international community arts festival …

CommunityArtPowerESSAYS FROM ICAF 2011

INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY ARTS FESTIVALROTTERDAM | 30.MARCH / 03.APRIL | 2011

5th

editiON

INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY ARTS FESTIVALICAF 30.MARCH / 03.APRIL MINI-ICAF 2.DECEMBER ROTTERDAM 2011

– FOR PETER AND ANNELIES –

0404

06IntroductionEugene van Erven

19Come Together: A Report From the In-BetweenAlexander Roberts

28Power and Community ArtsKevin Ryan

43Random Combinations, Deliberate MusicMichael Romanyshyn

54For Joy, Against Death: Community Theatre in ArgentinaEdith Scher

70Peace Industry Propaganda or ‘Troubles Porn’?Matt Jennings and David Grant

85Why I Stopped Making PeaceMerlijn Twaalfhoven

94Same Difference: Learning Through International PartnershipsNeil Beddow

ICAF Community, Art, Power

Contents19

54

94

198

140

70

05

107 Memoria Cross-Over Arts:

a German, Polish, Peruvian Collaboration

Ulrich Hardt

129Theatre For Everyone

Maria Schejbal

140A Field Ready to Leave Home: Notes From the ICAF seminar

Jan Cohen-Cruz and Eugene van Erven

181 Debajehmujig

Ron Berti with Joe Osawabine

198 Something Is happening Here!

Big hART’s Ngapartji Ngapartji in RotterdamKerrie Schaefer

214 All In This Together:

Art, Community and History’s LessonsFrançois Matarasso

Contents

28

85

107

129

181

214

43

05


06

07

Introduction / Eugene van Erven

IntroductionEugene van Erven


08

The day before I sat down to write this intro-duction, we learned that the Netherlands Fund for Cultural Participation awarded

the International Community Arts Festival (ICAF) a new grant to cover the next two years; this, while in the midst of severe budget cuts in the arts that have affected many of our colleagues. Despite the European economic crisis – or maybe because of it – we have been given the opportunity to organize a sixth edition of our festival in the early spring of 2014. This brings with it a huge responsibility. We have to demonstrate that we are indeed the interface between Dutch community arts and the rest of the world; that we are capable of productively bringing together some of the most inspiring ideas and practices in our field and can open them up to a wider audience. This book and its companion video are a first step in that direction.

Those of you who are familiar with the reports of previous ICAFs will notice a marked change. Whereas the earlier books were largely descriptive and impressionistic, this one consists of thirteen essays that cover a wide variety of topics in personalized, culturally specific styles. This choice grew from an urgent need, felt by both our visitors and ourselves, to reflect more deeply on our practices. It is also the result of a new festival component, the ICAF seminars, which consisted of a series of discussions that took place on four mornings, and which were facilitated by Professor Jan Cohen-Cruz from Syracuse University in the U.S.A. Together with a number of invited guests she explored the ‘power’ of community arts from different angles.1 While transcribing the video tapes of this sometimes heated conversation, it struck me that all these ideas would make a lot more sense if they were accompanied by in-depth back-ground pieces.

1. Earlier editions of the festival traditionally ended with a ‘final debate’ on Sundays. To my mind, these remained rather superficial because everyone wanted to have a say, which prevented deeper conversations. By inviting designated speakers into an inner circle I hoped to generate more profound discussions, at the risk of excluding an outer circle of largely muted spectators seated in the semi-dark. In his essay, Ron Berti criticizes this choice for which I, and not Jan Cohen-Cruz, am responsible.

09


The first piece is an upbeat account of our festival by a young artist, curator and journalist from England, Alexander Roberts. He completed a traineeship with us at ICAF, creating podcasts for our website and writing an article for the British Totaltheatre magazine, which we reprint here. As you will notice, Alexander was particularly taken by the Murga, an anti-xenophobic activist performance practice in public space that originated many years ago in Argentina and before that, at the turn of the previous century, in Cádiz, Spain. He was equally impressed with the community dance work of Paloma Madrid, a Swedish choreographer who had come to Rotterdam to create a piece in someone’s apartment together with five novice dancers, including an 80-year-old woman. Thanks to Alexander Roberts’ promotion of this work, Paloma’s Dance for Apartment will now soon continue in Iceland.

Paloma’s project, which she had developed with Bottkyrka Community Theatre in Stockholm, was one of five artist-in-residencies, another new ICAF feature intended to introduce new community arts practices to the Netherlands. The other four included an exchange around musical theatre and video art between our company and Favela Força from Rio de Janeiro, a collaboration between Imbali Visual Literacy from Johannesburg and the ‘Women’s Studios’ in Rotterdam (which resulted in fabric design and a fashion show), a street-corner visual arts intervention by Soft Touch Arts from Leicester (England) in one of the rougher neighbourhoods of Rotterdam, and a two-week project with at-risk youth facili-tated by Dance United Yorkshire. A documentary focusing on this last residency’s work in the Moerwijk neighbourhood in The Hague, is included as a bonus track on the DVD that accompanies this book.

The second article explores key words like ‘power’ and ‘community’. Its author, Kevin Ryan, is one of the driving forces behind the East Midlands Participatory Arts Forum (EMPAF), a network organization in the UK that first visited us in 2008 and that re-appeared in 2011 with a twenty


10

person delegation. Kevin, who directs Charnwood Arts in Loughborough, is also a seasoned visual artist. At ICAF, he offered a workshop in which festival visitors could serve as self-reporters and collectively create a book about the event. In his text, he argues in favour of the term ‘collaborator’, which he finds more fitting than ‘participant.’ He then turns to the many pitfalls and opportunities that community artists might experience when dealing with ‘the powers that be’.

Like Kevin Ryan, Michael Romanyshyn is a veteran community artist. He is a musician and theatre maker who worked for many years with the legendary Bread & Puppet theatre in the U.S.A. This company, which was founded in 1963 by German sculptor and dancer Peter Schumann, has been an important influence on community arts worldwide, but particularly in the Americas and Europe. Romanyshyn’s highly personal tale tells the story of his coincidental connection with Archa Theatre in the Czech Republic and the amazing intercultural musical trip that resulted from it. The Allstar Refúdžjí Band, which he directs, brought down the house on the opening night of our festival and later inspired a Dutch spin-off: Orchestre Partout. This band of asylum seekers, led by Ted van Leeuwen of 5eKwartier in Haarlem, won this year’s ‘Golden C’ award for best innovative community arts project in the Netherlands.

Next in line is Edith Scher. At our festival, she and her partner, guitarist Daniel Mir, had conducted an inspiring interactive workshop in which she demonstrated the way she creates large scale scenes with choirs in her own neighbour-hood, Villa Crespo in Buenos Aires. In Rotterdam, Edith’s participants included members from the Stut community choir in Utrecht, the cast of our own Senior Citizens Revue as well as performers from the Community Company of the Glasgow Citizens Theatre. I knew that Edith Scher was completing a book for the Argentinian National Theatre Institute, covering the rocky history of community theatre activities in her country, dating back to the days of the Videla dictatorship. The essay she wrote for this book, passionately and

11


poetically captures the spirit and the unique qualities of this movement in which her company, Matemurga, played an important part.

Immediately after the chapter on Argentina, Matt Jennings and David Grant guide us into the equally troubled history of Northern Ireland. Their chapter effectively demonstrates the value of accessible humanities research for the advance of community arts. They usefully explain terms like ‘kinaesthetic’ and ‘affect’ to explain the extraordinary power of the Theatre of Witness project by the Derry Playhouse, which they have followed closely. Matt and David argue that rather than exploitation of other people’s suffering, this initiative is valuable precisely because it does not neatly cover up tensions that continue to exist in Northern Ireland. The power of Theatre of Witness was made very clear to us in Rotterdam when, on the second day of ICAF, one of the original performers stepped out of the We Carried Your Secrets documentary we were screening, to act live on stage. It was one of the most memorable moments of our festival.

Another example of art for reconciliation is the work of Dutch composer Merlijn Twaalfhoven. He has created musical pieces for novices, amateurs, and professionals on the wall that separates Israel and Palestine in Bethlehem and in the demilitarized zone of Nicosia, Cyprus. At our festival, we screened a documentary about the Cyprus project, called Echoes Across the Divide. On Saturday night we pro-grammed Merlijn’s experimental attempt to bridge the abyss between professional singers on stage and people in the auditorium of Zuidplein Theatre. In his contribution to this book, Merlijn looks back on his work in the Middle East and Cyprus, regarding it more as a matter of generating respect than of making peace, which to him has become an empty word.

One of the oldest partners of ICAF is acta community theatre from Bristol. In his essay, its artistic


12

director, Neil Beddow, reviews this special relationship with Rotterdam, and reveals how it has helped him clarify what he is trying to accomplish in his work in England. While it has opened his organisation to the world, it has also prompted acta to take the initiative in an international cooperation project that received funding from the European Union. Under the name COAST (Community Oriented Art for Social Transformation) this project explores the theme of migration together with us in Rotterdam and two other partners from Germany and Poland. Neil’s essay testifies to the vital need to look beyond one’s own front door in community arts.

The German COAST partner is Expedition Metropolis from Berlin. In his contribution, Ulrich Hardt, the director of this organization, analyzes the cross-cultural arts exchanges he has been involved in with youth groups. His text focuses on a journey that a mixed group of Polish and German youngsters undertook in 2010 to the arts organisation Arena y Esteras in Villa El Salvador on the edge of Lima. This Peruvian company had participated in two of our earlier festivals, well before we heard of Ulrich Hardt’s work. His critical and honest text provides fresh insights into the work of our Peruvian colleagues and into the delicate nature of international arts collaborations.

Many such surprising connections lie behind the performances, film screenings, workshops and presentations that constitute ICAF. In May 2009, a week after Augusto Boal passed away in Rio, Ulrich Hardt hosted an encounter between Latin American and European community artists in Hellerau, just outside Dresden. Ana Sofia Pinedo of Arena y Esteras was there, as was Edith Scher from Argentina and Maria Schejbal from Poland. A few months later, in the freezing cold of January 2010, Neil Beddow and I stood on her doorstep in Bielsko-Biała to find out what her work with Teatr Grodzki was all about. In her text, Maria looks at some of the accidental encounters that have influenced her work, particularly her experiences with Peter Schumann of the Bread & Puppet theatre.

13


The longest – and possibly most unreadable – text in this collection is an edited and abbreviated transcription of the seminars dealing with the power of community art. It makes most sense when read after first watching the video documentary that accompanies this book. The ICAF seminars took place every morning of the festival. I transcribed and selected the material, deleting only remarks that were repetitive or less relevant, while still keeping sufficient verbatim quotations for the benefit of future researchers. I then sent the text to Jan Cohen-Cruz, who had facilitated the seminars, asking her to add comments. Together we decided to maintain the chronological order of the conversations, which each day contained a critical reflection on the ICAF programme of the previous day. Day 1 thus deals with the Australian Aboriginal Ngapartji Ngapartji project and the notion of functionality, which we would return to frequently in the following days. Day 2 addresses engaged art in politi-cally charged contexts such as Egypt during the Tahrir Square uprising and Northern Ireland after the ‘Troubles’. It also includes a critical reflection on the Community Company of the Glasgow Citizens Theatre, which had performed on Thursday night. Day 3, finally, began with an extended (and heated) debate about evaluation. Joe Osawabine, from the Canadian Aboriginal company Debajehmujig, found himself

Bruce Naokwegijig is being interviewed by Jennifer van Exel for the ICAF documentary. Photo: Roy Goderie


14

dragged into this to his great discomfort. His and Ron Berti’s reactions were a useful reminder that we need to be more aware of the western dominance in our discourse and the importance of incorporating other, older ways of thinking and knowing.

In the chapter that immediately follows the seminar transcription, Ron Berti and Joe Osawabine explain at greater length the special position that Debajehmujig has within Canadian society. Or rather, on the edge of it, because the company has increasingly turned its back on the main-stream art world in their country in order to focus on working with Aboriginal communities of which they, as artists, are an integral part. Through ICAF, they write, Debajehmujig has discovered a new world of like-minded spirits outside Canada. Since April 2011 they have established working relations with Sering in Belgium, with Arena y Esteras in Peru, and with the Community Company of the Glasgow Citizens Theatre. And in June 2012, they returned to the Netherlands to perform their work Global Savages at the Oerol Festival on the island of Terschelling.

The complex relationship between westerners and Aboriginals is also the main theme of Kerrie Schaefer’s contribution to this book. An Australian herself, she first provides a detailed background on Big hART and their Ngapartji Ngapartji project. She also offers an annotated description of the show, and provides useful background information for non-Australians. Having seen earlier versions of the show in Australia, Kerrie then addresses the question whether it can also work in a non-Australian context such as Rotterdam. Judging from people’s responses – which she thoroughly analyzes – she believes it can. The result is a sophisticated piece of community arts criticism of which there is still far too little in our field.

The final essay is written by François Matarasso, one of the world’s most influential thinkers about community arts. Although he wasn’t present at the main ICAF, he spoke

15


A scene from the fabric design and fashion show by Imbali Visual Literacy in collaboration with Women Studios in Rotterdam (The Great ICAF Circ/Us Show). Photo: Roy Goderie


16

A scene from Favela Força in collaboration with Rotterdams Wijktheater (The Great ICAF Circ/Us Show). Photo: Roy Goderie

17


at a Mini-ICAF we held on 2 December 2011. Somewhat provocatively, I had asked him to talk about the relation between community arts and the riots that had rocked several English cities earlier last year. Instead, he produced a fascinating comparison between British community arts in the ‘80s and today. This was later expanded for inclusion in this book. Containing many notes and references, this present work may, as François suggests, become the basis for a book offering a fuller treatment of the topic.

Like Matarasso’s essay, this ICAF collection contains the embryo of another book, one that tells the story of forty years community arts in the Netherlands and the role of the Rotterdams Wijktheater within it. What is already obvious, however, is that the foreign visitors to our festival have enormously influenced our work in Rotterdam. From text-based realistic theatre we have evolved to multidisciplinary productions that include music, dance, and video. We have become a little less wary of collaborating with local authorities and corporations and a little more street- wise. We have begun to think less like a conventional theatre company and much more like a flexible multifunctional community arts organization with a long-term vision. Our on-site visits to the partners in the COAST project, (which would never have come about without ICAF,) are also beginning to pay dividends. We are discovering differ-ences in approach – such as the much stronger emphasis placed on ownership and community collaboration in British community arts – and we are now considering incorporating these in our own work. Thus the cross-fertilization that began at ICAF continues here and elsewhere.

Debajehmujig-Storytellers has joined the World-Wide Virtual Theatre Carrousel, an international collabo-ration that was born when Mia Grijp of Sering (Antwerp, Belgium), Rosalba Rolón of Pregones (The Bronx, New York) and Oupa Malatjie (Tembisa Township, South Africa) met at ICAF and expressed the desire to work together. They now create new work in collaboration with partners in South


18

Africa, Peru, Iraq, and Canada, using online tools and virtual workshop spaces.

There are many more dimensions – and stories – related to ICAF that we do not have space to address here in detail. Some of these we have tried to capture in the companion video. Others we can only respectfully acknowledge with a heartfelt “Thank You” to: Favela Força, Imbali Visual Literacy, Soft Touch Arts, Bottkyrka Community Theatre, Lamourgaga, Archa Theatre, Ambrosia’s Table, Villa Zebra, the Community Company of the Glasgow Citizens Theatre, Parrabbola, Voices of the City, Junaid Jemal Sendi, the Mama Story Choir, the Stut Choir, CAL-XL, Démos, and Neighbourhood Art in Delft. The same goes for the countless individuals who made ICAF-5 the warm and inspiring event that it was. They include my wonderful colleagues at the Rotterdams Wijktheater among whom I must single out Anamaria Cruz. She embodies the spirit of ICAF.

A final note on language. I have consciously opted to respect the spelling variations that exist in Canada, the United States, Australia and Britain. Also, in the texts trans-lated from German, Polish, Dutch and Argentinian Spanish, I have tried to capture the linguistic peculiarities of these cultures or the authors. I am also responsible for writing or editing the author notes at the end of each chapter, and for any other inaccuracies that somehow managed to slip through the final checks made by my good friend Phillip Mann from New Zealand. ICAF-5 was the first festival we programmed and produced without the guidance of the founders of the Rotterdams Wijktheater, Annelies Spliethof and Peter van den Hurk. I dedicate this book to them.

19

Come together / Alexander Roberts

It’s the closing night and the festival bar has erupted.2 Remaining on the fringes of the dance floor, gazing in at the low-swinging,

flamboyant hips of the young Brazilians, and the quick dancing feet of the Swedish-Chileans, there is me – a slightly awkward, arm-waving, enthusiastic Brit, absorbing the frenetic pulse that beats between a truly unique gathering of people. There are people from all over the world dancing together to a band that is made up of an ever-changing mix of festival participants – with everyone invited to just pick up an instrument and join in. The music is totally improvised, which results in a constant stream of unexpected medleys, like the particularly memorable merge between a Brazilian’s soulful jazz scat, Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean (accompanied by South African beat-boxing), and a Dutch rendition of ‘Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes’.

I’m in Rotterdam for the International Community Arts Festival (ICAF) 2011. This closing night is an embodi-ment of the varied forms of encounter that have taken place

2. An earlier version of this article first appeared in Total Theatre Magazine 23: 3, Autumn

Come Together:REPORT FROM THE IN-BETWEEN SPACES AT ICAF

Alexander Roberts


20

A scene from Dance for Apartment. Photo: Roy Goderie

21


over the past five days. There’s a tirelessly busy dance floor; flurries of creative ideas for future collaborations loudly shared across tables; musical jam sessions between international musicians, playing to an equally international dance party; and bold critical discussions between artists, audiences, cultural managers and scholars – from Rotterdam, the Netherlands and the rest of the world – all mixed together, all seeking ideological meeting points that bridge the frequent rifts that seem to emerge between the differing perspectives people have on each other’s work. For some people, me included I think, it is not always the quality of the work on offer that serves as the true measure of a festival’s success, but instead the richness of the encounters that occur spontaneously in-between. In the case of ICAF 2011 the value of the ‘un-programmed’ moments cannot be overstated. The five-day-long festival began everyday at 10am, and ran with a jam-packed schedule right through to the early hours of each morning – but the ultimate success of this festival emerged just as much from the conversations that happened on the bus rides that took us across the city to the different workshop locations; the meals shared between each day’s participants; and the dancing, collaborating and debating that took place at the late-night music stage at the Rotterdams Wijktheater bar, as it did from the many exciting performances, workshops and seminars available.

One highlight of these ‘moments in-between’ was the festival Murga. In what I might be tempted to call a ‘stroke of genius from the programmers’, Enrique (‘Kíke’) Noviello from Antwerp in Belgium was invited to come and work with festival participants every morning to create a festival Murga group. What is a Murga, I hear some of you wondering? Well, emerging originally from Argentina (just like Kíke), Murga is a carnival performance tradition that parades through public spaces. Made up of musicians and dancers, it could be likened to a very theatrical brass band, but far more anarchic. Think loud and garish costumes; rattle-tattle bang-bang trance-inducing snare, and big bass drumming; Afro-beats and Latino brass; feet stomping, hip shaking, and


22

a lot of arm pumping, and you are getting there. Kíke’s Murga was like ICAF’s guerrilla party-bomb – appearing regularly, but unexpectedly announcing itself, as if from nowhere, through its large and loud group presence and dramatic drumming preludes. Time and time again they ambushed, and always their rallying call seemed to work. The music and the freedom of the moving bodies seemed to carry an unavoidable gravitational pull – like a sort of festival-party black-hole, sucking in everyone who was in ear or eye shot to watch, to jump in, and to dance.

The Murga, however, stands for a lot more than music and dancing. I bump into Kíke just before I am about to rush off to see another theatre show. I grab my chance to ask him what the Murga is all about for him. He quickly dives into his idea telling me about the power it has to quickly connect people together: ‘Murgas are the ideal melting pot for the mixing of cultures, which in turn generate more culture.’ I see the Murga doing this during the festival – acting as a sort of oil that smoothes the edges of people and allows them to meet, dance and play together. Its unpredictability and chaos creates an even playing-field among people, and its undefined borders between player and spectator means that it spreads almost invisibly around you. Before you know it, you are on the inside, moving with it, and a part of it becomes yours to play with. The Murga places an emphasis on creating spaces in which people with different cultures can breathe and be together, and also an emphasis on the people of a given community growing and developing through their encounters with one another.

As another Murga strike comes to a close I find myself seeking rest at a table of strangers. Within minutes we are all talking – conviviality among strangers is commonplace here. I am chatting to Ron Bunzl, a Dutch theatre-maker presenting work at the festival. Ron starts telling me, in a voice of gravel and silk, about his theatre project Circ/Us. He explains that its aim is to ‘bring together professional theatre artists with people of all ages, interests, cultures, and capabili-

23


ties, and translate their personal stories and dreams into circus acts.’ I am lucky enough to get to see some of this work two days later when it appears in excerpts as part of a large show-casing event. The work is unusual, and takes a very particular approach to circus. One scene told the story of a blind lady who dreams of flying. The (actually blind) lady stands in a long red dress at the front of the stage singing a Dutch ballad I am not familiar with, but the people behind me obviously know it as they are singing along. She is accompanied by The Allstar Refjúdží Band, and joining her on the stage is a female storyteller, who narrates the moment of the woman’s dream coming true. As she describes the lady’s flight, the storyteller dances with a floating, identical red dress attached to an aerial rope. In this circus, there are no tricks, no obvious virtuosity, but Circ/Us is playing with a quality that lies at the heart of circus: making the seemingly impossible possible. Where

A scene from the daily ICAF murga workshop. Photo: Roy Goderie


24

there is no trapeze to create flight there’s a storyteller, a song, and a dancing dress on an aerial rope. It is not an obvious swap, but the work dives into the realms of the imagination, and emerges with a space that creates an endless amount of possibilities through playing with the impossible.

Sitting with us at the table is choreographer Paloma Madrid (co-director of Bottkyrka Community Theatre, based in Sweden). As Ron rushes off to run a final rehearsal, Paloma and I get chatting. She’s at the ICAF as part of a residency programme that brought a total of four international community arts projects to the Netherlands over the course of three weeks leading up to the festival. Paloma’s project is a collaboration between herself as choreographer and five dancers (four of which had never had any form of professional dance training). The dancers range in age from their early twenties to early eighties. The work they create together is modelled on a project that Paloma has run a few times before, entitled Dance for Apartment. Madrid works with a group of untrained dancers and develops a score which is essentially a set of instructions – a sort of rule set. This then becomes a choreography that can be applied in response to any space. Each new space and time brings a new interpretation of the score. People of a particular neighbourhood are then invited to loan Dance for Apartment from their local library (just like you would a book). The loaner books a time with the dancers and Paloma, and then together they go to the home and perform Dance for Apartment.

I am excited at the opportunity to see it. I arrive in a suburb of Rotterdam at the given address with the rest of the 25-strong audience, go into the apartment and await Paloma’s guidance. No one sits, but no one seems quite comfortable standing either. We are all unsure. What do we do when no one, or nothing, tells us what to do? I feel lost without rules. Paloma obliges and invites us all to stand with her in a circle. We are then invited to read, one by one, a line from a document, which appears to be a sort of dramaturgy for the event we will all participate in.

25


We read in a loop until everyone has spoken aloud one line – lines such as ‘Note: What if where I am is what I need?’ Following this reading, the performance gets underway as a further four dancers appear. They travel across every space in the house, from the living room to the office, the bathroom to the bedroom. There is no music. The performances from the dancers gives no sense of centre to the apartment as a space. Often there is a different dancer in every room, which leads the audience to occupy every room simultaneously, based solely on their own wish, rather than by some explicit guidance, or indication from the dancers about where we should be. Occasionally, I’m in parts of the apartment, standing on my own, with no audience, and no dancers – just the space and I, but it stills feels as though I am with someone, as the apartment contains endless traces of the occupants – food in the cupboards, books on the shelf. What is taking place is almost anti-performance; anti-theatre. There is nothing being represented in this happening, but instead we are presented with a space in which we can explore whether these people we share it with, and the space itself, can ever be free of any given order. In moments I felt as if I was moving according to what I felt I needed in that space, in that time, with those people. In many other moments I did not. I felt lost, or found myself constructing my own safety net. Finding myself doing this, however, provided me with a sense for this work’s value. It asks the questions: How far can this go? How far can all of my subconscious behaviour patterns be challenged? It exposes its own impossibilities, and asks why, and if, these impossibilities are not actually possible.

ICAF is a festival that revels in the impossible. A space for artists, who make art motivated by the exploration of people being together – both as the object and subject of the work. This festival brought artists with this shared interest together from all over the world so they could commend, celebrate and challenge each other. The atmosphere was over-whelmingly convivial, yet polemical. It was this contradiction among attendees that made the whole event so worthwhile. The goal seemed rarely about seeking to breed homogenisation,


26

but rather, focused on finding ways of holding onto, investing, and indulging in difference.

And politics are never far away. Aforementioned, the Allstar Refjúdží Band – a band cum theatre group from the Czech Republic who opened the festival – is a group of refugee performers that formed out of a theatre project that was run by Archa Theatre in the Czech Republic. The performance group combines a blur of musical influences from across the world (including brass band, ethno, ska, rap, klezmer, Dixieland, Chinese Opera, and Armenian and Kurdish rhythms) all thrown into one pot, and creates theatre works that often focus on the social position and identity of immigrants in the Czech Republic.

Ultimately it is a quest for new attitudes towards the notions of ‘community’, to politics, to personal development, and to artistic expression that underpins all of the various manifestations of this five-day event. This is expressed very well by Ron Bunzl who, I come to discover, is quite a visionary. He warns me against getting weighed down by the amount of troubles that surround us in the world, and passes on some wisdom he has taken from a book by Stephen Covey called The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: ‘Covey talks of two circles: the circle of influence and the circle of concern. The circle of concern is very big, it’s all the things you are concerned about: war, poverty, etc. The circle of influence is that circle of things you can actually influence. If you spend all of your time focusing on your circle of concern, you’re going to become depressed and frustrated, because you just cannot take it on. If you focus more of your energy on your circle of influence, you realise there are a lot of things you can change right now – and through that, your circle of influence gradually grows.’

For a young theatre-maker, with wide eyes on a world of daily horror stories, it is invaluable advice to take on board – a reminder to focus on the here and now, and to search for the changes that you can actually

27


make, rather than getting lost in the enormity of all the issues that we, as a global community, are engulfed in. Community is you and me, here and now.

Alexander Roberts is a performance artist, curator, and theoretician from the UK. His work is research-process led and frequently engages with questions of community, body politics, foreign(ness), and the relationship between public, personal and private space. For more info check out his website : mralexanderroberts.wordpress.com.

28


Experienced community artists have little trouble in sharing stories of the transformative power of community arts. We all have such

stories related to the lives of individuals, groups or commu-nities. These transformations occur at many levels, from the intimate to the public, from the immediate to the long term.

Where do we begin to link ‘power’ and ‘community arts’?Perhaps we should always begin with a positive affirmation of the value we see in an approach to the arts that transcends the production of art for its own sake? We are active in developing work that enables our communities and our collaborators to gain new skills and confidence and open doors. We stimulate creative activities that inspire and develop new expectations of what might be possible in peoples’ lives. We enable the telling of stories otherwise untold. This kind of work encourages and enables individual and collective voices to emerge in existing and in new social and political contexts. It also allows people to organise themselves, internally and externally, around the issues, concerns, joys and pleasures of their lives.

Power and Community Arts

Kevin Ryan

29

Power and Com

munity Arts / Kevin Ryan

Power and Com


Kevin Ryan. Photo: Roy Goderie


30

We can make big claims for the power of community arts. Indeed, if we step back far enough we may even see its influence at a societal level, but most of what we see is far more intimate than this. Yet, this power and influence remains hard to quantify at any level, although over the years many partial attempts have been made by academics, practitioners and social commentators.

The term ‘community arts’ covers an extremely diverse range of approaches, practices and levels of understanding. What, then, may be some of the defining and binding elements that allow us to talk about ‘power’ and ‘community arts’?

Let’s first look at ‘power’. There are thousands of ways of defining and naming power. For instance, the naming of the world around us, classifications of power, within us, with us, over us, powers stopping us, allowing us, enabling us, controlling us, power through our licence to do or say things, or the power of others manipulating us without our awareness.

Then there are the ‘invisible’ powers we directly experience beyond their naming, the energies we move and dance with, blend and harmonise with in concert with others to create new and unexpected outcomes, synergies, ‘flow’ moments, transformative breakthroughs. Those things are not so easy to define or classify.

Naming enables us to build, whereas not naming, giving ourselves to the experience, enables us to move more freely and more powerfully in the moment.

And then what do I mean by ‘community arts’? For me it’s simple: that which can be named and rigidly defined as community arts always seems to fall short of my vision for and perception of the work. Perhaps I am not clever enough. Or perhaps it is that elusive mix of named and invisible powers when applied to creativity that forces me to constantly challenge certainty when trying to define

31

Power and Com


this term. I am excited and enthralled by the diversity of practices and approaches, but not convinced by any single formula or definition. Of course, naming helps to share the work and record the processes we engage in at a specific place and time. However, the moment I try to tie down the power of community arts and to define what is transformative and what is not, I run into the problem of defining what is appropriate and what is not in the lives of others. I cannot define the power of what may change the life of someone else. Even the smallest things can have far reaching consequences, and even the most awful things may have the greatest power for change. Thus, for you the reader, ‘community arts’ remains whatever it is that you understand it to be for the purpose of this article and if, somewhere in reading this, your view is transformed in some way, then so be it! The power of the author and the reader have been shared, we will find the answers together! Long may we do so!

Playing with PowerCommunity artists have, from the early days,

talked of the process of empowerment. This process can be one of complete or gradual abdication of direction, decision-making and control on the part of the artist to the participant. Indeed, the language describing these processes has moved beyond the concept of participant to talk of the other as collaborator. There is an important distinction. At one end of the spectrum a participant may exercise little or no power in the process other than the ability to be there or not. A collaborator, however, has actively chosen to be there and work with others on a power-sharing basis. For me this underscores the necessity of being able to define a typology related to participatory and community arts. I am arguing in favour of naming (undertaken properly and fully) so that the way we talk or write about our work is not too limited and so that we can begin to understand the dynamics of the relationships between one form or approach to community arts and another.

This 1984 quote from Owen Kelly is still relevant today in


32

many ways:

The community arts movement … has no clear under-standing of its own history. It has neither documented its own history, nor drawn any conclusions from it. Community artists have therefore failed to develop a consistent set of definitions, with the result that the movement has staggered drunkenly from one direction to another. (Community, Art and the State: Storming the Citadels. Comedia, 1984)

Writing about what he perceived thirty years ago, Kelly argued that we had erred too much on the ‘invisible power of the work’ at the cost of failing to name its worth and articulate its outcomes well enough to gain wider societal understanding for what we were doing. Early writers on community arts, such as Owen Kelly, were quick to point out that the ‘power’ and success of this approach to art would eventually lead to incorporation and a weakening of radicalism within the movement. The danger he perceived of a shift in power from a radical to a more remedial and safe pressure-valve approach for societal ills and inequality may still be valid today. However, I think it fails to account for the ongoing effects of community arts and its influence in so many other ways. Many community Arts practitioners have retained an independent outlook whilst making what they can of the larger forces that have sought to incorporate their work (e.g., governmental campaigns and State responses to inequalities or threats to social cohesion).

Certainly there have been times when our power has been relinquished. In ‘partnerships’ we may have experienced the shaping and re-shaping of approaches that may ultimately contradict our own principles of work. We may have had to deal with increasing restrictions on how we operate. Where money and resources have been accepted, for instance, in work undertaken to ensure our own survival, our abilities to challenge ‘top down’ initiatives may have been eroded.

33

Power and Com


To give an example of this from my own work is difficult because we have always sought to turn things around to our advantage and to the advantage of the communities we work with. One of our most successful projects, initiated with a group of young people, grew into an eight-year-long arts and media ‘service provision’ related to youth offending. In achieving this level of funding (altogether around £850,000) and support we had to significantly alter our approach to comply with requirements of the Youth Justice system. We gradually gave away more and more of the things that we knew intimately to be of value in shaping relationships with young people in order to accommodate the external support and funding for the project. We relinquished aspects of the power of what we do and how we do it to comply with the specific requirements of the funding body.

After a year or two, as we became more confident in the relationship, we re-shaped the project to deliver it the way that made us once again uniquely different from the Youth Offending Service. We found a stronger voice and participants demonstrated theirs to practically show the value of our collaborative approach. We could not challenge this effectively until we had demonstrated ‘results’ by the external measures imposed on us. In every year since, under continued measurement by our funding partners, we have demonstrated better results. This has come from working in more inde-pendent ways, from practices emerging from the values and approaches developed through our community-based work.

When power has been taken from us, it is usually in the incorporation of our ideas and approaches. They have been used to support government inspired social engineering and shorter-term manipulations. At its best, incorporation has been mixed with insightful recognition (by some government and local government departments) focused on genuine self-organisation and empowerment of people. It is the mediation of skilled and experienced community arts practitioners working with other community activists


34

that has made many of these positive community empowerment initiatives possible.

Ironically, it is exactly by demonstrating the value of our work (particularly in the UK), that we may have invited more explicit threats of incorporation from both the public and private sectors. Our ‘third sector’ (the voluntary and not-for- profit sector in the UK) approach has thus been ‘mainstreamed’ and commercialised in countless ways. Examples include projects that might have been community organised, arts based ‘not for profits’ twenty years ago, aimed at building wider community resources (and resourcefulness) through the arts.So many projects have been delivered by small businesses that are isolated and powerless beyond the commissioning period.

On the other hand, a number of high profile community projects have been undertaken by TV and media companies or through government commissions to larger companies. Such projects add glamour to the idea of community arts without ever giving any real power to the participants. The outputs (and indeed the need for specific outputs) are determined from above. By the same token, local authorities, or venues they support, have harnessed community arts approaches to address their own corporate targets and goals. Evidently, there may be benefits for people in these approaches and there have been some notable exceptions where local authorities have developed highly skilled community arts teams. However, for many, the work has become short-term and target-orientated and, at worst, has built expectations without any real longer-term develop-ment plan or supportive frameworks.

Over the years, my own organisation has been offered numerous commissions that we have responded to in one of three ways.

In the first instance, whatever the level of funding, if we don’t agree with the premise and if there is no room for negotiation, we always carry (and have exercised) the power to say no!

35

Power and Com


Secondly, we have the power to challenge. We argue the case for a different approach, for extending the benefits, for more time to deliver the work, for better partner-ship arrangements, for more flexibility, for greater direction to come from the people that we are being asked to work with. Some of our best work with larger partners has come about through mediating their chosen approach with the real needs and concerns of those they would like us to work with. In one case this led to the abandonment of a major re-development plan for an area and the re-shaping of that plan to more accurately reflect local wishes and needs. In another case it has led to major local policy shifts with regards to wide ranging measures in schools to combat bullying. Both began as short-term projects designed to have little or no consequence, but were extended from our initial counter challenges and by developing the voices of collaborators. Both become long-term vehicles for change.

Thirdly, we can choose to acquiesce and deliver what is being paid for without challenging anything on the surface of things. However, at the same time, I believe it is important to step back to look at the bigger picture. We take the money and then utilise the opportunity to train new people, make new contacts, develop the relationships to take things elsewhere in future or deliver a benefit that the commissioner didn’t expect. We exercise the power to demonstrate that an additional approach we were interested in developing, beyond a contract arrangement, worked perhaps better than what we were initially commissioned to do. Some corporate partners have experienced the joy of national recognition and awards for developing such innovative projects!

On the other hand, where our work has not been rigidly target funded, commissioned, negotiated or directed on the basis of a top down relationship, we have been able to create more positive relationships with power. The power, for example, of people to gather around an issue, a threat, a desire, a passion, an art form or the stimulus of


36

creative leadership, is still alive. This is true even in the most fragmented, consumer-driven economies, where anonymity in front of the TV screen has become the norm.

The skilled community artist knows that play is the key. Without play there is only the power and direction of others. Constructing, shaping and determining time for play is one of the main factors through which society prepares people for work, social conformity, consumption, cohesion and a sense of dissatisfied containment (that masquerades as contentment). Sadly, inequality of opportunity and the need to shape people through ways that are individually inappro-priate leaves many bereft of skills, even (and perhaps more worryingly), those who are powerful in economic, political and social terms.

Owen Kelly was right: there has been an erosion of the radicalism which generated the practice of community arts in its early years and helped to turn it into a movement. Then again, at that time the world was not connected in the way it is now. Issues of power and individual and collective expression have been transformed by our digital present and neo-radical future(s). It’s even more complex on the ground where mature radicals have sought other ways of influencing things and community arts emerges in new contexts inter-nationally, where its radical edge is far more apparent.

An interesting example from my own experi-ence is that of the Lajee Centre based in the Aida Refugee Camp, in the Palestinian town of Bethlehem. Surrounded on three sides by the walls and observation towers of the occupying military forces, this community with its small education centre has worked wonders in transforming the lives and outlook of young people in the camp. Through dance, photography, murals, film and radio the children and young people of Aida have reached world-wide audiences with their stories and challenged both the impunity of the occupying forces and the situation of their own lives. Their approach to challenging power is radically different from the path of

37

Power and Com


martyrdom chosen by their elder siblings or their parents’ generation. Arguably, their determined impact is a far greater cause for good.

Power Games – A Process of EmpowermentWe might begin with the power of the emotions.

One of the most frequent emotions a community artist encounters is fear, fear which leads to anger, sadness, im-mobility, sickness and a denial of interest and ability; fear of the other; fear of failure; fear of self in all its subtle configurations. The dialogue we bring to individuals, groups and communities around their concerns, around their fears and around how they feel is, at all levels, a first step towards empowerment. Fun is an antidote to many of these emotions, but only partly so. Behind the fun the source of the problems remains. Lightness, fun and celebration help open doors to dialogue, the first phase of a strategy that leads to deeper and more sustained work with groups and communities.

Considering and addressing people’s concerns and fears unlock the capacity for trust, for intimately sharing deeper worries. At the same time, it also enhances people’s capacity to share their most sought after dreams and desires. This may be as simple as having the confidence to perform, draw or write a poem or as complicated as leading a campaign, through creative means, that will result in substantial change for the community they live in.

Consideration of the concrete realities they encounter brings the community artist into a direct relation-ship with the things that people find oppressive or the things they value. These may well be things they wish to transform, or if valued increase, but which, without external help or new means, they cannot. By assessing the realities that surround people, those with power over the situation are identified. It is at this point at which the need for allies – the movers and shakers with the ability to share power and change things – is realised. Strategies for change may emphasise the necessity for power wielders to become true collabora-


38

tors, partners in realising new priorities and goals that take account of peoples’ real needs. The focus of our arts-based work may be in demonstrating that need more clearly.

This raises another issue. What are the processes, the structures, the attitudes and behaviours (both external and internalised) that hold us back as artists and as active citizens? This is where dialogue though creative play comes in. The supportive, creative responsiveness of a community artist needs to fly with that energy that cannot be named. By understanding one another’s emotions, fears, dreams and realities, a certain trust in relationship is generated and this enables people to laugh at their fears, to discover new ways of thinking and to realise that whatever tied them to one place was never ever immutable. It is nothing more complicated than regaining the ability to make choices, about anything and everything. Becoming responsible in this way may empower the individual beyond their previous imaginings.

The release from internal and external oppression allows for expression and a new confidence – a regaining of personal and collective power that can now be directed towards planning processes, designing and editing, shaping what came through play, innovation, experiment and insight, into a concrete, achievable goal. Planning and working together creates a solidarity and a process which combats the worst of fears and enables us to choreograph our energies to more effectively realise our dreams.

The process of creation and the process of trans-formation requires dedication, commitment and resolve. Testing this against the realities people face is important. Half-hearted exercise of power in the hands of a group will result in a weak attempt to change things. This in turn can confirm expectations of powerlessness in a very negative

39

Power and Com


way. Therefore, the reality-check on whether what has been planned is the particular action and progression people want and feel ready for is always important. It assesses the power, the energy and the intensity with which people will work to achieve their goal.

None of this happens in isolation. We still need knowledge, resources and potential supporters, which unbeknownst to us may already be there in abundance. The difficulty with resources and supporters is pretty much always in identifying them adequately and having sufficient time to build and maintain the relationships that can sustain the work. Knowledge acquisition is largely about knowing where to look and how to share the knowledge and apply it effectively once it has been found.

Kevin Ryan during his ‘Making a Book in a Day (or Two)’ workshop. Photo: Roy Goderie


40

We have now come full circle, still engaged as we are in the arts process, with new concerns, fears and dreams.

Making it in the Work – Where Does the Power Lie? This vital question underpins all collaborative

work between artists and communities. Whose vision initiates the process? Is it shared by all partners and collaborators? Do they work together in a democratic process or is what they do predetermined and in limited ownership? Is the ‘vision’ merely a devise, a starting framework? Was it determined by a funding body or did it emerge from a grass roots dialogue, collaborative agreement, open relationship and an exploration of the benefits for all parties? Are non-arts trained or unfunded individuals and groups treated as equal partners in these discussions? Have they been drawn into participation in different ways and at different levels or simply lured into the work through the artist’s own pre-occupations?

In the collaborative community context, who is the artist? The person with the skill, training and experience, the track record and the funds? Or are all engaged equally in a process of exploration, research, collecting, sifting, play and interactive innovation?

From vision we progress to investigation. From play and interplay (and its consequences) we are led into the processes of editing, decision-making and design. Who makes these decisions? How are they mediated? Who has the power in these relationships? How much power is invested in external factors such as legislation, funding requirements, compliance, local laws, cultural or religious constraints?

When the final editing and design decisions have been made, the ‘craft’ or practice skills enter into the frame. Are the editors and designers equally involved in the processes of production? Do different people play different roles in different parts of the process? Does the skilled producer work to the directions of those who are not skilled and, if

41

Power and Com


so, what are those without the skills learning and developing along the way? We sometimes need to trust the powers of others with more skills than us, to help us realise the impact we wish to have and to forward the message we want the world to receive. Equally, community artists need to trust the outcomes and the relevance of quality to the people involved and the context in which it is made. The skilled worker will need to balance the quality of product against the quality of the process and what this means to the participant.

Finally, what happens around presentation, distribution, promotion and evaluation? Who determines this process? Who decides on the projected outcomes for participants and the work? Does the commissioning agency determine this or can the people freely decide who they want to share their work with? What happens if they decide not to share it at all?

At the end of each engagement, project or programme we must ask ourselves whether people have gained the power to be able to do these things for themselves next time around? If not, how can we support them to gain the additional skills, confidence and resources they may need?

Each project or programme may require us to formulate constantly changing new answers to these basic questions. This is why we need to be adept at naming and experts at moving freely!

Power which Transforms Community Arts practice often involves a highly

complex set of social processes. In sustained work, conflicts may arise in many different forms and with different degrees of intensity. Lighter types of participatory art or forms of ‘engaged arts’ practice may circumvent some of these challenges because the expectations, attitudes and structural involvement of participants are constrained by the artist’s executive power. More intensive participatory practices work with the energy of conflict to advance creative


42

development through carefully applied agreements and the skills we manifest in managing complex relationships. Adaptability, commitment to the relationship, malleability of ideas, openness of decision making, and a sense of common ownership, are all key factors to success.

The professional or skilled artist has a particular responsibility to understand the context in which they are working and to continue to explore this in greater depth with collaborators and other participants throughout. This permits shared meaning and a fuller sense of (common) ownership to develop through the work. Without the ability to choose, the people we work with are powerless. When people trust the community artist and the community arts process, they have chosen to do something which brings the practitioner into a position of great power. How we utilise that power is the key to the quality of our practice.

Kevin Ryan is Chief Executive Officer of Charnwood Arts, a UK-based community arts and media organisation that was established in 1976 in Loughborough. In this year he also started his first community arts project in Portsmouth. Following involvement with other projects in Brighton and Oxford, Kevin co-founded Rosebery Arts and later the Charnwood Arts – Community Arts and Ethnic Minorities Arts Panel in 1980. During the 1980s he worked in youth and disability contexts, developing arts and media projects. He was also an active member of the East Midlands Association for Community Artists. In 1991, he co-founded the national independent community arts magazine Mailout and was its co-director until 2011. Kevin re-joined Charnwood Arts as an arts development worker in 1991 and became its director in 1995. Charnwood Arts works both locally within the UK East Midlands and internationally, including India, China, Taiwan, Canada, Palestine and across Europe. Kevin is also a founding member and currently a co-director of the East Midlands Participatory Arts Forum Partnership, which aims to support, promote and advocate for community arts development in that region of the UK and support national connections between community artists.

43

The Allstar Refjúdží Band is a project of the Archa Theatre in Prague. It began in 2008. These are some of my thoughts on the

evolution of the band and on my involvement as a composer and musical director.

I don’t like the term ‘world music’. But, it’s difficult to think of how else to describe the music of our band. We sing in five languages, the members are from seven different countries. A fourteen-year-old Roma boy from Usti, after a day of working with us on a new song, called the music “goulash”. It was an apt description, slightly critical but affectionate. I would add that the ingredients of our goulash are unusual and the taste is unique – a new kind of Czech goulash.

Random Combinations, Deliberate Music:THE ALLSTAR REFJÚDŽÍ BAND IN THE CZECH REPUBLIC

Michael Romanyshyn

Random Com

binations, Deliberate M

usic / M

ichael Romanyshyn


44

The Allstar Refjúdží Band at ICAF. Photo: Roy Goderie

45

Random Com


usic / M

ichael Romanyshyn

How do you compose music with a group consisting of such different musical traditions and tastes, not to mention backgrounds and abilities? I’m not an ethnomusicologist (thank God or I would have an even harder time), so it’s not a question of authenticity, it’s an artistic quandary: How to compose music which is ultimately a personal and unexplainable creation and still have it be a collective venture.

The words “collective” and “collaborative” can only begin to describe a process in which there are an infinite number of ways of creating. It depends very much on those involved and collaborative for one may mean compromise for another. The individual strengths and weaknesses determine the nature of your work together. In our case, it’s the weak-nesses that sometimes become our greatest assets. For instance, a lack of training on the part of some of the musicians in our band allows them to be more receptive to adventurous experimentation. And that is something noticeably lacking with the conservatory students we work with, who know already how everything is supposed to be. It’s striking to note that the members with a strong, traditional musical background, but with less training, have been more open and able to grow collaboratively than the students of music.

Dance Through the FenceThe idea for the band came from Czech theater

director Jana Svobodová. She worked for many years in Czech refugee camps producing large outdoor shows for local residents and audiences bused in from Prague. In 2008, collaborating with writer Hana Andronikova, she developed the show Dance Through the Fence, which was based on five stories of refugees she had met through her work. She brought the show to the Archa Theatre in Prague and put together a cast including some of the people from the camps. Part of her concept for the show was to have an orchestra that included all of the performers: musicians, actors and dancers. The production manager and the sound engineer were added into the band because they both played instruments. The challenge was to create music that everyone could


46

participate in regardless of their skill level, and that’s where I came in.

I was living with my family in Temple, Maine, a town of 550 located in the easternmost state of the United States. I was running a rural theater there in a church that I had converted into a performing space. Before that, I had worked with the Bread and Puppet Theater for 17 years, directed large community theater projects for several years afterwards, and I had managed a puppet theater on the Lower Eastside of New York City before moving to Maine with my wife Susie and starting a family. My background had a lot of music in it, but I had a desire to make it central to my work and had decided to devote the second half of my life to more music making.

Two days after the New Year in 2008, I entered the theater space at the Archa Theatre in Prague knowing very little about the people I would be working with for the next 10 days. I was prepared for one day’s worth of music. I hoped in the following days to find a way to compose songs in a collaborative manner, but how, in any precise way, that would be accomplished, I had no idea.

In the black box, state-of-the-art theater located two stories underground, I met this group: three great singers – Kurdish, Chinese and Swiss; one Armenian accordion player; a wonderful young Czech drummer; a troubled but talented Slovak trumpet student (also the sound engineer); the production manager doubling on saxophone; a beautiful and spirited Slovak dancer who began playing guitar that day; an odd young Czech actor with a tumbi; an accom-plished Czech film actress with tap shoes and her high school trombone; a talented Slovak actress with an accordion she could play but a couple of notes on; and the director of the show, Jana, with her very good but not very well working alto saxophone. Who could imagine? What a challenge, and what an opportunity.

47

Random Com


usic / M

ichael Romanyshyn

The first day, I taught a few tunes to everyone. We played a simple klezmer melody and a couple of New Orleans style songs. That was enough teaching from my playbook. This was, after all, not going to be a klezmer band or a New Orleans-style brass band. The second day began with sitting in a circle. I asked everyone to play something and we went around the room. Miran played his lute and sang a Kurdish folk song, Lu sang a traditional Chinese song a cappella, Gugar played several songs on his accordion, Philipp sang something in Switzerdeutsch and the others more or less demonstrated the sounds of their instruments. We weren’t going to be a Kurdish, Armenian or Chinese folk band either, so we started making up songs inspired by all of that, music we couldn’t faithfully reproduce but could make something else from for our own use. We composed six songs in those ten days together. It was one of the most special collaborations I have ever been involved in.

In Dance through the Fence, the band played in between the showings of five simultaneous pieces. The audience was divided into five groups and given a map of what shows to see and the order in which to see them. The five pieces were timed to end together and all the performers joined the band to play for the audience gathered in the center of the room. At the end of each song, the audience went back into their groups to see the next piece and the performers in the band ran to their respective stages, placed throughout the space. Later, the show was performed in a train station in Pilsen, as well as many other conventional and unconventional spaces.

After those ten days of rehearsals, I went home. The six songs were made and that was it. I returned with my family in February for the opening night and stayed for the week of performances, thinking that would be the end of my participation in the project. But someone had the idea to have the band play out in one of the clubs. What a surprise for all of us that turned out to be! We played and people ... danced. Until that moment, I hadn’t thought of our music as


48

dance music, but apparently it was. This outside success with a young audience opened up a whole other way at looking at what we were doing. There was another audience, not just the theater-going crowd.

Peter Schumann and the Art of What is PossibleI am a practitioner of the art of what is possible. It’s

one of the many things I learned from Peter Schumann while in the Bread and Puppet Theater. There’s a big picture and then there are the details that make up that picture. In the Allstar Refjúdží Band, those details often include not having the ideal instrumentation or the instrumentalists who under-stand the music in the way I would like. It might be a player from the Prague symphony who won’t play by ear or, on the other hand, players who have a hard time sight reading (I’m one of those) or playing the basic lines. But, that’s in large part what the art is all about. In the end, that the songs are

The Allstar Refjúdží Band at ICAF. Photos: Roy Goderie

49

Random Com


usic / M

ichael Romanyshyn

alive, that they get performed, listened to, danced to, is an artistic achievement. It’s certainly not the art of perfection, but it is the art of what’s possible and what is possible can become perfect in its own way. I listen to songs after awhile and I think, well – how could they possibly be any other way?

The tenor of our music is more important than the notes, but we do struggle over the notes. The members of the band rarely receive a new song of mine with unbridled enthusiasm. Although we actually do have quite a bit in common, our understanding of what is music, what is noise, what is rhyth-mically correct and what is not, is often at odds. Philosophical discussions are not much help. It’s difficult or impossible to resolve our differences with each other in the abstract. Doing is our only solution – making the sounds, playing the notes, hearing the ideas. Maybe playing music can produce world peace. It does in our band, if only for a short time.

We have had our differences and share of difficulties – more than a few! I suppose it’s not surprising. What is surprising is the longevity and success of the project. Flexibility is one reason. The band is fluid and people come and go (in our larger configuration we are eighteen, the smaller group between nine and twelve), but the core of the group – the foreigners who were there at the beginning – remains constant. As I’ve described already, we’re not a like-minded group of people. The band didn’t form origi-nally through friendships or common musical interests. It was an intentional band, put together and held together by the project (Hurray for public funding! Sometimes it’s the only way) and with what sometimes seems like a random selection of players. But our differences are also what make it interesting, and I’ll tell you a little more about some of those.

The political beliefs in the Allstar Refjúdží Band run the spectrum – almost. There are the older Czechs and Slovaks with a decidedly pro-West, anti-Russian sentiment; our Armenian accordion player from Georgia, whose kids had knives put to their throats and their mouths duct taped shut


50

by thugs involved in the Armenian/Azerbaijani conflict – he’s understandably nostalgic for the Soviet days; our Chinese singer Lu has complicated and multi-faceted opinions on the Chinese government and is at odds with some of the other members; the Swiss singer is a social democrat; our Kurdish singer likes George W. Bush because he helped to create Kurdistan; the young Czech and Slovak members in the band tend to be conservative and I’m an anarchist.

Political disagreements are not our main problem, though. (They’re nothing compared to the musical disagree-ments.) We more or less share a common point of view about immigration, social justice and human rights. We are a thematic band and the issues of racism, nationalism, cultural clash and immigration rights are at the core of our songs. This is where we have common ground. We don’t argue much about those issues.

One major disagreement we did have over theme and music combined, was during a tour to the Netherlands. A few of the young Czech members in the band were upset over our version of the Czech National Anthem. They were offended seeing people dance to it. My argument was that the anthem came from a very bad 19th century musical (No Anger and No Melee, by Josef Kajetán Tyl) and that we had improved it. In fact, the words to the Czech National Anthem echo the band’s theme so very well:

Where is my home, where is my home? Water roars across the meadows, Pinewoods rustle among crags, The garden is glorious with spring blossom, Paradise on earth it is to see.And this is that beautiful land, The Czech land, my home,

What could be more fitting for a refugee band to sing? It is better when sung before a Czech audience, that’s true. The reason is everyone knows the lyrics and when our

51

Random Com


usic / M

ichael Romanyshyn

singers with their Swiss, Chinese and Kurdish accents sing the song, it gives it new meaning which is lost on foreign audiences. Those audiences enjoy the reggae beat without understanding what the song is about, so our young members had a point. Another song uses a well-known text as well. It’s a poem by Jaroslav Seifert, Hora Říp, a poem that all Czech kids learn in school. It begins, I saw mountains full of ice, but of this I cannot sing... and later, My dear mother, our home is so lovely... The meaning of this song is altered too when sung with our heavy accents.

At the end of the first year, we made our first recording. One of the songs, Homesick, was by Miran. I arranged it and added a verse with Lu singing in Chinese and felt it would be great to have them sing together at the end. It worked very well. Miran sang two verses, then Lu a verse, then the two of them together. Without understanding the words, you could understand the song. When we got to the studio to record it, Miran refused to sing at the same time with Lu. In the Kurdish tradition, men and women do not sing together. I tried to persuade him, cajole him and finally we separated the two of them and he sang reluctantly and very lightly behind her.

Three years later, Miran invited Lu and me to join him for a few songs on stage at a Kurdish New Year’s celebration attended by many of the Kurds living in Prague. Hanging as a backdrop on the stage, in the large modern auditorium on the outskirts of Prague, were large photos of Kurdish revolutionary leaders. Well dressed young men and women sat at round tables drinking and eating. When it came time for Miran to perform, he was greeted warmly; everyone knew him. Our first song was Homesick, the same song he had refused to sing with Lu three years before. This time, in front of several hundred fellow Kurds, they sang it together.

The songs I write for the band, and the ones we make together, are no longer based on folk melodies. They have become something else, composed around the singing of


52

Philipp, Lu and Miran. If Miran writes a song of his own in Kurdish, I do very little arranging, but he picks out songs of mine he likes and contributes Kurdish lyrics and his singing. Gugar is often unhappy with my music, but he also readily contributes inventive and creative passages – harmonies and chord structures. Philipp writes songs in German and Switzerdeutsch. He is a master at quick and inventive singing, making up the singing melodies on the spot. Lu is constantly experimenting with her voice. She also sings traditional Chinese songs at concerts, writes and sings lyrics in Chinese for our new ones and finds ancient texts to sing as well. The Czech lyrics for the songs on our second recording, Who Eats Dogs?, are written by Archa Theatre director, Ondrej Hrab. Some wonderful Czech musicians have joined the band as well.

When Miran was zipped into a plastic suitcase that would cover his escape from Syria in 2003, he had visions of his safe arrival in Belgium. That’s the destination the human trafficker had assured him he would go when taking his $13,000. Placed in the back of a bus, he left the country undetected. Some days later, he arrived in the Czech Republic, listening to the Czech language for the first time in a country he had never heard of until then. He didn’t intend to be there, but now, he is Kurdish-Czech.

The traditions that we live by give us security. They are solid and predictable and, of course, correct. We rely on the predictability in an unpredictable world. When a random collection of cultures confronts an old, closed and resistant one like the Czech Republic’s, the clash is disruptive and though the repercussions are predictable the results are not. Something new arises from the clash and mixing of all those ingredients. It’s still Czech. And, like the individuals in the Allstar Refjúdží Band who are now Kurdish-Czech, Chinese-Czech, Swiss-Czech and Armenian-Czech, the band has become in its own random and deliberate way, Czech.

53

Random Com


usic / M

ichael Romanyshyn

Michael Romanyshyn is a composer, musician, puppeteer and theater director. He has been directing and partici-pating in community arts since 1974. He was a member of the Bread and Puppet Theater from 1975 through 1992. He also worked for many years with the Nicaraguan group MECATE. He was co-founder and Director of Los Kabayitos Puppet Theater in New York City from 1996 through 1999. And he was a member of the Honk! Festival Committee and the Second Line Social Aid and Pleasure Society Brass Band in Somerville, Massachusetts. He is currently Director of the Temple Stream Theater in Temple, Maine and Musical Director of the Allstar Refjúdží Band in Prague. He lives in Temple with his wife and two sons.

54


“For joy, against death”, can be read on banners in countless Argentinian squares.3 For the past 29 years, it has

also been the motto on the flag of the community theatre group called Catalinas Sur, our country’s pioneer in this form of theatre. From the moment the group was born in 1983, the date when democracy returned to Argentina, right up to the present day, the validity of that sentence has continued to grow. In those dark days, death used to be associated with the dictatorship that had just ended: afterwards it took on a new resonance. Today, it is not so much ‘death’ as, perhaps, a submission to belief systems that oppress us, or to accepting that it is a rule of nature that nothing can change or needs to change. Death is the silencing of the imagination, causing everything to remain as it is. Joy, by contrast, which has been embodied in community theatre since its founda-tion, means the defeat of death, in all its meanings. It is the creativity residing in neighbors fighting against what appears to be invincible.

3. The text has been translated from Spanish by Mercedes Echagüe (with additional editing by Phillip Mann and Eugene van Erven).

For Joy, Against Death: COMMUNITY THEATRE IN ARGENTINA

Edith Scher

55

For Joy, Against Death / Edith Scher

CC Barracas, El Loquero de Cordelia [Cordelia’s shrink’]. Photo: Julio Locatelli, red de fotógrafos de teatro comunitario

Edith Scher


56

What is community theatre in Argentina?Community theater in Argentina is a phenomenon

with very specific characteristics. It involves a huge number of people, linked by a network that embraces an increasing number of groups from different parts of the country. It is a practice that has evolved over time, both as a general nation-wide movement, and because each individual group is not short-lived, but in it for the long haul. The key feature is that those who make this kind of theatre are neighbors: residents, that is, of particular neighborhoods. They (we) build and transform their reality. I am not referring to groups of professional actors that explore issues of different communities and bring them to the stage, nor groups that make popular theatre that may be of interest to the community, nor to street theatre. Community theatre can be done indoors or out in the street. It is a theatre of neighbors for neighbors, from the community to the community. I am talking of a theatre that is defined primarily by those who make it. It is a practice which owes its name to the people who create it. To put it bluntly, it involves an entire neighbor-hood: a community that consists of a wide variety of trades, professions, ages, and backgrounds, with all the diversity that this implies. Community theatre in Argentina is not meant to transform those neighborhoods or populations commonly referred to as ‘at risk’. It affects each neighbor-hood’s population in its totality, whether they are ‘at risk’ or not. Thus, one of its strengths is the wide range of occupations of its membership, as well as the generational mix that this membership includes. In short: anyone who so wishes can participate. There are no selection criteria whatsoever regarding age, skill, or prior training.

Our community theatre is not intended only for the marginalized or impoverished. In a sense, we are all at risk, because, somehow, we are all prisoners of values and follow individual, hopeless, suspicious lifestyles. It is a massive social wound that our theatre tries to combat and heal. The middle classes, at least in Argentina (but not only here, I suspect) seem to have adopted an “every man for himself ” mentality,

57


and it is this which community theatre continuously calls into question. It does this not by taking this attitude as a theme for a performance, but through its intrinsic process, through taking joint responsibility for a project and thereby encouraging sustainable relationships, collective creation and hope.

Fundamentally, to the extent that it creates a framework for developing creativity, it stimulates the imagination. Art (in this case theatre) opens doors to the possible and thus allows us to imagine another destination than the “inevitable” one that life provides us. Another feature of our theatre practice in Argentina is that it does not have any political or religious affiliation. Nor does it have any other type of ownership that could restrict the entry of anyone, or that might require some sort of external dependency thereby threatening its autonomy. Community theatre stems from the idea that every human being has creative potential. This potential, when developed in a space that enables such growth, generates not only personal but also social transformations. It can only happen, however, if the context in which this growth develops is collectively owned and is based on the flourishing of others.

Community theatre groups in Argentina have a strong sense of territory. Being anchored in the neighborhood, they build a way of seeing the world that relies on its history and its people. From their home base, they network with other local institutions. These are core features of community theatre in our country. As a result, neighborhoods are no longer mere dormitories for the population and begin to act as generators of culture. This newly generated culture circulates in the spaces of the neighborhood, on sidewalks, in the history of the buildings, in homes, in the memories of people who lived in previous generations, in the oral culture of the neighbors. From this firm territorial base and with collective strength, shows are generated and produced. Our community theatre is always spoken from the first person plural, since it is the entire community giving an opinion. Together, they stop


58

to look, to create and produce what each of the neighbors alone cannot. It happens in unconventional spaces: in neigh-borhood schools, squares, and clubs; any place, really, where people come together to celebrate. ‘Celebration’ is actually a very apt noun to describe the spirit of our community theatre. It is an activity that includes the art of food, festivals, bonfires, or events where the elderly mix with children, street vendors with doctors, accountants with engineers, carpenters with waiters, and everyone with everyone.

Argentinian community theatre is also epic. It gives a new meaning to, and interacts with, older popular genres. That is, it refers to it, mixes elements from it, and borrows its acting techniques. It doesn’t do this in an archeological way; it reworks it so that the present talks to the past. In general, its mode tends to be tragic or comic, but does not often follow the conventions of these types to the letter. It rarely is straight drama, at least it hasn’t been until now. It has no individual protagonists, for example. If there are any protagonists, they are collective (played by the chorus). And plots do not come from private autobiographical stories; they are dug up from collective memory.

There are many community theatre groups in Argentina. The younger ones usually have at least thirty members, and the older ones can have as many as two or three hundred members. This is necessarily so, because it is a precondition that, for any proposal to become concrete, it must speak to the the entire community. Thus neighbors can develop their creativity within the framework of these projects, and the invitation to participate is open to anyone.

This is what, in general, the community theatre in Argentina is about. It began in 1983 with the emergence of the Catalinas Sur theatre group. It was followed in 1996 with the Barracas cultural circle and later by the first two groups to emerge in the interior of Argentina: The Murga of the Station in Posadas (1999) and the Murga of the Mountain in Oberá (2000), both located in the province of Misiones. From 2001

59


on, many more groups have been formed in Buenos Aires and other cities of Argentina. One of those is the group that I direct, Matemurga of Villa Crespo, wich was founded in 2002. I look at Argentinian community theatre from the vantage point of my experience managing this project, now ten years in the making. That is, I do not describe it as a researcher, but as someone totally immersed in it.

Why?Why did this phenomenon, that now counts

more than 40 groups in Argentina, come about? It was not a coincidence that the first group, Catalinas Sur from the La Boca neighborhood in Buenos Aires, appeared in 1983. It emerged in a context in which the society had a deep need to reconnect broken ties after years of military dictator-ship (1976-1983). It was a time of hope, a time of change. In those years, the Popular Theatre Movement was founded (Movimiento de Teatro Popular, or MoTePo as we abreviated it in Spanish) of which the Catalinas group was also part. Only a few members of this movement survived over time. Argentina had been devastated in many ways, including the destruction of group culture (the tradition of building something together with others) and therefore sustaining a movement of any kind was difficult. Why then did community theatre remain, why did it grow, why did it excite people, and why has it succeeded in creating new enterprises in the past twenty years?

Probably the statement of Adhemar Bianchi, director of Catalinas Sur, summarizes the basic reason for this persistence. ‘I believe in the consciousness of the “we”. Or we are an “us” and we are saved together or we will drown one by one’. “We”: the most generous personal pronoun, a vocabulary word that is almost forgotten, burdened with a pejorative sense, disbelieved, mistrusted, stripped of its power in the history of the last thirty years. It is not new to say that words are loaded with the connotations that society and the historical context attach to them. However, despite the apparent success of the “every man for himself ” belief, the


60

temporary kingdom of the law of the jungle, despite all these other meanings of “us”, in some hidden corners, rebel hearts have continued to palpitate. The community theatre has continued to say “we” with the body, for many years. It gave and continues to give people the chance to express them-selves and meet one another. Its very mode of construction keeps arts and politics inseparable; it keeps arts and social transformation inseparable as well, because it reconstructs and appreciates the knowledge and creativity of neighbors. This development implies an active attitude on the part of the community, the strength to stand up before the world. This is how Ricardo Talento, director of Barracas, expresses it when considering the state of things and the role of community theatre within it: “Creativity is completely asleep and broken – it merely holds on. I see that it is becoming increasingly difficult to think you can change anything in the world. And I do not mean great revolutions. I mean shifting the place of a chair, so that, when arranged differently, it makes it easier to move in my house. There are plenty of things one could do to develop creativity and to open the possibility to say, “I can modify, together with someone else, many things.” If I want shadow and plant a tree, I am changing something. If we were creative human beings, then we would not accept to live in such a stupid world.’

Community theatre as we know it in Argentina, is commited to that awakening of a dormant creativity, a passivity that is the result of a profound cultural breakdown in our society. A breakdown that has many tremendous dimensions.

Who?It is no coincidence either that those who

started community theatre in Argentina are people who were young in the 1960s and ‘70s. To under-stand why people like Bianchi and Talento chose community theatre, we must analyze the generation they belong to and what their early life was like. They grew up in a period in which young people believed in social changes,

61


transformations, and rights for all people. ‘May in France, hippies, opposition to the Vietnam War, and the Cuban Revolution influenced our thinking’, says Bianchi.

The reality after that proved to be much harder. Without giving up the hope for change, as we grew older we lost the conviction that everything was already in place and that things were going to happen there and then. But I dedicated myself to art and could not think of my most important activity, theatre, without also thinking of politics. That was crucial at the time. I think that if one stays only within the theater, one locks oneself up in a world that has its own logic (which may be very beautiful and very creative). You realize then that this kind of attitude involves concentrating a lot on the ‘I’. When I saw this, I started feeling contradictions. Exclusively specializing in theatre became boring and without meaning for the outside world; it was preaching to the converted. During my theatrical training I had always longed for a theatre with lots of blood: the raw theatre Peter Brook talked about, that of William Shakespeare, of the Spanish Golden Age, that of the Commedia Dell ’Arte. That universe was alive because it was not set in the courts of the elite, but in the world of the city squares, which was always infected by the force of the issues that people felt were their own. I started then to think in ways that would define me. I think all of that later led to my decision to make theatre in a neighborhood, with people in the square, with an epic scope, with fun and partying, always looking for a link to that raw theatre, which was so very alive.

Belonging, bonding with others, the involve-ment of many. How could this development occur in the years when Catalinas was born, without ignoring the environment, without ignoring the bloody defeat of all those earlier dreams of change? What would it become? Working from an artistic perspective, without trying to bring clarity to


62

the confused, but rather to foster the creative development of a community, a strong sense of belonging was born. This was a building processs that led to changes on the personal, social and neighborhood levels. It caused repercussions and echoes and aroused new enthusiasm. In the south of Buenos Aires, first in the neighborhood of La Boca and later in Barracas, a strong cultural core was generated, with an indisputable identity, an experience that transcended the boundaries of these particular spots on on the map.

Ricardo Talento belongs to that same generation. It is remarkable how, without knowing that one day they would meet and work together, he and Bianchi travelled on parallel paths. They both began in 1965, one in Uruguay and the other in Argentina.

The deep conviction of those who started community theatre in Argentina and knew how to pass it on to later generations, has the characteristics of awakening a dormant longing and the feeling that not everything is a given. That something, however small it may seem, may be affected by someone. That it is possible to build something with others and that such collective construction is a way of resisting and participating, of not waiting passively. That it forms part of the destiny of something. One of the main reasons, then, why community theatre persisted, has been the need to sustain and enrich a collective body, to never separate art and politics, to never give up the desire for a better society. It has forged an unbreakable link between artistic work and social change. But not by transmitting explicit, message-driven content to enlighten viewers, but – as I tried to explain earlier – through its very practice: acting together with others. Why art? Why theatre? Because it has the intrinsic ability to search beyond boundaries and resist what works automatically.

TogetherThere were other reasons as well. The need to

overcome moments of crisis, for example, led people to join in these endeavors. Bianchi explains:

63


The crisis and the transformations it brought about showed discomfort, sometimes more violent, sometimes less, but they always involved change. For support people began looking for an ‘us’. And community theatre certainly provided that. When you face a crisis, you ask to yourself: ‘Who am I?’, ‘Where am I?’ Identity and memory. With these questions you try to trace a line, to build a future.

With these remarks Bianchi feeds the theory of the collective subject. He mentions the crisis. “Just think of the fact that many of the younger groups that exist today were established in Argentina in 2002, right after the crisis of 19 and 20 December, 2001. I am not saying that this development was the immediate and only foreseeable consequence of these events, because nothing here is linear. Yet, it is true that in those years the feeling was renewed that it was possible to join up with others and bring about change.”

It is not the task of this essay to examine how and why many of the attempts to build something were not suc-cessful (although some were), nor does it intend to delve into the impact that the crisis did or did not have on our society in general. The truth is that, no matter how, at least in some sectors, the need to no longer take everything for granted was renewed, as also was the need to get together to build. To strengthen and save themselves, people sought to be part of a collective subject. What is evident is that community theatre, because it is based on very specific foundations (namely the participatory practice of art and the develop-ment of creativity), grew a lot from then on. Although the political circumstances today are no longer the same and we therefore may have to analyze new variables of change, this phenomenon continues.

Art as AxisSince ‘the social’ implies a very broad category, we

need to define our object of study more precisely when talking about community theatre as a medium for social exchange


64

and construction and transformation. At the basis of it all, the axis is the creative development of a community and not the simple meetings of neighbors sharing a meal, activities which happen and are welcome, but are always a consequence of the first. Only the challenge of a building process that contains the wisdom and the imagination of many, can awaken the desire to reach beyond boundaries, can unleash change, and possesses the potential to generate a fresh look at reality. If this does not happen, we run the risk that the foundation could move in another direction, which might mean a halt to the process in the short term and a return to the false separation of life and art. However, the desire of creation is inexhaustible in the long run. What I am referring to is that art is only a bonus activity we turn to after other more important tasks have been completed, that it is entertainment. Dignifying the human condition in the community, its active character, knowing the other, the ties of solidarity that are generated from the need to lend someone else a hand as well as the emergence of a creative society: these are not matters that lie

CC Barracas, Casamiento [‘Wedding’]. Photo: Julio Locatelli, red de fotógrafos de teatro comunitario

65


beyond the artistic task. They are inherent to it. This sounds like a truism but it is not.

Art and Social TransformationWhy do we in Argentinian community theatre talk

about art and social transformation? To answer this question it is necessary, first of all, to specify what we mean when we use such words. Throughout the history of culture, the meaning of art has been debated. For our purposes, above and beyond the many implications of this word, when we say ‘art’ we mean the creation of a universe that exists parallel to the everyday but which does not imitate everyday laws. We are talking about a construction that evokes the real world, but does not copy it as it is, the desire being to take a look at it. That look, which in community theatre is plural, contains an opinion. And to offer an opinion is not saying something in an obvious and elementary way. This referential world of which we speak here, when it is constructed in an artistic way, is kneaded, twisted and deformed. It can compress or amplify its tiniest detail.

But we were talking about what art is. This debate has been more or less intense at different times in history and its conclusions have influenced the dominant culture in each period. It is true that in this operation (to create a parallel artistic universe with its own rules that imply a point of view) the imagination is inevitably put to work and you can palpably feel with your hands the sensation of constructing something from concrete material. This work speaks of that other world we call ‘reality’, that thing without clear limits that usually presents itself as objective, normal, natural, immutable, just the way it is. Jump-starting the imagination necessarily implies a movement, a real possibility of perceiving and thinking about the world outside imposed limits. And that is where transformation begins. Art can be considered the exclusive attribute of artists, a special gift for the chosen ones. And it is true that there are artists. Some have shaken up humanity. But the practice of art can be seen also as an activity inherent to the human condition, as a way


66

to develop creativity, as a central part of community life. Why would anyone have to give it up? Why couldn’t the first-hand, living experience of art, its sensitive and critical condition, its ability to create logic where there is none, to create worlds that talk about the world, occupy a central place in the life of the community? Who determined that its presence comes last in the order of human priorities? Who cut off the right to imagine?

So let us continue, then, with what ‘social trans-formation’ is. It is nothing more than the assumption that a given state of affairs can be moved, changed. As we mentioned at the start, of everything that power has achieved, in its firm and unperturbed march, one of its greatest successes has been the conquest of thought, the control over people’s will, convincing them that injustice is something natural. This extends from exploitation and the necessity of war to the most trivial matters of interpersonal relations. Without this conquest such an oppressive system could never have been sustained.

‘Transformation’. Let’s clarify it further. Maybe the word becomes clearer if we explain what we are not referring to. It doens’t refer to individual change alone, not to mere self-knowledge which doesn’t go beyond the four walls of someone’s house. No. On the other hand, transformation does not imply either the naive belief that art can contribute directly to the redistribution of wealth or social injustice. That is not the task of art. But what change could ever happen in the world if the belief persisted that things are as they are and nothing can be built or changed? Community theatre continuously tries, through its very practice, to combat that belief. The artistic perspective tends to draw attention to what we normally do not focus on and generates a renewed perspective on what goes unnoticed or appears normal and thus exercises this kind of attitude towards life and its given conditions. Therefore, if this exercise is undertaken by the community itself, the potential for change is enormous.

67


When a community develops its creativity to the fullest extent that this concept implies, it stops being a spectator of its own fate and becomes an active part of social life. Art is central to this transformation. How, then, and in what way does this work in community theatre? On the one hand, it creates the conditions and framework for all who wish to develop their creativity. It provides a look beyond the limits of what supposedly has been designated as the only possible reality. On the other hand, it generates a practice that creates meaning if, and only if, it is done collectively. It is a practice that proves the need of others to create an object together. It is a creative process of which everyone is part but no one the sole protagonist. It is a construction that will survive and transcend, even if eventually someone will not be there anymore or decides to leave.

