This Flesh is Mine: a playwright's response

This Flesh is Mine: Iman Aoun as Hecuba.  Photo: Richard Davenport

This is a guest blog, written by Tim Grana, who contacted us after seeing This Flesh is Mine.  Tim is a playwright residing in St. Albans and currently working on a Shandean play based on the life of Laurence Sterne.

I did not ‘see’ This Flesh is Mine: rather, I was utterly immersed in a thoroughly gripping and visceral experience of what theatre—and only theatre—can, at its very best, do in illuminating and enriching our understanding of humanity.  It was a magnificent production of a brilliant play, one that not only captures the senses and emotions during performance but continues to resonate in the mind thereafter, confronting us as it does with those unquiet questions that will not be stilled by facile answers.   

Among the play’s many remarkable achievements is the seeming effortlessness with which it immediately conducts a modern audience into a genuinely ‘Homeric’ world. But not in the sense of an ‘adaptation’: it is a full-bodied re-creation of what it must have been for an ancient audience hearing a minstrel singing the Iliad: thrilling stuff, bursting with vitality, energy— with drama-- nothing like the often stilted or literary translations that we know.  This Flesh is Mine follows the Iliad in tapping down into the deepest strata of raw humanity, in precise and economical verse pitch-perfect to each character, and thereby unearths the fundamental drama inherent from the conflicting drives of our human nature.

The play takes us into a timeless realm of human universals, our modern world and the world of antiquity bleeding into one another by degrees, for human emotion is both timeless and universal, whether in actions of heroism or folly, or capacity for insight or self-delusion.  There really isn’t any ‘partisanship’ in Homer, in that the Trojans can be as heroic (and as foolish) as the Greeks, everyone can offer ‘good’ reasons for foolish actions, and there is something in the human condition that ever pulls us into tragedy if we are not wary—and often enough, even when we do perceive that risk but cannot find the saving graces of compassion, and forgiveness.  And that, I think, is how this play, which draws so deeply from the ancient wisdom of Homer’s drama, can speak so eloquently to our modern times.  There is no simple mapping of the players of the Trojan War onto the current parties of the Middle East, but there is a compelling illumination of human folly, intransigence, machismo—but also the faint but precious flickers of real courage, insight, and humility without which we must all perish.  It’s remarkable that there really aren’t any villains in Homer, just human folly, and an acknowledgement of the inevitability of that folly:  we can at once celebrate Achilles’ courage, strength and valour while witnessing the horror and devastation such ‘virtues’ unleash.  The play brought to mind a favourite quote from the American Civil War leader, Robert E. Lee: “It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it.”  

Andrew French as Achilles.  Photo: Richard Davenport

The characterisations of Achilles and of Hecuba were particular highlights for me, compelling and complex characters, with different facets of their inner selves coming into view as the play progressed.   Achilles remained attractive and sympathetic to us even in his most deluded and petulant moments—even, indeed, when desecrating the corpse of Hector.  And the depths of strength, sorrow, and suppressed rage that would bubble up from within Hecuba were among some of the strongest moments for me.

Many other delights in the play could be highlighted:  the skilled portrayal of the complex relationship between Achilles and Patroclus, or the playful suggestion that the hunt for Helen would be as futile as that for the phantom WMDs of Saddam—and by extension, that to search for ‘cause’ in conflicts that may have been raging even before our own births may do nothing to resolve them. 

 In one brief moment only did I feel the play lose a little focus, in the scene in which Patroclus seeks to borrow the unmistakable armour of Achilles, for he “cannot stand by”, as Achilles in his wrath can, while their fellow Achaeans are perishing in the face of the Trojan counterattack.  Achilles agrees to Patroclus’ request—too easily, I felt—and helps him don it for battle.  But on reflection I think this was not a fault in either the script or the performance, but for once simply in the distance between Homer’s world and our own.  As consuming as his wrath toward Agamemnon may be, Achilles’ love for Patroclus is greater—and through that love he acknowledges Patroclus’ need to fight for the sake of his own sense of honour.  If this is not too trivial an analogy, I suppose this must be something like the love that compels us, despite our fear, to loan the car keys to the teenaged son who has freshly won his driving licence. 

My one significant crit would be:  this play needs a longer run and a much wider audience. Even more specifically, I think Messers Bush, Blair, and Netanyahu should be compelled to attend a performance—and in an ideal world, that performance in a prison in which those gentlemen were detained without possibility of parole.  Well, like Achilles, I say, “A man can dream…”

Tim Grana

The matter of Visas

Edward Muallem and Razan Alazzeh recording a scene for This Flesh is Mine

Now that a week has passed since the last performance of This Flesh is Mine (last for now, I should probably say), I feel I can finally talk a bit in public about the fact that two of our Palestinian colleagues, Razan Alazzeh and Emile André, didn't make it to London.  If you came to the show and got a programme, you will have seen that their roles were taken, at the last minute, by two very proficient Arabic actors based in London, Jumaan Short and Tariq Jordan.  Somehow we managed to find them within 24 hours of our return to London from Ramallah - so they had a week to work on the play before it went in front of a London audience.  That happened also to be the week when we were doing technical and dress rehearsals - but it is actually possible for an actor to step in to a production at that stage, because the production itself is already very formed, so they can work everything out much more quickly from all that is going on around them.  I was lucky that the two actors hardly every coincided on stage - so they could respond to other performers who had already worked for a month. All of which meant that Razan and Emile continued, in a way, to be very present in the piece.  Jumaan and Tariq did not give the same performances - far from it - but the ghosts of those performances, and the experience that those Palestinian actors brought to the roles, informed every moment of the play.

