about black theatre

I was reading the Guardian debate on black theatre and even if it was too local for my case (I can’t really relate to British theatre) and lacked an intersectional perspective, it gave me some food for thought.

Roy Williams affirms the healthy state of black theatre in Britain, where there are different voices exploring what it means to be black in Britain. To the universalist claims that there is no black theatre because “Theatre is theatre. Nobody talks about "white theatre" when they go to see a David Hare play”, Williams responds in a meaningful way: “But then they don't need to. From box-office staff to administrators, from performers to directors, theatre is owned and controlled by white people. Anyone who isn't white is marginalised.”

The whole idea of promoting black theatre in Britain is based on the ideas “we need it to ensure we are heard” and also “"Theatre" sounds po-faced and white; "black theatre" sounds intriguing, daring”.

Tokenism is addressed in his article on these terms: “Black writers have to write about whatever they want. Write about race. Don't write about race. Just make sure your play challenges you as much as you hope it will challenge your audience. But if that audience seems more interested in defining you as a black person, rather than listening to your work, walk away. Those people are looking backwards and will take you backwards, if you let them.”

Michael McMillan writes another article on black theatre where he addresses also the importance of naming the black theatre: “ And eventually we would have heard about young writers such as Bola Agbaje and Michael Bhim, for example, irrespective of whether they're black or white – they're just talented and skilled new voices. Yet somehow the label of race seems to stick. Given our recent history, perhaps that's little surprise. Djanet, a character in Afrika Solo by the black Canadian playwright Djanet Sears, tells us in the very first words of the play: "You know, nothing exists until a white man find it." Thus it was claimed for many years that no theatre existed in Africa before Europeans arrived, even though black music, dance and humour have been intrinsic to the development of modern western entertainment.”

This argument makes me wonder how the Westerness/whiteness/patriarchy/heterosexism of theatre, music and entertainment become invisible on the way to the spectator and how artists are reproducing or challenging the colonial/imperial/dominant culture in various contexts. Because ignoring these genealogies certainly reproduce the conservatism of many artistic environments.

Peter Brook, interculturality and women

I am reading lately all these books on Brook, the famous English modernist director, and I am still puzzled by his idea of interculturality. Peter Brook’s well-known focus of intercultural theatre was dealing with East/West connections, mainly by using Asian performance elements and Indian or African narratives for his Paris-based theatre. The intercultural fantasy that he was involved with was very tricky. Gabrielle Griffin said it mildly: it “leaves intact a geopolitical imaginary that distinguishes, in a seemingly unproblematized way, between ‘them’ and ‘us’, between an ‘other’ and a ‘self’”. But on the other hand, what brings in, like in the case of Peter Brook's production of Mahabharatha, was emphasized by the actress Mallika Sarabhai which relates her acting experience in Mahabharatha to feminism:
"The turning point came with Peter Brook’s international version of the Mahabharatha where I played Draupadi. At that time a new wave of feminism was gripping the mind of the younger generation in the west. And for the first time young women were looking into feminist thought and ideology.[...] I had women of different backgrounds, black mamas from Harlem, sophisticated Sorbonne graduates, aboriginal women from the Australian outbacks—coming up to me and saying ‘why don’t we have role models like Draupadi today? She makes sense to us.’ One evening in the Paris Metro two slinkily dressed women came up to me and said, ‘we have stayed away from the feminist movement, things like “bra burning”. But today, after seeing your performance, we feel that is the kind of woman we want to be.’ I came out of the Mahabharata tour with a new perspective toward my art. I felt that if the role of one woman affected women across cultures then my advocacy and my performance had to marry."
Mahabharatha is even today probably one of the most contested Brook productions for his colonial appropriation and decontextualization of one of the most significant Indian texts. His official biographer, Michael Kustow, accused “the chorus of politically correct academics and cultural theorist attacking Brook” of demagogy, because they are not able to see the universalism of Brook’s mise-en-scene and his view on Mahabharata as one work that “carries echoes for all mankind” and is “of the greatness of the works of Shakespeare.” Even by this defense, I can clearly sense the Western standard to which the performance is referred to.
Another problematic episode in Peter Brook’s career as director is the way he depoliticized some powerful plays such as Caryl Churchill’s Far Away in a 2002 performance. David Hare, the British playwright, accused Brook of “draining plays of any specific meaning or context to a point where which became the same play – a universal hippie babbling which represents nothing but fright of commitment.” Brook responded by saying that he no longer believes in ”the value of debates, pamphlets, statements and pseudo-Brechtian speeches.” His theatrical direction for last decades is in search of something “more to life that the rational mind can grasp” with a strong influence of the spiritualist Gjurdieff’s ideas, a highly problematic approach in my opinion, by removing any social context and critical awareness for a “one-size-fits-all mysticism”. This is an important tool in maintaining and pushing a conservative view on theatre, by maintaining an oppressive idea of a forgotten tradition, none other that the colonialist privilege of a misogynist white male that conquers and exploits the feminized “oriental wisdom” (as Brook was talking on several times about his wife). In an Oedipian game, the non-Western culture becomes for Brook object of desire and exchange, a woman that can offer satisfaction as long as she becomes “maternal and domestic” (Brook talking again about his wife).

