Jatinder Verma

Back in 1990, I took my parents to see Tartuffe at the National Theatre. It was a long way from the powdered periwigs and camp capering they had expected. This was Jatinder Verma’s production - the first by any non-white director at the National - and he had, characteristically, set it in 17th century India, and employed an acting style to match the transmogrification. Mudras and accented English offered a perfect parallel to the manners of Moliere’s France, the body language as coded as traditional Asian theatre, the rhyming couplets as sing-song as the “Binglish” delivery that Jatinder drew from his performers.

Jatinder’s presence on a National stage was not simply a progressive gesture by Richard Eyre, embracing the changing ethnic and cultural make-up of 20th century Britain.  It was a statement of intent, from both directors, as to what cultural diversity ought to mean. Jatinder didn’t direct a play from India, or one dealing with Asian people in Britain (although he certainly can do both, and frequently has with Tara Arts). On the National stage, he laid claim to a European classic - and he has many times applied his resolutely distinct Asian style of performance in that genre, including Shakespeare as well as Moliere. He has always been incredibly bold: he states his right to address “our” classic texts, and to do them in his own way. His productions are absolutely about cross-cultural dialogues and interactions - but they emphatically refuse assimilation.

It’s a stance we really need at the moment. Thirty years on from that memorable Tartuffe, the National, and the arts in general, are apparently far more “diverse”, with black and Asian people engaged, and often leading, right across the sector. It’s undoubtedly positive that the arts and culture are more representative of the society from which they emerge. But I can’t help feeling that a lot of this apparent “diversity” is - literally - skin deep, and that people of colour are performing, both on and off stage, in exactly the same way as their white counterparts. I recognise that second and third generation migrants may well feel themselves to be as fully British as white people - but that doesn’t stop me questioning whether it is really “cultural diversity” if the cultural product itself remains essentially unchanged, and therefore the cultural and social assumptions remain intact. It’s very rare nowadays that we see anything as bold, as challenging, as Jatinder’s confrontations with the classics.

Over the years, he has become a friend and an ally. We’ve co-produced CONSUMED with his company Tara Arts, and will be presenting THE GREAT EXPERIMENT in their beautiful new theatre in February. Jatinder and I have had many conversations about the arts landscape, about theatre in Britain, India and Africa, about the politics of the aesthetic. I was genuinely shocked when he emailed on Tuesday morning to say he would be stepping down from Tara at the end of the year.  It feels like the ravens leaving the Tower of London - the company he has run since 1976 feels totally synonymous with him.  I hope we’ll still be able to see his work and to hear his voice: he stands against the blandness and sameness, the complacency that can so easily creep into our art form.

Diverting from Diversity - The Doctor

Joy Richardson and Juliet Stevenson in THE DOCTOR

After the ORIGINS Festival in June, I did an interview for the Westway Trust’s new website, responding to the Festival as a whole, and particularly to brian solomon/ELECTRIC MOOSE’s beautiful community performance, WESTWAY SOLSTICE.  The interview raised the vexed and current question of who can / should / gets to tell particular stories in particular spaces at particular times.  It’s a question that has been worrying me for a while…. 

The current orthodoxy is that theatre about (say) Nigeria should be made by Nigerian people, theatre about China by Chinese people, and so on. In many ways, I’m in total sympathy with this. In 2013, when the RSC was being hauled over the coals for presenting the Chinese classic THE ORPHAN OF ZHAO with only three Asian performers in the cast (variously playing a Maid and two thirds of a dog), Border Crossings was held up as an example of a more positive approach, making CONSUMED with Chinese performers not only playing but creating the Chinese characters, including dialogue in their own language. It was our third co-production with a Chinese company, and representative of our intercultural, collaborative approach. Both in our own productions, and in the visiting performances which we bring to ORIGINS, integrity and authenticity are central to what we do.  

However, there have been occasions when I have been challenged about my own role in making this work. I have been asked whether it is up to me (“as a white male”) to curate Indigenous work for London audiences, to direct and shape the performances of Chinese actor-devisers, to bring a Ghanaian text to the English stage. My response has always been that Border Crossings’ work does not appropriate anyone else’s culture: rather its engages with other cultures in a positive and dialogic way, recognising that we are all part of a globalised world, in which we need a dynamic and democratic interaction between cultures and artists in order to imagine how we can jointly inhabit that global space. I happen to come from one of the the countries that was responsible for the colonial processes that brought globalisation about - but that should not exclude me from the current discussions. If we are to recognise how our histories brought us here, then we had better not exclude anybody. If we want our theatre to make a real difference, even on the most basic “diversity agenda”, then it needs to speak to white audiences as well as black ones; to advocate for inclusivity by demonstrating it - not by ghettoising.

It worries me that British theatre seems currently to be stuck in an unhealthy position, uncomfortably close to racial essentialism. The orthodoxy is becoming that ONLY Chinese people can talk about China, ONLY Rwandan people can talk about Rwanda, ONLY gay or queer people can talk about sexuality….  and so on. While I absolutely do not deny the centrality of viewpoint, it is not healthy or progressive in a multicultural space to set up barriers to participation and engagement.  To exclude white males from the debate simply reverses the status quo: it does not lead us towards the equal space that we should surely crave.  

Robert Icke’s superb production of THE DOCTOR (which I saw recently at the Almeida, and which transfers to the West End in the New Year) suggested a radical re-think in the way theatre responds to “diversity”. It had a very diverse cast - in many different ways, not just racially. However, with the exception of Juliet Stevenson in the central role, and an important scene which was actually about the theorising of viewpoint, the casting was emphatically not done on the basis of race, gender, or other “identity” characteristics.  Indeed, there was a deliberate distancing of the performers from the roles they were playing, with the effect that the audience became actively engaged in a creative and political dialogue with the production. For example, the character FATHER was played by the Irish actor Paul Higgins.  FATHER is a Catholic priest, who Stevenson’s Doctor RUTH prevents from seeing, and giving the Last Rites to a dying girl.  The natural assumption, as the audience hears the actor’s accent, is that the priest is Irish.  So it comes as a shock, a disruption, when we discover through the dialogue that he (the character, not the actor) is black.  Does this change how we think about the situation, we find ourselves asking.  Should it?  Why should the priest’s race make a difference?  If the production had been cast by race and gender, by essentialism, then it would not have been able to raise these important questions about race and gender in such a powerful and disturbing way.  In this instance, it seems to me that the approach to diversity that aims at equality through literal representation is shown to be potentially quite conservative - allowing the audience a complacency around their own liberal assumptions.  

At the heart of Icke’s production was Joy Richardson, who played OLIVIA in our 1999 production of TWELFTH NIGHT, which toured Zimbabwe for the British Council. Joy is a very distinctive figure: a woman of African descent who was born in Guyana. During the play, it slowly emerged that she was playing CHARLIE, RUTH’s lover who died some time before. What was extraordinary was that, even in the closing scenes where this character came to the fore, there was never any indication as to whether CHARLIE was black, white or Asian; female or male (or other). This did not reduce in any way the emotional power of the relationship between RUTH and CHARLIE, or the sorrow of the loss. Indeed, it gave a strange purity to the emotion, precisely because it seemed to move beyond the bounds of “identity”. I’m not suggesting that the play somehow took the audience towards “the universal”, which remains a Western myth, used to subsume other cultures into a Judaeo-Christian world view; but it did suggest that in the most fundamental, physical, emotional and spiritual aspects of our lives, in love and death, there is a common humanity that goes beyond the politics of identity and separation. Love reaches beyond the self - that it the whole point. And death is the one thing we have to agree really is universal.  So perhaps the body, which has come to be read as the signifier of difference through identity, might also be the means by which we come to the next stage of our cultural and political journey.  