What had happened was that their visa applications had been rejected - we found out the morning after our wonderful preview performances in Ramallah, the day before we were due to fly home.  It wasn't a case of direct political interference to prevent Palestinian performers coming to London - though that wouldn't have surprised me in a climate where the ENO was unable to bring Abbas Kiarostami from Iran, and the Lebanese authorities have recently confiscated the passport of Lucien Bourjeily to stop him participating in LIFT.  Nevertheless, it was political, in way that is more subtle and so all the more insidious.

Put simply, the forms weren't filled in correctly.  The Ashtar administrators sent a supporting letter from us, inviting the performers to appear in the play, and ticked the box saying "tourist visa".  They should, of course, have ticked "business".  Why didn't they?  Well - Ashtar previously came to London in 2012, to present Richard II as part of the Globe to Globe Festival; and the events of the Cultural Olympiad were given a special dispensation - a tourist visa and a letter of invitation were considered enough, even for Palestinians.  It's not surprising that, having done this once, the company thought it would be a simple matter to do the same again.

My question is this: why was 2012 a special case?  During the Olympics, we wanted to show that London was an international cultural capital, that it welcomed artists, that it welcomed the world.  But that is clearly not the default position.  In fact, it's just a lie.  For a few weeks, when it suited the PR campaign, the doors were open.  The default position, to which we immediately returned, is one of suspicion and xenophobia.  If there is any excuse not to grant a visa, it will not be granted.

Something similar happened to us in 2007, when a group of Ghanian performers were denied visas because one of them, having been born in a rural area, did not know her date of birth.  On that occasion, the British Council in Accra made the case to the Consulate, and the decision was at once overturned.  This time, even though the British Council was actively (and financially) involved in the project, they could do nothing.  Because the visa service now has very little to do with the Consular Service.  It has been "out-sourced".  Privatised.

The spin around privatisation is always that it saves red tape and cuts costs.  Our experience indicates quite the opposite.  The privatised visa system is clearly much MORE bureaucratic and impersonal than the public one.  It is also much more of a drain on the public purse: the British Council's investment in flights for these Palestinian actors was largely wasted as a result of the visa decision.  So one arm of government undermines another.  Hardly the way to cut the deficit.

Two more facts - just to underline the absurdity of the whole thing.  Razan lives in Paris, though she retains her Palestinian citizenship.  So, when she didn't get the visa, we thought we could simply buy her a connecting flight from Heathrow to get her home.  No.  Palestinians need a visa even to transit through a UK airport.  So that was a whole new flight that had to be bought.  However, one of our Palestinian actors, Iman, was able to travel to the UK with us.  Why?  Because, by accident of residency in the disputed territory of Jerusalem, she is able to travel under an Israeli passport.  And, of course, Israelis can travel to and do business in the UK without a visa.  They are above suspicion.

Where do you stand?

Iman Aoun as Hecuba.  Photo: Richard Davenport

This Flesh is Mine has been running since Monday, and the response has been overwhelming.  The Guardian has a great piece by Ellie Violet Bramley about the making of the show and its relevance to the conflicts in Palestine, which is the main Editor's Pick today!  It highlights one of the main issues in the production - how it complicates the audience's relationship to the geo-political significance of the Middle East.

What's very exciting, watching the audience in the site-specific space at Testbed 1, is realising how the experience of the production itself leads to specific decisions.  Because there are no assigned seats, and the audience is free to move through the space, sitting or standing as they wish, their view of the events in the play is determined (quite literally) by where they stand.  You can be close to one of the stages, intimately engaged with the scene - or you can take up a perch on a distant sofa; or remain in the first space, seated at a regimented table, deliberately detached from the unfolding action.  You can lean on a pillar, sit on the floor, or move so that your viewpoint changes during the scene.  And all of this is political.

I hadn't planned this.  I had thought that the audience would essentially move in a block between spaces - but what in fact happens is much more interesting.  There is a clear awareness that the dynamics of the space as a whole encourage different types of engagement with the story - and this energy is disturbing and inspiring for the audience.  You become implicated in the piece's Middle Eastern resonance, whether by being detached or by being fully engaged.  The play in any case problematises Achilles' "liberal" stance as the man from the invading force who refuses to fight - and this knocks on into the audience.  It's a really extraordinary thing - and it could only happen in the form of live theatre.

Sunday's show will add to this, when "Two Schmucks, Three Opinions" (blogged here a few months ago) gets presented as a 12 noon show with lunch before the 4pm performance.  It's a fantastic way to approach the debate!