Transformation of Space and Bodies A schoolyard or any sidewalk, a square or a corner

can be turned into stage. Agreeing on that convention, the community is saying, ‘Wherever we walk normally we will now create another place, from a different perspective.’ A neighbor who tries to move in a different way or alter his voice to build a character, a neighbor who, along with others, sings or plays, will be momentarily immersed in a sea of possibilities and alternatives that will energize his impression of daily reality, which will no longer be perceived as an immutable, eternal and essential block. Moreover, those who participate in a group with such characteristics, will notice soon that artistic development can not occur in isolation. They will understand that their ideas and imagination are not imposed on others, but are amalgamated into one common flame. On top of that, not only does what is still to be discovered come into play, but also prior knowledge becomes part of everyone’s construction. It is impossible to do community theatre without realizing that you are not alone in this task. Consequently, to participate in a venture of this nature you must understand that growth is only possible if you drop individualism. Everyone can play a part. Not everyone can do the same thing, of course, because each


68

one has his own history and skills. Some are good at singing, some at acting, some in fine arts, others are good writers. Yet others again may be slow to warm up to any of these areas, but they may know sewing, electricity or possess some other knowledge. Everything adds up and, over time, many who first did not dare, will go beyond their limits and explore the new.

Transformation is also a result of exercising the memory. This is not a matter of recalling past events (although this also happens), but as the renewed activation of practices that have gone out of style, such as building relationships, trust in others, group organization, solidarity, or the possibility to build a better society. Community theatre encourages the pursuit of all these practices, which are inextricably linked to its artistic work.

So much for transformation. Now, when we say ‘social’ we put the emphasis on culture, which we understand as a construction, a thought about the world and its laws, a concept, a belief system, and, yes, even a symbolic order. The transformation which community theatre works towards has to do with shaking up paradigms that seem unchange-able, indisputable, constructed by culture. These paradigms paralyze and prevent societies from considering a life that is not governed by these parameters, by rules that cripple the ability to imagine or to get excited. They force us to resign ourselves meekly to a life which an oppressive culture so cleverly, so cunningly, presents as if it were natural and with no alternative but to surrender to it. That is why art does not come last in order of importance, as mere filling, as complement, as compensation, or as a patch. That is why we talk about art and social transformation.

To finish this article by returning to the beginning, it is necessary to remember one important detail, which is that among the achievements that inspire meeting after meeting, performance after performance, inch after inch, step after step, among the countless experiences that form part of

69


the world of Argentinian community theatre, resisting with joy stands out. Joy is one of the reasons why life is worth living. Through the joy of community theatre in Argentina we resists the different things that generate a sense of immobility, impossibility, death. It is with good reason, then, that the community theatre group Catalinas Sur has been waving its flag over the years and in thousands of public spaces, with its motto that is more than blunt: ‘For joy, against death.’

Edith Scher is a professional musician, theatre artist, and journalist. In 2002 she co-founded Matemurga, a community arts company based in her own Villa Crespo neighborhood in Buenos Aires. With this group she co-creates theatre performances, mural art, and music. In 2007, Matemurga released its first CD, ‘La Caravana’. In 2011, the Argentinian National Theatre Institute published Edith’s Teatro de vecinos: de la comunidad para la comunidad [‘Theatre of Neighbors: from the community for the community’].

70


Ever since public funding was first made available for community-based arts in Northern Ireland in 1978, there has been a

persistent tension between their intrinsic and instrumental value. The committed practitioners who have sustained the momentum of the community arts throughout the Troubles and into the Peace Process have come to internalise the ulterior motives of social utility and have learnt to adapt to ever more demanding funding regimes, culminating in highly prescriptive European Peace and Reconciliation programmes as part of the so-called ‘Peace Dividend’. Heads have been counted, mutual understanding has been ‘measured’ and issues have been engaged with, in what Lionel Pilkington has argued amounts to ‘an inevitable and universal complicity between the state and all forms of representation’ (2001: 201). The categories and agendas of these programmes have tended to reinforce the primacy of sectarian categories, however, precluding the

Peace Industry Propaganda or ‘Troubles Porn’?: ETHICS, AESTHETICS AND KINESTHETICS IN NORTHERN-IRELAND’S THEATRE OF WITNESS

Matt Jennings and David Grant

71

Peace Industry Propaganda or ‘Troubles Porn’? / M

att Jennings and David G

rant

Matt Jennings and David Grant

Chris McAlinden at ICAF.photo: Roy Goderie


72

possibility of development of new cultural identities.

As suggested by Peace and Reconciliation scholar John Paul Lederach, effective conflict transformation requires a creative leap of ‘moral imagination’, a dramatic and symbolic act of personal courage to break the structural bind of political and social discourse: ‘Art and finding our way back to humanity are connected …To believe in healing is to believe in the creative act’ (2005: 162). Current evaluation practices, however, rarely acknowledge that the primary achievements of community-based drama are found in ‘minutes of happiness’, as James Thompson has argued (2009: 118). In this chapter, we want to highlight an overlooked trend in community-based drama in Northern Ireland, which sidesteps the repetitive agendas of agitprop and social engineering and exploits the aesthetic potential of applied theatre to affect people deeply and engage with questions of morality and the sublime.

In seeking to deploy the arts in a symbolic re-imagining and re-imaging of Northern Ireland, Thompson’s emphasis on the affective impact of drama points us towards a fuller understanding of the role performance can play in helping to challenge deep-rooted assumptions. When the spiritual dimension of the work is acknowledged, it becomes possible to construe ‘meaning’ to be felt through a process of kinaesthetic empathy. Along similar lines, dance theorist Susan Leigh Foster (2008) has used the term ‘kinesthetic empathy’ to describe the ‘contagious’ behaviour and unconscious mimicry that makes a yawn catching or provokes an audience to cry when a character is in pain. Martin Esslin describes the same mechanism even more vividly when he refers to, ‘the continuous process of feedback between the performers and the audience: by reacting to the audience, the actors modify the audience’s reaction and that modified reaction, in turn, is felt by the actors … Each member of the audience also reacts to the reaction of other members of the audience’ (1998: 300). This liberation of the critical or emotional response of the audience from its assumed passivity and separation allows

73



rant

a recognition of the enormous intensity that the experience of performance can sometimes attain, the communion of performer and spectator in the ‘shock’ and ‘beauty’ of the moment, as Thompson describes it. This intense communion of feeling and understanding could be described as spiritual, especially when it occurs in response to ritualistic movement and the language and symbolism of liturgy.

The potential spiritual dimension of applied drama is clearly evident in the two Theatre of Witness productions for Derry’s Playhouse Theatre – We Carried Your Secrets (2009) and I Once Knew a Girl (2010). Although controversial and criticised by some for being politically unbalanced or danger-ously idealistic, the project director, Teya Sepinuck, succeeded in fashioning performative rituals of confession, communion and redemption out of the personal testimonies of its participants. As we experienced ourselves while watching the performances and as evidenced in extensive written feedback solicited after each performance by the company, Theatre of Witness had a huge emotional impact on audiences. The pain of personal guilt, loss and absence united ex- combatant, victim and observer in a shared sense of humanity and suffering. The sheer extent of the positive audience response to the production recorded on the website www.theatreofwitness.org/#reflections is exemplified by the heartfelt reaction of theatre academic, Mark Phelan:

I think it was the most profoundly moving experience I’ve had in the theatre, or anywhere else for that matter. You’ve also made me completely re-evaluate almost everything I’ve felt about the past ... and I feel utterly and completely transformed from having seen the performance. I actually think this will germinate more goodwill and genuine reconciliation through truth, as opposed to recrimination through truth that we have too much of in this place. (transcribed from the video documentary We Carried Your Secrets)


74

In We Carried Your Secrets, a cast of six men and one woman performed autobiographical monologues direct to the audience in testimonial form. The participants included a former Provisional IRA volunteer, a former RUC policeman, a former UDA volunteer and three young people whose relationships with their fathers had been damaged or destroyed by the Troubles.4 A year later, there were parallels in the ‘casting’ of I Once Knew a Girl, although this time the entire cast was female. The participants included an IRA volunteer, a serving PSNI police officer,5

a Loyalist community worker from the Shankill Road and three women who were directly involved as combatants but had been deeply hurt by separation or abuse from members of their families during the period of the Troubles. The first show was about the pain of the fathers, and of their children. The second show was about women’s experiences, which still seemed to refer primarily to fathers, husbands, sons and other significant males (generally in terms of their absence or acts of sexual and domestic violence). In both performances, an anonymous and generally silent character was intended as a symbolic representation of all those who could not or would not tell their stories.

James Thompson has urged caution in the engagement of applied drama with the experience of trauma, noting that to ‘tell your story can become an imperative rather than a self-directed action’ (2009: 45). He identifies this imperative as a culturally specific, contemporary Western insistence on the therapeutic value of storytelling as a universal palliative for ‘trauma’ in all contexts. The criticism expressed by one commentator that Theatre of Witness represented a ‘commodification of other people’s suffering’ (in conversation, 21 March 2011), reflects the concern that these kinds of testimonial performance may be seen as exploitative and pre-packaged conflict voyeurism. Playwright Tim Loane shares these doubts:

4. IRA stands for Irish Republican Army, the Catholic faction in Northern Ireland fighting against the British occupying forces and the ‘loyalist’ Protestant Ulster Defence Association (UDA) during the so-called ‘Troubles’, the de facto civil war that was waged between these parties between 1969 and 1998. RUC stand for Royal Ulster Constibulary. 5. PSNI stands for Police Service of Northern Ireland, the new name for the RUC.

75



rant

In this process of distillation for ‘performance’ it is nigh impossible to resist sentimentalizing and celebrating victimhood. This in effect means presenting the audience with exactly what it wants and gives them an easy way out through a hyper-emotional reflex. This was particularly evident in the post-show Q&A where I witnessed a gushing audience that was clearly feeding off the pain of it all – getting off on a kind of Troubles Porn (email, 20 May 2011).

Another of Thompson’s concerns is that applied theatre projects might conform to a strategic practice of reducing the complexity and horror of conflict into memorial narratives that promote a particular political agenda, in order to promote the idea that the status quo under the new regime is preferable, stable and incontestable. In relation to this idea, the Theatre of Witness project could be said to represent a strategic practice of propaganda for the Northern Ireland ‘peace industry’. Baker and McLaughlin, for example, have examined how a wide range of film fiction in the 1970s and 1980s echoed the news media in portraying paramilitary combatants as faceless, psychopathic thugs. After the 1994 ceasefire, the international media gradually began to humanize the political leadership of both Republicanism and Loyalism, portraying them now as concerned individuals, parents and community leaders, each with their own personal story to tell. The effect, if not the intent, of this transformation was to perpetuate the hegemonic prevalence of sectarian identity politics, while framing the political leadership as sympathetic champions of a newly de-politicised public sphere (2010). The new cultural and political focus on individual ‘human stories’, Baker and McLaughlin argue, serves to disguise the dominance of entrenched political structures and globalizing economic ideologies. From this perspective, the fundamental message of the ‘peace industry’ is that all forms of political resistance are futile and dangerous and that humanist individualism is the only way forward.


76

In trying to find a place for applied drama practice in these kinds of political context, Thompson proposes the creation of cultural acts of remembrance that allow the presentation of untidy and unsettling accounts and per-spectives of conflict that elude state-sanctioned narratives of closure, wherein ‘the past can find a place to live prob-lematically in the present rather than be cured’ (2009: 65). In our opinion, Theatre of Witness comes close to what Thompson has in mind. It does not conform to an inter-national and culturally insensitive model of trauma therapy. None of the participants were compelled to contribute their stories and many potential participants withdrew during the consultation process when they felt unable to participate. This was the reason that no representatives of the British military were involved in either production. Some had been interviewed, but all of these withdrew from the project before the performances. In interviews and correspondence with the authors, the participants who did perform were adamant that the process of devising and performing the piece was indeed therapeutic for themselves and for audiences, but that it had been a radical, sincere and voluntary act of courage on their part. As Victoria, one of the performers in We Carried Your Secrets, puts it:

From the word go, I wanted to do it. It was an opportunity to voice questions I’d been thinking about for years, to ventilate my own fears. I liked how Teya worked. Every step of the way we were asked how we felt about the project. Nothing was ever recorded. We had full confidentiality. People could always walk away … I didn’t feel I was selling my suffering. I was expressing my experience, in the only manner that felt safe. (Personal interview, 20 May 2011).

In answer to the charge of exploitation and voyeurism, Ann (a participant in I Once Knew a Girl), embraced the terminology while inverting its implication:

77



rant

Yes to Exploitation and Voyeuristic! The experience was a willing participation in self-exploitation. We told our truths. We were often unsure of responses or repercussions, but I believe this hard-hitting, truthful, open and uncomfortable experience was exploitation, although for the greater good! And of course it was voyeuristic – uncomfortable to partake in and watch! But again this type of production was intended to provoke reactions, emotions, discussions by opening up honestly on fully taboo subjects that are normally secrets and rumours and left festering under too many surfaces. Telling the truth is not propaganda. Using the truth as propaganda can only aid and educate in the process of healing. We are all victims of some cir-cumstance or other ... from the least to the worst ... but as we are all victims, we each have to personally deal with our own situations and it’s how we do that that pulls us out of ‘victimhood’ and helps ourselves and others to realise just how strong, courageous and em-powered we can actually be! (E-mail 31 May 2011).

Matt Jennings and Chris McAlinden. Photo: Clémence Girard


78

Although Theatre of Witness operates within a funding system determined by European public policy, we would argue that it contains the kind of ‘untidy, unsettling accounts’ that Thompson talks about. The stories are allowed to lie alongside each other without being resolved into any single overarching message of unity and reconciliation, other than in the example of the participant groups’ ability to listen sympathetically to each other and form friendships.

The success of this project, both as a work of art and an instrument of social change, lies in its refusal to resolve the disturbing and contradictory aspects of the stories told. Jon, the former IRA man, clearly and sympathetically describes the point of view that for people in the Bogside6 in the 1970s, armed resistance through membership of the IRA was a positive, even a necessary option. This stands alongside the statements of James, the former UDA man, in both the performance and documentary interview that the conflict ‘was all a terrible waste’. Fionbharr, in We Carried Your Secrets, and Kathleen Gillespie, in I Once Knew a Girl, both suggest, if not declare outright, that the police and British military intelligence actively colluded in the murder of their father and husband, while rejecting armed resistance to these forces. Victoria states that she loves her daddy, the RUC police officer, and never understood why people hated him so much, while standing next to Fionbharr who has said that he regarded all cops as scum. These tensions are left alone, without the formal repentance of religious confession and without the judgement or forced resolution of performative reconciliation.

There is an ancient cultural tradition of storytelling in Ireland and Britain – as entertainment, as historical record and as communal therapy. The songs and stories of the past have perpetuated the memory of the grievances upon which rival traditions have been built, but they have also provided comfort and interpretative structures in times of crisis. This

6. Bogside is the name of a predominantly Catholic neighbourhood in Derry, where some of the first riots occurred that initiated the Troubles. Nowadays it is best known for its political murals, which have become a tourist attraction.

79



rant

tradition predates and parallels both the Catholic tradition of the confessional and the Presbyterian/Protestant tradition of bearing witness to faith. In the context of Theatre of Witness, the character of the silent listener was not a judgmental figure of religious or political authority, but rather represented an audience of ordinary people with similar experiences as the speakers. As Victoria described it:

We weren’t victims. We were people describing our experiences. And the audiences, thousands of them, were people with similar experiences. The difference is that the people on the stage voiced their experiences, to encourage conversations with audiences about their experiences. It was for the people in the audience to replicate the storytelling.

Though divided by the denominational differences that characterise the divisions of the conflict and the ongoing political structures of Northern Ireland, the audiences were united, in the moment of active listening, by their shared responses to this act of storytelling and a consciously con-structed aesthetic of sacred liminality. The performances resonated with the gestures and language of Judeo-Christian ritual without conforming to a recognisable rite.

The language of the scripts frequently resonated with religious references – the script of I Once Knew a Girl, for instance, is full of phrases such as ‘The Brits had us crucified’, ‘The Big Man looks after me’, ‘God got me out of that situation – I would have ended up dead or in prison’, ‘Miracles do happen’ and ‘On the last day we will arise perfect’. Yet, so do the folk songs and the colloquial conversations of the people of Northern Ireland. At no stage in either production, in presentation or workshop process, was forgiveness asked for or offered, either from fellow participants, audiences or God. The stories were explanatory and yet elusive, frequently resolving into silence and stillness or the quiet abstract movements of transition into the next scene.


80

In an interview we held with her in December 2010, Teya repeated the comment, made by the father of one of the performers during a post-show discussion, that the stories they were sharing were ‘unheard’ rather than ‘untold’, before emphasizing that the Theatre of Witness methodology she developed is ‘rooted in listening’: ‘People are hungry to talk about what’s important to them. And I also really believe that people won’t tell you anything they don’t want to. So I don’t mind asking questions that may seem deep and hard. I really trust people’s sense of themselves.’

These principles were crucial to the aesthetic experience of the performances, which deployed a non-verbal dramaturgy of the sacred, a liturgical choreography one might say. In both productions, slow and repetitive movements would be carried out by the whole cast, in silence or while listening to the narration of one participant’s story. In I Once Knew a Girl, these ritualistic movements often involved mimed washing of hands and laundry, mopping and scrubbing of floors and actions of personal cleansing suggestive of baptism. These aesthetic frames highlight the significance of the idea of kinaesthetic empathy. As the term originated in dance criticism (see Foster 2008), it is relevant that Sepinuck began as a dancer and choreographer and her only formal performance training background has been in dance. At one point in We Carried Your Secrets, as James tells his story of Loyalist comrades dying in the conflict, Fionbharr, a young Catholic man of slender frame, collapses into the arms of Ciaran, who carries him out of the light in a gesture directly evocative of the iconic image of the Pieta, of Jesus’ corpse being cradled in the arms of Mary. Even non-religious members of the audience, including us, felt a psycho-somatic response to that image.

On a less culturally specific level, in every performance of I Once Knew a Girl, Kathleen Gillespie wept when she told the story of her husband Patsy being killed by an IRA ‘proxy’ bomb, and in every performance of We Carried Your Secrets, Fionbharr was in tears when

81



rant

recounting the murder of his lecturer father by a Loyalist paramilitary. Although this repeated distress prompted concerns regarding the mental health of the participants, experienced psychological counsellors were available throughout the process and were rarely required. But the kinaesthetic empathy of the audience response to the act of weeping was immediate and visceral. In every one of the five performances that we observed, many spectators, including ourselves, were visibly crying tears of their own. To some extent, this involves a manipulation of the emotions, a trick that can be just as easily exploited by a TV commercial or a Hollywood film, but these were not trained actors and the audiences were not ‘crying for Hecuba’. They were crying for the pain of the participants, for their loved ones and for themselves.

It is important to stress that both the actors and audiences are aware of the artifice of the performance, which not only gives the latter licence to engage, but also protects the performers from the rawness of their memories. Despite the nightly tears of Fionbharr and Kathleen, and the visible emotional responses of the rest of the two casts, the structure of the piece and the responses of the audiences were universally described by the cast members as helpful to managing the risks of the ‘healing’ process. At the same time, the fixed ritual character of the performances allowed audiences space for both affect and distance necessary for reflection. All three Q and A sessions witnessed by the authors drew multiple comments involving critical analysis of the political and social context of the performance from audience members, in spite of (or perhaps because of ) the respectful, even grateful, expressions of appreciation for the bravery of the performers. Hence, the assertion of Kathleen Gillespie, as recalled by Sepinuck in our interview, that this theatre production has been more effective than her twenty years’ experience of conventional peace work, which frequently has involved telling, but not performing, the story of her husband’s murder: ‘By telling your story you are helping so many other people. That is going to give you so much energy.


82

And for Kathleen [Gillespie], she said “it really makes Patsy’s death not in vain”. Somebody asked her to compare it to doing her other peace work and she said this just has so much more impact”.

What distinguishes Theatre of Witness from the formulaic narratives of victimhood on one hand, and the depoliticised neo-liberal individualism of the peace industry (McLaughlin and Baker) on the other, is the emotional and relational element of the work and its willingness to add raw edges to conventional peace process paradigms of celebration or confession. The post-performance Q and A sessions were crucial in this regard. That was when the humour and difficulty of the process of establishing dialogue came out, as well as the need for more uncomfortable spaces where unresolved tensions can exist.

The stories told in the Theatre of Witness perfor-mances resist the facile closure of any attempt to erase the difficulties of history into an optimistic present, and instead acknowledge the persistence of problematic histories without forcing resolution. The performances and after-show discus-sions offered a site of listening rather than speaking. The use of ritualistic movement and silence in the performance produced moments of receptive empathy. We believe, therefore, that Theatre of Witness is an important example of recaptur-ing the value of the sacred and spiritual as a dramaturgical element in applied theatre in Northern Ireland. Although some might argue that storytelling and kinaesthetic empathy have been deployed to manipulate audiences and promote a state-sanctioned ideology, we contend that the emotional power of these productions, provoking audiences to reflect on their own experiences and assumptions, takes them well beyond the exploitative and the propagandistic.

83



rant

References

Baker, S. & McLaughlin, G., 2010. The Propaganda of Peace: The Role of Media and Culture in the Northern Ireland Peace Process. Bristol: Intellect Books.

Esslin, M., 1998. ‘The Signs of Stage and Screen’. In G. W. Brandt, Modern Theories of Drama (pp. 299-306). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Foster, S. L., 2008. ‘Movement’s contagion: the kinaesthetic impact of performance.’ In T. C. Davis (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lederach, J.P. , 2005. The Moral Imagination: the Art and Soul of Building Peace. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.

Pilkington, L., 2001.Theatre and the State in Contemporary Irish Drama. London: Routledge.

Thompson, J., 2009. Performance Affects: Applied Theatre and the End of Effect. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Weiglhofer, M., 2011. Theatre of Witness Project Evaluation. Derry : Holywell Consultancy.


84

Matt Jennings is originally an Australian musician, actor and writer who ended up in Northern Ireland after a tour, just when the peace process began. He has stayed on ever since, earned a Ph.D. in Applied Theatre, and has become an active applied theatre practitioner and scholarly witness to community arts in his adopted country. He is currently based at the University of Northumbria (Newcastle), where he is a Senior Lecturer. He commutes from there to his home in Derry, where he lives with his wife and three children.

David Grant is Lecturer in Drama and Director of Education in the School of Creative Arts at Queen’s University. Before moving to Belfast in 2000, he worked extensively through-out Ireland as a director and critic. He has been Managing Editor of Theatre Ireland magazine, Programme Director of the Dublin Theatre Festival and Artistic Director of the Lyric Theatre, Belfast. His recent applied drama projects include an interactive performance written and performed by life prisoners at HMP Maghaberry and a participatory arts programme for older people with dementia.

85

Why I Stopped M

aking Peace / Merlijn Tw

aalfhoven

It was not because of conflict that I decided to create a concert on two opposite sides of the buffer zone that separate Greek and Turkish

Cypriots. It was because of the beauty and wonder that I felt, sitting on a Greek terrace hearing the sounds of a mosque from the other side of the derelict buildings that mark the forbidden zone. The voice of another world, so close and yet so out of reach.

The people I spoke about this division often started to tell me about the atrocities of the civil war and the evil of the other side. I told them that I never would or could really under-stand that story. It would not be wise for me to judge such a sensitive and incredible history. But as an outsider, I could perceive the actual world without preconception, and observe the beauty of it. I therefore proposed to celebrate the present.

A year later, I positioned 400 musicians, students, singers and children on rooftops, balconies and in the streets

Why I Stopped Making Peace

Merlijn Twaalfhoven


86

of both sides and created a music event that flew freely over the minefields, barbed wire and checkpoints.

The people told me that this music performance confused their logic. They were used to have a fixed and persistent opinion about the conflict and their neighbors. Now it felt open again because the political rhetoric was absent. They used to think about the buffer zone as an ugly place. Now they listened to the flutes, the birds and children’s voices that crossed the narrow divide. In this openness, everything was

A scene from Long Distance Call, Cyprus 2005.Photo: Laura Boushnak

87

Why I Stopped M


aalfhoven

possible and it was up to them to use the moment, to act on it.

A few weeks before I had learned to abandon the word “Peace” from my vocabulary. In Holland, peace means something relevant. It implies for example a better world. It’s about the end of misery. In Cyprus, however, peace means failure. It means people from abroad imposing their truths, it means politicians promising things that won’t work out, false hope, hypocrisy. So I decided not to talk peace, but just to focus on making good music in an exceptional place, and not spending more money in either of the two communities. It worked out. The concert was great. The virtually forgotten conflict was on CNN again, and this time not because someone had died but because people were listening to each other.

A year later, I was in Israel. There, too, peace didn’t sound like the friendly “shalom” you greet one another with. Mention it and you often elicit – how can I put it? – an expres-sion of pity. A sneer. A tired sigh.

“Peace” there means empty talk, political games and, above all, endless delay. Furthermore, many Israelis believe that peace is the same as security. The more fences, walls and deterrents they have, the more peace they think there will be.

A Palestinian friend explained to me that the concept of peace only really means anything if two sides are in conflict. To me, it seemed pretty obvious that that was the case with Israel and Palestine. But he saw things differently. To him the Palestinians are occupied. They’re not claiming


88

anything that isn’t theirs. They haven’t done anything to the Israelis to justify this situation. They don’t even have anything against the presence of Jews, just as long as they can stay in their own homes. But if you oppress people, drive them to desperation even, then you get resistance. Revolt. Ending the occupation and stopping the oppression isn’t a peace process, it’s simple justice. Just like a child returning marbles he has stolen isn’t a peace process but just behaving normally.

The basic precondition for peace is that each party considers the other as its equal and both agree that there has to be a new reality. Equality is an important concept in the West, upon which all laws are based. But in many other parts of the world it’s a modern idea that doesn’t always chime with the way society has been organized for centuries. What counts there is dignity, not equality. A man may be poor, but his dignity gives him self-confidence. Respect is worth more than wealth.

Years ago, I learned how Germany wasn’t respected after its defeat in the First World War. The Treaty of Versailles was imposed by the victors with the aim of making Germany pay for the damage caused by conflict. A reasonable demand, you might think: punish the guilty. But instead this humiliation proved the ideal breeding ground for a totally crazy ideology of superiority and reckless confidence. With disastrous results.

Instead of being punished again, after 1945 Germany was given economic support. That turned out really well. The fact that we, the Dutch, now have really friendly neighbours is thanks to the fact that, as well as making peace, we have forged mutual respect. We speak a lot about “making peace”, but strangely enough “making respect” is a phrase I never hear.

In practice, the real meaning of a peace is determined by the standards, values and principles of the strongest party: the victor or the majority. Respect, on the other hand, is

89

Why I Stopped M


aalfhoven

dependent upon a subtle relationship in which both sides develop a mutual understanding. Without that, peace remains nothing more than a contractual state, its terms enforced coldly or even imposed unilaterally.

In the Netherlands, we currently have a peace based on the rule that foreigners adapt to Dutch behaviour and that the Dutch are curious or interested in the cultural richness that a stranger can contribute to our society. We expect outsiders to trade in their own traditional customs for our fresh, blond truths. That’s how you create a neat, orderly society. A respectable peace, you might say.

But this adaptation is all one-way traffic. How many native Dutch people take the trouble to learn how to say so much as “good morning” in Turkish? Without displaying any interest in the culture, the constructs and the traditions the immigrant brings with him, or showing any curiosity regarding the manners, the values and the subtleties of the newcomer, that peace may be respectable, but it’s hardly respectful.

The only way strangers can demonstrate their value is by earning vast sums of money, by becoming directors of something or by driving around in a fancy car. This kind of intimidation is the most shallow connection between people. It is primitive, like the rule of muscle, during the time we lived on the savannah.

In the Netherlands we do not understand the word ‘respect’. We know the word well enough, of course, but not the values it represents. In that regard, I live in a developing country. Even next door, in Belgium, the Dutch are famous for their rudeness.

In a cheap hotel in Damascus, I was accosted by a man who had never met a Westerner before. He admired Europe enormously, but didn’t understand why we were so critical of the position of women in the Muslim world. In


90

his view, a woman in the Middle East is shrouded in a web of protection, honour and esteem, whilst girls in the West are treated the same as boys or – even worse – pose in their underwear in newspaper advertisements.

Everyone in the Middle East lives in different groups, families and often even religious communities. The modern world has made these distinctions even more diverse. A hundred years ago, the Palestinians were Christians, Muslims, Alevis, Druze, Jews, Romany, Bedouins – you name it. Now, as well as all that, they are Lebanese, Canadian, Amsterdammers, New Yorkers and so on. Diversity is the norm, curiosity a general practice.

Everyone in the Netherlands is equal. At least, that’s the rule. There are differences, but we try to organize our society in such a way that these are minimized, that they don’t get in the way.

A scene from Long Distance Call, Cyprus 2005. Photo: Merlijn Twaalfhoven / Martin Franke

91

Why I Stopped M


aalfhoven

That’s why our notion of peace is so limited. When we make peace, it’s a business deal – an agreement whereby mutual disagreements are muffled, forcibly hushed behind clear rules. Rules make real contact unnecessary. As long as you comply with them, you don’t have to be sensitive to the subtle reality that is other people.

But peace without contact is cold and lifeless. Where there’s no contact, prejudice forms. Only at a distance do people make decisions that cause others huge suffering.

Some time ago, an Austrian artist conducted a rather sick experiment. He tied an explosive belt around a dog and asked people to vote online on whether or not he should set it off. Protected by anonymity, the majority chose to blow the animal to pieces. Their cruelty wasn’t prompted by revenge for some injustice. They had nothing to gain and they certainly weren’t expressing some form of religious extremism. It was simply the result of detachment.

People are less cheerful beings when they have no social ties. Robinson Crusoe had nobody around him, so he had to fight to stay civilized. By imposing a strict daily routine upon himself, including shaving, working the land and keeping track of time, he did everything he could to avoid becoming an animal.

If you are curious about others, respect follows of its own accord. Peace then becomes a natural and automatic result of human interaction. Humanity is our most valuable possession, and the key to it is contact. As long as we are connected, we live in peace.

I organized a festival in living rooms in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem. Since public events are often forbidden or disturbed by the Israeli authorities, we decided to keep the performances secret and just invite people we personally knew. In this way, we created an intimate space for artistic expression, a place protected from politics and


92

ideologies. Only Palestinian and foreign artists took part, and we invited a local, Palestinian audience. Back home, many people presumed that this was a project in which Palestinians and Israelis were brought together in an attempt to make peace. Well, they were wrong. A few years ago, this had been exactly my plan, though. But, as I found out, when people are not equal, they won’t connect. When there is a basic disparity in society, imposed by laws and by force, people might live together, but there is no respect, no openness, no curiosity. The peace is bound to fail.

So instead of creating a superficial concept of connecting enemies, my goal with this festival was to create a realm where Palestinians could develop their personal independence, their self-esteem and cultural identity. Only when they experience dignity, when they know how to be equal in spirit, would they be ready to connect to the other side, I thought.

Working on peace is useless without being aware of the preconditions that are needed. Peace needs contact. Contact needs curiosity. Curiosity needs respect. Respect needs equality. Equality needs dignity and without knowledge of your cultural identity you won’t find the self-esteem to climb this entire ladder or even move a few steps up it.

I am fed up with people using the word ‘peace’ without having any picture of this whole system of values, this complex chemistry of inter-human relations.

I was recently asked to share my thoughts about an ambitious peace concert. My first proposal was that they find a new name for it. After all, that word “peace” is wearing thin. It has been applied to idle promises, cold deals, naïve plans or sly ambitions too often to be credible any more. We didn’t manage to find an alternative, though. And to be honest, I wasn’t very taken by the suggested alternative “contact concert”, either.

93

Why I Stopped M


aalfhoven

So why not keep the peace? But please, let any effort that we put into it help us to understand each other, instead of imposing our own concepts. We can keep Peace as a nice concept at the top of the ladder, a vision for a far future. But beware of cold business deals calling themselves ‘peace’, while expressing no sensitivity to the non-material wealth of others. Let openness be our goal. Let us find places where we can discover each other’s values without having to take an exam in equality. Let us make laboratories for a truly open society, one in which people can blossom and express their own, character-istic individuality and dignity.

Merlijn Twaalfhoven is a young Dutch composer who specializes in writing new music for orchestras, choirs and chamber music groups all over the world. He is perhaps best known for the remarkable community music projects he has created with his non profit organization La Vie sur Terre. His intention is to bridge worlds of contrast and to mix unusual elements into a new unity. He combines classic and modern, western and oriental, groovy and subtle music into a lively metaphor for today’s world. Doing so, Twaalfhoven connects styles, cultures but most of all people. In Holland, for example, he brings together mainstream Dutch art with immigrant culture in community art projects. And in Cyprus he took the expression “bridging the gap” quite literally when he positioned 400 musicians on rooftops on both the Greek and Turkish side of the buffer zone in Nicosia, the divided capital of this Mediterranean island.

94


‘O wad some Power the gift tae gie us To see oursels as ithers see us!’ – Robert Burns

‘ You do not only learn through the things you agree with, but also through the things with which you disagree’. – Peter van den Hurk, founder Rotterdams Wijktheater

This article is concerned with the impor-tance of partnership, especially partnership across national boundaries, and how the

learning that results can fundamentally affect the partners involved. I’ve arrived at the conclusions through the context of my own experiences, and so this is a personal story, but hopefully one that will resonate with other people involved in community theatre, community arts, or with any connection to international exchange.

I’ve been making community theatre for all of my professional life, in fact since I personally got involved in a

Same Difference: LEARNING THROUGH INTERNATIONAL PARTNERSHIPS

Neil Beddow

95

Same D

ifference / Neil Beddow

The Malcolm X Elders from Bristol perform We Have Overcome. Photo: Mark Simmons

Neil Beddow


96

community play in Bristol back in 1981. Following that first contact, I worked in the field as a freelancer, and for different companies, then co-founded acta community theatre in 1985. I continue to make community theatre because I believe that everyone has a story to tell, that everyone has innate creativity and the ability to perform, and that the resulting perfor-mances are vital, alive, true, honest and utterly engaging.

To be clear, and to set out my stall, Community Theatre, in acta’s definition, is made through a partnership between non-professional participants and professional theatre makers; is always devised and created through this partnership; is performed by the participants; reflects the creativity, imagination and stories of participants; has some wider social impact as its ultimate outcome.

Beyond this, for acta, the aims have always been to offer opportunities for people to re-discover and use their creativity to tell their stories, and through the process to value themselves more; growing and developing their own skills and confidence, thinking differently about where they live, about the people who live around them.

This practice and philosophy is rooted in youth theatre, and in the community play movement that began anew in England in the late 1970’s. Acta itself came into being in 1985, and has always had a wide brief in terms of target groups and types of projects. The main focus in the early years of the company was on supporting a network of youth theatres for young people in disadvantaged areas, projects with disabled people, and large-scale community plays involving hundreds of people from specific areas. Certain elements of this programme have continued through to the present. The company still supports vulnerable young people through on-going youth theatre and there are still (but fewer) large-scale projects, which concentrate on specific geographical areas. The company has always been concerned with offering opportunities to many participants, typically around 600 per year. In every year acta will work on around 20 projects, many

97

Same D


of them on-going groups which meet weekly through the year, and who create at least one new play, usually with a small number of performances in their local area.

The benefits of this are clear: a greater number of people are able to access and understand theatre; there is greater ownership of the process by which theatre is made; theatre is de-mystified and becomes a part of life. The drawbacks are to do with capacity, time and scale. As a relatively small organisation with eight staff, it can be difficult to keep all the plates spinning. There are only so many weeks in the year for performances to happen and good plays don’t have enough time to improve through repeated performance.

In the late 1990’s acta began to pilot a new strand of work, creating plays with small groups of adults, usually women from working class areas, and mostly focused on a specific social issue. These projects ran alongside the existing programme of youth theatre and large-scale community plays, and performed a handful of times to local audiences. Several performers from these plays, and also adults from other projects, began to approach acta, wanting to develop their skills and wanting to make more theatre. At the time, acta’s programme had no structure in place to respond to this developing need, but it made us think.

Then, in 2003, I was asked by South West Arts to go along to the International Festival of Community-based Theatre (IFCT) in Rotterdam. This visit was a sig-nificant moment, for me personally and for acta. Working away making community theatre in Bristol for years had started to feel like quite an isolating experience. Although acta had connections with other UK companies through the Community Play Network and the National Association of Youth Theatre, there were few which shared acta’s particular vision and approach to community theatre. The main revela-tion I had during the IFCT in Rotterdam was to discover just how global the community theatre movement had become; theatre created by all sorts of people for all sorts of reasons


98

– to educate, tell a story, right a wrong, celebrate cultural difference. Over the course of a few days I saw examples of community theatre and met participants and directors from Peru, South Africa, USA and all over Europe.

During the Festival two encounters were to be particularly significant. Firstly I met with Peter van den Hurk, the Founder and director of the Rotterdams Wijktheater (RWT), who had created and curated the Festival. Peter outlined the approach of RWT to making community theatre which was largely audience-based; working with small groups of participants to create and rehearse a play over a year, and then to tour the play for a further year, with a minimum of 20 performances. A second meeting, with Eugene van Erven, provided a fuller context to the breadth of community theatre happening across the world, with a wide range of practice, methodology and purpose. These meetings were the beginnings of what was to become a key partnership for acta and RWT.

I returned to Bristol full of inspiration and ideas, determined to experiment with the RWT model of community theatre, and convinced that Bristol would be a perfect place for a similar festival, one that would reflect the diverse cultural mix of the contemporary scene in the city. In order to progress these ideas, we invited Peter van den Hurk to visit acta in January 2004; to network, lead training sessions and discuss the comparisons and differences between the work of the two companies. Following this meeting, acta was invited to take a show to the next Festival of International Community-based theatre, taking place in March 2005.

This was an exciting opportunity to develop our profile, to present acta’s work to an international audience, and to further our engagement with the worldwide community theatre movement. It was decided to develop an original and relevant piece of theatre with a group of adults from disadvantaged areas of Bristol, to tour the show to disadvantaged areas of Bristol, and to take the play to the festival in

99

Same D


Rotterdam in March 2005. It would also offer on-going opportunities to those community performers who had told us of their desire to develop their skills and make more theatre.

