2024

The Mouth of the Gods

Usually this blog ends the year with a post looking back over Border Crossings' work across the last twelve months. For us, the main focus of 2024 has been THE MOUTH OF THE GODS, and I do very much want to write a post about that project, which has taught us so much about how our work can evolve to suit its rapidly changing context, within the framework of The Sligo Manifesto. But at the moment it feels as if that post needs to wait, perhaps until we release the film version in the new year. As I look back on the year that is ending, it feels incredibly urgent to talk about the project we concentrated on back in January, and which has kept coming back to remind us of its own significance throughout the year. SUPPLIANTS OF SYRIA. We've not yet been able to present the theatre piece, but the film has been shown in Turkey and in Tunisia. What's been happening in Syria itself over the last few weeks makes it feel immediate and necessary. But that's not the only thing.

Back in June, I went to a LIFT event called Democracy From Where I Stand. Unusually for LIFT (less so for us), this wasn't really a performance as such, but a direct engagement by artists and thinkers with the idea of democracy. The accompanying book starts with the assertion that "2024 will be remembered as the year of elections: over half of the global adult population will exercise the right to vote in dozens of states." That much is, of course, undeniable; but the year of elections has done little to ensure the future of "democracy", never mind advance the course of justice. Trump's return to the White House is the most obvious example of an election bringing into power a figure whose stated aims include the overthrow of constitutional structures, but it is far from the only one. Russia re-elected Putin, of course, but there were also surprising lurches towards populism and authoritarianism in Romania, Georgia, even France. In the early summer, the consensus in liberal social media wanted us to believe that India had expressed a powerful reaction against the pernicious rule of the BJP, but the reality is that Narendra Modi won a third term as Prime Minister: other parties were prepared to join his coalition, and his programme shows no sign of reversal. The international observational organisation V-Dem has dubbed the Indian example an "electoral autocracy". Even the UK's election in July, while putting an end to the hegemony of a Tory party that was (and is) drawing ever closer to the global model of populist extremism, was hardly the heralded democratic landslide that Starmer and his team pretended. Labour’s two-thirds majority in Parliament came from just over a third of the vote - the least proportional election result in modern UK history. The 2024 Labour "landslide" actually came from 600,000 fewer votes than the same party had won in its "disastrous defeat" of 2019, under the much maligned Jeremy Corbyn. Starmer sells himself as a competent manager, and there's no doubt that these statistics demonstrate managerial skill in relation to elections. In the UK as in the USA, it's not how many votes you get that matters so much as precisely where you get them. So the way to win elections is not to appeal broadly to the electorate through policy stances that might benefit them as a whole, but to target very specific interest groups through a process of advertisement, particularly online. 

Suppliants of Syria

SUPPLIANTS OF SYRIA is based on Aeschylus' great play Suppliants, which includes the first ever use of the word "democracy". It was written at a time when Athens was making its first experiments in this radical form of government, and the Syrian refugee Chorus asks, as the Greek citizens debate their fate, "What is this thing they call democracy?"  Well - one thing the Greeks were absolutely sure about was that democracy was not about elections. We just assume that the two are synonymous, but the Greeks were far wiser than we are. For them, elections were understood not to be part of the democratic government of the people by the people, but to be a manifestation of oligarchy - the rule of the rich. As they well understood, a system of elected government leads to wealthy people retaining power because they have the resources to persuade voters through whatever form of advertisement may suit them. Including the overt bribery recently practised by Elon Musk, who paid out $1 million every day to buy votes for a convicted felon. This immensely dangerous megalomaniac is now contemplating a huge donation to the UK's Reform (which claims to be a political party but is actually a private company), and is wading into the German electoral process on the basis of his "investments" there.

So the lesson of 2024 is not that we need "better elections" but that we need to overhaul the entire system by which we delegate power from a sovereign people. (It doesn't help that in the UK the people aren't currently even held to be sovereign, but that's another issue.) Political office needs to be perceived less in terms of status and power (and certainly less in terms of wealth), much more in terms of responsibility. It needs to be exercised not as a means to appease established supporters and potential voters, but in relation to what is considered most likely to be beneficial to the populace as a whole in the long term. And that "populace" needs to include people beyond the immediate "nation" (whatever that's supposed to be).  So many of the problems we face are global, and so the response must be global also. We need to consider other countries when we consider migration and asylum. We need to consider other cultures when we consider foreign policy. We need to consider other species when we consider the environment. 

