Review of '22

REMEMBRANCES
Photo: Avatâra Ayuso

As we come to the end of 2022, I feel as if we're at a watershed moment. Not only for Border Crossings, but for theatre, the arts, and the world. It's been a year lived in the shadow of an apparently receding pandemic, a murderous war in Europe, and the ever-growing threat of climate change. In the UK, it's been the warmest year on record. While the resilience displayed by many arts organisations in their comeback from Covid has been impressive, it's not an adequate response to the current moment simply to revert to "business as usual". There is no "usual" any more. That's why 2022 was the year in which we published THE SLIGO MANIFESTO: and I want to use this review of our activities to explore some of what that statement of intent has come (and is coming) to mean for us.

• This manifesto is our response to an increasingly uncertain world, characterised by pandemic, climate change and warfare. Planning has become hugely challenging, and risk is high. However, this has always been the state in our collaborative, intercultural devising spaces. We embrace uncertainty as a catalyst to creative practice.

The context, of course, is crucial, but it hasn't meant that everything is new. One key project during 2022 has been CRE-ACTORS, led by Border Crossings (Ireland) in partnership with the Théâtre du Soleil, Teatro dell'Argine and The Fence; and this represented an exploration and consolidation of a hundred years' worth of combined organisational experience in cross-cultural devised performance. The resulting e-book, which was launched in November and has already been viewed more than 10,000 times, at once documents and questions the partners' practices, enabling us all to develop the ways in which we make theatre in a changing world. We've all been delighted with the process, and are working towards further, deeper collaboration in the coming years.

CRE-ACTORS in Bologna
Photo: Jessica Bruni

• Our work - in theatre, in other art forms, in education, in community cultural development and online - is not an attempt to represent the world, but to change it.

As the year ends, we're also finishing our biggest community project yet: BOTANY BAY. Throughout the year, we've worked with five schools in London and Manchester to create beautiful new gardens, inspired by Indigenous principles of reciprocity and gratitude, complemented by Indigenous artworks and opened through performances inspired by Indigenous practices. This is not just a learning project, but an active intervention that re-configures and re-calibrates the social and environmental space which it inhabits. The way in which we work must, of course, reflect the ideals behind that work, so it's important that for the second year running we've been certified as a Carbon Neutral business.

In the BOTANY BAY booklet (printed just before Christmas, and due to be distributed in January), the Raramuri ethnobotanist Enrique Salmon says: "We are so inundated constantly through social media, television, movies, with one idea after the other that we don’t have time to stop. We don’t have time to sit with a chilli plant, or with a tomato plant or underneath an elm tree or a pine. Of just being with the tree or the plant. Of breathing and just being." 

BOTANY BAY: Kawa Huni Kuin with the Tree of Life at Cavendish School  
Photo: John Cobb

• Our predominantly white artistic leadership and management team will engage honestly and self-critically in evolving, creative, intercultural dialogues with marginalised artists, communities and stories.

BOTANY BAY was part of the 2021-22 ORIGINS Festival, which saw a further full year of participatory and dialogic work, bringing Indigenous ideas and practices into our communities. More than ever, we've been made critically aware of our own position as a non-Indigenous organisation, led mainly by white artists. In the last project of the Festival, SONGSTREETS, we brought together an Indigenous Australian musician, Jessie Lloyd, with the black community of Brixton, so as to generate a musical, cultural and historical exchange. The resulting installation will be released in January, and promises to be extraordinary.  

Recording SONGSTREETS

• We reject the commercial model of theatre as “production”. For us, theatre is a participatory process, all aspects of which need to engage with the communities we serve. Performance is a public ritual, a ceremony that brings our communities together.

We've been thinking a lot about performance as ceremony this year, because humanity is so much in need of renewal, and there are so few spaces and systems within which this can occur. It was very important for us to receive a commission from Birmingham 2022 to create REMEMBRANCES as an alternative welcoming ceremony for the Commonwealth Games. Collaborating with AVA Dance Company, b.solomon//ELECTRIC MOOSE and Matthew James Weigel, we were able to create a performance that asked the crucial questions around post-colonial relationships, and offered genuine potential for healing.

REMEMBRANCES
Photo: Avatâra Ayuso

• Our work going forward will therefore focus on “events” rather than “productions”; channelling energies towards generating real impact in terms of social and environmental justice, cultural and spiritual renewal.

