Introduction by Michael Walling (Border Crossings

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 “Buffalo” 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 fine 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 policy : I’ve known her since our days in the Platform for 1 Intercultural Europe. Her husband Dritëro I met for the first 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 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 artificial 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

Tagore in Stockholm

At the time of this meeting in Stockholm, Rani had just been appointed Project Director for the 9th World Summit 1 on Arts and Culture.

Tagore in Sligo In Sligo, the town in the West of Ireland where Border Crossings has its base, there is a bust of Tagore, close to the railway station, set on a limestone plinth directly opposite the former Pollexfen building on Wine Street. Pollexfen House was the home of William Butler Yeats’s maternal grandparents, and the bust was a gift from the Indian Embassy in 2015, to commemorate the friendship between Tagore and Sligo’s own great poet-playwright. When they met in 1912, Yeats had already founded the Abbey Theatre, and soon introduced Tagore’s play THE POST OFFICE into its repertoire. This is an early and striking example of intercultural theatre practice, based on a clear sense of common purpose between two artists from ostensibly very different backgrounds. Both Ireland and India were asserting national identities in the face of British colonisation: Tagore told Yeats that his ambition was to restore “India’s faith in herself” after “insults at the hands of the West” . This sense of 3 decolonisation through spiritual and cultural regeneration was very close to Yeats’s own position: like Tagore, he was wary of more confrontational forms of nationalism, that potentially endangered cosmopolitan exchange. The Sligo monument testifies to an interculturalism of high art, to exchanges in the salons of London, the imperial centre itself, rather than in the streets and fields of a resistant Western Ireland or West Bengal.

Yeats went on to experiment with Asian theatre forms and performers in his search for a revitalised Irish theatre that could at once assert a national identity and adopt an international perspective. Several of his plays use the Japanese Noh as a model. The most successful is probably THE DREAMING OF THE BONES (1919), which follows the Mugen Noh (夢幻能) convention of invoking ghosts and adopting shifting or simultaneous timeframes, bringing together a young revolutionary from the 1916 Dublin Rising against British rule with the spirits of Diarmaid and Dervogilla, who had invited the English into Ireland in the 12th century.

“Yes, yes, I spoke Of that most miserable, most accursed pair Who sold their country into slavery; and yet They were not wholly miserable and accursed If somebody of their race at last would say, ‘I have forgiven them’.”4

Yeats’s dialogue with Asian theatre forms and artists could be (and has been) read as a manifestation of what Daphne P. Lei has called “hegemonic intercultural theatre”, a “specific artistic genre and state of mind that combines First World capital and brainpower with Third World raw materials and labor” . But that would be reductive: it’s all too easy to equate “First 5

R.F.Foster: W.B.Yeats - A Life. 1. The Apprentice Mage. Oxford 1998. p.4703

W.B. Yeats: Collected Plays. Macmillan 1982 p.4424

Daphne P. Lei: Interruption, Intervention, Interculturalism: Robert Wilson’s HIT Productions in Taiwan. Theatre 5 Journal 6.34, 2011. pp.571-586.

World” with “white” and “Third World” with “non-white”. Yeats engaged with a world beyond the Anglo-Saxon precisely because Ireland was itself attempting to emerge from a prolonged history of colonial oppression, and needed to articulate that history in ways that could regenerate the political and cultural space and encourage healing. Nor were the cultures with which he chose to work necessarily “Third World” in the commonly understood sense of postcolonial spaces that continue to be economically oppressed: Japan was itself an imperial power. If we are to make an accusation against Yeats, it is surely not that he exploited nonWestern societies so much as he romanticised them, in an attempt to offer Ireland a postcolonial mythology of nationhood. He has, I think rightly, been critiqued for offering something disturbingly akin to a blood cult, as well as extolling a “primitive” culture pre-dating colonisation and Christianity, in a way that comes uncomfortably close to endorsing economic deprivation and injustice. But, as Denis Donoghue puts it in his Afterword to a collection of pamphlets issued by the Field Day Company : 6

