Eleven Israeli athletes were taken hostages by Palestinian organization “The Black September” at the 1972 Munich Olympics, drenching the sporting event in blood. Rabih Mroué, one of the most prominent artists of the contemporary Middle East, has created a performance together with Palestinian political journalist Manal Khader that depicts this event from the point of view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – the play premiered at Munich Kammerspiele in 2015 and caused a huge sensation across the world.Tokyo is now on the verge of hosting its own Olympics. With this in mind, the piece will be specially restructured as a performative lecture for the 2019 rendition of Theater Commons Tokyo.
Mroué will focus on the grand narratives of the 1972 Olympic Games attack, what happened, why, and how. Outlining images that are manipulated and generated by the mass media – or rather, precisely the margins and historical gaps that they eschew. The past, described and reproduced; the present, where our failures are repeated; and a future we perhaps could have predicted…by disrupting fixed ideas of history, ingeniously intermingling multiple times and multiple narratives, how might we approach the “truth”?