ARTS Afghan-born artist endures > BY A L E X A N D E R VARTY M ost ofthe time, repetition is boring. But as meditators and marathon runners well know, the act of repeating something over and over and over again can also bring a kind of liberation. When the mystic transcends the chains of consciousness or the athlete breaks through the wall of pain, they can experience a state of being that transcends quotidian cares— and that's also the effect Lida Abdul hopes to achieve with performance works like the as-yet-untitled piece she's bringing to Video In on Friday (October 28). "Repetition can be a number of different things," explains the Afghanborn performance artist, calling from her home in Los Angeles. "I'm very much influenced by the Sufi tradition in Islam, and by Islamic art—especially, for instance, the repetition in Arabic calligraphy. And praying itself is a repetitive act... .And yet, in a way, repetitive activity is an act of resistance as well." It's also an act of endurance, something Abdul knows a little bit about. She was born in Kabul in 1973, and then, once her family fled their war- torn home, grew up in refugee camps in Germany and India. Knowing that, works in which she repeatedly presses her face into the pigment-smeared pages of an open book or uses her bare hands to slowly push a block of ice across a room take on considerable emotional weight. They're about the patient longing of the refugee, about the frozen hopes of the exile, and, especially, about the constricted role of women in Afghan society—before, during, and after the Taliban's reign. "Some Afghan women that I know, that I've met in Kabul, are 25 years old and all they've known is war," Abdul explains. "It's an amazing thing that they've gone through that and continued to live their lives. Like, one woman that I met had a bullet go through her foot and now she doesn't even think about it; she survived. So I'm thinking of that kind of endurance in this new piece." The parameters of Abdul's new work, which she'll present as part of the LIVE Biennial of Performance Art, remain fluid; she says she'll only finalize the piece when she sees the room she'll appear in. The fixed elements, however, will be time, ice, pain, and, tellingly, an intricately woven Afghan carpet. The latter, she says, is a physical memento of home; a treasured rug was all many refugees managed to salvage from their bombed, burnt-out, or overrun living quarters. But it's also the product of the hard labour of women and children—and a material analogue of the way in which Abdul's painful, repetitious, and oddly beautiful performances weave together all the threads of her life as an Afghan, a refugee, a woman, and an artist. ^ Pianist mounts his "Everest > BY BILL R I C H A R D S O N T wo years ago at 9:15 a.m. Greenwich mean time, after evidently making provision for the temporary relocation of worshippers, Julian Jacobson installed himself at the piano of St. James's Church, Piccadilly. Thirteen hours later, he rose, having demonstrated that it was indeed possible to play through all 32 of the piano sonatas by Ludwig van Beethoven in a single sitting. "I'm just not the sort of creature who could bring that off," said his compatriot and fellow concert pianist Paul Lewis, on the phone from his home in London. "Apart from anything else, I don't see how you could practise for it." Lewis is taking a more leisurely approach to the scaling of what metaphor wranglers like to call, predictably, "the pianist's Everest". He's grouped the 32 sonatas into a series of eight separate programs to be presented on eight separate occasions, over the course of two seasons. He was here last spring to make the first payment on the sonata installment plan. He returns to the Chan Centre on Sunday (October 30) to perform the second grouping, which includes Sonata No. 21, the "Waldstein". He'll make six more trips back before the geese return in '07. All of which is to say that, Everestwise, he's now hardly out of base camp. Indeed, it was just two weeks ago, in Oxford, that he played the last note of the last sonata of the first grouping for the last time. "It felt a bit sad, actually. The thing about this kind of music is that it changes the whole time you work at it.... So, you play the last note and you know that you're going to leave it there for now, but it will never be done." Is it important to Lewis to know what was going on around Beethoven at the time he wrote whatever piece? "Certainly. This music is the product of a human being. V ## It adds something to your understanding of the music to know, for instance, about the progress of his deafness. In the case of the 'Waldstein' sonata, which is a later work, from a time when his hearing loss would have been more advanced, you feel that he's posing questions and then working through the problem to the answer, that he's finding a way to win through." Camille Saint-Saens, when he was 11, is said to have offered to play, without reference to a score, any one of the 32 Beethoven sonatas the listener cared to name. When Paul Lewis began this present undertaking he had, as any pianist of his stature would, a more than passing acquaintance with these works. He wouldn't, however, have been quite so cavalier as Camille about their public presentation. "Different pianists work in different ways. Some eat scores. They just have to look at the music and they know it. It's as though they have photographic memories, and they're visualizing the notes as they play them. That's not me. I can learn music very quickly for my own purposes, but I'm someone who has to live with a piece for a long while before I feel like I know it well enough for a public performance." A couple of thousand people in the dark. Eighty-eight keys, three pedals, 10 fingers, and a foot all brought to bear on, if we're lucky, transcendence—it's a vehicle for the channelling of a particularly human talent. There are many people in the world who can play all the notes of all the Beethoven sonatas. There's only a handful you'd pay to hear do so. Why? What takes talent to the cut above? "Oh, there are all kinds of theories and scientific studies about just that," Lewis says. "But I suppose I'd have to say that it comes down to an inability to live without the music. Love, I suppose. It comes down to love." ^ Touchstone Theatre presents FIRST MURDE* lfage theatre Village Voice J I . . n*-.. ........... i m *...... . • \ ** ' L I V E BIENNIAL OF PERFORMANCE straight ART OCTOBER 2 7 - N O V E M B E R 3 / 2 0 0 5 THE GEORGIA STRAIGHT 51