk, that the media is all controlled by big corporations and lying leaders who tell their peoples only what is "approved" news. I almost expected to see Dr. Said finish up with a Coca-Cola!
Much of what he said is a strong echo of what you told our Burlington audience in June.
Your kids have left us a beautiful gift and we get to look at it often because it is all made with their hearts and hopes. Which should have no visa troubles at all.
salam
~Brad
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