Historias mínimas

Nací y crecí en tierras australes que fueron habitadas por Selknams, Yaganes y Kawéskar; en una ciudad donde no había teatro. Tengo un apellido Mapuche pero no hablo la lengua de mis ancestros.

Me encantaría soñar en mapuzungun e imaginar futuros posibles junto a mi hijo en dicha lengua.

Sin embargo, hace dos noches muchos hombres salieron a las calles creyéndose dioses y quisieron repetir la horrible historia de nuestro pueblo; emulando a los conquistadores, armados con palos y piedras, arremetieron contra dirigentes Mapuches que hasta el día de hoy luchan por sus derechos.

¿Qué hacemos con tanta miseria? ¿cómo sobrevivimos a tanto nacionalismo barato? Han pasado siglos en los que los poderosos han contado y tergiversado la historia y ya no basta con imaginar. Es tiempo de contar todas esas historias mínimas que aún no han sido contadas. Entonces ya no seremos espectadores de la historia de unos pocos, sino que seremos protagonistas de la historia que queremos.

Hace varios años un sabio dramaturgo chileno escribió a propósito de Chile: “un infierno que se sostiene a fuerza de milagros, una esperanza seca que perdura”…  creo que esta expresión nos hablaba de cómo lo imposible puede sobrevivir a fuerza de amor. Una característica que ha marcado al teatro por décadas en muchos países, es su condición de ser un espacio que nadie entiende cómo se mantiene en pie, sino es por la convicción de quienes en él se desempeñan. 

De esta manera, en un mundo atravesado por una pandemia, llenos de incertidumbres y dictaduras disfrazadas de democracia, me atrevo a convocar desde la convicción que me da el amor a nuestro oficio para que no imaginemos teatros sino que los creemos y los multipliquemos.

Nacen teatros donde se escuchan y recuperan las lenguas de nuestros pueblos indígenas. Al otro lado de la montaña nacen teatros que cuentan la historia de nuestros ancestros que no fueron héroes. En una serie de islas perdidas en el mar nacen teatros amateurs, de barrios, de comunidades migrantes, de sobrevivientes de todas las batallas posibles de esta travesía llamada vida.  

El teatro es nuevamente un lugar de reunión y de reflexión no sólo para las élites, sino para todas y todos. De esa historia es de la que quiero ser parte junto a mi hijo. 

Me atrevo a invitar a tod@s a esta re-construcción postpandémica, que sea el teatro el lugar de las historias mínimas, un lugar cuya brújula sean las palabras: Amor, Respeto y Comunidad. 

dedicado a Frie Leysen

Small Stories

I was born and grew up in southern lands that were inhabited by the Selk’nam, Yaghan y Kawésqar peoples, in a city where there was no theater. I have a Mapuche last name but I do not speak the language of my ancestors.

I would love to dream in mapuzungun and, in that language, imagine possible futures with my son. 

However, two nights ago, many men went out into the streets believing themselves gods. They wanted to repeat our country’s horrible history, emulating conquistadors, armed with sticks and rocks, attacking Mapuche leaders that are still, to this day, fighting for their rights.

What do we do with so much misery? How do we survive all this cheap nationalism? Centuries have passed in which the powerful have told and twisted history, and now, imagining is not enough. It’s time to tell these small stories that still have not been told. Then, we will no longer be spectators of the history of a few but rather protagonists of the story we want. 

A few years ago, a wise Chilean playwright described Chile as “a hell that sustains itself by the strength of miracles, a withered hope that endures….” I think that this articulates how the impossible can survive through the strength of love. One trait that has marked theater in many countries, across decades, is its ability to survive against all odds, through the belief of those who make it.

In this way, in a world permeated by pandemic, full of uncertainties and dictatorships disguised as democracies, I call on us not to imagine theatres, but rather create and multiply them.

Theaters will be born in which we listen to and revive the language of our indigenous peoples. On the other side of the mountain, theaters will be born that tell the story of our ancestors who were not heroes. In a series of lost islands in the sea, amateur theaters will be born — those of neighborhoods, of migrant communities, of survivors of all the possible battles of this journey called life.

The theater will once again be a place of meeting and reflection not only for the elites but for everyone. This is the history that I want to be part of, together with my son.

I dare to invite everyone to this post-pandemic reconstruction. Let theater be the place of these small stories, a place guided by the words: Love, Respect, and Community.

Dedicated to Frie Leysen.

Translation by Alexandra Ripp.

Language/Generations

I was at Weiwuying, the National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts in Taiwan this past December. I had been invited to attend a conference on arts participation and lead a workshop on festival curation. I’d been to Kaohsiung many times to visit family, but it was my first time there in a professional capacity. Everything was familiar and unfamiliar at the same time: I recognized the humidity, the smells, the tempo of this southern port city, but I was still a stranger. 

In between conference sessions, I arranged to see a matinee. As my liaison handed me a ticket, she warned me that I likely would not understand it because it was in Taiwanese Hokkien, not Mandarin. The piece was inspired by the history and site of Weiwuying, built on former army barracks. It featured a genial narrator, a popular aging folk singer, Chinese opera, jokes about a local chain-store, beautifully shot city vignettes. It was a love letter to the city. I understood half of the language and references, but recognized the humor and the people. I felt strangely, and wonderfully, at home. I realized I’ve only experienced Hokkien around a dining table, not as live performance. It was a performative language full of inside jokes, loan words, specific rhythms — a linguistic dance I was more aware of perhaps because of my distance from it. For the first time in years I wished I hadn’t lost the language. 

I wondered, how would this show do in festivals? How to translate it, would it translate? And I caught myself. The piece was made to resist being read easily by an outsider, and I had reflexively tried to package it for international consumption. Artists don’t necessarily make their work to tour; they tour if the economics of the making necessitate it. Not every piece is for a touring circuit, asshole.

My parents immigrated from Taiwan to Singapore a few years before I was born, in the 1970s.  Growing up, there were different languages spoken at home: a mix of English and Mandarin with my sisters, Mandarin with my parents, and halting Taiwanese Hokkien with my relatives and grandparents. Japanese was also in my home — the remnant of the colonization of Formosa, but also from my parents’ genuine connection with the culture. 