Adjoa Andoh as RICHARD II

Theatre is not a literal space: it does not attempt to reproduce reality, or to signify reality through the precise representational approach of film. Rather it constructs a metaphorical space through which we can confront what is strange, constructed and unreal in our own lives.  This is why Brecht deliberately set his plays in metaphorical, distant worlds, revealing the constructed and performed nature of our societies through the medium of theatrical un-reality. That is why, although THE GOOD PERSON OF SZECHUAN is apparently set in China, Jane Horrocks could play Shen-Te and Shui-Ta with impunity - just as Adjoa Andoh was such strong casting as RICHARD II at the Globe.  The freedom to diverge from a literal and essentialised “reality” has to be central to a political theatre that de-constructs the fictions of established structures. 

The delight of this approach to diverse casting is that it avoids the pretence that an audience can simply ignore the physical characteristics of the bodies on stage before them, often called “colour-blind” or “gender-blind” casting. That is just a lie. When somebody stands in front of us, the first things we notice are the physical carriers of identity. As August Wilson put it in his famous 1996 talk “The Ground on Which I Stand”:

“Colourblind casting is an aberrant idea that has never had any validity other than as a tool of the Cultural Imperialists who view American culture, rooted in the icons of European culture, as beyond reproach in its perfection….  For a Black actor to stand on the stage as part of a social milieu that has denied him his gods, his culture, his humanity, his mores, his ideas of himself and the world he lives in, is to be in league with a thousand nay-sayers who wish to corrupt the vigour and spirit of his heart.”  

This is every bit as true of European, including British, culture. A theatre that is alive to the complexities of the current moment will acknowledge the histories that Wilson cites, and will cast performers not to assimilate them all into a tradition of theatre that remains just as it always was, and not merely as literal representations of “real”, “other” identities. The intercultural theatre required by the 21st century will cast people because of who they are, because of what they can bring to a role - but not in the naive way that pretends the performer actually is the person they are representing. It will recognise that the playful nature of the stage offers us the opportunity to read a character through the eyes of a performer - setting up multiple viewpoints on the action and its significance. We need a theatre that opens up our minds and our emotions - not one that reduces our cultural politics to racialised essentialism.  

Don't Let Them Tell You Stories

The Calais Jungle.  Photo: Jamie Wiseman

DON'T LET THEM TELL YOU STORIES is a new play by Brian Woolland, who wrote THE PLAYS OF LOVE AND WAR.  During 2017-19, Brian took part in our project THE PROMISED LAND, looking at the situation of refugees across Europe and Turkey.

The play, written in response, is being given a rehearsed reading at Rich Mix on October 11th at 6.30pm.  The cast is Rachid Sabitri, Olivia Darnley, Ross Hatt, Peyvand Sadeghian and David Furlong, directed by Michael Walling.

Click here for full details - it's free!

Brian Woolland writes:

Whilst participating in THE PROMISED LAND project, I was privileged to have many remarkable conversations with young people recently arrived in Europe from Syria, Iraq, Iran, Nigeria and Mali; conversations which were illuminating, inspirational and deeply challenging to many of my own preconceived notions about 'refugees'.

This play is a response to the project and to those conversations. As the project developed it became increasingly evident that all talk about migration and immigration in simplistic numerical terms is a denial of humanity – of theirs (whoever they might be) and of our own. The play also aims to address the assumption that by creating borders and building walls we can pretend that what’s on the other side is not our concern, not part of our world.

The play is not a documentary drama, and certainly not verbatim theatre, but it does draw heavily on conversations with participants in the project, including those refugees we met in Adana, Bologna, London, Oldenburg and Toulouse. 

I would like to thank all who participated in every way in THE PROMISED LAND project. I am particularly grateful to Micaela Casalboni and Nicola Bonazzi of Teatro dell’ Argine (Bologna) for their richly insightful conversations and inspirational theatre company. And above all to Michael Walling of Border Crossings, for asking me to take part in the project, for our continuing conversations and for organising this rehearsed reading. 

ORIGINS at the Globe - Guest Post by Mei Ann Teo

Madeline Sayet performs WHERE WE BELONG at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse

Monday night was an historic occasion, when Mohegan theatre-maker Madeline Sayet performed her solo piece WHERE WE BELONG at the Globe's Sam Wanamaker Playhouse to a standing ovation.  The play, which deals with Shakespeare, colonialism, personal stories and shifting identities, sat wonderfully in this iconic space, which gave the event a very particular meaning.

Director Mei Ann Teo writes:

June 17, 2019. London.

The last day of our run at Border Crossings' ORIGINS Festival (visionary artistic Director Michael Walling) happens at Shakespeare's Globe. Every time I hear this story, another rich layer emerges, and this time, in this space, I am beside myself.

Maddy's story did something to that space last night. She was not only speaking to the people in the room, but all those who have passed through it, and are buried around and beneath. She was speaking to the walls, embedding them with new DNA. She was also speaking towards the future; speaking to enable us with the tools to have a future, speaking us into understanding, existence, survival, and into thriving/flying.

It wasn't a solo show, no. She was not alone. With her were the people she met in England, the family she came from, many others but most sweetly, the Mohegan chief Mahomet Weyonomon who has a rock memorial in the green grass at Southwark Cathedral.

With her were all of us, witnessing, being transformed through the passion of her struggling with the question "where do we belong" and while there are never any easy answers and endings, I'm finding the courage to decide to make mine, "everywhere".

Pathways Through the Festival 3: Belonging

NO WOMAN'S LAND

The themes of ORIGINS come together in the idea of Belonging. Madeline Sayet’s WHERE WE BELONG (Rich Mix 14-16 June, Shakespeare’s Globe 17 June) offers an Indigenous perspective on Brexit Britain, exploring both the causes and the consequences of the 2016 referendum through the eyes of someone whose culture was colonised by ours.

A CASUAL RECONSTRUCTION (Rich Mix 14-16 June) probes ideas around identity, culture and cultural ownership to offer new ways in which diverse & minority communities might stake a claim to belonging. Similar themes appear in the photographic self-portraits of Meryl McMaster, who is both First Nations and Scottish.  Meryl’s work is part of SUBSTRATA (Baldwin Gallery 4-18 June).  In NO WOMAN’S LAND (The Place 14-15 June), Naulaq LeDrew and Avâtara Ayuso confront the challenge of belonging to an Arctic that is being destroyed by people who seem to think the planet “belongs” to them, and not the other way round.

At the climax of the Festival, WESTWAY SOLSTICE (Maxilla Gardens 21-23 June) will engage with one of London’s most diverse communities, working with Anishinaabe choreographer-in-residence Brian Solomon//ELECTRIC MOOSE to respond to the ground we stand on, the people who live on it, and the lives that live with us.  Belonging, at the deepest level.

Pathways Through the Festival 2: Participation

A CASUAL RECONSTRUCTION

For our 10th anniversary Festival, we have expanded the remit of ORIGINS beyond performance and dialogue, into fully participatory events.  From early May, contemporary First Nations choreographer brian solomon//ELECTRIC MOOSE has been working with the community in North Kensington to create a site-specific dance performance called WESTWAY SOLSTICE (Maxilla Gardens 21-23 June).  Using a large and very diverse cast of local people, Brian’s work draws off his Anishanaabe cultural heritage to generate an intense relationship to land, environment and the body.

At the start of the Festival, Indigenous Australian artist Marree Clarke will be leading a KOPI WORKSHOP (Rich Mix 11-12 June), where you can experience the traditional mourning practices of her people. It’s an extraordinary privilege to work with an Indigenous artist on such an intimate and intense aspect of her culture.  Marree will guide participants through an emotional and spiritual journey, focusing their emotions into the creation of their personal clay cap of mourning.

Moe Clark (no relation!) is a Métis artist from Québec, whose practice ranges from the traditional drum to contemporary electronic music.  As well as performing at THE ORIGINS CONCERT (Rich Mix 13 June), Moe will be the host of KIYOKEWIN (Rich Mix 15 June).  Drawing off the traditional gathering and storytelling events practiced by her Elders (and hidden under the kitchen table because they were banned), KIYOKEWIN uses contemporary technology to bring Elders into a living exchange with Festival-goers in a calm and open space.

Through these participatory experiences, we hope that people might start to think differently about their relationships to culture and locality.

Pathways Through the Festival. 1: Migrations

INO MOXO

From 2017 to 2020, Border Crossings is focussing on the issue of migration, both in our theatre work, our community and education programmes, and in ORIGINS!  From an Indigenous perspective, migration FROM (not to) Britain is the source of current tensions.  Every event in the Festival in some way responds to the history of colonisation, and its ongoing impact on Indigenous people, their cultures, lands and environments.

NO WOMAN'S LAND (The Place – 14-15 June) brings together two migration stories, as Inuk Elder Naulaq LeDrew and Spanish dancer Avâtara Ayuso bring together their hugely different experiences of life in transit.  Naulaq’s migration from the Arctic of her childhood to the Toronto of today has strengthened her desire to preserve her cultural traditions, the Inuktitut language, the music, dance and costumes of the Inuit and the games they play.  It’s also turned her into a climate activist!  As well as appearing in the show, Naluaq will be talking about her culture at the National Maritime Museum and Rich Mix.

Another encounter between two women from different cultural backgrounds is at the heart of A CASUAL RECONSTRUCTION (Rich Mix 14-16 June): in this case Canadian Métis visual artist Nadia Myre and non-Indigenous theatre-maker Johanna Nutter.  Bravely and playfully facing up to challenging issues like cultural appropriation and the politics of race, the performance responds to the complex cultural and ethnic mixing that is the legacy of imperialism.

SONNY ASSU’s extraordinary visual art (Canada House 21 June – 5 September) and brian solomon//ELECTRIC MOOSE’s probing and insightful dance piece THE NDN WAY (Playground Theatre 17 June) are further examples of work that confronts the cultural politics of colonisation. By presenting this work, ORIGINS will broaden debates around migration and diversity to include the ongoing impact of colonial histories, raising questions around cultural ownership, appropriation & the need for dialogue.

There are also, of course, histories of migration in the other direction too: many Indigenous people have visited London across the years.  HIDDEN HISTORIES (National Maritime Museum 19 June) tells some of their stories and relates them to the present day, while Madeline Sayet’s WHERE WE BELONG (Rich Mix 14-16 June, Shakespeare’s Globe 17 June) evokes the memory of her Mohegan ancestors to make sense of her own contemporary experience of London.

The experience of watching INO MOXO (Southbank Centre 15-16 June) is a journey in its own right, as the audience is led up the Amazon in search of the great Ayahuasca shaman Ino Moxo.  Here the migration is internal as well as literal: the Ayahuasca experience inspires a visionary new theatre form that helps us see the world through different eyes.

More Than Words - Dancing in Hungary

At first glance, Hungary is not the most obvious place to run a training week around minority ethnic groups and linguistic diversity.  Even Budapest is an astonishingly homogenous city by the standards of contemporary Europe.  During our day in the city, waiting to catch the plane home, we saw only two darker skinned women.  One of them was selling sunglasses on the street, and the other was emptying the waste bins.  We speculated that they were probably Roma.  In the remote spa town of Cserkeszőlő, where the training took place, there was even less diversity.  Unsmiling and overweight middle-aged couples in white towelling robes prowled the hotel corridors, occasionally dipping themselves in the indoor pool or the outdoor jacuzzi, taking buffet meals and rarely venturing beyond the front door.  On the last day, when I had time to enjoy the outdoor pool with some of the other participants, it was very clear that the people sharing it did not like the fact that there were foreigners in their water.  And when we tried to relax in the evening with an Italian friend’s guitar, the disapproval of noise after 9pm was matched only by the exasperation that these barbaric souls could not even speak Magyar.

So, actually, Cserkeszőlő was the perfect place for this MORE THAN WORDS week.  It was a place where a group of cosmopolitan Europeans, used to intercultural and multilingual spaces, to acceptance and diversity, could experience what it actually feels like to be in a cultural mi-nority.  It was a place where the Magyar tribalism advocated by Viktor Orbán was openly on display, and the famous fences made total, terrifying sense.  It was a place where we tried hard to integrate, and were not made to feel welcome.

And so the training room became at once a sacred space and a refuge - a place where, thanks to the careful leadership of IKTE, we were able to operate as an uninhibited and creative group, and to build a sense of security through the processes of moving together.  It offered a very clear lesson in the potential value of such experiences for people from minority cultures: in the dance workshop, there is a chance to escape from the social stigma of the outsider and to acquire a renewed confidence in the self as a physical presence, and to enjoy being part of an integrated and non-judgemental group.

The Promised Land - A Week in Oldenburg

At the Migration Centre, Oldenburg

Artistic Director Michael Walling reports on THE PROMISED LAND week in Oldenburg:

We spent a lot of time talking about the Shoah.  If you are in Germany, and you’re dealing with questions of cultural diversity, cultural conflict and the presence of the “Other”, then that is to be expected. If you’re also talking about the role of museums, then it becomes inevitable.  German museums, and the German cultural sector more widely, have a crucial role as the guardians of this “cultural memory”.  Holding history and educating society about it, they are charged with ensuring that nothing like the Shoah ever happens again.

This is very important in understanding why Germany has been so exemplary in its response to the (so-called) “refugee crisis” of 2015, and the presence of so many new citizens in its cities since that time.  A highlight of our week in Oldenburg was a visit to the city’s Migrationcenter – a space where refugees were able to learn skills and language in a positive, supportive and well-equipped environment, mentored by experts, with the real expectation of a place in the job market.  We met people on the way to becoming painters, carpenters, metalworkers, dressmakers, hairdressers, warehouse managers, gardeners and cooks.  The Centre Manager explained to me that the German government asked her to justify their funding on the basis of how many people were placed in jobs after training.  It makes perfect sense: invest in new citizens when they arrive so that they come to be contributors to the social and economic space.  It saves a lot of benefit costs and a lot of psychological pain.

