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.

Paris, Syria, and Ai Wewei

I have only provocations.  I have no answers.

Last night I was at a diplomatic party - and I met Hilary Benn.  I hadn't really expected to run up against the man who, less than 24 hours before, had won applause in the House of Commons for disagreeing with his party leader and voting to bomb Syria.  It seemed more than a little odd, given what he had said only two weeks before.  Click here and marvel.

The air strikes on Syria are a response of sorts to the killings in Paris, but they are a knee-jerk response.  Like everything David Cameron says or does, the decision to go to war was an unconsidered reaction to a short-term news agenda, playing for what he regards as immediate popularity, rather than looking towards any longer-term plan or future possibility.  I recognise, of course, that we must do something - but an intensification of the conflict Daesh desires is not it.  We are casting ourselves in exactly the Western crusader role they have given us in their apocalyptic narrative. The best analysis I have read of the ISIS / Daesh movement is by Graeme Wood, writing in The Atlantic.  If this article makes one thing clear, it is that the escalation of conflict is exactly what they desire.

So the current response is not only inadequate - it is dangerous.  And this begs the question -  if not by bombing, how should we respond?

On one level, as Diane Abbott and Caroline Lucas articulated very clearly on last night's Question Time, there are diplomatic and economic measures that can be taken.  We could start by stopping arms sales to Saudi Arabia.  You can watch the debate and consider for yourself...

For me, as an artist, the question of response is not so directly political - though of course I recognise that the directly political is central.  The contribution of artists is in the cultural arena, and is to do with interventions in public space that shift the quality of thought.  Cultural activity changes the emotional temperature, the atmosphere.  It allows certain things to become thinkable, and certain things to become unthinkable.  At the moment, the unthinkable is becoming policy - and so the need for cultural response is very real.

I'm not saying that art can "Stop the War".  I'm certainly not saying it can stop Daesh.  What I am saying is that a mature society responds to events on a variety of levels, and that the response of artists is often the most profound - the response that can help others think through matters on a more practical level.  In pre-colonial Ghana, the role of the seprewa player was to provide music in the chief's hut, as a way of enabling him to think through what to do.  In Ancient Greece, the Athenian populace watched the plays of Euripides as preparation for jury service and the legislative process.

So - what music, what theatre do we make at this moment?  How do we counter destruction with creativity?  How can we re-member what was blown apart?  How can we find any sort of beauty to set against the violence?

The day before the Paris massacre, I went to see the Ai Weiwei exhibition at the Royal Academy.  A great deal of this show seems to me to be grappling with precisely the questions that Paris has thrown at us.  His subjects are almost always to do with meaningless oppression, destruction and death.  He makes art from his own imprisonment, from the vandalistic inheritance of the Cultural Revolution, from the bones of Mao's nameless victims.  Most strikingly of all, he memorialises the children who died in the Szechuan earthquake.

Straight is an overwhelming artwork, particularly as shown at the RA, where it is framed by the collected and catalogued names of the children, placed on the walls like a war memorial.  The 150 tons of steel bars that constitute the artwork are taken from the wreckage of the schools where the children died.  The buildings collapsed because these bars buckled so easily - Ai's video in the same room explains the engineering failures, and the huge challenges of gathering the names, finding out what he could about the children, straightening the bent metal.  But it has been straightened, and lies in the RA as a testament to an intense and difficult dedication.  The bars have to be straightened, the artwork says, because their not being straight is the reason 5,000 children died.  To straighten them is a memorial, an act of reparation, a political gesture.

If we can begin to inject something of this depth and emotional intensity into our own cultural space, if we can begin truly to memorialise our lost youth, then perhaps we can begin to move beyond the current simplistic 'eye for an eye', revenge-driven militarism.  Perhaps we can begin to think, and feel, a little differently. We desperately need to.