Ramallah audience acclaims "This Flesh is Mine"

Here are a few responses from the audience in Palestine for our previews of This Flesh is Mine.

"Incredible.  I'm speechless in all honesty.  My heart was racing throughout the entire thing.  The emotion was overwhelming.  Tremendously inspiring."
"I loved this play.  It grasped my attention for every second."
"It had so many conflicts and the actors were more than perfect."
"It proves that mythology has been able to address human souls and dilemmas throughout time.  The performance was great."
"An astonishing mixing and understanding of both Israeli politics and the Palestinian mentality and behaviour."
"It is really great to see English and Palestinian actors work together with the source of the great Greek theatre.  We need more co-operation in the future."
"It was treasurable, modern and creative.  The actors were astonishing.  Actually, this is the first time I visit a theatre so I'm happy."
"I think that the play links with our situation in Palestine.  Particularly when it comes to fighting and power relations.  You bring an old story and tie it with the issues of the world nowadays."
"That was the craziest f***ing thing I've ever seen!  Loved the modern elements as the play went on.  Seriously you guys were amazing!"

An actor in Ramallah

The skyline of Jerusalem

This is a Guest Blog by actor Gerrard McArthur, who will be playing Priam and Phoenix in This Flesh is Mine.  Gerrard is currently rehearsing the play with Border Crossings and Ashtar Theatre in Ramallah, Palestine.

 

A blazing day in Palestine, green tea with mint, goats bleating on the roof blending with the call to prayer, a sustained, graceful, wandering colour in the white heat.

 

Just snatching a coffee outside rehearsal in the shade - it's remarkable here, to live among the oppressed & to live in a no place; very Augusto Boal... Kindness & life exude from these people like the blooming violet flowers that sprout along the roadside rubble, articulate survivalists, with angry grace.  

 

Traffic more alarming than Rome, a hooting gallery, just about keeping to the roads; pedestrians walking at will as if the raging cars were pesky gnats.  

 

Was in Jerusalem at Easter. Black & white into COLOUR, and frenzy and fervour and focused chaos: a sense of Holy Rock (Gig) about it, packed into the small square of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, as each religion processes around it and in and out again, in a rough-theatre rotation sounding to the deepest of the Sepulchre's sacred tolling bell, people reaching out to passing sacred objects and then a laughing out to passing processing friends; inside, weeping women at the site of the washing of Jesus' body, a short step away from the crack in the stone of Golgotha, a short step away from the kissing of the true remains of the Holy Cross, a short step away from Jesus' tomb - these biggest events of the Christian story so compressed together in the stone tunnels and broadening archways, it seems like an extraordinary Christian convenience store, like Christo Metro... 

 

In burning daylight the next day back into the narrow confining tunnel-like stone streets of Jerusalem, part bazaar, sometimes walking on shiny rubbed levels of the seven layers of destroyed Jerusalems that are like emerging ribs of the corpse of lost cities, 2000 years old.  

At the top of the narrow walled way that is the Via Dolorosa, we spy a vantage point above us atop the Austrian Hospice, enter in the coolness and climb the stairs of the hushed sanatorium to come out again into the white light on to a wide, flat terrace with a breathtaking David Lean CinemaScope vision of the entire Holy City, astonishingly cramped and crammed, a pressed piling of small rounded cupolas on ancient houses to the dominating Gold of the Dome of the Rock....

Culture in Palestine

Actor David Broughton-Davies looking out across Ramallah

In Arabic, the word for "home" and the word for "poem" are the same - bait.  I suppose "home" and "poem" are similar in English too, holding within them the sacred "om" sound that echoes through so many languages; but the discovery that in Arabic the words are identical has helped me to focus some of the thoughts that this time in Palestine has been provoking. It has helped me to understand the huge importance of culture here.

The great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish writes in A Cloud in My Hand of the close identification between land and language, the way in which the place and tongue of both are, or should be, central to the formation of human identity:

"The place was prepared for his birth:
his grandfather's hill of sweet basil
with views to the east and west.
God's olive trees rising with the language."

But, for the Palestinian people, home is an absence.  The nakbar (catastrophe) of 1948, which drove so many of them from their homes, made land and its role in the creation of identity at best provisional.  And so the role of the poem, the other side of bait, has become absolutely central to the creation and the preservation of identity.  If Palestinian culture is undermined, then there will be no Palestine.  And so every cultural event, every educational event, every poem, play and song, is an act of resistance and resilience.  That is why, in total contradiction to the image presented in the western media, Palestine is probably the most culturally vibrant space I have ever encountered.  Everyone you meet here is deeply informed about history and culture: everyone is actively engaged in the preservation and regeneration of culture.  The young are proud of the learning they receive, and embrace their provisional status as a work in progress - their lives as a process of self-fashioning.  It is extraordinarily moving.  And very salutary to those of us whose cultures are being steadily eroded and commodified. 

The play we are rehearsing here with Ashtar Theatre, This Flesh is Mine, is also very much about creation and debasement of language, about exile and the right to remain, about home and poem.  One of the three English actors, Andrew French, said to me last night that we could not have done it justice had we not rehearsed in Palestine.  He is absolutely right. 

