Invisible Indigeneity

Rafael Montero and Kate Smith in LOYOLA

Back in August, I directed a short opera for El Parnaso Hyspano at the Arcola’s Grimeborn Festival. We called it LOYOLA, but it was originally titled San Ignacio Loyola, and was written by Domenico Zipoli, a Jesuit musician, on the missions in Latin America. Given that the missions’ purpose was to evangelise the Indigenous people, and that the title role was sung by Rafael Montero, who is himself an Indigenous Latin American, this was never going to be a “straight” opera production. As I wrote in an earlier post, we felt obliged (and excited) to take on board the Indigenous viewpoint on the context in which the piece was originally created, and to ask what this music could signify in the very different historical moment of its present performance. That was why I decided to turn it into the dream of a dying Indigenous man (also called Rafael Montero - the name was on the hospital bed); to emphasise his rejection of conventional religion in the figure of the Demon (who became a priest, in a way that was entirely consistent with Zipoli’s text); and to read his passing on of his mission to a younger colleague as a call to action for an activist allied to Indigenous causes. 

The weird thing was: nobody seemed to notice.

This isn’t a rant about bad reviews. Actually the reviews were very positive. Nor is it an artistic flip about how audiences can’t understand my creative genius. But I do think it’s important to ask why, when something so basic as a performer’s ethnic and cultural identity becomes central to a production, it should be almost universally overlooked. In a way this isn’t even to do with my directorial decisions, which were as much the result of Rafael singing the role of Loyola as of my own interest in Indigenous issues. It’s to do with how the performing body is read in the current political and cultural context.

What does it mean to cast performers “from diverse backgrounds”? “Diverse” has come to mean “non-white” (as if whiteness were some neutral norm from which everything else is a “diversion”), rather than its original meaning, a synonym for “various”. We are all “diverse”. But prevailing modes of thinking tend to assume that the labels of identity politics only apply to people who have in some way been historically excluded. So “gender” is regarded as something that women and trans people have, but is rarely applied to men. “Ethnicity” is seen as something that Black and Asian people have, but white people do not (I remember a director saying that she wanted a cast with “more ethnicity”, not realising that there could only be as much ethnicity as there were actors). I am a great believer in diversity, particularly in theatre, because it leads to difference, richness and the fusion (or fission) of multiple viewpoints, all of which are conducive to drama and to democracy. So I find it odd when “diverse casting” is treated as something inherently desirable but also as something to be ignored. As the Chair of our board, Jatinder Verma, has often argued, theatre signifies through the live body on stage, and so the audience reads that body, including its various identifying characteristics. We do see race, gender, age, (dis)ability etc. - whether or not people are cast according to the character they play having the same characteristics as the performer. This is why it’s possible to make audacious and brilliant casting decisions like Adrian Lester as Rosalind or Henry V, Kathryn Hunter as Richard III, Nahil Shaban as Haile Selassie. These performers bring themselves to the roles, disrupting the way the audience views the character by virtue of who they are. I realise that all these examples date from some years ago. Maybe the landscape is a little different now, a little more literal, a little less open to disruption? 

Related to this is the current orthodoxy that characters who are from non-white backgrounds, trans characters, disabled characters etc. must be played by actors who share those specific characteristics. I don’t disagree with this. It’s not an absolute and eternal rule, of course, but an ethical movement specific to the present time, an adjustment that needs to be made in view of the historical injustices that have led to people with these characteristics being excluded from the stage and screen, where they were portrayed through such “virtuosic” performances as Laurence Olivier’s Othello and Daniel Day-Lewis’s Christy Brown. The idea that only black men should now play Othello is what Gayatri Spivak has called “strategic essentialism”. Race is not actually essential - but at the present moment in history it is in the interests of justice and equality to behave as if it were.

How does this relate to what happened when Rafael performed LOYOLA? I think the audience found itself faced with a choice between two prevailing ways of reading his Indigenous body. One would be that the character is literally (perhaps “essentially”) an Indigenous person, which St Ignatius Loyola clearly was not. So the audience (and the critics) turned to the second orthodoxy, which is that ethnicity and cultural background should be ignored when non-white people play “white” roles. The possibility that the performer’s ethnic identity might be considered when they play a character of a different race, even if the whole production is structured around this, seems to be something that can no longer be considered. 

This is very unfortunate, and plays absolutely into the hands of the theatrical establishment, which has always survived by being what Lawrence Stone called the British aristocracy - “An Open Elite”. Apparent outsiders are absorbed and assimilated, so long as they continue to play by the rules. “Look at us, aren’t we wonderful, we’ve got a black Hamlet / Hamilton / Harry Potter.”  The underlying mythologies of the great tragic prince, the founding father or the boy wizard are not in any way questioned or undermined by such casting - indeed, they are reinforced by the “inclusive” gesture. It makes it very difficult to offer an audience casting decisions that genuinely shift the ground, because the audience has become very nervous of reading them that way.

