Year Ending

THE GREAT EXPERIMENT:
Tony Guilfoyle, David Furlong, Tobi King Bakare

2020 was Border Crossings' 25th anniversary year. It would be fair to say that this didn't really make as big a splash as we might have wished - although there was a nod to it in Centre Stage and there will be a very full article looking back over the company's work in New Theatre Quarterly next year, so our landmark won't be passing entirely unnoticed through the fog of Covid. As the year ends, it's also worth remembering that our devised play THE GREAT EXPERIMENT was actually produced in 2020: we rehearsed in January and performed throughout February, our tour ending just before theatre came to such a drastic stop. It was a landmark production for us, representing several years of development, and we were very lucky that we were able to present it just in time. It had been a difficult piece to place in venues - many of whom had thought it too "niche" or obscure - who would want to see a play about the indentured labour migrations to Mauritius? We were therefore doubly delighted to see our theatres and museum venues packed out night after night, particularly with people from the Mauritian and Guyanese communities, and to see those same communities engaging in post-show discussions and in our Collection Day at the National Maritime Museum. This wasn't just a skin-deep engagement, either. The play was complex, many-layered and politically provocative, plunging into the controversies over post-colonial legacies and contemporary inequalities and injustices without offering any simplistic solutions. My greatest pride in the production was that the audiences, many of whom were not regular theatre-goers, went along with this on every level. 2020 was not only about coronavirus: it was also, crucially, the year when the Black Lives Matter movement came to a head. Just a few months before Edward Colston's statue was torn down in Bristol, THE GREAT EXPERIMENT was confronting the way in which slavery and its legacy continue to shape the social and economic structures of the contemporary world. 

 

THE GREAT EXPERIMENT:
Nisha Dassyne, Hannah Douglas, David Furlong

The lockdown came in March, of course, just as Robert Lepage's SEVEN STREAMS OF THE RIVER OTA was playing at the National - the only piece of live theatre I got to see all year. For Border Crossings, as for many theatre companies, the first response to the closure of the theatres was a decision to share online recordings of past productions, so as to maintain links with our audiences, and maybe even find new ones. This season of streamed productions, which ran from April to June, didn't only represent a welcome retrospective: it also allowed us to reflect as an organisation on our work to date, and to think about how we might develop in the aftermath of the Covid crisis. Each streamed production, which was available for a week, was followed by an online discussion, and the recordings of these LOCKDOWN DIALOGUES are still available on our website. They are all valuable - but perhaps the most important of all was the last one, featuring our Patron Peter Sellars and many of the other interlocutors from earlier in the series. Peter's wisdom and optimism offered us a real sense of ways forward in such challenging times.  We also started a podcast, with Alaknanda Samarth recording Artaud's THEATRE AND THE PLAGUE with music by Dave Carey: it's obvious why we chose this piece, and the ripples from its splash are still being felt as far away as India.    

MORE THAN WORDS:
Raffaele Messina

I don't believe that online theatre is going to prove a substitute for live performance. Theatre remains the vital space where we can gather as a community to experience our togetherness, our sense of connection, and also our differences and conflicts, working towards mutual understanding and democratic exchange. Theatre is the epitome of all that has been lost to us through Covid - so when we are able to gather again, it will be at the core of humanity's renewed effort to tell and to understand the stories of our times. That said, the experience of sharing our work online, debating it online and, as the year went on, making it specifically so it could go online has opened up new lines of thinking which can only broaden our reach and enrich our practice. Even within the Lockdown Season, we released a new film online. MORE THAN WORDS had always been planned as a film - it was part of an Erasmus + project to explore different approaches to communication beyond language, including the digital. However, its release at the height of the pandemic in Europe made it seem at once very immediate and forward-looking in its form. In the opening sequence, Raffaele Messina's Clown wanders the empty streets of an ancient town. We had thought of him as a survivor of war, migrating into an alienating urban Europe - but in the context of 2020, he also seemed to emerge from our own immediate crisis, and to challenge by his silent present the ways of living that facilitated the spread of the virus. 