Approach to Ramallah

The wall outside Ramallah

For a week now, I've been in Ramallah, rehearsing our new production of This Flesh is Mine with our friends at Ashtar Theatre.  The collaboration has been in the wind for some time, and it's very exciting for us all that it is finally happening.  The play is loosely based on Homer's Iliad - and has very powerful resonance here, where people know very well what it feels like to live through a prolonged siege.

I'm here with three UK actors - Andrew French, Gerrard McArthur and David Broughton-Davies - and we are working closely with three actors from the Ashtar Company - Iman Aoun, Razan Alazzeh and Emile André - plus an assistant director, Rana Burqan.  Iman is also the Artistic Director of Ashtar, and it was she, with her husband Edward Muallem, who met us from the plane in Tel Aviv last week.  The drive was an education in itself.  The further we moved from Tel Aviv, the more barbed wire started to appear by the sides of the road.  As we got closer to the Palestinian Territories, the famous wall, erected by Israel to segregate the West Bank, came into view.  Ramallah, which is the de facto capital of Palestine, is entered through the Qalandia checkpoint - a mass of concrete, barbed wire and heavily armed Israeli soldiers, with very narrow lanes for the vast amount of traffic that needs to pass.  They don't check your papers as you go in - they really check them as you go out.  Because, I suppose, you might want to attack Israel....

Once past the checkpoint, the first area of Ramallah you see is the Qalandia refugee camp.  It's not the usual image of a refugee camp - there are no tents.  The camp has been there since the Nakbar of 1948, and is, in its own way, established.  It is also incredibly cramped and deprived.  In a way, the people living there would not want it to become too like the rest of the city: its temporary, provisional nature is part of their identity, and that is what they need to cling onto.

By contrast, the city itself, while hardly plush, is friendly, lively and very cultured.  In fact, it is one of the most cultured spaces I have ever been to.  Everyone, including young people, is very aware of the details of their history, and the need to assert their clear, separate cultural identity in the world.  They are also very aware that the dominant narrative subverts that identity, labelling them as radical Islamists and nurturers of terrorism.  As the great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish said, there is no-one to speak for the Trojans in this war. 

Iman knew Darwish: he used to come to Ashtar before his death in 2008.  On the first day, she took me to his tomb, and the little museum where his study is preserved.  It is very moving.  The grave sits high above the city, looking across the work in progress that is Ramallah.  And a Palestinian flag flutters in the breeze.

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.

Indoors and Outdoors

The Duchess of Malfi

I was lucky enough to go to the new Sam Wannamaker Playhouse at the Globe recently, to see its opening production, The Duchess of Malfi.  I've always had a soft spot for Webster - if that's the right term...  not least because my first ever professional production was The White Devil.  Never believed in making life easy for myself.  Not that this particular evening was really about the play - except in so far as it made sense to choose a piece that took place mainly in the dark.

The production is a fascinating experiment in how the indoor theatres of the Jacobean period might have functioned - and it suggests that this new space may well prove even more revelatory than the restored Globe has done.  After all, most of the great plays of the Jacobean age (including the major Shakespearean tragedies) started out in spaces like this - only moving to the Globe stage later on.  I often wonder how a play like Malfi or Macbeth would have coped with the transfer.  This Malfi is occasionally illuminated by the artificial "daylight" that comes through the playhouse windows, but most of the time the shutters are closed, and the space relies on an ever-shifting palette of candlelight.  There are chandeliers that fly from high above the stage to the level of the actors feet - candles on pillars, candles held by the performers.  There is a whole bank of votive candles illuminating the wax effigy of Antonio and the children.  And, of course, there is darkness - real, total darkness, when Ferdinand gives his sister the dead man's hand.  What is really wonderful is the way the candlelight reflects off the gilding which is so present in the decoration of the space, and the jewelled costumes of the performers.  In the 17th century, there would have been just as much metallic glitter on the clothes of the audience, which must have generated a magical glow, and a sense of complicity between stage and auditorium, as both areas were caught in an elevated, transformed, religiose world.

King Lear

I was still thinking about this when I saw the National's King Lear a week later.  Sam Mendes has read it in part as a play about homelessness, and that's fascinating, given the preoccupation of the Jacobean stage with indoors and outdoors.  Lear in an indoor space like the Wannamaker would be the intimate family drama of the interior: Lear in the Olivier is closer to the Globe - demanding acting that defies the scale of open space.  But the secret of the play is surely in the dialectic set up between the two - the sense of home, of family, even of love, set against the impersonal vastness of the elements and the implacable amorality of an atavistic universe bereft of gods.

Competing Ideologies - 12 Years a Slave

The fact that 12 Years a Slave won Best Film at the Golden Globes without picking up a Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress or even Best Supporting Actor has caused quite a stir in critical circles and on the web.  You can see why.  The whole "awards season" is based on the idea of certain films "cleaning up", triumphantly proclaiming that they have all the prime cuts, allowing the marketers to blaze "Awarded 12 Oscars" across the publicity.  But this year, it seems, things may just be a little different.  12 Years a Slave is undoubtedly the best film of the last twelve months - in fact, it's one of the best films I have ever seen - and one of the reasons it is so good is precisely the same reason that it hasn't been mopping up the individual awards.

