Review of '22

REMEMBRANCES
Photo: Avatâra Ayuso

As we come to the end of 2022, I feel as if we're at a watershed moment. Not only for Border Crossings, but for theatre, the arts, and the world. It's been a year lived in the shadow of an apparently receding pandemic, a murderous war in Europe, and the ever-growing threat of climate change. In the UK, it's been the warmest year on record. While the resilience displayed by many arts organisations in their comeback from Covid has been impressive, it's not an adequate response to the current moment simply to revert to "business as usual". There is no "usual" any more. That's why 2022 was the year in which we published THE SLIGO MANIFESTO: and I want to use this review of our activities to explore some of what that statement of intent has come (and is coming) to mean for us.

• This manifesto is our response to an increasingly uncertain world, characterised by pandemic, climate change and warfare. Planning has become hugely challenging, and risk is high. However, this has always been the state in our collaborative, intercultural devising spaces. We embrace uncertainty as a catalyst to creative practice.

The context, of course, is crucial, but it hasn't meant that everything is new. One key project during 2022 has been CRE-ACTORS, led by Border Crossings (Ireland) in partnership with the Théâtre du Soleil, Teatro dell'Argine and The Fence; and this represented an exploration and consolidation of a hundred years' worth of combined organisational experience in cross-cultural devised performance. The resulting e-book, which was launched in November and has already been viewed more than 10,000 times, at once documents and questions the partners' practices, enabling us all to develop the ways in which we make theatre in a changing world. We've all been delighted with the process, and are working towards further, deeper collaboration in the coming years.

CRE-ACTORS in Bologna
Photo: Jessica Bruni

• Our work - in theatre, in other art forms, in education, in community cultural development and online - is not an attempt to represent the world, but to change it.

As the year ends, we're also finishing our biggest community project yet: BOTANY BAY. Throughout the year, we've worked with five schools in London and Manchester to create beautiful new gardens, inspired by Indigenous principles of reciprocity and gratitude, complemented by Indigenous artworks and opened through performances inspired by Indigenous practices. This is not just a learning project, but an active intervention that re-configures and re-calibrates the social and environmental space which it inhabits. The way in which we work must, of course, reflect the ideals behind that work, so it's important that for the second year running we've been certified as a Carbon Neutral business.

In the BOTANY BAY booklet (printed just before Christmas, and due to be distributed in January), the Raramuri ethnobotanist Enrique Salmon says: "We are so inundated constantly through social media, television, movies, with one idea after the other that we don’t have time to stop. We don’t have time to sit with a chilli plant, or with a tomato plant or underneath an elm tree or a pine. Of just being with the tree or the plant. Of breathing and just being." 

BOTANY BAY: Kawa Huni Kuin with the Tree of Life at Cavendish School  
Photo: John Cobb

• Our predominantly white artistic leadership and management team will engage honestly and self-critically in evolving, creative, intercultural dialogues with marginalised artists, communities and stories.

BOTANY BAY was part of the 2021-22 ORIGINS Festival, which saw a further full year of participatory and dialogic work, bringing Indigenous ideas and practices into our communities. More than ever, we've been made critically aware of our own position as a non-Indigenous organisation, led mainly by white artists. In the last project of the Festival, SONGSTREETS, we brought together an Indigenous Australian musician, Jessie Lloyd, with the black community of Brixton, so as to generate a musical, cultural and historical exchange. The resulting installation will be released in January, and promises to be extraordinary.  

Recording SONGSTREETS

• We reject the commercial model of theatre as “production”. For us, theatre is a participatory process, all aspects of which need to engage with the communities we serve. Performance is a public ritual, a ceremony that brings our communities together.

We've been thinking a lot about performance as ceremony this year, because humanity is so much in need of renewal, and there are so few spaces and systems within which this can occur. It was very important for us to receive a commission from Birmingham 2022 to create REMEMBRANCES as an alternative welcoming ceremony for the Commonwealth Games. Collaborating with AVA Dance Company, b.solomon//ELECTRIC MOOSE and Matthew James Weigel, we were able to create a performance that asked the crucial questions around post-colonial relationships, and offered genuine potential for healing.

REMEMBRANCES
Photo: Avatâra Ayuso

• Our work going forward will therefore focus on “events” rather than “productions”; channelling energies towards generating real impact in terms of social and environmental justice, cultural and spiritual renewal.

