Pathways Through the Festival 3: Environment

Are We Stronger Than Winston?

"Where is the Environment?" asked Caroline Lucas yesterday.  She's quite right to challenge the major parties - neither of whom have said anything about this most crucial of issues during the current election campaign.  Across the Atlantic, it now seems that Donald Trump aims to withdraw from the Paris deal on climate change.  It's a scary moment, and no mistake.

This is the time when, more than ever, we need to be listening to the voices of indigenous people, who experience climate change at the front line on a daily basis.  Not only do they feel its effects particularly acutely - they also have long cultural traditions of living in close harmony with nature.  In indigenous cultures, you do not own the land but care for it - passing it on as a healthy inheritance to the future.  Now, more than ever, we need to be engaging with indigenous people as we try to find a way forward in our relationship with a damaged planet.

Reports from Standing Rock

ORIGINS 2017 has a range of inspiring and provocative events about indigenous ideas on the environment, beginning with REPORTS FROM STANDING ROCK on June 11 - a series of short films that show the realities of the protest and explore the depth of the Native American activists' passion to save their land and waters.  Trump's refusal to engage with indigenous protestors may yet prove to be his political undoing - his failure to engage with environmental issues is certainly very dangerous for us all.

Are We Stronger than Winston?

Just how dangerous is shown in ARE WE STRONGER THAN WINSTON? by VOU Dance Company from Fiji, performing at The Place on June 23 and 24.  Winston was the cyclone that hit Fiji in February 2016: the worst recorded tropical storm in the history of the South Pacific, killing 42 people and causing tens of thousands to flee their homes. In the words of the choreographer, Navitalai Waqavotuwale: "Soon the house that once sheltered us, now threatened our very lives as it collapsed in shreds around us. Soon the ocean that once fed us came pounding at our doors demanding our breath. Soon the wind that once rippled through our children's hair and carried their voices homeward, snatched them from our very arms and hauled them beyond the horizon where their voices were heard no more. And soon, mothers were burying their children, and children were burying their mothers."

Melissa Veszi as Poluknalai

A lighter but equally important take on climate change in the Pacific is offered in  Sani Muliaumaseali'i’s new musical for family audiences, BABA THE BAD BABOON.  In this version of a Polynesian folk tale, Baba is an experienced leader who assures the goddess Poluknalai, the supreme protector of animals and nature, that all will be well under his watch - leading to a dire loss of animals and ecology.

Angry Inuk

It's in the Arctic that the effects of climate change are probably most glaringly obvious, as the ice melts at astonishing speed.  Alethea Arnaquq-Baril's remarkable film ANGRY INUK, which has been winning audience awards at film festivals across the planet, is powered by fury at the world's failure to engage with the people who actually live in the Arctic - the Inuit themselves.  Their environmentally sustainable approach to seal hunting - using every part of a non-endangered species for food and clothing, and to give them traction in the global marketplace - is set in sharp contrast with the insanely wasteful approach of western interests in the Artic region.

Tanya Tagaq

So it seems only fitting that the last voice you will hear at ORIGINS this year is an Inuk voice - TANYA TAGAQ.  More than a traditional throat singer, Tanya seems to embody and to vocalise the Arctic landscape itself.  Her extraordinary improvised soundtrack to the silent "documentary" NANOOK OF THE NORTH is a staggering evocation of the beautiful and bare lands that sustain the planet - and that we are all too close to destroying.

The Roman Tragedies - The Illusion of Participation

The Roman Tragedies

This photo is unusual for a theatre blog - I took it myself.  In Ivo van Hove's production of The Roman Tragedies, many of the rules about theatre and spectatorship seem to be thrown out of the window.  You can take photos.  You can tweet about the show as it unfolds through its six-hour span, and the tweets are flashed across the stage during set changes.  You can move between seats, and onto the stage, where you sit in close proximity to the actors.  You watch the performance both live (at various distances) and on live filmed relays, both on the large screen above the stage and on the many TV monitors around the space (including, if you like, in the foyers).  Given that the Shakespeare text is spoken in a contemporary, prosaic Dutch, an eye on the screen is essential as that's also where the subtitles are.  In one of the most thrilling scenes, Hans Kesting  as Mark Antony delivered his eulogy to Caesar very close to me, and once or twice locked eyes with me (the spectator as crowd member) - but I also had to keep looking away from him to the broadcast version, so as to check what he was actually saying (the spectator as receiver of the mediated).  You can buy food and drink on stage, and eat it during the show.  You can check out the make-up area, where the performers are prepared to go on camera.  There's an info desk about the company's work, from where the set changes are announced, complete with musak.