Awards for individual attainment crave the showy, the flamboyant.  The Academy loves it when an actor loses huge amounts of weight for a role, or makes some excruciating journey into an abused past, or recreates a known historical personage, or "lives inside the character" on set.  The Method still rules in Hollywood.  But the Method, derived as it is from a psychoanalytical view of the human condition, is diametrically opposed to the sort of films made by Steve McQueen and his collaborators.

In a world view driven by psychoanalysis, everything is about the self.  Human behaviour is explained in terms of insecurities, neuroses, the fact that somebody's mother didn't love them.  It ignores the wider forces - political, economic, even spiritual - that shape the world within which we operate, and which can have a huge effect on our experience of it.  If you are depressed, psychoanalysis tells you to go inside yourself and look for the cure.  The Academy would no doubt applaud the strenuous efforts required to do so.  But perhaps the real reason for the depression may be (for example) the economic structure that causes someone to lose their job and have little chance of finding another.  A reason located outside the subject, not inside the psyche.  And this is what makes the Method so convenient for the political right - all those depressed people just need to pull themselves together, because it's their own fault really.  Give the man an Oscar.

Steve McQueen's work is remarkable for its avoidance of a moral agenda driven by personal psychology, and its privileging of a strange and disturbing factual presentation in the manner of Brecht.  As Sarah Churchwell argued in her Guardian piece on the memoir used as the film's key source, Solomon Northup "repeatedly insists that not all slave-owners were depraved, defending William Ford and others he encountered. These people were not inherently evil; rather, 'the influence of the iniquitous system necessarily fosters an unfeeling and cruel spirit'."

The story of Northup's enslavement is the perfect vehicle for a morally sophisticated piece around this subject.  Because Northup was an educated, middle-class, violin-playing, literate person,  he can be established at the start of the film as a participant in a complex socio-economic system: the more conventional narrative, seen in work like Roots, of the loss of an African Eden and the bringing of an outsider into the corrupt society of slave-owners generates a more simplistic binary (one which has been contested by a number of African writers, perhaps most pointedly by Ama Ata Aidoo in The Dilemma of a Ghost and Anowa).  Northup was kidnapped, and so the nexus into which his life was taken bears a closer resemblance to the narratives of contemporary human trafficking than to those of the Atlantic crossing.  As a result, there is the potential to generate real moral dilemmas in every scene, because there is a commonality of understanding between Northup and the slave-owning characters, as well as the other slaves.  The scene where Northup tries to stop a female slave from mourning so publicly the loss of her children, largely on pragmatic grounds, is extraordinarily complex and eschews easy answers.  These scenes are very involved, very disturbing, and very well acted indeed.  But they are not Methody or showy at all.

P.S.  Yes, I know Michael Fassbender lost huge amounts of weight for Hunger - but even so, his Bobby Sands was not a Method performance, and it was not a psychological film.  Sands starved himself to death for political reasons (and whether you agree with them is another matter).  McQueen and Fassbender are true to that.

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.

1963

It was quite a year, 1963.  If the BBC is to be believed, the most significant of the 50th anniversaries we've been celebrating was the creation of Doctor Who - but I'm inclined to think that the Kennedy assassination, Martin Luther King's Dream speech, the Cuban missile crisis, the arrival of Nelson Mandela on Robben Island and the Beatles' first LP are all a bit more important.  Not that I want to do down Doctor Who.

Philip Larkin said it was the year that sexual intercourse began.  If so, then some people must have got in a few months ahead, because 1963 was also the year when I first saw the light of day.  Which has made this an important anniversary year for me too.

Of course, looking back over 50 years on Planet Earth does tend to make certain events feel more distant.  Doctor Who certainly seems to have been around for ever.  But so many of the other key moments from that year don't seem distant at all - even to me, who had not consciousness of them at the time.  The Dream speech is a defining moment of the contemporary era - a moment which gave definition and articulacy to so many of the battles over inequality and injustice that are still being fought today.  Back in the summer, I was invited to a commemorative event at the US Embassy, with Jesse Jackson speaking and a broad range of advocates for the UK's diversity agenda in the audience: Shami Chakrabarti and Keith Vaz, and a lot of artists.  It was very clear how present and immediate the speech still felt for all of us.  It's very emphatically of the now.

So my 50th year experience is not the form of middle age I had expected.  I had thought that my past would start to seem more distant, because it was.  In fact, it's seemed rather the opposite.  I've started to think of events before 1963 as closer to me, rather than further away.  If 1963 feels like a year which is still very present, then for my parents, who were young adults then, the war that had ended only 18 years before must have felt very immediate indeed.  And for somebody who in 1963 was the age I am now - the First World War would stand in the same relative historical place that the Dream speech does for me.  So next year's centenary is not really about that conflict receding from us, so much as an awareness that it is not actually that distant - that history is not the foreign country where things are done differently that we explore through our schooling, but rather a very present force, shaping our culture, our political context, our very ways of thinking and modes of being.