We started the group in July 2004, and a group of six women were invited to take part. Over the next nine months, the group created a new play, For Love Nor Money, which opened at the Rotterdam festival in March 2005. It then toured to eight community venues around disadvantaged areas of Bristol. The play addressed issues relevant to the participants and the neighbourhoods they represented. Acta envisaged it as a way of building new audiences for theatre in Bristol. The project also enabled acta to add to the “quality debate” within the arts sector, by developing a high-quality product, working with a small number of performers over a long period of time – both devising and through rehearsal – and, crucially, performance.

The performance style was intelligent, yet refresh-ingly unpretentious, simply and effectively proving it’s point… the strong gritty substance which lay just

The Malcolm X Elders from Bristol perform We Have Overcome. Photo: Mark Simmons


100

under the humour of the play really gave power to the main performances... there were many moments of interesting theatre, using varied forms and structure which gave the play a more dream-like dimension… it wasn’t the Royal Shakespeare Company, but so what? It was brilliant anyway, and it definitely deserved the standing ovation it received. BBC Bristol review of For Love Nor Money

For Love nor Money was a great success for acta. It led to this strand of work – touring community theatre – becoming a major part of our annual programme. This aspect of our work continues to engage skilled and experienced community performers to devise and tour high quality, original, relevant and affordable theatre to disadvantaged areas where there is no access to, or tradition of, theatre-going. In this way we develop a new audience for theatre.

Artistically, through this strand of work, acta aims to explore and develop a ‘popular’ theatre which is: - Reflective – mirroring and examining contemporary culture - Accessible – welcoming, approachable, affordable - Challenging – tackling important issues and experimenting with different theatre techniques to extend audience’s preconceptions about theatre.

Following For Love Nor Money, acta has created and toured three further plays on this model, touring extensively to disadvantaged areas of Bristol, and extending to rural villages, arts centres across South West England, main-house venues in Bristol, and further performances in Holland. The first three plays were designed for adult audiences, and tackled social issues – debt, reality TV culture, internet grooming, mid-life crisis. Recently, acta has expanded this model to create touring shows aimed at engaging children and families new to theatre going. The success has been so great that one play was toured for two successive years. We are now planning a second play on the same model for December 2012. This line of work continues to be extremely popular,

101

Same D


attracting large audiences, 50% of whom are new to theatre-going. It will, therefore, continue to be a significant focus for the company over the next five years.

The partnership between acta and RWT has been evolving since 2003, with RWT bringing performances to Bristol in 2007 and 2009, and acta performing again in Rotterdam in 2008. As a result, there has been a continu-ing exchange of ideas and debate about community theatre in our respective countries, but also joint reflection on work in a global context, with acta’s returning presence at the inter-national festivals in Rotterdam.

There have been benefits of the partnership for both companies: a sense of mutual support; on-going learning from each other’s practice; a critical friendship. For acta, the partnership has raised our profile internationally, leading to connections with many international companies and practitioners, particularly in Belgium, Holland, and the USA. We have visited Sweden to talk about acta’s work at Rikteatern, and in 2010 the Director of Gavle Folkteater brought the entire company to visit us in Bristol, to share ideas about community theatre development.

Through the partnership with RWT, I was inspired to develop ideas for a wider international partnership. I hoped it would extend the principle of sharing practice and methodologies, and that it would lead to an exchange of work, to be hosted by acta in Bristol. Our event would be modeled on the Rotterdam Festival, but would focus solely on community theatre, rather than community arts in its wider aspect as the Rotterdam festival had started to do by 2008. Following a series of meetings with Eugene van Erven from RWT for an initial exploration of these ideas, I made contact with Ulrich Hardt from Expedition Metropolis and with Maria Schejbal from Teatr Grodzki. Ulrich was already interested in the development of an international partnership project and had even coined a title: COAST, Community Oriented Arts and Social Transformation. The four partners


102

put together a plan for a two-year project to run from May 2011 through April 2013 and acta coordinated a bid to the EU Culture Fund for 50% of the funding required. This bid was successful and the project is now up and running.

Community Oriented Arts and Social TransformationThe idea behind the COAST project was to link

four European arts organisations which used Community Theatre within their own national context as a way of addressing social and artistic inequalities, enabling greater access to theatre and the arts, and providing a platform for the creation and expression of original theatre. For the project, each company would work with groups of socially excluded and marginalised people to explore the theme of ‘crossing borders’, with a particular focus on migration and the creativity that happens where different cultures make contact. From this process five new plays were created and performed within their own countries. They were then also presented for the benefit of partners and the wider public at the COAST International Festival of Community Theatre in Bristol in March 2012.

The COAST Festival created an opportunity for shared experience and learning, not only between the four partner organisations, but for a wide range of practitioners, students and academics from the UK and beyond. In addition to the new plays which partners created for the festival, there was also a performance from The Afrocats (CAN, Manchester), workshops from partner companies, Perpanata, Sarah Nelson (Finland), and debates with panel members including Dr. Eugene Van Erven, Peter van den Hurk, Francois Matarrasso, Hassan Mahamadalie, and Dr. Kerrie Schaefer. Attendees at the Festival numbered 30 practitioners, 116 participants, and 350 additional audience for performances.

The four days of the festival displayed great diversity. The six plays that were presented at COAST were all examples of original community theatre created in

103

Same D


partnership with excluded communities on the theme of ‘crossing borders.’ They displayed a remarkable breadth of theatrical style, content and intent. - Teatr Grodzki worked with adults, both deaf and hearing, to create a simple piece of non-verbal theatre, centred around the manipulation of life-size puppets.

- The Rotterdams Wijktheater presented a special adaptation of a site-specific play developed with the Chinese community in Rotterdam, centred on a story of a family-run restaurant using filmed and live action from a small group of actors.

- Expedition Metropolis formed a new company of partici-pants who had migrated to Berlin, to interpret the story of one man’s experience of migration, using music, projections, physical theatre and music.

- acta performed two narrative-based devised shows, one by Somali women which centred on generational and cultural tensions, and another with elders from the African Carribean community which related the story of migration to England in the 1960’s. Both plays were devised and partially improvised in performance.

- Afrocats presented a play by Lydia Besong, which used an integrated company assembled for the project, telling a dark story in a minimalist style, using ensemble work, monologue, and song.

Many of the practitioners articulated a sense of wonder at the differences of approach and presentation. They also expressed keen interest in what could be learned from each other’s practice, both to enrich and affirm their own work. For Geraldine Mormin of Expedition Metropolis, ‘the most beautiful part of the Festival is to really experience the large range of theatrical methods and styles. When you see other people doing the same work, your own vision becomes sharper, you have more ideas, you get inspired, but also you see what you don’t want to do, why you are following another path.’ For Kees Deenik, dramaturge for the RWT production Zhong, the festival in Bristol provides ‘a very important opportunity to meet people from different countries, to hear their stories, to see the work and how they brought their stories to theatre.


104

to look them in the eye and say “what are you doing?”, “why are you doing it?”and “what can we learn from each other?” For his colleague, Stefan van Hees, the event provided a welcome opportunity for reflection: ‘It creates the time to look at yourself.’

In addition to presenting and viewing perfor-mances, practitioners also had the opportunity to experience a taste of each other’s approach through practical workshops. In these, again more differences than similarities in approaches to making participatory community theatre emerged. Companies would find that whilst there were specific games, exercises and philosophies in common, there were great differences in their approach to encouraging and collecting material; in turning that material into theatre, and in determining what kind of theatre resulted from that process – who it was for, and what its purpose was.

These differences and similarities were explored in more detail in debates that were themed around central questions: the practical approaches and difficulties in making community theatre; the tensions between social benefit and making high-quality theatre; and who is targeted and involved in making the work. These discussions were fronted by panels of experts and commentators from a range of backgrounds and served to further debate about what makes community theatre such a distinctive artistic experience. As a result, an under-standing developed that community theatre is indeed a ‘broad church’ with many different interpretations and models, all of which create exciting and meaningful theatre that reflects and responds to the community within which it operates.

This approach of shared learning is to be developed

further during the second phase of the COAST project, which will run through to April 2013. In this period connec-tions between the partners will intensify through a sequence of staff exchanges in which techniques, philosophies, and methodologies will be explored. This will undoubtedly lead to deeper mutual understanding between the different partners

105

Same D


and about the ways each company addresses social issues through the arts in the context of their own country. By the end of the project, the learning from this unique process will be documented, evaluated and disseminatedfor the benefit of colleagues elsewhere in the world, with the creation of a book, a touring exhibition, a video documentary and a website.

The first of these COAST exchanges has now already taken place. In May 2012, two young directors from the Rotterdams Wijktheater, Suzanne Bruning and Kaat Zoontjens, visited acta for 5 days. It occurred during a fairly typical week for acta. We had workshops with families, children, adults and young people, rehearsals for shows, devising for others, and a performance. Our Dutch visitors were exposed to a wide range of work, with many groups of participants, all at different stages in their theatre-making. Suzanne’s and Kaat’s questions forced us to look again at ourselves, at aspects of our practice that we took for granted, things we did because we had always done them, and things which we assumed everyone did. They made us reconsider why we did things the way we did and think about how we could possibly improve them, but also to celebrate what made us unique and what we do well. Kaat and Suzanne, in turn, took elements of acta’s practice and philosophy back to Rotterdam to share with their colleagues. The exchange gave us both the opportunity to view our work from someone else’s perspective and to challenge our own preconceptions about our work. I am convinced that the remaining three exchanges in Rotterdam, Berlin and Bielsko-Biała (Poland) will have more surprising insights in store for all of us.

Finally, for myself, the key learning from acta’s international partnership since we started them in 2003 is the amount there is to learn not only from each other, but about ourselves from someone else’s viewpoint. Somehow that seems easier to do with international partners. Perhaps there is not the same sort of rivalry that can exist with organisations in our own countries. Maybe we share too much with our compatriots, or are too dismissive of each other. Or could it


106

just be that there is a certain freshness of approach that comes from people in other countries, with other artistic influences, who are using different methods to respond to their own cultural and national context?

Whatever the reasons, it is international partnerships which capture the imagination and which bring extraor-dinary and unexpected opportunities. Already well before the dust has settled on the first year of COAST we are developing plans for further collaborations. Acta and RWT are discussing the devising of a joint play with Somali women in both our countries. And all four of us are exploring an initiative aimed at linking elders in the COAST partnership countries.

For acta itself, the impact of the meeting with RWT in 2003 is continuing to affect the work and spirit of our company. Over the next five years we will extend our touring community theatre programme, and will further develop work with migrant groups in the City. We will also make more links and host more performances from national and international companies. We want to continue, in short, to advance cultural understanding through the power of theatre, the power of people telling their stories in their own words, to search for universal truths and human connections which go deeper than cultural differences.

Neil Beddow was born and brought up in the West Midlands, studied at University of Exeter and Goldsmiths College, and co-founded acta in 1985. He specialises in devising, writing and directing original community theatre with the diverse communities of Bristol. His work has ranged from large-scale plays with casts of hundreds, to small-scale community touring shows. He has worked with all ages and across generations. Neil has responsi-bility for visioning, resourcing and overseeing the artistic content of acta’s programme. He represents acta at national and interna-tional levels, and has a particular interest in community theatre in a global context. His published works include Turning Points, the impact of participation in community theatre (2001).

107In 2009 and 2010, three community theatre companies from Germany, Poland and Peru collaborated in an exchange on memory, borders,

migration and neighbourliness.7 The participants were young members and professional coaches at the three companies: Expedition Metropolis (Berlin, Germany), Arena y Esteras (Lima, Peru) and Teatr Brama (Goleniów, Poland).

The first stage of this intercontinental quest began in May 2010 with a series of workshops in Berlin, where young people from three community theatre groups collabo-rated on a music and drama presentation. The groups involved at this stage were Expedition Metropolis (Berlin, Germany), New Limes (Schwäbisch-Gmünd, Germany) and Teatr Brama (Goleniów, Poland). The resulting production was performed in both Germany and Poland. This collaborative project soon gained a Latin American flavour when they were joined by the Peruvian community theatre group Arena y Esteras. This led on to the next phase, when the young people from Germany and Poland took their work to Lima.

7. Steve Green based this English translation on a Dutch translation by Eugene van Erven.

Memoria Cross-OverArtsA GERMAN, POLISH, PERUVIAN COLLABORATION

Ulrich Hardt

Mem

oria Cross-Over Arts / U

lrich Hardt


108

Central to the exchange were issues surrounding the crossing of personal and collective boundaries. How do people recall moments such as these? How are people affected by them? How might it be possible to translate them into a theatrical language? The central metaphor was a derelict train station. Such buildings are commonplace in Latin America, where tracks often lead off into nowhere and stop there. In this way

Polish and German youth perform alongside Peruvians on a village square in Peru. Photo: Ulrich Hardt

109

Mem


lrich Hardt

and others, German realities collided with Polish realities, and central-European experiences and dramatic idioms collided with their Latin American counterparts.

The Polish and German groups had already worked together for some time. Living fairly close to each other, they were able to meet several times for substantial

periods to work on a play together. The young people were fully involved in all preparations, including organisation and creation. Before the first meeting took place, a thematic questionnaire in either German or Polish was emailed to all par-ticipants. A conscious decision was taken not to work on a script in the first phase from May to July 2010. Taking as their starting point the clear and tangible idea of locating the piece in a deserted station, the participants set about examining all sorts of borders, such as those between memory and forgetfulness, day and night, internal and external perceptions, oneself and the ‘other’, and between Germany and Poland. These themes were explored through literary texts by writers such as Olga Tokarczuk, Cécile Wajsbrot and Frida Kahlo, as well as by watching a Colombian theatre play, visiting a self-styled ‘Club of Polish Losers’, the signpost park in Witnica, conversations with the Egyptian immigrant Sayed Zahra and, finally, the heir to Topf and Sons, the company that built the incineration furnaces in Auschwitz. All this preparatory work produced a rich variety of material that served as the basis for a script for the first version of Plataforma in September 2010.


110

Through this participatory process of research and theatre production, participants and coaches alike gained an understanding of what makes community theatre work. It became clear that reflecting on ‘collective’ memories and recalling personal experiences in a productive way had a positive effect on the acting performances of the participants, and strengthened the awareness of individual and group identities. The collective working process reinforced the sense of community, especially in those remarkable moments when personal experiences connected with those of someone else in an entirely different context. These moments had a remark-able impact, and they could in turn be recalled and brought back into the productive process.

Energy and motivation of participants was noticeably greatest during theatre improvisations, music sessions and night-time walks. The German and Polish participants had collaborated in previous years and had come to view each other as workmates and friends. But there was something different about the encoun-ters that took place as part of the ‘deserted station’ project. The reason was that the groups had never before worked together so intensively on a project. This was an entirely new challenge. It was tough and it was tiring, but at the same time it was productive and valuable in unexpected ways. It was a very real encounter for all involved, and everyone crossed boundaries of various kinds.

Summary of preparatory activities - at home, come up with five questions on a specific topic and look for relevant physical or symbolic objects;

- discuss this subject with other people around you; - at the first meeting in Berlin, acquaint yourself as much as possible with the topic so you can later work on it back home with your own group.

During the collaborative creative process - professional musicians led music workshops; - professional theatre makers gave acting and improvisation

111

Mem


lrich Hardt

training; - fieldwork and inter-cultural orientation took place, along-side meetings with people with first-hand experience;

- the first performances took place.

Follow-up work included - collaborative evaluation; - archiving of photos, videos, texts and sound recordings.

Memoria, a theatre expedition from Europe to Latin America A great deal of correspondence and many Skype

conversations took place in preparation for this interconti-nental collaboration. A crucial factor in strengthening the collaborative process was the two-month working visit to Arena y Esteras by the young Expedition Metropolis actress Geraldine Mormin. Although many more people in Poland and Germany were involved in the preparations, in the end three participants from Goleniów and five from Berlin went to Peru. They took with them a number of questions: questions about human rights, about memories suppressed because too painful, about reconciliation and forgiveness, about hope, and about uncertain futures.

Through this expedition, the dialogue that had started in the German-Polish border has been brought into contact with the specific dynamic of a remote region in Latin America, the poor district of Villa El Salvador at the southern edge of the megalopolis Lima. Here, new little neighbourhoods are being built illegally every day. Territories are demarcated or clash with others due to the officially unacknowledged migration from poverty stricken and neglected regions of the hinterlands. The architectural and infrastructural contrasts which were witnessed on the two-hour journey from Villa El Salvador to the centre of Lima, are a perfect reflection of the deep societal divisions in modern-day Peru.


112

Arena y Esteras has been working in Villa El Salvador since 1992. Through thick and thin, and with huge dedication and determination, the group has worked all those years on its vision of what community theatre can contribute. And this relationship between theatre and its social context was one of the most important focus points in our intercontinental encounter, during October and November 2010. The exchange consisted of workshops, shows and performances in the public space, of internal wranglings and mutual solutions in the theatre, of simply sharing daily life, and of the mutual reflection on each other’s working methods and contexts.

One of the activities was a German-Polish theatre evening that formed part of the theatre festival Yuyaykunaypac (Quechua for ‘I remember’). There were performances of scenes from earlier co-productions between Teatr Brama and Expedition Metropolis, but now involving some actors from Arena y Esteras. Ana-Sofia Pinedo Toguchi, one of the two artistic directors of Arena y Esteras, was delighted with the result:

Villa El Salvador needs something like this so much. Here and elsewhere in Peru, nobody wants to dwell on the recent past with all its pain and loss. There’ve already been too many tears. All that’s left is TV soaps or a deafening silence. You just don’t attract audiences with a subject like Memoria’s. That’s something we notice at Yuyakunyapac too. That’s why it was good this evening that there were so many adults and children. I could see how the three participating actors [Pamela, John and Chinito] from Villa El Salvador are representative for other young actors in our community. This experience has helped them to grow so much. Personally, I’m not so crazy about onstage catharsis, about drama triggering intense deferred emotions. What we need here are examples of how to make the

113

Mem


lrich Hardt

wish to change, a willingness to break down walls, tangible and understandable. I was able to see this transition take place in the radiant faces of Pamela and Chinito’s characters Eve and Adam. It was both playful and poetic. It was very moving for myself and the entire audience.

The meeting The initial meetings were first and foremost

aimed at creating a common point of memory. The young Peruvians were busy with a new production at the time and they showed a few scenes. They saw these scenes as a kind of alternative photography that they could use to portray the current situation in Peru as viewed from the perspective of Villa El Salvador. In doing so, they focused less on the success-ful side of Peru than on the hope and memories of marginal-ised groups, particularly itinerant seasonal workers. To return the favour, the young Europeans performed scenes from their own recent co-production. Pretty soon, it became clear that the European and Peruvian scenes shared sufficient common themes to enable the two groups to enter into a dialogue. The structure and dramaturgy of Plataforma was open enough to incorporate Peruvian material, allowing something new to emerge. Arturo Mejia, the other artistic director of Arena y

Polish and German youth on a morning walk in the Andes. Photo: Ulrich Hardt


114

Esteras, characterised the situation as follows: ‘You brought the skeleton with you from Europe. Now we can add the organs and nervous system together.’

The theme of memory ran like an invisible thread through all aspects of the exchange. It was there in the per-formances, in the short excursion to the Andes, in painting murals, in the visit to the Yuyanapac exhibition in Lima’s National Museum and in the city’s memorial ‘The Eye That Cries’. But it was also clear that we were three very different partner organisations with three very different directors who had to learn how to work together. It wasn’t always easy, especially for the cast, but it was also positive and exciting. The pressure of time and context meant that solutions had to be found quickly, and in many situations the motto was always, ‘Don’t talk. Do!’

Assignments were formulated in such a way that they could be carried out by teams rather than individuals. ‘Always working together to find common solutions, I found quite difficult and intense,’ explained Arturo Mejia. And Ulrich Hardt particularly remembers two striking experiences during the Andes trip. One was a workshop for 40 children aged 4 to 6, where his group had to work with Peruvian and Polish participants without any real prepara-tion. The other experience was the morning walks and the stories told by farmers they met along the way.

Plataforma performancesBuilding on these experiences, Plataforma

Sudamericana was put together in just a few days. Ulrich Hardt made the following notes the night after the first per-formance at the Festival in Villa El Salvador.

A theatre play can be like a poem. Today the ‘Plataforma’ poem lasted exactly 42 minutes. I saw many of our experiences on our expedition reflected as if through a crystal prism: a hand gesture, a brief action in the scene, images and impressions from the

115

Mem


lrich Hardt

previous days. Everything fused in a wondrous way with the material already at hand. […] The two real worlds that clashed with each other were there on the stage. In his onstage encounter with John, Marcin found himself in a true state of inner diaspora. In pain and with all her might, Gioia refused to be drawn into Chinito’s melancholy, but in passing asked her own burning question: who will grant me my own sorrow? […] Even more powerfully, the audience saw their own conflicting feelings reflected in the four couples (Anne and Nils, Gioia and John, Pamela and Chinito, and Ola and Marcin) as they danced in the Carnival scene. By turns passionate and world-weary, the couples glided across the dance floor – to the grotesque sound of a howling dog – re-awakening many personal histories among the audience. […] When these tightly edited moments, drawn from fragments of shared landscapes of the memory, came together in a poetic unity and were presented to the audience, the experiences of our ex-pedition were transformed through theatrical labour into indelible life experiences.

ReflectionsThis expedition brought participants together for

three weeks to complete a collaborative project. But was the aim of this enterprise equally clear to everyone involved? And did exchange take place in the right way? It may be argued that it did not, because the performers were unable to discuss this issue and reach agreement on it.

In the closing evaluations on the eve of departure, the participants stumbled on a difference in understanding of the term ‘social compromise’. Arena y Esteras use this term to describe their personal position and their group mentality: their social and political commitment. Several times Ana-Sofia and Arturo suggested they were perhaps, ‘less artists than social and political activists who use art’. And when asked how they define ‘community’ they


116

explained that it is a group that develops a sense of solidarity in the middle of the urban jungle. ‘We defend solidarity and commitment, even if it means preventing people gaining experiences outside Villa El Salvador. Young people first have to get a good education and develop a sense of identity within Villa El Salvador.’

In Villa El Salvador, the borders are there for all to see: in the architecture, in society at large, in the entrances to buildings and even in the taxi and bus routes. Without these clear demarcations, it would be far more difficult to achieve a sense of community. For the Berlin-based actors from Expedition Metropolis, it is no easy matter to build a sense of community based on territorial, cultural, religious, historical or stylistic factors. Arena y Esteras considers the best descrip-tion of ‘community’ to be a ‘group with solidarity’. To them, ‘community’ is a way of counteracting external threats, such as the ubiquitous corruption, political capriciousness, or lack of governmental interest in young people. But how do you go about building such a sense of solidarity?

Arena y Esteras trains young people from poor backgrounds to become youth leaders. They set a good example when it comes to human rights, gender equality, access to education, the battle against corruption and violence, as well as other pressing issues. Each and every actor in the group is driven by a personal desire to bring back a little piece of human dignity into themselves and their community. In countries where a citizen cannot expect the state to take care of such issues, these and similar citizens initiatives are of vital importance.

Over the course of their training, the actors are equipped with a whole range of artistic and social skills, including music, literature, political history, leadership and organising. All of these qualities are crucial elements in the training for a community artist. Increasingly, there is also input from outside Arena y Esteras, particularly from international volunteers. But they keep a

117

Mem


lrich Hardt

close eye on these external influences, because they can also be a threat and weaken the inwardly focused identity of the organisation. ‘Over the three weeks we worked together we noticed that this tension was sometimes a burden for the Arena y Esteras actors’, Ulrich Hardt remarks: ‘We were unable to really participate in these discussions, either because we couldn’t understand them or because they took place out of sight’.

So how does solidarity come into being within Expedition Metropolis? What brings the people together and makes them act as a community for a time? The answer is to be found in encouraging the actors to discover a relation-ship between all their activities (especially creative/artistic ones) and their contexts – in other words, by stepping outside one’s own comfort zone and entering into dialogue with an environment, with a fellow performer, with a play and its characters, with the history of places visited and the people who live there, with issues, with one’s own observations and experiences and the energy and power that these release. In short, it’s about entering into a dialogue between yourself and the Other. It’s about including and working with gaps and differences in a constructive way. It’s about recognising boundaries, shifting boundaries, making boundaries pervious. Walking along and working with these boundaries is like gathering in an in-between space, where a transitory temporary community comes into existence by sharing common interests and learning. Often, the Expedition Metropolis communities are attached to a concrete story and place: a memorial space, an abandoned train station, or the heritage of a former disinfection factory where we are based today in Berlin. Curiosity and sensitivity are essential qualities in this context.

Teatr Brama sees itself as a community of young artists that uses its own production and performance practice that is fuelled by solidarity to develop a strong group mentality. They take feelings that they experience as powerful and intense and present them collectively on stage,


118

accompanied by music. This working method perhaps also accounts for the coolness and sense of distance that has remained between Expedition Metropolis and Brama, even after multiple and intensive shared experiences.

In conclusion: transformationThis report describes small steps towards larger

cultural, political and social developments. They form the rich topsoil in which global processes of change leading to a higher quality of life, fairer trade and moral responsibility can grow. In community arts projects it is the unforeseen, surprising impulses and signals inspired by the aesthetic environment that offer up resistance to the depressing TINA (There Is No Alternative) syndrome.

Memoria – Crossover Arts works at the cutting edge of politics and education. It taps into the power of poetry and the mimetic capital of the stage arts, the art form that is by its very nature more concerned with transformation than any other. This approach to performance is aimed not at representing an eternal truth or a perfect character, but at portraying people engaged in their search, at portraying beings in action, beings moved by passions and their readiness to change environments. The capacity of theatre to transform is rooted in telling stories of change and sharing those stories with an audience. Viewed from a political perspective, this means we are talking about imparting information in a tangible form that leads to a deeper comprehension of what it is to be human. This potential was clearly demonstrated in the performances and found expression in the faces of Pamela (Eva) and Chinito (Adam) at a number of telling moments. Perhaps it was this yearning that did strike and affect Ana-Sofia and the audience in Villa el Salvador.

119

Mem


lrich Hardt

Ulrich Hardt is is a theatremaker and community development initator. He is co-founder and current director of Expedition Metropolis (ExMe). Before graduating in theatre studies and philosophy in Berlin, he did community work in Glasgow and was a professional carpenter working in sustainable construction. For three years he worked as an actor and musician with the Polish theatre association ‘Gardzienice’, where he participated in international theatre expeditions and festivals in East- and West Europe and North America. Since 1997, he has been organizing and directing productions and international community art projects, first as part of Schlesische 27 (Youth Art International) in Berlin, and later within the European Network Creative Cooperations and the European-Latinamerican initiative for Art and Social Transformation ‘Mind and Jump the Gaps’. His work focuses on transcultural artistic practices as a resource for development, community learning, inclusion and qualification.

120

Scenes from Dance for Apartment. Photos: Roy Goderie

122a. Workshop by Debajehmujig. Photo: Clémence Girard b. Ted van Leeuwen. Photo: Kees Deenik c. Lungani Mogale of Imbali (South Africa) at the ICAF

information market. Photo: Roy Goderied. A scene from The Air We Breathe. Photo: Roy Goderiee. Murga in action. Photo: Roy Goderie

a.

b.

c.d.

123

f. Favela Força during the festival opening. Photo: Roy Goderie

g. Peter van den Hurk and Jan Cohen-Cruz chat under a photo exhibit from Argentina. Photo: Roy Goderie

h. Allstar Refjúdží Band. Photo: Roy Goderie

i. Workshop by the Glasgow Citizens Theatre. Photo: Kees Deenik

f.

g.

h.

i.

e.

125

A scene from Momentum by Dance United and youngsters from Moerwijk. Photo: Roy Goderie

126

Junaid Jemal Sendi (Ethiopia). Photo: Roy Goderie

127

A scene from I Myself Got Lost by Mama Story Choir. Photo: Roy Goderie

A scene from It Should Be Me Up There! Photo: Roy Goderie

128Teatr Grodzki workshop. Photos: Roy Goderie

129So many things happen by accident. Or, maybe we ourselves have to be always prepared and ready to respond to the challenges and oppor-

tunities that life offers us. Once we learn how to make use of them, all seemingly accidental events begin to take a logical and meaningful course.

31 March 2011, Rotterdam. It is the second day of the Fifth International Community Arts Festival. I am sitting on stage, among participants of the discussion on the power of community arts. After a few minutes, a late discussant appears and joins our circle. I cannot believe my eyes: it is Michael Romanyshyn, whom I met at the Bread and Puppet Theatre in Glover, Vermont over twenty years ago! For me this had been the beginning of my great adventure with socially engaged theatre which, at the same time, always fights for the highest artistic level. In fact, Bread and Puppet has strongly and permanently influenced my personal life and professional career. I saw them in 1984 in Kraków for the first time, at the beginning of my drama and theatre studies at

Theatre For Everyone

Theatre For Everyone / Maria Schejbal

Maria Schejbal

130


the Jagiellonian University. It was Diagonal Man – a moving story about the human condition with huge puppets on stage, so typical of Schumann’s aesthetics.

There was a man, not wild not tame, not small, not tall, grief in his head, joy in his feet, he looked at the world, got burnt by the world, was afraid of the chiefs, not more than anybody, not less than anybody, lovingly carefully he eats his pea soup…

I still remember so well the crowd of large faces filling up the space and moving rhyth-mically. Michael Romanyshyn was also among the actors. I was totally knocked out by the power of this performance and its visual beauty. The simplicity of narration illustrated by the fantastic puppet creatures, as well as the mysterious and poetic way of conveying the message was very different from what I was used to in theatre. I have to admit: Peter Schumann’s images effectively defeated traditional word-based and actor-oriented art in my mind. It was a real eye-opener to discover that puppet theatre is far from childish!

I started to search for more information about Bread and Puppet and began to dream about joining the company one day. In 1987, again by accident, I found out that Bread and Puppet would perform their Life and Death of the Fireman in Warsaw. There was a discussion with Schumann and his crew after the show and as it happened I was sitting just in front of him. After this conversation, we all went into the old city, where Peter and the actors played music and danced on stilts. At that time, this was something unusual for Poland: an unexpected burst of colors spreading all over and around the market square; a free street activity

131


Peter Schumann in Vermont, July 2011. Photo: Maria Schejbal


132

clashing with our grey and rather gloomy world. Schumann’s stilts were unbelievably tall! When he spread his stilted legs, cars could easily pass underneath. When the parade was finally over and Peter was about to leave the square, he noticed me standing there watching and he approached me. He was still wearing his famous striped red and white top hat. I was only able to mumble something like: “Your theatre is so beautiful and great…”. And he replied: “Come to visit us in Vermont!”. He kissed me on the cheek and left. Sometimes I still wonder how on earth I managed to organize a one-year stay in the USA during a time when there were tight restric-tions on passports, visas, and plane tickets in my country. It must have been because never before in my life had I wanted to do something so badly.

I arrived in Glover, Vermont in July 1988, just a few weeks before the annual celebration of Bread and Puppet’s famous Our Domestic Resurrection Circus. I had managed to obtain a leave of absence from my university for one year to write a master’s thesis about the Bread and Puppet Theatre. Suddenly, I found myself in a big crowd of artists and novice puppeteers from all over the world. I was immediately put to work, like everyone else. Every day we were busy with hundreds of fantastic jobs: painting flags and posters, learning how to walk on stilts, cutting garlic, rehearsing with the puppets (small and big ones) and helping to build them (a lot of paper-maché work). At that time, the Circus was organized as a two-day event that attracted thousands of people. The same program (consisting of side shows, a passion play, a circus and a pageant) was repeated on Saturday and Sunday. I was involved in most of the theatrical performances. This was, in fact, the very first time in my life I had performed, not counting our workshop pieces at the university. It was an extraordinary experience which I still treasure and continues to be a source of strength in my daily life. Dressed in white, like the entire Bread and Puppet Family, and carrying a colorful flag in my hand, I ran out into the outdoor arena in front of a huge crowd of people. This is how the Circus always begins. I also remember being part of

133


the pageant – operating one of the gigantic arms of ‘Mother Earth’ – together with a few other people, and working in the Bread House, giving pieces of dark bread with garlic (which Peter had baked in his brick oven) to people queuing up to receive it after the performance.

Besides being actively involved in the Circus preparations and activities, I spent a lot of time in the Bread and Puppet Museum, which holds an unbelievable collection of masks and figures designed by Peter Schumann. An old, huge, three-story barn, characteristic for this part of New England, is filled up with countless puppets. These used to be the main characters in the Bread and Puppet shows that have been performed all over the world. These enormous faces, with frozen expressions representing a true individuality, had a strong impact on my imagination and theatrical taste.

I had the great privilege to stay for the whole month at Schumann’s small wooden house, up the hill above the Bread and Puppet farm. It was special to live with Peter and his wife Elka in their home environment, just being part of their family life. After leaving Vermont, I continued my adventure with Bread and Puppet in New York City in 1989. I accom-panied the team of Metropolitan Indian Report when they were rehearsing and performing at a cultural center based in an old church in Manhattan. I did the lights for the show, and this allowed me to watch the performance for several nights in a row. I keep one special memory from that experience: silently sweeping the stage floor together with Peter before each per-formance. The piece itself was a typical example of Bread and Puppet’s visual and metaphorical narration, exploring an important social problem. It compared today’s urban home-lessness with the situation of American Indians who had been dispossessed in the past. I still remember several stark images: dark Indian faces slowly rising from the stage, a massive paper-maché hand held out to collect the monthly rent, the beds of a shelter for the homeless descending from the ceiling, a group of dancing Indian spirits, and puppet buffalos passing by miniature representations of burning buildings. The perfor-


134

mance offered no solution; it gave no simple answers. It was ‘just’ a work of fiction, but one that would continue to linger on in the audience’s mind long after the performance had finished. As it did in mine.

Later, also in New York City, I joined the company for a big street parade organized to protest against some water pollution threats. Bread and Puppet was distinctly visible among other demonstrators thanks to the huge puppets and the band that accompanied them. I was a member of the Butchers. We were characteristic representatives of the greed and ruthlessness of those wielding power. These grim figures with white faces, wearing black suits and hats were simply covering the ground with thick, black foil. I had great fun, running up to bystanders and clashing cymbals before their faces, every time the Butchers stopped to do their job. I really felt that I was doing something important. I was acting in the streets of the Big Apple, and this meant emphasizing the watchwords that Peter had printed on hundreds of posters, banners and postcards:

- ‘Resistance of the mind against the supremacy of money’; - ‘Resistance of the heart against business as usual’; - ‘Resistance to the worthlessness of the machine-operated details of life’.

In August 1989, I returned to Glover for one last time to participate in the Circus, just before my flight back to Poland.

All these deeply moving experiences as well as my close contact with Peter Schumann’s artistry have shaped my world view, my understanding of theatre, and my artistic vocation. After my return home, I finished my studies and began to look for ways in which I could put what I had learned in the United States into practice. In 1992, I got a job in a theatre in the southern Polish city of Bielsko-Biała. One of my first tasks was to design a new promotional campaign to attract more audience to our performances. I engaged

135


local youngsters from vocational schools and together with them organized some street happenings. I discovered how important it was for them to feel they belonged to our small theatrical community, to meet from time to time, to share the same interests.

Shortly after I moved to Bielsko-Biała, and again by accident, my adventure with volunteering began. While researching a topic for an article about non-governmen-tal organizations in Poland I ended up in the Catholic Re-socialization Center for Youth-at-Risk. My first meeting with these troubled young people inspired me to find new ways of using my passion for theatre. I began doing drama workshops with them, and ended up working there for fifteen years. Today, someone else is carrying on these artistic activities and they remain an essential part of a therapy program at that institution. In 1997, thanks to my growing reputation as the local ‘drug addicts counselor’, I received a proposal to design and implement an educational program for the Banialuka Puppet Theatre in Bielsko-Biała. We intro-duced theatre as an instrument to combat social exclusion to many local institutions, including several kindergartens, day-care centers, and a hospital. After four years, the program was cancelled by a new director. I decided to join The Bielsko Artistic Association, Grodzki Theatre. This is an NGO, newly founded by my friend Jan Chmiel, a puppeteer who had been involved in theatre work with mentally disabled persons for many years. I have been working with Grodzki since then, and it has taken over my life completely with projects focused on art and education for social change.

In the meantime, another theatre group had come into existence, initiated by one of the former addicts who had participated in my workshops at the re-socialization center. After finishing therapy and leaving the centre, the young man kept urging me to do some more theatre work with him and his friends. We created our first show in 2004 and the group named themselves The Grodzki Theatre Junior.


136

The performance told the story of homeless people dying in the streets of Polish cities in winter. We used simple paper puppets made by the actors. The performers added their own memories of what it was like to be a street tramp to the information we found on the front pages of daily news-papers. One year later we were invited to take part in a youth exchange programme in Greece. We performed at the main square in Nafplion in the Peloponnese.

Over the years, there have been more and less busy periods and considerable ups and downs in our activities. But the group still exists, though people have come and gone. Some time ago, three persons suffering from intellectual disabilities and a few people who were deaf joined us. Together we created the puppet show Our Dream Journey, which was premiered at the COAST International Festival of Community Theatre in Bristol, UK in March 2012. And so the story goes on.

A scene from Our Dream Journey. Photo: Mark Simmons

137


What I experienced more than twenty years ago in the USA has significantly influenced all stages of my professional career. It has also brought me to Rotterdam in 2011. I was invited to run a workshop introducing festival participants to the artistic and educational methods used by the Grodzki Theatre Association. In the workshop, I decided to refer directly to my long experience of working with young recovering drug addicts and directing them in several theatrical plays. I also included some of the things I learned from Peter Schumann. The three most important things about theatre he taught me are: First, everyone can find his or her own place on stage (or around it, or behind it). Second, it is always worth touching on problematic, vulnerable and important elements of life in our theatrical search for Beauty and Truth. Theatre can be both easily accessible and unique. This is its special power. And third, we do not always need a drama, or a long text, to create a powerful performance. An image, a feeling, a dream, a poem which maybe someone wants to share with us, can flower on stage in all its glory. Moreover, the visual narration can be often more meaning-ful, convincing and moving than hundreds of words spoken on stage.

