The Land Acknowledgement

Cliff Cardinal in THE LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Back in 2017, we brought Cliff Cardinal's HUFF to ORIGINS. That's a year before this five-star review, which the show received for its Edinburgh run, on the day it closed. With Cliff's work it seems you have to be in the know.... His latest piece, THE LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT, which opened LIFT at the Southbank on Wednesday, started off in Canada during 2021, under the title William Shakespeare's As You Like It. As Cliff explains in this version of the show, especially (and necessarily) re-worked for London, that was a ruse to get "rich Canadians" into the theatre. The performance begins with a traditional red curtain in place, and Cliff comes through it to begin a "land acknowledgement". This is one of the things he has to explain in a bit more detail for his London audience: in Canada it's common practice for events to begin with an acknowledgement of the Indigenous people on whose land the event is happening. So the original 2021 audience would have thought his speech was just another tokenistic prelude to the main event, which would of course be the Shakespeare production. They got a bit twitchy as it went on rather longer than usual. Eventually it became clear that there wasn't going to be a Shakespeare production. The land acknowledgement is the entire show. 

I wish I'd seen that original version, and been able to observe the ruse in action, and the extraordinary actor-audience dynamic that must have evolved through the evening. In London, the ruse couldn't work in the same way, and so the title has changed and Cliff is honest from the start about what he's doing, telling the story of those original audiences as part of his performance. But here too, the relationship with the audience is deliberately and deeply uncomfortable. There's laughter a-plenty - the format is essentially a stand-up comedy set - but there are also winces, gasps and moments of profound and disturbed silence. At the Brighton Festival, there were walk-outs. After all, as Cliff points out, a Land Acknowledgement is basically an acknowledgement that the land has been stolen. Usually, when someone acknowledges that they have stolen something, they give it back. But here, the acknowledgement alone seems to be considered sufficient. That must have been very telling in Canada, and it hits home in Britain too, albeit in a slightly different way. The oil companies, the banks, the mining companies...  all those head offices that sit in the City and profit from Indigenous land while poverty wreaks havoc on the res.....  

In Australia, the conventions that have evolved are a bit different. The land acknowledgement there is known as a "welcome to country". Elders are asked (and usually paid) to welcome people onto their lands. But, as an Indigenous Australian activist explained to me, this protocol misses out one crucial aspect in the Indigenous tradition of hospitality, which is that the visitors used to request permission to come onto someone else's lands, and that permission had to be granted before any form of welcome was offered. Nowadays, permission is taken for granted and hospitality has been commodified. It's only by performing a land acknowledgement that you can raise the vital questions about their validity. 

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.  

Pathways Through the Festival. 1: Migrations

INO MOXO

From 2017 to 2020, Border Crossings is focussing on the issue of migration, both in our theatre work, our community and education programmes, and in ORIGINS!  From an Indigenous perspective, migration FROM (not to) Britain is the source of current tensions.  Every event in the Festival in some way responds to the history of colonisation, and its ongoing impact on Indigenous people, their cultures, lands and environments.

NO WOMAN'S LAND (The Place – 14-15 June) brings together two migration stories, as Inuk Elder Naulaq LeDrew and Spanish dancer Avâtara Ayuso bring together their hugely different experiences of life in transit.  Naulaq’s migration from the Arctic of her childhood to the Toronto of today has strengthened her desire to preserve her cultural traditions, the Inuktitut language, the music, dance and costumes of the Inuit and the games they play.  It’s also turned her into a climate activist!  As well as appearing in the show, Naluaq will be talking about her culture at the National Maritime Museum and Rich Mix.

Another encounter between two women from different cultural backgrounds is at the heart of A CASUAL RECONSTRUCTION (Rich Mix 14-16 June): in this case Canadian Métis visual artist Nadia Myre and non-Indigenous theatre-maker Johanna Nutter.  Bravely and playfully facing up to challenging issues like cultural appropriation and the politics of race, the performance responds to the complex cultural and ethnic mixing that is the legacy of imperialism.

SONNY ASSU’s extraordinary visual art (Canada House 21 June – 5 September) and brian solomon//ELECTRIC MOOSE’s probing and insightful dance piece THE NDN WAY (Playground Theatre 17 June) are further examples of work that confronts the cultural politics of colonisation. By presenting this work, ORIGINS will broaden debates around migration and diversity to include the ongoing impact of colonial histories, raising questions around cultural ownership, appropriation & the need for dialogue.

There are also, of course, histories of migration in the other direction too: many Indigenous people have visited London across the years.  HIDDEN HISTORIES (National Maritime Museum 19 June) tells some of their stories and relates them to the present day, while Madeline Sayet’s WHERE WE BELONG (Rich Mix 14-16 June, Shakespeare’s Globe 17 June) evokes the memory of her Mohegan ancestors to make sense of her own contemporary experience of London.

The experience of watching INO MOXO (Southbank Centre 15-16 June) is a journey in its own right, as the audience is led up the Amazon in search of the great Ayahuasca shaman Ino Moxo.  Here the migration is internal as well as literal: the Ayahuasca experience inspires a visionary new theatre form that helps us see the world through different eyes.

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.