The Roman Tragedies - the onstage make-up area.

It could all be incredibly gimmicky, I suppose - and it is certainly fun - but it seems to me that this is much more than an experiment with audience participation.  And that the participation is not actually participatory at all.  I saw the production when it first came to the Barbican in 2009, and then I wrote that "there's an element of real democracy about the whole thing. It raises endless questions about theatre and politics - not least whether politics might be turning into nothing but performance."   Reading that blog today, it feels like a memory of a more innocent time, as well as recognising the production as prophetic.  In its current manifestation, the production opens with the Trump inauguration being broadcast on TV, while Volumnia and Virgilia discuss the absent Martius, their private conversation also being broadcast.  There seems to be no boundary between the public and the private.

The Roman Tragedies - spectators and TVs

On one level, this reflects our current "politics as show-biz" - the desire to feel intimate with public figures, to be aware of their private lives, to have them live out those lives as a public display (Antony and Cleopatra is particularly strong in this way).  On another level, it suggests the privatisation of public space - the way in which reckless magnates like Trump, Farage and (the most immediate example) George Osborne have come to treat politics as just another part of their self-aggrandising, self-enriching projects.  And this is crucial to the way the performance works - or, at least, it felt so in the charged atmosphere of 2017, far more so than it had in 2009.  Because the apparent agency this production gives to the audience is not agency at all: we remain as passive recipients of the play.  If, as I said in 2009, the production is "democratic" (and at heart I believe theatre to be a fundamentally democratic form), then it is through the exposure of what is so profoundly undemocratic in the current moment.  We have ceased to be participants, and become mere consumers.

Van Hove cuts all the scenes where Shakespeare has the common people speak.  The actors address the audience as "Friends, Romans, countrymen" - partly live but more tellingly through the medium of broadcast.  We feel as if we could be part of the story, as if our role contains the potential for action - but in fact we spectate.  The performance provides us with basic needs - we can work out when to take a loo break and the food is pretty good.  But we retain our role as spectators even as we are offered the illusion of participation.  For the last section of the performance, we are ordered back to our original seats, facing the conventional proscenium stage in a conventional hierarchical relationship - and of course, we unquestioningly obey.  Even the final ovation, leaping to our feet as one, is somehow disturbing in this most uneasy of performances.

In June 2016, the people of Britain responded to a marketing campaign based on lies, misinformation and the manipulation of prejudice, conveyed through broadcast and social media.  This led to the shocking referendum result, which has since been exploited as an expression of "the will of the people" to chilling effect - the Brexit process is being rushed through without consultation or democratic process.  Trump's antics are only an Americanised manifestation of the same basic thing.  Last week I was grateful to the Dutch for an election that stemmed the tide of populism, and for a piece of theatre that clarified just what is going on.

2016

When Nobody Returns - Andrew French as Odysseus with Bayan Shbib as Calypso

Well - that was quite a year.  And I don't mean because lots of celebrities died.  Actually, I suspect that from now on, lots of celebrities will die every year - popular culture in its current form dates from the 60s and 70s, so, as the Americans say, do the math.  But perhaps that does make this a suitable moment to question the huge amounts of emotional energy that are now devoted to such people - famous for looks, quirky soundbites and private lives led all too publicly.  As George Monbiot argued recently, the Trump election is the logical outcome of this.  And it's making 2017 look daunting to say the least.

2016 was also, of course, the year of the referendum.  It was NOT the year of Brexit - the actual leaving of the EU - which may still be some way off...  Here's hoping.  Even so, it's already proving impossible to attract European partners to work with UK-based organisations on intercultural projects, either in the arts or in education.  This is going to make the future challenging for us at Border Crossings, where international collaboration is central to our mission, and where the structures of the EU have been hugely beneficial.  For the time being, we are continuing to run our intercultural theatre courses, which have to date had a European emphasis - but in future we'll be looking to engage more participants from the UK and the wider world.  This summer's course actually started on June 24th - the very day the referendum result was announced.  It felt difficult, to say the least, to welcome our European guests to London.