I don't know if this distinction between "productions" and "events" is clear or even necessary for a wider public, but it's crucial for us, because it's about what our work is doing in the world. It asks whether it is there for our own satisfaction and profit, or to make a real difference. In the beautiful ceremonies that opened the BOTANY BAY gardens, in the sharing of space around a fire that ended REMEMBRANCES, in the deeply spiritual music we presented at the British Museum for our joint event CELEBRATING PERU, and in the potent exchanges around CRE-ACTORS, we felt this shift occur. As I wrote in the CRE-ACTORS e-book: "To conceive of a theatre that is multiform and various, a shared space that yields innovation through the clash of distinct viewpoints and approaches, rooted in ongoing dialogues between artists from different backgrounds, and informed by potent overlaps between friendship and disagreement: this is to propose not only a theatrical and artistic but also a cultural and democratic vision. It is about space that is profoundly shared, whether that be the stage, the auditorium, the street or the parliament house. It is about equity and justice."

CELEBRATING PERU
Photo: Benedict Johnson © The British Museum

• We now work through two charitable companies, one in the Republic of Ireland and one in the UK: both dedicated to intercultural dialogue through the arts. In furtherance of this international mission, we will engage more substantially with European partnerships and develop a range of key funding relationships, including core funding.

The development of Border Crossings (Ireland) has been a major theme during 2022, both through CRE-ACTORS and a second Erasmus + project on which we are partners: X-EUROPEAN. This project, exploring the Third Space as a way to generate positive cross-cultural interaction, has taken us to Germany and Finland, and culminated in an invigorating theatre workshop which Lucy Dunkerley and I led at the Glencree Centre for Peace and Reconciliation in Wicklow a few weeks ago. 

Our relationships with funders are, of course, crucial: we've been fortunate this year to benefit from working with the Erasmus + programme of the European Union, Arts Council England, the National Lottery Heritage Fund, the UK-Australia Season, the High Commission of Canada in the UK, and Beyond the Spectacle.  

X-EUROPEAN
Photo: Aydin Cam

• We will deepen the relationship between our live and digital work, recognising the complementary nature of live and virtual experiences, and the different ways in which these inter-related approaches can generate reach and impact. We believe that any art form is regenerated and developed by its interaction with other forms, and so we will enhance our theatre through digital practice and our digital work through our theatre.

2022 began with the release of our film about the 2021 journey of TOTEM LATAMAT: and an enhanced digital presence has characterised our work throughout the year.  REMEMBRANCES had a streamed as well as a live version, which meant that it could be seen far more widely, including by First Nations communities in Canada and beyond. SONGSTREETS will be realised as an app. The plaque which we commissioned for DOVER BEACH by Wiradjuri-British artist Jasmine Coe was hugely enhanced by the accompanying film. Similarly, BOTANY BAY included a wide range of digital learning materials, particularly a series of short films, each of which concentrated on a specific aspect of the project as it developed through the seasons. The SPRING film, presented by Karuk actor Nathan Woodworth, has proved a great success with his tribe, and has also become part of the permanent display at the American Museum in Bath. Our online presence has also enabled us to partner with like-minded international organisations in innovative ways, for example the digital partnership between ORIGINS and Canada's imagineNATIVE Festival, which brought this film festival's online programme to UK audiences. CRE-ACTORS, which could have been a very inward-looking project, benefiting the partners only, has become known to the global theatre community through the e-book. This digital emphasis has also meant that our marketing and communications are no longer just a means to "sell" our work, but have become an integral part of it - a much healthier approach, which we've recognised structurally by bringing Emma Townsend, who had proved herself indispensable on ORIGINS, into the core team. 

TOTEM LATAMAT
Photo: John Cobb

• We will be more risk aware in our financial management, more conscious of the evolution of projects through their processes, and more sensitive to the need to keep cultural work free of charge or very affordable. We will therefore ensure that contingencies form a larger element in our budgeting.

This sounds like the most mundane clause in the Manifesto, but in a way I think it's the most significant of all. Since the start of the pandemic, we have not sold a single ticket.  And I can't say I've missed it. I'm not saying that everything we do in the future will always be free: theatre remains an industry as well as an art form and sometimes it will be necessary to work with a venue that necessitates a paid Box Office.  What I am saying is that commercial and financial considerations of this kind can no longer be allowed to determine the value of artistic work. I recently wrote on this blog about the way in which an MBA-style approach to running arts organisations has fatally undermined the sector: and for us it's a key lesson of the current moment that we have to put our artistic priorities and their cultural significance before the administrative structures which support them.