This is the point in the argument when "realists" tend to wade in and say that it's never going to happen, so there's no point even trying. To which I reply that, only a few years ago, nobody would have believed that a person like Donald Trump could ever become President, let alone twice. Nobody would have believed India, "the world's largest democracy", would come to be dominated by the fanatics of Hindutva, who are seemingly free to murder critical thinkers, journalists, artists and activists, and to target the Muslim population just as they please. Nobody would have imagined that a genocidal campaign could be waged for more than a year against a helpless people, with the clear backing of the Western "democracies" who supply the weapons with which the oppressor wreaks such havoc. None of this seemed imaginable. None of it was "realistic". So, if these appalling, unimaginable things have come to be, we should and must allow ourselves to imagine the alternatives. That is the only way we can begin to take the practical steps through which this "unrealistic", "unimaginable" opposite of our unthinkable reality can begin to become realistic and imaginable. 

There are two places where the work has to begin. One of them is education, and the other is culture. 

And so, just briefly, I find that I do want to think again about THE MOUTH OF THE GODS. I'm not for one moment pretending that six performances of a baroque opera can change the world, but I do want to point out that this was a cultural and educational work that told a true history, a people's history, of colonisation and dispossession. In the process, it became an act of resistance, and an expression of resilience. It demonstrated all too clearly the economic basis of the global political system. It shared these things with the communities who had worked to make it, including no fewer than seven schools, and it celebrated that educational and cultural action. It was able to share in this way because it was not itself a commodity - nobody paid to see it, and so a new audience came who engaged with this performance in a different, more equal way.

The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that this is our role as cultural workers. We have to imagine the world otherwise, and then offer up that possibility as something to be shared.

Wishing you all the very best for 2025. 

After Assad

Mount Cassius, seen from Antakya in Turkey. On the other side is Syria.

This afternoon, Ireland added itself to the list of European countries to suspend the processing of asylum applications by refugees from Syria. Austria, Belgium, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK had already done something similar.  It is, of course, very convenient in terms of right-wing domestic narratives about defending European identities and stopping the boats. It also plays very readily into the standard Western mythological narrative of the individual hero (or villain). When will we learn? "Get rid of the bad guy" we always say "and the problem is solved." It's truly extraordinary that, only a couple of days after Assad's fall, European countries should be taking actions that imply Syria's problems are over.

Of course, there are many Syrian people who desperately want this to be true. Many of the Syrian friends we worked with in Turkey to create SUPPLIANTS OF SYRIA have been expressing relief, joy, and a deep desire to return to what remains their beloved home, in spite of the devastation wrought upon it. Some Syrians have begun the journey: and of course the actions of European governments can only encourage this. But there are also a great many people travelling in the opposite direction: people who, in one way or another, may have worked for the Assad government, or who may fear that others will think they did. Just because the dictator has fallen, it doesn't mean there is going to be a free and peaceful, benign and gentle regime established in his place. Look at what happened after Gaddafi's fall. Or Saddam Hussein's. Or Louis XVI's. A revolution, including one that overthrows a tyrant, leaves a void, and a void becomes a contested space that may be filled in many ways.

Those same European governments who have suspended asylum claims are also rapidly considering whether to remove HTS (the insurgent organisation that brought down the regime) from the list of terrorist organisations. It would suit their agenda to do so. However, HTS is an Islamist organisation that emerged from IS and Al-Qaida. Since 2017, they have held sway in Idlib, which was the last stronghold of IS - a place to which none of the refugees I have met expressed any desire to return. It is true that the HTS leader, known in Idlib as Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, has reverted to his birth name Ahmed al-Sharaa, and is taking some pains to paint the country's future as egalitarian and democratic (whatever that may mean - the Suppliants ask). But his history does not suggest the sort of leader Western powers like to see in the Middle East. From 2003-6 he was a jihadist combatant in Iraq, and spent time under American incarceration, including in Abu Ghraib. After 2011, he returned to Syria to fight for IS. On his triumphant arrival in Damascus, he spoke of it as “a victory for the Islamic nation”. “I left this land over 20 years ago, and my heart longed for this moment,” he said. “Sit quietly my brothers and remember God almighty.”

They might also want to remember President Erdogan of Turkey. HTS has a complex relationship with the Northern neighbour who houses so many of their compatriots, but there is no doubt that it was their uneasy alliance which allowed HTS to hold sway in Idlib for the last seven years. Turkey wants a Syrian regime that is hostile to the Kurds, and an excuse to reduce its enormous refugee population. As so often, Erdogan lines up uneasily beside the Europeans. 

Those last seven years in the micro-state around Idlib offer the best indication of how HTS may try to rule Syria (in so far as there is even a state left to rule). The basic services of government were supplied, and taxes were levied to pay for them. They also imposed deeply conservative rules, particularly on women, and dealt brutally with any opposition. Informed sources are suggesting we may see something close to the Taliban. Meanwhile, Turkey has increased its attacks on the Kurds, who are deprived of their uneasy alliance with Assad, and Israel has been advancing from the Occupied Golan, intent on taking Syrian military bases so as to avoid their coming under Islamist control.

Is this really the moment to suspend all asylum claims from Syrian refugees? 

From Zoukak Theatre in Beirut

 In 2013, Border Crossings worked with Zoukak Theatre in the Lebanese capital Beirut as part of our development process for This Flesh is Mine. This post is their letter to international friends and fellow artists in the face of the Israeli invasion of their lands.

Zoukak Theatre

These are terrible days in our contemporary history. Decades of efforts to create laws, conventions, and agreements that uphold common human values and unite us as citizens of the world are being systematically trampled upon, violently disregarded, and dismantled by a monstrous machine of death, destruction, and dehumanization, reducing entire regions in Palestine and Lebanon to rubble—all under the pretext of Israel’s right to defend itself.

As we write these lines, surrounded by the sounds of drones, military aircraft, missiles, bombings, and the looming threat of embargoes and settler occupation in our country, we wonder how many more wars can we survive? What can be said and done today in the face of such horror? What can we, as artists who already operate on the margins of society, do to make any difference in the course of history? It might sound naïve, but we do know what to do. While a massacre is taking place in the street behind us, art can confront injustice, maintain connectedness, and reinforce a sense of shared existence. We know that individual efforts can influence public debate and rebuild values that bring about a potential for global change. 

Since our inception in 2006—during another brutal Israeli war on Lebanon—Zoukak has remained committed to working under difficult circumstances, both locally and internationally. Now, in 2024, eighteen years later, we find history tragically repeating itself, though on an even larger scale. We are witnessing an unprecedented level of armed aggression by Israel, compounded by the use of advanced military technologies, including artificial intelligence, cyber warfare systems, and internationally prohibited weapons.

A few days ago, we decided to cancel our biennial festival, Zoukak Sidewalks, which was a special edition this year, marking Zoukak’s 18th anniversary. We had considered it a milestone—a step into adulthood in terms of both responsibility and freedom. Responsibility, in the sense of our ongoing commitment to engage with society through art, and freedom as the ability to question, challenge, and continuously recreate the world around us through the active power of imagination.

The ongoing brutal Israeli war on Lebanon has forced us to halt our efforts to sustain this vital cultural encounter. We were looking forward to welcoming you - our international and local colleagues and audience members - and sharing reflections on this significant moment as part of our nearly decade-long tradition in Beirut. While circumstances have forced us to pause, we remain steadfast in our commitment to continue creating. Today, in the face of death and destruction, there is power in our gathering - to create art as an act of resistance and to support relief initiatives and the basic needs of those most affected by the attacks. As we stand on the edge, the act of listening becomes vital. It is through deep listening that we can shape practices toward togetherness and justice.