MAGNETIC NORTH:
Hivshu

These ideas acquired a still sharper focus in a collaboration with the British Museum, responding to their extraordinary exhibition about the Indigenous cultures of the Arctic. The original plan had been for us to produce an evening of performances at the Museum, on the lines of our ORIGINS event for the Indigenous Australia exhibition in 2015. That was to have been in the summer. The exhibition finally opened in October - and then closed again. At the same time, we were constantly re-working the event to take into account the restrictions on travel for the artists, and the limited numbers of people who could attend any live presentation. For a time, we aimed to centre the performance on live music, with the Sámi band VASSVIK providing a constant accompaniment to performers streamed in from around the Arctic Circle, as well as live mask dance in the exhibition, and the whole streamed out to the audience. When even that basic element of liveness was ruled out by further travel restrictions and the Museum's second closure, we re-worked the show again, so that the music, mask dance and ceremony were all pre-recorded in the performers' own localities. What I found particularly exciting about this process was that, while it was at times very challenging and quite scary, it offered a route towards a streamed event that would not have been so incredibly intense and moving had it been planned as a film from the beginning. MAGNETIC NORTH (which you can watch on our site) has been acclaimed as "a profound filmic introspection addressing climate change", "an eloquent cry for what we should value in our lives", and "a must watch for any environmental activist, scientist or dare I say it, ordinary person of the people, who needs to be reminded of who and what we’re fighting for." Much of this is down to the interplay between the direct address to the audience of Taqralik Partridge, Laakkuluk Williamson-Bathory, Ishmael Angaluuk Hope and Hivshu, and the location of their cultures in the Arctic landscape by cinematographers Kiliii Yuyan and Hans-Olof Utsi. It's also to do with the way the filmed materials and VASSVIK's music allowed the debate between climate activists Caitlyn Baikie and Mya-Rose Craig to acquire a grandeur, a spiritual resonance, a theatricality that took it way beyond "panel discussion". For a company that locates its theatre in the immediacy of the political moment, there is an important lesson here.

I AM EUROPE:
Rebecca Unsworth-Webb

MAGNETIC NORTH premiered on December 3rd, but it wasn't quite our last event in a year that had also included our first debates around our new Irish sister company, participation in a panel on Indigenous programming for the Edinburgh Fringe, and a fitful but fruitful series of workshops (at first in person, but then largely online) for our young refugee group, the Border Crossers. During the latter part of the year, Maria da Luz Ghoumrassi and I also worked with a hugely talented and committed group of final year students of European Theatre Arts at Rose Bruford College, exploring a theme I've been drawn to for some time - the founding myth of Europe, our continent named after a Middle Eastern woman who was carried off by Zeus in the form of a bull. The same thing happened: the government announced that all students had to leave for home by December 9th, and so our planned performances in a socially distanced auditorium had to be hastily re-imagined for an online presentation. We filmed a lot of it in the theatre space. We filmed some of it elsewhere on or around the campus. We did some scenes on Zoom after the students had gone home. Some of them made their own video sequences around their own localities. We shot the closing scenes on location, on a beach in Essex, observing Covid regulations and getting very cold. If you've read this far, you may be interested to see the resulting piece: it's called I AM EUROPE. 

I've already said that I don't envisage a wholesale shift online, either for our work in particular or for theatre in general. But it would be reckless to imagine a simple return to the form we had before, and foolish not to learn from the significant gains these experiments have proffered.  As we enter 2021, Border Crossings seems well placed to capitalise on the learning we've acquired in this extraordinary, and in many ways tragic year. We were lucky enough to receive a Culture Recovery grant from the Arts Council, a significant portion of which will allow us to purchase technical equipment and build capacity for online streaming. This may mean that we do more international collaborations in a virtual way, like MAGNETIC NORTH.  I'm sure it will mean that we host a lot of our debates and exchanges online. More excitingly still, it may enable us to push the bounds of live performance as an intercultural and international form, bringing together physically present and streamed performers and audiences across the world. Watch this space. And, until then, a Healthy and Happy New Year to you all.

MORE THAN WORDS - Making the Film

MORE THAN WORDS - Raffaele Messina

“Every film is a foreign film”, write Atom Egoyan and Ian Balfour, “foreign to some audience somewhere - and not simply in terms of language”.  Their book Subtitles: On the Foreignness of Film addresses the paradoxical nature of this international art form in the age of digital communication and global distribution.  In spite of its apparently global reach, most film remains firmly rooted in, and so constrained by, language.  As B. Ruby Rich argues in the same volume, audiences tend to resist subtitles because reading them makes the experience of film-going into “work”, when they prefer to think of it as “relaxation” and “entertainment”.  “My guess”, argues Rich, “is that foreign films function as a rebuke for some viewers…  evidence that the world is not made in ‘our’ image, and that neither our society or our language is universal.”

The undermining of universalism, with all its postcolonial, neoliberal overtones, is a key element in the MORE THAN WORDS project.  Charged with creating a film that could function as one of the project’s Intellectual Outputs, we gradually realised that, in order to be true to the spirit of this European partnership, we had to find a way of communicating through film that was not solely, or even largely reliant on spoken or written language.  The original application form had stated that the film would be “subtitled in all project languages”.  Since there are at least seven of these (one of which, Arabic, is written in a non-Western script), conventional subtitling would have the effect of turning each shot into a calligraphic page.  Given that all the other Intellectual Outputs are written texts, this seemed to be a bit of a wasted opportunity.  As a result, there are titles in all the project languages, but they happen as an independent element in the film; highlighting the challenge posed by language, rather than using language as an artificial means towards a spurious accessibility.