In homes and public spaces, Singaporeans speak Malay, Tamil, Mandarin (and the dialects Teochew, Cantonese, Hokkien, Hakka, etc.), Peranakan Malay, Hindi, Singlish, and more. English is the (dominant) working language of the state. Malay is the indigenous, official language of the country. Children are educated in English and take lessons in their “Mother Tongue” (Malay, Tamil, Mandarin) as a Second Language. In the race from “third world to first,” the government (like others) pressed on with regulation and standardization, privileging certain languages over others in the name of progress: English instead of  “Mother Tongue,” Mandarin instead of the dialects, and so on. 

Language can be lost in one generation — I worry about that every day with my young daughter speaking Mandarin. What, then, to make of the dialects that are spoken less with each successive generation, the very dialects that have drowned out indigenous voices? The globalization/colonization of cities presses languages out of cultures and out of the land. The globalization of culture presses art/works into particular aesthetics and a linguistic framework that is legible and translatable. If I had to imagine a theatre, it would be a theatre that resists with all its might being easily read, that flourishes in moments that are impossible to translate.

“If the good doctor can’t cure you, find the less good doctor.”
— Tswana Proverb

• In November 2015, internationally acclaimed South African artist William Kentridge gave a lecture entitled “Peripheral Thinking” at Yale University. In his talk, he raised the question of what is happening at the edges and how we can learn from it. He discussed the porousness of focus and described the ways in which studio processes can be instructive for looking at universal questions.

• In January 2016, I received a call at home in Johannesburg from Kentridge’s studio with a request to meet William for tea later that week. I had no idea what the meeting was about but remember waking up on the day of the meeting with a combination of curiosity and excitement. Later that day, I met a relaxed William just post his end-of-year holiday. He described a want to create and support a new space for the arts in Johannesburg. As a fellow artist, activist, and resident of downtown Joburg, he asked me to work alongside him and his studio team in initiating this space. The meeting was not very long, but I left it with formative words ringing in my ears: “interdisciplinary,”incubating,” “collaborative,” “collective,” “responsive,” “embodied.”

• In November 2016, I was in the eye of a magnificent storm of contemporary production.It was day three of an intense and massively generative five day incubator workshop working towards the inaugural performance season for The Centre for the Less Good Idea, due to open April 2017. Around 80 artists¹ from every discipline were being collectively curated by a five person team assembled by the Centre: a visual artist/filmmaker; theatre-maker/writer; poet/performer; choreographer/dancer; and composer/musician. We sought new combinations of text, movement, sounds and image. As we tested first ideas we hit upon incidental discoveries and had the opportunity to not only collectively identify and test them through repetition but to also capture the process, through film, sound, image and writing, an act of archiving fluid processes. The space was giving all its attention and resources to the impulses, connections, and revelations collectively identified by the artists.

• It was 4pm, and perhaps due to a late afternoon sugar low coupled with an unparalleled exhilaration, I had a sense of being outside of my body, a deja vu type of dream feeling — everything had slowed down, and I looked around the room: a group of poets and percussionists were responding by building sound and words to professional boxers in a boxing ring. A cinematographer and lighting designer were debating the best way to capture a visual artist furiously throwing clay and moulding it on to a dancer. An 11-man a cappella choir was moving in unison while a choreographer and operatic singer disrupted and responded to them. This was utopia, a safe making space for creative playfulness, and I was its animateur.Such a space doesn’t require a director in the traditional understanding of the word;it requires someone committed to maintaining energy and momentum, taking care of and holding artists in their processes, and pulling on threads and activating networks near and far.

• It is June 2020. The Centre for the Less Good Idea continues to be built in the same way one builds an artwork — through trial and error, piece by piece, allowing that which works to grow legs and letting that which does not fall away. If we had a manifesto it would be:²

• Sitting in the heart of downtown Johannesburg (a city famous for its violence and perpetual collapse),small and on the edge of the international art world is an incubator space for the performative arts. As founder and funder, William has allowed for an idyllic disregard for the usual economic logics of profit and gain which underpin so much art-making across the world. The collaborative collective approaches have, to date, given 400-odd artists over seven seasons and more than 30 one off performances an unparalleled momentum.

• So, what is next? We think, perhaps, an academy for the Less Good Idea?

Photo credits: William Kentridge, Blue Rubrics, Lapis Lazuli pigment printed in blue on found thesaurus page.

1. The Centre creates two, six-month seasons a year. Core-curators from South Africa and of varying artistic disciplines are invited. The curators then engage practitioners with whom they would like to collaborate, and with that, the seasons grow. Alongside the seasons, the Centre has a monthly programme in which new work is incubated and shown for one night only. In 2020, we launched SO, the Academy for the Less Good Idea.

2.  The Centre’s visual and conceptual identities are drawn from William’s practice, in particular his methodological approach to generating new large-scale performance work. Visually, our identity is based on his Blue Rubrics, a series William began after receiving a gift of pure lapis lazuli gouache from Afghanistan. In order to find a use for the vivid blue pigment, he addressed it in terms of its specific color and material. eventually mixing it into ink to overlay silkscreen prints. In William’s words, “They are called Blue Rubrics, but a rubric really should be red — a rubric was the printed or illuminated red text in a liturgical manuscript, in which the black ink would have been the text of the liturgy and the red would have been instructions on how to pray. So they are footnotes to a thought, the edges of the thought. In my case, they are unsolved riddles, phrases which hover at the edge of making sense… WHO NEEDS WORDS (the whispering in the leaves)…. These are fragments of sentences which sit in a drawer of phrases used in other work over the years, which get taken out and sorted through on occasions.”

Disarmed by Unexpected Encounters

As we count the days back to the possible point of exposure and forwards to the remaining time of isolation, as the everyday loses all spontaneity of unexpected encounters in the endless repetition of routine, engagement with others seems to be the only means of capturing the present, of challenging our own single-perspective notions in the face of a multitude of often uncomfortable polemics.

In a similar way, we’ve frequently been caught in the performance machine of spectatorship in the theater, seeking indices and our own routes into the performance, into the environment it establishes, seeking an aperture, an opening leading to a being-here. The theater we yearn for is not an “alternative” to the “real” world but is a “real place, where real people go to work, and where their work takes the form of ‘conversation.'”[1] There is no single perfect vantage point, but rather a series of possible entries into the event. Narrative continuity is extremely unstable in these circumstances, with dramaturgy constructed by chance encounters with others, by failed gestures that remain in traces, by the unplanned. We design a space of friction, a happening, a multitude of conversations.