Together with the ICAF workshop team we worked on a story about searching for our own true identity and freedom. The inspiration comes from the novel Jonathan Livingston Seagull, written by Richard Bach. A brave seagull, frustrated with the meaningless materialism, conformity and limitation of the life, wants to become a master of flying. This finally brings him into conflict with the rest of his flock. With the help of this simple narration we tried to answer really serious existential questions and dilemmas. Our aim was also to explore the nature and artistic potential of various ordinary materials: fabric, foil, paper and rope. There were no main parts, no more or less important characters. We were all equal in this common adventure of being playful and creative. Unfortunately, we did not have enough time to structure a complete tale, but several ideas and topics important to this temporary community of participants were


138

raised and tempting directions to follow in the future were pointed out. The power of our art was self-evident. I remember that it was exactly the same when in 2001 I decided to put Jonathan on stage with my young drug addicts in Poland. The group caught the spirit of the story right from the beginning and transformed it into a very personal and moving theatrical piece, using plastic bottles and string. We closed our ICAF workshop by sharing impressions, seated in a circle:

‘It looks like we have been doing this for years’. ‘We all found different meanings in what we saw. And we shared a lot of things too’. ‘Everybody could do something!’. ‘Exploring things. This is very important for me’.8

That unexpected meeting with Michael Romanyshyn in Rotterdam made me decide to go back to Glover. After twenty-two years, in July 2011 I found many things just the same as when I first discovered them in 1987. It all seemed well-known and familiar. I saw the same enthusiasm and fascination with Bread and Puppet’s art among apprentices involved in different aspects of the production. Once again, I discovered the great power of Peter Schumann’s open-air performances, with all kinds of fantastic figures integrated into the landscape. I spent many hours in the Museum and I joined the ‘potato population’ led by Peter to the pine forest as part of the pageant. The new theatre building made a great impression on me. This ‘generic, all-purpose paper-maché-religion Cathedral, with normal admiration and protest,’ has been decorated by Peter with hundreds of drawings and images. It is his true kingdom, a magical space open to the sacred and the profane, to all kinds of manifestions by human beings and puppets. I was leaving Vermont with the hope that Bread and Puppet would come back to Poland once again in the near future. And guess what? They performed in Wroclaw and Bielsko-Biała in May 2012!

8. The full description of the Rotterdam ICAF workshop is available in the form of a learning path titled “Team work on a theatrical scenario” at: arteryproject.eu/platform

139


Every deep, positive experience remains with us all our lives. This is the message which I have been always trying to share with the people I work with and which comes directly from my own adventure with Bread and Puppet. In theatre we can learn many useful things. However, our common effort is not only about gaining skills in how to animate puppets and other objects (which requires a thorough training, patience and precision, by the way) or about having control over our body. Most of all, it is about exploring things and getting to know ourselves. Perhaps one day we will discover that all the theatrical experiences we have gone through contribute to the logical course of events in our life. Maybe nothing happens by accident.

Maria Schejbal is head of the Cultural and Educational Projects Department at Grodzki Theatre (since 2001). She is widely considered an expert in management and coordination of EU funded projects. She holds an M.A. in Theatre from Jagiellonian University in Kraków (Drama and Theatre Department). She has eleven years experience as an instructor for educators, therapists and volunteers. Over the past fifteen years she has conducted countless workshops in theatre education, including working with young drug addicts. She has also participated in the European “Art in Action” programme and has competed artistic and managerial internships in the USA, Serbia, and Thailand. She is an officially licensed psychodrama assistant and is the author of 6 publications for teachers and educators (published in Polish, English, Romanian, Portuguese, Greek). She is a member of ASHOKA Innovators for the Public.

140


A Field Ready to Leave Home:NOTES FROM THE ICAF SEMINAR

Jan Cohen-Cruz and Eugene van Erven

Neil Packham of Glasgow Citizens Theatre conducts a feedback session at the ICAF seminar. Photo: Roy Goderie

141

A Field Ready to Leave Hom

e / Jan Cohen-Cruz and Eugene van Erven

Each morning of our festival, a group of about 80 practitioners, students, and participants from all over the world, gathered in the small

auditorium of Zuidplein Theatre to explore different aspects of power in community arts. We had organized an inner circle of conversants and an outer circle of attendees, from whom questions and comments were gathered during the intermission. An animated, and at times heated, debate ensued. It was facilitated by Jan Cohen-Cruz, a widely

published and internationally respected American scholar in the field of applied, engaged and community arts. Below, Jan and I have tried to distill the essence of this conversation from seven hours of transcribed video recordings. To keep our text readable and coherent, we had to leave out lots of material, some of which appears in a different, audiovisual form in the video documentary that accompanies this publication.9

Jan opened the proceedings with a statement and a question about the power of community arts, inviting others to do likewise:

One power of community-based art that we draw on is partnerships between people in universities – which I think is a very underused resource – and people from other sectors with shared concerns. My question is: How can we deepen community arts’ efficacy through better partnerships across sectors?

9. Note from Jan Cohen Cruz: I want to thank Eugene for inviting me to guide this daily conversation, for his excellent job editing the transcripts, and for foregrounding, from the many ideas expressed, the notion of “a field ready to leave home,” a remark I made casually in passing. Thinking about it now, how prescient. As participants at an international convening, we were looking for the meaning and value of the local from our many global locations. As Clifford Geertz wrote about fieldwork in his seminal essay on thick descrip-tion, the ethnographer describes and analyzes cultures in a place but not strictly about that place. As we ripen as a field, so is it for us in community arts.


142

Tina Glover of the East Midlands Participatory Arts Forum, one of the oldest community arts networks in England, stressed that in her country community arts is about all art forms and not so much about theatre alone, as seems to be the case in the Netherlands:

The power of community arts for me is about the participant leading and being the determinant of most of the work. My question is: Where do artists lead and where do participants lead?

Rosalba Rolón, artistic director and co-founder of Pregones Theatre in the Bronx (USA), formulated a question about the relation between ‘community’ and ‘art’:

We are a professional theatre company that developed in the midst of a neighborhood. On the one hand, I think that the word ‘community’ has been co-opted by dominant cultures, at least in the US. Therefore we prefer to use the term ‘neighborhood’ as a source of our strength. Our inspiration is that art is a sacred goal and that each neighborhood needs to have great art. My question is: Is art a goal or a tool?

Joe Osawabine, artistic director of the indigenous arts organization Debajehmujig – Storytellers from Canada, raised the issue of the artist’s status in the social contexts where they work:

Debajehmujig is an Ojibway word meaning ‘story tellers.’ We are one of three or four indigenous theatre companies in Canada that deliver training to Aboriginal youth. We bill ourselves as a professional community-based company. One of my questions is: Where do you draw the line between professional and community-based? We are professional, and we work with community-based people in our projects: from kids to professional actors and all the way up to elders. We see it all as one thing.

143



Moreover, Joe and his colleagues themselves first encountered the arts as kids on the Wikwemikong reserve where they grew up – and where they continue to live and work as artists and community members.

An de Bischop, the director of Démos, a semi- governmental center for youth work, culture and sports in Flanders (Belgium), discovered community arts while on student exchange to South Africa:10

When I returned home I discovered it existed in Belgium as well and that community arts has been supported since its very beginning in the early ‘90s. We conceive of community arts as an entry point towards diversity in the arts in general and as an active form of cultural participation for socially deprived people. I don’t see ‘community’ and ‘arts’ as opposites but as mutually enforcing one another. My question is: How can community reinforce the arts and, conversely, how can the arts reinforce socially deprived people and communities? I say this because I see that the high arts still don’t recognize community arts as a legitimate form of art. And the social welfare sector doesn’t recognize the arts as important for the development of people.

In an immediate reaction, Matt Jennings, a scholar-practitioner from Northern Ireland, responded: ‘Rather than a tool or an art form, I wonder: Is art a right, a need, or as some policy bodies seem to think, a luxury?’ Sandra Trienekens, a Dutch social scientist, argued that if not a right it is at least a human necessity:

I am looking at community arts as a way to slow down our hectic social processes to a more human pace in which we can really and truly meet and connect. I look at how people experience that. That is also where the strength of community arts lies. I’d like to extend

10. In 2009, An de Bischop wrote her Ph.D. dissertation about policy rhetoric and community art: Community Arts als Discursieve Constructie, Gent: Universiteit Gent. An abbreviated English version of this study appeared as ‘Community Art is What We Say and Write It is’ in P. De Bruyne and P. Gielen, eds. 2011, Community Art: The Politics of Trespassing. Amsterdam: Antennae Valiz, 51 - 72.


144

the question about where do artists lead and where do participants lead to include commissioners. There is hardly a situation in the Netherlands where it is only a negotiation between artists and participants. There is always a housing corporation, a local authority, or a welfare agency involved. So: How do you deal with this triangle of power relations in a way that you can continue to honor the community’s story in an artistically interesting way?11

Big hART’s Ngapartji NgapartjiAfter this first inventory of possible themes, Jan

Cohen-Cruz moved on to a critical reflection on the play with which the Australian company Big hART had opened the festival the night before: Ngapartji Ngapartji. For this, she drew on a method she learned from American choreographer Liz Lerman:12

Liz believes that the process of responding to work is not enough in the hands of the people who make it. She says that after you’ve made a work, no matter what it is, you first need to hear what was meaningful to other people. Second, the people who made the work should ask questions of people who saw it. Only later do spectators offer opinions, and only after flagging the topic and asking the artists if they want feedback on that aspect.13

Scott Rankin, the writer and director of Ngapartji Ngapartji, began by explaining that the show his company presented at ICAF was very different from the original version which had toured Australia:

I am a foreigner in my own country and I was invited in to the Pitjantjatjara nation to help bring the story

11. In a recent book called Culturele interventies in krachtwijken [‘Cultural Interventions in Marginal Neighbourhoods’. Amsterdam: SWP, 2011], she and her colleagues Willemien Dorresteijn and Dirk Willem Postma explore this triangular power in three projects in the western suburbs of Amsterdam. 12. See Liz Lerman and John Borstel, 2009, Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process: A method for Getting Critical Response on Anything You Make, from Dance to Dessert. Takoma Park, Maryland: Dance Exchange. 13. For the benefit of those whose native language is not English, we have decided to include some lengthy quotations from Scott Rankin in this text, although some of his statements also appear in the DVD chapter ‘The Power of Big hART’ on the companion video.

145



forth for people who don’t speak Pitjantjatjara, who don’t have that language and culture. That’s what we did with this big touring show in Australia, which involved 37 people. When we were invited here to Rotterdam, the one thing we didn’t want to do is just bring a finished piece. We wanted to consider what the diaspora was of this audience coming together here at ICAF.

Scott was quite critical of the show they had performed the previous night:

If I had been part of the audience last night, I would have said that there was a tangle of theatrical languages that were neither in control enough nor free enough to take their own course. So the show moved towards intimacy and then distanced itself from the audience in a way that was unintended by the company.

He further explained that one of the big ambitions of the project was to concretely affect Australian national policy regarding Aboriginal language and culture. His company’s aim is to affect national political power in a sustained way:

The perception of aboriginality in Australia is that it is a museum thing, whereas in actual fact it is a whole group of nations which are incredibly intact in the north of the country and quite decimated in the south. In Australia the government spends $123 million a year on making sure people can learn Indonesian in schools and virtually zero on making sure that the 150 remaining indigenous languages can be taught in schools. That robs children of their language so they can’t learn their own narrative and that is a crime. The reason is not because ministers and bureaucrats in Australia are particularly cruel. It’s because they don’t know the story, so it is easy to hurt these people inadvertently.They hurt


146

them by not having a national language policy. There are real issues here of power, not as an abstract notion but the application in Australian schools and in the lives of indigenous people of a policy issue that is inadvert-ently crushing languages that are dying with the limited life expectancy of indigenous people. The whole reason for ‘Ngapartji Ngapartji’ was to approach the government minister to get a national language policy on the desk and to release funding in a very real way.

Matt Jennings, himself Australian by birth, wondered about the Aboriginal ownership of the project, and what some of the intercultural tensions were that Scott may have encountered as a ‘white fella’ in an indigenous setting. Scott replied:

This project began 5 years ago. My conversation with Trevor Jamieson, the lead actor, began 11 years ago. It’s an absolute collaboration, first with his immediate family as we would know it and then with the broader Spinifex family and then in the larger Pitjantjatjara family.14 At that point, the senior women, who aren’t with us here, took on the guiding of the project. Some examples may be: there are many songs that I am not allowed to hear as a man or as an uninitiated white person, songs that are dangerous for me to hear, some of the men’s songs that can’t be performed on stage in front of women. So we decided to sing some of the songs for which there is public access, or to translate some of the cold war songs like Creedence Clearwater Revival’s ‘Bad Moon Rising’. These were songs written at the time of the cold war when Trevor’s family was still out in the nuclear bomb zone. We chose to trans-late them into Pitjantjatjara as a cultural gesture to a white audience. In doing that, however, the women told a story about a man and the full moon, which was very important to them, but which was also scary and which they couldn’t be seen singing about in public. In the translation we changed the ‘bad moon’ to a ‘bad

14. See Kerrie Schaefer’s article later in this book. She explains a number of these cultural particulars, like Aboriginal extended family structures.

147



sun rising,’ which allowed us to cross those cultures. At another point I was offered something, I’m still not sure what, which I was told was a kangaroo testicle, and which I was supposed to eat almost raw. Now I know there are some very sacred parts of that animal, but to this day Trevor has not shared with me whether they were taking the piss out of me or were offering me something very special. In that sense it’s a project that isn’t all earnest but absolutely comic as well.

In response to a question about the project’s larger political aims from EMPAF’s Jan Reynolds, Scott answered that originally it had started with Trevor telling his family’s troubled history. The idea to lift the project from the personal and local to a national policy level came from Scott. From that moment on he had needed to drastically expand the organization of his company. It provides an unusual model for a community arts organization, one that flexibly expands (or shrinks) depending on the intrinsic needs of an enterprise:

At the height of the project we had a creative producer, a literacy and language producer, a community pro-ducer, a researcher, an evaluator, and a media liaison, and particular meetings about how we were going to move in Canberra (the national capital) on the policy issue. We had to learn to be as savvy as somebody trying to lobby for environmental policy that suits his company’s shareholders. If we’re not prepared to enter into those dialogues, not as adversaries but knowing that within government there are many people who are desperately trying to do things like us and are dedicating their life to it in a way that we are – that is, the generosity of spirit and not the adversarial nature of it – then we might as well shut up shop.

FunctionalityA number of seminar participants had questions

about the relative lack of prominence of the two female performers in the Rotterdam version of Ngapartji Ngapartji.


148

Scott explained that in the original Australian production a large women’s choir had been very powerfully present, but that for practical reasons they had not been able to come along on this tour.

Jan Cohen-Cruz then led the conversation to a more general discussion of instrumentality and power. For Jan Reynolds (EMPAF), the special power of community arts resides in its potential to educate and communicate outside of formal educational structures:

We have the opportunity to influence and inform through the work that is made. We can challenge, we can give people a new way of seeing things, a different perspective. That is the difference between using art as part of a purely educational setting for a learning purpose and that only’.

For Maria van Bakelen (IDEA),15 the power lies in the unpredictable adventure of the artistic journey:

One of the main opportunities that community arts give to people is that it is often not known what we are going to create. Art offers an open space, a space that has perhaps not even a purpose. It gives you the opportunity to express yourself in a way you normally would not do. People fill that space with their stories, a song, or their silence. By doing that, the art is already functioning on a personal level. And if it is presented to an audience which is in the same situation and when there is reciprocal communication between the story on stage and in the audience, a new space opens up.

Michael Romanyshyn, a community musician from the USA whose contribution on the Allstar Refjúdží Band appears earlier in this volume, pointed to the spiritual power of community arts:

15. IDEA is the International Drama/Theatre and Education Association: www.idea-org.net.

149



Speaking from an American point of view, in our cul-ture we have lost the power of our expressive tools. We don’t look at music as something that has healing power or medicinal powers. We are really a language-based society where everything has to be talked out. People don’t know how to express themselves visually as a group. Individually as an artist, yes. How do you make something with which you want to convey something without using a lot of words? We can give those tools. But they have to be relevant. What you are say-ing is as important as how you say it, and you can use different ways to do that. And the ‘how’ often influences the ‘what’ you’re saying. You don’t really know what the outcome is if you are going to add a word to a picture.

You can’t imagine that until you do it. You don’t know what the meaning is when you put a particular melo-dy to a dance that someone is doing until you actually do it. You don’t want to know beforehand. You want to discover it.

Maria Schejbal, a theatre artist working with the Polish collective Grodzki, was less optimistic about the healing power of community arts:

People often ask me why I do theatre with young addicts; why I don’t put them into hard labor. This relates to the question of how to measure the impact. I used to tell very nice success stories during those

Jan Cohen-Cruz. Photo: Roy Goderie


150

meetings. One of our addicts became a professional actor. It was very hard and long for him to reach there. In the end he got a paying job in one of the best puppet theatres in Poland. That kind of thing does happen, although not often. And then half a year ago he went back to drugs. So talking about functionality is not very easy. Not to go crazy I have adopted the philosophy that any really good and constructive experience in our lives has some kind of meaning.

Impact, effect, art as a tool and instrumentality would remain a continuous point of contention during the next two days. This was not surprising given the presence of social scientists and the pressure that many community artists feel to deliver evidence of the effective-ness of their work. Scott Rankin argued, however, that artists should not bend over backwards to accommodate commisioners:

We are too eager to absorb other people’s longing to use words like ‘impact’. These are terms of manufacturing and if we fall into the trap of being manufacturers we’ve sold our souls out and set back the craft by a decade. If we place all that desire for things to be transformed and redeemed and different and place all that into the content of the work, we destroy the work. So look at the process, lengthen the process, begin the work, be savvy, become a lobbyist, pull all the people in and leave the poetry alone. My mistake when I come to work with people who have never used a computer, never been in a theatre, who have their own traditions, is to begin this dance to bring the work into [theatres] like this. I want these people to respond to my incredible gift as an artist. I want them to take on my languages and skills, which are already rusty and crusty and horrible and old-fashioned. But instead my gift should be removing everything from getting in the way of the exquisite beauty of what is already this world that I’m entering. Rather than

151



shrink-wrapping it into a bag and taking it to a festival to put on. Staying out of the way requires a great deal of creative muscle, I think.

A Field Ready to Leave HomeJan Cohen-Cruz opened the second day of the

seminar with her view on the position of community arts within the larger art world. For this, she drew on ideas from her most recent book, Engaging Performance (Routledge 2010):

I think of our work as a kind of call and response, as engaged and engaging art. I don’t like the silos that community art often ends up in. Certainly in the US – and I believe this is true elsewhere – there are assumptions that it is aesthetically less clear or pleasing, that it is of more use to the people doing it, and that it is somehow apart from the great traditions of art. In fact, when I think of the people who have influenced me the most they have created all different kinds of art and some don’t even create art; they create other work. It’s such a deeply inter-disciplinary field. One of the topics that came up yesterday is that there is a piece of work that we want to be aesthetically delightful and that there is a very important process. Different people position themselves in different places in the relation between the process and the product that is created. But we are looking for both. I like that we don’t all agree, manifested both by what we say and by the work we see. There are different ideas about what community-based art is. That is a sign of a healthy field that is reaching into its adolescence. It is a field that is ready to leave home. Because I think it is a call and response there is one thing that keeps it all together: something we experience, something we care about in the world, a situation that breaks our heart, or that thrills us,


152

that we feel compelled to respond to. We see artistic tools as part but not the only way to respond. There is a wonderful saying: “the life so short, the craft so long to learn”. And then it is not good enough to just be a good artist. We are in a field where different kinds of expertise are called on. How do we find partners from other sectors? How do we accom-plish something that includes but goes beyond art? Those of us who are more in the scholarly, reflective side of community art are looking for principles in the practice that hold true for the scholarship as well. This dialogical approach is true in the practice and in the scholarship. That is what I try to do here.

Yesterday, we began by saying where we’re each coming from. How is an international dialogue possible when the work is so rooted in a place and in response to a local situation? Your concerns and the values that underlie what we all do point to what extends beyond the local. The power of the work is as much about the process as the product, but often all that the public sees is the product. So how do we communicate how the process is a source of the power? Is it in the nature of a community art event that it has to include a conversation as well as a presentational piece? The degree to which we see video in community art now has quickly proliferated. It’s one way of communicating that there is something that happens besides the product and the audience needs to know about it.

Have we pushed what is unique about community arts far enough, or do we still think we are the poor cousins of ‘real art’? Are we still trying to emulate the forms of ‘real art’? I put that in quotation marks because I believe art is large and that we are very much part of it. In a sense, even, we are more a part of the great traditions in art than ‘real art’.

153



Community arts has artistic roots that go way back to times when art, culture and daily life were indistinguishable. It also has identifiable antecedents in the avant-garde and the radical politics of the 1950s and ‘60s. In all those ways, community arts is closer to the reality that continuously unfolds around us than any other arts practice. Nowhere did this become clearer than in the words of Marwa Seoudi of the Cairo-based theatre company El Warsha who had come to ICAF to report on her recent experiences at Tahrir Square:16

It is difficult to talk about community art in the professional sense of the term in relation to what happened in my country. When we were in Tahrir Square everybody was an artist. Professional actors, directors, filmmakers didn’t play a bigger role than everybody else. You could see that in the creativity of the signs that people made. From the start, people were asking Mubarak to leave, leave, leave. And when after a few days he hadn’t left, people started making signs saying: ‘Leave because my arm is starting to hurt from holding up this sign’. And then that became a series of similar signs, like ‘Leave, because I miss my wife and children and want to go home’ or ‘Please leave because I want to get married’.

A folk musician had come with a tabla drum. He played for 2 or 3 minutes and then others took the tabla from him and kept on playing for hours and hours. And when after a week still nothing had happened, people would come up with sketches and one-act plays. In Egypt we have the ‘zar’, a superstitious kind of dance with which you drive away the evil spirit. At one point, a group of people dressed up in funny clothes started doing the zar for Mubarak to leave. It’s a special dance with lots of percussion where you have to bang your heads and say, ‘Leave, leave, leave’.

16. El Warsha has been performing engaged shows in Cairo and beyond for many years. With support from the Swedish development agency SIDA, Marwa also coordinates a regional arts network in the Middle East called ‘Tamasi’, a cooperation between 11 organisations in Egypt, Palestine, Jordan and Lebanon. One of the latest productions in this project is a bus tour called ‘Support Services Office’, which toured Egyptian villages with performances about the political, the economic and the human rights situation.


154

I remember a guy dressed up as a soccer referee with a red card he held up for Mubarak, expelling him from the game. There was a lot of spontaneous creativity like that: graffiti, chants, songs. It was so powerful, so intense. One day, the F16 jets came flying over. It was really shocking. What was going to happen? In less than two minutes there was a bucket of paint and a guy writing on the floor in very big font telling the pilot: ‘Get out of here, you coward, we are not leaving the square!’ And people stood together so they could form different words with their bodies. I used to go up to a friend’s house to look from above. They conveyed different messages to Mubarak, to the regime, or to their friends.17

Marwa Seoudi’s words prompted an animated exchange about community arts and political power.18 According to Mia Grijp (Sering, Belgium), community arts is about redefining leadership in art and in our communities. South Africa’s Connie Sedumedi concurred, also with Jan Cohen-Cruz’s idea about art as call and response:

We go into the communities because we see there is a need. And when you go there and show people ‘Hey, you can do this, you can help yourself ’, I think there is power.

Scott Rankin adopted a broad, philosophical view with regards to art and politics:

After oppressions and revolutions, people need new ways of being governed because the traditional monarchy systems don’t seem to work anymore. That’s the era we’re in right now. One approach is punitive, the legislative or the policed policy. The other way, which is where I think all of us sit, is in the story, the narrative. Nations are narrations,

17. See K. Khalil, ed. 2011, Messages From Tahrir: Signs from Egypt’s Revolution. Cairo and New York: The American university in Cairo Press. 18. See DVD Chapter ‘The Power of Politics’ for further images of this discussion.

155



which is not an original thought.19 Nations form an unfolding narrative, which they write together. The stick is the punitive, legislative, policed en-forcement. The carrot is the narration that becomes the nation: being in a cultural tide together so that norms form about kindness and compassion and how to live with a neighbour and how to conduct one-self with everybody together. Especially at the com-munity end of the spectrum, we place ourselves in a little backwater where we rob ourselves of our own authority, our own responsibility, and our own use of the 600,000 hours that we’re given as a human being to live on this earth. As storytellers we have the responsibility to use our power to end invisibility, to bring people into the narration, to work at the carrot end of the field, and to fight against the unnecessary and corrupt use of the punitive, the policy, the police end of it. Where we can go wrong is to allow the poetry to disappear and put in place of the poetry propa-ganda. Whether that propaganda is for what we consider good things or not, it will always be a problem, because you drift from there to a punitive form.

Maria van Bakelen objected to this black and white view. In less democratic countries like Egypt, where an oppressive military regime needs to be ousted, the poetic carrot may not be enough, she argued. Rankin countered that van Bakelen overestimated the democratic level of Australia (‘every second woman and every third male who comes to the attention of the police is aboriginal’), but he agrees with her that things are more complex than he formulated it:

What I saw on the news [about Egypt] far away in Australia was a wonderful, unfolding narrative and storytelling, using the media in really good ways. So there is a lot of agreement with what you’re saying about the complexity of how big narrative is and how it plays out.

19. The term comes from the Indian cultural philosopher Homi K. Bhabha, Nation and Narration. London: Routledge, 1990. Rankin argues that great community art, like Ngapartji Ngapartji, should also assume its rightful place in a national cannon.


156

Rosalba Rolón added her own inflection to the carrot and the stick metaphor:

Each context requires a flexibility of spirit in the service of that context. What the artists are doing today in Egypt is not what we need in the Bronx. We need to give ourselves permission to take on the political slogan when we need to and to go into a whole different realm when that is called for. Having worked in Nicaragua for many years during the Sandinistas or in Cuba, you see how artists position themselves and feel that that is a different historical moment than today.

Glasgow Citizens TheatreAfter this extensive discussion of community art and

concrete political situations that also included Northern Ireland (about which Matt Jennings and David Grant write earlier in this book), we moved to Scotland. The Community Company of the Citizens Theatre from Glasgow, Scotland is one of the few examples in the world of a community-based theatre company officially attached to a professional repertory theatre. It is based in a historical Victorian playhouse and specializes in adaptations of existing playscripts with high production values. For ICAF, however, they decided to experiment with a new approach in which they incorporated personal stories

The inner circle of the ICAF seminar. Photo: Roy Goderie

157



of cast members, improvisations, and video in a show entitled It Should Be Me Up There! Another unusual element in this show was the self-parody of the two professional directors involved in the project. They chose to put themselves on stage along with the community participants. Through their vulnerable presence on stage, Neil Packham and Elly Goodman stimulated a lot of thinking about the ideological nature of artist-participant relations. At one point, Neil Packham tongue in cheek, cheerfully had approached community members with the words: ‘Let’s do a bit drama, shall we?’ He admitted that he was a bit worried about including this speech in the show:

There was an interesting moment in rehearsal when I said to Elly, ‘Are we setting ourselves up here? How far do we take this?’ Obviously I’d like you to think that is not the way we approach our sessions. It made me cringe, because I was definitely playing a ‘baddy’. I wanted that to be discussed.

Elly Goodman elaborated:

It was a pastiche to make it more theatrical. It’s about engaging people in something without them realizing they’re doing it. We often don’t know when the workshop begins. It’s the power of the group that is fueling and feeling the way that the sessions go. We work with really marginalized groups in difficult environments – male prisons, particularly difficult places in Glasgow – where they have to keep up a kind of machismo and where it is a horrendous thing not only to explore your own inner creativity and do something that you think might be interesting, but also to have the pressure of perform-ing in front of your peers. In the show last night we wanted to explore how we begin that process. It’s a fascinating topic how we begin that shared experience and how the power shifts around within the confines of that workshop. It is endless and hard to


158

define, because every single person you meet and every single dynamic and mix of people is so unique that no matter how long you’ve been doing it and how many incredibly fascinating and colorful experiences you’ve had, it still feels new. Every dynamic is unique. It’s never a finite thing.

In an implicit critique, Rosalba Rolón warned about the danger of artists imposing too much of their own ideological agenda in their work with communities:

Many artists working in communities begin to resolve their own dilemmas, perhaps because they don’t come from these places. When we have an acting class at Pregones, participants come to learn the craft; they’re not coming for something else and yet we end up imposing other things. They are there because they want to sing well, to move well, and to act well. It is my responsibility to build great artists in my community, not to build great social workers. We have great social workers; I’m not one of them. That’s a real challenge for us as a field that would be good to discuss more openly.

With her remark, Rolón sharpened the discussion about an artist’s hidden ideology versus community ownership. Scott Rankin usefully introduced a cross-cultural expansion of that notion:

Ownership is a dangerous word. For Pitjantjatjara people it means something entirely different. If I went to them saying, ‘I want you to own this work’, they would go: ‘What?’ Because ‘if I have something, it’s yours’ to them is a different concept’.

A New Kind of CriticismGiven its diversity of practices and contexts

and the equal importance of process and product, one of the major challenges for community arts is criticism.

159



Traditional western arts criticism, with its focus on individual genius and artifacts operating in the international arts market, lacks the tools to assess the work in all its dimensions. Scott Rankin pointed out:

Critics who are experts elsewhere are suddenly naïve in our world. At Big hART, our response to it has been to invite a traditional theatre critic to come to three projects right at the beginning and be part of the process and to critique it. We invite them to talk about their own awkwardness and about the virtuosity of the process, the foolishness of it and where it is falling down. And then to follow it right through to the end. This is the opposite from ‘ You can’t come to the preview and if you must come to the opening night, well, I guess we’ll live with it.’

Jan Cohen-Cruz agreed that there is a need to change critical paradigms for community arts and evoked Thomas Kuhn’s book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions on how paradigms change:20

He says that people will keep on seeing things the way they are used to unless you do something to alert them to look at something else. So if you say, ‘Do you see this workshop? Do you see how people participate in this circle? Do you see how different people take leadership of this circle? That didn’t happen in the beginning. Everyone assumed they knew nothing; they shied away’. If you deal with critics who aren’t familiar with community work, they aren’t going to know how to look without such exchange.

Social scientist Sandra Trienekens pointed out that it is not only difficult for traditional critics to look beyond the surface of the work but also for non-artistic agencies involved in the work. She wondered how Citizens Theatre deals with that. Neil Packham is in two minds about it. He fills out the

20. T. Kuhn, 1962. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.


160

required forms whenever new participants enter a project:

Once we have done that, we usually let it go and never refer to it again. We just create and leave all that behind. I find it very challenging when someone goes, ‘ You need to quantify these people’. I don’t know how to quantify myself. I have as many mental issues as the people that I’m working with.

He has equal misgivings about promoting his work in the press, which sometimes tends to be voyeuristic:

They go, ‘Oh I really like that story about Eddy. He was addicted ’. We’ve also had a lot of asylum seekers and refugees come to the project and we always say we don’t want to speak to that particular rightwing paper. But then others argue, ‘Wouldn’t it be good to have that publicity?’ All that sits really uncomfortably with me. You want to do it because you want to be recognized in the professional world and if you deny the critic that opportunity then you end up undermining your work. But I want the critic to invest some time in exploring what that work is about.

An de Bischop offered another critical perspective on It Should Be Me Up There! by drawing on contemporary cultural theory:

It was the first time I watched the self-referential post-modern approach in community theatre. In Belgium we never do that and I loved the way you questioned the processes that leads to community theatre and how you questioned your own role as makers, as directors in this kind of process. It might be a good thing, a sign that community art is growing up. That it is ready to reflect on its own tensions, its own dangers, and its own risks.

161



De Bischop has noticed a similar ambivalence about criticism as Neil Packham displayed:

Some artists believe that we should be be judged by the same principles as regular arts. Others feel that we are different and should be proud to be. They say that we don’t need those critics to come and criticize us and that we ourselves should find new ways to criticize process and re-evaluate the whole thing.

She noted two competing principles operating in Flemish community arts:

We define two principles behind the concept of community arts. One is making art more inclusive, accessible, diverse and thereby democratizing it. The other is from welfare to well-being, which is a more competence-based approach for people with the power and will to change to create and become free spirits. The whole welfare policy in Belgium is geared towards activating people towards work, towards economical standards. It is similar in the UK, I think, and I see that as a real problem. In this view, art is simply another way to work with disadvantaged groups. As artists, you always have to try to get beyond the economic benchmarks. Your partners from the social sector always want you to put marginal groups into quantifiable categories. We are never allowed to talk about people as creative spirits, but only in terms of numbers of therapeutic sessions they have to follow, or amounts of support money they are entitled to. Economic power dominates everything in policy.

De Bischop’s remarks brought the discussion back to a discussion of art and politics, which Matt Jennings neatly summarized with a healthy dose of relativity:

There is this point where community arts is culture, as in people’s everyday lives. I mean this in the sense


162

of traditional communities: ‘this is our language and this is our culture’. At moments of resistance, it is completely spontaneous and grassroots. There are no facilitators or leadership, or virtuosos, or arts policies. It is just people making creative responses to their lives as they live. And sometimes within that it is not so much the narrative; it is the silence that is the power. It is the moment when some moment happens. Then, when a conflict is resolved and a transformation process begins, policy may begin to create an industry and we as artists become the professionals offering our expertise to engage and facilitate and enable people to develop great art out of their narratives. That’s when the demarcation happens and we begin to wonder, ‘Are we artists? Are we social workers? Are we in-fluencing policy or are we enabling grassroots voices and is a narrative being developed and are we doing this to create great art or are we doing this to improve a social political situation?’ Then it becomes all very complex and where is the nuance? Then when the arts funding goes and the industry is gone, we’re back to creating spontaneous art on the barricades. We become part of the rest of the crowd and spend the interven-ing time having a job in a different industry.

Northern IrelandJennings refocused the seminar on another

powerful presentation at ICAF from the previous evening: a screening of the documentary We Carried Your Secrets.21This moving film traces former combatants in the Northern Irish conflict and their children while creating a play on their experiences. At one point, the documentary freezes into a still frame and one of the participants, Chris McAlinden, steps out in front of the screen to perform his solo live on stage. It was an electrifying moment and also the very first time that a piece of Northern Irish community arts was presented to an international audience outside of its own context. ‘It hasn’t even been taken to England and it barely makes it down to Dublin,’ Jennings explained.

21. See DVD chapter ‘The Power of Politics’ for images from this event and further remarks by Matt Jennings and Chris McAlinden.

163



I hope it gets across that the Troubles aren’t entirely over. In fact, in the last year there has been a very marked resurgence of extreme violence. No massacres yet but lots of bombs, including one just last Monday night in my hometown, Derry.

We Carried Your Secrets was an exceptional under-taking in many ways. Its straight, testimonial storytelling style is relatively rare in Northern Irish community drama, as was the large budget available for this three-year-project. Jennings elaborates:

It allowed the engagement of a documentary crew fulltime and counselors. That is unheard of in community drama in Northern Ireland. It had a budget of hundreds of thousands if not millions of Euros. That is unbelievable in community drama in Northern Ireland. The vast majority of projects that I have been involved in as a practitioner or researcher involved 30 hours contact time for a period of maybe six or seven weeks and was delivered under a budget of 2,000 pounds, usually around 1,200 to 1,500 for everything, professional staff fees, costumes, props.

Earlier in this book, Matt Jennings and his colleague David Grant extensively analyze the controversies surrounding the ‘Theatre of Witness’ program of which We Carried Your Secrets was part. In the ICAF seminar he pointed out that:

To some it was a massive piece of propaganda on be-half of the Peace industry including cuddly versions of paramilitary activists and their victims to convince people that we should all just get along with each other and have a good cry about it … [To others, it was] a very brave piece of theatre that had never been done before. Audience responses, especially from ordinary people not involved in community arts or the peace industry, were overwhelmingly positive. Most


164 of the criticism came from professionals within the community arts sector and the peace industry.

Chris McAlinden, who is now completing a Master’s in film at Queen’s University in Belfast, has used the documentary as a toolkit for reconciliation workshops that he sometimes facilitates:

I was in a highly nationalist school called St. Joseph’s and I brought James there, the Loyalist Protestant. Before he came in, one of the girls was saying that she hates Protestants. Through his coming in, his presence and telling his story, she was able to humanize and see. So that’s how storytelling becomes a method of peace building.

The testimonial aspects of We Carried Your Secrets were subtly related to some unsuspected cultural dimensions of Catholicism and Protestantism, explained Jennings:

Last day of the ICAF seminar. Photo: Roy Goderie

165



Testifying your sins and suffering in a public context has more of a tradition among Protestants. In Catholic traditions, if you confess your sins or your suffering, you do that in private in a box to God through the priest, and not to a congregation of people. So, some people felt that the aesthetic of the format itself was more Protestant than Catholic. Yet, other people commented that the content was more Catholic because there were more Catholics than Protestants on that stage. And then the response was, ‘Well, this is Derry and 90% of the population here is Catholic, so it’s hard to get a 70-30 split without misrepresenting.’22Partly this has to do with the fact that Northern Irish community drama has been largely dominated by Catholic groups. Protestants have been notoriously reluctant to engage with this form. Initially, you were required to work with at least 30% from the other community. And then a Protestant working-class person would react: ‘I have to do art AND talk to a Catholic? Come on!’