Anyone who has experienced the immigration systems of European countries can tell you that language is often far from being a means of accessibility.  Language can just as readily be a tool of power.  It can be used to obscure, to obfuscate and to exclude.  Our film includes a number of sequences in which various languages are employed without subtitles, so that only a portion of the audience will have a literal understanding of what is being said.  The emotional power of these sequences should be in the way they reflect the experience of people who enter European spaces without European language skills.  The audience is made foreign by the film.

The great advantage of film to a project like MORE THAN WORDS is that it is primarily a visual medium.  Through the composition and juxtaposition of shots, the rhythmic energy of editing and the nuances of facial and bodily expression in performers, film allows for an emotional narrative that speaks across languages and moves beyond the purely intellectual.  If the film was to complement the other project outputs, and to offer something distinct from them, then it had to become more purely filmic, a visual and musical construct that could convey the project’s work in a mode that moved beyond language, that was “more than words”.  This was how music, rather than the spoken word, became the dominant element in the film’s soundtrack - to the extent that much of the language involved becomes itself a musical and emotional rather than a rational element.

The original brief was for a film that charted the linear narrative of the project’s development: I freely admit that this is not what we have done.  However, our film absolutely does what the more detailed description specifies:

“It will follow the work of the partners, the discussions and debates, it will show the problems, doubts and solutions found.… The film will also focus on how the different forms of expression - theatre, story telling, dance and humour - can be merged.… It will end up with a common performance prepared by the partners together.”

Our common performance is the film itself, which draws off the skills of the partners in Clowning, dance, theatre and the digital to tell a story inspired by our journey together.  It tries to be honest about the challenges we face, both as practitioners engaged in work that attempts to embrace linguistic minorities, and as educators whose methodologies are not always practically or ideologically compatible.  As a result, it seeks neither fusion nor resolution, but rather engages in an emerging and ongoing dialogue between different art forms, educational approaches, cultures and languages - a dialogue which is dynamic, vital and profoundly democratic.

European societies rest on a creation myth that emphasises the primacy of language: “In the Beginning was the Word.”  That is not how creation is understood elsewhere.  Hindu myth portrays the beginnings of the universe through the figure of Shiva, the cosmic dancer, while many African cultures speak of a primal music from which emerged the physical world and the spoken word.  These cultures, which today interact so potently with our changing continent, are closer to scientific truth than our own traditions.  It is now commonly accepted amongst evolutionary psychologists that music preceded language and is actually a more fundamental aspect of human communication.  If we are to generate a contemporary European polity that embraces its global reach, then we need to find ways of relating to one another that are musical just as much as linguistic.  We need to be brave enough to move beyond the merely rational.

I hope you enjoy the film.  Click here to watch it!

MORE THAN WORDS was made with the support of the Erasmus + programme of the European Union.  
The European Commission's support for the production of this publication does not constitute an endorsement of the contents, which reflect the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

2019 - at Border Crossings and Beyond

Ino Moxo - ORIGINS Festival

2020 will see Border Crossings reach its 25th anniversary.  During 2019, we've been busier than ever, working to bridge the gaps between cultures and to generate mutual respect and understanding in the globalised world.  The task has never felt more necessary...

In many ways, this has been an extraordinary year for us, packed with incident and excitement.  At the centre of our programme was ORIGINS 2019: our 10th anniversary Festival of First Nations. Launched at the British Museum back in March with a compelling performance by Indigenous Australian musician Eric Avery, the Festival proper covered two packed weeks in June, taking in some of London's most iconic venues and populating them with world-class Indigenous performances.  It was an incredible privilege to present the first ever London showings of Peru's Grupo Integro, with their brilliant, mind-expanding production of INO MOXO at the Southbank - a piece that made time stand still and took the consciousness of the spectator into the visionary space of Ayahuasca ritual.  Equally unforgettable, and historic, was Madeline Sayet's WHERE WE BELONG, particularly when it played the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at Shakespeare's Globe - placing the Indigenous voice right at the heart of British culture, and offering a completely new view of what that culture may come to mean in the 21st century.  AVA Dance company's NO WOMAN'S LAND at The Place brought Inuit culture to the Festival in the charismatic person of Naulaq LeDrew, as well as gaining a UK National Dance Awards Nomination for Avatâra Ayuso.

Where We Belong - ORIGINS Festival

I was also thrilled with the Festival's programme of Participation and Learning - in some ways the fullest yet, with brian solomon//ELECTRIC MOOSE creating a new dance piece with community dancers and a youth orchestra from the North Kensington community.  WESTWAY SOLSTICE, performed on three summer evenings in sight of Grenfell Tower, offered vitality, hope and energy for our communities and our youth.

Westway Solstice - ORIGINS Festival

Our ORIGINS participation work from the 2017 Festival had an ongoing life this year too, when the photographic exhibition POCAHONTAS AND AFTER visited St Andrews.  Word of that project has spread...   it's put us in touch with the Powhatan nation themselves.  Two of their Chiefs honoured us with their presence at the ORIGINS opening, and I've since visited them in Virginia, accompanied by Madeline Sayet, to explore the possibility of making a new play together...   Watch this space!

The year has also seen us working on a number of collaborative projects across Europe, three of them funded by the EU's Erasmus + programme. In the spring, we co-produced UNDER THE WHALEBACK with the North Frisian Theatre - a production hailed as their best work to date!  THE PROMISED LAND, which focused on the role of the arts and culture in making Europe a welcoming space for refugees, saw us undertake two fascinating weeks of exploration and training in Oldenburg and Toulouse, based on museum work and business coaching.  The project came together in the e-book which we published during the summer: it's proved a huge hit across a whole range of sectors, offering a combination of policy frameworks and recommendations, theoretical discussions and practical approaches. The project also led to Brian Woolland's new play DON'T LET THEM TELL YOU STORIES, which we presented as a rehearsed reading in October at Rich Mix.  MORE THAN WORDS, which looks at ways to work with communities who have little knowledge of the local language, reached a key point with a week in Luxembourg, during which we brought together a range of disciplines and approaches to answer a range of framing questions.  The Intellectual Outputs, including a film starring the Italian clown Raffaele Messina and directed by myself, will come out in the spring of 2020!

The spectre of Brexit has inevitably haunted these projects throughout 2019.  Almost every time we worked in Europe, we seemed to be on the edge of a precipice.  There have been many occasions when it has been very likely that our projects would simply stop - cut off, incomplete and futile.  It was a relief that we managed to finish all we had planned in THE PROMISED LAND, and it now seems that the Transition Period will allow MORE THAN WORDS to be completed during 2020.  But that is, at best, a minor gain in the face of a very frightening future.  In 2016, the day after the referendum, we had to welcome a group of European visitors to London.  On Friday 13th December 2019, I was in Southern Italy for a meeting around the MORE THAN WORDS project, and had to explain to our European partners that the election result was the point of no return. As Border Crossings enters its Silver Jubliee Year, it is faced with the prospect of being an international organisation in a nationalist country, an intercultural organisation in a monocultural space, an advocate of reconciliation under a government dedicated to false and divisive imperialist mythologies.  The last few years have been challenging - but the ones ahead will be much, much harder.

We have our strategies, of course.  We have many dear friends and allies.  We are deeply aware that the "hostile environment" makes our work all the more necessary.  You can look forward to some innovative and creative announcements in the coming months. And, most importantly, you can look forward to THE GREAT EXPERIMENT - our new devised play which explores the imperial history on which our country's new mythology of exceptionalism appears to be based. It seems we may have hit the perfect moment for this essential piece of theatre.

I wish you all a year of peace, hope and resilience.  

More Than Words - Dancing in Hungary

At first glance, Hungary is not the most obvious place to run a training week around minority ethnic groups and linguistic diversity.  Even Budapest is an astonishingly homogenous city by the standards of contemporary Europe.  During our day in the city, waiting to catch the plane home, we saw only two darker skinned women.  One of them was selling sunglasses on the street, and the other was emptying the waste bins.  We speculated that they were probably Roma.  In the remote spa town of Cserkeszőlő, where the training took place, there was even less diversity.  Unsmiling and overweight middle-aged couples in white towelling robes prowled the hotel corridors, occasionally dipping themselves in the indoor pool or the outdoor jacuzzi, taking buffet meals and rarely venturing beyond the front door.  On the last day, when I had time to enjoy the outdoor pool with some of the other participants, it was very clear that the people sharing it did not like the fact that there were foreigners in their water.  And when we tried to relax in the evening with an Italian friend’s guitar, the disapproval of noise after 9pm was matched only by the exasperation that these barbaric souls could not even speak Magyar.

So, actually, Cserkeszőlő was the perfect place for this MORE THAN WORDS week.  It was a place where a group of cosmopolitan Europeans, used to intercultural and multilingual spaces, to acceptance and diversity, could experience what it actually feels like to be in a cultural mi-nority.  It was a place where the Magyar tribalism advocated by Viktor Orbán was openly on display, and the famous fences made total, terrifying sense.  It was a place where we tried hard to integrate, and were not made to feel welcome.

And so the training room became at once a sacred space and a refuge - a place where, thanks to the careful leadership of IKTE, we were able to operate as an uninhibited and creative group, and to build a sense of security through the processes of moving together.  It offered a very clear lesson in the potential value of such experiences for people from minority cultures: in the dance workshop, there is a chance to escape from the social stigma of the outsider and to acquire a renewed confidence in the self as a physical presence, and to enjoy being part of an integrated and non-judgemental group.

