Dear friends,
Lebanese artist Tania El Khoury calls her work “interactive live art”: a
mode of performance in which the audience is an essential collaborator.
Cultural Exchange Rate drafts its audience into this role by activating all
five of our senses as we seek the story of one family’s life on the LebanonSyria border. Through direct, if sometimes unexpected, invitations to bear
witness, the piece personalizes global tragedies of war and forced migration,
surfacing physical and emotional sensations of memory, displacement, and
desire. These sensations complicate whatever we might think we know
about El Khoury’s homeland. El Khoury writes in preface to this installation
that “the cruelest of borders are invisible to the eye.” As Cultural Exchange
Rate suggests, these are the borders we erect between the past and the
present, within families and communities, and even within our own psyches.
As we prepared to bring Cultural Exchange Rate to Holy Cross, I had the
opportunity to experience the work’s most recent production at Invisible
Dog in Brooklyn, New York. Moving through the installation with the Holy
Cross community in mind brought into different focus the piece’s
provocative questions about what we owe each other—and at what “rate of
exchange.” I am delighted that hosting Cultural Exchange Rate at The Prior
with the involvement of so many academic departments and programs
extends a discussion taking place about El Khoury’s work on campuses
from Bard to Occidental and among audiences around the world.
Cultural Exchange Rate draws from numerous traditions of performance art
that make participatory claims on their audiences. Yet the piece also
underscores the fact that all performance is participatory—that there is no
such thing, in other words, as a passive spectator. Today you step into a
Boroughs Theatre wholly converted for the purposes of this presentation.
Even as it’s obvious that the construction of The Prior has transformed the
physical landscape of the Holy Cross campus, we have just begun to
experience the endless transformations that will take place inside the center
in the years to come. These include the transformations in ourselves.
Kyle Frisina
Interim Director
Prior Performing Arts Center