I don't know if this distinction between "productions" and "events" is clear or even necessary for a wider public, but it's crucial for us, because it's about what our work is doing in the world. It asks whether it is there for our own satisfaction and profit, or to make a real difference. In the beautiful ceremonies that opened the BOTANY BAY gardens, in the sharing of space around a fire that ended REMEMBRANCES, in the deeply spiritual music we presented at the British Museum for our joint event CELEBRATING PERU, and in the potent exchanges around CRE-ACTORS, we felt this shift occur. As I wrote in the CRE-ACTORS e-book: "To conceive of a theatre that is multiform and various, a shared space that yields innovation through the clash of distinct viewpoints and approaches, rooted in ongoing dialogues between artists from different backgrounds, and informed by potent overlaps between friendship and disagreement: this is to propose not only a theatrical and artistic but also a cultural and democratic vision. It is about space that is profoundly shared, whether that be the stage, the auditorium, the street or the parliament house. It is about equity and justice."

CELEBRATING PERU
Photo: Benedict Johnson © The British Museum

• We now work through two charitable companies, one in the Republic of Ireland and one in the UK: both dedicated to intercultural dialogue through the arts. In furtherance of this international mission, we will engage more substantially with European partnerships and develop a range of key funding relationships, including core funding.

The development of Border Crossings (Ireland) has been a major theme during 2022, both through CRE-ACTORS and a second Erasmus + project on which we are partners: X-EUROPEAN. This project, exploring the Third Space as a way to generate positive cross-cultural interaction, has taken us to Germany and Finland, and culminated in an invigorating theatre workshop which Lucy Dunkerley and I led at the Glencree Centre for Peace and Reconciliation in Wicklow a few weeks ago. 

Our relationships with funders are, of course, crucial: we've been fortunate this year to benefit from working with the Erasmus + programme of the European Union, Arts Council England, the National Lottery Heritage Fund, the UK-Australia Season, the High Commission of Canada in the UK, and Beyond the Spectacle.  

X-EUROPEAN
Photo: Aydin Cam

• We will deepen the relationship between our live and digital work, recognising the complementary nature of live and virtual experiences, and the different ways in which these inter-related approaches can generate reach and impact. We believe that any art form is regenerated and developed by its interaction with other forms, and so we will enhance our theatre through digital practice and our digital work through our theatre.

2022 began with the release of our film about the 2021 journey of TOTEM LATAMAT: and an enhanced digital presence has characterised our work throughout the year.  REMEMBRANCES had a streamed as well as a live version, which meant that it could be seen far more widely, including by First Nations communities in Canada and beyond. SONGSTREETS will be realised as an app. The plaque which we commissioned for DOVER BEACH by Wiradjuri-British artist Jasmine Coe was hugely enhanced by the accompanying film. Similarly, BOTANY BAY included a wide range of digital learning materials, particularly a series of short films, each of which concentrated on a specific aspect of the project as it developed through the seasons. The SPRING film, presented by Karuk actor Nathan Woodworth, has proved a great success with his tribe, and has also become part of the permanent display at the American Museum in Bath. Our online presence has also enabled us to partner with like-minded international organisations in innovative ways, for example the digital partnership between ORIGINS and Canada's imagineNATIVE Festival, which brought this film festival's online programme to UK audiences. CRE-ACTORS, which could have been a very inward-looking project, benefiting the partners only, has become known to the global theatre community through the e-book. This digital emphasis has also meant that our marketing and communications are no longer just a means to "sell" our work, but have become an integral part of it - a much healthier approach, which we've recognised structurally by bringing Emma Townsend, who had proved herself indispensable on ORIGINS, into the core team. 

TOTEM LATAMAT
Photo: John Cobb

• We will be more risk aware in our financial management, more conscious of the evolution of projects through their processes, and more sensitive to the need to keep cultural work free of charge or very affordable. We will therefore ensure that contingencies form a larger element in our budgeting.

This sounds like the most mundane clause in the Manifesto, but in a way I think it's the most significant of all. Since the start of the pandemic, we have not sold a single ticket.  And I can't say I've missed it. I'm not saying that everything we do in the future will always be free: theatre remains an industry as well as an art form and sometimes it will be necessary to work with a venue that necessitates a paid Box Office.  What I am saying is that commercial and financial considerations of this kind can no longer be allowed to determine the value of artistic work. I recently wrote on this blog about the way in which an MBA-style approach to running arts organisations has fatally undermined the sector: and for us it's a key lesson of the current moment that we have to put our artistic priorities and their cultural significance before the administrative structures which support them.

The year has been rich.  In the deepest sense of the term.  And I am far from certain what happens next.... Let's embrace that. 

Wishing you all the best for 2023.