“While an argument can be refuted, and a thesis undermined, a vision can only be answered by another one. I don’t think any historian’s evidence would make a difference to Yeats’s vision, or dislodge it from our minds. Only another vision, as complete as Yeats’s, could take its place. Where could one look for such a thing?”7

That was in 1985. Replying to Donoghue from a moment almost a quarter of a century on from the Good Friday agreement - after the Irish referenda on divorce, abortion and same-sex marriage, after Brexit, after the arrival of Syrian, African and Ukrainian refugees and migrants in Ireland and across Europe - my sense is that the vision now needed is not to be found in the “genius meets guru” variety of cross-cultural exchange initiated by Yeats and Tagore, but in the new interculturalism that is emerging from the pluralistic nature of contemporary social and political space. To conceive of a theatre that is multiform and various, a shared space that yields innovation through the clash of distinct viewpoints and approaches, rooted in ongoing dialogues between artists from different backgrounds, and informed by potent overlaps between friendship and disagreement: this is to propose not only a theatrical and artistic but also a cultural and democratic vision. It is about space that is profoundly shared, whether that be the stage, the auditorium, the street or the parliament house. It is about equity and justice.

The framework of a transnational European project is an ideal structure within which to explore the potential for such an intercultural theatre, in which many different, and perhaps competing voices are present. Because the European Union is itself an evolving intercultural project, it is suggestive of both the potential and the challenges that result from genuinely collaborative and collective structures, in which “vision” is not the sole responsibility of any one leader, but emerges from dialogue and consensus. In recent years, and certainly since the perceived “refugee crisis” of 2015-16, the idea of Europe as a shared space of equal collaborators has been increasingly under threat. Border controls have tightened drastically, and many countries have failed to welcome people who are migrating; whether because of war, persecution, climate, poverty or aspiration. One former member state has abandoned the European ideal completely, retreating into a bizarre amalgam of neo-imperial exceptionalism and hysterical self-pity. Others have seen the rise of a powerfully nationalist populism, in some cases to the level of government, which tends to scapegoat cultural minorities as a perceived threat to “national identity”. Even in countries that are more open to newcomers, the dominant discourse remains one of migration and cultural diversity as problems to be solved rather than opportunities to be embraced; with “integration”, even “assimilation”, being privileged, and the potential for learning from intercultural exchange being arrogantly dismissed. These developments, while made manifest in political terms, are fundamentally cultural in their roots, and so it is in the cultural and educational sectors that

Field Day was a very important theatre company, based in Derry, that toured politically aware theatre through the 6 North and South of Ireland, as well as producing discursive materials.

Alice Milléquant & Reza Rajabi in KANATA (Théâtre du Soleil) Photo: Michèle Laurent

the essential work of countering them has to be undertaken. We will not develop a Europe that is open, egalitarian, diverse and pluralistic unless we have populations who understand and embrace these values.

In order to do this, we have to develop cultural forms that demonstrate, not only in the work they present publicly but also in the process of its making and the structures of its management, the viability and desirability of the intercultural. We need the intense beauty, the magnificent newness, that arises when opposites attract and meld. We need creative processes that make manifest their own democracy, and which are open to dialogue with the multifarious communities they serve. We need cultural institutions that are not conventional hierarchies, but which exist to facilitate frank exchange and disagreement as an impetus to creativity and positive change. This is what Border Crossings meant in THE SLIGO MANIFESTO when we said that our work “is not an attempt to represent the world, but to change it” . As 8 the late Jean-Luc Godard put it:

“Realism does not mean that something real will be presented. Realism means that the process of representation will itself become real.”9

