The Makerly Text & the Spectatorly Text. A Narratological Analysis of Rimini Protokoll's Remote Jerusalem 1 Maya Arad Yasur (Tel Aviv) Remote Jerusalem, a site-specific walking performance by German theatre group Rimini Protokoll, sets out to explore the ways in which we move through the urban “ meadow ” and to what extent these movements are manipulated or navigated and by whom. We can translate these questions into questions of dramaturgy: If we consider any performance-text as an urban meadow and the audience as a herd led by a shepherd, then we can ask: To what extent is the individual spectator manipulated by this shepherd? How much freedom of choice and interpretation is given to the sheep? This paper leans on concepts from literary narratology and defines the shepherd as a performative narrator while analyzing the relationship between the performative narrator and the audience using Roland Barthes' concepts of the writerly text vs. the readerly text. Remote Jerusalem, a site-specific walking performance by German theatre group Rimini Protokoll, sets out to explore the ways in which we move through the urban space and whether these movements are maneuvered, manipulated, or as the dramaturgy of the performance implies, navigated. Remote Jerusalem asks questions on themes of herd mentality vs. individualism and free will, using the performative mechanism of an audio-guided tour in which the voice heard through headphones leads a group of people through their day-to-day, natural habitat. The navigator not only tells the participants where to go, but also where and what to look at, what to think, and later, about midway through the performance, also manipulates and divides the group. Shortly after the beginning of Remote Jerusalem, the sound of bells is heard through the headphones; the type of bells that shepherds hang around the necks of their sheep. This is the moment when one of the performance ’ s main dramaturgical aspects is announced: we, the participants are turning into a herd. The navigator clearly says, “ I will call you a herd, ” and explains: [T]hose who are on the edges are eaten. Those in the middle don't get food. But you are not animals guided only by your instincts. You can think. And that distinguishes you from animals and machines. Or that's at least what you think. 2 In saying that, the navigator unveils the premise of the performance and the overarching question that serves as the driving force behind the performance's dramaturgy: who or what is leading our choices, our movement, our speed, our thoughts, and our points of view when we walk around the meadow of our lives? The meadow and the act of walking around in our environment will quickly grow into a metaphor for the way we live. Who or what steers our choices or the direction that our lives take? To examine this question, I will look at four performative agents that construct the performance: the individual participant - a sheep; the audio navigator - the shepherd; the remaining participants - the herd; and lastly, the urban space in which the performance takes place - the meadow. Each of these agents comes Forum Modernes Theater, 33/ 1-2, 40 - 53. Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.24053/ FMTh-2022-0004 with their own individual interests and agendas which they try to guide and direct the participants towards. The questions raised by the structure of the performance in turn raise methodological questions regarding the dramaturgy of the theatre performance as such. What potential do the space, the herd and the audio navigator have, combined and separately, in leading the participant through the theatre performance? The question of the participant's free will can be translated into a question related to audience reception. If we refer to any performance text as a meadow, then the audience is a herd made up of individual sheep. Who is then the shepherd, meaning, the performative narrator, guiding the participant through the performance text? To what extent is the spectator manipulated by that shepherd? How much control does this performative narrator have? How much freedom is given to the sheep? This narratological relationship between the performative narrator and the audience can be effectively approached by means of Roland Barthes' concept of the writerly text and the readerly text in which he makes a post-structuralist distinction between literary classical forms such as the 19 th century novel and the 20 th century literary forms which challenged those realistic conventions 3 . "The more plural the text, the less it is written before I read it" 4 , Barthes writes in his essay S/ Z. While the readerly text, according to Barthes, does not acknowledge the reader as a producer of the text but only as a receiver of a pre-fixed reading, in the writerly text the addressee is the one who writes the text without any prior exclusive authority which narrows down the entrances into the text. A common example of a writerly text is the story The Dinosaur by the Guatemalan writer Augusto Monterroso. The complete story goes as follows: "When he awoke, the dinosaur was still there." 