Eugene van Erven of the Community Art Lab interviewed on 13 December 2007 the internationally renowned cultural critic Rustom Bharucha live on the internet. The subjects included a number of recent developments in the Dutch community art scene. These topics were related to Bharucha’s own work and experiences.
Bharucha particularly reflected on two current projects that the Vrede van Utrecht Community Art Lab has been researching, ‘The Opera Flat’ of YO! Opera in Utrecht and ‘In the Name of the Fathers’, a community theatre production at the father centre in The Hague directed by Marlies Hautvast.
rtsp://streams.let.uu.nl/schuurman/vredevanutrechtCAL/rustominterview.mov
The webcast interview is an initiative of the Community Art Lab (Vrede van Utrecht) in cooperation by the CIM department and the subject area Theatre of the Faculty of Humanities of Utrecht University.
Beste Com Labers,
Zeer leerzaam. Ik heb ademloos geluisterd naar het gesprek tussen Eugene en Rustom.
Ik hoop dat jullie hiermee verder gaan en kijk al uit naar het volgend interview.
Even laten rusten alvorens ik inhoudelijk ga reageren, ik hou wel van Indiers die heilige koeien schoppen. :)
Hartelijk dank.
Luc Opdebeeck
Formaat, werkplaats voor participatief drama
www.formaat.org
Wat ik erg interessant vind, is dat Bharucha erg helder in zijn analyses aangeeft dat het theater altijd een zekere machtsstructuur met zich meebrengt. Ik had een gelijkaardige spontane reactie bij de beelden van het eerste community theater-project, als Bharucha: gaan de Nederlandse theatermakers (regisseur/auteur) niet te licht over hun eigen rol, verlangens, authoriteit in wat getoond en gezegd wordt? Ik vond daarbij de discussie over monolinguisme bizonder interessant, vooral ook omdat de Nederlandse taal hier kennelijk al te onbevraagd als dominant communicatiemiddel en dus ook weer als instrument wordt ingezet in het theater. Ik vraag me af in hoeverre de gevoelens bij die taal, die wellicht voor de acteurs enorm gelaagd is, uitgelicht wordt in de voorstelling. En ik stel me daarbij ook de vraag of het ‘gebrekkige’ of anders-Nederlands daarbij niet eerder een orientalistisch effect te weeg brengt, wat de voorstelling misschien juist niet zo ‘politiek correct’ maakt als Bharachu durft te beweren.
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RESPONSE OF RUSTOM BHARUCHA:
I think the politics of language and translation are absolutely crucial in negotiating the power dynamics of any inter/intra-cultural encounter. The responsibilities of intervention increase when one is consciously working in a socio-political context where the marginality and exclusion of the participants are vital aspects of the encounter. From what I saw of the video footage–which was itself a very partial and selective rendering of the multiple dynamics of the encounter–I felt that there was a far too swift consensus that was agreed upon by the participants and the playwright/director. There was not enough questioning or debate relating to the pertinence or alternative choices of the text-not least the possibilities of countering/counter-pointing/silencing Dutch with multiple languages. In that sense, I found some of the participants’ endorsement of the text playing into ‘politically correct’ reassurances.
However, as Peter Verstraate accurately points out, the ‘broken Dutch’
actually spoken by the participants does have the potentiality to register more disjunctively. It also has the potential to complicate the politics surrounding ‘accents’, ‘imperfect speech’, and ‘enforced speech’, which, on the one hand, can have an Orientalist effect, but, on the other hand, can also call attention to the hegemonic norms of standardized theatre speech.
What matters is how we frame multiple languages, speech patterns, dictions, and accents within a critically reflexive dramaturgical context. Critical reflexivity is what matters. Let us not assume that we speak in the same tongue.
RUSTOM BHARUCHA
What bothers me is the seemingly paradoxical issue of the antagonism between the so-called mainstream theatre and community theatre. On the one hand there is the strong belief in the importance of differences. Bharucha himself said that “differences can help to bring people together”. On the other hand mainstream theatre and community theatre are not meant for each other, so to say. The professional theatre is middle class, community theatre is working class. Could it be possible to imagine or develop a view in which to bridge the gap, in special circumstances, under the recognition of the need for magic and fantasy in the theatre, to create electrifying moments or moments of disturbance, which is self evident in all great art, and so also in well made and really creative theatre?
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RESPONSE OF RUSTOM BHARUCHA:
I think there’s a utopian thrust underlying this need to bring together the different contexts of ‘mainstream theatre’ and ‘community theatre’ under the rubric of ‘magic and fantasy’ and ‘electrifying moments’, which are ’self evident in all great art.’ What if you’re not interested in making ‘great art’, whatever that means? Peter Schumann, veteran of the highly creative Bread and Puppet Theatre, has affirmed time and again that he makes ‘bad art.’ How does one assess the ‘great’, or, for that matter, the ‘bad’?
Art making has multiple functions, and some of them could be utilitarian and rather modest. Perhaps, we need to open ourselves to the recognition and shaping of multiple sets of criteria for the work that we encounter in different spaces, involving different communities. Some of these communities may not be trained in ‘art’ as such, but that need not stop them from being ‘creative’. How is this creativity articulated? Through what processes of learning? Within which time-frames? In what circumstances? These are the questions that ‘community arts’ tend to highlight, quite unlike so-called ‘mainstream art’ where the norms of ‘quality’, ‘professionalism’, ‘methods of work’ and ‘excellence’ are already in place.
One is not arguing against the upholding of critical criteria for community arts because this could lead to the worst kind of tokenism, but let us also acknowledge that these criteria need to be contextualized in very volatile, rough, and fragile sites of interaction. Let us also acknowledge that there can be ‘electrifying moments’ in community arts, but the point is that such moments have the power to totally destabilize the norms of what constitutes ‘great art’ in the first place. In this regard, I remember watching the children of sex-workers from the red-light district of Calcutta introduce themselves at the end of a dance-drama performed in an international workshop relating to HIV/AIDS. There was something ‘electrifying’ in the way those children took the microphone and spoke out to the audience. On the one hand, one could argue this is ‘not art’, but the sheer ring of those children’s voices made my hair stand on end.
While creating divides across diverse sectors between artistic and cultural practice is not always productive, as Wil Hildebrand correctly cautions, and the need for making bridges is necessary, it is equally necessary to build new vocabularies and epistemologies of cross-cultural contexts in order to respect differences through differences. Merely falling back on one’s assumptions of what constitutes ‘art’ in the first place without troubling the privileges and myopia embedded in these assumptions runs the risk of
playing into liberal complacency.
RUSTOM BHARUCHA