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created and directed by Boaz Barkan

NoLands / SummerWorks Performance Festival, The Theatre Centre BMO Incubator, 1115 Queen St West, Toronto

August 11–13, 2026

Barkan: “I am not an anatomist, I’m a dancer”

Much of 20th-century Western political theatre placed its faith in facts. Piscator projected newsreels and photographs to anchor the stage in historical reality. Brecht built arguments through economic and historical detail. Documentary theatre went further still, with Peter Weiss using transcripts from the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials in The Investigation (1965). But, as Serbian-American playwright Steve Tesich observed, ours has become a “post-truth” culture, where emotion and personal belief shape public opinion far more than objective fact.

That shift underpins Boaz Barkan’s lecture-performance Our Other Organ presented at The Theatre Centre as part of the SummerWorks Performance Festival.

Standing before a wooden table covered with a white sheet, with two lamps positioned on either side, Barkan delivers an anatomy lesson. His specimen is the breathing body of circus artist Joel Degerfeldt, chosen as a representative of the typical “White man” – his face concealed to protect his identity. The performance draws directly from the tradition of the anatomical theatre, where the dissection of bodies has served as a pedagogical tool from the Renaissance to the present.

But if anatomy claims knowledge through proof, Barkan draws his dissection from experience: from encounters with others and from his own Jewish family history. “I am not an anatomist,” Barkan admits. “I’m a dancer”. What he senses is something anatomy cannot demonstrate — an “other organ” somewhere beneath our left ribs, mirroring the liver.

According to Barkan, this imaginary organ is a spongy substance capable of absorbing the racial hatred in which the body is immersed. From there, its effects spread to the major organs and vital functions. The brain becomes increasingly certain of its own moral righteousness and of its exclusive claim to historical victimhood “We believe we are the victim, the only victim,” Barkan remarks. The legs develop a restlessness that drives them from place to place, in search not so much of a destination as of a cause to consume them Barkan is clearly means Palestine. Even the sexual organs are compromised: pleasure itself is transformed into an uncontainable hatred.

There is something unsettling in the fluidity with which the performer makes this argument. It might be the forcefulness with which Barkan digs his fingers into Degerfeldt’s body. Or the precision with which he illuminates individual limbs and body parts. He speaks with wide-open eyes, determined to make his case as lucidly as possible. Indeed, though the performance begins from Barkan’s own Jewish inheritance, he expands the organ into a broader metaphor for the entitlement that allows people to act at someone else’s expense.

In a world increasingly organized around war and opposition, perhaps we could all benefit from keeping our other organ in check.

Alessandro Stracuzzi

Photo: Boaz Barkan (anatomist) and Joel Degerfeldt (cadaver). © 2026 Jacob Tekiela.

For tickets visit: summerworks.ca.