The CRE-ACTORS project is at once an exploration of possible approaches to this evolving vision, and a demonstration of it in action. It can be both at once, because its cultural vision is not based on product so much as process. Theatre, like democracy, is not a specific commodity, an object, a thing. You cannot pick up a performance, as you can a painting or a novel or a film, decide that it is property and profit by giving it monetary value. Theatre is a lived experience. It is not an object but an event. It does not exist, it happens. It shares this crucial characteristic with education (which is not the same thing as a qualification) and with true democracy (which is not the same thing as power). In CRE-ACTORS, we opened ourselves up to learn from our peers about how they approach the collective creation of intercultural performance, with each of the three theatre companies involved leading a training week on their own methodologies. We also opened ourselves to scrutiny, critique and dissent, as our dramaturgical partner The Fence facilitated processes of open evaluation and contextualisation. This e-book draws together some of what emerged from the two-year process, and offers it up for further debate, for use in other contexts, and so for change and development. As a partnership, we are also anxious to develop this collaboration further: it seems to offer us a genuine path forward at a time of deep uncertainty.

In the pages that follow, you will see accounts of the different approaches to intercultural devising offered by artists from the Théâtre du Soleil, Teatro dell’Argine and Border Crossings, together with the responses of participants to methodologies and working practices that were often very different from their own. You will also see discussions by some partners of performances made by other partners, which we offer as a taste of how the ways in which we make theatre may lead to particular kinds of result. You will see further materials that place our work in a wider context, either in relation to associated partners who shared something of their work with us, or discussions of intercultural issues that have arisen from responses to theatre projects.

One of the most significant of these debates was our online discussion about the controversy that surrounded the Théâtre du Soleil’s play KANATA, which opened at the Cartoucherie in December 2018. This piece, which was not directed by Ariane Mnouchkine but the visiting Québécois artist Robert Lepage, dealt with the history of Canadian First Nations, and was widely criticised for not including Indigenous performers or consulting with First Nations

See p. 1068

communities in Québec. During our conversation, an audience member said: “Basically the problem is that white, middle-aged men in the arts take it upon themselves to tell stories on behalf of other people.” I was reminded of this a year later, during our training week in Dublin, when, in a rare moment of tension, a local participant who was joining us for two days questioned my role as one of the leaders of the workshop, suggesting that it was not 10 appropriate for work around cross-cultural dialogue to be facilitated by “someone who looks and sounds like you.” I wasn’t able to find out any more about what they meant by this, as they refused to discuss it with me. It was fairly clear, though, that we were in the territory of identity politics, and that what was being questioned was the power relationship in the room. Inequalities between facilitators and facilitated are to some degree inevitable and even necessary in any artistic or educational project, but these can all too easily come to reflect the very hierarchies of race, culture and gender that intercultural theatre aims to question and subvert. I have some sympathy with the positions expressed by these two people. After all, when you live in a world defined by global exploitation, it’s very tempting to read every action as an expression of that paradigm. Solidarity can all too easily elide into interference and facilitation into control. But to make the assumption that this is always what is happening when white males aged over 40 attempt to engage interculturally or to make theatre is essentialising and reductive: a failure of imagination.

I do wonder whether the frequency with which this assumption is made might be partly the responsibility of those of us who teach critical approaches to understanding culture. Because so much theoretical debate has been about de-constructing artistic work and exposing ethically dubious underlying assumptions, because so much is taught in terms of being postsomething, we have come to see ourselves as positioned at the end of history, tasked with passing judgement on what has gone before. The reality, however, is that we are still very much in the process; and, while there is undeniably much that needs to be undone and critiqued, there is also so much more that needs to be achieved. Justice and equity won’t come simply because we attack what’s gone before (and what may “look and sound” like it) as unjust and inequitable. What we need to work towards is positive action and empowerment, creativity and collaboration. Hans Magnus Enzensberger said that “It is more fun to blow up a tower than to build it” , but perhaps it would be even more fun to create a whole new edifice 11 through a playful collaboration with others. The key questions would then become who those others may be, how you might engage them, and how to ensure that the work is genuinely dialogic and collaborative. In order to be truly potent, theatre needs to historicise and politicise the lived experiences on which it draws, and so to clarify that everyone, both theatre-makers and audience, is involved.