One of the key strands of our work during the year has been to address the European question of the refugee crisis.  Lucy has been working very directly with a number of refugee groups throughout the year, particularly unaccompanied minors and women - while I've been speaking about the role of culture in addressing the crisis at events in Karlsrühe, Stockholm and Brussels, including a significant contribution to the EU's Voices of Culture report on the question.  People often accuse the EU of being undemocratic - but I've never encountered genuine consultation and dialogue like this at a national level.  So we also have to re-think how Border Crossings can continue to have an active political voice in the aftermath of Brexit - it's really crucial that we maintain this in some way, as the interplay between theatre and policy is surely key to what we are about.  Sabine Frank, the former Secretary-General of the Platform for Intercultural Europe, says as much in our 21st birthday publication, 21 FACES OF BORDER CROSSINGS.

While we were working with refugees and talking about the relationship between culture and refugees, we were also making theatre that explored the contemporary Middle East and the aftermath of war.  Brian Woolland's new play WHEN NOBODY RETURNS was a sequel to THIS FLESH IS MINE, and we presented them together as a season with our Palestinian co-producer ASHTAR and our old friends at CSSD.  The plays were accompanied by Palestinian food, a series of talks on related themes, a Middle Eastern poetry event, and a reading of a new play by Tariq Jordan.  The whole programme has a coherence, and, as the lady from the Arts Council said to me on the phone just before Christmas - "This is exactly the sort of work we need after the year we've just had".

2016 was also the year we made our first documentary film:  HIDDEN HISTORIES: DISCOVERING INDIGENOUS LONDON had several acclaimed screenings, particularly one at the Houses of Parliament.  We were, of course, thrilled when the narrator, Mark Rylance, was knighted in the New Year's Honours List!  And if all that wasn't enough - we also rebranded the organisation to mark its 21st birthday, with a lovely new design by Kind Studio and a beautiful new website from Future Design.  We also launched the 21 Club for our major donors - please do consider becoming a part of this: with the cuts to arts funding and the loss of European sources, we are going to be ever more reliant on our donors to support this crucial work.

At the end of the year, I usually write a bit about other cultural productions and events that have particularly excited me.  It's very striking that almost all the great theatre I've seen has been in some sense intercultural or from overseas: we SO need to keep our links with the world if we are going to be a dynamic and energised society...   2016 was the year of Peter Brook's Battlefield and Robert Lepage's renewed Needles and Opium, of Lola Arias' Minefield and Lies Pauwels' extraordinary The Hamilton Complex- all of them international productions in London.  It was also the year of the Young Vic's Yerma - adapted and directed by Australian Simon Stone - and the remarkable Thebes Land from our friends CASA at the Arcola - a play from Uruguay.  Even the finest homegrown work - Simon McBurney's The Encounter and Katie Mitchell's stunning version of Sarah Kane's Cleansed - were international in outlook and European in style and sensibility: these are two British directors who work across the continent.  And it shows.

I'm writing this on the day our Ambassador to the EU tendered his resignation.  There's a rocky ride ahead - but Happy New Year, everybody.

Destroying the bridge

The Bridge at Mostar - after destruction

I have been reading my friend David Wilson’s autobiographical book Left Field.  For some years David, who founded the charity War Child, was Director of the Pavarotti Music Centre in Mostar – and a significant portion of the book revolves around his extraordinary work in the war-torn city.  During the conflict, the ancient bridge at Mostar became a symbol of all that went wrong – it had been built by the Ottoman Turks, and was destroyed by Croat forces. Andras Riedlmayer has termed the destruction an act of "killing memory", in which evidence of a shared cultural heritage and peaceful co-existence were deliberately destroyed.

It’s a timely moment to recall the terror that resulted from the break-up of the Yugoslavian Federation in the 1990s.  Massacres, ethnic cleansing, a land laid waste, a refugee crisis that gave a foretaste of today’s. Neighbour turning on neighbour and friend on friend because of perceived differences in ethnicity, religion or culture.  No-one would call Tito’s Yugoslavia an ideal polity – but the nationalist mayhem that resulted from its dissolution showed humanity at its worst. Refugees from that time tell us that things started to go wrong when people began to say “Let’s segregate all the Muslims”.  Right here - in modern Europe. 

