APAM 2014: Who enters whose world?

dirtsong - The Black Arm Band

I've been in Brisbane just over a week, enjoying some sun and taking part in APAM - the biennial showcase of Australian Performing Arts.  It's the second one I've attended - and again it's been a great resource for learning what indigenous theatre-makers are up to.  The great revelation for me was The Black Arm Band - an organisation I had heard of but never heard before.  dirtsong was a remarkable experience, with incredible music from performers like Emma Donovan and our old friend Trevor Jamieson, sung in front of poignant black and white film from the communities.  It's very simple, but it's pure artistry.

I enjoyed the other indigenous work too - and there was quite a selection.  Some of it I already knew - in fact Gudirr Gudirr was here - and I was able to connect with lots of friends from the past.  Even Natasha Wanganeen, who I hadn't seen since Bullie's House ten years ago, was here performing in a children's show. Some of the work in APAM is shown in full, some of it in 25 minute excerpts (as happened with Ilbijerri's Corranderk, for example), and some in the form of "pitches".  These last can be surprisingly useful - even though you don't see the production, you get a sense of what may be happening in a year's time.  Things to keep an eye on.

What I enjoy most is this aspect of an artistic community working together towards possibility.  The "market" aspect isn't really my cup of tea - the discussions around it absolutely are.  On day 2, I was asked to host a "roundtable session" on First Nations touring - a job I shared with a wonderful Ojibway woman from Canada, called Denise Bolduc.  It soon became clear that we weren't going to talk about the logistics of how - it's so much more important to talk about why.  What does it mean to tour indigenous arts?  How can this work be enabled to speak to European audiences?  Should it?  These are the big questions we've been asking in Origins - and it's very helpful to address them here in Australia.

There was a keynote session - a panel, not a lecture - which also went, very bravely I thought, into the thorny thickets of cross-cultural collaboration.  Ong Keng Sen was speaking, and suggested that the challenge of intercultural work was that every artist was in fact an individual, and so the idea of them somehow representing their culture didn't work in practice.  I take his point - but it was interesting to hear it challenged from an Aboriginal perspective: in indigenous cultures, the individual self is not as important as the community, the history, the culture.  Keng Sen's individualist standpoint is that of the globally dominant culture: and that's all the more reason why it needs a corrective.  Why, asked an Aboriginal woman in the audience, are indigenous people always expected to enter into the structures of the "white world" (this "market" being a good example), when nobody ever expects white artists and producers to enter into Aboriginal culture?

These ideas grew for me when I spent Saturday afternoon with Wesley Enoch - a very distinguished Aboriginal director who now heads up Queensland Theatre Company.  To Wesley's mind, the lack of any treaty between the colonial power and the indigenous people in Australia (a situation very different from that in New Zealand or North America) means that the relationship between the cultures is stuck in a paternalistic model, with no negotiation.  Aboriginal people have things done for them - with the subtext that they need to become more like white people.  Wesley's example is housing: "My family doesn't need a nuclear family home", he says.  "We all want to live together as an extended family.  We need a compound.  But that doesn't work within the colonial structures."

It's the old problem of homogeneity - and oddly, I felt that APAM reflected this in other ways too.  The dominant culture, with its desire to "market" everything, is so present now across the globe, that it is getting more and more difficult to find anything that is specific and local.  But theatre, to be valid as a live art form, has to be exactly that.  Many of the performances I saw this week were marked by their similarity to work I could see just as readily in London, New York or Toronto.  They all had video....  Of course, I quite like video in the theatre, and I use it myself to address globalisation....  but it seems to me that the real drama of the internet age requires the tension between the global and the local.  Otherwise we just accept a kind of blanding out - a sameness which is generalised and dull.  We need to be working towards theatre that embraces the culturally specific, and places it in conflict with the post-colonial dominance of the West.  We have to have the courage to enter into, and move between, one another's worlds.

2013

Song Ru Hi in Consumed - with Zhang Ying on video.  Photo: Richard Davenport

It's been a very remarkable year for Border Crossings.  To start with the headline figures: during 2013, we
 - attracted audiences of 7,425
   and 969 public participants
-  presented 75 performances or exhibition days
   and 127 workshops or participation sessions
-  worked with 121 artists
   and 25 venues
-  travelled to 6 countries
   to involve their artists in our work
-  toured our new piece Consumed
   and presented the third Origins Festival

Consumed was a hugely exciting project for us, bringing our devised work to a new level of sophistication, and really embracing the complexities of working across languages, using new technologies as part of the drama itself.  Working again with Song Ru Hui and Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre, we were able to deepen the collaboration and build on the trust.  The results were very remarkable.  There's a terrific TV documentary about the play in the Chinatown series by Propeller (which broadcasts to over 10 million viewers) - you can see it online at http://propellertv.co.uk/programmes/chinatown.