After our performances, the public joins us: touching the props, examining the abandoned costumes, testing the floor, and looking back over their shoulders towards the now-empty seats. The performance is over, and an excavation of sorts begins. The gaze turns its object, the theatrical event, inside out, looking at its seams: the duct-taped cables, the backs of screens, the lost sock, the stage lit up by working lights, devoid of shadow play.

Like the people in Brecht’s Street Scene, we are stuck on a street corner, struck by our responsibility for the event. As the dust settles, as the sweat is wiped away, we find ourselves in an encounter with memory and the traces of the event: among the material and cerebral detritus, among the fascinating ruins. What is left on stage takes the shape of a strange post-festum instruction manual or informational guide. This exploded view of traces and ephemera functions as an extension of the performance itself and is more reminiscent of a situation in the making than one that has just passed.

BADco. is a collaborative performance collective based in Zagreb, Croatia. Since 2013, we’ve initiated a series of 24-hour events,[2] inviting others to join us in temporarily inhabiting spaces—ecologically problematic urban zones, former industrial buildings, abandoned construction sites of cultural venues. A day would start with setting up tents, a generator, cables and mics, parking bikes and letting dogs run around, coffee—but also a segment of choreography, a reading, a workshop, an interview. And it would continue with conversations, concerts, objects, dance.

Even if we planned a schedule or a narrative arc, performing in such a setting inevitably leads to text spoken or choreography danced coming into proximity, into correspondence with what others brought to our expanded conversation, leaving us disarmed by unexpected encounters, creating a space of friction, a space—to quote Congolese choreographer Faustin Linyekula—”where a work of art and the spectator come together to produce a crisis, as well as mutual recognition.”[3]

[1] Nicholas Ridout, Passionate Amateurs: Theatre, Communism, and Love (University of Michigan Press, 2013), 124.

[2] More on the project at: http://badco.hr/en/work/1/all#!nature-needs-to-be-constructed

[3] Florian Malzacher, Not Just a Mirror. Looking for the Political Theatre of Today: Performing Urgency 1 (Alexander Verlag Berlin, 2015).

Optional reading soundtrack: ‘Nina’ by Electric Fields (Inma, 2016)

What’s free to me? It’s just a feeling. It’s just a feeling. It’s like how do you tell somebody how it feels to be in love? How are you going to tell anybody who has not been in love how it feels to be in love? You cannot do it to save your life. You can describe things, but you can’t tell them. But you know it when it happens. That’s what I mean by free. I’ve had a couple times on stage when I really felt free and that’s something else. That’s really something else! I’ll tell you what freedom is to me: NO FEAR! I mean really, no fear. If I could have that half of my life. No fear! Lots of children have no fear. That’s the only way I can describe it. That’s not all of it, but it’s something to really, really feel. Like a new way of seeing. Like a new way of seeing something.

– Nina Simone (1968)

I first heard these words—spoken by the legendary American singer Nina Simone in a 1968 interview—not from their primary source, but sung as the lyrics in a 2016 song—Nina—by the Australian electronic/pop band Electric Fields. Helmed by Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara singer Zaachariaha Fielding, Electric Fields have lit up the Australian music scene with their fusion of shimmering, melodic pop, and invocations of Australian First Nations cultural stories, strength, and sovereignty. Their music sparks with an energy that transposes the vast and complex histories of Australia’s First Peoples into euphoric, reflective moments that infuse the dancing bodies for whom they perform and play. I heard them for the first time at a queer dance party in Sydney. 

Nina Simone’s words, inseparable from her lifelong struggle as a civil rights advocate, reverberate powerfully with the different definitions of “freedom” that might be considered by Black and white people in a contemporary colonial world. Freedom from the kind of fear that emanates from the violence and oppression of white, patriarchal institutions. The fear that seeps from government policies and corporate power structures directly into people’s bodies, memories, and hearts. What would it mean to be free of such fear? What would that feel like? What would it enable? I’m not African American or Indigenous Australian, but I’m a queer man of color, and I think that’s what I go to those parties for: to find out what that might feel like.

Recasting of Nina Simone’s words to Electric Fields’ melodies reignites a flame of conversation that not only touches on the civil rights movements of the 1960s and present-day struggles for First Nations sovereignty, but that stretches backwards and forwards through time and considers the battles of all racially oppressed peoples to find sovereign self-expression in the face of a monolithic and opposing cultural power. Perhaps this Imagined Theatre is the one that keeps that flame bright and strong, across generations, borders, cultures, and barriers. Perhaps it’s this Theatre that might finally fan that flame into a firestorm, strong and fierce and pure enough to burn down those old outmoded ideas of race and the power structures they serve. Let them fall away. And there we will be, dancing in the ashes.

A response that has everything and nothing to do with making performance

The Time of the Now

Dries Verhoeven, “Fare Thee Well!” (Oslo). Photo courtesy of the artist.

I am writing these lines after my first academic year at New York University in Abu Dhabi, one year after the last edition of Fast Forward, the site-specific festival that I imagined and curated for Athens as a critical response to the multifaceted “crisis” in Greece. I am writing these lines during a dematerialized summer shrunk to a disembodied liveliness and to a distanced sociality across space-times. While I am struggling to imagine a theatre that matters. As I always did. But now it seems that it needs to matter differently. It seems that it needs to address differently the urgencies that exist in the here-and-now, present but often latent, confined in between the anxieties of the creation time, the precarious conditions of the production system, the institutional imperatives, and the contested sponsorships. Does the fact that it needs to “matter differently” mean that we need to invent “new” forms and subject-matters? To challenge any exoticization through alienation? To decolonize originality and authenticity? To reconsider sustainability but also post-humanity? To privilege theatre as a social process instead of theatre as commodity? I honestly don’t know.

I am writing these lines as I need to imagine something in order to make it. Theatre is always, for me, a porous, relational common ground where discursive events go hand in hand with poetry and radical aesthetics. Theatre is a translocal space of togetherness, a collective state of mind where unimaginable forms of engagement and emancipation can potentially emerge. Theatre-as-commonality reminds us of the essential role that theatre has played in all times: from the ancient city-states to the struggles for freedom and justice in our “short century” and the ongoing fight for a world that matters — for all, equally.