How Can We Tell Community Art Works? And Do We Need to Know?Many community artists consider evaluations

an unwelcome but unavoidable component of the work. At the same time, Jan Cohen-Cruz pointed out, it is useful to know if you have accomplished what you aimed to do. One of the problems, as day three’s seminar painfully revealed, is that scholars and artists often use different vocabularies and frequently have different ideas of what is of value and worth eVALUating. Quantitative analysts tend towards statistical information that some people find dismissive of person-al meaning and overly abstract, theoretical, and jargonny, designed at too great a remove from the people involved.

22. Much of the money for Northern-Irish community arts came from the Special European Programmes Board for Peace funding (SEUPD). Jennings explained that there have been three periods of peace funding: 1997 to 2002 (Peace I); 2003 to 2008 (Peace II); and 2009 to 2013 (Peace III). ‘Theatre of Witness’ fell under Peace III. Under Peace II, a project would not be valid as a peace process unless you could demonstrate that a 70-30 % mix of Protestants and Catholics were involved. Jennings: ‘You absolutely had to be classified according to one or the other; you couldn’t just be an “other”. Under Peace III things became very restrictive. The work had to be about combatants or victims. It had to directly address issues of the conflict. It had to be about the ‘Troubles’. You also had to have a statutory body as a partner – such as a county council or a university, but there were also bigger budgets.’


166

Many practitioners – let alone community participants – have little tolerance for it. On the other hand, scholars who recog-nize knowledge generated in non-academic settings can be marginalized by both traditional, particularly social science-based evaluators, and community arts participants.23

As an introduction to this controversial topic, Jan Cohen-Cruz took us on a short excursion into anthropology, which is one of her main frames of reference for community-based art:24

I recognize a continuum from work that tends to-wards ritual – when it actually tries to accomplish or overcome something like a rite of passage – and work at the other end of the continuum that might be purely for aesthetic pleasure. A lot of work falls somewhere be-tween these two poles. Clarity of goals, whatever they are, is necessary to assess if you reached them or not.

Artistic goals often have to do in one way or the other with audience but in ritual there is no audi-ence. Richard Schechner writes: ‘there are concentric circles of heat’. If you take a wedding, for exam-ple, the two people getting married and the person conducting that ceremony, so that the wedding will get recognized, are in the hottest point. The next circle is maybe the former boyfriend, the mother who can’t stand that this is who the daughter is marrying and other people who have stakes. And from there it goes out further and further. Aesthetics are still important – the bride’s dress, the flower arrangements – but nevertheless at the service of the efficacy of the cer-emony to mark the union of two people.

Very close to that idea of no audience but perhaps witnesses, is Boal ’s idea of the spect-actor. It is

23. Note from Jan Cohen-Cruz: The organization I directed for five years, ‘Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life’, has been developing ‘integrated assessment’ meant to foreground participants in community projects, and sharing values typical to our field. Visit www.imaginingamerica.org and look under the research tab for more informa-tion about this evolving approach. 24. See Jan Cohen-Cruz 2005. Local Acts: Community-Based Performance in the US. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

167



important that people watching a forum theatre scene feel they could intervene at any moment. Not everybody does, but even so they are there in an active position. In that regard, Boal built on Brecht, who wanted an intellectually active spectator who would be thinking: ‘Does it have to be like this? What about those contradictions?’ Boal then said, ‘Why should we stop with being intellectually active? Why not have a physically active spectator who could step right in and enact an alternative?’ Boal had very specific goals which could indeed be evaluated.

Boal also did conventional theatre. Sometimes he was perfectly happy for spectators to sit in the dark and have their own reflections. In such cases evaluation may focus more on the product. This relates to Paolo Freire’s notion of ‘praxis’: we do something and then we reflect on it. The moment of being an audience is that sweet sensation of just being allowed to reflect. Depending on the nature of the production, there can sometimes be nothing worse than being asked to participate. My own biggest horror story was when I went to a play, which took place during the period that Hitler was coming to power. The makers had set it up like a cabaret and then they turned very bright lights on the audience and said, ‘if you’re a Jew stand up!’ I am a Jew so I was between a rock and a hard place. I didn’t expect this, but I found it strangely traumatizing that I had to stand up in a bright light. But if I didn’t, I felt I would be denying my people. It was a terrible position to be in. I think you have to be very careful about what you ask an audience to do and why. It’s important for audiences to understand the expectations of the art makers and for each stakeholder to have a say in a project’s evaluation.

In a dinner conversation with Paloma Madrid and her colleagues from Sweden the third night, Boal came up in the context of politics and community


168

arts. One of the reasons Boal created Theatre of the Oppressed was precisely because he had the incentive to bring theatre to people who wanted to change their political situation. He didn’t want to waste his time with people who wanted things to stay the same. On the other hand, there are a lot of people who are betwixt and between. Scott Rankin pointed out that when he brings a policy component in alongside the arts process, he assumes that many people working in government are very well meaning. They’re not developing certain policies because they’re evil or want to keep people down; they just don’t know any better. They don’t realize the ramifications of there being no national policy for Aboriginal language and culture, for example.

So, we can also regard communities in terms of circles of heat, from people in the center who feel the ramifications of policy decisions the most, to people who feel it the least.

One definition of politics has to do with arrangements of power. There is always politics in that sense. A lot of community arts is about holding on to and reinforcing traditions, and things as they are, sometimes over- simplistically – ‘Look at us singing and dancing, and aren’t we happy. See: everyone participates in our society’. In other situations, the reiteration of tradition is to strengthen people holding on to some-thing meaningful to them, which perhaps those in the government are trying to marginalize. In any case, there is a potential role for community arts regarding what social arrangement is being reinforced, whether it is subtle or overt.

Relatedly, the subject of potential allies is evident in the Northern Irish project we discussed yesterday. It was about wanting to have a conversation with people with a different point of view and a sense that

169



everyone needs to go through some kind of healing and get beyond denial, if the Troubles will ever totally be over. That is about a kind of politics focused on bringing all the pieces together. It doesn’t mean that you feel fine about what happened. You still may disagree with certain positions people took. But ultimately you must find a way to come together and move forward.

According to Jan Cohen-Cruz, artists also need to find out what their own values are, to find out what and who they care about and how to address certain issues in a community. She referred to the work of Dudley Cocke at Appalshop in the Appalachian Mountains to illustrate this point:

He urges artists to neither get too far in front of or too far behind the community with which they are working. When artists think of themselves as equal participants, they bring their own desires into a pro-cess as well. There are things you want to see, things you want to push further about. You’re not to leave yourself out. On the other hand, we’re well aware that the artist possesses a certain power that is not equal to everyone else’s. So it’s also about not being in denial about that. Yet, as someone in the outer circle of our gathering pointed out: the artist shouldn’t hold back on their own power and resources. After all, that’s why they were invited. Not imposing it, but building on what you’re given.

Sikko Cleveringa, coordinator of the Dutch Community Arts Lab-XL, also underscored this need. He wants participants, artists and commissioners to make a bigger effort to think about why they find this work so important:

What does art mean to you and how do you think it can affect your environment? Our research group


170

is trying to figure out how they can engage in a dialogue with the participants about what their motives are and what they expect from the project, before, during and afterwards. The reason why we do this is that we believe that other professionals investing in these kinds of projects will be most easily convinced when they become aware what it means to the participants, who say so in their own words. We also believe that it enhances empowerment when participants themselves are invited to reflect on what’s happening. Through that process they become possibly even more aware of their experience and appreciate it more as well.

Neil Beddow (acta, Bristol, UK) expressed dis-satisfaction with baseline assessment that is intended to determine what participants are like when they join a project and to measure their distance travelled.

I’ve come to the belief that there is actually no point in asking for evaluation until people are about half-way through, because then you can ask them: ‘How far do you think you have come? Have you no-ticed any changes? What are the things you have enjoyed? What are the changes in the way you work or the way you live?’ We’re doing a family learning project right now: moms and dads work-ing with their children through the arts after school, playing together and making creative things. One of the things we wanted to measure was how much people were starting to use these games, techniques, and improvisations in their homes. We got an evaluator in who wandered around and chatted to people. She didn’t have a formal list and sat down with them and said: ‘These are the questions and you have to answer’. They picked points out of the conversations. But I think that baseline assessment before or at the beginning of a project is a rubbish time to evaluate. It is actually a bad thing to do.

171



Because you’re trying to establish a relationship with people saying, ‘Look, we’re trying to do this thing and it’s going to be really fun, but we need your help’. It’s that kind of contract. And then to say at that point, ‘Sit down and tell me how confident you are, how crap your life is, and how much do you want it to change?’ You can’t do that, because the minute you do that, they’re out the door.

Luc Opdebeeck, a Rotterdam-based Theatre of the Oppressed practioner, explained that part of the problem lies in front-loading community arts projects with unrealistic social outcomes.

If projects we do have targets like x percent of the group needs to have found jobs by the end of the project, we get in trouble. Most of the participants we work with are not ready for work. Society wants them to, but they have an addiction or a psychological issue they need help with. Society pushes them and us as community artists to return these people to the job market, so that they can become useful again.

This doesn’t mean that he regards his work as in-effective, however:

If we work with the disabled on legislative theatre and bring it back to the public and then extract from that 14 or 20 things that have to be changed urgently for this community, we bring that back to the management of that particular organization. If they are willing to listen, which sometimes they are, we manage to change the situation for the whole community.

And sometimes neatly quantifiable outcomes are not even expected, as dancer Liz Lerman found out to her surprise. Jan Cohen-Cruz explained that Lerman had been


172 invited to do a dance project with kids thrown out of every school they had ever enrolled in:

Liz was meant to do just a project that would engage them. It was enormously successful in that re-gard. Every kid was dancing on the tables, down the library, in the corridor, in the lunchroom, and they animated that school like nothing before. In the end when Liz was leaving she felt bad, but the school director said, ‘Don’t be sorry. It’s wonderful that you’re leaving, because these young people never get an experience with a beginning, middle and an end. Things always cut off before they’re done: they get thrown into this school, are abandoned by their families. So for them to go through a beginning, middle and an end and for it to be good is such a great experience for them’. So, in that project not having sustainability was important. Obviously you can then measure how engaged they are in school afterwards.

Tina Glover, Jan Reynolds, Jan Cohen-Cruz, Luc Opdebeeck and Connie Sedumedi listen to Maria van Bakelen. Photo: Roy Goderie

173



Debajehmujig: Art From Within the Community25

During the preceding discussion about evaluation and impact, Joe Osawabine had become increasingly fidgety. When Jan Cohen-Cruz asked him for a reaction, Ron Berti, Joe’s companion, jumped in with a passionate statement:

I feel the speed of this room is really oppressive. It doesn’t allow for a certain kind of conversation that I think we need also to have happen. One of our elders, a traditional storyteller, said, after we had invited her to a similar conference: ‘I just want to remind everyone to be very careful that in your eagerness to help and to do things, and to understand your process, that you’re not creating so many fences and walls through definitions and all that, that you’re not allowing that flame, that fire, that thing at the center, which is creative energy. That is the center. If you’re flaming that you don’t know where it’s going to go. But if you’re flaming it, then you’re successful ’.

What if you don’t identify as being separate from that community you’re talking about? So there isn’t this ‘us and them’ thing from the very beginning. So that you’re not trying to bring something to, but allow something to come out. Remove everything, every definition, every box, every line and just let creative energy be the starting place and see how things happen and where things go.

As a sobering reminder to all of us in the room who live in a world requiring assessments and measurements, Joe Osawabine then quietly stated:

We don’t talk about our work in the way you have been doing here. We’d like to keep it a lot more simple. We don’t sit around and have these kinds of conversa-tions. We don’t really define ourselves as community artists or professionals. We consider ourselves as

25. See DVD chapter ‘The Power of Debajehmujig’ for images of the Global Savages and further statements by members of this company. In the chapter following this one, Ron Berti and Joe Osawabine elaborate on their special position vis-à-vis the Canadian educational system and the arts sector.


174

storytellers. So, as Ron was saying, if we go into a community and no one has killed himself by the end of the week, then we have achieved our goal in that sense. It’s really hard to sit and listen to these types of conversations, for me anyway, particularly on a Saturday morning. When we work in a community, we measure our success if a child can stand up in front of a room and can speak his name at the end of it. Then we have been successful in that situation.26

We tried to fit in to mainstream models of society for quite a few years but it just never worked. We finally realized we were trying to fit into a frame we could never ever fit into. So we literally turned our chairs around. We were looking to southern Ontario, when that was not our context. We were trying to go to Toronto to get on the big stages. That’s when we turned around and said, ‘No, this is our community here, these are the people we’re talking to, these are the people that understand us, these are the people that we can make the difference with’. That’s exactly what we did. From then on we focused our attention on the communities that were there right around us.

Global Savages constitutes a relatively new approach for Debajehmujig. Rather than a conventional performance piece, it is storytelling. In hindsight, the group would have preferred to perform much more informally at our festival, in the round, outside, around a campfire – rather than on a big stage with lights and in a traditional theatre auditorium. Ron Berti explained:

What struck me last night at about 3 AM was that the show changed from community art to what some people call ‘professional ’ entirely by the context in which it was performed. The first time, we performed it in Halifax as a vehicle to set up an understanding amongst people there of a certain worldview that would inform a conference. The second time, a few

26. The suicide rate among First Nations youth is five to six times higher than non- Aboriginal youth in Canada (Source, Health Canada: www.hc-sc.gc.ca/fniah-spnia/pubs/promotion/_suicide/prev_youth-jeunes/index-eng.php#s2121. Consulted on 21 June 2021.)

175



months ago, we spent days on the streets with these guys as Global Savages in downtown Vancouver in the rough part of town interacting one-on-one with Aboriginal people from the West coast for days. We had them then follow the Global Savages around town and have them bring their friends along. Finally, we walked with them into a theatre, where they had never even gone before, where they sat down for free to watch it.

One of the first things we knew we were going to do with this project here was sing ‘The Humble Song’ in Dutch, which really has got nothing to do with the show ultimately. We were just trying to reach out to this community of Dutch people. If you spend more time in a place, you are naturally going to integrate that experience into the piece. So, here in Rotterdam we would also have liked to be out on the streets. We would have hoped people would notice, would want to stop and talk and engage, and walk away and go: ‘I want to check out where those guys are.’ In that way you’re slowly, slowly building the relationship. That’s the number one thing: the relationship. If there is no relationship, there is nothing. So we are very conscious of that. How do we build the relationship? Sing in their language, even if we don’t speak it. One on one, face to face.

Joe Osawabine explained that Global Savages is one of the most important projects they have ever done as a company and that he envisioned it growing in the years to come:

We want to take the time to gather the stories right now from the elders of the communities around the Great Lakes. The elders are getting older and the stories are going to pass on with them. If we don’t go actively into the communities to gather the stories, they are going to die out with the elders when they


176

go. So, we are going to spend a few years travelling around the Great Lakes as the Global Savages, gathering stories that then become part of the stories that we can tell inthe show, depending on what context we’re in. All along we’re going to create a ‘wampum belt’ that tells the story of the journey of the whole project. The wampum belt basically is a form that has been created traditionally to keep track of history. So it will be the history of the project over the next six years, or ten years, who knows.27

The Language Gap between Artist and ResearcherKerrie Schaefer, an Australian scholar working at

the University of Exeter, England, effectively summarized the enormous diversity and breadth of the community arts field. It ranges from very small, virtually invisible grassroots projects like workshops delivered in remote Aboriginal communities in Northern Ontario to projects like Big hART’s, which literally aim to knock on national policy doors in the country’s capital:

Sometimes it worries me in Big hART’s work in how they want to mainstream. There is a risk of appropriating community stories. Maryrose Casey has written about Ngapartj Ngapartji in terms of appropriation.28I don’t actually agree with her with regards to that piece, but there are other community shows that I have seen in which the community that it is about has been completely misrepresented’.

The wide range of practices and differences of opinion amongst practitioners also extends into the academic world, where applied arts scholars and cultural theorists often talk at cross-purposes with each other as well as with social scientists. Jan Reynolds of EMPAF echoed Joe Osawabine’s frustration about the language scholars employ to talk about her work:

27. In June 2012, the Global Savages returned to the Netherlands to gather stories of inhabitants of the northern tidal flat island of Terschelling, which they incorporated in ten shows they performed as part of the Oerol Festival. 28. Casey, M., 2009. ‘Ngapartji Ngapartji: Telling Aboriginal Australian Stories’, in Negson, C. and Forsyth, A., eds. Get Real: Documentary Theatre Past and Present, Hampshire: Palgrave MacMillan, 122-139.

177



I find that language very hard to engage with and I have worked in community arts for the last 30 years. Many of the people we work with quite rightly wouldn’t be able to engage in discussing this. They are not going to be able to feed back to you. They are going to be uncomfortable about being here. Therefore, if we really want to hear from people – and it might be us; we could take part in a community arts project right this minute – we must allow the voice to be at a level that everybody can engage with. We’re trying so hard to up the level of community arts to make it valuable by pitching it at an academic level, without under-standing that the real voice is somewhere else. We’re going to have a conflict unless we resolve that.

Sikko Cleveringa, who perhaps reluctantly represented the social scientist’s approach, appreciated Reynolds’ position, but pointed out that for this work to happen, for that creative flame to be released, there needs to be a supportive context:

It is important for the future of community arts to be able to bring these two worlds together, because both are true. I can imagine that an organization like Big hART has succeeded in doing that. They do whatever it takes to create that open space so the spark can emerge. But they also know that if they want to make a difference, they need to create the right con-ditions and to communicate with funders and with governments and with all kinds of stakeholders. The truth of the matter is that, even though community arts is big and recognized, we still don’t succeed in explaining very well to the rest of the world what we are doing. I think that part of the solution lies in finding ways to get the participants to talk, so it’s no longer researchers asking the questions and translating the answers for the others, but empowered people telling their stories about why this work is so important to them, in their own words.


178

That is exactly why Elly Goodman of the Citizens Theatre prefers to work with documentary film makers:

They get to the loneliest people, those who don’t have a voice and certainly would find it difficult to articulate in written form so beautifully and sensibly about the entire process that they had gone through. Also in a more recent, shorter piece in a prison we had documentary makers in where, again, guys who were uncomfortable writing could now express this really well. We put these documentaries on our website with people’s permission or we give out the DVD to people who want to hear a more in-depth response in which people can talk really freely.

The proof is when people continue to come back. In our community company, people continue to vote with their feet. They come to our theatre because it speaks to them and they want to be part of it, part of their group, and of their own community. But when we parachute in to a context like a homeless unit or a prison and that project ends, where then do you leave them? People told us that we would never get these hard-ened offenders to participate and yet we finished the job and guys who have now been released from prison come to our acting workshops and get involved in our plays. We are very pleased about that. But we are still learning about how you evaluate, how you track people, especially those who get lost in society upon release.

Rosalba Rolón provided another explanation for the gap between researchers and artists. It has to do with academic language and the pressure to publish or perish, which make scholars sometimes lose touch with the object of their investigation:29

29. Note from Eugene van Erven: For authors like Kerrie Schaefer, Matt Jennings, David Grant, Jan Cohen-Cruz and myself, who also work at universities, contributing to this ICAF collection may have less value in the eyes of their academic colleagues than publishing in a recognized scientific journal or in a book published by a recognized publishing house. Yet, all of us consider it important that knowledge about community arts based on first-hand experience enters the academic discourse – and that quality writing reaches practitioners.

179



Some evaluators and researchers have their own agendas or their own goals for their own careers. We should always ask them: ‘What is going to happen with this research and where is it going to be published?’ Publishing is not necessarily bad, mind you, but it is not what we need most either. What we need is a partner, particularly when that person gets so close to an intimate process. For that reason, it has to be the right partner. It’s not about establishing a mutual admiration society where a researcher goes: ‘Wow, Pregones is so wonderful.’ It’s about finding a really thorough critical perspective that we can’t do on our own. We don’t have time to write; we’re busy enough writing a play. So it’s great having that extra brain thinking about things and processing and articulating with us as a partner. The end result could be really confrontational, like: ‘is that what we are doing?’ That is a live relationship. At Pregones we have been very slowly building a circle of scholars, around us that we can call and ask, ‘Is this making sense in the context of the world?’

Neil Beddow also recognized the potential benefit of research, although it is not and never will be his favorite pastime:

I am in community theatre because I want to make theatre, but also because I want to make positive change in some way. I want to use theatre as a vehicle for that. If I can’t measure that change, if I can’t begin a project with a set of aims and objec-tives and then measure whether I have hit them or not, how will I know whether I’m succeeding? So I think it is something that we all do in one way or another internally. Trying to prove it externally is another matter. Although I get as frustrated as every-one else who is predominantly a maker in having to tick boxes and having to prove the monetary value of what you do, we’re living in a world where that is


180

increasingly important. Structures exist which aren’t that difficult for us to take on. We recently engaged in a longitudinal study of people who had been involved in our projects. We were trying to prove a case to get the project refunded. But it required us to get back in touch with people who had been involved in the project ten years ago, tracking them down, finding out where they were and then talking to them about the impact of the work on their lives. What we found through that is how much they valued the experience they had had and what a huge impact it had had on their lives and how much they enjoyed being asked to comment.

At the end of the seminar, Scott Rankin mentioned the story of an Aboriginal elder that placed the entire debate about evaluations, statistics, community arts, power, politics, and residual effects of participation in the arts – even when measured after many years – in a different light. He told about Trevor Jamieson and the Big hART crew traveling back with Ngapartj Ngapartji to perform it in a river bed near the town of Ernabella, where the project had originated. In the ABC documentary about this return home, Trevor is seen talking to a clan elder, an old man who is dying. The elder tells Trevor that many of the things he does in Ngapartji Ngapartji are against cultural traditions, but despite all this he encourages him to keep going. He recognizes that this work is part of a much bigger dynamic that is impossible to imagine and that will continue long after he is gone. Like the 18,000-year-old stories of Debajehmujig, Scott Rankin thought the elder seemed to be saying, we community artists working in the first half of the twenty-first century shouldn’t be so arrogant as to think that we can fix the world once and for all in our own lifetime.

181

Debajehm

ujig – Storytellers / Ron Berti w

ith Joe Osaw

abine

On day three of ICAF I had an opportunity to attend the discussions being guided by Jan Cohen-Cruz. My colleague Joe

Osawabine was one of the inner-circle of conversants, and I was eager to hear what people had to share. Facilitator Jan Cohen-Cruz was standing in the centre, and she promptly began laying the foundation for the day’s discussion. To be honest, I could not hear what she was saying at the beginning because the voices in my head were louder. I was entirely distracted by the set-up, which I was trying to interpret. If you are in the dark, you are a spectator not a participant. The circle is open, but this is not an indication or invitation to participate. There is a resemblance to a talking circle, except that there is a person in the centre, so it is not meant to be a talking circle, which would mean all voices are equal. STOP TRYING TO ATTRIBUTE MEANING TO THE FORMAT AND LISTEN TO THE SPEAKER! You weren’t here during the first two sessions where everything was likely explained. Pay attention!

Debajehmujig – Storytellers: COMMUNITY BASED PRACTICE FROM THE INSIDE LOOKING OUT

Ron Berti with Joe Osawabine


182

As the minutes passed I was able to start listening, but this only changed the nature of my distraction. I was listening for references that reflected our experience, or our values, or our process – some kind of connection. I was listening with Joe’s ears, as he was seated in the light and was

Josh Peltier and Jessica Wilde-Peltier sing The Humble Song. Photo: Roy Goderie

183

Debajehm


ith Joe Osaw

abine

expected to participate. I could not find an access point to the discussion. The conviction and speed with which the content was presented made it seem ipso facto. I felt an unspoken assumption that we understood, that we agreed with certain concepts or ideas. I realized that I did not understand where the

discussion was coming from or where it was headed. I started to think we were ‘out of our league’, but a second voice said, ‘how can you be – this is what you have dedicated your life and career to. This is what you do’. I could see in Joe’s body language and the look in his eye that a certain fear was creeping in. He became restless. I became restless. And then suddenly, a question was formulated and directed at Joe.

I have worked with Joe for 20 years. I know Joe. I could not tolerate the idea that he would try and respond out of courtesy, out of expectation. I had a visceral response, and I spoke out, even though I knew it was not my place to do so. My instinct told me to try and find the words of the Elders to guide me through. I remembered Esther Osche telling us about the fire at the centre of creative energy.30

And the rest is a blur.

ICAF was our first International Community Arts Conference. At national and provincial conferences in Canada, there has always been at least a modicum of understanding that we represent a different world view and different values. I was unaware that I too had made an assumption, that this understanding was more broadly held. Now that we know it is not, we would like to try and explain it.

30 OSCHE, Esther Jacko: Traditional Anishnaabe Storyteller from the Whitefish River First Nation and author of the first full-length play in the Ojibway language – Lupi-the Great White Wolf, produced by Debajehmujig Theatre Group in 1991.


184

Debajehmujig – Storytellers is unique. It is one of the longest running nationally recognized Aboriginal arts organizations in Canada, founded in 1984 by Shirley Cheechoo. Most significantly, is the rural location on an Indian Reserve, on an Island in the Great Lakes – Manitoulin Island – hence the descriptor in our company mandate ‘professional community based’.

More than just a geographic distinction, the Wikwemikong Unceded Indian Reserve is the home community of the artistic leaders of the organization – Joe Osawabine and Bruce Naokwegijig, who have been with the company for more than 20 years. In fact, most of the 13 full-time staff and 8 board members are registered band members of Wikwemikong. This is very significant. There are very few other Canadian theatre organizations – native or non-native – whose leadership is actually from the community in which they are located, and even fewer, if any, whose staff and board have been consistent for several decades.

Manitoulin Island is the largest freshwater Island in the world – more than 150 km long. However, the total population is little more than 12,000. This is spread out over a dozen communities, about half native, half non-native and while Wikwemikong is the largest by population, it has fewer than 4,000 full-time residents. The hamlet of Manitowaning – home of the Debajehmujig Creation Centre – has a population of less than 500. Our closest theatre colleagues are a 2.5 hour drive away, in the urban north city of Sudbury. There are no other established Canadian arts organizations located in such a small, rural, isolated location.

For more than 15 years, the company has been serving the remote communities of Northern Ontario from our home base on Manitoulin Island. It is an immense region spanning 802,000 square kilometers, making up 87% of the land mass of the province, but with only 6% of the population. There are approximately 750,000 people dispersed across the region, 100,000 are Aboriginal.

185

Debajehm


ith Joe Osaw

abine

Many of the artists in the organization began at Debajehmujig as youth, around the age of 12. By the time they were 18, they had received sufficient training and traditional teachings, and gained enough confidence and skills, to be able to train other Aboriginal youth through an initiative called The Best Medicine Troupe – Youth Training Youth (BMT). Designed and operated by Outreach and Education Director Joahnna Berti, this outreach based vehicle for delivering training to rural, isolated and remote communities has a primary objective – to release the voice of the youth by meeting them at their model of the world.

The BMT program brought our artists into constant contact with other Aboriginal communities, both on reserves and in the urban north cities – where most youth had to go to attend mainstream secondary schools. They are flown in from their remote home communities which are not large enough to have their own schools, and billeted in homes. Adjusting to the urban, mainstream culture as a 13-year-old Aboriginal youth from ‘the bush’ without the daily support of their families is a challenge for even the brightest, and few can adapt or cope.

For a decade the BMT travelled from community to community, providing training residencies and creating custom shows based on themes suggested by and relevant to the communities themselves. This was done alongside the youth of the communities they were in – literally – they shared the stage or performance space with them. This was not contract work on an occasional basis. Unlike other arts organization, Debajehmujig artists have been employed full-time, 12 months of the year, since 1996.

We use the term ‘Arts Animators’ to describe our artists – a term that defines the multi-skilled nature of the artist and their ability to ‘animate’ or ‘put into motion’ a group of people or community through artistic engagement. As the Arts Animators continued their outreach work through the BMT, they developed their individual skills


186

and a collective creation process – the 4 Directions Creation Process – which supported them in creating original works from a cultural and socially specific point of view.31 When performing the shows, it was clear that these storytellers had an intimate and personal understanding of what they were talking about – they too were from an Indian Reserve in Northern Ontario, and they shared a similar reality with similar challenges. This ‘first hand knowing’ of the material and the unique ecology of the reserves existed across a broad spectrum of work – stories about stereotyping, about racism, about abuse, about addictions, about diabetes, – the list is long. The work required extensive research into each topic – always from the point of view of the relevance to Aboriginal people, and in a manner or form that spoke uniquely to young Aboriginal people. This work became a significant educational opportunity for the Arts Animators.

Perhaps this begins to explain why we do not experience an ‘us’ and ‘them’ when we work in communities. We are them, they are us. The community arts practitioner or Arts Animator, and the community based participant, occupy different places in the circle, but they are all in the same circle.

Every tour was accompanied by workshops and/or training residencies that not only expanded on the content or subject matter, it also provided an opportunity to create relationships. And every community – most with less than 500 residents – was visited repeatedly. It is important to return. Returning means you continue to care and the relationship deepens.

Reserve communities of Northern Ontario are not only very small, they are also very isolated from one another. In most cases they can only be accessed by air, or during freeze

31. The Four Directions Creation Process (4D) is a culturally and socially specific process developed by Debajehmujig Theatre Group from 1996-2000. Wholistic in nature, it recognizes that the artist is the creation – the performance is the celebration. The process recognizes that as humans we create with our entire being, our physical, emotional, mental and spiritual selves, and as such, the process accepts and supports all aspects of the artist in these areas. 4D is adapted to the skills and intuitions of artists who have been strongly influenced by an oral tradition. It is a process that nurtures honesty more than accuracy, and sharing more than starring. It consciously uses personal resources: physical like a skill, emotional like a memory, spiritual like a transformative experience, or intellectual like an object, as key to personal and group creation.

187

Debajehm


ith Joe Osaw

abine

up, by winter roads across the ice. They generally have little contact between them, and in the past this isolation has often meant that they do not realize that their personal struggles – with youth suicide, with addictions, with abuse – are shared by many others. The Best Medicine Troupe was one vehicle that helped bring the awareness of a shared reality to their consciousness, and alleviated some of the shame the communities experienced for not being able to look after their own members.

Few Canadians realize that Aboriginal people have an entirely different experience in the world. Even something as simple as travel, is a different experience. When Aboriginal people plan a trip of any distance, they link together Aboriginal communities along their route. This is partly due to the fact that a ‘Status Indian’ under the Indian Act, with a valid membership to a reserve, has access to a ‘gas card’ allowing them to purchase fuel without paying all of the taxes that other Canadians pay. In order to do this, they must use gas stations on reserves. Non-Aboriginal Canadians for the most part, do not visit the reserves, and therefore travel a different route. A second significant reason for this manner of trip planning is to maintain contact with their relations, who they may only see during the summer as people travel the pow-wow circuit across the continent. As native and non-native, we move differently in our country. A separate reality, and a third solitude.32

Similar to 45% of reserve based youth, the artistic leadership at our company did not complete secondary school, and have no post-secondary education. While formal education is highly regarded, the reality is that for a variety of reasons mainstream institutionalized education has been an environment of frustration and limitation. The frustra-tion is compounded by the fact that Aboriginal people, their history, and life ways are not reflected in the curriculum – it is not until Grade 3 or the age of 8 that students are even introduced to the existence of Aboriginal Canadians. Text book Canadian history begins with the arrival of the

32. A reference to the 1945 novel Two Solitudes by Hugh MacLennan, describing the relationship between English speaking and French speaking Canadians.


188

Europeans, and their discovery of the land and the ‘savages’ that inhabited it.

The more rural and isolated you go, the more extreme this disconnect to formal education becomes. In the far north, youth are taken out of school by parents and grand-parents when it is time for the goose hunt, or the moose hunt, or to set the trap lines. With extreme unemployment and no cash economy, survival does not depend on a graduation diploma, but rather, on being able to obtain and prepare wild food and create shelters.

As you move farther south and enter the urban communities, the statistics change, as does the reality of daily life. In these communities, one must follow the value system of the mainstream in order to succeed or thrive in the main-stream. Debajehmujig is located in between the two, and most people now choose formal education, particularly with the increasing number of Aboriginal run secondary schools. However, it is important to realize that there are still many careers, particularly those regarding cultural practices, which one cannot study at a college or university. If this is the career path you have chosen or been selected for, then an alternative education is required.

Artistic Director Joe Osawabine explains it this way:

I would like to share an anecdotal story from my good friend and cultural teacher Eddie King. It goes like this: There was a young man who went to university and after six years of study he received his MCB – Master of Canoe Building degree. Now throughout his studies he learned of all the theories that are in-volved in building a canoe. However, he only built one real canoe, completing it just before graduation. Unfortunately the canoe didn’t fare too well and soon was water logged and sunk. But because he did complete the canoe, and wrote a brilliant paper about canoe making, he still received his MCB.

189

Debajehm


ith Joe Osaw

abine

There was this other young man around the same age as the first one. This young lad did not have an MCB. However he had been building canoes since he was ten, and prior to that he would sit and simply watch his father building canoes. The young man could look at a birch tree and before even cutting it down, he could tell you exactly the size of canoe you would be able to produce, and precisely how much spruce gum you would need for sealing the seams. This young man has built maybe 15 canoes so far in his lifetime and not one of them has sunk.Now if you need a canoe, whose canoe do you want?

I share this story because I am the young man who has sat and watched for many years before I took the stage at the age of 12. My first performance was in the Ojibway Language ‘Lupi – The Great White Wolf ’. This was back in 1991 and I have been in-volved in theatre ever since. I am now 33 years old and the current Artistic Director of Debajehmujig – Storytellers. This is not to say that formal education is not important because I believe it is, but there are other ways of learning and doing things. Every-thing I know now as an artist – a storyteller – I have learned as a result of listening, modeling, practice and animation rather than through the written word. When you are given a story from an Elder or cultural teacher, you cannot tell the story to others until your teacher is convinced that you understand the story well enough to make it your own and to tell it honourably. You must repeat the story back to your teachers until they tell you it is yours. This may take a few hours, a few days, or a few years, depending on the story. And some stories can take two weeks to tell.

And in the words of traditional singer Nicole O’Bomsawin:

Observing, listening, remembering, and transmitting are the foundations of Aboriginal education.


190

The transmission of Aboriginal knowledge has long been a specific challenge for the mainstream, perhaps most significantly in the attempts to ‘civilize’ and ‘Christianize’ native people. Jacqueline Shea Murphy articulates this well in reference to dance:

Dance practices and gatherings threatened assimi-lation policies based on classroom education and literacy, as they affirmed the importance of history told not in writing or even in words, but rather bodily. Praying through bodily movement and ritual practice rather than through sitting, reading and believing threatened colonizers’ notions of how spirituality is manifested.33

Percentage wise, there are more Aboriginal Canadians living off-reserve and in urban centres than on reserve. Urban based Aboriginal arts organizations are staffed by artists and administrators with a broad base of both formal, mainstream education and traditional cultural teachings and knowledge. It is our perception, however, that there remains a substantial difference in the practice of on reserve artists, as they live, work, and socialize in a completely integrated Aboriginal environment. If we may defer to the words of Gerald Taiaiake Alfred:

...what makes an individual ‘indigenous’ is his or her situation within a community. In fact, it is impos-sible to understand an indigenous reality by focusing on individuals or discrete aspects of culture outside of a community context. However knowledgeable and rooted one may be, one cannot be truly indigenous without the support, inspiration, reprobation, and stress of a community as facts of life.34

33. SHEA MURPHY, Jacqueline: Associate Professor and Chair of Dance at the University of California, Riverside. She is author of Dancing Bodies Living Histories: New Writings about Dance and Culture. Eds. Anne Flynn and Lisa Doolittle, Banff Centre Press, 2000. 34. ALFRED, Gerald Taiaiake: Author, educator and activist, born in Tiohtiá:ke (Montreal) in 1964. Alfred is an internationally recognized Kanien’kehaka intellectual, political advisor and is currently a professor at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada.

191

Debajehm


ith Joe Osaw

abine

This ‘difference’ is further reflected in the following statement by Taiaiake Alfred:

Native American community life today is framed by two value systems that are fundamentally opposed. One, still rooted in traditional teachings, structures social and cultural relationships; the other, imposed by the colonial state, structures politics. This disunity is the fundamen-tal cause of factionalism in Native communities, and it contributes greatly to the alienation that plagues them.

At the ICAF gathering during the morning sessions, Joe Osawabine alluded to this when he described the company’s decision to turn our chairs around and stop measuring ourselves by urban mainstream values, and instead focus on the rural reserve communities around us in the north. At some point, an artist or an organization must make a decision which value system they are going to embed themselves in. If they choose the reserve based community values and are therefore compelled to follow the traditional teachings, as is the case with Debajehmujig, then they are going to require an additional tool or vehicle in order to advance. They will require a conduit, or translator, or bridge in order to facilitate communication and interpretation between these two worlds.

For twenty years now, this has been my role as well as the role of Joahnna Berti, and we have been given the name ‘bridge builders’ by one of our company cultural advisors. We have earned the respect of both funder and Elder, and we are permitted to speak on behalf of the company and the community when the situation advises that we do so. We bring the resource of having been educated in the mainstream about the mainstream, and then educated in the community by and about the community. What we have learned, is that there are clearly two different world views operating in one country, and that it is our responsibility to make certain that this is always the underlying premise upon which any cross-cultural relationship or partnership is built.