I've always known this, of course.  But this year has made it seem very immediate and real.

Madiba

Some time ago, we ran a long and complex research and development process around the life of Nelson Mandela.  It's still a project which we intend to realise fully - but we won't do it until we know we can do it full justice.  It may still be some time away.  But today it seemed appropriate to share one short lyric from what will one day be a piece of music theatre about the extraordinary, inspirational figure to whom the world has kissed a fond goodbye.


  All things change.  Nothing is.  All things become.
The sunlight's nightly death gives hope of new dawn.
The carcass of the zebra feeds the soil.
The dry veldt is refreshed by sweetening rainfall.

Our deaths are not an end but a beginning:
the voices of our fathers underground
sing softly through the ashes of this burning
and lay a balm upon a gaping wound.

All things change.  Nothing is.  All things become.
Umkhonto we Sizwe must now be born.
Black Pimpernel, Rivonia's first accused,
Robben Island's hushed forebearing Crusoe.

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.

Two Schmucks, Three Opinions

Steve Tiller, surrounded by food

A while ago, my friend Jonathan Meth got into a Facebook spat with an actor and director called Steve Tiller.  It was about Palestine - a subject about which they are both very impassioned, not least because they are both British and Jewish, in each case secular and non-Zionist.  The Facebook spat turned into three long lunches - each three hours long, in fact.  The conversations over lunch were recorded, and form the basis of a 90 minute dialogue called Two Schmucks, Three Opinions, which I witnessed at St Barnabas Church in Bethnal Green on Friday night.  And it is rather wonderful.

The evening begins with food.  I've been getting more and more interested in how food relates to theatre - we even had a restaurant as a venue for Origins - how the experience of eating together makes the exchange of ideas a simpler matter.  In this instance, the meal reflects the core of the play, and the audience become participants in the lunch that forms the springboard for the exchanges.  The conviviality of this construction is important to the play - because conviviality is its subject.  How, it asks, can the Israeli and Palestinian people live together?  Jonathan and Steve are too nuanced and sophisticated in their thinking to suggest that they have any easy answers to this most intractable of diplomatic problems - but the form they have chosen does at least go some way towards the inescapable conclusion that they need to sit down at the same table and break bread together.

I was sitting next to a young man called Ahmed, who was one of two Palestinians in the room.  As a child of 11, he had been shot by Israeli soldiers, when he and his friends were throwing stones in Gaza.  The bullet had entered his body under the rib cage, and left through his back.  He was very fortunate to have lived.  Sitting next to Ahmed, there was nothing abstract about the political ideas Jonathan and Steve discussed: he embodied their physical reality.  Without the meal and the conversation it brought, I would not have known this.

Jonathan and Steve also bring a physical reality to the discourse.  For one thing, even though they read the transcripts of their lunches, you're constantly aware that they are speaking their own words.  If you know them, you can hear the idiosyncrasies - only Jonathan could say "It's not umbilical at all".  They've left in the overlaps and unfinished interjections, the moments when they say really stupid things - they've edited the conversations but not at the expense of the messiness that characterises what people say in the thick of an impassioned debate.  I don't usually like verbatim theatre - I don't see that language is necessarily given dramatic validity by the fact that a "real person" said it - but in this case, where the parameters are very clear and where the "real people" are also theatre-makers who can structure their transcripts without losing the spontaneity, it becomes closer to a structured improvisation, and it really works.  For another thing, they begin the piece by locating the politics firmly in their own physical presences as Jewish men - Jonathan rather disconcertingly describes his circumcision at the age of 8 days at the very beginning, and you can't get much more visceral than that.

So - the politics felt very real in the room.  And the questions - horribly insoluble.  The last part of the evening passes the debate to the audience, and there was a clear sense from everyone that the need was for Israel, somehow, to change its way of thinking about the Palestinian people, to recognise them as inhabitants of the same land, to include them in a single, cross-cultural, secular state.  Is there a role for non-Israeli Jews in this, I asked them?  The answer was that they could do as they had - invite people to dinner, debate in public, open the discourse.  It's true, of course.  It's the only way.

Truth and Reconciliation

Samoan ava ceremony at The Origin of Origins.  Photo: Nick Moran

It's an incredibly rich and stimulating time at the Origins Festival.  More than ever, this third outing has managed to combine some really incredible performances and films with a real depth and passion in discussion - an intense engagement with the cultures and the issues explored.

Truth and Reconciliation is a big theme this year, and Tuesday evening at Rich Mix really explored this, with Justice Murray Sinclair of Canada's Truth Commission joining us by Skype, plus remarkable films and the music of Indigie-Femme.  I was very struck by Justice Sinclair's remark that Truth was something the victims could tell - but that any process of reconciliation actually has to start from the perpetrator.  In a way, that's what the festival is all about: westerners have to become actively engaged with indigenous cultures, and recognise the harms that have been done to them in the name of our absurd drive for wealth.   We have to find a new way jointly to inhabit the planet.