I am, of course, offering all this as a warning against June 23^rd.  If, as now appears very possible, Britain votes to leave the EU, that will signal the triumph of a dangerous fiction, called the nation state, over the undeniable truth of common humanity.  Britain’s retreat into splendid isolation would almost certainly spell the end of the European project: Marine Le Pen would demand a copycat referendum in France, and all across the continent the forces of the radical right, already roused in their paranoid, xenophobic response to the refugee crisis, would continue to assert “national” identities and to close their borders against perceived “outsiders” – desperate people who have already fled violence, persecution and the devastation of their lands.   I don’t believe Donald Tusk was exaggerating when he said that this thing called Brexit could lead in time to the collapse of Western civilization. 

Much of the rhetoric of the Leave campaign has been about how “we” need to assert control over “our” borders.  Setting aside the fact that recent visits to airports and stations suggest the UK borders are now more tightly controlled than they have ever been – allow me to pose a more basic question here.  Who are “we”?  Just what group of people is it that is supposed to be asserting some fundamental right to deny others access to a particular territory and the cultural and social life that takes place within it?  Just what is the identity that the curb on immigration is supposed to protect?  What is the Britishness that will somehow be rejuvenated by the abandonment of Europe, the retreat into splendid isolation?

Isolationist positions tend to be the prerogative of imperial nations.  Spain was a closed society from the time of Philip II onwards, even though it also ruled vast swathes of the globe.  China didn’t just become an isolated state under Mao Zedong – it had another five centuries of it prior to that.  Today, an isolationist stance is also key to Donald Trump’s idea of foreign policy: build a wall at your border, ban all Muslims, and make America great again.  Of course, such isolation only goes in one direction – imperial powers isolate their “homelands” from immigrants and foreign influences, at the same time as they regard other territories as theirs to plunder for natural resources, cheap labour, and holidays in the sun.  Perhaps this is why Boris Johnson and his coterie are so fond of evoking the spirits of Churchill and Thatcher: what they are in fact attempting to do is to place themselves in Britain’s imperialist tradition. Perhaps this is also why, astonishingly, so many Black and Asian Britons, the descendants of immigrants, appear to be flirting with a Leave vote: in a Fanonian style, they have taken on the perceived identity of what was once the imperial ruler of their ancestral homelands.  They don’t seem to have noticed that the age of Empire is long over. 

Or is it?  There are, after all, territories within the United Kingdom that retain their links to Westminster because of the imperial project.  There’s been much speculation about the direction Scotland might take in the event of a Leave vote: if Scotland votes overwhelmingly Remain and England votes Leave, that will be yet further proof that these are now two distinct countries.  But the bigger question is probably Northern Ireland.  For some time now, the uneasy peace of the province has been secured by an easing of the border with the Republic – a “United Kingdom” outside the EU would not be able to sustain this.  I remember very clearly John Hume, the great, unsung architect of the current peace process, comparing his vision for the future of the whole island of Ireland to the European model: a space in which it was still perfectly possible for the French still to be French and the Germans German – but impossible for them to be at war.  He was emphatically right: no state of war has every existed between EU members.  Brexit is a sure-fire way to overturn the comparative stability that has been achieved in the Irish question.  Who are “we” – defending our “Britishness” – if the result of “our” action is to set in motion a violent conflict on what is still legally “our” territory?

It could be like Bosnia.  It really could.

I write this at the end of two intense, stimulating and energising days in Brussels, where I have been part of the EU’s Structured Dialogue process around the role of Culture in the Refugee Crisis.  People who have read this blog in the past may recall that Border Crossings has also worked on EU policy before, as part of the Platform for Intercultural Europe.  The EU is often accused of being undemocratic – but never in Britain have I encountered processes of consultation like these.  In Britain, policy is made on the hoof to suit the needs of the next sound-bite.  And this has to stop.  It is turning our democracy into an idiot’s circus.  The referendum itself was a knee-jerk response to a few electoral successes for UKIP – and what a sorry mess it has turned our to be. 

The EU is not perfect – of course it isn’t.  I have, in my time, sat in a Brussels office with a German accountant attempting to make sense of invoices in Chinese, as a result of onerous accounting processes around EU funding.  But Britain seems to have decided that how well or badly something is managed is all that matters – to the point where it matters more than the thing itself.  For some time now, Arts Council England has privileged the cult of management over artistic vision – and a similar myopia is now filtering the gaze we cast upon the EU.  If something has management failings, those can be sorted out – what we should be judging is the idea itself.  And the idea of the EU is something humanitarian, welcoming, enabling, and peace-making.  It is one of the hopes of humanity.  We would be insane to throw it away. 

Insane, insane, insane.