Une Semaine au Soleil

 

Nicola Bonazzi and Dominique Jambert in the Cre-Actors workshop

After seemingly endless Covid delays, and surrounded by vaccination certificates and antigen tests, we were finally able to hold the first workshop in the Cre-Actors project, run through our Irish company, in the last week of July.  I couldn't have wished for a better return to the world of live theatre-making: not only were we able to gather in a large intercultural devising group, we were on the main stage of La Cartouchrie, working with actors from the great Théâtre du Soleil itself.  In the image above, you can see Nicola Bonazzi, from the Teatro dell'Argine in Bologna, working in a costume from their legendary production of LES ATRIDES.  We were able, quite literally, to cover ourselves with the great theatrical tradition of this remarkable troupe.  It was deeply refreshing and restorative to reconnect with theatrical tradition, sensing a continuity and a dedication that has survived the rupture.  It was, in the fullest sense, a week in the sun.

The Soleil is famously a company which bases its work in mask; in the traditional forms of Asian theatre and commedia, in which the mask is a sacred object that carries the spirit of a pre-existing character.  While we made little use of actual masks in this workshop, there were costumes involved from the very beginning, as well as music in every improvisation, often used as the stimulus for the scenario.  The workshop leaders, Dominique Jambert and Vincent Mangado, also made use of the framework from THE TEMPEST as a stimulus to creativity, and I suppose that was like another mask - another tradition of theatre to inform our creativity.  

There will be other posts about this week on the Cre-Actors blog, and detailed discussions of the methodology in the project e-book next year.  But at this point, I simply feel a desire to celebrate a return to theatre-making, and to express the joy of being part of the traditions that come together on the Cartoucherie stage.  It is fun.  It is holy.  It is political.  It is community.  

Acropolis / Apocalypse

Flying into Athens, the fires are already visible. We step into 45°. The Metro line from the airport isn't running. Maybe the rails have buckled in the heat.

Ash falls in a hot snow over the city.

In the Acropolis Museum a statue is weeping. She offers an ancestor for Catherine Schaub's lamenting witness - the Libation Bearer. Only last week we were on the stage of the Soleil - battling to grace these whimpering tomorrows with the name of tragedy.

Ash falls in a hot snow over the city.

Our meeting is brief and desultory. We attempt to debate the socially engaged. Some people don't stay beyond the first morning - present only to record their presence. Their cynicism oppresses more deeply than the sun. A moral vacuum. A failure of vision. They fiddle with their phones and cremate the planet with the fuel of their insouciance.

Ash falls in a hot snow over the city.

Today is August 6th. Hiroshima Day. We knew in 1945. In Beirut, 1982, Mahmoud Darwish witnessed this day under a hail of shelling. The vacuum bomb. He longed for coffee and he knew today. The statue on the Acropolis too. Aeschylus, Electra, Oedipus, Tiresias.... We have always known.

The attendance report is sent to the funder.

Ash falls in a hot snow over the city.

Performed in Paris

Macbeth: Nirupama Nityanandan and Serge Nicolaï

I've been in Paris for a couple of days, thanks to Vincent Mangado and Dominique Jambert, two actors from the Théâtre du Soleil who I met on a panel in Cambridge a couple of months ago.  Panels seem to be rather good networking spots - we also owed our time with Zoukak in Beirut to a panel.  I guess you actually get to talk about your artistic ideas if you meet in a public forum...  it cuts the need for small talk!

The current Soleil production is Macbeth.  It's clear to see why Ariane Mnouchkine wanted to tell this particular story at this moment in French history.  It's a very contemporary reading, with TV crews and automated weaponry.  In the English scene, the London Eye rotates in the background, having clearly displaced Big Ben as a symbol of the City.  The Macbeths are a "power couple", surrounded by luxury, clearly wealthy beyond belief, and yet somehow still ambitious for more, to the point of self-destruction.  It's the world of Nicolas Sarkozy and Carla Bruni - politics as glamour.  Lady Macbeth is first seen supervising the gardeners on their estate.  The intense exchanges after the murder of Duncan take place in a stable, with (very realistic) horses tossing their tails and snorting at every exclamation and every knock.  The murder is discovered as the court prepares for breakfast around a banquet table, complete with self-service bars for the cooked items.

What this achieves really well is an atmosphere of sick opulence coupled with universal suspicion.  The Lady Macduff scene is particularly strong: an entire household of servants assembles to hear the Messenger's warning, and set about burning important papers, dressing the children and packing cases before the murderers arrive.  It's actually very realistic for a Mnouchkine production, continuing a trajectory that she's been on since Le Dernier Caravasérail, which at times it resembles, especially in its regimented scene-changes.  The action is accompanied by an almost constant live musical score - but if anything, this actually serves to make the production feel even more in the mode we tend to accept as realistic, since it brings it closer to the language of film.