In this historic moment, we call on the international cultural and artistic community to stand united against colonialist atrocities, funded and co-produced by governmental and taxpayer money in the “West.” We urge you to raise your voice about the current situation, which has reached an irreversible point: daily massacres, widespread displacement, and the extensive destruction of civilian areas, all met with disturbing international complacency. This is not only about our own survival but about the future of human consciousness. We call upon your solidarity during these dark times for Lebanon, Palestine, and the world. 

We grieve our losses daily, even as we know the time for true mourning has not yet come—one that promises to be long and difficult, if we ever get the chance to mourn. Now, the urgent task is to stop this monstrosity!

Watching a young girl in Gaza carry her injured little sister on her shoulders, walking barefoot for two kilometers to give her a chance to live, we can’t help but find within ourselves that same strength to move forward. 

We await the day when we can share artistic work in the theatre again. Until then, we hope those living and witnessing this atrocity—whether up close or from afar—are able to stay safe and maintain their sanity.

Zoukak Theatre

The Question of Language

 

First Quechua Lexicon, 1560
Source: Wikimedia Commons

A few days ago there was a (positively) provocative exchange on our Instagram page, asking why our posts and other communications about THE MOUTH OF THE GODS were in English. The comment read: "No tiene sentido qué hablen de herencia latina, hablen de "descolonizar" y "festejen" el día de la invasión y pongan todos los nombres en inglés"; which translates "It makes no sense to talk about Latin heritage, talk about "decolonizing" and "commemorating" the day of the invasion and put all the names in English."

I take the point. English - the language of globalisation and conquest - doesn't seem to be the ideal medium in which to express anti-colonial sentiments. On the other hand, neither does Spanish, the language in which the comment was made! It may well be true that Spanish is the language through which London's Latin American communities communicate with one another, and so the marker of their difference in our local context - but it is every bit as much the language of colonial rule as English. If we're really going fully to "de-colonise" communication, then the languages we have to turn to are the Indigenous ones. But, while there certainly are speakers and learners of Quechua and Aymara in this city, the use of these languages in publicity would exclude all but a very small number of people. The purpose of Instagram posts is not to be our artistic statement in themselves, but to attract people to the performance, where the fuller statement is made.  I hope this performance will offer a much fuller and richer reflection on the language issue.

We are very aware of the complex questions surrounding Indigenous languages in relation to colonisation.  As Franz Fanon argued, someone "who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language" - so the maintenance and promotion of Indigenous languages is essential to the preservation and resurgence of Indigenous cultures, with their distinct and hugely helpful ways of thinking in relation to community, spirituality and environment. This is why the UN has decided to designate a Decade of Indigenous Languages, of which our work is a part. In his hugely important book about writing and theatre-making in post-colonial spaces De-colonising the Mind, the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o makes a powerful case for the avoidance of English (and other imperial languages) on the grounds that they exclude those who are already marginalised in post-colonial societies by a lack of educational opportunities. He is, of course, entirely right. 

In performance THE MOUTH OF THE GODS will actually represent a complex engagement with these very questions. There will be some use of English, in the spoken scenes performed by actors, but these will be deliberately distanced from the audience by their framing through the observation of an Indigenous community, offering a Brechtian estrangement from the language we tend to assume is "normal". The power and dominance of English will be deliberately distanced and questioned. There will be some Spanish, probably spoken and certainly in some of the sung texts from the Codex Martínez Compañón; but the dramatic context will not allow Spanish its cultural dominance either. "O dolce Jesú mio" feels much less Catholic when used to mourn an Indigenous leader executed with the endorsement of the Church. 

The final sections of the show are entirely in Indigenous language. The powerful aria Hanaq Pachap Kusikuynin, written in  Quechua, leads us towards the short opera San Francisco Xavier, which is in Chiquitano. The title is its only element in Spanish, and the only overt reference to the Jesuit order on whose missions it was originally created. Otherwise, the anonymous 18th century Indigenous writer used Chiquitano words for "god", "heaven" and so on: words which were in use long before colonisation, and so liberate the music from the Catholicising constraints of imperial evangelism. My hope is that the piece will move closer and closer to an assertion of Indigenous cultures and their value. It's just that you have to cut through the accretions of colonial language and dominance in order to get there. 