The year has been rich.  In the deepest sense of the term.  And I am far from certain what happens next.... Let's embrace that. 

Wishing you all the best for 2023.

Pathways through the Festival 1: History and Representation

The New World

As ORIGINS 2017 approaches, and people are getting keen to book their tickets, we thought it might be useful to outline a few possible Pathways Through the Festival - giving you the chance to work out what events sit together well by theme or "feel".  Our First Pathway is about History and Representation.

At the heart of these ideas sits the contested figure of Pocahontas.  2017 is the 400th anniversary of her time in England and untimely death at Gravesend, aged only 21.  Celebrations can be complex: and this anniversary hasn't been without its controversy. Writing in Indian Country Today, Lisa J. Ellwood attacks the way in which the commemorations have seemed to appropriate Pocahontas (or Matoaka, as she was properly known) as a "Great and Powerful English Feminist".  Ellwood cites the alternative oral traditions of the Powhatan, which we also explored in our HIDDEN HISTORIES film.  According to this tradition, Pocahontas was abducted, raped and eventually murdered: a very different tale.   [You can see HIDDEN HISTORIES as part of our REMEMBERING POCAHONTAS event at Syon House on June 15, or in a pre-festival screening at Bernie Grant Arts Centre in Tottenham on May 27]  Our friend Graham Harvey (part of our TALKS programme) wrote a blog piece on the commemoration at Gravesend, which also problematises it in the light of colonial histories and post-colonial tensions.  As a Festival celebrating indigenous culture, ORIGINS can't enter this territory without an overt awareness of its being contested space.  So our REMEMBERING POCAHONTAS night will be a Native American ritual, not a Christian one, at a site where she lived, not where she died.  It will involve contemporary Native American women who have travelled to England locating their own stories in relation to hers - or what hers might have been.  And the film we are screening about her, THE NEW WORLD, is an attempt to move beyond contested histories and into the realm of the mythological - the imaginative space where the real potential for healing can be found.

Observance by Julie Gough 

You might want to compare THE NEW WORLD with Julie Gough's THE LOST WORLD.  Julie's art constantly questions the way in which Aboriginal lands and artefacts are owned or represented by the dominant culture.  Like many of the voices in ORIGINS, hers is raised to debate the continuing dispossession of indigenous peoples, not only from their lands but also from their histories.  The same issues are tackled in very different ways in the theatre piece THE 7 STAGES OF GRIEVING, in which Wesley Enoch and Deborah Mailman trace the indigenous Australian experience from first contact to the present day.  It's a great example of theatre and performance re-claiming history for the people on the receiving end of its more malign forces, superbly performed by the young Thitharr Warra woman Chenoa Deemal.  It's director, Jason Klarwein writes: "The language you hear in our version of this play is Chenoa’s language. The design elements of the show are based on the rainbow coloured sands of Elim Beach where Chenoa grew up, the artworks of the people there, and the tropical rainforests of Far North Queensland. We have taken the structure of this marvellously robust work and given it our experience. Our childhood and our pain. As well as the pain of generations of displaced First Peoples."

Tanya Tagaq

The question of History - who owns it, who controls it, who has the right to claim it - is perhaps most powerfully addressed by working with Museums.  ORIGINS first worked with the British Museum in 2015, and this year we're returning there, complementing their exhibition WHERE THE THUNDERBIRD LIVES with a screening of the extraordinary 1914 archive film IN THE LAND OF THE HEADHUNTERS, which opens the Festival on June 10.  A second archive film, NANOOK OF THE NORTH, marks our Closing Night at the National Maritime Museum on June 25 - but this time the film is gloriously re-appropriated by the culture on which it casts its colonial gaze.  The great Inuk throat singer Tanya Tagaq improvises a live soundtrack to the film - embodying its representation
of the Arctic landscape and undercutting its construction of the Inuit as primitive "Others".  In many ways, this performance is an answer to the colonial writings of history that have continually dogged indigenous peoples - an issue also presented at our other NMM screening, PASSAGE, which sees the slandering of the Inuit by Victorian moralists like Charles Dickens, and the beginnings of reconciliation in the present day.  That whole history of mis-representation, leading to self-representation on film is traced in the wonderful (and very funny) documentary REEL INJUN, and countered by the re-invention of indigenous language itself in Christian Thompson's video installation BERCEUSE.