In our discussion of KANATA, Dominique Jambert said that Robert Lepage’s aim in using the Théâtre du Soleil’s ensemble to address First Nations history was “to tell the story of Canada from outside and with our eyes. New eyes.” That’s classic Brecht, of course, aiming for a detached, cold theatre of historical understanding and morally informed objectivity. But, for me, the problem is that there is no such thing as detachment in the age of globalisation. It is not the case that a group of international artists based in France are detached from the politics of Canadian colonisation. France has long been part of Canada’s colonial history. Today TOTAL (a French company) has a huge stake in the Canadian tar sands, a focus for First Nations land claims and environmental activism. All over the world, people are using that oil. We are all implicated: we are all involved. So perhaps what we should be striving towards is neither a theatre of detachment nor a theatre of lived experience, but a theatre in which everyone is constantly self-aware and self-critical, working towards a recognition of where they stand in relation to the theme, raising the consciousness of the audience through the process of raising their own.

The Dublin training was jointly led with Lucy Dunkerley. It was characteristic of the CRE-ACTORS project that no 10 workshop was led by any single director, but all were co-facilitated.

This need for a genuine cultural métissage and a space for both artistic and political experiment may account for the way in which islands became a leitmotif in the CRE-ACTORS project. Islands have often served as try-out spaces for social engineering: Ireland has long been a powerful example, and Mauritius, whose history Border Crossings addressed in THE GREAT EXPERIMENT , has been another. Lampedusa, all too conveniently placed between 12 Sicily and Tunisia, has more recently become the site of a particularly intense intercultural encounter, as dramatised by the Teatro dell’Argine in LAMPEDUSA MIRRORS . 13

It has been convincingly argued that Lampedusa was the intended setting of Shakespeare’s 1611 play THE TEMPEST . When I directed the play in India in 1995, I was keen to localise its 14 colonial concerns, both in relation to imperial history and the ongoing “coca-colonisation” by global capital. In 1999 Border Crossings presented TOUFANN, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s play by the Mauritian writer Dev Virahsawmy , re-imagining Prospero’s island as an 15 intercultural space which, as a direct result of its insular claustrophobia, pushes its inhabitants towards an oppositional rigidity in racial and cultural self-definition. Virahsawmy’s play counters this with an advocacy of intercultural miscegenation, characterised by the Creole language in which he writes. We translated it into another Creole language: English . 16 THE TEMPEST also clearly underlies the Théâtre du Soleil’s production of L’ÎLE D’OR , which 17 opened in late 2021, half way through the CRE-ACTORS project. Set on an imagined Japanese island far from the Cartoucherie, the play dramatises the world of a theatre troupe who open their space to travellers, artists who “resist the forces of evil”, and who are hit by a pandemic. A decade earlier, in LES NAUFRAGÉS DE FOL-ESPOIR, the Soleil had portrayed another shipwreck on an imaginary island, and this was one of the pieces Dominique and Vincent asked us to watch on video in preparation for their training workshop. During the work they led in Paris, an island and a shipwreck formed the basic stimulus for our improvisations. The Théâtre du Soleil often works from a classic model, and if you’re going to address questions of interculturalism and theatre, then THE TEMPEST is an obvious and fertile one to choose.