The contrast with other countries we have seen during THE PROMISED LAND is very marked.  In the UK, asylum seekers are still not allowed to work, or even to be formally educated or trained.  In Italy, where the situation had seemed a little more positive only a year ago, migrants are now being demonised.  The Reception Centre Opera Padre Marella, which we visited in Bologna, has been told to close by the end of the month.  The young men who were living there will become homeless: Micaela from Teatro dell’Argine tells me that many are simply disappearing into a growing sub-culture, and will no doubt be condemned as morally degenerate when they turn to crime because they have no other way to feed themselves.  In Turkey, where the situation is particularly difficult because of the country’s position as a holding place on the periphery of Europe, we saw Syrians being caricatured as terrorists by Turkish students, even when they were in the same room.  France, where we will be working next, seems as hostile as ever to the presence of minority cultures.

Germany is different BECAUSE of cultural memory.  There is a deep desire to be international and open, a clear moral sense of the danger that comes with “Othering” people from different countries and cultural backgrounds.  If anything proves the constantly reiterated point made by the project team - that the problems faced in Europe around migration are essentially cultural problems in the host population - then it is this.  In a society that recalls with pain and shame what happened when other people were labelled as alien, when it cast itself as culturally and racially superior, then that space of remembrance becomes ready for acceptance and peaceful co-existence.

Of course, Germany is no Utopia.  There are clear economic pressures, and the threat of the AfD is very real.  I found it disturbing that the refugees should themselves be the subject of programmes against anti-Semitism, because they come from Arab countries where there is an understandable objection to Israeli policy towards the Palestinian people.  To subject these traumatised people to images of mass graves in concentration camps is not best practice in cultural education.  But it was heartening to see at IBIS, a refugee organisation we visited, that refugees were being offered specific training in how to counter the threat of the radical right.

Exploring the relationship between Germany’s horror at its own history and the open culture that characterises its present, I perceive an extraordinary contrast with the woeful inadequacy of historical understanding in other European countries.   Germany looks back on the Third Reich with shame: but in France, Italy, Turkey and the UK, an assertive imperial past is still regarded as a matter of pride.  Much of the Brexit discourse has been around Britain being “a great country”, which still seems to regard its past global hegemony as a civilising mission.  Our museum sector and our cultural sector need to learn from Germany: we have to reassess our imperial past for what it was – a plundering of global resources, both material and human, which has resulted in the grotesque inequalities that blight the world today.  We have to confront the systematic massacres of indigenous peoples in Australia, North America and sub-Saharan Africa, the uprooting of people from their lands and the psychological wrecking of their languages and cultures.  We have to get past the comfortable lie that the Shoah was a uniquely evil event in human history.  It was conducted on an industrial scale that was indeed unique – but the underlying urge to destroy those regarded as inferior is common to the imperial projects initiated by European societies across many centuries: projects of which many nations are still taught to be proud.  We have to develop a cultural sector and a museum sector that is inclusive and honest about history: that is what will equip us to deal with the huge dangers of the present.

So it was good that we talked a lot about the Shoah during our week in Germany.  But, at the same time, I felt that the museums we saw were not applying the same sense of cultural responsibility to the present.  We saw an outreach project at Oldenburg Castle, where a group of migrant women had responded artistically to the building, with some really challenging insights – but their work was not incorporated into the narrative of the museum itself.  The Castle retained its identity as the legacy of a “great man” from the 17th century – there was no sense that it might have been built or run by people who were less wealthy, who might have been female, and who might even have come from somewhere else.  Migration and the need for inclusion imply a new understanding of local history that relates the specifics of the locality to the international networks and influences that mould such spaces.  We need to link the local and the global – a process towards which European programmes are well placed to contribute.

It’s odd to find myself responding in this way to North German culture.  After all, this is the land of Lutheranism.  It was here that the Bach Passions were created, offering a lasting example of “great art” that is also participatory, “high culture” that is available to the entire community.  But contemporary Germany still seems to harbour a belief in cultural class divisions: a perturbing exclusivity seemed present in the museum spaces that we saw.

This brings me back to our evening at IBIS, and our morning at the Migrationcenter.  In both cases, the refugees themselves showed us the way towards a culture of welcome.  At IBIS, after they had told us about the centre and its work, we all sat down to eat together, and the young refugee men (they were all men) played music.  They danced – and we danced.  We danced together.  The music was Middle Eastern, and the dance traditional.  If anyone had felt possessive, then this was their culture, not ours.  But they invited us in, and we participated.  And this led us very easily towards the important conversations, to the human stories, to the empathy that makes for acceptance.  One young man told me about his journey across a European border in the back of a van with 38 others crammed into a tiny space, unable to breathe. He talked about kicking the door down, about old people and children collapsing at the roadside, about the driver running away.  Another man talked about an ISIS massacre, and the murder of his grandmother.  They told us this because they wanted us to know, and because they were at ease to speak.  A sharing of culture had facilitated this profound exchange of truth – this most basic necessity for social cohesion and functional democracy.

At the Migrationcenter, we were also invited to participate.  The refugees asked us to plant flowers in their garden to mark our visit, and to write messages on the eye-shaped symbols they had carved, which were then mounted on sticks as an art installation outside the centre.  I found it very moving that this should happen – that it should be them who welcomed us, and not the other way round.  That it was they who drew off collaborative artistic practice to make sense of our presence in what had become their space.

Here is what I wrote on the eye:

The Eye is the Beginning.

Before we can encounter another person
chat with them
eat with them
work with them
vote for them
love them
first we must see them. 

In this symbol, the most basic and necessary act of welcome:
You Are Here.  We See You.

Clowning in Potenza - Guest blog by Sinéad Elinore Emery

During our time together in Potenza I was massively impressed by people being willing to explore, learn and grow with such commitment and trust. I was especially inspired by the learning opportunities provided by combination of professionals in the room, from nurses, to engineers, to architects and youth workers. The unity we felt as a group so very quickly, has made me think of past workshops run cross-discipline and how they failed and faltered, through giving space to too much talking and debate. I for one am guilty of all too often hiding behind the power or distraction of words and failing to embrace the power and precision that communicating non-verbally can manifest and this week was just the reminder I needed to re-wire a touch and refocus elements of my practice.

Since undertaking the training, I have used several of the games we explored during out time in Italy, one of favourites being Ha Ho Hee, which I managed to deliver with 80 young people in one go in Egypt, in a prison with 10 category A offenders and at a 60th birthday party in Ireland. What I loved about this great opener was that it provided a wonderfully powerful physical way of either expelling or gathering energy depending on group or individual needs. I have used this game to invite people to pass on good energy across the circle or rid themselves of their nerves through the clear and strong movements and the bold sounds of the ha, the ho and the hee. Within each of the above examples groups were calmer and more focused having played the game.

When in facilitator mode I often find we can over-explain things that are far better communicated through doing and feeling, as opposed to lengthy verbal instructions. The training in Potenza helped me to reflect on how to incorporate less words in to my facilitation. This came in very handy in my most recent facilitation in Egypt, with large groups of young people. Drawing on some of the nonverbal approaches, I found myself resorting to clear and simple nonverbal cues in place of lots of over-explaining and unclear gesticulation.

My time in Potenza was one the hardest weeks of training I have ever experienced. While I took away a heap of great activity ideas and learnt a lot from the practitioners I met, I went on a challenging personal and professional journey during the sessions. This training taught me to remember the value of letting barriers down – something I do not find comes easy- to be ok with things going out of ‘control’ from time to time – a challenge to a perfectionist, to keep things simple – tricky when you feel the need to cover all bases and above all to be ok with failing and things not working out... In fact this is where the clown thrives, working with the problem instead of around it or away from it….  Speaking of which I don’t think I found my clown this time around but I am OK with that.