192

The following remarks by Anne Poonwassie quoting Willie Ermine can help articulate this challenge:

World-views emerge from the totality of peoples’ social, political, economic, cultural and spiritual perceptions and beliefs. Ermine (1995) defines Aboriginal and Western world views as “diametric trajectories in the realm of knowledge”. He describes Aboriginal world-views as founded on a search for meaning from a metaphysical, implicit, subjective journey for knowledge based on the premises of ‘skills that promote personal and social transformation; a vision of social change that leads to harmony with, rather than control over, the environment; and the attribution of a spiritual dimension to the envi-ronment’. He contrasts it with the Western world-view of the physical, explicit, scientific and objective journey for knowledge.” 35

35. POONWASSIE, Anne: Faculty member of Adult Education at the University of Manitoba, Canada, specializing in Aboriginal Focusing-Oriented Therapy for Complex Trauma. She is co-author of An Aboriginal Worldview of Helping: Empowering Approaches. Canadian Journal of Counselling 35, 2001. ERMINE, Willie: MEd, BEd (Cree), Faculty member of the First Nations University of Canada with an appointment to the Indigenous Peoples’ Health Research Centre. He has published numerous academic articles on epistemology, philosophies of cross-cultural research, global climate change and the nature of Indigenous metaphysics.

Debajehmujig - Storytellers at ICAF. Photo: Roy Goderie

193

Debajehm


ith Joe Osaw

abine

In very real terms, we have witnessed this ‘differ-ence of values’ in artists from our own community. When they go to the ‘big cities’ they are drawn into a value system that is hierarchical – the goal is to be recognized, to be awarded or applauded, to have a more prominent billing – ultimately, to be selected as standing out from the others on a subjective account of excellence. When the same artist returns to the community, (which many do when there is little work, when they are frustrated, when they have wandered off their path, etc.) they are expected to relinquish the mainstream values and adopt the values of the community, which are to become equal with, to become one with, to invest in their relation-ships with each other and their integration in the commu-nity as the ultimate goal. This creates an internal conflict that roosts in the heart and soul of the individual artist.

From the community perspective, the ultimate goal is not to rise above the others but to raise up everyone, and we have seen this successfully accomplished. If you look at the billboards at the entrance to the reserve, you can see clearly who, in the eyes of the community, have successfully done this. They are artists who do not relinquish their ties to the community on their journey up the ladder of success, but rather, become ambassadors of the community raising the profile and esteem of all.

This understanding of community based traditional values extends far beyond how personal achievement is acknowledged or accepted. For example, if you want to receive knowledge or advice from an Elder, it is important to know that asking a direct question is inappropriate and disrespectful. This is also true of criticism of another community member or their efforts.

One of the legacies of the unfulfilled promises of treaties made between the government and Aboriginal people is a mistrust of the written word. Even today and in our own sector of the arts, we can experience words as an expression of power. An example is the use and understanding of the word


194

‘professional’. While it is difficult to define definitively, it can easily be used to disqualify or exclude. At the same time, it is impossible to avoid.

More than a decade ago, we held a workshop to specifically examine the meaning and relevance of this word. The outcome was recognition that for our artists, the word had pejorative undertones. It has been used as a tool against us, rather than something that empowers us. We could do nothing about its use in the mainstream, but within our organization, we explored the idea of coming up with an alternative word that would function in our circles as something closer to the original intent. We arrived at the word ‘honourable’. Are you conducting yourself ‘honourably’? Do you ‘honour’ the creation space as sacred? Are you ‘honouring’ the intent of the story by the manner in which you are sharing it?

The opposite of literacy is orality – the transmission of knowledge or ideas through the spoken word. One of the foundations of the oral storytelling tradition is ‘to only speak the truth’. In order to do this, we must focus on what we know to be true, through our personal life experience. Our greatest resources are within us. With our project The Global Savages, we have returned to the Aboriginal storytelling tradition. What we learned in Rotterdam, is that the true power of traditional storytelling exists in the storytellers ability to decide exactly when, where, and how the story will be told, in response to the storytellers perception of what the listener would benefit from hearing at that particular time and place. Without the ability to respond to the specific environment in which it is told, the value of oral storytelling cannot surpass the value of the content of the story. On the contrary, when the conditions are right, the power of oral storytelling is in the subtle shifts, deletions and additions made by the storyteller, as his/her relationship unfolds with the listener. As Carla Taunton points out:

195

Debajehm


ith Joe Osaw

abine

It is important to recognize that in Aboriginal com-munities the story has long been a vehicle for resistance, employed as a strategy for cultural survival. This sug-gests that storytelling is a method of intervention.36

For Debajehmujig talking ‘about’ our work is challenging unless we have the opportunity to engage those who we are sharing with in an actual process. It is relationship based, and without any relationship to those who are listen-ing, the amount of contextualization would be overwhelming, and the resulting experience would be weakened by tedium.

Our experience at ICAF was of tremendous value to us and it has impacted our work in many positive ways. We have developed ongoing relationships with several groups, including the Community Company of Glasgow Citizens Theatre, where Neil Packham and Elly Goodman have developed a way to guide community members by walking side by side with them, rather than pulling from the front or pushing from behind. And with Mia Grijp of Sering and the partners of the World-Wide Virtual Theater Carrousel, who have developed initiatives that can reach the most isolated of children – physically and emotionally – and bring them into a circle of relationships with others. And after being truly inspired by the Senioren Revue of the Rotterdams Wijktheater under the careful guidance of Suzanne Bruning, we returned to our own community and immediately began one of the most important and impactful projects we have ever undertaken, with our own seniors – Elders Gone AWOL.

The opportunity to present The Global Savages had additional benefit to us, as it resulted in an invitation to perform a few days later in Donderen (Drenthe) at the home of PeerGrouP Theater, where we were entirely inspired by the work they were doing and gained a more profound under-standing of true self-sustainability. And through this same experience, we met Riet Mellink, who subsequently visited us in Canada and partnered with us on our extraordinary journey to Terschelling Island and the Oerol Festival.36. TAUNTON, Carla: Performing Resistance / Negotiating Sovereignty: Indigenous Women’s Performance Art in Canada. Ph.D. Thesis, Queen’s University, 2011.


196

As we often say, Aboriginal culture like all Indigenous cultures is relationship based. When Eugene van Erven came to our community to better understand our context and our work, a most important and honourable relationship was established. This was the foundation on which our participation at ICAF was founded and where many more important relationships began. Gchi Miigwech Eugene and all those involved who make ICAF such a unique and important gathering and opportunity.

As a result of our experiences, we have articulated a new direction for the company for the upcoming years. We have shifted from a regional approach to programming, to one which we now identify as being ‘Internationally Linked and Intentionally Localized’. Our network of community relations is expanding, and is now inclusive of farmers, elders, mechanics, gardeners – the list goes on. We have become a more porous organization, with a regular flow in an out of people from all walks of life.

In closing we would like to quote Cyndy Baskin referring to an article published by Eber Hampton in 1995 in the Canadian Journal of Native Education titled ‘Memory Comes Before Knowledge’. She wrote:

‘Memory comes before knowledge’. For me, this magi-cal, mysterious and completely sensible phrase captures the connections inherent in Aboriginal world views. It helps me to understand so many pieces of the circle that contribute to Aboriginal ways of knowing and seeing the world. It is inclusive of spirit, blood memory, respect, interconnectedness, storytelling, feelings, experiences and guidance. It also helps remind me that I do not need to know or understand – in the sense of absolute cer-tainty – everything. It reinforces the sense that it is per-fectly acceptable and appropriate to believe that there is much that I am aware of, but that I cannot explain.37

37. BASKIN, Cyndy: Assistant Professor, Ryerson University, Toronto. ‘Aboriginal World Views as Challenges and Possibilities in Social Work Education’. Critical Social Work 7 (2), 2006.Authors Acknowledgement: Many of the quotes used in this essay were taken from Understanding Aboriginal Arts in Canada Today – A Knowledge and Literature Revue Prepared for the Research and Evaluation Section, Canada Council for the Arts by France Trépanier and Chris Creighton-Kelly, December 2011.

197

Debajehm


ith Joe Osaw

abine

Ron Berti graduated from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario in 1980 with an Honours Bachelor of Art Education Degree. After further studies in Venice (Art History), Montreal (Theatre Design) and Toronto (Film & Television) he established a career as a Film Director/Editor in Toronto as one of the pioneers of the Music Video genre. Ron was acknowledged by the industry with numerous awards along with his company partners at Total Eclipse – A Film Group Ltd. In 1992, after working on documentaries about Northern Ontario communities, he could not resist the pull to the rural life of his upbringing in the Georgian Bay region, and moved to Manitoulin Island with his family. Ron accepted a position at Debajehmujig – Storytellers in 1993 where he is currently the Artistic Producer/Executive Director.

Joe Osawabine is from the Wikwemikong Unceded Indian Reserve on Manitoulin Island, which continues to be his home. His engagement at Debajehmujig – Storytellers began at the age of 12 and was strongly influenced by the late Larry E. Lewis. Within the organization he was educated by a series of professional arts sector mentors and his experiences with The Best Medicine Troupe, and within the community by Cultural Educator and Elder Eddie King. Joe and his colleagues were the first graduates of the National Aboriginal Arts Animator Program at Debajehmujig in 2000, and was a key contributor to the development of the Four Directions Creation Process. He is the current Artistic Director of Debajehmujig – Storytellers.

198


Something Is Happening Here!: BIG hART’S NGAPARTJI NGAPARTJI IN ROTTERDAM

Kerrie Schaefer

Trevor Jamieson performs in Ngapartji Ngapartji. Photo: Roy Goderie

199

Something Is H

appening Here! / Kerrie Schaefer

Trevor, keep going and talking for a long time. Give the children life and show the culture and the language. They have a lot to hold onto. Talk about the life.Talk about the good things to understand so they can look after country. Tjukurrpa38 is from the beginning, before the people. Land is not finished, law is not finished. It’s not finished. (Ernabella elder, Kuwaki

Punch Thompson, in Nothing Rhymes with Ngapartji, 2010).

Founded in 1992 in Burnie, a Tasmanian city then in the midst of a

severe economic downturn, Big hART has evolved into a leading national arts organisation engaged in innovative, arts-based community development and social change. Ngapartji Ngapartji was one of four Big hART projects featured at ICAF in Rotterdam. Based on the original Australian production, Ngapartji Ngapartji was performed in Zuidplein Theatre on March 30, 2011. The title of the performance is taken from an expres-sion in Pitjantjatjara, one of a cluster of “mutually intelligible dialects” (Kral 2012: 16) that make up the Western Desert language group spoken as a first language by Indigenous people across a large area of central Australia. Translated into English as ‘I give you something, you give me something’, this concept underpins a multi-faceted project by Big hART involving arts-based community development, language maintenance and theatre making with Pitjantjatjara communi-ties in Alice Springs town camps and on

38. Tjukurrpa translates as ‘Dreaming’ or ‘Law’ and refers to “the spiritual framework that provides the overarching cultural schema within which contemporary life is played out” (Kral 2012: 21).

Something Is H



200

Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands. In an attempt to find a more adequate English language translation for Ngapartji Ngapartji, project evaluator, Dave Palmer, likens the concept to gift-giving relationships in which the gift draws us into a mutual dependence upon those involved in the exchange, a formal give-and-take that forces us to acknowledge our participation in and dependence upon each other. It also forces us to respond to those around us, those who are ‘other’ but with whom we are bound, as part of ourselves, not as a stranger or alien (2010: 4).

The Ngapartji Ngapartji project was conceived by Trevor Jamieson and Big hART’s Scott Rankin after a signif-icant period of research and development including Trevor’s long-term investigation of his immediate and extended Spinifex39 family history. Alex Kelly joined the project at its inception as creative producer. The project itself ran for over 5 years (from early 2005 to mid 2010) and consisted of community arts and media workshops, and creative develop-ment processes with multiple outcomes, including an online Pitjantjatjara language and culture site (ninti.ngapartji.org/) and Ngapartji Ngapartji co-created by Jamieson (performer) and Rankin (writer and director). In fact, the website and per-formance cross-referenced each other as the price of a theatre ticket could include an online Pitjantjatjara language course.

Ngapartji Ngapartji is a highly flexible and adaptable production. Form and content change to suit particular contexts and audiences in Australia and, now, internationally. First performed as work-in-progress at the Melbourne International Arts Festival (MIAF) in 2005, Ngapartji Ngapartji then expanded to a large-scale festival production before it was adapted to a national touring show complete with community cast changeovers mid-tour. In addition to touring Australian cities, Ngapartji Ngapartji was installed in a dry riverbed in Ernabella, a remote Indigenous community. In a further adaptation, Ngapartji Ngapartji was reduced to an ensemble of four to tour internationally

39. The traditional lands of the Pila Nguru are situated in the Great Victoria Desert in Western Australia, adjoining the border with South Australia. The people, commonly known as Spinifex after a type of grass prevalent in the desert region, are part of the Western Desert language group.

201

Something Is H


to ICAF. In Rotterdam, Jamieson was joined onstage by Derek Lynch, with whom he performs in Namatjira, a legacy of the Ngapartji Ngapartji project and currently in peak production mode, and Pansy and Sonja who are involved in Yijala Yala, a project in development in the Pilbara region of Western Australia.

Before the ICAF performance in Rotterdam I’d seen the work-in-progress and the large-scale MIAF productions in 2005 and 2006, respectively. I’d also opted to pay for a theatre ticket and online language course, and had enjoyed watching young people, positioned as experts of language and culture in self-produced video clips, speaking Pitjantjatjara so that I could clumsily attempt it. As I took my seat in the auditorium I wondered what was happening here in the telling of this Indigenous Australian story in a theatre in a cosmopolitan European port city to an audience gathered for an international festival of community arts. How would spectators respond to this deeply affecting, informative and always fascinating piece of performance? What knowledge and understanding would they bring to make sense (or not) of it? Had they previously encountered Indigenous Australian Theatre or was this ‘first contact’? How might this performance inform their knowledge and understanding of Australia and of Indigenous/non-Indigenous race relations? And would audience members, themselves, be affected by implication in the (post-)colonial and racialised power relations that the performance exposes?

My curiosity was spurred, too, because this first performance of Big hART’s Ngapartji Ngapartji outside Australia and to an audience gathered to interrogate community arts practice might test the company’s modus operandi. Big hART works in communities marginalised by distance and/or socio-economic deprivation to create change at individual, community and national policy levels. On a solid basis of arts-based workshops and creative development processes that take at least three years, they produce large-scale art works targeted at mainstage theatres


202

or international arts festival markets. Big hART’s work, as the company name suggests, aims to explore tensions in producing work that is deeply engaged in social change agendas, and that is highly visible and outstanding art. So, would this piece of Indigenous Australian theatre, the product of a long process of creative and socio-cultural engagement, make the distance? Could it keep in balance those tensions between community and art, product and process, local and global, playing to an international audience in Rotterdam?

Ngapartji Ngapartji in RotterdamAs the audience enters the auditorium three people

already sit on stage grinding earth into dust with mortar and pestle. Affixed to the back wall of the space are hundreds of small squares of roughly torn white paper overlapping to form a large rectangular screen. Three box seats stage left complete a semi-circular shape facing the auditorium. In front of the middle seat is a pile of bones, each one carefully stacked on top of the other in a vertical formation.

As the auditorium lights dim a musical note reverberates throughout the performance space, a hypnotic drone accentuated by bell chimes and bird song. Trevor Jamieson enters from stage left and walks to centre stage. He stops and removes his coat jacket, shirt, shoes and socks. Each item of clothing is neatly folded and placed on the floor next to a seat. Dressed in a black singlet and dark blue jeans he walks, barefoot, to where the three performers are sitting and scoops a handful of white dust from a mortar bowl. At front centre stage he pauses a moment and then proceeds to explain in Pitjantjatjara followed directly by the English translation (Dutch surtitles are projected) the Pitjantjatjara worldview – a complex metaphysics, ontology and epistemology. He draws a circle with the white dust on the stage floor and then steps into the circle to demonstrate how that worldview encompasses and holds a newborn baby in ngura (country), language, story and kinship relationships. This is the beginning of a long introduction, an extended cross-cultural orientation to a way of life that

203

Something Is H


has evolved over 60,000 years of continuous inhabitation of the Australian continent. Such an introduction is necessary, Trevor implies, before he can tell the story of the boy, his now adult brother, running across a desert landscape in the home movie projected on the screen: ‘how do I tell you his story?’

Slowly, through storytelling, humour, song, dance, documentary video, home movies and audience inter-action, Trevor draws spectators into his world. First, we learn to say hello. Trevor contrasts the bone crushing handshakes and the direct eye contact of the Dutch greeting to ‘Pitjantjatjara way’, which involves neither touching nor direct eye contact but the call and response, Wai Palya and Uwa Palya. Introducing his co-performers (Derek, Pansy and Sonja), Trevor and Derek exchange greetings before calling out Wai Palya to the audience who respond Uwa Palya. Trevor then decides that we are ready to learn a ‘deeply cultural song’: ‘head, shoulders, knees and toes’. All the performers stand and sing the song:

Kata, alipiri, muti, tjina, [head, shoulders, knees, and toes]Muti, tjina, muti, tjina, [knees and toes]Kata, alipiri, muti, tjina, [head, shoulders, knees and toes]Pina, kuru, winpinpi, mulya. [ears, eyes, lips, and nose]

The audience is on its collective feet singing and performing the actions. The performers run through until everyone is singing loudly and confidently.

Trevor begins his story with his Tjamu (grand-father), whose first contact with non-Indigenous groups was with the immigrant Afghani cameleers who built the railway from Adelaide to Alice Springs: “Nyangangka kutjuparinyi (Something is happening here)”. With some Indigenous people drifting into a settlement around the railway station at Ooldea soak, a traditional waterhole, the Presbyterian church


204

builds a mission at Ernabella and attempts to lure people to more remote country with deposits of strategically placed food: ‘Nyangangka kutjuparinyi [Something is happening here]’. Despite these incursions into the Pitjantjatjara way-of-life, Trevor’s Tjamu is able to move freely between the different settlements and his ngura (country). Trevor’s father is born on his ngura and experiences, in his early years, a combination of settled and nomadic life on traditional land.

A few years later, in an act of international cooperation set against the background of the cold war arms race, the British government establish a nuclear weapons testing programme in the south west desert region of South Australia (Maralinga): ‘Nyangangka kutjuparinyi [Something is happening here]’. Soldiers erect fences across the land stranding nomadic people mid waterhole. Precious little is done to warn Indigenous people living in the test site zone. The government and their expert advisers believe the desert is empty. Just in case, leaflets are dropped but the warnings are written in English. The local people speak several languages but English isn’t one of them. It falls to Trevor’s Tjamu to go out in his truck to warn them to leave the area. A loud sound effect signals an explosion. Trevor knocks the pile of bones to the floor and begins laying them out individually in a large, flat circle on the floor. He says that his people were bombed for 12 years (beginning in 1952), twice as long as WW2. There were at least 9 large bombs detonated, each one larger than the Hiroshima/Nagasaki devices, and hundreds of smaller dirtier tests. In total, 22 kilos of plutonium were scattered across the land, poisoning it for tens of thousands of years. He details the sickness and death that followed as people were caught under the sticky radioactive cloud that fell on their kata and alipiri and got into their pina and mulya.

After the bombs, Trevor’s father grows up in mission settlements. These places are like refugee camps. He can’t go back to his ngura. Neither can his parents. Trevor’s Tjamu keeps busy by going out in his truck, finding people to bring back out of the reach of the poison. But mission

205

Something Is H


life isn’t a good one for a young, traditional woman. A home movie shows a young Trevor talking to his father, asking him about his grandparents. Trevor’s father hesitates and then says: ‘Dad killed mum’. As Trevor explains, one night his Tjamu returns from a trip to find his wife drunk and with other men. In a rage he kills her. As Trevor talks, the three performers randomly turn over white squares on the back wall. The image of a landscape appears. It is a partial picture, in bits and pieces. Trevor picks up the story again. With his mother dead and father in jail, Trevor’s father grows up alone in different mission camps and, while he tries to run away, he has nowhere to go. He’s ‘the first of a new breed, living in two worlds, a nowhere kid. … without his country, what is he? Without his country, who is he?’

Cue Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s This Guy’s In Love With You. Trevor’s father falls in love with a girl on the mission. They marry and have children, including Trevor and his brother. The next generation, represented by Trevor’s brother Jarman, live in between two worlds – city and bush. He might go out hunting kangaroo but he might also dial up the local pet shop for some roo tails.40A home movie plays on screen. It shows Trevor and his mother staging an intervention. Jarman has been out drinking and getting into trouble with the police. Trevor and his mother arrive to collect him and they bring with them Jarman’s two young children. In the film his mother tells Jarman that he’s to take the children home, take care of them and keep himself out of trouble, which he promises to do. While the film is difficult to watch because of the raw emotion of a situation in which children are also caught up, the message is clear. Trevor’s mother, he and his brother, and his brother’s children make up three generations of the one family, standing together, working together, and looking after and caring for each other. Waltya [family] is strong and there is hope.

Hope is coming from another angle too. As Trevor says, the old people are restless. They have had enough of living in mission camps crowded with the spirits of the dead,

40. In Australia kangaroo meat – a gamy, lean red meat – is sold as pet food in super-markets and shops.


206

of whom there are many. As Trevor speaks the other performers turn over the rest of the white squares on the back wall completing the landscape painting in the style of the renowned western Arrernte artist, Albert Namatjira. The old people, Trevor says, are determined to build a road back to country and to take the young people with them to live as close to their ngura as possible. There they will wait the 25,000 years for the ‘half-life’, when the radioactivity will have exponentially decayed. As Trevor strums an acoustic guitar he is joined centre stage by the other performers. They pick up the tune, again, of Dylan’s I Shall Be Released, trans-lated into Pitjantjatjara, and sing out the end of the song and performance.

Responses to Ngapartji Ngapartji41 – performing cosmopolitan indigeneity

I really enjoyed it. The way it was told was so inter-esting. It made everyone stop to listen. That’s why I said the power of art is making people aware of their heritage, because he [Trevor] was talking about the history of his country. And you could see that he likes to look after his country. He was saying a lot about that and about his family.

It is not only an Aboriginal story; it becomes the story of the world. Already for that alone it is important that we go back to the stories of indigenous people (and their suffering). We in the West have been going back for years and years to look to the past to learn for the future. That is not easy, but it is urgent.

These responses from different conference par-ticipants in Rotterdam highlight one of the key features of Ngapartji Ngapartji, which consists in telling stories that are extremely personal and intimate and yet also inextricably linked to global events. The story of the Spinifex people is an

41. All responses highlighted in italics in the sections below are taken from the ICAF Seminar Transcript based on the discussion led by Jan Cohen-Cruz on 31st March, 2011. See also the chapter entitled ‘A Field Ready to Leave Home’ earlier in this book.

207

Something Is H


Aboriginal story and the story of the world in so far as their very recent history and foreseeable future is tied to the seizure of their sovereign lands by the Australian government on behalf of the British for the testing of nuclear weapons. The fallout from that cataclysm is not just death and illness from the radiation but what flows, predictably and unpredictably, from dispossession of country, including addiction, family breakdown and random violence, as in the horrific killing of Trevor’s maternal grandmother.

And it isn’t that Indigenous culture isn’t dynamic. Perhaps picking up on the intimation that Indigenous Australian culture was fixed in the past, that its ancient and unchanging ways were something Europeans, exhausted by the pace of late modernity, could return to for inspiration, solace and correction, Rankin responded thus: I should also say that the work is not about the museum aboriginality of Australia, but about a thriving, growing, living culture. Something is happening all the time in Indigenous culture and stories develop to explain and understand change. Trevor, for instance, remarks that his people have bedtime stories relating to rising ocean levels at the

Scott Rankin conducts a workshop on Big hART’s current project in the Pilbara region of Western Australia. Photo: Roy Goderie


208

end of the ice age 8000 years ago. What is different about ‘this something happening here’ is that it was so sudden and such a fast pace of change. Within one generation – from Trevor’s grandfather to his father – the Spinifex people were catapulted into the “flows of nuclear modernity” (Gilbert 2012: 2).

So, in answer to a question I set earlier: of course Ngapartji Ngapartji made the distance to Rotterdam precisely because the performance was a meeting of two thoroughly cosmopolitan cultures. A common conception is that urban cities are places where the world exists in microcosm but, actually, it might be that distant and remote locales, places typically inhabited by the world’s Indigenous peoples, are an intrinsic part of the cosmopolitan matrix. If we learn anything from Ngapartji Ngapartji it must be that Indigenous people are at the centre of world events rather than periph-eral and remote to them. The Spinifex people were caught up in the middle of a nuclear arms race played out between then world superpowers. Similarly, the mineral rich homelands of Indigenous communities in the Pilbara region of Western Australia hold wealth of a scale that protects a national economy from a global financial crisis and fuels the emergence of new world superpowers. Indigenous commu-nities in the Pilbara region, like many others elsewhere, are engaged in hard-nosed and messy negotiations with global mining corporations in order to ensure that the wealth in the ground enables local communities to thrive.

Just as Ngapartji Ngapartji challenges ideas about centre and margin, it similarly troubles common conceptions of time and space. In a recent article, theatre academic Helen Gilbert asserts that while Ngapartji Ngapartji chronicles ways in which an Indigenous way-of-life has been disturbed and ruptured by the coming of an atomic age, the performance is equally concerned with continuity and connection (2012, 3). Drawing on the work of geographer, Nigel Clark, she argues that central to Ngapartji Ngapartji is a notion of ‘vertical mobility’, or movement through ‘deep time’ as opposed to horizontal movement across space (ibid., 3-4). Maintaining a

209

Something Is H


connection to one and the same place over millennia, whether that is 60,000 years into the past or 25,000 years into the future, includes weathering the changes, physical or man-made, that must surely come. Thus, while Ngapartji Ngapartji testifies to Indigenous people’s pain and suffering, it also demonstrates an ability to adapt to change, and to survive and endure.

Responses to Ngapartji – issues of creative power and control

It would be interesting to hear about how the choices were made and by whom in making this performance as it is.

So the original approach came from Trevor? Was it his idea to make a piece that would say something at a national level, to make a difference in the amount of money put into language development? Or was that your idea? And how difficult was it to merge the telling of a story and that national voice?

So if you’re advocating for a national language policy, does that affect who is in your company? Does that mean there are particular skills or a facility in moving in a different world to be taken seriously or to know the language? What is the impact as far as who needs to be part of the work?

As one would expect from an audience of community theatre practitioners, deeper questions about the project honed in on issues of power and control in the con-ception and direction of the Ngapartji Ngapartji project, in the creative development process, and in the tension between the storytelling drive and the national policy change aims of the project. There was also a pragmatic concern about how the company organised itself, its skills base, to engage with power at national government level.

Rankin explained that Trevor and he were put in contact by people who knew that the kind of work that Trevor


210

wanted to do was the kind of work that Scott did. That intro-duction, some eleven years ago, initiated a long conversation, which was followed by an invitation from Trevor’s family. According to Rankin, the Ngapartji Ngapartji project is, an absolute collaboration, first with [Trevor’s] immediate family as we would know it and then with the broader Spinifex family and then in the larger Pitjantjatjara family. At that point, the senior women, who aren’t here, took on the guiding of the project.

The senior Pitjantjatjara women who were heavily involved in language and arts workshops with young people, in creative development and training processes, in performance as language teachers and song chorus, and in discussions around protocol, were absent from the production in Rotterdam, because it needed to be scaled down for international travel. Their absence was felt, and the lack of women at the forefront of the performance was commented on by conference partici-pants. However, this perceived lack also provided an insight into Big hART’s process in so far as the female performers on stage were not Pitjantjatjara women but from Indigenous communities in the Pilbara region of Western Australia, where another project – Yijala Yala – is currently in development. The trip to Rotterdam provided a training opportunity for those women. That is, involvement in Ngapartji Ngapartji provided the women with an opportunity to study how they might perform their own Indigenous story to the world. Perhaps they stood back so as to better research us!

In terms of how storytelling sits with the policy change agenda (see Palmer, 2010, for a full list of the artistic and social aims of Ngapartji Ngapartji), Big hART views these two facets of the project as wholly connected. The company’s core premise is that “It’s much harder to hurt someone if you know their story”.42Rankin explains that their approach to engaging power is open and based on a preparedness

to enter into dialogues…not as adversaries but knowing that within government there are many people who are desperately trying to do things like

42. See www.bighart.org/public/?p=80

211

Something Is H


us and are dedicating their life to it in a way that we are – that is the generosity of spirit and not the adversarial nature of it.

While this assumes that power is wielded inadvertently and that story and dialogue are powerful tools for consciousness-raising, an analysis which some may reject as liberal, it perhaps belies the resources and inter-agencies (human and organizational) that Big hART mobilise to achieve project aims. Rankin provides some idea of what’s involved when he states that,

at the height of the project we had a creative producer, a literacy and language producer, a community producer, a researcher, a researcher/evaluator (two very different ideas), we had a media liaison [person, and] we had particular meetings about how we were going to move in Canberra [the national capital] on the policy issue.

The 157-page project evaluation provides a more in-depth analysis than I can provide here (see Palmer 2010). Suffice to say that this was probably one aspect of the perfor-mance in which the process was less visible. However, what isn’t in doubt, which is significant given that storytelling is central to achieving social policy change in Big hART’s work, is the lead performer’s mastery of the art of storytelling and the associated force of the performance:

As a Latina living in the US ‘first voice’ is extremely important to us – and not someone else telling the story about someone else. It was very important to hear it from this amazing actor. I want to stress again how important it is in our work to have some-one with the qualities of the main actor in the piece, who has amazing resource, in the voice, in the body, in the delivery. We have to demand of ourselves that excellence.


212

This does raise another interesting question or problem. What if we don’t have performers (even a single one) of the calibre of a Trevor Jamieson? It is possible to develop talent but, in fact, Ngapartji Ngapartji is inconceivable without Jamieson as the storyteller whose whole being is tied up in the performance. Is it possible, then, to emulate Big hART’s remarkable social and artistic feats? Should we, if we do, even aspire to? To paraphrase Brecht, it is important to remember that ‘this is work, not magic’ and that Big hART’s work – in fact, each project – has developed in very specific social, cultural, artistic, institutional and governmental contexts. The project evaluation reveals the huge effort, the routine slog, of a large group of Big hART artists (artsworkers?) and community participants, and the context-dependent nature of their mutual engagements. These methodological evaluations are a gift to the field allowing us to appreciate in context the dif-ferences, as well as similarities, of local achievements gained through collective hard work.

References

Big hART’s Approach URL: www.bighart.org/public/?p=80 [31 July 2012]

Gilbert, Helen. 2012 [forthcoming]. ‘Indigeneity, Time and the Cosmopolitics of Postcolonial Belonging in the Atomic Age’. Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies. Special issue on Indigeneity and Performance. Ed. Helen Gilbert.

ICAF seminar transcript, 31 March, 2011.

Kral, Inge. 2012. Talk, Text and Technology. Literacy and Social Practice in a Remote Indigenous Community. Bristol, Buffalo and Toronto: Multilingual Matters.

Nothing Rhymes With Ngapartji. 2010. [Documentary film] Dir. Suzy Bates. Big hART and Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).

213

Something Is H


Palmer, Dave. 2010. Ngapartji Ngapartji: the consequences of kindness [project evaluation] Big hART

www.bighart.org/media/file/Evaluations/Ngapartji%20Evaluation-consequences%20of%20kindness.pdf

Kerrie Schaefer completed a PhD on the work of the Australian performance ensemble, The Sydney Front, in the Centre for Performance Studies, Sydney University (2000). From 1999 to 2006 she was Lecturer in Drama at the University of Newcastle, NSW, where she joined Associate Professor David Watt’s Performance, Community Development and Social Change practice-based research group. In 2007 she relocated to Exeter University in the UK to co-ordinate (with Fiona MacBeth) an undergraduate and MA programme in Applied Theatre. She is currently on research leave supported by Exeter University and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to write a book for Palgrave Macmillan on community performance.

214


‘All In This Together’: THE DEPOLITICISATION OF COMMUNITY ART IN BRITAIN, 1970 - 2011

François Matarasso

The Floyd Road mural in 1976, a project of the Greenwich Mural Workshop. Photo: Steve Lobb

215

‘All In This Together’ / François Matarasso

What’s in a name?43

The term ‘community art’ came into use in Britain at the beginning of the 1970s, at a time when the cultural experimentation

of the 1960s was confronted both by harsh economic conditions and by more concerted resistance from a cultural establishment beginning to recognise the nature of the challenge to its authority it was facing (Hewison 1995:152). Community art was used to describe a complex, unstable and contested practice developed by young artists and theatre makers seeking to reinvigorate an art world they saw as bourgeois at best and repressive at worst (Braden 1978; McGrath 1981).

The phrase ‘community art’ fell out of favour at the beginning of the 1990s, to be replaced by the seemingly-innocuous alternative, ‘par-ticipatory arts’, though the original term is still used by some people and may even be in the process of rehabilitation.44 It is also used outside the UK, notably in the Netherlands and Australia, where it has acquired locally-specific meanings with diverse connec-tion to the original theories and methods. 43. Some of these ideas were first presented at the mini International Community Arts Festival in Rotterdam (Netherlands) on 2 December 2011, and I am grateful to Eugene van Erven for the invitation to speak and then write on these topics. I am also indebted to Carol Crowe, Pauline Matarasso, Jo Wheeler and especially Helen Simons for commenting on earlier drafts of this essay. Finally, I am privileged to acknowledge my debt to Steve Lobb, Carol Kenna, Lulu Ditzel and Robb Finn with whom I worked in 1981-82 at Greenwich Mural Workshop: this essay is dedicated to them. 44. Some other terms have also appeared, notably ‘combined arts’, ‘community-based art’ and ‘socially engaged practice’, partly as a result of renewed interest in working outside galleries in the contemporary art world. It is questionable how far these practices, which have been described by Grant Kester and use different theories and methods, should be considered as community art or even participatory arts (Kester 2004).

François Matarasso

216


Does this change of terminology have any impor-tance? Surely it is the practice that counts, as the founders of the Association of Community Artists argued in 1971. Anyway, as Juliet famously says, ‘a rose by any other name would smell as sweet’.45 But Juliet is a 13 year old child and her question is naïve, if idealistic, as the play makes clear. Words matter. They shape, reflect and shape again how we think: language expresses us.

The renaming of community arts is not without meaning. It is both symptom and indicator of a profound change in the politics of Britain after the election of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government in 1979, a change that saw individual enterprise promoted at the expense of shared enterprise and a recasting of the citizen as a consumer engaged in transactions rather than relation-ships. Britain was not alone in experiencing this ideological change, nor was the government its only cause. The collapse of Soviet communism, the liberalisation of the global economy and advances in computer and communication technology were all determining influences.

The arts were not exempt from this transforma-tion of British society, economics, culture and thought. As the virtual space in which a community expresses, nego-tiates and redefines its meanings, art, like language, both shapes and reflects society. The path from ‘community art’ to ‘participatory art’, whilst seen as merely pragmatic by those who made it, marked and allowed a transition from the politicised and collectivist action of the seventies towards the depoliticised, individual-focused arts pro-grammes supported by public funds in Britain today.

Of course, this is a simplification. There was non-political community art work in the 1970s and 1980s and there is challenging socially-engaged arts work now. But the trend of the past 40 years has been from radicalism to remedialism. While there have been improvements in aspects of practice within a global trend towards cultural democracy, community

45. William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Scene 2.

217


artists in Britain – if anyone still describes themselves as such – have mostly been carried along with the ideological tide of the times. Ignorance of their own history and reluctance to theorise their work, already lamented by Owen Kelly in 1984, has left them largely unable to resist the domination of market economics in the arts or in society as a whole.46

Today, when the results of that unchallenged domination are evident in economic collapse and a raft of social, political and environmental crises, it is time for artists working with people to ask some questions about history, about theory, about practice. It is time to review the journey from community art to participatory arts and ask what was lost on the way. It is time for artists working with communities, under whatever term, to ask how well their ideas and practice engage with today’s troubled world and what contribution they can offer in making a better one.

Community art and collective actionAlthough connected with older traditions of

cultural emancipation, such as the Workers’ Educational Association, community art’s immediate roots lie in the artistic, social and political experimentation of the late 1960s.47It had grown quickly and by 1974, the Association of Community Artists submitted a list of 149 groups to the working party set up by the Arts Council to examine the issue (Kelly 1984:13). There could not but be diversity of opinion and practice among such a large body of practitioners. Even so, many of those who created the community art movement – and it is significant that it described itself as a movement – had a clear left-wing political agenda (Kelly 1984:36). Theatre groups such as Red Ladder and 7:84 – The Economist had written in 1966 that 7% of the UK population owned 84% of its wealth – set out to articulate socialist political analyses and ‘raise awareness’, in the language of the time. For Welfare State, who set up camp in 1968 on a former rubbish tip in 46. This is not a universal experience: for example, community art in Belgium and the Netherlands exhibits a lively, if sometimes rarefied, political and theoretical discourse (De Bruyne & Gielen 2011). But the very Englishness of the story of community art described in this essay tends to confirm its close connection to England’s wider experience of politics, economics and social change.47. The Workers’ Educational Association, founded in 1903, describes its vision in terms that few community artists would disagree with: ‘A better world – equal, democratic and just; through adult education the WEA challenges and inspires individuals, communities and society’; see www.wea.org.uk/about/vision


218

Burnley, living in community was itself a political position. Not far away, Albert Hunt’s Bradford Art College Theatre Group was devising plays like John Ford’s Cuban Missile Crisis and The Fears and Miseries of Nixon’s Reich.48 Other activists, for instance in the visual arts, may have had less committed politics but they still operated within, and were sympathetic to, a broadly left of centre progressivist culture. After all, the British right had had just four difficult years in government between 1964 and 1979.

Community art in the 1970s also grew up alongside the much bigger, more mature and more theoretically sophisticated community development movement. In 1953, the United Nations had defined community development as:

A movement to promote better living for the whole community with active participation and if possible on the initiative of the community. (Craig 2011:3)

Although initially linked with decolonisation (and promoted as an alternative to communism), the thinking and practice of community development spread quickly to urban renewal programmes in the USA, in the context of the civil rights movement, and to Britain.49 It is not necessary to go far into community development theory or practice here, except to note some key ideas in the UN definition. First, it is concerned with improving the living conditions of the whole community, not of individuals. Secondly, it sees active participation as the essential means to achieve that improve-ment. Finally, it prioritises the community’s own initiative – in other words, its own judgement of what would constitute an improvement in its living conditions and how that might be achieved. (It should also be noted that this is to be done only ‘if possible’, a qualifier that can be considered realistic, open to corruption or both, according to interpretation.)