5 This story, known as the shortest story ever written, provides more gaps than information about the possible course of events, inviting the reader to be active in filling those gaps independently. Noam Knoller extends Barthes' notion of the writerly/ readerly text to his narratological research of digital artifacts, defining a userly text as a text which requires not only a mental effort as in Barthes' writerly text but also modes of physical engagement 6 . Whereas Knoller does not keep the symmetry to Barthes, I wish to apply Barthes' concepts of writerly and readerly texts to theatre and performance by defining makerly (theatre) texts and spectatorly (theatre) texts, accordingly. I use the term a spectatorly (theatre) text to refer to a performance which is encoded in signs in a way that invites a single reading, interpretation or an experience, manipulated and controlled as much as possible by the performative narrator who attempts to narrow down the number of variations in which the text can be decoded into one single reading. Such a text invites a rather passive spectating experience, both cognitively and physically, and thus a more semiotic approach of analysis. While Knoller proposes that the userly text requires not only a cognitive engagement with the text, but also a physical and bodily engagement of enactment 7 , the makerly text features larger-scale forms of engagement. Performances in which the audience is physically static but is prompted to active spectatorship and interpretation show as much of a tendency towards the makerly as performances requiring physical engagement, such as walking tours, immersive forms of theatre and different participatory modes of theatre. The question is to what extent the individual spectator shares the performative narration of the piece, and how much freedom one has in making one's own experience of it, which is why such makerly texts invite a more phenomenolo- 41 The Makerly Text & the Spectatorly Text gical approach of analysis. The makerly and spectatorly theatre texts are not oppositional binaries but the two ends of a scale, and every performance can be positioned somewhere along that scale. The narratological question of who is the agent guiding the participant through Remote Jerusalem or who is the performative narrator can also indicate the position of the piece on the spectatorly - makerly scale. The more the theatrical elements and strategies of the performance guide the participants in their experience in one direction as a herd, the more spectatorly the text is. At the other end of the scale, the more the individual participant controls their own experience and choice of directions (physically and mentally), the more makerly is the text is. In other words, the more the members of the audience share the performative narration, the more the performance is a makerly text and the more plural the number of experiences. In order to position Remote Jerusalem on the makerly-spectatorly scale, I will analyze the role and level of control that the space, the navigator, the herd and the participant have in the performative narration. The Meadow: Space Can space serve as a performative narrator? To what extent does the urban space of Remote Jerusalem serve as a guiding agent for the participant? Remote Jerusalem is a walking performance in which a group of participants is guided through various urban locations. Following Marie-Laure Ryan, Kenneth Foote, and Maoz Azaryahu, I define the various locations throughout the city that comprise the route of the performance as the spatial frames of the performance - the shifting scenes of action in which the characters move 8 . In the first instance, the spatial frames of Remote Jerusalem are the streets of Jerusalem. The walk starts in a Jewish cemetery, from which the participants are guided across the city through malls, a tram, a shopping street, a hotel and the city hall square, ending on a balcony of a building facing the old city of David. With the exception of the cemetery and the old city at the beginning and at the end of the performance, the rest of the spatial frames, the middle of the performance, are a sequence of non-places 9 - as defined by Marc Augé - spaces that are constructed for specific purposes, such as travel, shopping, leisure, and the relationships that people have with these spaces create a shared identity of passengers or customers. While Augé does not use the word escapism, he does, however, describe the effect of entering into a non-place as temporarily distancing those who enter it from their worries and concerns by means of the environment of the moment. 10 Augé says that the subject experiences a loss of identity when entering a non-place, because they are subjected to a sort of possession that frees a person of his or her identity and gives them the pleasure of roleplaying instead. 11 The participants are led from one non-place to another, turning the city into a series of non-places: a tram where we all play the role of faceless commuters; a shopping street where we all play the role of customers, and a hotel where we play the role of temporary lodgers. The places selected as the spatial frames of the performance make us forget about our identities and surrender to the role assigned to us, along with the other role-players around us. When the audio navigation guides us to enter a shopping mall everything in the shopping mall prompts us to forget about the reality outside of it. To further substantiate this point, the navigator points at the shimmering lights and sculpted heroes from the films shown there. Going even further, the participants are then instructed to sit in rows, like an audience at a show, and to observe passersby as if they 42 Maya Arad Yasur were characters themselves. The navigator wants us to observe the manner in which Augé's thesis is made manifest in a Jerusalem mall: "soon a theatre show will begin," the navigator announces, describing the mall as a stage placed by a designer, and the passersby as actors standing on the stage, pretending to be waiting for something. The participants are watching passersby in the navigated roleplay, but all they see is the image of themselves, as the navigator instructs them to step onto the stage (Fig. 1). Remote Jerusalem is what Fiona Wilkie categorizes as “ site-generic, ” 12 in the sense that it is constructed for every city while being adapted to whichever one it takes place in; the city of Jerusalem in 2018, in this case. Seeing as how Remote X (the general title of the project, independent of any specific locale) is performed in various cities around the world, the unique aspects of any particular city are not the primary object of investigation. Similarly, the setting - the second level of narrative space defined by Ryan, Foote and Azaryahu as the sociohistorical-geographical-environmental basis of the entire narrative 13 , is not twentyfirst-century Jewish Jerusalem, though the spatial frames may well be. The history of the city, its extreme socio-political climate or the locations in it, are neither explored, nor relevant. For instance, the cemetery, the performance ’ s first spatial frame, is merely presented as a site where people are buried, as it would be anywhere else in the world. The fact that the cemetery in Jerusalem is a Jewish one or that the burial traditions practiced there are of those of the Jewish faith is in no way relevant. Equally irrelevant is the history of the place, the ground on which it is built, or the identity of the individuals buried there. The main function of the selected spatial frames is to evoke certain thoughts, feelings, and positions of the individual participant toward their own patterns of behavior in the environment where they live. Therefore, the setting decided on is the twenty-first-century metropolis and, indeed, it is the setting of every iteration of Remote X - whether in Berlin, Jerusalem, or Madrid. What is the common aspect of all cemeteries then? Fig. 1: Remote Jerusalem by theatre group Rimini Protokoll, Israel Festival 2018. 43 The Makerly Text & the Spectatorly Text The cemetery and the city of David are different from these non-places and can better be described as heterochronic heterotopias. A cemetery, according to Michel Foucault, is a heterotopia: a counterplace, a place of otherness which is real, as opposed to a utopia. 14 A cemetery is a heterotopia, says Foucault, because it begins with the heterochronia; a time which, for the individual, is a loss of life. Remote Jerusalem opens and closes with two spatial frames that are heterochronic heterotopias. The cemetery is personal and manifests a point in time that every individual knows they will inevitably reach. The closing spatial frame is of a balcony facing the old City of David, a place which, time and again, for millennia has been occupied and reoccupied by different empires and which symbolizes, if anything, a place ’ s triumph over time. The performance leads us from this first heterochronia, through a sequence of more everyday urban spatial frames, to the second heterochronia. The sequence of spatial frames within the modern city, contained between the two, is where we keep on moving, despite the certainty of our own mortality. And indeed while walking along a bridge overlooking the whole city, the city is described by the navigating audio as “ one big organism ” 15 in which “ streets and tunnels cross it like veins in your body. ” 16 Such words that paint the city as a living organism, in contrast to the death-dominated cemetery, highlight the production of space as a statement of the performance. The urban space is designed and produced in a way that separates the world of the living from the world of the dead and the transience of humans. But who designed it for that purpose? Not the audio navigation. The latter is just guiding us through existing spaces in which we spend our daily lives. A space is a product, according to Henri Lefebvre, and acknowledging it as such can expose its production process. 17 The city, to elaborate on Lefebvre, is a place produced by the hegemonic, capitalist powers that be for capitalist-escapist purposes; a site designed to help us suppress the knowledge of the cemetery that awaits us at the end of the road, and of our own mortality and meaninglessness that confront us when looking at the Old City. The questions to be asked are: To what purpose? What are the representations of the space? Or, to use Lefebvre's second tier of space production, who and what are those representations made to serve, and how? Alternatively, in narratological terms: is it possible that the space is a narrating agent that guides the way we experience the narrative of our daily lives? Bal defines narrative text as a story which, in order to be conveyed to recipients, is converted into signs, the agency uttering those signs being the narrator (an agency constructed by an author) 18 . If we establish the notion that the space is a hegemonic product, designed to create an escapist mentality that turns the people into a herd of customers in service of the agenda of capitalist hegemony, then this space becomes a narrator that, following Bal, uses roads, signs, structures, stations, lights, windows, etc., to create an experience that leads the addressees through the plot that they, the authors, are communicating. Although the space can be seen as a narrator, it is not the performative narrator of the performance, as it also exists without it. While the space is produced to narrate our life experience, the performative narrator of Remote Jerusalem guides us towards the insight that the place is a product and that our experience in it is narrated. The space thus is a tool in the service of the performative narrator. The Herd When the navigator instructs the participants to exit the cemetery, he orders us to 44 Maya Arad Yasur stand in a circle with the rest of the participants as we are about to become “ a herd. ” The sound of cowbells is heard through the headphones and the navigator says, “ I will call you a herd, ” 19 and explains that we are not animals guided only by instincts but are also capable of thinking and, at the very least, being under the illusion that we are not just like animals. In that moment, the navigator establishes the idea that our mind is being manipulated and guided by agendaand interest-driven forces. The navigator identifies itself as our shepherd, a shepherd not only telling us where to go but also guiding our awareness of other influences: “ How do the others influence your walking pace? How do you influence the others? ” 20 the audio navigation asks. At another point, when we reach a T-junction, the navigator tells us to choose which way we would like to go. The herd somehow ends up following a handful of leaders who start walking to the right, but then the navigator tells us to turn left. In doing so, the navigator exposes the hierarchy between the forces within the herd, which is part of an attempt to gain control over our minds: The space was designed to stop us at this point, and to force us to choose between right and left. The herd seized power, though not for long. The navigator - that figure of power and authority - proved to be stronger than the herd. At a later point, in the middle of the street, the navigator instructs the participants to stand in front of a glass window with the rest of the herd. We are told where to stand so that every face is seen. “ The herd is reflected in the glass window, ” 21 the navigator says, asking us to make room for the whole herd and to look at ourselves. This moment of self-reflection, looking at ourselves as part of a large group of strangers is a basic narratological focalization technique in the most optical sense. Focalization, according to Bal, is an element of the story level and describes the vision of the character who sees 22 . The participant, that is the protagonist of their own story, is looking at their own reflection, realizing that though they may consider themselves an individual, they are ultimately just another face in the crowd. This gap between their subjective self-perception as an individual and the realization of their loss of identity through the gaze is a moment of self-focalization in which the protagonist-focalizor not only sees himor herself as a member of a herd, but also realizes that all the members of the herd, wearing the same headphones, are looking at themselves and experiencing the same realization - it is a herd of protagonists who are seeing their own solitary images that echo in those of the others, on a par with Augé ’ s description of non-places (Fig. 2) The ultimate test which the participant faces as the navigator further increases efforts to prove the herd ’ s unreliability takes place in a hotel lobby. After the group has rested for a while, the participant suddenly realizes that the navigator has split up the herd, and that not all the participants are hearing the same messages. Suddenly, some herd members are leaving while others are being told to stay where they are. This is a powerful moment in the performance as it raises questions of choice: how do we choose whom to follow? How can we be so sure that the voice we choose to listen to is right? Doubt creeps into one's mind when one realizes that many people are choosing a different path. What if their voice is more right than mine? Ultimately, this has a positive effect as it makes one doubt everything - the voice and the herd. It summons one ’ s individuality, for if one does not know who to trust, one should therefore trust oneself. The herd was not the most dominant influence on the participant's decisions and choice of direction. When the navigation gave the participants freedom of choice, as happened at the T - junction, we could see 45 The Makerly Text & the Spectatorly Text that it is the navigation which turns the participants into a herd, meaning, the herd would not exist without the shepherd - the navigator. The Navigator In the first instance, it appears that the navigator functions almost as an epic narrator, opting for traditional theatrical strategies, recounting the story orally from their own perspective, manipulating the plot, selecting and coloring the places with thoughts and commentary, and framing the views and thoughts that will be communicated to the participant - the addressee. If space alone were the element of performance being examined here, then we could argue that the navigator is in fact the performance ’ s narrator who is leading us, like a tour guide, through the various locations. However, in Remote Jerusalem the primary focus is on the relationship between an individual and their urban environment, and not merely on the environment itself. The narrator uses the terms herd and shepherd, and