It was also the text through which, in 2011, Robert Lepage undertook a collaborative project that did involve working directly with First Nations artists. Performed outdoors on the Wendake reserve of the Huron-Wendat nation, close to Québec City, LA TEMPÊTE directly addressed the colonisation of “New France” and the ongoing resistance of First Nations. In stark contrast to most productions, Lepage’s staging of the Epilogue did not involve Prospero asking forgiveness of the audience, but instead had him speaking his apology directly to Caliban. Caliban was played by the Métis actor Marco Poulin, who was armed with an axe throughout the scene. As Melissa Poll observes:

“Here Prospero is the French and English coloniser writ large, representing colonialism’s devastating legacy, including the loss of Indigenous land, the decimation of Aboriginal populations caused by war and European diseases, the abuse endured in

12 See p. 131-3

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72pFxZYiQaU and François Matarasso: A Restless Art. Lisbon & London, 13 Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation 2019. p.176 b

For example in Caroline Rooney and ينور14 يلوراك. “Shakespeare’s Hermetic Lampedusa - ةيسمرهلاازوديبملوريبسكش: From Colonial Fantasies to the Afterlife in The Tempest.” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, no. 42 (2022): 10–38. https:// www.jstor.org/stable/27106554

See p. 132

15

Dev Virahsawmy and I categorise English as a Creole language because it is composed of words and usages from 16 a huge variety of other languages that migrated with their speakers. It has also itself morphed into many different versions of itself, for example Irish English.

Sulayman Camara, Lea Cirianni, Morro Fatty, Paolo Fronticelli, Matteo Posa, Cherno Sankareh, Costantin Cosmin Sonea, Ida Strizzi, Irene Tarozzi & Dauda Touray in LAMPEDUSA MIRRORS (Teatro dell’Argine) Photo: Luciano Paselli

residential schools and the consequent cycle of alcoholism and mistreatment faced by many Indigenous Canadians today. Spectators are prompted to see themselves exposed in this face-off and are invited to draw their own conclusions over how Caliban should proceed. It begs the questions: How should settlers be brought to account for colonialism’s devastating impacts? Where does reconciliation fit in our national future?”18

This does not sound like the work of a “white, middle-aged man” usurping First Nations’ right to tell their own story, but a sensitive artist engaged on a profound level with the political tensions in and about the space that he jointly inhabits with other cultures, working closely and collaboratively with those cultures to address and share the pressing needs of the immediate moment.

It was perhaps easier for Lepage to achieve this in the site-specific location of Wendake because he was not working with a permanent ensemble like the Théâtre du Soleil, but with a cast specifically assembled for the project, with ethnic and cultural background a key consideration. This seems to me a central theme in the cross-cultural encounter of the CREACTORS project itself, since two of the organisations involved are ensembles, while the other two are not. The Théâtre du Soleil is made up of performers from a huge range of countries, but they deliberately do not make casting choices on the basis of culture or ethnicity. Rather, as we discovered during our week in Paris, characters emerge through improvisation and are then performed by a wide range of actors as the devising process develops. The costume, the mask, determines what is put on stage, rather than the individual performer inhabiting that mask. The workshop that Dominique and Vincent led was a response to the particular theatrical space they created on the stage of the Cartoucherie, and the vast range of costumes and props (many with a flavour of Asian cultures) that were ranged along the side of the stage for us to employ. The imagination is therefore stimulated from the outside, and the cultural Other is “put on” rather than directly encountered. Hélène Cixous, the writer who works with the Soleil in their processes of collective creation, has spoken of:

“something that unglues us, that makes us lift off, that tears us from the earth, from common sense and from identification, from identity, from the self. A moment ago I said there is a change of country; at the same time there is de-selfing.”19

It is this abnegation of the self that gives the Théâtre du Soleil’s performances their blazing theatrical forms and their ability through those forms to create what Brecht called a ‘Verfremdungseffekt’ - an estrangement, a making strange, a demonstration that what we are witnessing is not normal, that things do not have to be this way.