In the scene where he sent his follower Frances (San Francisco Xavier) out to fulfil his mission, Rafael’s Loyola sang about the need to bring truth to the poor people who dwell in ignorance.  And pointed at the audience.

LOYOLA: Tara Venkatesan, Biraj Barkakaty,
Rafael Montero

Loyola - opera meets the Indigenous

Rafael Montero

I've been directing a new opera production for presentation at the Arcola's Grimeborn Festival, for a company called El Parnaso Hyspano, led by the Indigenous tenor Rafael Montero, who was so impressive in the Celebrating Peru performance we curated at the British Museum last year. The piece, which we're calling Loyola, was originally entitled San Ignacio Loyola, and was written by a Jesuit composer called Domenico Zipoli for the missions in Latin America, where the performers would have been Indigenous singers and musicians. The score suggests that they must have sung and played European baroque to a very high standard, and at the same time hints at the inclusion of musical traditions from the locality itself. The inclusion in our production of Johnny Rodriguez on percussion and Andean pipes follows through on that line of thought, and it sounds wonderful....  

Johnny's presence, like that of Rafael singing the title role, is entirely "authentic", but of course feels strange and radical in the context of a European performance. Zipoli wrote his da capo arias and secco recitatives for Indigenous people to perform, but a European audience associates these sounds with European singers and players. What's more, the title character was none other than the founder of the Jesuit order: a hero of the European Counter-Reformation, determined to evangelise what he regarded as the ignorant pagans of the Americas and Asia. The Jesuits, whose successes included being consulted by the Emperor of China himself, were in many ways a triumphalist and militant prototype for contemporary models of ideological globalisation. 

The conductor Gabriel Garrido, with whom I worked on Xerxes for ENO some years ago, and from whom I learnt a lot about the jazz-like world of the baroque, made a recording of the opera which you can watch on YouTube. I like the musical performance, and the staging is probably as "authentic" as you can be - but it is also, frankly, ludicrous, and feels almost offensive in the 21st century. We really cannot perform a straight, unquestioning glorification of cultural imperialism in the era of #BlackLivesMatter, least of all with an Indigenous person in the title role. But perhaps that Indigenous presence suggests a way in which this music can be re-created for the 21st century, revisiting the cross-cultural dialogue that was, in its own lop-sided way, at the heart of the original creation.

What if our Loyola is not a Jesuit firebrand but an Indigenous teacher? What if the people who live in ignorance are not the Native people of the Americas and Asia but the imperialists themselves and their descendants, who continue to profit from their ancestors' incursions and whose profiteering now threatens the planet itself? How, in that case, might we portray the Angels who tell Loyola to get out of his convalescent bed and become active in the world? Who might be the Demon that tempts him towards a life of ease and complacency? What legacy might he want to pass on to his chosen successor, and how might we portray that missionary figure for today? 

These questions have been the spur to making our production. 

2013

Song Ru Hi in Consumed - with Zhang Ying on video.  Photo: Richard Davenport

It's been a very remarkable year for Border Crossings.  To start with the headline figures: during 2013, we
 - attracted audiences of 7,425
   and 969 public participants
-  presented 75 performances or exhibition days
   and 127 workshops or participation sessions
-  worked with 121 artists
   and 25 venues
-  travelled to 6 countries
   to involve their artists in our work
-  toured our new piece Consumed
   and presented the third Origins Festival

Consumed was a hugely exciting project for us, bringing our devised work to a new level of sophistication, and really embracing the complexities of working across languages, using new technologies as part of the drama itself.  Working again with Song Ru Hui and Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre, we were able to deepen the collaboration and build on the trust.  The results were very remarkable.  There's a terrific TV documentary about the play in the Chinatown series by Propeller (which broadcasts to over 10 million viewers) - you can see it online at http://propellertv.co.uk/programmes/chinatown.

Origins was also an extraordinary experience, bringing together some of the most important artists in the world today.  It was a huge privilege to host Diane Benson, Victoria Hunt, Trevor Jamieson, Dalisa Pigram and Indigie-Femme in London - as well as the many other indigenous performers, artists and thinkers who gathered here for those rich and invigorating couple of weeks.  What makes the Festival really special is the way it connects international "high art" with the communities of First Nations people living here - and this year was especially exciting in that respect, with both the Samoan and indigenous Mexican communities being featured prominently.  The Day of the Dead event at Rich Mix is something we will never forget!