Something which came flooding over me after our day out in Matera, interacting with unsuspecting members of the public, was the quality of genuine connections and the sheer volume of compassion in this group, something I found utterly overwhelming - juxtaposed with the disheartening consideration of the absence of connection and compassion in so many aspects and elements of day to day life in this complicated world. I will be making it my mission to play Secret Angel with so many of my groups to come - what a wonderful and touching way to encourage people to connect and consider another being, to observe them and think about how they can silently support them, one small way to combat some of the tough stuff we humans go through…. Powerful.

NATIVE at the Berlinale

VAI

The Berlinale is extraordinary.  A documentary about a Maori woman who herself made documentaries, directed by her son as his first film, might just about squeeze into the London Film Festival in a small venue for what is perceived to be a “niche” audience.  At ORIGINS, we would put it into an intimate cinema and focus on the debate it provokes.  At the Berlinale, MERATA: HOW MUM DECOLONISED THE SCREEN was shown on a Saturday night on a gigantic IMAX screen to a packed cinema, and was followed by a long and effusive Q&A.  The indigenous film-makers continually expressed their thanks to the festival for giving them such an empowering platform, and the audiences for coming in such numbers.

But then, Berlin is a genuinely international city.  I don’t mean that it’s intercultural - it’s less diverse than London or Birmingham - I mean that it sees itself as a space engaged in the global exchange of culture, people and ideas.  Pretty much everyone speaks fluent English, which is the main language of the Festival.  Nobody resents the “Other”.  People are eager to learn and to engage with ways of living very different from their own.  As we prepare to fall off the cliff of Brexit, we should look to Berlin as an example of how we can improve ourselves as a necessarily cosmopolitan society in an intimate global space.  I hope that ORIGINS can contribute to this: the need has never felt more urgent or more extreme.

MERATA was one of two films made by emerging directors about their inspirational mothers.  The other was SHE WHO MUST BE LOVED, by indigenous Australian director Erica Glynn, about her mother Freda, who was a pioneer of indigenous media.  About half way through the film, Freda mentioned her youngest son, Warwick.  A bit later on, she mentioned that she had been briefly married to a certain Bob Thornton….   It was only at the end of the film that Warwick Thornton himself appeared, collecting an award at the Sydney Festival and saying that he owed his film-making success to his mother.  Both the films made it very clear how the close family ties in indigenous families can generate an immense cultural energy.

I was also struck by how little of the ego that characterises Western directors was present in the NATIVE presentations.  VAI, the opening feature, was directed by nine indigenous women, each presenting a ten-minute vignette, portraying a woman called Vai (meaning “water”) at different stages of her life.  They weren’t actually the same woman - she could be many ages in the same era, and moved around the islands of the Pacific - but they were like the same woman, with other people in her family always having the same name, even if their personalities were very different.  Vai, water, flows between Polynesian people and binds them together across the vast Ocean.  And, like this story of common cultures and continues regeneration, the very process of film-making suggested a community approach that puts aggressive individualism in the shade.

2018-19

I didn't write the post that normally ends the year on this blog: although, now I think about it, 2018 was an extraordinary year for Border Crossings.  We found ourselves leading two large-scale European projects, The Promised Land and More Than Words, as well as partnering in a third.  Our photographic exhibition, Pocahontas and After, was visited by more than 20,000 people during its time at Syon House in West London, and won a British Library Labs Award.  It's now on its way to St Andrews...  We offered a whole series of ORIGINS Offshoots events with some amazing partners, including the National Maritime Museum, whose new galleries opened in the autumn, featuring the sound installation that we had jointly commissioned from Tanya Tagaq.  As the year ended, we got the news that the Arts Council will fund us for the 2019 ORIGINS Festival - that's something to look forward to in June!

So - why has it taken me until January 15th even to think about taking stock of the year that has just ended?  Well, today is the date of the "Meaningful Vote" in Parliament, and there is a palpable tension in the air.  Everything we do or try to do in Britain at the moment happens in the shadow of Brexit.  Only weeks before the date when we are due to leave the EU, there is complete uncertainty as to the terms of that departure - indeed, in my more optimistic moments, it seems far from certain that it will happen at all.  Here's hoping.  From the perspective of the company, Brexit is a terrifying paradox: it has the potential to destroy us, and (if it happens) will certainly make it much more difficult to sustain our work.  On the other hand, it makes all that we are doing even more essential.

Over Christmas, I read Fintan O'Toole's brilliant analysis of Brexit: Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain.   What an extraordinary post-colonial irony that it should be an Irishman who provides the clearest insight into what we might call "the English question"!  It's the post-coloniality that is most striking in O'Toole's argument: England, he suggests, has tried to compensate for its colonial history by re-casting itself as the colonised, and for the meagre rewards of World War Two by regarding itself as defeated and invaded.  Brexit is the result of an independence movement against a colonial power that does not exist, and a defence against an invasion that has never happened and never will.

The last days of 2018 underlined his case, when a series of little boats, bearing tiny numbers of desperate refugees, attempted to cross the Channel.  Far from admiring this echo of Dunkirk (O'Toole is very good on the "Dunkirk spirit"), Sajid Javid decided that this was a "major incident", and deployed the Royal Navy.  The over-reaction is comic in its extremity - but it is also characteristic of the present moment.  "We are being invaded, we are under threat, we are the victims.  There is bound to be pain, but it's like the war: the pain is part of our heroism."  Except that the pain is entirely of our own making.

What O'Toole makes abundantly clear is that, while Remain politicians have been obsessed with dire warnings about "the economy, stupid", Leave has understood Brexit for what it truly is - a crisis in culture.  This is what I mean when I say that our work is being made more and more essential by what is happening.  What sort of a culture could accept the representation of a handful of hapless refugees as an invading force?  Only one that has completely lost its sense of reality, one that has been fed an entire bogus mythology.  Whatever happens politically in the coming weeks, the work of recreating our identity for a contemporary, intercultural, globalised space will take a long time, and is very urgent.  It is in the cultural sphere that this turmoil must be resolved.

And that is what Border Crossings does.  The Promised Land is all about the refugee question, and how culture can aid the process of integration, of building new communities in which both established and new citizens have a place.  ORIGINS, Pocahontas And After and The Great Experiment all engage with the mythologies around our colonial past, and seek to redress them through the voices of the colonised.  That's why we have to keep going, however difficult it is likely to be.

Happy New Year, everyone.

Clown

Raffaele Messina

The Clown is radical.  In a space of violence and despair, the Clown makes the outrageous gesture of spontaneous joy.  In the space of pain, suspicion and mistrust, the Clown offers vulnerability and empathy, the healing contact of the compassionate, unbroken gaze.  
 
In 2002, a group of Clowns, led by Patch Adams, went into Kabul to confront the violence unleashed across Afghanistan by George W. Bush and his allies.  The film of their journey is astonishing: it is also deeply upsetting.  In one sequence, a young child is treated for the most horrifying skin injuries.  Among the doctors, offering presence, openness and care, there is a figure in a red nose, holding a balloon.  
 