in doing so, opens both up to discussion while leaving a gap for negotiation over free will, because, ultimately, human beings are not sheep. They think, they remember, they look around and are engaged by a range of desires beyond the most primal stimuli of hunger and fear. The navigator undertakes to consider all of the above, to navigate the thoughts and points of view of the wanderers, to propose interpretations, and to evoke doubt and insecurity. If the navigator were a narrator of the traditional, epic kind then that would make the participants - the addressees in the traditional sense - an audience, in which case the performance would tend to the spectatorly side of the makerly-spectatorly scale. In Remote Jerusalem, the navigator, when speaking, often favors the second person, in both the singular and the plural form, sometimes referring to the herd and other times to the individual participant. Whereas Bal notes that second-person narration is not only fundamentally illogical but also impossible for the reader to manage, Fig. 2: Remote Jerusalem by theatre group Rimini Protokoll, Israel Festival 2018. 46 Maya Arad Yasur seeing as how the reader is that second person, 23 the medium of theatre enables simpler management of second-person narration; for one, because the narration is heard rather than read, but most importantly, because the audience and the performance share the same space and time. A sitespecific performance makes it even more manageable, seeing as the narrative space and performative space come together and unite. Consequently, the second-person narrator can refer to the addressee's movements, to what they see, and what they hear. Yet, once more, this all suggests that the participant is not the external spectator of the narrative, but rather a character within it. What is more, if the participant is indeed a character, then as Chatman's communication model of the literary narrative 24 asserts, the agency speaking to him or her is not the narrator, but rather another character which, in the participants ’ story, represents a shepherd or guide. The navigator thus is not the performative narrator but rather a character. As I have shown so far, the performance is not a free-style walking tour in the nonplaces comprising modern Jerusalem. The order of the spatial frames is selected and organized by a certain agency. That agency, the performative narrator, is the one selecting the cemetery and the old city as the spatial frames that open and close the tour, deciding that the walk starts in one heterochronic heterotopia and ends in another one. The notion that the cemetery is a heterotopia that separates itself from the space of the living is articulated in the performance by the very fact that the experience which the performative narrator sets into motion within it is a personal, intimate one. The navigator, the spatial frames and the herd are the main expressive means in the service of the performative narrator. Upon entering the graveyard, the navigator instructs the participants to wander around the gravestones independently; they are to choose one to sit on and then reflect on their own death and the death of their loved ones. By choosing the cemetery as the first spatial frame, the performative narrator uses the space and the navigator to equip the participants with the notion and prospect of their own inevitable death. It is only later, when each participant is making their way outside the cemetery, that the navigator gives the instruction to form a circle and to then walk together along the path leading to the gate that “ separates the living from the dead. ” 25 In doing so, the performative narrator, using the spaces and the navigating audio, points at two ways in which the participants might cope with the knowledge of their demise: an acknowledgment of their own herd mentality and a dissection of the production process of the spaces they spend their lives inhabiting, produced by the capitalist hegemony in order to preserve its dominance and power. If we were to conclude now, then the impression would be that Remote Jerusalem can be positioned on the spectatorly side of the makerly-spectatorly scale. The performative narrator uses all the performative and spatial means to control the experience of the participants, to manipulate it and to direct their thoughts and visions. But how far does it succeed? The Participant Having established the argument that the navigator is a character on the story level, we now have a solid enough ground to stand on and claim that the participant, in addition being an addressee, is also a character on the story level. The content of the text, as in Bal ’ s definition of story 26 , directly relates to the participant. The participant is the protagonist, which is why the navigator addresses 47 The Makerly Text & the Spectatorly Text them in the second person as one would expect to observe in a dialogue between two characters, or in one character ’ s monologue delivered to a second character. The participant and the navigator are two characters with a very specific power dynamic. The navigator is not only a guide whose purpose it is to instruct the protagonist where to go and what to do. Here, the navigator ’ s main goal, as previously argued, is to awaken the protagonist's awareness to the other forces trying to influence or control his or her choices. In this case, the navigator emerges as a most unique navigation system as they steer the protagonist's consciousness, like a guru, teacher, or spiritual guide. Bal writes that whenever events are presented, they are always presented from within a certain vision. A point of view is chosen, a particular way of seeing things. 