Spirit of the Ancestors

Talking about Museums and indigenous peoples often leads to the discussion of re-patriation.  It's a complex issue, but one which has to be dealt with.  TE KUHANE O TE TUPUNA (The Spirit of the Ancestors), which screens at Arthouse Crouch End on June 14, does just that.  It's a film from Rapa Nui, or Easter Island, about the search for the the lost Moai Hoa Haka Nanaia, a statue of significant cultural importance.  That statue currently sits in pride of place in the British Museum.

2015

The Voladores at the Origins Festival.  Photo: John Cobb.

The year that has just ended was in many ways a very depressing one for anybody involved in intercultural dialogue and progressive politics.  The institutionalised terror of Daesh, particularly as made manifest in the Paris attacks, underlined the total failure of the West to build bridges with the Islamic world.  The response has been simply to escalate the cycle of revenge and confrontation: anyone who seeks to understand why these things are happening is castigated as somehow sympathetic to mass murder.  At the same time, we are witnessing an ever-growing humanitarian crisis, and the British (and European) inability to respond in any but the most narrow-minded and divisive terms is pitiful to behold.  Nicholas Winton, who died in 2015, showed how a civilised society should respond to the spectacle of desperate people fleeing from persecution and death.

The other great crisis, Climate Change, was the subject of yet more self-interest and short-sightedness on the part of the governments of "developed" countries, in the Paris trade agreement that they claimed was an Environmental treaty.  In spite of a huge presence and intense lobbying by indigenous peoples, the voices of cultures with real environmental understanding were entirely ignored, passed over in the interests of capital.  Humanity's failings this year leave me wondering how many more years there will actually be.

And yet, during our work this year, I have time and again felt a renewed optimism and a sense of change in the air.  The Origins Festival during the summer was the largest gathering of indigenous peoples in London ever, with truly extraordinary work on show, and a real feeling that the time had come for these formerly oppressed cultures to reassert themselves in the global space.  The festival embedded itself into the city more deeply than ever before, with entire schools coming off timetable to take part, the British Museum being shaken by the ancient rhythms of Torres Strait dance, and open spaces being regenerated through the healing rituals of the Voladores de Papantla.  The Festival also included the two most important pieces of theatre I saw this year - hopefully I can say that without sounding too arrogant, as we didn't make them ourselves, but curated them!  Oxlajuj B’aqtun, by the Guatemalan Maya company Grupo Sotz'il, was actually about the change in the Mayan calendar, and their sense that a new period of history is slowing coming about, one that will see a more environmentally aware, just, and egalitarian society.  Beautiful One Day, by Australia's Ilbijerri,  placed current cross-cultural tensions into a longer historical perspective, and offered the long view of the Elders as a way of looking not backwards, but into the future.

That same spirit has been informing our Heritage work over the last few months, with the development of our Oral History archive around the indigenous presence in London.  2016 will see our first documentary film, on this same subject.  It's an exciting development in our work that we are collaborating so much with Museums and historians - many of our projects in development are about reclaiming forgotten histories and so re-imagining potential futures.  It's an approach close to the heart of everyone at Border Crossings, including our Patron Peter Sellars, whose talk at Rich Mix was a highlight early in the year.

2015 also saw us developing a new play with Brian Woolland - a sequel to This Flesh is Mine, which had a rehearsed reading at Salisbury Playhouse in the autumn.  Entitled When Nobody Returns, this play will be the Odyssey that follows our Iliad.  After the war, there come the stories of returning soldiers, of displaced people, of broken relationships, of lands occupied and peoples dispossessed.   Our plan is to work with our partners at ASHTAR Theatre in Palestine to present the two plays in rep during 2016 - so look out for an inspiring and important response to all that is happening in, and emanating from the Middle East.

2016 is also Border Crossings' 21st birthday - and there are some very exciting celebrations being planned.  Like all times of trouble - this change of year is also a time of hope.

Happy New Year.