The Teatro dell’Argine is also a permanent ensemble, but one made up entirely of white Italian artists. They are deeply aware that this marks them as representatives of the host culture, and that this is probably unavoidable for some time to come, given the structural issues that prevent Italians from migrant backgrounds entering the theatrical profession. As a result, the intercultural devising work of this company, which we experienced during our training week in Bologna, is carried out in dialogue with community groups, particularly younger people. Teatro dell’Argine work through theatre to engage with refugees and other minority groups. Sometimes this means that the non-professional status of the people performing determines the theatrical form employed. Sometimes it means that the absence of the Other has itself to be acknowledged within the performance. An example of this would be LA LUCE INTORNO (The Light Around: 2021) , which related the true story of a young migrant from Africa, but 20

Melissa Poll: Robert Lepage’s Scenographic Dramaturgy. Switzerland, Palgrave Macmillan 2018. pp.136-718

Eric Prenowitz(ed): Selected Plays of Hélène Cixous. London, Routledge 2004. p.519

was performed as a solo piece by Micaela Casalboni. Her own story, as a theatre-maker engaging with this material, became a key part of the performance too. To return to Godard: the process of representation in itself became real, an artistic intervention in public space.

Border Crossings’ 2020 devised play THE GREAT EXPERIMENT also dramatised the process of 21 its own creation. Here, however, the casting was more directly reflective of the intercultural identity politics, with Mauritian, Scottish, and both white and black Irish performers representing their own cultural identities and creating their own ‘characters’. The training workshop in Dublin explored how we approach devising which draws directly off the cultural differences between the people in the room. Of course, we can only do that because we are not a permanent ensemble: we bring together a particular group of artists to make a particular piece happen. This is the norm in Ireland, America and the UK, but it is definitely not the norm in some other parts of Europe, where commendable collective structures and job security prevail. A key element in understanding the differences between the partners’ approaches is this structural consideration.

Our fourth partner, The Fence, is not a theatre-making organisation at all, but a dramaturgical network, based in Sweden while operating throughout Europe and indeed beyond. I’ve felt deeply grateful for this distinct, detached and questioning presence throughout the project, and particularly now as we attempt to analyse and evaluate what occurred and to explore how we might respond and develop. It was both moving and empowering to see how the participants who had attended the training workshops expressed in their reports a desire to continue collaborating, a sense that the partnership was potentially offering far more than any one partner might achieve alone. We are beginning to explore what an intercultural collective creation might be if it is generated using a similar networked approach to that of The Fence and of the CRE-ACTORS partnership itself. What happens if direction and leadership are devolved, with different partners shouldering responsibility for different sections of a project? How might that open up deeper potential for intercultural exchange, and create performances that, because their process is made real, proffer models for societal change?

We are no longer separate islands, but are becoming an interdependent archipelago of the kind envisioned by the Martiniquais poet and playwright Édouard Glissant: connected rather than divided by our borders, responding together to the rising and falling of the tides that bind us. Basing his ideas on the Caribbean with its history of colonisation and enslavement, Glissant speaks of a utopian potential in this multilingual and hybrid archipelago, which exists precisely because of the shared experience of trauma, the ultimate “element of exchange” between people. The model can be applied to Europe too: after all, the European Union is at its heart a response to the trauma of Nazism and the Second World War, and was born in the thick of the decolonisation processes which followed that conflict. Thinking of Europe and its relationship to the wider world, Glissant rejects the division of space, property and patrimony as a basis for global ordering, and instead advocates a “tout-monde”: a shared space that emerges from multilingualism and interculturalism through poetry and performance and belongs to all. It is a territory emerging from what has been lost, an open boat, sailing through the storm of history and holding all humanity on board . 22

One final thought as to why this project emerged in the form it did. It happened during the Covid-19 pandemic.

See p.131-321

Édouard Glissant: “The Open Boat” in The Poetics of Relation (1990) trans. Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor, University of 22 Michigan Press 1997.