27 The vision of the fabula 28 is the basis of the focalization that is carried out by the agent of the story level - the focalizor. The fabula is seen through the eyes of an agent whose vision turns it into a story. Remote Jerusalem does not aim to create a scene for the eyes of external focalizors who are watching the herd from the outside. Instead, in Remote Jerusalem, the focalization is more character-bound 29 , or a form of internal focalization 30 that is it is carried out through the vision of each protagonist as they perceive and experience the series of events. In Remote Jerusalem, what the protagonist is hearing and seeing is the main act of focalization. Therefore, the participant, that is the main character, is experiencing the sequence of spatial frames through the prism of their own mind. However, the navigator has limited control over where a participant looks, and even less control over how and what they may see in whatever it is they are looking at. As a participant in Remote Jerusalem, I sometimes chose to look where the navigator instructed me to, whereas at other times something else would be more appealing to me. And while a voice may have been navigating my thoughts, I did find myself often disagreeing with it, or feeling irked by the direction in which it was trying to steer my thoughts. This relationship between navigator and protagonist is a constant test of the latter ’ s free will, seeing as, ultimately, each participant creates/ perceives his or her own story and experiences a different level of free will, accordingly. The optical focalization, the memories and thoughts evoked by the spatial frames, the herd, and the navigation make up the main level of the story as experienced by the protagonist. For instance, at the entrance to the cemetery just before the performance officially begins, the navigator instructs the participant to wait and look around. Trying to follow the instruction, I did indeed look at the trees and the bushes; however, something else, much more appealing caught my attention. A woman suddenly appeared behind a rickety wall, just outside the graveyard and was not an intended part of the performance. The woman was praying, or so it seemed. Her mouth was moving, yet I could not hear her because of the music playing through the headphones and the navigator ’ s voice which was louder than anything else going on outside. My gaze was fixed on numerous posters and handwritten signs on the cemetery wall that read, “ Praying at the rabbi ’ s graveside Monday, Thursday, Monday saves the soul. ” Once again, I looked at the woman, whom I believed may have been there for the purpose of “ saving her soul, ” only to then realize it was a Wednesday. Something about that woman took me back years ago to a time when I, myself had lived in Jerusalem, a place where I experienced many close confrontations with religion and its attempts to judge the way I chose to live my life. The woman looked at me and, for a moment, I 48 Maya Arad Yasur felt judged by her. For me, this was the beginning of the story. It was much more powerful, in my experience, than the visit to the graveyard as designed by the performative narrator. Bal refers to memory as an act of vision of the past that is situated in the memory ’ s present. 31 The events from the past that are focalized by the protagonist are events on the fabula level; therefore, the fabula of the performance is more than just the series of spatial frames within Remote Jerusalem ’ s timeframe. In fact, the number of fabulas experienced in the performance is as high as the number of participants and, as such, it creates the narrative universe - the performance as a single event, shared by all of them, as categorized by Ryan, Foote and Azaryahu 32 . The herd shares a collective consciousness as a group of people participating in the same performance and yet, each member comes with their own baggage of beliefs, wishes, fears, memories, etc. The narrative universe is the sum of all the participants ’ memories, thoughts, fears, and fantasies, even if each of them, being a character-bound focalizor, is only exposed to their own narrative space. My very intense encounter with the seemingly praying woman turned the whole performance, as I experienced it, into a location tour of my own Jerusalemite past, spanning the seven years I had lived there during the Second Intifada when suicide attacks in Jerusalem were a daily occurrence. When I step into the cemetery along with the rest of the participants, the navigator asks me to pick a gravestone and stand next to it. A gravestone bearing the name “ Raphael Tzvi Elimelech ” catches my eye, mostly because of what is written underneath the deceased ’ s name: “ The greatest young man in the history of Israel. Depressed and tormented ” . The navigator instructs me to ask myself questions about the man, only I cannot relate to this instruction as I am still deeply influenced by the vision of the woman behind the graveyard and those bizarre signs calling on people to pray on certain days if they seek redemption. My thoughts drift off to Nakhshon Waxman instead, a fallen soldier who was kidnapped twenty years earlier, back when I was stationed in a military base in Jerusalem. I think about his parents and whether they too came to this cemetery all that time ago to pray for his or their own redemption. The navigator asks me to imagine my own death and what would be left and remembered of me, only I am not really bothered by it at that moment. The spatial frames of my own narrative pulled me twenty years into the past to my own story space locations, as categorized by Ryan. The spatial frame of the cemetery serves as a world-disrupting event, one of David Herman's four basic narrative elements. 