Earlier this year, as part of THE PROMISED LAND project, we spent a morning with the remarkable organisation Clowns Without Borders, who have been working regularly amongst the refugees across Europe and the Middle East.  To Sam Holdsworth, who runs the UK branch, the presence of the Clown at the moment of arrival is of huge importance in establishing the potential for welcome and moving forward.  As somebody emerges from the sea, there should not only be food, warmth and medical care: there should also be a very simple, very basic, acknowledgment of common humanity.  Even a joke.  How silly, how apparently insignificant.  How serious, how profound. 

In late November, Lucy, Sinead Emery and I went to Potenza in Southern Italy to work with the wonderful Clown Raffaele Messina as part of the MORE THAN WORDS Erasmus + project.  This project looks at how the arts and cultural sectors can engage communities who have little or no knowledge of the local language.  I had expected the week might concentrate on the Clown as a workshop technique, looking at the training methodology as a means to communication without language.  Instead, Raffaele chose something far more basic – how the Clown can be the face of welcome.  How the Clown can offer a sense of something more important than the labours of language learning or the morass of immigration bureaucracy.  How the Clown can be the bridge between people.

Lucy clowns for the locals

As a result, the week felt almost Grotowski-like in its concentration on the self.  We worked on openness and eye contact, on truly seeing inside the other.  We worked on our animal nature, our instinctiveness, the weight or lightness of our bodies in space.  We worked on emotion, and on how to concentrate that emotion into the tiny mask of the red nose.  I had worked a lot with mask before, and knew its potential to drive one personality from the body and allow another, more elemental being to take possession.  I had observed how the great clowns, like Chaplin, were essentially mask actors.  What I had not been prepared for was the totally transformative power of the red nose – the way in which a tiny piece of leather or plastic can open up a buried self: childlike, hilarious, innocent and raw.  Unleashed in the streets of Materra, the Clowns reached out to locals and to tourists, provoking laughter, tenderness and song.  People responded because they felt no threat.  Only joy.  The radical act of joy. 

Bearing Witness

A photo from the Lublin ghetto

In the city of Lublin, in Eastern Poland, in 1992, an avant-garde performance group called NN Theatre was given the use of the city's old Grodzka Gate.  One day an old lady came to see them.  She said she remembered living in the gate as a small child, kept hidden from the outside world.  She had no real knowledge of who she was, and no recollection of her parents.  She did recall that she had been smuggled away, and so she thought that she was probably a Jewish child, who had somehow been protected from the Nazis.

The young Poles who ran the theatre company were astonished and moved.  They had not known about the history of the building they occupied.  It turned out that it had also been known as "the Jewish Gate", and that it led from the old centre of Lublin to what had been the Jewish quarter of the city - an area that the Nazis had completely destroyed.  As a result of this encounter, the theatre company completely changed its course, and set about documenting the Jewish history of their space, so that today it is closer to a museum than a theatre. The Gate still has a performance space, and it is sometimes used - but NN Theatre is now primarily a witness to the horrific history in its locality.  The young man who showed Lucy and myself around the exhibition, and who works with this material every day, was visibly moved by much of what he told us.  To give just one example, there is a series of photographs of a young boy from Lublin during the 1930s - birthdays, holidays and parties - so powerful because they are so ordinary.  The last photograph shows him carefully groomed for his first day at school: it was September 1939.  After that, there is nothing.

The Holocaust hangs like a malignant smog over Poland.  Of the six million Jewish people killed in Europe, three million were Polish. The death camps were almost all in Poland: Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, Chelmno. Lublin's closest camp was Majdanek.  At the start of the war, the city had 120,000 citizens, of whom 43,000 were Jewish.  Almost all of them were killed.

A few days earlier, I had visited the extraordinary Jewish Museum in Warsaw, called POLIN.  In a very different way from the Grodzka Gate, this is also a theatrical experience.  There are actually very few objects in this museum.  Rather, there are spaces to experience, stories to probe, projected imagery and concealed nuggets of text.  There is a reconstructed wooden synagogue of the 18th century, a little cinema screening Yiddish films of the 1920s, a reconstructed Warsaw street.  And, of course, towards the end there is the horrific material on the Holocaust.  In a narrow but high metal tank with rusted walls, there are graphic photos and accounts, on a very intimate scale, of the act of killing.

I found these exhibits almost unbearable - even more than at the Jewish Museum in Berlin.   Much of this emotional power derives from the long and detailed narrative that precedes the Holocaust section.  As POLIN's website explains: "We present 1000 years of Polish-Jewish coexistence, speaking of cooperation, rivalry and conflicts, autonomy, integration and assimilation. While seeking to confront thorny issues, we also bring attention to bright chapters in our common history."  The Jewish presence in Poland has been huge, ever since the early Middle Ages. POLIN makes much of the tolerance initiated by Bolesław III in the early 12th century, and his recognition of the economic advantages that would be brought by Jewish migrations into Poland.  The history is not always one of harmony, but it is one of cultural co-operation - what the EU would call "integration", as opposed to "assimilation".  The Jews remained Jewish and the Christians Christian - but they lived complementary lives.  In the early years of the Second Polish Republic, the centenary of which is being marked this year, the Jewish population was hopeful for a productive intercultural future.  "Fate has joined us with the Polish people for good", wrote Sholem Asch in his 1928 book Haynt (Today), "and our wishes and hopes belong to both nations, to one road, to a common bright future."

Both museums, in very different ways, offer narratives of hope, of peaceful coexistence, of cross-cultural understanding.  Above all, they bear witness to the horror that results from the dehumanising rhetoric of racism.  Why then, I found myself asking, has Poland moved so far to the political right in recent years?  Why has it become so notably intolerant of ethnic and cultural difference?  Why has the arrival of Syrian refugees in Europe triggered such consternation there, seeing the rise of a home-grown fascism?

There are no easy answers to this, of course - but I do wonder whether the pressing need to bear witness to the Shoah might not have had an unintended consequence in shifting the narrative.  Emphasising Polish history as an exemplar of tolerance through its Jewish past might serve to suggest a particularly deep relationship between a Polish society largely defined by its Catholicism, and a Jewish society also defined by a religion which shares many of the same scriptural roots.  The profound horror of the Polish experience under Nazi occupation might lead to a very understandable reluctance to criticise the state of Israel, with its foundation myth so rooted in the Shoah.  If modern Poland (and other countries in modern Europe) remains traumatised by the events of the early 1940s, then that may be one reason for the deep suspicion displayed towards Islamic cultures and people.  The Israeli state has a tendency to cast itself as a victim of Islamic aggression, and terror attacks by Islamist groups have helped feed the idea of a Judeo-Christian Euro-American world under assault from this inimical "Other".  A society that defines itself by its Catholic religion and its history of coexistence with Jewish people is very likely to be suspicious of Muslim migrations.

The witness that is borne to the Shoah is essential, of course - and so is the narrative of Polish and Jewish coexistence.  But we need to look for other narratives too.  Perhaps we need to bear witness to the remarkable policies of religious and cultural multiplicity practised under the Ottoman Empire.  Perhaps we need to revisit the dynamic and vibrant culture of Moorish Spain, where Christian, Jewish and Muslim scholars and artists engaged in profound and productive cultural exchange.

Museums, theatres...  we have work to do.