photo via flickr

learning some misogyny in English

Misogyny starts early. No wonder my male friends can't explain how words and attitudes are popping out of them. They use the ultimate excuse and argument: "this is how I was socialized." And sometimes I found myself using words or phrases that are so unthought. And they stand for so much bullshit. Yesterday I thought a lot about how we use dirty language and what all these colorful and funny expressions actually mean: homophobia, mysoginy, racism, classism, hate. Of course, the solution is not to completely delete all these words and language associations from your vocabulary but to think more about them when using. And if possible subvert them and play around their first problematic meaning. I know it takes a lot of work but that can also be fun, you can do it playfully. Because using what you learn in primary school as something impossible to change means hell. If you look at this "innocent" drawing from a children's book you might get the bigger picture. And fuck, I don't want to live in that patriarchal world. Or to make any kid believe that this is how this world functions.

thanks Bogdan for the image!

a Great War postcard

Dated 18 August 1915

more Great War postcards at greycat

staging death

In Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead there is an interesting line: "You can't act death. The fact of it is nothing to do with seeing it happen – it's not gasps and blood and falling about. It's just a man failing to reappear." Alfred Hickling uses it as a contradiction to an event at the Liverpool Shakespeare Festival last week, the so called Stage-death contest, organized by Lodestar Theatre Company. I have thought about it quite a lot, probably because I used death in most of my performances. What was the driving force for such an unconscious decision? I have to admit that death is everywhere and nowhere, one of the most used conventions in alternative theatre and one of the most life-affirming technique but the question is: what is behind it? Used as a convention, death becomes a Brechtian comment. If it is just a form of affirming life on stage, as in Judith Butler’s amateur theatre act of playing dead-of-AIDS gays, then the act in itself is full of hysterical creative energy, the dead is not actually dead, is just an identification for the living. The focus in many cases is on the impossibility of representing death, just like in Tom Stoppard comment: it is not death that we see on stage but just a form of avoiding its representation. Because we know actors are not dead: we can feel their breath and their aliveness. They are showing us something and their staged death is not in vain, it comes with a reason.
But back to the stage death contest: the basic requirement was to turn up and expire for as long as possible. The proposed scenarios included Death By Chocolate, Death By Liposuction and Death By Misadventure. Marks were awarded for overacting, self-indulgence and shoddiness of costume. I have no idea who won. And to close this post I found a photo on flickr with a theatrical sketch from Brazil where thousands of mothers loose their children to armed violence. Few of these mothers staged a performance for the Hummingbird Project in connection with the Social Communication Programme, Urban Outcries. This is from their show, staging the death of their children: