Competing Ideologies - 12 Years a Slave

The fact that 12 Years a Slave won Best Film at the Golden Globes without picking up a Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress or even Best Supporting Actor has caused quite a stir in critical circles and on the web.  You can see why.  The whole "awards season" is based on the idea of certain films "cleaning up", triumphantly proclaiming that they have all the prime cuts, allowing the marketers to blaze "Awarded 12 Oscars" across the publicity.  But this year, it seems, things may just be a little different.  12 Years a Slave is undoubtedly the best film of the last twelve months - in fact, it's one of the best films I have ever seen - and one of the reasons it is so good is precisely the same reason that it hasn't been mopping up the individual awards.

Awards for individual attainment crave the showy, the flamboyant.  The Academy loves it when an actor loses huge amounts of weight for a role, or makes some excruciating journey into an abused past, or recreates a known historical personage, or "lives inside the character" on set.  The Method still rules in Hollywood.  But the Method, derived as it is from a psychoanalytical view of the human condition, is diametrically opposed to the sort of films made by Steve McQueen and his collaborators.

In a world view driven by psychoanalysis, everything is about the self.  Human behaviour is explained in terms of insecurities, neuroses, the fact that somebody's mother didn't love them.  It ignores the wider forces - political, economic, even spiritual - that shape the world within which we operate, and which can have a huge effect on our experience of it.  If you are depressed, psychoanalysis tells you to go inside yourself and look for the cure.  The Academy would no doubt applaud the strenuous efforts required to do so.  But perhaps the real reason for the depression may be (for example) the economic structure that causes someone to lose their job and have little chance of finding another.  A reason located outside the subject, not inside the psyche.  And this is what makes the Method so convenient for the political right - all those depressed people just need to pull themselves together, because it's their own fault really.  Give the man an Oscar.

Steve McQueen's work is remarkable for its avoidance of a moral agenda driven by personal psychology, and its privileging of a strange and disturbing factual presentation in the manner of Brecht.  As Sarah Churchwell argued in her Guardian piece on the memoir used as the film's key source, Solomon Northup "repeatedly insists that not all slave-owners were depraved, defending William Ford and others he encountered. These people were not inherently evil; rather, 'the influence of the iniquitous system necessarily fosters an unfeeling and cruel spirit'."

The story of Northup's enslavement is the perfect vehicle for a morally sophisticated piece around this subject.  Because Northup was an educated, middle-class, violin-playing, literate person,  he can be established at the start of the film as a participant in a complex socio-economic system: the more conventional narrative, seen in work like Roots, of the loss of an African Eden and the bringing of an outsider into the corrupt society of slave-owners generates a more simplistic binary (one which has been contested by a number of African writers, perhaps most pointedly by Ama Ata Aidoo in The Dilemma of a Ghost and Anowa).  Northup was kidnapped, and so the nexus into which his life was taken bears a closer resemblance to the narratives of contemporary human trafficking than to those of the Atlantic crossing.  As a result, there is the potential to generate real moral dilemmas in every scene, because there is a commonality of understanding between Northup and the slave-owning characters, as well as the other slaves.  The scene where Northup tries to stop a female slave from mourning so publicly the loss of her children, largely on pragmatic grounds, is extraordinarily complex and eschews easy answers.  These scenes are very involved, very disturbing, and very well acted indeed.  But they are not Methody or showy at all.

P.S.  Yes, I know Michael Fassbender lost huge amounts of weight for Hunger - but even so, his Bobby Sands was not a Method performance, and it was not a psychological film.  Sands starved himself to death for political reasons (and whether you agree with them is another matter).  McQueen and Fassbender are true to that.

Ngugi wa Mirii

I got a copy of the latest edition of African Theatre, and saw an obituary for Ngugi wa Mirii. I hadn't heard - but he died in a road accident in 2008, aged only 56. The obituary, by his more famous namesake Ngugi wa Thiong'o, is very elegantly written. They worked together in the early years of African community theatre, especially the famous Kamairiithu theatre. The Moi dictatorship drove them both into exile. Ngugi was Thiong'o went to the US, and Ngugi wa Mirii to Zimbabwe - like many African intellectuals and idealists (among them Ama Ata Aidoo), who believed that the newly independent nation could become a model for the continent.

It was in Zimbabwe that I met Ngugi wa Mirii in 1997. He had been there 15 years, and had established ZACT (Zimbabwe Association of Community Theatres): an extraordinary organisation which facilitated Theatre for Development on a grand scale throughout the region. The methodology was similar to Boal in Brazil - he showed me a framed photograph of himself shaking hands with Paolo Freire, mounted proudly on his wall. He also gave me a T-shirt, which I still have. It lists the many types of theatre which ZACT presented on the back, and on the front it says "Theatre for Conscientization and Development". I don't wear it often - just when I want to make a point. It usually works.

Still talking about the Dilemma!

http://234next.com/csp/cms/sites/Next/ArtsandCulture/Books/5576862-147/story.csp

Nice to feel appreciated!

Press Night

Last night we finally got to the official opening at the Africa Centre. A packed house - lots of guests from the Afrophile community, including a Ghanaian family complete with baby, who gurgled through the show. That's African theatre for you... oddly, it seemed to add something to the show - there are so many references to children, and it felt rather like the background sound of the village!