I am writing these lines thinking that we need perhaps to unmake theatre in order to imagine it  — to un-make means, Homi Bhabha writes, “to release from repression, and to reconstruct,  reinscribe the elements of the known.”[1] Does that mean that theatre shall assume the responsibility for the unspoken? Shall we collectively envision cultural events that transcend the way that we have shaped our “global” art world? Could we rethink the role of the curator as a public servant at a moment when we don’t even know what “public” means? Is it possible to identify and dismantle the power relationships that shake the artistic field both on the inside and the outside? Shall we reconsider the distribution of resources beyond postcolonial concepts such as the Global South, or essentialist approaches to interculturalism? I honestly don’t know. I am only thinking that we need to re-imagine it.

[1] Homi Bhabha, “The World and the Home”, Social Text (1992, n. 31/32), 146.

Photo from Burrard Inlet, courtesy of the author.

A Response from a Circle of Cedars

Dear Erin,

I read this essay as an articulation of your practices and as a call to act and manifest them into reality. I also read this writing as its own realization in the world; a story with generative power, developed in community through the telling.

I had these thoughts in mind as I sat in a gathering of cedar trees along the Burrard Inlet in Vancouver. Looking out at the water, with branches forming a kind of sanctuary above, I stared at the beauty of this northwest world. I remembered Musqueam weaver, artist, and knowledge keeper Debra Sparrow speaking  of her grandfather Ed Sparrow who told her how the Musqueam people — whose villages had been in this inlet — were forcibly removed and their home burned to the ground. That home site was gone, but the power of story, passed down through generations and then shared, now shaped my understanding of where I was. Sitting there at the base of a tree, I held that cruelty, the peace of the trees, and the longevity of her family story in my thoughts. I felt like I was also becoming-tree; keeping witness.

In your writing, I imagined who was there, the easy respect given to each person bringing their creative involvement to surface, and how content we were to be in that place, ready to go wherever these expressive paths led. Your story is part of this doing.

Versions of this event surface in my mind: open mic at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe when that nervous 16-year-old girl heads up with her worn notebook, opens the page, and the whole room breathes together listening to the journey of her words; a Jeff Buckley concert in the early ‘90s at the Sin-e Cafe as he went in and under the emotions of the song to return us all into a wider universe; Montreal’s Studio 303 and Casa del Popolo as we danced and trained and sang our way into a community that is still in touch over 20 years later; a wondrous night at Bar 169 in downtown Manhattan with an open mic and a gathering ready to share it all THAT night, with an audience (and bartender) holding us close enough that we could let loose; improvised and gorgeously intimate performances of West African and Afro-Cuban dances disguised as Monday night intermediate classes at Lezly’s Dance & Skate School and Fareta just north of Houston on Broadway; Bruckner’s Bar & Grill in the early 2000s, Pregones and BAAD! Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance always — with our combined love of ALL things Boogie Down Bronx and what was shared in that mix; the dance community in Vancouver riding their bikes in the rain to give feedback at rehearsals, posting dreams about new work online, walking into any studio, sitting on the floor, ready to open their hearts —not saying no to themselves.

Your vision is a “keeping place” for refueling and inspiring fellowship in the world. It calls for relationships that sustain and hold and call more to happen.

Thank you for reminding me,

Jane

This work was written on the traditional, ancestral and unceded Coast Salish territory of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) Nations. Thank you for allowing this uninvited guest to live on your land and enjoy these waters and abundant beauty. 

Withness, without us

We had seasons, festivals, and tours, we had work days and evening performances and opening and wrap parties. If something fell off pace, it merely got left behind. See you next cycle, try to catch up. What happened once we all disappeared together? 

The last performance I saw/managed before The Kitchen closed to the public was an open secret. The worst kept secret. Ralph Lemon staged the third iteration of his Rant performances as part of Okwui Okpokwasili and Judy Hussie-Taylor’s curated series for Danspace Project. It was a secret because the audience was meant to consciously be there. Someone wanted you there; maybe it was Ralph or another performer, maybe it was The Kitchen or Danspace. Kevin Beasley created the booming soundtrack through his own sound system that provided much more power than a small black box theater needs. Ralph, Okwui, and Samita Sinha’s voices reached over the beats. Dwayne Brown, Mariama Noguera-Devers, Stanley Gambucci, and Paul Hamilton danced in unison, and Darrell Jones stepped out from his seat in the audience for a solo. The air was humid with sweat, and the performance was followed by a lot of hugging. I was closing down the building so I let everyone linger afterwards for as long as they wanted. There was time, people didn’t feel in a rush that night. A few months later, Ralph wrote briefly on the work for MoMA’s website and lamented the luck of this occurring before we all scuttled into our apartments and hid away. Why was this particular, not quite public/not quite private performance blessed by timing, and not others? There is no trace of this performance on our website, where so much performance is now presented, because it was a secret. It was made to remain within our bodies. We didn’t know that many other future performances would be erased, but in another way, and would have to live on in our imaginary.

Rant is an iterative score filled with expressions of rage and freedom, created by Black and Brown artists in a dark space within an institution. There’s accumulation, but no peak. (Maybe it’s all peak.) I’m reading Tara’s score of performance notes as a gathering of past shared moments. We’ve fallen out of time for months now. If we can’t even remember what day it is, how can we share time? Conjuring the past has been such a comfort.

It can feel like it’s only grief and rage that bring us together now, not in the darkness of the black box, but in the hot summer sun and on our small screens that will contain us for a long while. We’ve been with ourselves for many months now. Without our routines, we can often feel like our bodies are these emptied theaters. We’re not useful. We’re not housing the senses and the other bodies that fill us up. But as Tara writes, “change is only legible in relation.” If it wasn’t clear before, universal grief doesn’t exist. Universal rage doesn’t exist. We’re beside ourselves right now. Togetherness needs to remain relative. 

Festivals and The Time They Offer

Vincent de Repentigny’s text WHAT TIME IS IT?  brought to light five key ideas on the notion of time:

1. How “the concrete experiences of our lived times often seem out of sync with the abstract character of our clock-based social time regime” and how this can perhaps lead to alienation.
2. Time on digital and online platforms as opposed to the lived experience of time.
3. The idea of being able to invent new time structures.
4. The notion of time as varying from one society and culture to the next.
5. And time experienced differently as an individual and collective.