Premier in Adana - Radical Empathy

From Suppliants of Syria

Lucy and I went back to Turkey last week, for the premier of the film version of Suppliants of Syria.  The film is feeling like an ever more important part of this project, not least because of the huge challenges of raising the funds to perform the play in the region where it's set. I'm determined that we will get it to Adana, where we can share it with the Syrian women who took part, but that goal is still a long way off, and in the meantime we owed it to them to impart some sense of how we've been responding to their offer and their work.

It had been some time since I'd looked at the film, so I was able to be more objective about it than is usual when my work first goes in front of audiences.  I'm pleased to say that I was very moved by it - the women's sharing of personal stories, intercut with the Choruses from the Greek play Suppliants, is really searing in its honesty. Their acting, the cinematography and the music feel so rooted in that experience that it's impossible to resist its emotional force. And it's very exciting to have that put into dialogue with more political and structural considerations - there's a very theatrical, I guess Brechtian, interplay between the emotional truths and the objective frames around them.

Which said, my own emotional response pales into insignificance beside the reaction of the women themselves. In the Q&A that followed the screening, one of them, Iman, said that the film was "an incredible achievement - but I have been crying all the way through." I had thought that this was rhetorical, but Lucy, who was sitting amongst them, told me that all of them had been in tears from very early in the film. I suppose there was a lot being re-visited for them all; and there were also new stories they probably did not know, about the personal journeys of their friends who were sitting beside them. There's a moment in the film where some of them share with me that they had never told the stories before. The frame of the creative project was essential to draw out these incredibly important truths.

Another audience member was a Turkish NGO worker, who said that the film would bring out empathy in its audiences, and this was really important for the ongoing refugee work of her organisation.  I found myself responding that what is needed everywhere - not just in Turkey but also in Europe, America and global - is a new radical empathy as the way past the politics of prejudice.  It's very hard to hate somebody when you have heard them tell stories like these.  

In Praise of KAOS

Janet McTeer as Hera in KAOS

The internet has gone wild with fury at Netflix's decision not to commission a second series of KAOS. Actually, most of the protest has been about KAOS being "axed", which isn't really what has happened, as there only was ever one series actually commissioned. But the world of TV, and especially streamed TV, is such that anything that doesn't make it into Series 2 is deemed to have "failed". Commercially, which is the only context in which the language of "success" and "failure" has any meaning, I can only assume that Netflix were right, and that the series hadn't achieved the viewing figures that would make another iteration seem a sound business proposition. The fans who are up in arms don't measure the work's worth by its audience figures, of course - and neither do I. And I loved this series. But, on reflection, I'm actually rather glad that there won't be a second run.

Why? KAOS, to my mind, was a superb drama, and that is not the same thing as soap opera. It was a beautifully crafted, wonderfully insightful and provocative work of art, and as such was self-contained. That makes it astonishingly difficult to repeat. I can't think of any TV series (or film, or play) that has managed it, and of course many "successful" franchises have tried. Netflix's own version of The Handmaid's Tale was a superb adaptation of the novel (with some judicious changes) in its first series, but was left with nothing to adapt in series 2. As a result, it just resorted to more of the same, which is the opposite of dramatic. Gilead carried on being oppressive, Offred carried on being oppressed. So what?

Aurora Perrineau as Riddy

It was precisely because KAOS was such great drama that it resolved itself in an entirely satisfactory way. Again, I'm departing from online orthodoxy here. The prevailing view is that there were lots of loose ends and unresolved plot lines, doubtless deliberately set up by creator Charlie Covell in order to facilitate the longed for series 2. Maybe there was an element of that, but Covell is much too skilled a dramatist to leave their drama hanging in the air, its meaning incomplete. Any drama will leave its audience with the sense that further events might evolve, but that is part of its meaning, not a bid for further attempts to finish. The Handmaid's Tale is a case in point: at the end of the novel Offred is captured, and the reader is left puzzled and disturbed at what may have happened to her, and how the tapes on which she tells her story have survived. But a sequel that answers these questions diminishes, rather than augments, the original work. In Shakespeare's great tragedies, the audience leave thinking about the deaths of Hamlet, Macbeth or Cleopatra, but they also leave imagining what life might be like under the regimes of Fortinbras, Malcolm or Octavian. 