There's something unsatisfying in this.  This political world, presented so realistically, sits uneasily with the military background of the play.  The opening war, with the political figures on the battlefield, seems untrue to the contemporary setting.  In the later scenes of the thanes rebelling against Macbeth, there are buried cachés of rifles, torches and bicycles - recalling Ariane's longstanding desire to create a piece about the French Resistance.  Again, it seems to belong to a different world from the contemporary political aggression.  Nor do the supernatural elements of the play fit well with the contemporary realism.  It was difficult to understand who or what the witches were supposed to be, the nature of ghosts and visions in a world that screamed of "rationality".  Only the sleepwalking scene, superbly performed by Nirupama Nityanandan, seemed able to cross the barrier between the suburban and the supernatural.

As ever, it was wonderful to be at the Cartoucherie.  The ritual of eating before the show - cheaply and very well at communal tables - and the extraordinary warmth of the open spaces make attending a performance there a special, holy, public event in a way from which we all should learn.

Exhibit B

I also - at last - got to see Brett Bailey's Exhibit B.  I had thought, after it was closed due to protests in London, that I had missed the chance.  For a time it seemed as if I might miss it again - there were more protests in Paris, and an attempt to close the show through the legal system.  As we approached the performance space, there were gendarmes with guns and crash barriers, checking names every few yards.  This was every bit as intense as the situation had been in London, except that the French authorities had upheld the tradition of Liberté, and supported the performances.  This meant that the debate could be informed by people actually seeing the show, although the protestors refused to do so.  In one particularly striking development, Lilian Thuram, a black footballer from the triumphant 1998 French World Cup team, announced that he would be going a second time, and taking his children.

And this points towards something that, in the midst of the racism row, is very surprising.  Exhibit B is a very tender, compassionate, and deeply moving piece of work.  It is an act of mourning and commemoration.  It serves to educate and to warn, but not to accuse.  It is, I would dare to say, an act of healing.  

The performance begins with the spectators seated, waiting for their individual number to be called, which allows them to enter the exhibition space.  The process has the effect of separating you from friends and companions.  It also feels very tense (something added to by the police presence outside).  This is how asylum seekers must feel at ports: cut off and dehumanised.  Reduced to a number.

You walk past a series of tableaux, each of which features one or two black performers, who are motionless apart from their eyes, with which they deliberately return your gaze.  Each tableau has a caption that contextualises it - and these constantly underline that "onlookers" are part of the exhibit.  You are a part of this.  There are tableaux drawn from the history of "human zoos", evoking the practice of displaying "savage" people from Africa as curiosities, including the display of body parts after their deaths (in some cases until very recently).  There are others that confront the way in which colonialism in Africa assaulted the body - the cutting off of the hands of rubber workers judged to be lax in the Belgian Congo; African women in a concentration camp in German South-West Africa (now Namibia) boiling and scraping their compatriots' skulls clean to send to Germany for pseudoscientific examination.  There is a "coloured" woman from apartheid South Africa, who because of her racial designation could not even sit in a park with her "white" mother.  There are refugees from Somalia and Congo, recently arrived, their lives summarised in a bald list of facts beside them.  There is a a contemporary Somali man strapped in a row of airline seats, his mouth taped shut: in front of him are listed 14 asylum seekers who have died during their forced returns from Europe since the 90s.

It sounds rather simple, rather factual, rather documentary.  But the presence of the living performers makes this drama, theatre.  As Dominique says, they incarnate the people who are remembered here, bringing them into your consciousness as you become aware that you are also in theirs.  This does not have the effect of making you feel accused - but rather allows you to commune directly with the performers, and to sense through them the tragedy of history.  They enable this through their extraordinary stillness and deep, calm concentration: Brett tells me afterwards that the only rehearsal he undertakes with them is a training in meditation.  As you pass by each person, and share time with them, you do honour to those they embody.  It becomes very difficult to move on: you only do so when you are ready, usually with some small physical signal of farewell and of homage.

All this is embraced by beautiful vocal music, emanating from the final tableau, in which four singing heads emerge from plinths, harmonising.  Above them are three photographs: the severed heads of three Namibians.  One of them is a child.

You emerge devastated, but also purged.  There is time to sit quietly, to talk if you need to.  There are people there from the Ligue des droits d l'homme.  There is a space to write your feelings down, if you wish.  I took time to process.  I am attempting to do it now.  But, of course, the whole point is that this intense exchange between bodies and souls in space is beyond mere words.