When My Spirit Raised Its Hands

Tonight's opening, Diane Benson's play When My Spirit Raised its Hands, is a further contribution to this.  Already Diane has been a powerful presence at our Festival, pointing out the parallels between the Alaskan Tlingit experience and that of Australian Aboriginals in her response to Fiona Foley's brilliant lecture on Wednesday.  Her play, which is at Rich Mix till Sunday, explores the Civil Rights movement in Alaska, and gives a rare (perhaps even unique) insight into Tlingit life and culture.  Diane is not only a theatre-maker, she is also a political leader - the adversary of Sarah Palin!  And that's got to be a good thing....

The Origin of Origins

The smoking ceremony.  Photo: Nick Moran

Origins 2013 got off to an amazing start on Wednesday night, with the Bargehouse packed to bursting for an Aboriginal Australian smoking ceremony, a Samoan ava ceremony, and performances from Suara Indonesia Dance, Baila Peru and Indigie Femme.  With a fantastic indigenous buffet by our partner restaurant Mestizo, there was a great sense of conviviality!

Suara Indonesian Dance.  Photo: Nick Moran

The ava ceremony is a Samoan welcome, in which honoured guests are called and offered the powerful, slightly numbing, cup of ava.  Our guests included Fiona Foley, Tasha and Elena from Indigie Femme, Victoria Hunt, Michael Greyeyes, Coll Thrush and Gabe Hughes.  Gabe is the first Rhodes Scholar from the First Nations of Canada - and she responded to the ava with a traditional honour song.  All in all, a remarkable night, which sent Twitter ecstatic!

Thursday saw us back at Bargehouse for the opening of the EcoCentrix exhibition.  Helen Gilbert has brought together some truly amazing works of art, which on the first night included a live art piece by Victoria Hunt!  Highlights are The Edward Curtis Project images by our old friend Rita Leistner, and an amazing installation of red dresses, highlighting the disappearances of First Nations women in North America.  Four floors of riches....

Copper Promises.  Photo: Heidrun Lohr

Last night, Copper Promises opened at The Place.  It's only on for two shows, so by the time you read this, it may be over, but if it isn't - go.  It's beautiful beyond belief: intense, spiritual, concentrated, and full of technical wizardry.  At the post-show talk, Victoria talked about the process by which she made the piece - opening herself to influences and possibilities, rather than imposing herself on the material.  And the fact that the piece is being shown in the UK gave it added power - as Hinemihi, the Maori meeting house at the centre of the tale, now sits in the grounds of a Surrey country house....

In solidarity with Indigenous People

With the Origins Festival due to start tomorrow - we reproduce this syndicated article by Laura Finley Ph.D.

Monique Mojica - Staging First Nations.  Photo: Ric Knowles

Last I heard, contracts negotiated between two consenting and capable parties are supposed to be binding, with repercussions if one party violates what has been agreed upon and codified into a legal document.  That is, of course, unless it is the state entering into such agreements with indigenous peoples. Then these legal documents are little more than lip-service, or so it seems, based on the actions of the U.S., Canadian, and other governments who have and continued to trample the rights of indigenous peoples with impunity. Instead of being held accountable to the legally binding agreements they have signed, these governments continue to deprive indigenous peoples of their land, their livelihoods, and their cultures. Worse yet, they have the gall to point the finger at indigenous peoples and their allies who resist this continued destruction of their land and resources, calling them the criminals.

The United States government has negotiated some 600 treaties with Native people, most of which it has violated. As just one example, were it to have adhered to its own agreement, the Lakota Nation would have encompassed much of the western Midwest (and some of the easternmost region of what we now call the West), with the vast resources offered by the land and water in that region. Instead, many Lakota live on reservations (or prisoner of war camps, as they might be called) like Pine Ridge, which is annually one of the most impoverished places in the United States. Unemployment rates run around 70 percent, and as of 2011, almost 50 percent of Pine Ridge residents live below the federal poverty line. Like a third-world country, life expectancy rates hover in the later 40s and early 50s, in stark contrast to the rest of the U.S, where the average women lives to be 81 and the average man to 76. But, when Native peoples have organized, like the American Indian Movement did in the 1960s and 1970s, they are presented as a threat, not as part of the solution.

Canada has done no better. Instead of honoring its agreements to indigenous groups, the Canadian government has stolen the land and poisoned the water, soil, and air in which many from the First Nations live. On October 15, 2013, United Nations special rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples James Anaya issued a scathing report, noting that 20 percent of aboriginal peoples in Canada live in homes in need of serious repairs and that the suicide rate among aboriginal youth is five times greater than that of all Canadians.  Anaya called the situation a “crisis,” and, among other factors, traced it back to Canadian government policies that broke up homes and destroyed indigenous cultures by sending indigenous youth to horrific boarding schools where they were forced to become as White as possible.

But, instead of critically reflecting on Anaya’s report, the Canadian government elected to further oppress this already marginalized group. Just days ago, when indigenous peoples and their allies organized to protest fracking in New Brunswick (a natural gas extraction process that devastates the land and groundwater) the RCMP responded with force. Instead of listening to the voices of indigenous peoples about the Tar Sands pipelines, the Canadian government has criminalized their voices and continues to plunder on.