Clowning in Potenza - Guest blog by Sinéad Elinore Emery

During our time together in Potenza I was massively impressed by people being willing to explore, learn and grow with such commitment and trust. I was especially inspired by the learning opportunities provided by combination of professionals in the room, from nurses, to engineers, to architects and youth workers. The unity we felt as a group so very quickly, has made me think of past workshops run cross-discipline and how they failed and faltered, through giving space to too much talking and debate. I for one am guilty of all too often hiding behind the power or distraction of words and failing to embrace the power and precision that communicating non-verbally can manifest and this week was just the reminder I needed to re-wire a touch and refocus elements of my practice.

Since undertaking the training, I have used several of the games we explored during out time in Italy, one of favourites being Ha Ho Hee, which I managed to deliver with 80 young people in one go in Egypt, in a prison with 10 category A offenders and at a 60th birthday party in Ireland. What I loved about this great opener was that it provided a wonderfully powerful physical way of either expelling or gathering energy depending on group or individual needs. I have used this game to invite people to pass on good energy across the circle or rid themselves of their nerves through the clear and strong movements and the bold sounds of the ha, the ho and the hee. Within each of the above examples groups were calmer and more focused having played the game.

When in facilitator mode I often find we can over-explain things that are far better communicated through doing and feeling, as opposed to lengthy verbal instructions. The training in Potenza helped me to reflect on how to incorporate less words in to my facilitation. This came in very handy in my most recent facilitation in Egypt, with large groups of young people. Drawing on some of the nonverbal approaches, I found myself resorting to clear and simple nonverbal cues in place of lots of over-explaining and unclear gesticulation.

My time in Potenza was one the hardest weeks of training I have ever experienced. While I took away a heap of great activity ideas and learnt a lot from the practitioners I met, I went on a challenging personal and professional journey during the sessions. This training taught me to remember the value of letting barriers down – something I do not find comes easy- to be ok with things going out of ‘control’ from time to time – a challenge to a perfectionist, to keep things simple – tricky when you feel the need to cover all bases and above all to be ok with failing and things not working out... In fact this is where the clown thrives, working with the problem instead of around it or away from it….  Speaking of which I don’t think I found my clown this time around but I am OK with that.

Something which came flooding over me after our day out in Matera, interacting with unsuspecting members of the public, was the quality of genuine connections and the sheer volume of compassion in this group, something I found utterly overwhelming - juxtaposed with the disheartening consideration of the absence of connection and compassion in so many aspects and elements of day to day life in this complicated world. I will be making it my mission to play Secret Angel with so many of my groups to come - what a wonderful and touching way to encourage people to connect and consider another being, to observe them and think about how they can silently support them, one small way to combat some of the tough stuff we humans go through…. Powerful.

Clown

Raffaele Messina

The Clown is radical.  In a space of violence and despair, the Clown makes the outrageous gesture of spontaneous joy.  In the space of pain, suspicion and mistrust, the Clown offers vulnerability and empathy, the healing contact of the compassionate, unbroken gaze.  
 
In 2002, a group of Clowns, led by Patch Adams, went into Kabul to confront the violence unleashed across Afghanistan by George W. Bush and his allies.  The film of their journey is astonishing: it is also deeply upsetting.  In one sequence, a young child is treated for the most horrifying skin injuries.  Among the doctors, offering presence, openness and care, there is a figure in a red nose, holding a balloon.  
 
Earlier this year, as part of THE PROMISED LAND project, we spent a morning with the remarkable organisation Clowns Without Borders, who have been working regularly amongst the refugees across Europe and the Middle East.  To Sam Holdsworth, who runs the UK branch, the presence of the Clown at the moment of arrival is of huge importance in establishing the potential for welcome and moving forward.  As somebody emerges from the sea, there should not only be food, warmth and medical care: there should also be a very simple, very basic, acknowledgment of common humanity.  Even a joke.  How silly, how apparently insignificant.  How serious, how profound. 

In late November, Lucy, Sinead Emery and I went to Potenza in Southern Italy to work with the wonderful Clown Raffaele Messina as part of the MORE THAN WORDS Erasmus + project.  This project looks at how the arts and cultural sectors can engage communities who have little or no knowledge of the local language.  I had expected the week might concentrate on the Clown as a workshop technique, looking at the training methodology as a means to communication without language.  Instead, Raffaele chose something far more basic – how the Clown can be the face of welcome.  How the Clown can offer a sense of something more important than the labours of language learning or the morass of immigration bureaucracy.  How the Clown can be the bridge between people.