As co-director of performing arts festival Kyoto Experiment, all five of these ideas are very timely (!) when thinking about the present and future of a contemporary international performing arts festival, especially under the current circumstances we now find ourselves in. The performing arts sector, as well as the wider arts world and beyond, is experiencing numerous cancellations and postponements. At the same time, however, theatres and festivals offering online streamings of performances are more accessible than ever. Of course, the situation has had devastating effects, but viewed in a positive light, it has also forced many to reflect on current practices and brought to the fore a number of questions. One such question concerns the timescales and frames in which we organise and produce contemporary international performing arts festivals, as well as the timescales and frames in which audiences encounter these festivals.

In a world increasingly governed by productivity and an “obsession with saving, measuring and organizing time,” Repentigny’s imaginings of “safe time” or perhaps “non-productive” or “experimental” time is no doubt more essential than ever. Perhaps a way of achieving this “non-productive” time is by first delineating the boundaries of a “safe, non-productive space” in which one by definition spends their time being non-productive. Examples of this are perhaps public spaces such as libraries and parks, but we could also extend this idea to include public theatres and festivals. When there is increasing pressure to be productive, it is essential to advocate for as much freedom as possible in terms of the space and time in which work is produced and presented. This is, of course, important for the artist as well as the audience that encounters the work. In the future, we should increasingly think about how the festival as a platform can create and offer “non-productive” space in which not only artists but also audiences can spend “non-productive” time.

Performing arts certainly has the power to teach us new ways of discerning and experiencing space and time — in this sense, the power to invent new time structures. The “traditional” format for a performing arts festival consists of the presentation of a line-up of various artists’ works. The audience buys tickets, enters the theatre at 7pm, sits down, and “watches” the work. Perhaps, however, it is the responsibility of the festival, and not only the artist, to increasingly challenge these boundaries of space and time. A performing arts festival should not merely be about offering audiences performances to passively “watch” at a certain time, but also about creating time and space for artists and audiences, as well as the wider community in which the festival situates itself, to gather, and encounter and challenge one another. A festival, unlike a theatre tied to an actual immovable space, is perhaps fertile soil for experimenting with these ideas.

With regard to time as experienced in digital or virtual spaces, the increasing number of online streamings of performances has provided space for experimentation as well as a rise for concern about how the arts sector should protect the time- and space-bound “liveness” of the performing arts. Perhaps what is needed in the future is neither a full embrace nor a rejection of the digital in the performing arts sector, but rather a recognition and experimentation with the ways that the digital can give us more access to physical reality. This would not be a substitute for the experience of watching a live performance work, but instead a kind of second platform that could be provided by the festival. As Robert Hassan proposes, the mass of information online often seems like a “digital prison of constant distraction.” However, what if festivals could offer a well curated, independent online space, not to simply stream performances, but to invite and connect audiences internationally, giving an insight into the local scene, context, community, and processes that not only surround but sustain a contemporary performing arts festival?

The future of international performing arts festivals, as well as the performing arts sector more widely, certainly has much to consider when responding to contemporary notions of time and productivity. For festivals, providing a platform that can offer time for freedom in creation, encountering, and sharing between a community of people, artists, and audiences alike is essential.

To an Imagined Theatre by Lisa Gilardino and Eva Neklyaeva, or their revelations in “the Glossary of Magical Practices, Places, and Creatures,” a mirror:

Carol Rama, anti-fascist theatre

“In my dream world, in my world of play, there’s always an animal. It’s a fantasy animal, and loving: when I was little […] grass snakes were objects of desire for me, and I put one in my drawings…. I’ve always loved objects and situations that were rejected. When I was about six I used to sleep with a frog that clung on to me. When my uncle explained to me that it clung on because it was a cold-blooded animal, I cried all day long because I thought it was an amorous relationship.” ^[1]

Carol Rama (1918–2015) was a self-developed artist who lived her life in Turin, a city well known for its witches. Rumors of magical triangles and covert pentagrams appear in its travel guidebooks. Rituals and magic are considered everyday, perhaps circling or emanating from a drain in the center of town. Black voids and impure holes appear in her collage works, staring back with disembodied eyes. The autonomy of her world — incarnated by her studio that, like a portal, opened an inter-dimensional fold and granted access to the immensity of her two-dimensional imaginary — brings into being the fundamental structure of her unmeasurable powers, her uncontainable obsessions.

Her earliest representational watercolor works began in the late 1930s and debuted in a moment when fascism was spreading throughout Europe, although Mussolini had been in power in Italy for decades prior. Rama’s first exhibition was quickly censored as obscene in 1945, curtailing her pursuit of figurative painting. For Rama, figuration consisted of many watercolor paintings populated by prosthetic-like body parts, stylish shoes, missing limbs, outstretched tongues, animated stoles, floral/laurel auras, razors, shit, fake teeth, wheelchairs, make-up, flaccid penises, snakes and eels protruding mainly from vaginas, psychiatric hospital restraints, group masturbation, etc. Rama’s work of this period is frequently described as delinquent,

Charlotte Salomon, “Life? or Theatre?”

Made between 1941 and 1942 while hiding in France, Charlotte Salomon’s suite of 784 diaristic gouache paintings with transparent text, dialogue, and musical overlays — an operatic drama based on Charlotte Salomon’s life overrun with familial abuse and suicide — also disappeared for two decades following Salomon’s death at the age of 26 in Auschwitz. In her book Charlotte Salomon and the Theatre of Memory, Griselda Pollock describes “narration as a political act,” stating that: “Leben? oder Theater? in the form it takes as a painting — spatialization and visualization — performs narration visually (and is not just a narrative)…. There is a relay between the profound undoneness of a subjective namelessness experienced by the artist who undertook her artworking to find a name by telling stories and what I am identifying as the theatre of memory that was produced to do this very thing. The work was invented to enact such a theatre of memory that would play out before the subject whom its creator might become through its making in the imagined presence of others.”^[2]

Reza Abdoh, giving birth

In his spoken introduction to the Museum of Modern Art, New York screening of film and video works by Reza Abdoh, Ron Athey condensed his remarks to a contextual description of the Los Angeles club scene in which the two artists overlapped and of the scene of cosmic rage and prolific death from which Abdoh’s work emerged. Elsewhere, as described by writer James Hannaham, Abdoh “blazed through the performance world like a comet — his career was brief, bright, mysterious, and intense. The theatre director’s major works — with his company, Dar A Luz — all appeared between 1990 and 1995, when Abdoh died of AIDS.” Hannaham goes on to describe the “theatre director/ringmaster/auteur’s” work as characterized by “actors attacking scripts that dealt audaciously, even pornographically, with vital issues like racism, homophobia, and AIDS… [with] a relentless feverishness and physical risk onstage that was often frightening….”^[3] I think Athey used the word “shouting,” as if to emphasize the sheer appropriateness of urgency expressed by Abdoh’s high volumes and intensities. The film and video works Abdoh unleashed made total sense in that world — something that historicization of his work, and of others of this generation, has perhaps forgotten.

