Our Other Organ

Our Other Organ is a performance lecture built around the anatomy of a body and the anatomy of an idea. Summerhall’s Anatomy Lecture Theatre is the perfect setting for it, and the room is used well. Boaz Barkan begins in a friendly, oddly charming manner, asking for a volunteer to undergo his dissection. Nobody does, of course, so Joel Degerfeldt is brought out and covered with a shroud that looks remarkably like a prayer shawl. Barkan calls him the “perfect white body”.

The charm does not last, however. As Barkan straddles the silent and still Degerfeldt, he presses his fingers deeply into the flesh, contorting the corpse-like body in unnatural ways. Eventually Barkan’s probing reaches the “other organ,” as he begins to talk about his grandfather, growing up in 1930s Dresden, and the anti-Semitism that became lodged in the body.

Joseph Schmidt, the Jewish tenor and radio star whose career in Germany was stopped by the Nazis, sings from Barkan’s phone. The lights go out and the torch picks out the body on the table. Barkan describes Schmidt’s voice as sticky. It is an unsettling little moment, the history entering the room.

Thus the “other organ” becomes Zionism, then violence. Barkan describes it as a sticky purplish thing spreading through the body, before it becomes fiery and orange. Walking across the stage becomes walking into Palestine. “Not only did Europe give us this land, it gave us this white body.”

This is where the piece sometimes feels pushed. The argument is never difficult to understand; quite the opposite. There is very little room for another reading of what the organ represents, and some of the physical metaphors begin to feel as though they are carrying rather too much.

But the images are hard to shake. Barkan talks about righteous violence while sucking his fingers in a grotesquely sexualised gesture, turning them into weapons. He runs through the manufacturers of guns, shells and bullets used in the conflict, then lifts Degerfeldt onto the table like Frankenstein with his monster. Fake blood runs into the white underwear as Barkan chants: “I am the victim. I am the only victim.”

Our Other Organ sits somewhere between theatre and performance art. It can push its metaphor too far, but Barkan’s descent from charming lecture to grotesque dissection makes the whole thing deeply unsettling.

Our Other Organ by NoLands.