Lucy clowns for the locals

As a result, the week felt almost Grotowski-like in its concentration on the self.  We worked on openness and eye contact, on truly seeing inside the other.  We worked on our animal nature, our instinctiveness, the weight or lightness of our bodies in space.  We worked on emotion, and on how to concentrate that emotion into the tiny mask of the red nose.  I had worked a lot with mask before, and knew its potential to drive one personality from the body and allow another, more elemental being to take possession.  I had observed how the great clowns, like Chaplin, were essentially mask actors.  What I had not been prepared for was the totally transformative power of the red nose – the way in which a tiny piece of leather or plastic can open up a buried self: childlike, hilarious, innocent and raw.  Unleashed in the streets of Materra, the Clowns reached out to locals and to tourists, provoking laughter, tenderness and song.  People responded because they felt no threat.  Only joy.  The radical act of joy. 

Bearing Witness

A photo from the Lublin ghetto

In the city of Lublin, in Eastern Poland, in 1992, an avant-garde performance group called NN Theatre was given the use of the city's old Grodzka Gate.  One day an old lady came to see them.  She said she remembered living in the gate as a small child, kept hidden from the outside world.  She had no real knowledge of who she was, and no recollection of her parents.  She did recall that she had been smuggled away, and so she thought that she was probably a Jewish child, who had somehow been protected from the Nazis.

The young Poles who ran the theatre company were astonished and moved.  They had not known about the history of the building they occupied.  It turned out that it had also been known as "the Jewish Gate", and that it led from the old centre of Lublin to what had been the Jewish quarter of the city - an area that the Nazis had completely destroyed.  As a result of this encounter, the theatre company completely changed its course, and set about documenting the Jewish history of their space, so that today it is closer to a museum than a theatre. The Gate still has a performance space, and it is sometimes used - but NN Theatre is now primarily a witness to the horrific history in its locality.  The young man who showed Lucy and myself around the exhibition, and who works with this material every day, was visibly moved by much of what he told us.  To give just one example, there is a series of photographs of a young boy from Lublin during the 1930s - birthdays, holidays and parties - so powerful because they are so ordinary.  The last photograph shows him carefully groomed for his first day at school: it was September 1939.  After that, there is nothing.

The Holocaust hangs like a malignant smog over Poland.  Of the six million Jewish people killed in Europe, three million were Polish. The death camps were almost all in Poland: Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, Chelmno. Lublin's closest camp was Majdanek.  At the start of the war, the city had 120,000 citizens, of whom 43,000 were Jewish.  Almost all of them were killed.

A few days earlier, I had visited the extraordinary Jewish Museum in Warsaw, called POLIN.  In a very different way from the Grodzka Gate, this is also a theatrical experience.  There are actually very few objects in this museum.  Rather, there are spaces to experience, stories to probe, projected imagery and concealed nuggets of text.  There is a reconstructed wooden synagogue of the 18th century, a little cinema screening Yiddish films of the 1920s, a reconstructed Warsaw street.  And, of course, towards the end there is the horrific material on the Holocaust.  In a narrow but high metal tank with rusted walls, there are graphic photos and accounts, on a very intimate scale, of the act of killing.

I found these exhibits almost unbearable - even more than at the Jewish Museum in Berlin.   Much of this emotional power derives from the long and detailed narrative that precedes the Holocaust section.  As POLIN's website explains: "We present 1000 years of Polish-Jewish coexistence, speaking of cooperation, rivalry and conflicts, autonomy, integration and assimilation. While seeking to confront thorny issues, we also bring attention to bright chapters in our common history."  The Jewish presence in Poland has been huge, ever since the early Middle Ages. POLIN makes much of the tolerance initiated by Bolesław III in the early 12th century, and his recognition of the economic advantages that would be brought by Jewish migrations into Poland.  The history is not always one of harmony, but it is one of cultural co-operation - what the EU would call "integration", as opposed to "assimilation".  The Jews remained Jewish and the Christians Christian - but they lived complementary lives.  In the early years of the Second Polish Republic, the centenary of which is being marked this year, the Jewish population was hopeful for a productive intercultural future.  "Fate has joined us with the Polish people for good", wrote Sholem Asch in his 1928 book Haynt (Today), "and our wishes and hopes belong to both nations, to one road, to a common bright future."

Both museums, in very different ways, offer narratives of hope, of peaceful coexistence, of cross-cultural understanding.  Above all, they bear witness to the horror that results from the dehumanising rhetoric of racism.  Why then, I found myself asking, has Poland moved so far to the political right in recent years?  Why has it become so notably intolerant of ethnic and cultural difference?  Why has the arrival of Syrian refugees in Europe triggered such consternation there, seeing the rise of a home-grown fascism?