48. In 2008, Albert Hunt was interviewed for the celebration of Bradford College’s 175th anniversary: ‘There is now a distorted perception of the 1960s. I passionately think the work we did, with people inside and outside College, was hugely important. It was not eccentricity but about engaging with people and valuing their experiences. Having people cooped up in classrooms all day, tested and harangued by authority, as they are today, is true eccentricity’. www.175heroes.org.uk/albert_hunt.html 49. The UK and Commonwealth branch of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, an important early supporter of community arts, was also very engaged in community development work (Braden 1978:135).

219


By the 1970s, this practice was embedded in many poorer areas of Britain, with community develop-ment workers active in the creation and support of tenants’ associations, women’s groups and similar grass roots organisations. The community art movement, in cities like London, Glasgow and Manchester, and in the new towns being built to relieve urban overcrowding, found natural allies here as well as a body of ideas and experience on which to draw. It did so because many of its leaders were committed to an art that was public and collective, as John McGrath, founder of 7:84, wrote in 1981:

Theatre is not about the reaction of one sensibility to events external to itself, as poetry tends to be; or the private consumption of fantasy or a mediated slice of social reality, as most novels tend to be. It is a public event, and it is about matters of public concern. […] The theatre is by its nature a political forum, or a politicising medium, rather than a place to experience a rarefied artistic sensibility in an aesthetic void. (McGrath 1981:83)50

At about the same time, the community arts advisory panel of the Greater London Arts Association described community art as an approach that:

Involves people on a collective basis, encourages the use of a collective statement but does not neglect individual development or the need for individual expression. (Kelly 1984:2)

The work they described included a very wide range of artistic action that was mostly ignored by established arts institutions and by the funding system: outdoor festivals, creative play, inflatables, murals, community printing, radical writing and new media work. It also had room for traditional music and dance, popular forms such as rock music which, with the emergent punk movement and its DIY ethos, was also developing a political consciousness, and the artistic ex-50. It is not coincidental that this book contains a foreword by Raymond Williams, who the same year also introduced Albert Hunt’s The Language of Television: Uses and Abuses (London 1981).


220

pressions of people who had come to Britain from the Carib-bean, Africa and the Indian sub-continent.

Now that the radical performances and festivals like Craigmillar and Easterhouse have gone, it is the murals painted in the poorer districts of London and other cities that are the most visible traces of this artistic vision. The work of Brian Barnes, Ray Walker and other artists are evocative survivors of community art at this time.51 The Floyd Road Mural in Charlton, SE London is an emblematic example, painted in 1976 by Carol Kenna and Steve Lobb of Greenwich Mural Workshop, with the local resident’s association.52 The mural, still in good condition after 35 years, shows local people, black and white, resisting the bulldozers of commercial developers. Other images on London’s walls show people united against fascism in the 1930s (The Battle of Cable Street) or resisting the nuclear missiles that haunted many people’s imaginations at the time (Wind of Peace, Riders of the Apocalypse). The contrast with Banksy’s popular and witty, but cynical and essentially individual street paintings is striking: it is also notable that his work has been commercial-ised by the publishing and art markets.53

‘An histarical occayshan’ The development of community art in 1970s Britain

occurred at least partly as the art world’s response to the wider social changes of the time, just as its transformation in the 1990s was linked to the social and cultural changes going on then. The connection with the radical end of popular music, particularly punk, pub rock and reggae, has already been noted, and the political struggles evident within the arts were versions of much greater trials. London’s murals often depicted soli-darity and resistance but in idealised forms; unhappily, more vicious conflicts were on the horizon by the end of the decade.

In April 1981, a little less than two years after the election of Margaret Thatcher, the inner London district of

51. The London Mural Preservation Society website shows many of these works: londonmuralpreservationsociety.com/ 52. londonmuralpreservationsociety.com/murals/floyd-road/ 53. ‘A collection of works by graffiti artist Banksy have sold for more than £400,000 at an auction in London’; BBC News, 30 March 2012: www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-17559526

221


Brixton experienced a violent confrontation between local people and the police. Street battles between mostly black youths and mostly white police officers raged for about 48 hours, resulting in hundreds of injuries and the burning of 28 buildings, with a further 117 damaged and looted. Petrol bombs were thrown for the first time in mainland Britain.54 The riot was triggered by an incident in which a young black man had been stabbed, but it was fanned by a major police operation in the area over the previous days, codenamed ‘Swamp 81’, in which the police’s power to stop and search people merely on suspicion (or ‘sus’ in the street talk of the day) was a source of great resentment, partly because it was used so disproportionately against young black men.55

The wider background included rapidly rising unemployment as Britain sank into recession and decades of mistrust between London’s black population and its police force.56 For the poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, whose record, Makin’ History, appeared in 1983, this was ‘Di Great Insohreckshan’, when it was:

doun inna di ghetto af Brixtan dat di babylan dem cauz such a frickshan dat it bring about a great insohreckshan an it spread all owevah di naeshan it woz truly an histarical occayshan (Kwesi Johnson 2006:60)57

The Prime Minister did not see it as an historical occasion: for Margaret Thatcher, the events were simply ‘criminal’.58 Nonetheless, she was forced to institute a public inquiry under Lord Scarman, which reported in November

54. www.met.police.uk/history/brixton_riots.htm. The Metropolitan Police appointed its first black officer, Norwell Roberts, in 1967; the participation of white youths in the events is recorded by Darcus Howe: ‘Darcus Howe remembers the “insohreckshan”’, New Statesman, 3 April 2006, www.newstatesman.com/200604030015 55. The name of this operation is notable, since the word ‘swamp’ had often been used by the opponents of immigration to describe its effect on British society; the word can be seen as a ‘dog whistle’ term, seemingly bland but an immediately recognizable signal to a specific group. 56. Op. cit. New Statesman, 3 April 2006. 57. Linton Kwesi Johnson, ‘Di Great Insohreckshan’, from Making History, Island Records, 1983; the poem is also at The Poetry Archive www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/single-Poem.do?poemId=1496058. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Brixton_riot


222

1981 that ‘complex political, social and economic factors’ created a ‘disposition towards violent protest’.59 Before then, however, urban unrest had spread to other parts of the UK. In July riots took place in London, Birmingham, Manchester, Bristol and elsewhere. Disturbances in the Toxteth district of Liverpool were particularly ferocious, lasting nine days and leading to hundreds of injuries and arrests as well as massive destruction of property.

That month, the No. 1 single in the UK pop charts was ‘Ghost Town’ by The Specials, which had evidently captured the mood of many young people:

This town, is coming like a ghost town Why must the youth fight against themselves? Government leaving the youth on the shelf This place, is coming like a ghost town No job to be found in this country Can’t go on no more The people getting angry60

The Specials were the first major British band with black and white members, drawn from the working class communities of Coventry. Their anti-racist unity was non-negotiable, embedded in the very name of their (independent) record label: 2 Tone. The Specials, along with other ska and reggae bands of the time, had emerged from a politicised punk and post-punk music culture that expressed social(ist) solidarity in Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League (Hewison 1995:200ff ).61 This movement continued through the early 1980s, reaching a high point of public conscious-ness with Live Aid in 1985 and ending with the Red Wedge music collective that supported the Labour Party’s failed 1987 election campaign. After Margaret Thatcher’s third successive election victory, musicians seemed to lose their appetite for politics. In 1988, Billy Bragg sang, in ‘Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards’:59. news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/bbc_parliament/3631579.stm60. Jerry Dammers, ‘Ghost Town’, 2 Tone Records 1981, www.thespecials.com/music/view/3661. Many other commercially successful singers expressed strong anti-government views in the late seventies and early eighties, including the Clash, the Jam, UB40, Billy Bragg, Tom Robinson and Elvis Costello.

223


Mixing pop and politics he asks me what the use is I offer him embarrassment and my usual excuses62

Today, an online search for ‘red wedge’ offers mostly shoes: a neat symbol of the shift from politics to consumerism.

It has been argued that ‘Thatcher paid little heed to Scarman after 1981’ (Neal 2003:57) but some things did change. Most symbolically, the ‘Sus’ law, that gave the police powers to stop and search people in the street, was repealed in August 1981.63 Reforms were also made to police procedures and recruitment. Such measures did not, of course, solve the problems of policing diverse and multicultural communities, as subsequent events have shown: for example, in 1999, the 62. Billy Bragg, ‘Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards’, from Workers Playtime, Go! Discs,1988. The album appeared with the label ‘Capitalism is killing music’, a satiric comment on the stickers then appearing on the records of the big music companies stating that ‘Home taping is killing music’. 63. The police have since regained these powers and many others in the name of public order and security, under both Conservative and Labour governments.

François Matarasso (L) makes a point at the Mini-ICAF on 2 December 2011 while Eugene van Erven (R) listens. Photo: Arnold Zwanenburg


224

Macpherson Inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence and its investigation described the Metropolitan Police as ‘institutionally racist’.64

The Thatcher government also responded to the 1981 riots by investing in urban regeneration, including some cultural initiatives such as the Garden Festivals advocated by the then Secretary of State for the Environment, Michael Heseltine, and the creation of an outpost of the Tate Gallery in the decaying Liverpool docks (Hewison 1995:280ff ). For Britain at least, these were the first steps towards an enthusiasm for culture-led regeneration, inspired by Glasgow’s year as European Capital of Culture in 1990 and enabled by the huge flow of funds for capital investment in cultural infrastructure that followed the creation of the National Lottery in 1994. The ground was being laid for the artistic boom of the late 1990s, even if it was not quite the ‘new Renaissance’ one minister would declare on the eve of the financial crisis.65

Culture-led urban regeneration projects could not be expected to end civil unrest in Britain; nor did it. With the Miners’ Strike in 1984 and new urban riots in 1985, resistance to government policy and state power continued for some years.66 Indeed, the 1990 Poll Tax Riots are acknowledged to have contributed to ending Margaret Thatcher’s Prime Ministership.67 There have been disturbances in the 20 years since then, often, as in Brixton, associated with the policing in inner cities. There is a conscious history of popular rebellion

64. See www.guardian.co.uk/uk/1999/feb/24/lawrence.ukcrime12; the Macpherson Report at www.archive.official-documents.co.uk/document/cm42/4262/4262.htm 65. James Purnell MP Secretary of State for Culture, 5 January 2008: ‘When Brian [McMaster] talks about the potential for a new Renaissance, I don’t think that’s an overstate-ment. It’s exactly true.’ www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/jan/05/artnews.artsfunding66. Some community arts organisations were involved on the fringes of these struggles: for instance, Corby Community Arts printshop produced posters and leaflets for the unsuccessful campaign to prevent closure of the town’s steel works in the early 1980s. Big Country’s 1984 record, Steeltown, celebrates Corby’s industrial history, one of the last such expressions in popular music. 67. The Poll Tax was the name given by its opponents to the Community Charge, which in 1988 replaced the longstanding Rates system for funding local government. The Community Charge was no longer based on the value of a house, but on the number of people living in it, a move which it was argued shifted the burden of taxation from the wealthy to the poor. The Community Charge was short lived. It was replaced in 1992 by the current Council Tax, a value-based property tax like the old Rates, under the government of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative successor, John Major.

225


inseparable from British democracy.68 Schoolchildren are taught – or were in the 1960s – about Magna Carta, Simon de Montfort and the first parliament, the Peasants’ Revolt, the Pilgrimage of Grace, the Civil War, the Glorious Revolution, the Peterloo Massacre, the Levellers, the Luddites, the Suffragettes and the Jarrow Marchers. In 1988 the Thatcher government’s local taxation reform was given the benign title ‘Community Charge’: its opponents renamed it the Poll Tax, making an explicit connection across 600 years with the unjust taxation that sparked the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381.69

Ideas of communityIn 1981, the idea of community, so central to the

collectivist ideas of community artists, still had popular resonance. As late as 1983, Raymond Williams could write:

Unlike all other terms of social organisation (state, nation, society, etc.) [community] never seems to be used unfavourably, and never to be given any positive opposing or distinguishing term. (Williams 1983:76)

Admittedly, Williams was a man of an earlier age, born in 1921 and formed in pre-war working-class Wales and post-war welfare state intellectual circles. By the time of his death in 1988, politically at least, the idea of community was becoming rapidly discredited by an ascendant neoliberal ideology. The word was treated with suspicion by academics and radicals alike; it seemed increasingly tainted, particularly as Government co-opted its positive associations to rebrand policies such as the ‘community charge’, ‘community policing’ and ‘care in the community’. George Orwell had warned of ‘Newspeak’ in 1984: it had reached Britain in good time.

By the late 1980s, community art was associated, not always unfairly, with simplistic certainties articulated in work of little artistic ambition. It seemed like Billy Bragg’s singing: heartfelt, but not Schubert. And mixing pop and

68. Cf. David Horspool’s history of The English Rebel (London 2009): www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/aug/16/english-rebel-horspool-hattersley69. Douglas Dunn published The Poll Tax, The Fiscal Fake in 1990, an increasingly unusual example of political engagement by a British poet.


226

politics – what was the use? Community art looked tired and old fashioned in the early days of computers, the Internet and the ‘creative industries’. Its slogans seemed disconnected from its actual practice. It could be criticised for infighting, self-indulgence and obscurantism; it frequently was for its quality and aesthetics (Witts 1998:481). Community art had even come to seem naïve to some of its practitioners after a decade of Thatcherism, privatised public services and deregulated finance, as it had always been to its opponents in the arts and politics.

By renaming their practice ‘participatory arts’, artists working in social contexts seemed to free themselves from all this unhappy lumber in a single bound. The new term was neutral and descriptive, a simple statement of what the work did. Where community art saw itself as a form in its own right, the addition of a final ‘s’ enabled the participatory arts to become a method applied to all other forms.70 So art forms and styles previously criticised as ‘bourgeois’ could be recast as ideologically neutral, while their advocates adapted the once radical methods of community artists to the cause of advancing civilisation. The techniques of cultural democracy were conscripted to the cause of the democratisation of culture. Because it coincided with deep changes in social policy driven by the neoliberal ideology that came to dominate politics and public life during the 1980s, the change both reflected and enabled a shift in practice.

The difference can also be seen in some aspects of the riots that shattered many urban districts of England in August 2011; (interestingly, neither Wales nor Scotland, where Thatcherism had much less appeal than in England, experienced this unrest). The similarities with the events of 1981 are obvious. The differences are also illuminating and mirror some of the changes in British society evident in its community art and wider culture. 70. Others see this question differently. Owen Kelly, for example, argued against the idea that community art was a form, saying instead that it was how work happened that charac-terized its innovation (1984:18). But, of course, form is created by how something is done. The Arts Council – admittedly not a trust-worthy guide in this area – implicitly treated community art as a form by creating a Community Arts Panel alongside its existing art form panels; it never established a Participatory Art Panel. The use of the final ‘s’ in both terms is also a matter of interpretation: in fact there was and is little consistency, a fact that tends to confirm the view of limited theoretical clarity among practitioners in either field.

227


‘You should get some of your own’ The London riots of August 2011, in the midst of

economic depression and a year into the first Conservative-led government since 1997, were the most violent and wide-spread since those of 1981. On 9 August, Claire Burlington, a resident of Woolwich (South East London), reported what she saw on her blog:

The main shopping street, Powis Street, was like a war zone. A war where glass, rubbish, fire extinguishers, rubble and mannequin body parts were the major weapons. I couldn’t see all the shops as parts of the street were totally blocked off, but this incomplete list will give an idea as to what it was like: Argos – looted; M and S – windows smashed and looted; all the mobile phone shops looted and smashed; all the pawnbrokers in the side streets – CashConverters etc and smaller independent jewel-lers-cum-pawnbrokers – smashed windows, forced security grilles and looted; New Look – windows smashed and looted (I thought it was really bizarre that all their window mannequins had gone), Burton – windows smashed and looted; Bon Marche – smashed and looted, video game shop – smashed and looted; a now-unidentifiable shop (possibly a mobile phone shop) – burnt to a shell with walls collapsing into the street and firefighters still putting out the flames; Natwest bank – smashed windows and looted.71

Three large buildings, including a new Wilkinson’s supermarket, had been torched and a number of other fires had been started.

There were many similarities between 1981 and 2011. In both cases, riots occurred as a fairly new and not very popular right wing government responded to economic

71. It is worth quoting this first hand account at length both for its vivid description of the effects of the riots on residents and because it is unmediated by the interests of politicians or media companies:


228

recession by implementing large scale public spending cuts.72 Again, a police assault on a black man (the fatal shooting of Mark Duggan on 4 August 2011) was the initial spark, seeming to confirm perceptions of police racism and injustice among those involved.73 There was, according to research by the London School of Economics and The Guardian newspaper, a significant sense of political anger felt by many of those involved in 2011:

‘I still to this day don’t class it as a riot,’ said one young man in Tottenham. ‘I think it was a protest.’ He was far from alone. A consistent theme emerging from the experiences of the rioters across England was that they harboured a range of grievances and it was their anger and frustration that was being expressed out on the streets in early August.74

However, in the dominant media narratives about the riots, this aspect was overshadowed by a discourse that, in theory and rhetoric, is very similar to that of 1981.75 David Cameron, like Margaret Thatcher, saw only ‘pure criminality’, going on to argue that:

This was about behaviour… people showing indif-ference to right and wrong… people with a twisted moral code… people with a complete absence of self-restraint.76

The riots did produce large scale criminality, but that is not so unusual in Britain today. The MPs who abused their generous expenses scheme might equally be described

72. There had already been violent demonstrations against the Coalition’s increase of student tuition fees from £3,000 to £9,000 per year and the scrapping (in England, but not in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) of the Education Maintenance Allowance, which supported students from low-income families. www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-15646709 73. www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/nov/18/mark-duggan-ipcc-investigation-riots. The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and The Guardian news-paper have conducted important research into the riots, including interviewing 270 people directly involved in the events. Of these people, 73% had been stopped and searched by police in the previous 12 months. Reading the Riots, Investigating England’s summer ofdisorder, The Guardian/LSE, p.19; available at www.guardian.co.uk/uk/interactive/ 2011/dec/14/reading-the-riots-investigating-england-s-summer-of-disorder-full-report 74. Reading the Riots, p.24.75. The LSE/Guardian research highlights the widely different interpretations of the causes held by interviewees who were involved and the public at large, an aspect which must be troubling to anyone concerned about social cohesion: Reading the Riots, p.11. 76. www.number10.gov.uk/news/pms-speech-on-the-fightback-after-the-riots/

229


as criminals with ‘a twisted moral code’; several went to prison in 2011. The bankers who stole from their clients, fixed interest rates and fuelled the economic crisis also showed ‘a complete absence of self-restraint’, though few have yet been imprisoned.

But focusing only on individual criminality, rather than the systems that allow people to behave criminally – or even encourage them to think that doing so is ‘normal’ – is an inadequate response to a social, economic and political crisis that is systemic. It also does little to prevent a recurrence of criminal behaviour – and one thing we can say about both riots and fraud is that they recur. So, without lessening individual responsibility for individual acts, we should look at the conditions that made their behaviour not just possible, but acceptable, to people with no previous criminal record. One way into thinking about those conditions is to ask how 2011 was different from 1981.

The obvious novelty, widely analysed by the media, is the belief that the 2011 riots were predominantly about personal greed, as young people smashed their way into high street stores to steal mobile phones, computers, trainers, clothes and other consumer goods. One young person inter-viewed for the LSE/Guardian study of the riots said:

The rioting, I was angry. The looting, I was excited. Because, just money. I don’t know, just money- motivated. Everything that we done just money-motivated.77

Because this image was real, it was easily burnished by media corporations with their own commercial and political interests. Photographs of people looting or even posing with stolen goods were widely published and fuelled public support for unusually tough sentencing by the courts.78 The initial protest over the death of Mark Duggan was quickly overshadowed and the disorder’s political dimen-

77. The Guardian, Monday 5 December 2011; www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/dec/05/summer-riots-consumerist-feast-looters 78. www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2023667/London-riots-Looter-posts-photo-booty-Facebook.html


230

sions obscured.79 Instead, the media – itself expanded beyond imagination since 1981, when there were just three TV channels and newspapers were literally and not just metaphorically monochrome – focused on personal stories of victims and perpetrators. A revival of the established moral panic about youth gangs (which can be traced back to the battles between Mods and Rockers in the 1960s, if not earlier) was the media’s only suggestion that there was any collective or organised aspect to the riots.80 Otherwise, it was the increasingly familiar story of selfish individualism, personal greed and moral vacuity, versions of which have already been used to explain the banking crisis, the parliamentary expenses scandal and now phone-hacking, media intrusion and bribery.81

79. The LSE/Guardian research reports that some looters justified their actions with an anti-capitalist analysis, making reference to the morality of large corporations, but what weight should be placed on this is unclear: www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/dec/05/morality-of-rioters-summer-riots 80. According to the LSE/Guardian research, 75% of the general public believe that gangs were an important cause of the riots, while only 32% of the interviewees actually involved thought so; Reading the Riots, p.11.81. The last have all emerged in the Leveson Inquiry into ‘the culture, practices and ethics of the press’ set up in July 2011 by David Cameron; www.levesoninquiry.org.uk/

ICAF workshop. Photo: Roy Goderie

231


That story is neatly represented by the song that was at the top of the UK pop charts in August 2011. It was ‘Swagger Jagger’, the first record by Cher Lloyd, who finished fourth in the 2010 series of the popular TV programme, The X Factor. Its chorus runs:

Swagger jagger, swagger jaggerYou should get some of your ownCount that money, get your game onGet your game on, get ya, get ya, game on82

This is a long way from the socio-political state-ment of ‘Ghost Town’, though the imperative to ‘get some of your own and count that money’ is just what the looters were doing, perhaps feeling that they were only following the example of the politicians, bankers and celebrities of Britain’s sorry elite. It seemed that many people’s principal objection to consumer capitalism was that they didn’t get enough of it. One casualty of the Woolwich rioting was rich in symbol-ism. A mural by Carol Kenna and Steve Lobb was destroyed when Wilkinson’s store burnt. It had, in Steve’s words, ‘made the case for the communities of the town to live happily together’.83

There was no sustained critique of power in 2011, as there had been 30 years before, only rage, frustration and a profound sense of injustice. And so there has been no public inquiry into the causes and consequences of the riots: just severe custodial sentences. In the past, political parties and trades unions, community development and education activists – including artists – could give collective form to such feelings. In an era of depoliticised individualism, who was there to organise, analyse or explain? The absence of an articulate political dimension leaves the individual unquestioned as the central actor in a market economy. The collective ‘wi’ that Linton Kwesi Johnson places at the heart of the ‘histarical’ confrontation with ‘babylan’ is absent

82. Curiously, this song was a collective effort, requiring nine contributors, mostly American hip-hop producers, a commercial manufacturing process strikingly different from the independent DIY ethos and authorship of 2 Tone and the punk movement; www.cherlloyd.com/gb/songs/entry/swagger_jagger/ 83. Personal communication.


232

today.84 In a race for private satisfaction, it’s everyone for him-self or herself – and the devil take the hindmost.

From radical to remedial: Participatory arts and ThatcherismThe key difference of participatory arts, in keeping

with trends in British economic and social policy through-out the 1980s and 1990s, was its attention to individuals rather than communities and its depoliticised response to their situation (Matarasso 2007). Projects focused less on community as expressed in place and more on groups of people seen – often by public agencies who provided the funding – as having common problems such as poor health. Those problems themselves were often treated apolitically, for instance as part of a discourse about well-being rather than the reality and causes of health inequality. People enjoyed and benefited from taking part in these arts projects but change, such as it was, was mainly personal. Art forms and activities that offered opportunities for celebration, such as parades, carnivals and outdoor events, took precedence over those that demanded more intellectual, aesthetic or political engage-ment from participants, audiences or the artists themselves.

Community art’s critical relationship to art and society was flawed in many ways but it has been increasingly hard, since the mid-1990s, to see a critical dimension in participatory arts at all. It is also worth noting that the term ‘participatory arts’ has not gained currency outside the arts world itself. It is used largely by professionals, often loosely and sometimes almost as a euphemism: some admit free-ly that the people they work with do not understand it, preferring instead the more familiar concept of community art, with or without a final ‘s’.85Nearly 30 years ago, Owen Kelly castigated the community arts movement for its failure to capitalise on its early promise or its beliefs, arguing that:

84. Johnson’s ‘wi’ is truly a political collective, since he says in the poem that he was not there himself: ‘it woz event af di year / an I wish I ad been dere’ (Kwesi Johnson 2006:60). 85. A Google search for ‘community art’ produces about 181 million results; the same search for ‘participatory art’ gives just 7.6 million hits.

233


In refusing to analyse our work, and place that analysis into a political context, the community arts movement has placed itself in a position of absurd, and unnecessary, weakness. (Kelly 1984:3)

It would be wrong to describe participatory arts as being in a position of weakness, given how its methods and at least some of its ideas have become mainstream practice across the arts in the past 40 years. There is much better and easier access to the arts in Britain today than there was in 1970 and the character of the arts offered has also changed greatly. (How far that will survive the massive reductions in arts spending of national and local government now being implemented in the cause of austerity remains to be seen.) The community arts movement and its successors have played an important part in achieving that change, helped enormously by greater prosperity, better education, the growth of culture in leisure and other factors.

However, that achievement has come, as Kelly argued it had already in 1984, at the cost of compromise with state power and ideology. In the case of community art, it is the focus on individuals and on non-political analyses that has been the most important change, reflecting two of Mrs Thatcher’s best known political dictums, both dating from the high point of her political authority, after she had won a third election. In an interview for Woman’s Own in September 1987, Thatcher summarised her belief in the individual:

We have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand “I have a problem, it is the Government’s job to cope with it!” […] and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.86

86. www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106689


234

Paraphrased as ‘there’s no such thing as society’ this American-sounding statement of individual responsibility became a touchstone of Thatcherism.87 Six months later, in the House of Commons, Margaret Thatcher neatly encapsu-lated not just a central idea of her economic policy, but, in a different way, her ideas about society too, when she said:

There is no way in which one can buck the market.88

In presenting markets as neutral, even natural phe-nomena like the sea, the ideologues behind the Washington Consensus aimed to make the decisions of governments and corporations appear as inevitable as the tide.89 If British min-ers and steelworkers could not produce as cheaply as those of Poland or Korea, that was simply how things were. The result-ing unemployment was just bad luck or, for the harder ideo-logues, the result of uncompetitive practices forced on decent managers by greedy trades unionists. And since there was no society or community – except when the word might smooth the way for taxation or policing – there was no need or scope for collective action in response. The problem was individual-ised, so that each unemployed person had to accept personal responsibility for their situation. State financial support was gradually reduced to today’s subsistence levels and govern-ment help was limited to retraining people to take jobs in the new service businesses emerging after de-industrialisation.

But, as the historian Tony Judt argues:

The victory of conservatism and the profound trans-formation brought about [was] far from inevitable: it took an intellectual revolution. ( Judt 2010:96)

87. By 2005, when he was elected Conservative party leader, David Cameron seemed to distance himself from the divisive image of his predecessor by saying that ‘There is such a thing as society, it’s just not the same thing as the state’: www.britishpoliticalspeech.org/speech-archive.htm?speech=315. This idea has since become the intellectual justification for the ‘Big Society’, a key social policy of the present government. 88. Margaret Thatcher speaking at Prime Minister’s Questions on 10 March 1988, www.margaretthatcher.org/document/107195. Her use of ‘one’ unconsciously expresses her belief in individualism; one person clearly cannot influence a market, but a group of people can as the bankers who fixed the Libor lending rate clearly demonstrated. 89. British schoolchildren once learned, alongside those myths of popular resistance, the limits of governmental power in the story of King Canute on the seashore, his feet lapped by the waves and submitting to God.

235


It also took a cultural revolution, which many were happy enough to contribute to, through ignorance or inattention, self interest or sympathy. The cultural sector as a whole did very well in this brave new world of liberalism, enterprise and consumption. Rapidly expanding computer technology spawned new art production methods and dis-tribution platforms and initially made a great deal of money, though those same technologies are now destroying the economic models they once fed on.90 The term ‘creative industries’ was coined to describe the financially productive part of the cultural sector, though without much awareness of its symbiotic relationship with the now dominant neo-liberal economic model. ‘Creatives’ came to see themselves as the elite of the knowledge economy, flattered by media-savvy advocates such as Richard Florida (Florida 2002). In the UK, cash from a National Lottery founded in 1994 began to enrich publicly-funded cultural institutions as never before. New theatres, concert halls and galleries sprang up like mushrooms after a good rain, sometimes even in poor areas in need of urban regeneration; programmes thrived, including those participatory arts activities designed to increase ‘engagement’ in the expanding cultural offer.

The cost of this prosperity received less and less attention in a booming arts world which, like the New Labour governments that backed it, felt things could always be done for the economy’s losers. One analyst of the Labour govern-ment concluded early:

New Labour’s discourse is littered with a sense of resig-nation and an indication that remedial, paternal inter- ventionism is the most that social democrats can hope for in the current climate. (Wickham-Jones 2003:36).

Participatory arts were gradually drawn in to addressing – or even servicing – the complex symptoms of a more and more unequal society (Wilkinson & Pickett 2009). Now funded more by public welfare agencies than through dedicated arts resources, artists working with people had less

90. The Specials had to sell many more records to get a No. 1 hit in 1981 than Cher Lloyd in 2011.


236

and less time to think beyond the immediate problems of their ‘clients’ or, in the new current climate, of how to finance their work. Community art, always more interested in causes, was not required.

‘All in this together’The most obvious similarity between 1981 and

2011 is that there was an economic crisis then and there is one now, though today’s troubles seem to be much deeper. Curiously, the present Conservative Prime Minister, David Cameron, has appealed to the neglected idea of community, telling the British people in his first major speech after taking office in 2010 that ‘We’re all in this together’.91 But if we are all in this together, the important question is what ‘this’ is – a competition or a community? Is it about individual pursuit of personal enrichment or shared enterprise for the common good?

Community, in theory and in practice, has real problems but, since it is a result of human action, it would be naïve to expect otherwise. Injustice and inequality, the abuse of power and the oppression of minorities, conformism and repression – these and all other human failings exist in com-munities large and small, of every type and culture. They must be resisted in community as much as anywhere, but they do not in themselves invalidate community as a goal or an idea, any more than they invalidate the human beings who enact them. Indeed, though modern sociologists like George Yúdice doubt the ‘warm persuasiveness’ that Williams saw in the idea (Bennett 2005:51-4), being part of a community remains a widely held aspiration: we are, after all, social animals. Studies of the motivations of volunteers consistently show the importance that people place on being part of a community and contributing to meeting its needs (Argyle 1996; Low 2007). In the arts, the idea of supporting community is a key factor in motivating the thousands of volunteer promoters who bring touring shows to British villages (Matarasso 2004). If Robert Putnam identifies both a decline of community in America and nostalgia for an idealised past, these things

91. David Cameron Speech, 7 June 2010.

237


matter because recognition of community’s value is the foundation of his analysis of social capital (Putnam 2000).

There is no going back to community art as it existed in the 1970s, nor should we wish to do so: as John Fox, co-founder of Welfare State, has written, ‘Nostalgia dulls reality’ (Fox 2002:4). The world is vastly different and many aspects of arts practice have matured and improved. But there are ideas from that time that merit revisiting, particularly the recognition of collective interests alongside individual ones and the readiness to question systems, whether in society or in art. We do not know what kind of world is emerging from the huge economic, political, social and cultural upheavals we are now living through but we can meet it in different ways. There are those who, wedded to the hegemony of the past 30 years, believe that it will be restored. Perhaps they will be vindicated, in the short term, but all systems fail and the most wasteful fail quickest.

If community art has a future, under whatever name, it will be because it has renewed itself, shedding ideas and practices shaped by a failed ideology and searching out new ways in which artistic engagement can help people meet the world as it is and perhaps make that meeting better for all those involved. That will require hard work, with little money. It will require constructive cooperation and openness to other ideas, experiences and values. It will require admitting our weaknesses and our failures, especially those we like best. It will require engaging with history and theory, debate and experiment, and in language that is inclusive and democratic. It will require listening to those who have gone before and have experience – and to those who haven’t, because they have new ideas about a world unlike the one that has been. It will, in short, require a lot of us.

But it might produce a community art practice that is rooted in humanist and democratic ideals; that questions assumptions, including its own; that is ethically engaged and politically aware; that sees money as a means, not an end;


238

that gives people skills for life, not just for work; that is cooperative with others and competitive with itself; that is optimistic and joyful. It might, in short, foster a culture truly worth celebrating and an art to empower us.

References

Argyle, M. 1996. The Social Psychology of Leisure, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Bennett, T., et al., 2005. New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Oxford: Blackwell.

Braden, S., 1978. Artists and people, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Craig, G. et al, 2011. The Community Development Reader: History, Themes and Issues, London: Policy Press.

De Bruyne, P. & Gielen, P., eds. 2011. Community Art: The Politics of Trespassing, Amsterdam: Valiz Antennae.

Florida, R., 2002. The Rise of the Creative Class And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure and Everyday Life, New York: Basic Books.

Fox, J., 2002. Eyes on Stalks, London: Methuen.

Hewison, R., 1995. Culture & Consensus: England, Art and Politics since 1940, London: Methuen.

Kwesi Johnson, L. 2006. Selected Poems, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Judt., T., 2010. Ill Fares the Land, London: Playaway.Kelly, O., 1984. Community, Art and the State: Storming the Citadels, London: Comedia.

239


Kester, G., 2004. Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art Berkeley: University of California Press.

Low, N. et al. 2007. Helping Out: A national survey of volun-teering and charitable giving, London: Cabinet Office.

Matarasso, F., 2004. Only Connect , Arts Touring and Rural Communities, Stroud: Comedia.

Matarasso F., 2007. ‘Common ground: cultural action as a route to community development’, Community Development Journal, 42, 4: 449-458.

McGrath, J. 1981. A Good Night Out, Popular Theatre: Audience, Class and Form, London: Methuen.

Neal, S., 2003. ‘Scarman, Macpherson and the media: how newspapers respond to race-centred policy interventions’, Journal of Social Policy, 32, 1: 55-74.

Putnam, R., 2000. Bowling Alone, The Collapse and Revival of American Community, New York: Simon & Schuster.

Wickham-Jones, M. 2003. ‘From Reformism to Resignation and Remedialism? Labour’s Trajectory Through British Politics’, Journal of Policy History 15, 1: 26-45.

Wilkinson, R. & Pickett, K., 2009. The Spirit Level, Why more equal societies almost always do better, London: Allen Lane.

Williams, R., 1983. Keywords, A vocabulary of culture and society, London: Fontana.

Witts, T., 1998. Artist Unknown, An Alternative History of the Arts Council, London: Little, Brown.


240

François Matarasso (1958) was born in the South Midlands (England) in a French-speaking environment. He studied literature at university and somewhat accidently encountered community arts while looking for a printer for posters of a theatre production he was involved in. He ended up doing a one-year apprenticeship with Greenwich Mural Workshop and subsequently worked for 14 years as a community artist in the Midlands. In the mid ‘90s he became a pioneer in arts evaluation and published his groundbreaking Use or Ornament? The Social Impact of Participation in the Arts (Stroud: Comedia, 1997). He has written – and lectured – extensively on this subject, about which he has become increasingly critical. Recently, his work has begun to shift towards tastefully produced and elegantly written documentation of arts projects. In April 2012 Multistory published Where We Dream, Matarasso’s study of the West Bromwich Operatic Society, which includes photographs and a video documentary. It is part of a larger series Matarasso calls ‘Regular Marvels’.

241


ICAF is a production of the Rotterdams Wijktheater (RWT)

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written consent of:

Stichting Rotterdams WijktheaterJan Ligthartstraat 633083 AL RotterdamThe NetherlandsTelephone: +31 (0) 104230192info@rotterdamswijktheater.nlwww.rotterdamswijktheater.nl

BOOK

Editor: Eugene van Erven

Translations: Eugene van Erven, Steve Green, Mercedes Echagüe

Copy editor: Phillip Mann

Design: Fred Sophie (nxix)

Printer: Veenman+

Book production management: Anamaria Cruz

Publisher: © Rotterdams Wijktheater 2013ISBN: 978-90-807202-5-1

DVD

Editors: Robert Jan Schmidt, Morgan Brun, Eugene van Erven

Camera: Robert Jan Schmidt, Morgane Brun, Adrien Quintino, Dan Williams, Dorrotya Zurbo

Still Photography: Clémence Girard

Interviews: Jennifer van Exel

Film Production: Hemmo Bruinenberg

Colophon

Community, Art, Power is a collection of essays especially commissioned by the International Community Arts Festival in Rotterdam. This event has been taking place every three years since 2001, when Rotterdam was Cultural Capi-tal of Europe. It is produced by the Rotterdams Wijktheater, one of the most prominent community based theatre companies in the Netherlands. Over the years, the festival has grown to become an inspiring encoun-ter of community arts professionals and participants from all over the world. This book contains original texts by François Matarasso, Jan Cohen-Cruz, Michael Romanyshyn, Edith Scher and many others. It addresses music, theatre, storytelling and visual arts in countries such as Argentina, Northern Ireland, the Netherlands, Poland, England, Peru, Germany, the Czech Republic, Australia and Canada. Community, Art, Power includes a unique DVD with mini- documentaries from the festival and a bonus track about an ar-tist-in-residency of Dance United in The Hague. The book’s editor, Eugene van Erven, is artistic director of the festival and author of Ra-dical People’s Theatre (Indiana University Press, 1988), The Playful Re-volution (Indiana, 1992) and Community Theatre: Global Perspectives (Routledge, 2001).


ISBN 978-90-807202-5-1

international community arts festival …

Documents