Brexit and Democracy - A Reply to François Matarasso

Dear François

Thank you for taking the trouble to respond to my questions on Twitter in such depth and with such care.  We are, of course, in agreement on most of the key issues.  Like you, I am sure that the referendum was an appalling idea, and that the key to Parliamentary democracy is that complex questions have to be settled through complex processes of legislation - informed, nuanced processes - not reduced to a simple binary.  Like you, I find the persistence of the outmoded "First past the post" system absurd.  Like you, I am inclined to believe that the best chance of survival now is in the People's Vote campaign, although (like you) I do not feel that this second use of the referendum tool stands any chance of healing the wounds opened by the first, even if it does manage to halt the march over the cliff edge.  I would also be deeply concerned that such a Vote would confirm the creeping doctrine that a referendum is the highest form of democracy, trumping Parliamentary statute, rather than being subject to Parliamentary sovereignty.

Last week, my local MP wrote to her constituents about the People's Vote.  Her name is Joan Ryan, and she is a Labour MP, though significantly to the right of the current leader.  She asked us to return a form, in which we were asked to tick one of three boxes:

• Yes, there should be a public vote on the final Brexit deal, just in case.
• No, there shouldn't be a public vote and we should just get on with it, whether it's good or bad.
• It's an interesting idea.  I'd like to know more about it.

"I'd like to know more about it."  Now, there's an argument for Parliamentary sovereignty rather than plebiscite if ever there was one....

Aside of the disingenuous language, this "voter consultation", or market research, is in effect a mini-referendum on a referendum.  It suggests to me that the root of this whole crisis is in the focus-group approach to democracy that was pioneered by Tony Blair: the idea that policy is just another consumer product, and that in order to "sell" it, you must first find out whether it appeals.  Cameron's appeal to "the people" as a ploy to outflank UKIP in the competition for "market share" was a logical continuation of this. But policy is not a consumer product, and representatives are not delegates.  Joan Ryan's attempt to muster some statistics on public opinion to back the People's Vote smacks of desperation - surely the democratic thing would be to argue in Parliament that such a vote is inherently desirable?

You say that the most compelling point I made on Twitter related to the illegal actions of the Leave campaign, but that "electoral law is quite often broken but that rarely leads to results being overturned".  That is true - but it isn't an argument against overturning the result in this case.  Only today, Tom Watson has called for a "Mueller-style investigation" into possible Russian interference in the referendum. Carole Cadwalladr's reporting on the manipulation of data by Leave has made it clear that this was a deeply anti-democratic campaign, indeed a corrupt and criminal campaign, and that it shared its principal actors with the Trump election campaign, which has this last week been proven criminal.  At the very least, this would seem to make a cast-iron case for the suspension of the Article 50 process pending a proper investigation into whether the basis on which Brexit is being conducted has any validity at all.

You referred to something you wrote in the immediate aftermath of the referendum result - and I find myself doing the same.  This dates from July 5th 2016, and I stand by it today.  The key points about democracy are towards the end of the piece.  In particular, I want to emphasise again the importance to democratic processes of considering significant minorities and their needs.  The Northern Irish dimension, which was completely ignored by both sides in the campaign, is now the biggest obstacle to a "deal" (another commercial term contaminating democratic political discourse).  Is it really "democratic" to force the province to lose the integration with the Republic that has brought peace to the island of Ireland, when the citizens of the province decisively voted against such a decision?

I agree with pretty much everything you say, François; but I can't go with you to the conclusion that "As a democrat, I have to accept Brexit, despite misgivings".  For me, as a democrat, I simply cannot accept it.

your friend
Michael

PS  I've matched your Fountains Abbey with Glastonbury.  Both casualties of a previous occasion when England decided to cut off ties from the continent.

"Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang."

Multicultural Montréal

Présence Autochtone

I've just spent a week in Montréal, thanks to a grant from the British Council and the Québec Government, who are looking to build artistic and cultural collaborations.  It's a fascinating space for anyone working in intercultural and multicultural performance.  The Francophone Québecois, fiercely proud of their identity, clearly regard themselves as a minority with a drum to bang within the predominantly Anglophone Canada.  The Anglophones in Québec, in turn, are officially classed as a minority.  So that means the two dominant cultural groups are both minorities.  Which doesn't leave all that much room for the minority minorities.

I'd been to the city several times before, particularly to research indigenous work for ORIGINS, and the First People's Festival, Présence Autochtone, is a longstanding ally.  This year the Festival took advantage of my trip, and made me one of two visiting professionals to talk about our work (the other was Jerker Bexelius from the Southern Sámi Cultural Centre in Sweden).  As so often, there was some bemusement, even suspicion, from the indigenous audience as to why a British organisation should want to curate a Festival of indigenous cultures in London - a suspicion that soon disappears when they hear about the healing agenda in what we do, and the positive value constantly placed on the global indigenous movement.

As I spoke about the real need we have in the UK for the positive models that indigenous culture can offer, the Festival Director André Dudemaine remarked that this was like something Jean-Paul Sartre had said during the Algerian War: that the Algerians were not only fighting to free themselves from colonisation - but that they would also liberate the French.  A people cannot be free while it continues to oppress others.  It was a characteristically astute observation, and it also made me realise that, while many First Nations are quite resistant to the Québecois agenda, indigenous Francophones like André inevitably read their position in relation to a French discourse. Until then, I had always thought of the Festival's name as a simple statement of "We're still here" - but I now realise that it relates to a whole tradition of resistance to colonialism.  Présence Africaine, to which I now realise the name alludes, is a pan-African magazine, published in Paris since 1947.  As an exhibition at Montréal's Musée des Beaux Arts reminds me, it was crucial to the development of Négritude, and Picasso provided illustrations, working alongside Aimée Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor.  Sartre and Camus contributed too - even négritude was not separatist, and embraced its allies.

There are allies for the First Nations in Montréal too.  I got to meet Rahul Varma, a playwright and producer who runs Teesri Duniya Theatre (it means "Third World" in Hindi), and who set up the fascinating magazine alt.theatre.  Rahul's company produces a wide range of plays, characterised by a global perspective that links specific communities in Québec with the international.  That has included First Nations, as well as refugees, Palestinians, and people involved in both the Rwandan and Armenian genocides.  I met Johanna Nutter, who is working with First Nations visual artist Nadia Myre as a way to develop artistic practice and cultural reach for both of them.  I met Michael Toppings, whose organisation MAI offers space and support for a whole range of diverse artists.

And yet....   It feels like there's a very long way to go.  When André and Rahul talk about the very low levels of funding and press coverage they are able to access, it doesn't sound like sour grapes - it sounds real.  When the agenda of the provincial government is to promote what it regards as a minority (the Francophones), then it's much less likely to open up to other minorities.  There's no doubt that Montréal is a global, intercultural city - but its arts funding structure and its press don't really reflect that as yet.

I had a wonderful evening with Yves Sioui Durand and Catherine Joncas, the founding Artistic Directors of Ondinnok, who came to the very first ORIGINS Festival in 2009 to lead a workshop around their Theatre of Healing work.  Yves cooked salmon and wild mushrooms, and we talked about their astonishing work.  But they were also clearly under a cloud - and it was a cloud cast by two great Francophone theatre-makers who they had regarded as their allies and friends. They are also two theatre-makers whom I admire immensely, and have been privileged to meet and talk with over the years. Ariane Mnouchkine and Robert Lepage had decided to work together to create a piece called Kanata, in which the story of Canada's First Nations would be told.  The only thing was - there were no First Nations people involved, either on stage or in consulting roles.  There was, of course, a protest, and the production has now been cancelled.