A Pathway through the Origins Festival. 1. Elders and Youth

Zugubal Dancers

The programme for the Origins Festival is vast - our biggest yet by far - so it can be quite a challenge to find your way around it.  To help out, we've traced three Pathways through the Festival, following the key themes that we used in programming, which we will publish over the coming days.  The three  themes are:

• Elders and Youth
• Politics and Protest
• Food and Ecology

So today, we start with the Pathway -

Elders and Youth

The Zugubal Dancers almost embody this theme in the make-up of their group: eight young dancers, and two Elders who are travelling with them from the Torres Strait Islands.  Indigenous Australians have a great reverence for Elders, and these two are coming to provide stability and guidance for a group travelling far from their home 'country'.  You can see them performing at the Origins Concert and Indigenous Australia Late - Origins Festival at the British Museum.

The host for that night at the British Museum is another Australian Elder, Francis Firebrace, who will give you a taste of the traditional Elder's welcome.  If you want to hear more of the wisdom Francis has accumulated in his 80 years, then come to his storytelling event at Rich Mix, where he will be yarning for children and adults alike.

Museums are, of course, all about the relationships between generations, and we are really excited to be working so closely with the British Museum.  To find out more about the dialogues going on between museum curators and indigenous communities, come to the panel debate at Rich Mix, where there will be a wide range of differing opinions to be heard!

Staying with Australia, the Festival is really excited to be presenting all three of Rolf de Heer's films with the great veteran Aboriginal actor David Gulpilil.  The most recent, Charlie's Country, is the story of an Elder who finds it impossible to live in the contemporary world.  With strong elements of autobiography, Gulpilil charts a process of dislocation, and shows the possibility of redemption in Charlie's contact with the young.

Hamaca Paraguaya

A very different film, Hamaca Paraguaya also looks at the world through the eyes of the Elders: in this case an ageing Guarani couple, whose son has gone off to the Chaco War.  Originally commissioned by our Patron Peter Sellars, the film is an extraordinary meditation on time, mourning, and old age.

Our other Latin American film is El Regreso  from Venezuela - a film that concentrates not on Elders but on Youth.  The protagonist is Shliwala, a ten year old Wayuu girl, who survives the massacre in her village only to be faced with the alien world of the contemporary city.  The child actors are quite incredible.

Oxlajuj B’aqtun

Staying with Latin America, your Elders and Youth Pathway leads to our special outdoor event at Horniman's Pleasance, and especially to the inspired Mayan theatre company Grupo Sotz'il.  Their ritualised play Oxlajuj B’aqtun was made in response to their founder's assassination and the great change in the Mayan calendar, and so embodies a shift between generations and eras.

Finally, let your Pathway wind back to the Torres Strait, and Ilbijerri Theatre Company's Beautiful One Day at the Southbank.  A play which unites theatre professionals with the Elders and Youth of Palm Island, Beautiful One Day is full of a love for country and community, as well as an anger at their destruction.  The calm presence of Auntie Maggie Blackley at the centre of the performance is a reflection of the truly integrated nature of indigenous cultures: especially as the company will also be travelling with a very young baby.  The next generation of Palm Islanders will be here to direct your eyes forward beyond this Pathway.

Alanis Obomsawin

I spent most of yesterday in the company of Alanis, who is probably our most distinguished guest at Origins. I picked her up from her hotel at 12, and we went together to the very plush residence of Canada's Deputy High Commissioner, for a lunch to celebrate the 70th birthday of the National Film Board. Tom Perlmutter, the head of the NFB, was there with his wife - and there were other filmmakers and Festival directors, plus Simon from Canada House. In the thick of all the Festival mayhem, it was very nice to pause for a couple of hours and lap up some praise for what we've done!

I squeezed in an afternoon at the office before the screening of Alanis's film Kanehsatake at the British Museum. This is THE film I've wanted to show at the Festival, ever since I first saw it in Montreal in September. Fantastic to be able to do it with Alanis present. Or rather, present for the beginning and the end.... during the screening she whizzed off to Canada House in a taxi to yet another drinks reception, and then whizzed back again to us to do a Q&A with her usual incisiveness.

After that, she took us all for a drink, and was still partying away when I left at 10.30. I find it hard to believe that this woman is 76....

Alanis is giving The Origins Lecture at Riverside Studios tonight at 6.30. Promises to be amazing.