33 At a certain point, we were asked to board the Jerusalem tram which, twenty years ago, had not yet been built. I could not help but think of Amsterdam, another city I had lived in for several years, where trams were an integral part of my daily life. I thought about the passing of twenty years, and about everything that has happened to me and to Jerusalem in the course of that time. However, the most vivid memory that comes back to me during the performance is evoked by the spatial frame of the main shopping street. I experience a memory of my old friend, Einat, who used to work as a waitress in a café on this road. She was there, at the café, the day a suicide bombing took place there. After an agonizing few hours, we finally learned that Einat was safe. Some years later, she became religious; a thought that in my mind, was directly linked to the woman in the cemetery. Ultimately, the participant in Remote Jerusalem is active in the creation of the 49 The Makerly Text & the Spectatorly Text performance text as a character, focalizor, and is invited to share the performative narration. Now we can easily position the performance on the makerly side of the scale, depending on the level of freedom that each participant takes to share the performative narration (Fig. 3). The Makerly Text and the Level of Site-Specificity Positioning the performance on the makerly side of the scale has further implications on the way we categorize the performance. Wilkie reserves the label, site-specific only for performances in which a profound engagement with one site is absolutely essential both to the creation and execution of the work. When we realize that Remote Jerusalem is a makerly text, with the participant being both a character-focalizor and a performative narrator, the sites of the performance and the selected spatial frames become crucial to the narrative experienced by the participant. Remote Jerusalem, we can therefore argue, features high levels of sitespecificity, while the documentation of the site, that is the objects, the anecdotes, etc., which Wilkie describes as elements of sitespecific performances, are all part of the memory or personal baggage which the participants bring along with them. Wilkie argues that “ To make a truly site-specific piece means it sits wholly in that site in both its content and form, otherwise, if movable, it becomes more about the site as a vehicle/ vessel. ” 34 A non-narratological analysis of the performance could lead us to categorize Remote Jerusalem as site-generic rather than site-specific, seeing as how in Remote Jerusalem the specific places to which the group is led are not the focus, but instead serve as vehicles/ vessels for the human experience, as defined by Wilkie. The narratological analysis demonstrates, however, that the performance is indeed site-specific, after all. If the participant is the actant in the fabula, a character on the story level, and the receiver on the level of the text, then not only is the narrative space rendered the geographical space but the Fig.3: Remote Jerusalem by theatre group Rimini Protokoll, Israel Festival 2018. 50 Maya Arad Yasur protagonist's biography, history, and memory now also become the receiver's. This duality whereby a character is also its own receiver means something virtually impossible in literature and in film. Only a personal journal would be an equivalent, although the performance is not delivered by the receiver 35 in the same way that a journal is written by its protagonist, and what is more, it is meant to be read by the latter. I would have had a fundamentally different experience had I participated in Remote Vienna, or Remote Berlin, or any other iteration of the performance other than Jerusalem. The reason for the difference in experience is the narrative ’ s greater fabula, that is the fabula in which Remote Jerusalem is but one event in a series of events experienced by the protagonist - myself. Rimini Protokoll is known for having coined the term, Experts of Daily Life. They make a point of avoiding using professional performers in their shows and, instead, opt for real people whose biographies and backgrounds (Airport Kids) 36 , professions (Cargo X) 37 , or any other biographical element are in line with the performance ’ s theme. Remote Jerusalem refines the concept of experts of daily life to its core: each person is the expert of their own story, and they narrate it, focalize it and act in it, as they walk through their narrative universe; an understanding that could only come from a narratological analysis of the performance ’ s discourse level at the moment of the performance itself. Conclusion The question of the spectator's free will and the level of freedom one takes in overcoming the other narrating forces to narrate one's own story is what will eventually position the performance on either side of the makerly-spectatorly scale. Analyzing Remote Jerusalem using narratology enabled us to overcome a tendency to view the