INTRODUCTION by Michael Walling (Border Crossings) It’s 6th September 2022, and we’re in Stockholm for a CRE-ACTORS project meeting. After a day’s work at the Riksteatern, we go for dinner in an Indian restaurant. That in itself used to be considered an inspiring intercultural experience: in today’s Europe it has become so commonplace that an “authentic” Swedish meal would probably seem more “exotic”. On the restaurant wall, silkscreen printed like a mass-produced Warhol celebrity, is the face of the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore. He wasn’t personally present in this city in 1913 to receive his Nobel Prize, but he was feted when he did come in 1921 and 1926. I tell Edward “Bu alo” Bromberg, our wonderfully attentive host from The Fence, that Nisha, my wife, studied at the University founded by Tagore, Visva-Bharati in Santiniketan. Five years of ne art, taught under the trees of West Bengal. “Wow” he replies - in the measured American drawl that hints at his hippy past with The Living Theatre during the 1970s - “One of my best friends lives in Santiniketan. Rani and Dritëro have friends there too.” Rani Kasapi, who is Swedish with Iranian heritage, works in cultural policy1: I’ve known her since our days in the Platform for Intercultural Europe. Her husband Dritëro I met for the rst time today: he’s Artistic Director of the Riksteatern. “Oh yes” says Rani, “we love Santiniketan”. It’s another one of the many moments of global synchronicity that have characterised the CRE-ACTORS journey.
Tagore in Stockholm
Tagore looks down from the wall: poet, playwright, painter, philosopher, politician, prizewinner and poster-boy. 75 years after India’s independence, he stands here as witness to new waves of global migration, to the paranoid strengthening of arti cial borders, to the revival of imperial pasts in globalised systems of exploitation, to the interpenetration of economies, languages and cultures. “When on this Earth I cast my eyes, great multitudes I see there moving with tumult, along diverse paths in many a group, from age to age, urged by mankind’s daily need in life, and in death….. Sorrows and joys unceasing blend in chant raising the mighty hymn of life. On the ruins of hundreds of empires, they go on working.”2 1
At the time of this meeting in Stockholm, Rani had just been appointed Project Director for the 9th World Summit on Arts and Culture. Rabindranath Tagore: Poems. No. 121. Kolkota 1942.
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