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.  

Exhibit B: a response to the closure

An Image from Exhibit B

It's a tense and troubled time for those of us involved in intercultural performance.  On Monday, I was invited to attend a public meeting at Stratford Circus to discuss the controversy over Brett Bailey's piece Exhibit B, opening the next night at the Vaults.  I replied by saying that I was more than willing to join the debate, but I'd rather do so after seeing the production for myself, which was due to happen tonight.  Now that the protests have brought about the production's closure, it seems I won't get the opportunity.  This means that anything I say about this work is based on conjecture and surmise rather than on experience and critical engagement.  That much at least I have in common with the protestors who shut down the work: most of them have not seen it either.

I do, however, have some knowledge of Brett Bailey as an artist, and of the company he leads - Third World Bunfight.  I saw their production of Big Dada (dealing, comically and disturbingly, with Idi Amin), and the truly astonishing celebration of spirituality and anarchy that was iMumbo Jumbo.  I have read the other plays and commentaries in Bailey's book, The Plays of Miracle and Wonder.  Only last week, I saw his stunning re-imagining of Verdi's Macbeth at the Barbican - a production which uses two icons of European culture (Shakespeare and opera) to address the ongoing neo-colonial incursions into Africa, and to represent the horrific conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo as the direct result of imperial history and current Western rapacity.  In this Macbeth, the witches are the forces of international capital, offering material rewards to the nascent dictator in return for purchase on the natural wealth of the land - above all the coltan used in phones and computers.  I have spent valuable and productive time in the company of Brett Bailey, and that of Abey Xakwe (a frequent leading performer with Bunfight), discussing these productions in relation to the wider cultural and political discourse.  We've talked about my own work too.  We've swapped the occasional email.  We don't know each other well - but I recognise a fellow traveller on the rocky road of a politically and spiritually engaged intercultural theatre when I see one.  So, whatever else might be said about Exhibit B (and, as I say, I haven't seen it) - it will have been a considered and serious piece of work.  It will most certainly not have been the sensationalist and self-promoting circus that its detractors have portrayed.

Exhibit B

We have to acknowledge that the anger is real.  Its main focus seems to be on the fact that the production draws off the history of the 19th century "human zoos", where black African people were shown to Europeans as sub-human curiosities.  As I understand it, the piece develops that idea into the present day, with figures like asylum seekers being similarly framed.  It sounds to me like a powerful and striking way to undercut the prevailing media discourse around such people, and around the gaze of the dominant culture.  "Look", it would seem to say: "the human zoo still exists.  This is how Africa is treated in our own time."  If that is its meaning, then it would seem to be the very opposite of racist.

But the detractors suggest that the presentation of such images, even in an artistic context, is inherently racist.  Their argument seems to be that representing the human zoo is equivalent to being the human zoo.  And that is deeply problematic.  Because if we are to equate the artistic representation of something with its actuality, then we are not able to deal with anything in art beyond flowers and teddy bears.  I don't honestly think that the people who oppose Exhibit B believe this.  The controversy has tended to couple their reaction to the "human zoo" with the fact that Brett Bailey is a white South African - and I suspect that this may be the more important strand.  Who represents?  Who has the right to represent?  Who is being addressed in that representation?  These seem to me to be the underlying issues.  Perhaps what is genuinely discomforting about Exhibit B is that the perceived hierarchy of white director and black performers could be seen to perpetuate racial hierarchies and divisions - particularly if the audience is also predominantly white (and, at Macbeth last week, it was).  After all, Twelve Years a Slave was very graphic in its representation of slavery and racial violence, but nobody called for the film to be banned.  But this was the work of a black director.  There's a good (and by no means uncritical) essay about this aspect of Bailey's exhibits by Nathanael M. Vlachos - click here.  A key point that Vlachos makes is that the black performers look out of the tableaux at the audience with great intensity, deliberately inverting and subverting the conventional gaze.  It is the white spectator who is "on view" and made the object of scrutiny in this work.

I acknowledge the problem of "the white director".  Indeed, I live with it on a daily basis.  I accept that the horrors of colonial history and the neo-colonial present will have a different emotional impact on those people whose ancestors were slaves from those whose ancestors were slave-owners.  But that does not mean that only black people can talk about this.  Indeed, I would argue that it makes it essential that everybody talks about it, and that the conversation is had between races and cultures, so as to find a way of dealing with this divisive history and jointly exploring a way to move forward.  To bar any one group of artists from engaging with such subjects on the grounds of their ethnic origin seems to me far more problematic than anything they might or might not say.

