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.

EcoCentrix and Namatjira

This year's Origins Festival is refusing to go away.  Although the intense period of Festival activity ended on November 3rd, there was a further week of the EcoCentrix exhibition at Bargehouse, and from tonight to Friday, Namatjira plays at the Purcell Room.

EcoCentrix was a very exciting partnership for us: the chance to help present an exhibition curated by Helen Gilbert and her team on the Indigeneity Project, who have been researching indigenous performance and its place in the contemporary world for as long as we have been running the festival.  There were many overlaps in material, of course - work by Marrugeku, Fiona Foley, Rosanna Raymond and Victoria Hunt was in the exhibition as well as the Festival, and Rita Leistner's images from The Edward Curtis Project related to the themes she and Marie Clements had explored at the Origins workshop in 2011 (itself based on the play and images shown in Vancouver the year before…  journeys, journeys…).  But perhaps even more important than this was the way in which EcoCentrix was able to expand the range of what was on show - allowing audiences to look at indigenous performance in relation to its space, land and culture, and to think about the key issue of sustainability in new and surprising ways.

One of the many things which indigenous cultures are really good at, indeed one of the things which seems to me to define their particular place in the contemporary cultural ecology, is making new things out of old things.  That can be on a really basic level - a bit of packaging becomes a puppet, a discarded pot morphs into a ceremonial drum.  But it can also be on a much more complex level of high culture, where ancient ideas can be adapted and re-contextualised to operate in relation to modernity, losing none of their power in the process.  Indeed, what emerged most strongly in EcoCentrix was the way in which this process leads to a gain in power - the way an idea or image embedded in time and cultural continuity is renewed and regenerated by its being related to modernity.  It doesn't feel obsolete at all, but relevant and immediate.

Namatjira is also about this idea.  A great Aboriginal artist, Albert Namatjira was regarded as fit to sit alongside white Australians (and was the first indigenous person to become a citizen of his own country) because he painted in a style which could be recognised and understood by Europeans.  But that does not undermine the indigenous sensibility in what he did.  If you see his work at the Royal Academy, it leaps out from the European imagery around it, demonstrating a completely distinct approach to landscape, colour and the spiritual life and energy of country.  He stood in a continuum of ancient culture - but made it of the moment when he lived, intersecting with the wider world, utterly new and unique.  I suppose that's the essence of creativity.