There are no easy answers to this, of course - but I do wonder whether the pressing need to bear witness to the Shoah might not have had an unintended consequence in shifting the narrative.  Emphasising Polish history as an exemplar of tolerance through its Jewish past might serve to suggest a particularly deep relationship between a Polish society largely defined by its Catholicism, and a Jewish society also defined by a religion which shares many of the same scriptural roots.  The profound horror of the Polish experience under Nazi occupation might lead to a very understandable reluctance to criticise the state of Israel, with its foundation myth so rooted in the Shoah.  If modern Poland (and other countries in modern Europe) remains traumatised by the events of the early 1940s, then that may be one reason for the deep suspicion displayed towards Islamic cultures and people.  The Israeli state has a tendency to cast itself as a victim of Islamic aggression, and terror attacks by Islamist groups have helped feed the idea of a Judeo-Christian Euro-American world under assault from this inimical "Other".  A society that defines itself by its Catholic religion and its history of coexistence with Jewish people is very likely to be suspicious of Muslim migrations.

The witness that is borne to the Shoah is essential, of course - and so is the narrative of Polish and Jewish coexistence.  But we need to look for other narratives too.  Perhaps we need to bear witness to the remarkable policies of religious and cultural multiplicity practised under the Ottoman Empire.  Perhaps we need to revisit the dynamic and vibrant culture of Moorish Spain, where Christian, Jewish and Muslim scholars and artists engaged in profound and productive cultural exchange.

Museums, theatres...  we have work to do.

MORE THAN WORDS: Silence, presence and secret languages

Guest blog by Marieke Schippert

MORE THAN WORDS - London workshop

In March, my 9 year old son and I flew to London for a training in an international setting. It was named MORE THAN WORDS and was about finding ways of communicating with people without words, for example with people with whom we don’t share the same language. Some of the tasks were meant to be done in the city: listening to the sound of different districts and neighbourhoods, observing the body language of people there, and determining ways of communication without sharing the same language.

Silence

As a single mom, I had to bring my son to the training in London, and we performed the tasks in the city together. The first tour brought us to Tottenham. First of all, the buildings there spoke to us. They said, that the people there didn't have too much money, and not so much space. Many of them were drying their clothes out of their windows. The shops there said, that many people there were immigrants, who wanted to preserve parts of their lifestyle in their new home: we saw lots of shops that made us feel like being in African or Asian countries.

Soon after arriving in Tottenham, my son purposefully directed me to one of the centres of communication without words: the playground and sports area in the park.  In that park, there were different public sports facilities: a football field, a basketball court and some fitness devices. Two young adults were playing football, without talking to each other. My son wanted to play as well, so he moved closer and closer to them, until one of them kicked the ball in his direction, inviting him to play. They communicated perfectly without words.

Another young man was shooting hoops on the basketball court. He was very good at it. Some admirers stood by and watched him play. They as well communicated very well without words - he knew, that they admired him, and they knew, that he appreciated them watching.

In the fitness area, there were several different people using the fitness equipment. Very diverse people of different ages, from very young to quite old, different skin colors, singles and couples, men and women. Together, they performed an act of ballet: Without talking, they freed the fitness devices and changed from one to another in perfect harmony, sensing the wishes of the others. Specially two people, a couple, seemed to know each other for a very long time - they were in perfect harmony and matched perfectly. They had a routine they performed without talking at all. They always changed the devices at the same time, did the exercises in the same rhythm. The communication between these people was just like a dance routine.

No wonder people, who work with refugees, often use sports as a means of coming together, getting into contact and achieving something together. Sport is one of the best, most efficient ways of communicating without words.

Presence

While we were in the park, school finished, and the pupils came out of a school nearby. Many of them crossed the park to go to the subway or to catch a bus. The girls were walking two by two, close together, talking quitly with one another. The boys were walking two by two as well - but talking very loudly, shouting all over the place, sometimes walking with great distance between them, expanding their conversation over half of the park.

Even if I couldn't understand their words, I could still read their body-language. And that language is gendered, influenced by gender roles. The girls were saying: "We better stick together and don't take up too much space!" and "We‘d better not attract too much attention on us!", while the boys were saying "I/We own this place!".

Their behaviour told me a lot about the society they live in. I understood, that men and women are not equal, that men are allowed to take up way more space than women, and that they are taught from a very young age on, that they rule the world. Girls are taught to hold back, to be pleasant and to admire the boys. The society they live in must be fundamentally gender biased.

Another presence that marked my son and me very much was the presence of Black people in London. Coming from Berlin/Germany, we were in awe. My son is Black, I am White. In Germany, even in Berlin, we are very often stared at. People keep asking themselves how we are related. My son gets stared at, touched without even asking and asked a lot about his Blackness. He was overwhelmed when we were in Brixton, waiting outside the subway for a friend. He was amazed by the great number of Black people that came out of the subway – they were the majority! That is an experience that he never makes in public German spaces (only in empowerment settings). He loved seeing so many Black people in the subway in general, and also finding them in very different professions in London. Their presence was very empowering to him.