In KAOS, what we are left to imagine is the chaos itself. The whole series, from the moment in Episode 1 when Jeff Goldblum's paranoid Zeus spots a wrinkle, is about the imminence of chaos, a sense that the old order of the gods is about to collapse. Covell's gods are an elision between classical Olympus and today's mega-rich, constantly indulging their appetites at the expense of mere mortals. The threat to their everlasting decadence is that mortals learn of how their deaths (Eurydice descending into a stark black and white Underworld) are not, as their religion suggests, a step towards reincarnation, but an absolute destruction as they are turned into the "Meander water" that feeds the gods and ensures their immortality.

Isn't this exactly what is happening in the world? Aren't we dominated by a few extremely wealthy people whose "success" is built on the oppression of all others, and the destruction of the planet?  Aren't the people who have long been lulled into submission finally working out the mythology of centuries, and moving to overthrow them? We are living in the last generation before the revolution - before the chaos that characterises social and political meltdown, but which is the only way for new structures to emerge.

Misia Butler as Caeneus and Aurora Perrineau as Riddy

It's crucial to KAOS's power as drama of the current moment that its casting embraces "diversity".  Covell's approach, unlike most directors working in mainstream media, is not tokenistic but very carefully considered and central to their work's meaning. Eurydice (Riddy) is a mixed race woman with feminist credentials. Her companion in revealing the reality of the Underworld is Caeneus, a trans man. In each case, and elsewhere, the casting itself illuminates both the original mythology and the way in which it is being used here. The myth of Caeneus has always seemed to me particularly unpleasant and problematic: assigned female at birth, Caeneus was raped by Poseidon, who then granted his wish to be made male so that he would never be raped again. He was, however, murdered by the centaurs as they taunted him over not "really" being male. In KAOS, Caeneus is assigned female at birth in an Amazon community, but is aware from the start of being trans, and is supported by his mother, for whom he waits in the Underworld. His sexual encounter with Riddy is natural and simple, although socially transgressive, and it is this love affair that allows them to understand the reality of the gods, and to begin the process of undermining their power. At the end of the series, Caeneus remains in the Underworld, able to survive beyond the moment when he's supposed to become Meander water, and Riddy is on the surface, carrying her revolutionary knowledge.  

So yes - there could be a series in which they proclaim the truth, get ignored, then persuade, and either triumph or not - but we don't need that.  KAOS, utterly brilliantly, has arrived at exactly the moment in world history for which it was made. We will look back in wonder at its prescience. 

Election Eve

Caught on camera: Noor Alhuda Hajali and Keir Starmer

For anyone who happens to have missed it, tomorrow is Election Day in the UK. It's the culmination of what has been a very predictable and frankly dull campaign, sparked by the Prime Minister's "surprise" announcement six weeks ago: an announcement that seems to have been motivated as much as anything by fatigue. Sunak and the Tories knew that the game was up, and didn't have the energy to carry on. On the radio this morning a Cabinet Minister acknowledged that Labour was about to win a landslide, and in the Telegraph a former Home Secretary fired a starting pistol for the Conservative leadership race that will inevitably follow their defeat. 