speaking voice, the navigator, as the narrator of the performance. Such a simplified analysis may falsely regard the participant as the addressee and the herd as audience and, in doing so, completely overlook the depth and complexity of the performance. However, using narratology to analyze the piece has shown that the participant is the protagonist and, as such, as a unique element of site-specific theatre, they are rendered an internal, or character-bound focalizor. The navigator therefore is not the narrator, but rather yet another character on the story level. The hegemonic capitalist forces are the authors of the participant-protagonist story, while the navigator is a character in it who is trying to open the protagonist's eyes to the fact that he or she is being led by hidden forces. The navigator is aspiring to become the narrator and sometimes does succeed, albeit partially; for instance, when the protagonist acts contrary to what the space dictates like walking backwards, placing imaginary binoculars on one's eyes in the middle of a shopping street, and dancing at city hall. However, as long as the navigator fails to convince the participant to destroy the produced space and regain the ability and right to narrate his or her own story, they are destined to remain a character in the protagonist's story: a teacher, guru, or spiritual guide who aspires to expose hidden powers. The herd, the audience as one homogenous group, is a major indication of the performance's makerly-spectatorly position. When the audience of a performance is a homogenous herd, led in one direction both in movement and in interpretation and narration, then we might say that a performance is a spectatorly text, while the more divided the herd is in their experiences, the more makerly it is, with different individual 51 The Makerly Text & the Spectatorly Text narrations making it as makerly as possible. The herd in Remote Jerusalem, though comprised of protagonists of their own narratives, is but another character in each participant ’ s story. The herd has the power to influence and dictate the protagonist's movements, thoughts, and actions as much as the space does. However, what my own experience of Remote Jerusalem demonstrates is that neither the space nor the herd can eliminate one's subjectivity, memory, point of view, free will and thought, or the ability to bring into the performance ’ s fabula an additional, even larger fabula: an individual fabula, emotional baggage, and/ or a sequence of events from one ’ s past. The stronger the participant ’ s ability is to resist the narration of the space and the herd, the more they can claim their own story. Once again, in a non-narratological analysis, the participant ’ s distraction from the navigation to his or her own thoughts and memories would be considered a marker of where the performance had failed or was not strong enough in its ability to control the audience's experience, whereas, according to the narratological analysis, therein lies the very strength of it. Notes 1 Stephan Kaegi and Jörg Karrenbauer, dirs., Rimini Protokoll Theatre Group, Remote Jerusalem (Jerusalem, May 2018). 2 Ibid. 3 Roland Barthes, S/ Z: An Essay, trans. Richard Miller, New York 1974, pp. 3 - 14. 4 Ibid., p. 10 5 Augusto Monterosso, Complete Works and Other Stories, trans. Edith Grossman, Austin 1995. 6 Noam Knoller, “ Complexity and the Userly Text ” , in: Marina Grishakova and Maria Poulaki (eds.), Narrative Complexity: Cognition, Embodiment, Evolution, Lincoln 2019, pp. 98 - 120, here p.107. 7 Ibid. 8 Marie-Laure Ryan, Kenneth Foote and Maoz Azaryahu, Narrating Space / Spatiailzing Narrative: Where Narrative Theory and Geography Meet, Columbus 2016. 9 Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, London 1995, p. 94. 10 Ibid., 103. 11 Ibid. 12 Fiona Wilkie, “ Out of Place: The Negotiation of Space in Site-Specific Performance ” , (PhD diss., University of Surrey School of Arts, 2004). 13 Ryan, Foote and Azaryahu, Narrating. 14 Michel Focault, Heterotopia, trans. Ariella Azoulay, Tel Aviv 2003, pp. 14 - 15. 15 Remote Jerusalem, Rimini Protokoll, 2018. 16 Ibid. 17 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, Blackwell 1991, p. 186. 18 Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, Toronto 2009, p. 9. 19 Remote Jerusalem, Rimini Protokoll, 2018. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 Bal, Narratology, p.145 23 Ibid., p. 29. 24 Seymour Chatman, Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film, Ithaca and London 1990. 25 Remote Jerusalem, Rimini Protokoll, 2018. 26 Bal, Narratology, p.5. 27 Ibid., p. 145. 28 Bal defines the fabula level of the narrative as a series of chronological events experienced by actants, whereas the story is those fabula events rearranged and colored (ibid., p. 5) 29 Ibid., p. 25. 30 Ibid., p. 147 - 153. 31 Ibid., p. 150. 32 Ryan, Foote and Azaryahu, Narrating Space, p.25. 33 David Herman, Basic Elements of Narrative, Oxford 2009, p. 105. 34 Wilkie, “ Out of Place ” , p. 53. 35 This is related to the author of the piece, another widely discussed term in narratology, which, narratologists commonly agree is external to the narrative model. 52 Maya Arad Yasur 36 Lola Arias and Stefan Kaegi, dirs., Rimini Protokoll Theatre Group, Airport Kids, Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne (2008). 37 Stephan Kaegi and Jörg Karrenbauer, dirs., Rimini Protokoll Theatre Group, Cargo X (2006). 53 The Makerly Text & the Spectatorly Text