The presence of Black people in London versus their presence in Berlin tells a lot about racism and postcolonial relations. For us foreigners, the situation in London seemed a bit better than in Berlin, but many housing areas still seemed quite segregated, which shows how both societies are still fundamentally structured by racism.

Secret Languages

In Tottenham, we went into a little café. Inside, there were two men speaking an african language, two men speaking french, and two men speaking a slavic language. As they all spoke different languages at their tables, they were able to have a very intimate ambience while talking. My son and I spoke German, which seemed to be unusual to the others, since they looked quite a lot at us. But we, as well, had our intimate language. It still matters a lot, what language you speak - the reactions vary very much depending on what counts as "normal" in that area, and what prejudices people have about people speaking your language. In general, speaking French for instance provokes other reactions than speaking an African language in a public space. These reactions are racially biased. These biased reactions are a very powerful way of communicating without words – most of the micro-aggressions linked to racism and other forms of discrimination are exercised without saying a single word. Looks and body language are more than enough to be very clear about what a person thinks about someone else. As we get more an more conscious about racism and discrimination in general, people often start taking care about the things they are saying – but we should focus as much on our general expression and body language. They are way more unconscious and direct ways of communicating and reflect what we really think, even if we don’t say it.

Body language and the tone of the voice are secret languages that also told me al lot about the people in that café in Tottenham. Even if I couldn’t understand what these pairs were saying, I still got to know a lot about them. First of all, that they had some relation to a country in which a different language was spoken. Their way of speaking, their voice, and their attitude, told me a lot about them : How they were feeling, a little about their character, and something about the relationship between them and their counterpart. I could also get some information about what kind of topics they were discussing, or at least, what the topic meant to them emotionally. For example, it was easy to tell, if they were discussing work topics, private topics, leisure topics or if they were fighting. It got very clear, if the topic was serious and very important to the person, if it was emotionally charged, or if it was a light topic.

Without words, we can understand very important things: emotions, relation and intentions. What’s lacking, is the concrete theoretical content. We maybe can’t discuss very theoretical issues without a common language. But we can use emotions, relation an our intentions to communicate in a very profound way. That means, that we need to get involved in a different way that what we mainly see as a professional relationship when we work with refugees for example. We need to go into a relation with them, show and share our emotions, and be clear in our intentions. On that basis, understanding will be easy. We also need to reflect the basis of our work and be very self-aware and self-scrutinizing about our own biases and prejudices. That is the foundation for going into an open, un-biased and true relation and communication.

Marieke Schippert works with NARUD - an African community organisation in Berlin.

Training Weeks

More Than Words - photo by Julia Slominska

The last two weeks have been spent in workshop rooms.  Not developing a new show.  Not engaging a community.  Not even training people for a specific artistic project.  It's just been a wonderful, open opportunity to exchange ways of working and the ideas behind our approach with like-minded people from across Europe.  What a great thing Erasmus + funding is.  How silly we would be to lose it....

Our first week was the Theatre Training for the MORE THAN WORDS project, so the room was filled with Italian clowns, Hungarian dance therapists, Polish performers, architects and photographers, German academics and community workers....  and so on!  The fact that not everybody starts from a performing arts viewpoint is challenging, of course - but also wonderfully liberating, in that theatre practice starts to be seen from different perspectives, including by ourselves as "trainers".  I found myself connecting a lot of the exercises we use for devising plays with ideas about architectural space, social space, and therapeutic needs.  Involving people from other sectors in a workshop helps to pull you out of the "theatre box" - to see theatre as a wider, socially responsible force.

MORE THAN WORDS emphasises non-verbal approaches, because it's to do with working across cultures, often when there is no common language.  Because this week was focussed on training the trainers, there needed to be some conversations and reflections - but the purest moments were the ones that moved away from this into movement, music and imagery.  As the first partner to offer this training, we had the tricky job of defining parameters - but I think that was done clearly enough for the subsequent work to build on what's been achieved so far.

Last week was also about Applied Theatre, with a group of Italian practitioners joining us to learn how theatre techniques can move into social spaces to empower communities.  Because that covers such a multitude of practices, we alternated the week between practical exercises drawn from our own cross-cultural work, and engaging with other artists who approach performance in different ways.  Hannah Conway led a workshop on music for Applied Theatre, and Kelly Hunter took the group through her extraordinary methods that use Shakespeare as a way to develop creativity with autistic children.  Dave Carey of Chickenshed showed the group some examples of how that theatre has made changes in the lives of disabled children, children in the care system, and young people at risk of offending.  It was incredibly affirming of the form and what it can achieve socially...

At the same time - I always worry about making a case for theatre that sounds too instrumental.  It's not because theatre can affect social good that it needs to exist - it's because it IS social good.  Just trying to make sure that remains at the forefront of all these discussions.