Constantina Zavitsanos, “you and me and astrology”

“…that this world has things that double not halve, that the cut is such a smooth criminal, that love’s holographic, that touch is impossible but we do it anyway, that a bunch of things operate at our incapacity beyond translation, that capacity is so overrated, that desire is abundant — that desire is abundance, sharing doubles, that some things get bigger the more you take away like holes, debt, dependency…” ^[4]

Using access as a primary material, Constantina Zavitsanos’ exhibition L&D Motel featured an installation of infrasonic sound built into the architecture of the gallery, alongside open captions and a series of transmission holograms. Based on a score that was experienced inaudibly (through the vibrations of a ramp and video projection of open captions), L&D Motel leveled abilities to make a theatre of abundance. Zavitsanos spent a month in residence in the space leading up to it, making work but also in conversation about modes of working, temporality, bureaucracy, as well as unstructured time as a form of attending. It closed with an installment of Constantine and Tourmaline’s Weekly Weather astrological forecast, consulting the stars, together.

How to make abundant theatre, narrate politics, shout history? Maybe we should ask the witches.

[1] Carol Rama, cited in a wall label in Antibodies, curated by Helga Christoffersen and Massimiliano Gioni, New Museum, NY, 2017.

[2] Griselda Pollock, “Introduction,” Charlotte Salomon and the Theatre of Memory, Yale University Press, 2008.

[3] James Hannaham, “Reza Abdoh,” 4Columns, June 29, 2018.

[4] Constantina Zavitsanos, L&D Motel, 2019, project notes.

CONCEPT of landscape

I am a smoker. I am also a father. I do not have any outdoor space in my apartment, so I end up smoking by the front window. Admittedly, this does not fully stop smoke from getting inside the flat. But it does make me feel less guilty. We are in lockdown. Not the best time to quit smoking. We are at Week 5. At the peak, the experts say. And, at this point in the story, kids are supposed to be spreading the virus like wildfire. The window looks over a street in Brussels. In the rhythm of my addiction, I start to see these five minute breaks as short contemporary art performances. Will someone pass by? How will they be dressed? Will they have a funny walk? How drunk will they be? Are they aware that an audience is watching?

Back to reality. Most of the passers-by are homeless or refugees. Everyone else has a safe place to hide at the moment. The lockdown has made inequalities even more visible. Humans who did not manage to jump on the fast boat of capitalism have ended up stranded in the deserted city, while others managed to reach their second property on time. It’s Week 6. Suddenly priorities appear clearer than ever. For the passers-by in front of my window, it is survival: finding food, a bed, and an alternative way to create resources. Whatever that may mean. It is most certainly a performance in itself.

It is a sunny weekend. It is Week 7. Helicopters are flying over the neighborhood. Police killed another youngster. Protests erupted and I see young guys running down the street, most certainly trying to escape cops. Other audience members have joined, watching from different buildings and angles. The killing was not filmed. So protests will not spread around the world, yet. But the ground is boiling here also. The world will begin changing fast. Cursors will shift and radical ideas will be talked about as possible futures. Hopefully.

The post office at the end of the street has reopened. Clients have to wait outside in a line, respecting a 1.5 meter physical distance. This means the line stretches to my window. Suddenly the performance has become an ensemble piece. What attitude do you adopt in the line? How long will this last? Are we at Week 8 or more? Slow movement has replaced the previous catwalk-like rhythm. Soon, regular speed will return and there will be too many things happening at the same moment to be able to spot the meaningful details.

One could define the word “concept” as an abstract idea. From Week 9, I chose to look at the future as a concept and the view from my window as a landscape. Wikipedia informs me that “the character of a landscape helps define the self-image of the people who inhabit it and a sense of place that differentiates one region from other regions. It is the dynamic backdrop to people’s lives.” The backdrop is in place. The performers will arrive. Together we return to the art of living. And we will do our best to pretend we have not been transformed.

Photo courtesy of the author.

pregnant with
questions 

A city in the relative north of what is known as the United States of America. A perfectly imperfect mix of charming Italianate architecture and new builds that mirror the accepted discomfort of a place that’s often difficult to define through binary categorizations: Midwestern/Southern, urban/suburban, red/blue, Black/white. State lines only seem to register here when they’re of cultural benefit, or with regard to taxes, or jokes. How these states are separated, however, also happens to represent a stark historical twoness: Mason-Dixon.

The city, like every other, is in the midst of a quiet, confounding health crisis. This pandemic has brought a new moment into the world. That can be said at all times, of course, but this time is very new. Perhaps less a moment than an age. One that feels pregnant with questions for which there are no answers. One that is filled with absence. One that, briefly, feigns a sensation of global collectivism, whereby state energies and resources are pooled together for a clear good. Within this trauma, I dare to believe in a reconsideration of priorities, of society. For a moment, within this new moment…

And then we watch George Floyd for eight minutes and forty-six seconds. And then we learn about eight targeted gunshots into Breonna Taylor’s bed. And Ahmaud Arbery. And. And. And…

And, suddenly, I am reminded of what I don’t know, and shaken awake to an embarrassment of cultural blind spots that have offered me the privilege of expansive reimagining. What is it that I haven’t been seeing? Where do I listen harder now?[1]

Now, I see streets pulsing. Thousands gathered, masks on, in exhilarating public demonstration. Fists are in the air, stances held firm with arms akimbo. I hear a symphony of urgent calls for action, organized chants, a helicopter circling with the sound of a souped-up lawn-mower, and police sirens aimed as threatening klaxons toward the “civil-disobedient.” As this city is in protest, so is the world: New York, Seattle, London, Lisbon, Tokyo, even Bethel, Ohio.

