OBITUARY: Reza Abdoh
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Your support makes all the difference.Reza Abdoh died in New York exactly a month before he was due to bring his company to Britain for the first time as part of Lift (London International Festival Theatre), a visit much anticipated by cognoscenti of the louder, violent fringes of the extreme performance avantgarde. His death at 32, from an Aids-related illness, concludes one of the riskiest theatrical careers of the last decade.
In fact Abdoh had worked in Britain before as a teenager, moving there at the age of 12 from his native Tehran, and two years later joining the National Youth Theatre to start directing. His subsequent move to the United States to study at the University of Southern California seems a smaller distance than that between the National Youth Theatre and the productions of Dar a Luz, Abdoh's peripatetic company.
Influenced by a roll-call of aggressively independent practitioners, from Artaud and Genet to the Living Theater, the Wooster Group and Pina Bausch, Abdoh created multi-media works on a scale closer to the megalomania and adrenalin rush of rock music than to traditional theatre.
Abdoh moved himself and his nomadic tribe from California to New York and on repeated blitzkriegs across Europe, performing in suitably derelict and physically dangerous venues: the ballroom of the condemned Diplomat Hotel off 42nd Street; the meat district after dark; an impossibly located loft. He was a perfectionist, a closet martinet and prodigiously gifted creator of effects, co-ordinating bombardments of noise, physical energy and outrage.
Taking mythological and classical themes, from the Egyptian Book of the Dead to The Hip-Hop Waltz of Eurydice (1990), Abdoh fused and subverted them with deliberately shocking topics: the mass-murderer Jeffrey Dahmer living with Andy Warhol in hell; a grotesque caricature of a Jewish businessman exploiting slaves (played by white actors in the "blackface" - technically illegal in New York); the most complex sexual perversions, illness, torture, a plethora of sodomy. Titles such as Tight, Right, White (1993) and A Story of Infamy only hint at the bravura thrills of Abdoh's productions, which took place among, and against, the audience, exploding every taboo with aplomb.
Reza Abdoh, theatre director: born Tehran 23 February 1963; died New York City 11 May 1995.
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