For Yves and Catherine, it feels very personal.  Yves worked closely with Robert on his previous production about Edmund Kean and First Nations, Alanienouidet.  Yves and Catherine worked twice with Ariane at the Cartoucherie, helping her company in rehearsals, for example on Le Dernier Caravansérail.  I find it difficult to understand how two such creative and aware people, who already know First Nations artists of this calibre, could not have realised that people would be upset by their decisions.  I do not believe in essentialism - in the theatre or anywhere else: it is nonsense to say that only Chinese people can talk about China or African people about Africa.  But globalised, multicultural, post-colonial spaces require globalised, multicultural, post-colonial dialogues and collaborations in order to achieve the complex art that can reflect their kaleidoscopic realities.  It isn't enough for those of us from the former colonial powers and the settler communities who see ourselves as allies of the colonised to represent them and to tell their stories on our stages.  They will still be our stages, and the action of representation so comes to reinforce rather than undermine the imbalances of power.  Our stages, like our cities and our politics, have to be shared.

[Research trip supported by the British Council]

MORE THAN WORDS: Silence, presence and secret languages

Guest blog by Marieke Schippert

MORE THAN WORDS - London workshop

In March, my 9 year old son and I flew to London for a training in an international setting. It was named MORE THAN WORDS and was about finding ways of communicating with people without words, for example with people with whom we don’t share the same language. Some of the tasks were meant to be done in the city: listening to the sound of different districts and neighbourhoods, observing the body language of people there, and determining ways of communication without sharing the same language.

Silence

As a single mom, I had to bring my son to the training in London, and we performed the tasks in the city together. The first tour brought us to Tottenham. First of all, the buildings there spoke to us. They said, that the people there didn't have too much money, and not so much space. Many of them were drying their clothes out of their windows. The shops there said, that many people there were immigrants, who wanted to preserve parts of their lifestyle in their new home: we saw lots of shops that made us feel like being in African or Asian countries.

Soon after arriving in Tottenham, my son purposefully directed me to one of the centres of communication without words: the playground and sports area in the park.  In that park, there were different public sports facilities: a football field, a basketball court and some fitness devices. Two young adults were playing football, without talking to each other. My son wanted to play as well, so he moved closer and closer to them, until one of them kicked the ball in his direction, inviting him to play. They communicated perfectly without words.

Another young man was shooting hoops on the basketball court. He was very good at it. Some admirers stood by and watched him play. They as well communicated very well without words - he knew, that they admired him, and they knew, that he appreciated them watching.

In the fitness area, there were several different people using the fitness equipment. Very diverse people of different ages, from very young to quite old, different skin colors, singles and couples, men and women. Together, they performed an act of ballet: Without talking, they freed the fitness devices and changed from one to another in perfect harmony, sensing the wishes of the others. Specially two people, a couple, seemed to know each other for a very long time - they were in perfect harmony and matched perfectly. They had a routine they performed without talking at all. They always changed the devices at the same time, did the exercises in the same rhythm. The communication between these people was just like a dance routine.

No wonder people, who work with refugees, often use sports as a means of coming together, getting into contact and achieving something together. Sport is one of the best, most efficient ways of communicating without words.

Presence

While we were in the park, school finished, and the pupils came out of a school nearby. Many of them crossed the park to go to the subway or to catch a bus. The girls were walking two by two, close together, talking quitly with one another. The boys were walking two by two as well - but talking very loudly, shouting all over the place, sometimes walking with great distance between them, expanding their conversation over half of the park.

Even if I couldn't understand their words, I could still read their body-language. And that language is gendered, influenced by gender roles. The girls were saying: "We better stick together and don't take up too much space!" and "We‘d better not attract too much attention on us!", while the boys were saying "I/We own this place!".

Their behaviour told me a lot about the society they live in. I understood, that men and women are not equal, that men are allowed to take up way more space than women, and that they are taught from a very young age on, that they rule the world. Girls are taught to hold back, to be pleasant and to admire the boys. The society they live in must be fundamentally gender biased.

Another presence that marked my son and me very much was the presence of Black people in London. Coming from Berlin/Germany, we were in awe. My son is Black, I am White. In Germany, even in Berlin, we are very often stared at. People keep asking themselves how we are related. My son gets stared at, touched without even asking and asked a lot about his Blackness. He was overwhelmed when we were in Brixton, waiting outside the subway for a friend. He was amazed by the great number of Black people that came out of the subway – they were the majority! That is an experience that he never makes in public German spaces (only in empowerment settings). He loved seeing so many Black people in the subway in general, and also finding them in very different professions in London. Their presence was very empowering to him.

The presence of Black people in London versus their presence in Berlin tells a lot about racism and postcolonial relations. For us foreigners, the situation in London seemed a bit better than in Berlin, but many housing areas still seemed quite segregated, which shows how both societies are still fundamentally structured by racism.

Secret Languages

In Tottenham, we went into a little café. Inside, there were two men speaking an african language, two men speaking french, and two men speaking a slavic language. As they all spoke different languages at their tables, they were able to have a very intimate ambience while talking. My son and I spoke German, which seemed to be unusual to the others, since they looked quite a lot at us. But we, as well, had our intimate language. It still matters a lot, what language you speak - the reactions vary very much depending on what counts as "normal" in that area, and what prejudices people have about people speaking your language. In general, speaking French for instance provokes other reactions than speaking an African language in a public space. These reactions are racially biased. These biased reactions are a very powerful way of communicating without words – most of the micro-aggressions linked to racism and other forms of discrimination are exercised without saying a single word. Looks and body language are more than enough to be very clear about what a person thinks about someone else. As we get more an more conscious about racism and discrimination in general, people often start taking care about the things they are saying – but we should focus as much on our general expression and body language. They are way more unconscious and direct ways of communicating and reflect what we really think, even if we don’t say it.

Body language and the tone of the voice are secret languages that also told me al lot about the people in that café in Tottenham. Even if I couldn’t understand what these pairs were saying, I still got to know a lot about them. First of all, that they had some relation to a country in which a different language was spoken. Their way of speaking, their voice, and their attitude, told me a lot about them : How they were feeling, a little about their character, and something about the relationship between them and their counterpart. I could also get some information about what kind of topics they were discussing, or at least, what the topic meant to them emotionally. For example, it was easy to tell, if they were discussing work topics, private topics, leisure topics or if they were fighting. It got very clear, if the topic was serious and very important to the person, if it was emotionally charged, or if it was a light topic.

Without words, we can understand very important things: emotions, relation and intentions. What’s lacking, is the concrete theoretical content. We maybe can’t discuss very theoretical issues without a common language. But we can use emotions, relation an our intentions to communicate in a very profound way. That means, that we need to get involved in a different way that what we mainly see as a professional relationship when we work with refugees for example. We need to go into a relation with them, show and share our emotions, and be clear in our intentions. On that basis, understanding will be easy. We also need to reflect the basis of our work and be very self-aware and self-scrutinizing about our own biases and prejudices. That is the foundation for going into an open, un-biased and true relation and communication.

Marieke Schippert works with NARUD - an African community organisation in Berlin.