Origins: The Day of the Dead

It's also been the year in which our Community Engagement work really took off, with Lucy Dunkerley leading participatory projects for young people in schools and community settings across London and in China.  She also began the engagement with Muslim communities that is going to be a key part of our work in the next couple of years.  Back in June, Brian Woolland and I were in Lebanon, working on a new piece called This Flesh is Mine, which we are planning to produce in May.  It's going to be a co-production with Ashtar from Palestine, and has the potential to be a really extraordinary piece of work - bringing home the emotional experience of the contemporary Middle East and galvanising the debates we really need to have around the geopolitics of the region.

Looking back over the wider cultural experience of the year, it seems to me that the arts in general, and theatre in particular, were rather restrained, even conservative.  I know that's not a common view - and of course there's been plenty of "innovation" on show, but it's largely been of the "look at me, aren't I clever?" kind, rather than genuinely seeking out and generating new meaning and significant ideas.  It's the sort of innovation that is generated by insecurity - a competitive, rather than a sustaining approach to art.

There are exceptions, of course.  I hugely admired Sons Without Fathers at the Arcola - Helena Kaut-Howson's response to Chekhov's Platonov, which gave the play an incredibly sharp contemporary edge and banished all thoughts of this writer as wistful and bourgeois.  It was wonderful to see A Season in the Congo performed in London, especially with Chiwetel Ejiofor playing Patrice Lumumba.  Ashtar themselves made a brief visit to Rich Mix, with their piece 48 Minutes for Palestine, directed by Mojisola Adebayo.  But my theatrical highlight of the year was actually a piece I saw in Norway, performed by a Maya theatre company from Guatemala. Oxlajuj B'aqtun by Sotz'il Jay is a staggering performance, deeply rooted in Maya culture and spirituality, made in response to the death of Lisandro Guarcax González, "guide and founder of Sotz’il Jay, who was murdered on the day Oxlajuj B’atz’(Monkey 13) (25th August 2010). Because, as he said: “Nqarayij chi ronojel qasamaj nk’atzin chi nkitamab’ej nk’aj chïk winaqi' ”. We long for all our efforts to be transformed into the knowledge of the other."

This sort of communally created, culturally immersed, deeply felt and politically committed work is exactly what our culture needs at the moment, and it's something we see less and less.  More private and personal cultural forms - the novel, in particular - are very much alive and vital.  But culture in the public arena, where the theatre operates, is being drained of its lifeblood.  A theatre that is forced to justify itself in economic terms, a theatre that is reduced to simplistic pre-conceived social "SMART objectives", a theatre embarrassed by its spiritual role - this is a theatre in terminal decline.  2014 has to be about reasserting the vitality and necessity of the art form - not as something which contributes to economic growth or attracts tourism, not as a luxury which we add on once we've dealt with other needs apparently more basic, but as something which is itself basic to any healthy and dynamic society in its own right.  Survival alone will be an achievement this year - but it's also pointless if we don't survive as something truly necessary: as a space within our darkling work that offers healing and contemplation, regeneration and provocation, energy and light.

Happy New Year, everyone.

The Golden Dragon

Carissa, Zeynep and I all saw this fascinating piece at the Arcola last night. It's the first production my old university chum Ramin Gray has done in his new position at ATC - and it's characteristically inspiring stuff. The text is from a German writer called Roland Schimmelpfennig, and it looks at globalised economics and human trafficking through the microcosm of a Chinese restaurant and the various people who live in the block above it. I found the play's form really exciting - it's a storytelling piece in which the five actors play characters as far removed from their own persona as you can be - particularly in terms of age and gender. The entire cast is white - and that's been a source of some controversy - but for me it worked, precisely because there was no attempt to represent race or any other biological aspect of humanity. The actors were honest about who they were - a group of people in London right now, telling a story in a more objective, detached, but none the less affecting way. It's a different approach from our own, and every bit as valid.

Ramin asked us to join him for a drink - which turned out to be ATC's fundraising gala. He's laying lots of stress on international work with the company, as his speech / fundraising pitch made very clear. But it's not in competition with us in any way - Ramin's approach is collaborative, but it's also very clearly writer-led, and it's not cross-cultural in the way our processes are. I think we probably need to work quite carefully to define ourselves more precisely, so that people know what we do and why we are different.

Chat to Nick Williams, who used to be our ACE officer, and is now Executive Director at ATC. He fills me in on the current situation with booking tours. And I also get to chat with Maria Delgado, who is Chair of the company, and whose interests overlap with mine all over the place! I'd been reading her notes in the London Film Festival programme, and feeling annoyed that I'm going to be away for the whole of October. Maria says it's a particularly strong programme this year.