At 11pm one humid night, with eyes on the city as the helicopter surveys and the police vans round up anyone not adhering to the new curfew mandate, I question my place in this situation. I work in the arts and, depending on with whom you’re speaking, the arts have not inherently been as focused on resolving inequality as they have been on providing experiences of commentary on the issue. These middle-ground positions are useless today, dangerous, even, with the knowledge of marginalization and cultural appropriation demanding that the past be reconciled with real steps.

And so, I ask myself: How do we distinguish responsible allyship from structural savior complexes and cultural opportunism? And how long do we allow for radical change to take within institutions, and what are the measurements? And what does an ideal organization look like, top to bottom, and how do we conjure that?

And. And. And…

I am pregnant with questions. Surely there are answers.

[1] Thank you, Amy.

After the Intermission, Acts V and VI

(Acts I – IV condensed, from the original by LJ Findlay-Walsh)

Act I

The sun filters through [the avenue of trees] and different hues dance on the tabletop and blind my eyes. I’m busy but I’ve stopped.

Act II

It’s raining; the moon casts a sheen on the surface of the table.

ACT III

The birdsong we hear reminds [me] of something; tears fill [my] eyes.

Act IV

[W]e are on that table, bare feet on that cool surface, doing that dance, all of us, at least I think we are. It feels very much like we are.

Act V: NOW

After the Before Times, after the table was a stage, it was mostly a shelter. Its still shiny surface reflected a quiet sky, where the stars had just begun to reappear. Loneliness pervaded; small damp animals scurried by (they were not afraid); there was so much birdsong.

Six months in and it’s all gotten a bit scraggly: the table is worn, the grass has grown, the birds have confidence, the sky is bluer and the stars hurt the eyes they are so bright. Sometimes loneliness slinks away. And the women stand apart from each other, their hair greyed and grown, they wear their clothes for days in a row now (no one cares). Remnants of monuments and thrones lie in rubble around the park, splashes of paint catch the moonlight.

Things have changed.

Should we try to get back to any of it? Can a map take us anywhere anymore? The roads have been repurposed, the buses are empty, everyone’s habits have changed. Where did Normal go anyway? It was never shared in the first place, so we can just let it go, right? The future feels pretty bleak right now but maybe austerity will breed a new kind of beauty.  A warmth, with hundreds of colours, letting the intentions of nature take the lead. Let’s join those attempting a return to the Way Older Normal, the one a few before the last one. Let’s help with that.

I can hear better now. I can see better too. The food isn’t as processed so I can taste and smell better. But that occasional emotional hit to the solar plexus? That’s gone, along with the lump in my throat, the brimming tears. That is what I miss. But my purpose has shifted so I’ll stand to the side. I can bring treats and a bit of the old, just enough to keep some memory connection, but nothing more.

Act VI: LATER

I’m still in the park. Fatigue and sadness are finally begetting some hope and eventual joy.

The table stays here.

This is the most liminal of moments ever: let’s glance back one last time at the night; the New Era beckons and the sun is shining.

Fruit Stand

A recent article about Nick Cave describes how the artist was motivated by the beating of Rodney King at the hands of the Los Angeles Police Department in 1992 to make his trademark sound suits, and how after the killing of George Floyd, he has been questioning his own practice and asking himself how he can do more. His new project Amends asks white people to look in the mirror and ask that same question. 

I had dinner with Nick approximately ten years ago in Seattle. If he would’ve asked me then if I cared about social justice, I would’ve answered “hell yeah,” even though my advocacy for racial equity and inclusivity at the time, and perhaps even now, could be described as more dutiful than urgent. 

Maya’s evocation of urgency and connecting it to pleasure crystalized something for me, namely: how pursuing the latter has a way of inhibiting the former. If one goes around asking, “Do I dare to eat a peach?,” perhaps they’re less likely to be concerned about people who never have such choices. Or even if they do care, they do so at normal speed. Dutifully. 

Many people in and around the arts enjoy drinks, dinner, conversation, and whatnot before and after shows with great enthusiasm. I used to rationalize these as small rituals that prepare people beforehand to experience art and process it afterwards; after 25 years working as an arts administrator, I’m not sure that art isn’t just an excuse for such pleasure-seeking, which is fine — except I question if dogged pursuits of pleasure are usually accompanied by equally fierce commitments to fighting for others to be at the table. This is what I’ve been asking when I look in the mirror. 

I think Maya recognizes this conundrum and is proposing a new set of conditions, which have been crucial all along, for experiencing pleasure through art and performance devoted to a diversity of perspectives — not just through the art or ideas being presented, but in every other way too. By who is producing and curating the experience. By who is in the audience. By who is on the board. It’s our duty — it’s my duty — to work towards Maya’s vision of the “feast” with conviction and a sense of urgency. 

July 13, 2020 

Trying to Land…

I keep circling around the question—can “success” be possible without it being achieved on the backs of others?

What are rebellious actions, now that everyone (including those who have resisted for such a long time) is being forced to rethink and “disrupt”?  

Will those who have a history of thinking outside normative ways of working be swallowed and left invisible as bigger voices and institutions “pivot” and appropriate their strategies with no consultation?

How can we be activists for those who are underrepresented, advocates for change, and continue to provoke thought when all of these actions are quickly absorbed back into a never-ending spiral of narcissism, marketing, and capitalism? 

How to get over the guilt of making or promoting your own shit when there is so much going on in the world? And how to go deeper than simply positioning your event as a fundraiser for other causes?!

I keep asking myself: are you being transgressive in a way that is contributing something new to the conversation… or are you just being an asshole?

Can we be “considerate assholes”?? Testing boundaries while simultaneously offering context and support around experiences that are potentially challenging or uncomfortable?

But what to do when all the considerations become overwhelming? And how can we reconcile with the realization that our personal ideas of freedom may be someone else’s trauma or nightmare?

Are we responsible for the fact that our decisions have real consequences and may cause harm?    

What does “safety” imply when the most important works are not “safe” experiences in the traditional sense of the word?

Can those who have the emotional capacity hold spaces where audiences and artists can be comfortable with risk, and open to the possibility of changing their minds? (This seems to be the thing folks are most scared of these days). 