When we first planned our two-year collaboration it was early 2020, and it seemed almost impossible that what we were suggesting would ever happen. Travel, theatre, even physical meetings were all prevented by the need to contain the virus. As the project unfolded, there were constant setbacks as a result of new waves and new lockdowns. In late 2021, there was a rush of infection across the Théâtre du Soleil company. Even in the second half of 2022, people were getting infected and plans were having to alter. But somehow we did it. We met in person and we worked together as living bodies in physical space. We spoke, we sang, we laughed, and in all of these things we celebrated breath. Breath is life. Breath is spirit. In all of the CRE-ACTORS workshops there was a great sense of euphoria, of relief, of freedom and celebration. Creativity, humanity, was no longer confined. Simply to gather came to feel like a revolutionary action.

This did not mean, however, that the pandemic was simply forgotten in our work. Nicola Bonazzi spoke often as the CRE-ACTORS training weeks as a “holiday” from the everyday: but he also acknowledged that this too was an attribute of the Covid lockdown:

“One of the proposed exercises concerns our relationship with the lockdown. That too was a period of suspension. A difficult, a dramatic one. But some say it wasn’t that bad. Because it gave the opportunity to stop, not to be swallowed up by haste, by the race. And now we are here, in another suspension, decided by us this time: a suspension in which we take the time to play. To play together. The suspended time of the game is the thing I feel the most in these five days. With the rediscovery (every time it seems like a new thing) of the wonder of living this suspension with others. A holiday. And after all, doesn’t the term “vacation” derive from the Latin “vacare”, that is, “to miss”? Theatre = empty = vacation. Theatre is a vacation. In short, in these five days I have been on vacation. But it has also been five full days... And so what? And so, I filled my vacation with discoveries.”

When “normal life” was suspended, we were forced to question why. The spreading of the virus to humans was the result of our having destroyed the natural habitats of other animals, and its spreading around the planet was the result of globalisation with its constant movement of people and goods. Faced with the consequences of our actions, and aware that this was a smaller version of the climate catastrophe that is to come, we were compelled to re-think structures and approaches to living and working, including theatre. We became more aware of how crucial the “excluded” were: the “essential workers” going about the business of sustaining life while life was on hold were not bankers, accountants or performers but food pickers, shelf stackers and care workers. We might have been confined to our homes but we could still order pizza. With that awareness there came an understanding of the need to consider the entire planet and the whole of humanity in our thinking, a sense of the deep injustice that the globalised world makes manifest in its cities and its fields, a desire for cultural and spiritual renewal.

Maybe, in the aftermath of the pandemic, we can begin to move away from the idea that the intercultural, the migrant, is somehow a problem or a threat to “us”, and instead to recognise our common need for justice and humanity.

At the end of our discussion LEPAGE AU SOLEIL, Innu writer Maya Cousineau Mollen said how pleased and relieved she was that the controversy was being discussed calmly. Previous

debates had been much more acrimonious and confrontational. “It was like a challenge, where you have to choose: you are with me or against me. I hope that with time people will calm down and see things in a more philosophical way.”

In Bologna, as Nicola recalls, we were asked to use our memories of lockdown as a stimulus for creativity. There are several of these “umbrella stories” in this e-book, and we’d like to invite you to join us in hearing them as intimate performances, the sharing of personal experiences that have wider resonance and social meaning. I wasn’t specifically remembering Maya’s call for “a more philosophical way” when I wrote my umbrella story, but I find a synergy between what we each express.

Here it is.

Sligo October 2022

It was the moment when the world said “Stop. You’ve all gone mad. You need this time. Slow down. Adjust. Re-calibrate. Turn inward. Ask what you have done.”

Nature came back.

In a London kitchen sunlight penetrated the stained glass and the feeling of the world shifted In the West of Ireland candles were lit for the suffering, reflected in disco balls In Chile a huge TV was never used In Dublin a TV was always on In Brazil the beach was not there In Paris the windows opened onto gardens and scaffolding Orchestras marched through the corridors of

Chiswick In Bologna the piles of laundry multiplied while a huge fish hung on a bedroom wall And in fair Verona, a girl with the name of a star opened her grandfather’s book of philosophy.