While I, and the rest of the London audience, have been denied the opportunity to see this work and engage with it directly, I do know a number of people who saw it in Edinburgh.  Lyn Gardner's response is worth a look...  So is Amy Bonsall's.  Dione Joseph, who critiques performance from a non-white perspective, was disturbed by the piece, and particularly by the element of silence.  She did not like the fact that nobody spoke - either performers or audience.  Not having experienced it, I'm unsure: the silence might perhaps give a sense of black performers and critical audiences being silenced - it might equally create a powerful metaphor of oppression and a space for deep personal contemplation, even for mourning.  What I can say with certainty is this: that on this occasion, the voices that shout loudest have been allowed to triumph, and have silenced both artistic expression and critical response.  It suggests that, in a world dominated by the media clamour, there is no space for that silence that is far more profound than noise.

Praise Singing

We had our sharing session for the workshop this morning. David, and Jane from the Botswana Society for the Arts, pulled in a reasonable crowd of interested people, with the actors' friends and families (including one rather embarassed mother) making up the rest of the audience. I had been feeling a bit nervous about this event - it's always a bit strange to show work which isn't made with the purpose of performance - but in fact the audience was incredibly responsive. We showed a number of the movement-based exercises we'd been working on, including a lovely performance of posed tableaux, and some of the mini-plays that had been made in response to various creative stimuli. As when they were first formed, I was surprised and delighted by the specifically Botswanan feel of these - the sense that we'd managed to tap into the psyche of the place. The cumulative effect reminded me a bit of Third World Bunfight - the rapid shifts between the spiritual, the farcical, the political and the personal is very exciting in this environment. As so often at the end of a workshop, I was left wanting to carry on, and to see whether this work might become a piece of theatre. David, Jane and I are having a meeting on Monday morning to see what we can plan... who knows? The British Council people, who paid for my flight here, came in during the week, and the director of the Alliance Francaise was here this morning, and seemed to enjoy herself.

At the end of the showing, Jane got me to present certificates in a slightly headmaster-ish way - they looked nice with lots of logos on them and everybody seemed happy. One of the actors, Emmanuel, made a speech about how they could go on to develop what they had learnt. And then came the moving moment. Kagosi, who seems to be one of the shyer members of the group, began to show his real talent as a Praise Singer, improvising in Setwana as the others ululated and danced around him. In spite of not understanding a word of it, I realised that this was a very rare and special honour - that I was being praised by a Praise Singer. They certainly know how to make you feel wanted here. Later, David told me the poem included jokes about Kagosi's limited English, and his desire to be cast in a production in London (there was lots of laughter from the other actors and the audience).

Beautiful and humbling. Thank you fabulous artists.

Arrival in Botswana

I'm typing this in Prof. David Kerr's office at the University of Botswana. I arrived here yesterday, via Jo'berg, to run a workshop for a mixed group of David's students and the Botswana Society for the Arts. It's an initial dipping of toes in Botswanan waters - and I'm feeling very excited about it!

David is an extraordinary man: an academic, a director and an activist, who has devoted his life to working in Southern Africa. He's spent two long periods in Malawi, where he met Kate Stafford, and she introduced us when he visited London a while ago. Since then he's been on our mailing list, and when he saw the level of intercultural engagement we were making with Re-Orientations, along came an invitation to come here and see what could be done. Thanks to the British Council for the funding!

David and his Zambian wife Adela met me at the airport, and took me straight to an arts and crafts centre called Batswanacrafts, where there was a schools competition going on in traditional dance. There's less drumming here than in many other parts of Africa - the rhythms come from clapping and rattles on the feet. It's very mesmerising, all the same. David tells me about a time he was working on a scene about traditional healing with a student group, and one student really did go into the trance state that the rhythms are designed to induce. It reminds me of Brett's work with Third World Bunfight - the emphasis on altered states of consciousness.

Much of the theatre which is done here is issue-based, particularly TfD work and HIV /AIDS awareness (with a 25% infection rate, that's no big surprise). I read a couple of the devised pieces David has made with his students - one of which is in the African Theatre volume on Youth, and the other is a recent piece about homophobia, called Straight and Narrow. It's not illegal to be gay here, but homosexual acts are... which must be pretty tricky. David says that even five years ago, it would have been impossible to do this play, but that now it seemed easy: even the straight actors were willing to play gay characters. On the other hand, there are negative aspects to this new distance which younger Batswana are acquiring from tradition - they don't, for example, know the traditional songs, there's a cultural limbo. All of which could make for a fascinating workshop. And I start tomorrow....