Can we take more care in our invitations? Be more transparent about what is being offered, communicate why artists are being invited, and provide more clarity about the conditions while acknowledging all of the messy problematics, the feelings, and complications in the proposal?

Like peeling back the layers of an infinite onion, it’s hard to not be discouraged by the unsatisfying feeling that we are never going to get “there” —But what if we surrender to the fact that we will never arrive? That there will always be a new “there”? That it’s our job to constantly uncover every new dominance that forms and the new realizations of what is being excluded, what’s missing?

Can we be happy in this kind of work? Or is it a recipe for permanent unhappiness?

And how to support those who do not want to participate, who need to take time, who don’t want to immediately return to “normal”? 

Can we valorize this newfound sense of “not doing” as an important way of being? (and of working?)

Will all this time for reflection inspire action that will be felt both in the short and long term or will we just continue to eat our own tail?

“Scare Quotes Forever!!”

Diversity Alphabet

“As Cast” is in the past.

Black Lives Matter!

Canada Council for the Arts – Creating, Knowing, and Sharing

Don’t be the crab in my bucket, I got glass ceilings to shatter.

Every theatre has a go-to playwright who seems to be Noel Coward.

Flags are for colonizers. The only flag I wave is rainbow.

God grant me the serenity to gather safely.

How do we not have more representation on our stages?

Intimacy Coach. Communicating consent.

Just in: Indigenous Theatre.

Knock, knock. Who’s there? #MeToo.

Listen.

Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. #MMIW

#NothingAboutUsWithoutUs

Oh, I am just so tired of politely screaming into the silo that is “Diversity in the Arts.”

Protest! Protest! Protest!

Quarantimes.

Really bad theatre reviews. I miss them.

Systemic Racism is not okay anymore.

Truth and Reconciliation calls you to action.

Uhm, where’s the audience?

Virtual was never part of any Artistic Director’s 2021/2022 theatre season.

White fragility triggers whiteness.

X marks the checked box. Diversity done!

You only live once. COVID-19.

Zero fucks given to white supremacy.

Are you all right?

Mariana Arteaga @marianaarteaga · 15 h
Hi, are you all right? I really wish so.

Silverio Orduña @Silveri_O · 15 h
I’m fine… Thinking about the present and the curatorial work of fostering an aesthetic experience. I want curatorship to be accompaniment: one body side by side, bodies together that produce a shared present.

Mariana Arteaga @marianaarteaga · 15 h
I just think that since the pandemic our idea about what we call time has changed, right? I think that in our practice there has been an excess of future in the logics of creation, mobility, programming, leaving us minimal opportunities to develop a practice that is in dialogue with our present. I would ask you then, what do you think it means to be together now?

Silverio Orduña @Silveri_O · 14 h
I think generally, in order to be together, we link closeness and bodily proximity. The touch. In a context of distancing and sanitary protocols, it seems to me that the effect of energetic connection, of incorporations and exchanges produced by dance, choreography and live arts, is an alternative that can build other ways of being/making body, despite the distances.

Mariana Arteaga @marianaarteaga · 14 h
I also believe that we have to rethink ideas about space-time. What will be our approaches for collective experiences in public space? Is it a matter of expanding into space? Will the biological function of “sweating” be thought of as an ethical decision when “sweating” together? I want us to exercise curatorship from a place of care, but also from the possibility of challenging certain imposed care ethics.

Silverio Orduña @Silveri_O · 14 h
That is why it seems to me that the imposition of sanitary protocols has the possibility of transforming into choreography of affection and care—a different form of curating. In order to center care, this form of curatorship would have to regain its critical and experimental practice, which would enable it to practice this care remedy the condition of the “new normal.”. How can we transform distancing into a constellation of presences, into a flow of energy or into a new way of caressing each other?

Mariana Arteaga @marianaarteaga · 14 h
Yes, but then I think it is urgently necessary to incorporate our relationship to virtuality into this discussion about care and the critical and disruptive power of curatorship. On the one hand, the image overload experienced in these days; on the other, in a logic of being present during this pandemic, art became a palliative and a crutch of entertainment. I would like us to be less reactive and driven to produce and more able to think of a transversal curatorship which incorporates other agents, not only from the performing arts field.

Silverio Orduña @Silveri_O · 14 h
I would also like to incorporate all the knowledge that we have accumulated in our bodies, all bodies, and place it in the place it deserves. To review the collection of bodily knowledge that we have developed and appreciate the enormous meaning of walking, moving, free flowing, wherever we want.

Mariana Arteaga @marianaarteaga · 14 h
Walking together. That will be my first proposal.

What if anything is possible?

What if our home is in the theatre? What if these dark rooms have allowed us to be free from the tyranny of the mundane?  Have cleared our minds and opened our hearts?  What if these dark rooms of waiting where our friendships formed, our drinks overflowed, and our open hearts broke became suddenly dangerous? What if the way that we cared and created empathy vanished in an instant? Would we find it in a Zoom waiting room? Would we recreate it in our streets in protest marches and banners? Or would we simply crawl further into ourselves and away from one another?

What if anything is possible?

Performance lives for so many of us in the moments where we see and are seen, where we feel and are felt. We have created, we have observed, we have waited. Yet. We are, in this waiting, reckoning with the realities of when, where, and how our curated performance palaces have been blind and unfeeling—where our intentions have been wholly separate from our impact.

What if anything is possible?

What if you have never felt cared for or seen by live performance? What if our cutting-edge curation, our form-destroying festivals, our seasons of brave new work, our bridge-building concerts, have never spoken to you or about you but instead made it clear that we don’t want you around? Made it clear by the signals of our unspoken rules, our drink minimums, our ticket prices, and our inability to imagine a world that could include your story? What if that exclusion was the point? What if?

Anything is possible.

So much lost in this waiting. So much revealed. So much undone. So much planted.

What beckons us from this stage? What must we create in this present to take care of one another in a new way? Can theatre not be dragged down by its logistics, its unending waste, its determination to prioritize a singular narrative, its partnership with white supremacy? Can theatre move into a moment, a movement? Someday the curtain will rise and who we were in this present will be on full display. What did we make? For whom?  As we redefine space and time as a human collective, can we reimagine how to create a sustainable artistic community that understands how to build care for one another into the process and make that process of creation a sacred breath?

In and out. Up and down. Flexible. Necessary. Rooted in relationship.

Anything is possible.