Origins was also an extraordinary experience, bringing together some of the most important artists in the world today.  It was a huge privilege to host Diane Benson, Victoria Hunt, Trevor Jamieson, Dalisa Pigram and Indigie-Femme in London - as well as the many other indigenous performers, artists and thinkers who gathered here for those rich and invigorating couple of weeks.  What makes the Festival really special is the way it connects international "high art" with the communities of First Nations people living here - and this year was especially exciting in that respect, with both the Samoan and indigenous Mexican communities being featured prominently.  The Day of the Dead event at Rich Mix is something we will never forget!

Origins: The Day of the Dead

It's also been the year in which our Community Engagement work really took off, with Lucy Dunkerley leading participatory projects for young people in schools and community settings across London and in China.  She also began the engagement with Muslim communities that is going to be a key part of our work in the next couple of years.  Back in June, Brian Woolland and I were in Lebanon, working on a new piece called This Flesh is Mine, which we are planning to produce in May.  It's going to be a co-production with Ashtar from Palestine, and has the potential to be a really extraordinary piece of work - bringing home the emotional experience of the contemporary Middle East and galvanising the debates we really need to have around the geopolitics of the region.

Looking back over the wider cultural experience of the year, it seems to me that the arts in general, and theatre in particular, were rather restrained, even conservative.  I know that's not a common view - and of course there's been plenty of "innovation" on show, but it's largely been of the "look at me, aren't I clever?" kind, rather than genuinely seeking out and generating new meaning and significant ideas.  It's the sort of innovation that is generated by insecurity - a competitive, rather than a sustaining approach to art.

There are exceptions, of course.  I hugely admired Sons Without Fathers at the Arcola - Helena Kaut-Howson's response to Chekhov's Platonov, which gave the play an incredibly sharp contemporary edge and banished all thoughts of this writer as wistful and bourgeois.  It was wonderful to see A Season in the Congo performed in London, especially with Chiwetel Ejiofor playing Patrice Lumumba.  Ashtar themselves made a brief visit to Rich Mix, with their piece 48 Minutes for Palestine, directed by Mojisola Adebayo.  But my theatrical highlight of the year was actually a piece I saw in Norway, performed by a Maya theatre company from Guatemala. Oxlajuj B'aqtun by Sotz'il Jay is a staggering performance, deeply rooted in Maya culture and spirituality, made in response to the death of Lisandro Guarcax González, "guide and founder of Sotz’il Jay, who was murdered on the day Oxlajuj B’atz’(Monkey 13) (25th August 2010). Because, as he said: “Nqarayij chi ronojel qasamaj nk’atzin chi nkitamab’ej nk’aj chïk winaqi' ”. We long for all our efforts to be transformed into the knowledge of the other."

This sort of communally created, culturally immersed, deeply felt and politically committed work is exactly what our culture needs at the moment, and it's something we see less and less.  More private and personal cultural forms - the novel, in particular - are very much alive and vital.  But culture in the public arena, where the theatre operates, is being drained of its lifeblood.  A theatre that is forced to justify itself in economic terms, a theatre that is reduced to simplistic pre-conceived social "SMART objectives", a theatre embarrassed by its spiritual role - this is a theatre in terminal decline.  2014 has to be about reasserting the vitality and necessity of the art form - not as something which contributes to economic growth or attracts tourism, not as a luxury which we add on once we've dealt with other needs apparently more basic, but as something which is itself basic to any healthy and dynamic society in its own right.  Survival alone will be an achievement this year - but it's also pointless if we don't survive as something truly necessary: as a space within our darkling work that offers healing and contemplation, regeneration and provocation, energy and light.

Happy New Year, everyone.

Big hArt

On Friday afternoon, I was at Australia House for a presentation by Big hArt from Australia. This is a company we've been close to for some time, ever since we started discussing bringing their amazing production of Ngapartji Ngapartji to Origins last year. We didn't manage it - mainly because it would have involved 50+ flights from Australia, which is pushing it - but now that we are looking at the next Festival, they are also developing a one-man version of the piece, which is altogether more manageable. It's this idea which was shown to us on Friday.

Trevor Jamieson, who was part of our First Nations Advisory Panel and helped us to launch the Festival in that same room in 2007, tells his family history in this show. It's an extraordinary story of destruction and survival - and in this version he is juxtaposed with video footage of interviews with Elders (many of whom actually appeared in the original version). This less formal, less showy version of the show is in many ways more immediate for a British audience than the grand spectacle of the original.

Talking to Scott Rankin afterwards, I get the impression that this is how his thinking is currently moving. The new Big hArt project, with which Trevor will again be involved, is a direct engagement with the mining companies who are ripping up the Aboriginal homelands. He's right, of course - if we just make shows that talk to the converted, we get nowhere. The people who we somehow have to reach are the decision makers, the people with power. As Peter Sellars says about opera - talk to the people you think you don't like.

We're looking at working in partnership with the City of London Festival next year - and it's started me thinking about all those City board rooms.