An Evening with Peter Sellars

Peter Sellars

A great start to 2015 for the Border Crossings Laboratory - with our Patron Peter Sellars giving an inspiring talk to a packed house at Rich Mix!

Peter's talk, like Rustom Bharucha's a few months ago, was a way for us to interrogate, expand upon and share some of the key ideas which are informing our work.  So we started with a discussion of the relationship between Greek myth and contemporary warfare in the Middle East: the parallel we used in This Flesh is Mine, and which Peter has also employed in productions like The Children of Herakles, The Persians and Ajax.  The Children of Herakles seemed particularly interesting for us, as it combined the presentation of a classical Greek tragedy with the presence of real refugees, both on stage as a silent Chorus, and in the framing events, engaging directly with the audience.  It's always of interest to us - and at times a challenge to us - to find direct connections between our community engagement work and our artistic productions (however obvious the indirect connections may be).  Peter talked about the way in which the presence of the refugees in that show served to interrogate the performance, to measure it against the reality of lived experience; while at the same time the performance also gives that experience an imaginative dimension.  So it becomes a two-way traffic.

Greece is also a wonderful model, because its drama was part of the brief but powerful flowering of democracy in Athens.  As Peter pointed out, even this wasn't an ideal time if you happened to be a woman, a slave, a foreigner or a child....  and yet, as a result, the title of every Greek play is the name of a woman, or of a group of slaves, or foreigners, or children.  Theatre became the way to give voice to the voiceless.  That should remain its function today.

The Children of Herakles

The Children of Herakles wasn't just a performance.  In fact, Peter was very explicit that he's become more and more interested in creating the context for a performance - to the extent that he now gives that every bit as much attention as the performance itself.  In this piece, the evening started with a debate about refugee issues.  It was only 30 minutes long - deliberately not enough time to do the subject justice or to resolve anything.  But this means that the audience go into the performance provoked, thinking about the current situation, and so activated and alive to possibility.  And, after the performance comes the meal, which is then followed by a film about refugees.  The meal is crucial, because that is the opportunity for people to engage directly with individual refugees and to hear their stories and their views.  Peter being Peter, he was able to bring ministers and mayors to break bread with the stateless.

Listening to these ideas was very helpful to me in thinking about our forthcoming Origins Festival, which also needs to be a meeting place and a space for dialogues between people who would not normally meet.  It's no accident that Peter has devoted much of his career to Festivals.  What's more, he also has a powerful interest in indigenous cultures - another subject he discussed that evening.

He embraced the secrecy.  For a lot of Western people who approach indigenous cultures, the element of secrecy is a frustration, or a "challenge".  There is an assumption that, eventually, if we keep applying our scientific and anthropological curiosity, we will break through and learn.  But that is not how indigenous cultures work.  Certain knowledge is not open, but is preserved and treasured as the private property of the culture, known only to certain elders, and shared only as needed.  And, to Peter's mind, that is crucial to the cross-cultural dialogue, because it forces the Westerner, if they have real respect and regard the indigenous people as their human  equals, to adopt a position of unaccustomed humility.  We have to acknowledge that we may never know, and that it is not our decision whether or not we will learn.

Peter's next production is The Indian Queen.  Its opening is about the invasion of the Americas - an attack on the indigenous:

"Wake, Quivera, wake, our soft rest must cease,

And fly together with our country's peace;

No more must we sleep under plantain's shade,

Which neither heat could pierce nor cold invade;

Where bounteous nature never feels decay,

And opening buds drive falling fruits away."

Things and Thinking

A fascinating and wonderful day with Rosanna Raymond and the Indigeneity Project - this was the first Laboratory workshop for a while, and really served our aim of using the Laboratory to generate ideas for where our work might go.  Rosanna began the day by talking about the Polynesian concept of Va - a form of space which does not separate people and things, but which joins them together.  And the practical work of the day became an expression of that, as one by one we showed things we had brought with us, linked to ideas about identity and migration, and shared their stories.  Very soon we were seeing things not in the museum way of "the object", but in terms of their relationship to the human, their agency in relation to people and movement, their presence in the world.

This became especially exciting when some of us moved out into the streets, taking our things with us, to display what we started to call a 'Musée de l'extérieur'.  We tried different ways in which the things could be shown on the streets of London: beside a statue, held by people sitting on Boris bikes, on a row of bollards, held by people standing on a monument.  The versions with the people who knew the stories of the things was most effective, especially when they were positioned so that they were framed by an existing monument or piece of architecture.  And, of course, this sets up a dialogue with the monument itself - which, given that it's London, is almost always in some way to do with imperialism.  These interventions led to members of the public engaging with the things and their stories - asking us about them or photographing us as we held them.  

It's richly suggestive of something we can really develop for the Festival.  Watch this space! 

Tu

I first met Hone Kouka and Miria George a few years ago when they were in England for Rosanna Raymond's Pasifika Styles Festival in Cambridge. They came along to the Border Crossings Laboratory and ran a workshop for us. In the workshop, Hone was very keen to explore ways in which Maori culture and ideas could be put to theatrical use. He worked on the movement styles drawn from birds, the haka, waiata and chants. At the time, I could see he was working his way towards something. And now, several years down the line, I've seen what it was.

Tu, his new play at the New Zealand International Festival, is a big step forward for Maori dramaturgy. Hone brings the Maori understanding of time and history into the play - in Maori thought it is the past that is in front of us, because we can see it, and in this play people quite literally look at the past. The cultural forms emerge beautifully out of the characters' need for self-expression, giving physical and poetic voice to their inner journeys. It's very exciting work. What's more, it's performed in an urban marae, which is an inherently theatrical space, and lends the whole a sense of community and ritual combined. The marae is traditionally configured like a traverse stage, and Hone uses that wonderfully to articulate confrontation and journey. It's a great night.

It also has a cast of ten and a big set, so I don't think it's going to be practical for me to bring it to the next Festival. Sigh.