Word on the street is good. There was a very buzzy atmosphere in Aunty Ama's Spot afterwards, and lots of people were there who had contributed in some way to this project - James and Patience Gibbs, Tessa Watt, Nick from the Arts Council.... I made a bit of a speech to thank everybody (especially Dzifa for the Ghanaian collaboration and Kate for making it all happen), and then got Aunty Ama to launch the Theatre and Slavery book.

We're rather proud of this, the first of our more discursive publications. There are essays about the play (a very good one by Awo Asiedu), plus others about other work on the theme: Julia Swindells has written about theatre in the run-up to the 1807 Act, and John Thieme has written about Caribbean work on the subject. There's the script of Mohammed ben Abdallah's The Slaves, pictures and extracts from Moj of the Antarctic, and poetry by Ama and by Dev Virahsawmy. And, especially importantly, there's material about contemporary slavery too. A very touching piece by Shikha Ghildyal about TfD work with child labourers, a Foreword by Aidan McQuade of Anti-Slavery International, and a characteristically brilliant essay by Rustom Bharucha, who as usual shows it's all more complex than it seems.

It's all going on at the moment.....

Celebrity culture

With two projects bubbling away towards the boil, Border Crossings has never been busier. It's exciting, but a bit mad! I find myself making silly mistakes, like leaving .html off the links to the Laboratory and Box Office pages in some email shots. Luckily at least some people are keen enough on what we're doing to email us and ask! If I didn't have Kate as Producer for Dilemma, I think I'd be totally out of control by now. She's been doing some of the really tough work, like the Work Permit application and buying air tickets. She only found out at the last moment that Osei is actually Osei Korankye's surname - he uses it first as his stage name. thatw as close to a serious border incident. Booking tickets on Ghana International Airlines is an interesting one too. You reserve online, then phone Ghana to sort out payment. They give you a mobile number of a Uk-based agent, who only takes cash deposited in their account before issuing tickets.... This didn't feel right! Eventually Kate managed to track down a real office and got some real paperwork for our real cheque.

Meanwhile, I've been talking to PR people. It's important we get a good profile for this show, especially with Ama coming. One man depresses me. He's never heard of Ama, which is fine - the job is to make sure people have heard of her. But his argument is that if somebody isn't a "celebrity", then you can't get them any press at all. I begin to wonder how anybody ever becomes a celebrity. I point out that she's won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, the Nelson Mandela prize and pretty much everything else going bar the Nobel. "Look", he says: "Athol Fugard can't get interviews. The only one the producers of Victory got was by flying a journalist to California at their expense to talk to him in person. We live in a celebrity culure." And Athol Fugard - that great writer and artist - is apparently not a celebrity. But Paris Hilton is.

Full steam ahead

The last few weeks have been packed with admin - all of which is moving very much in the right direction. The really good news is that Dilemma has now been funded by the Arts Council, the Commonwealth Foundation, Passage of Music and the Gibbs Trust. Which means we're on. Kate (who runs Bilimankwe, and is going to be producer on this project) and I carve up the admin jobs - which are legion. The most immediate tasks are around bringing people from Ghana, where the news of the go-ahead has been greeted with much rejoicing! We need a work permit, which means getting passport details. I suspect at least one of the people we're inviting may not have a passport - and that there may also be no record of her date of birth, which will make everything a bit more complex than it really needs to be. Of course, I may be wrong, and I hope I am. By a fortunate coincidence, Steve Collins, a young director who we're intending to take on as an intern on this, is currently in Accra with Theatre for a Change, so he can help smooth the way and sort some of the cultural bridges. I doubt he'll still be there by the time the cast need to apply for visas, so we may have to get British Council help there.

Phone Ama Ata Aidoo. She's very excited, and sure that she will be able to come for at least a week, possibly more. This is a big boost to the marketing - which is probably the biggest job of the lot. Plus it will be wonderful to have such an eminent figure around our work.

Meanwhile, the Origins Festival is also moving on. We've got funds from the US Embassy and from Arts WA for the Advisory Board's meetings and the launch in September. I meet up with Ian Connich, the Director of the new Centre for New Zealand Studies at Birkbeck, and he offers to show some Maori short films for the launch. This will be great - it's a way of involving some element of presentation even at this early stage. I phone Allan Collins (Aboriginal film maker) in Alice Springs, to see if we can also show his amazing film Sunset to Sunrise. He seems very open to the idea, and tells me amazing things about the background to the piece. In order to allow the elder Max to tell his story, they spent six weeks consulting other elders about protocols, and then went to the specific place in the bush where Max's father was born, and sat under a specific tree to tell the story. None of this is overt in the film, but it goes some way towards explaining the extraordinary resonance it has.

Ophelia Huang emails from Shanghai to say we've got a CTC grant for me to go to China and meet Director You again, with a view to moving the Trilogy forward. Hopefully I can get this to happen in December, once Dilemma is done - I'd like to be in the country till then if I can. But there are also pressures to try and get the work seen in the first half of 2008 - not least the China Now Festival. I met their Programme Manager, Fenella Barber, who would like the project to be part of the Festival. Worry that suddenly everything is happening at once..... which is great, of course......