"Change" has been Starmer's buzz word throughout the campaign, but it isn't very easy to ascertain precisely what this much-heralded change will actually be. He says he has changed his party, and that much is certainly true. Labour is now a small-c conservative party. Its main priority, he tells us, is the creation of wealth. He has dropped the Green Investment Plan that had seemed to offer some ecological slant to policy. He has back-pedalled on the abolition of University tuition fees. He has also abandoned the entire (Corbynist) manifesto on which he stood to be Labour leader. He has purged the party of dissenting voices, following the example of Boris Johnson's withdrawal of the whip from all Remainer Conservative MPs before the 2019 election. He has supported Israel's genocidal attacks on the Palestinian Territories. He makes "tough" noises about immigration. When asked if he was a socialist, he replied that he was one because he "always puts the country first and party second." I had always thought socialism had something to do with the common ownership of the means of production. So in truth there is remarkably little policy difference between the two main parties in tomorrow's election. Both say they want to "grow the economy" with no acknowledgement of the environmental devastation and global injustice that involves. Both say they will not increase taxes, although at the same time they want to cut NHS waiting lists, recruit more police and more teachers etc.. Both want to "stop the boats". Labour's opposition has not been based on differences in policy but criticism of execution and management. Our "democratic choice" is reduced to whether we prefer corrupt people who line their mates' pockets and turn Downing Street into an illegal drinking den, or a dull and conventional team of management consultants. What they are actually attempting to achieve, however, is identical. And it shows no vision whatsoever.

Of course, in some ways this is reassuring at a moment when politicians who undoubtedly have a vision of sorts, the populist parties of the radical right, are making such headway elsewhere. The European elections were shocking, and the consequences of Emmanuel Macron's petulant response are likely to be even worse. Ireland may also see a snap election, called opportunistically because Sinn Féin has lost popularity over (you've guessed it) immigration. Indian friends have been relieved that Modi and the BJP no longer have an overall majority, but the murderous and deluded messiah of Hindutva remains in power. Never mind what looks almost certain to happen in America in November. 2024 is the year when nearly half the world goes to the polls, but that does not make it a year in which we can celebrate democracy.  It makes it the moment when we have to question if we even have democracy at all.

Anyone visiting us from 5th century Athens would have no doubt on that score. We do not have democracy, we have elections; and elections, the Athenians believed, are the antithesis of democracy. They are oligarchic, or aristocratic. A wealthy "political class" parades itself before the public to be elected, but that public has no real power or participation. In Aeschylus's Suppliants, which offers the frame for our current project SUPPLIANTS OF SYRIA, the Chorus of refugees makes the first recorded reference to democracy. As the citizens decide whether to admit them, they ask "What is this thing they call democracy?" Within the play, and within Athenian society, it is a process of debate between the citizenry that leads to a jointly agreed policy decision. An humane decision, as it happens. This approach to democracy was genuinely participatory, as well as being intimately linked to theatre, the space where the different arguments could be rehearsed prior to decision-making processes.

It isn't possible simply to reproduce Athenian democracy today, but it is certainly possible to learn from it, and to modify our own tired and broken system accordingly. The Athenian citizenry numbered about 30 to 40,000 - a body that excluded women, children, slaves and foreigners, so they weren't actually "the people" in any egalitarian way. We can be more inclusive, and still work with similar, manageable numbers, which means that on a local level it is possible to reach sound and informed decisions on the basis of full participation. That in turn can allow for more nuanced forms of representation, whereby power is delegated to representatives at national and international assemblies. 

In the coming years, we want to explore this model of civic engagement in our theatrical spaces, recognising the urgent need for democratic regeneration. SUPPLIANTS OF SYRIA represents the beginning of this investigation, and will involve a process of exchange between very different people present at the performance, in the context of listening to the voices of others. Given the context of the current elections, it is only right that our first experiment with this approach to theatre engages with the question of migration. Allowing the voices of the refugees themselves into the theatrical space at once overturns the inanities about "smashing the smugglers' business model". If the politicians really wanted to "stop the boats", then they could just allow the refugees to get on planes. We need to change the culture so that it stops being about short-term personal gain and becomes about what is actually just and equitable. This the antithesis of the soundbite, the refutation of easy sloganeering and reductive advertisement. Who knows - it may even help us start to develop a vision for the world we might want to leave to our children.

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I had better include a disclaimer on this post, though the fact that I have to do this is in itself is evidence of the very problem we are trying to address. When the election was called, for the first time ever, the Charity Commission emailed registered charities (including Border Crossings) to remind them of their "responsibilities when campaigning or engaging in political activity."  They were clear that "Charities have the legal right to campaign so long as doing so furthers the charity’s purposes and is in the best interests of the charity. Charities must also remain independent and must not give their support to a political party." I believe this blog post fits these legal criteria.