So, while the U.S. and Canada are two of the wealthiest nations in the world, both should bear the responsibility and pay the price for becoming so through the extraction of resources and land that did not and does not belong to them.

Indigenous people and their supporters have not and will not be silent about these issues.  Groups like Idle No More have organized, taken to the streets, and used traditional indigenous dance and culture as well as teach-ins and other nonviolent direct action to organize communities to speak out about the repressive policies. I was fortunate to hear from representatives from Idle No More recently and to participate in one of their rallies. To call it a humbling experience is an understatement.

For readers who are not familiar with these histories, I implore you to educate yourself. There is far more to the story than I have presented here. When you do, you too will be outraged, and hopefully called to act, to support indigenous peoples as they fight to regain that which is lawfully theirs and to ensure they can raise their children in non-toxic environments. It is the least we can do.

Laura Finley, Ph.D., teaches in the Barry University Department of Sociology & Criminology and is syndicated by PeaceVoice.

Walking First Nations London

Just rehearsed the guided walk for Origins.  It's going to be amazing!  Coll Thrush, who leads it, is an historian from the University of British Columbia, and he is writing a book about the visits made to London by indigenous people - primarily from North America but also from the Pacific - since the first contact between the cultures.  Amazingly, it goes back to 1502 - only ten years after Columbus - when some Inuit seem to have been in London.

Coll leads the walk from Covent Garden, through the areas where the four kings of the Cherokee (pictured, with their alcoholic interpreter) stayed, and the house where the Raleigh circle worked on an orthography for Native American languages.  He takes you to St Martin in the Fields, where the King and Queen of Hawaii once lay in state, draped in cloaks made from the feathers of 90,000 birds of paradise.  He shows you where Pocahontas and her uncle were met by King James and saw a masque by Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones.  He ends up at Westminster Abbey, with an astonishing story about a shaman.

What is especially exciting is how conventional ideas of the two cultures are often reversed.  Many visitors felt that London was a savage and depraved place: one Native American was a priest who came in the 18th century to save the Londoners for Christ.  Many were so disillusioned by what they saw that, like the uncle of Pocahontas, they returned to their own lands determined to lead rebellions against the colonists.  You start to see your own history differently when it's refracted through the eyes of another culture.

There are two walks during the festival - on October 26 and November 2.  Click the links to book!

Australia

Bliss by Fiona Foley

I was lucky enough to get invited to a preview of the RA's new Australia exhibition last week, and to hear the curator Kathleen Soriano, and indigenous artist Christian Thompson talking about it at the High Commission on Friday night.  As much as anything, it's very exciting that there is so much Australian culture, and so much indigenous Australian culture, on show in London this autumn.  There's even a new dedicated website, called Australian Nexus, which exists to bring them all together. And there is Origins, right in the thick of it.  Fiona Foley, whose Lecture is set to be a Festival highlight, has a video piece called Bliss at the centre of the last, most political section of the RA show: it deals with the way in which Aboriginal workers were turned into opium addicts, paid in drugs rather than cash - and it does it through the disturbing medium of beautiful poppies.  Vernon Ah Kee, the designer of Gudirr Gudirr, also has a piece in the show.  And so it goes on.  There's even an essay in the catalogue by Thomas Keneally - who got us interested in Aboriginal culture in the first place, way back in 2003-4 with Bullie's House.

The show begins stunningly, with an evocation of journeying into landscape: a lone motorbike rider drives into the bush, raising his arms in a crucifix.  And then there's a room of beautiful indigenous art - the traditional art of Dreaming, totem and landscape, although some of it has shifted form and medium to be painted on canvas and hung on walls.  The majesty, colour and sheer energy of these works is so powerful that it is difficult to see how the rest of the show can possibly live up to them - and for the first few rooms of European-style art created after the invasion, it emphatically doesn't.  It takes some time to realise that, in a way, this let-down is almost the point: that the settler art, supposedly more "civilised", more "refined", was in fact simplistic and timid by comparison with that of the indigenous culture.

Where the exhibition really takes off again is in the more modern sections, when white artists begin to engage with the reality of the land, rather than imposing a European sensibility; and when indigenous art becomes engaged with the political encounter between the cultures.  Sidney Nolan's series of Ned Kelly paintings are there - much more vibrant and epic in the flesh than in any reproduction (including the exhibition poster, which washes out the colours quite badly).  Albert Namatjira's watercolours are similar acts of cultural boundary-bursting - he uses that most English of forms to paint a landscape about as far from Surrey as you can imagine - and to fulfil his ancestral Dreaming.  Margaret Preston is one of the first non-Indigenous artists to absorb indigenous influences, and as a result her work seems to speak far more clearly of and to the Australian space - geographical, political and spiritual. Her evocation of Adam and Eve as indigenous people exiled from Eden by a white angel is provocative and visceral.

The show ends with Fiona's work, Vernon's Can't Chant (wegrehere) #2 and other pieces exploring the tensions of an emerging, but far from integrated or complete, cross-cultural, post-colonial reality.  Australia is full of tensions - and that is what makes it so culturally dynamic at the present moment.  It's a vital time to be engaged with what is happening there.