Tuesday 8 December 2009

BerlinLondonKampalaMinsk

Four Writers, Four Cities: Collaborative Writing for Performance

BerlinLondonKampalaMinsk is a collaborative project between four playwrights - David Lindemann (Berlin), Andrei Kureichyk (Minsk), Charles Mulekwa (Kampala) and Gabriel Gbadamosi (London) – to develop and write a play for production in four cities which draws on shared research and experience of our different performance cultures and contexts. The project emerged from The Fence, a network of European playwrights established in 2003 and developed through a series of twice-yearly meetings and exchanges at theatre festivals and events across Europe. Curated by writernet, of which I was Chair, the network has instigated a series of international collaborations aimed at remodelling writer/translator exchanges and exploring both common ground and structural differences in rethinking the role of the playwright in our culturally diverse societies.

The objective of BerlinLondonKampalaMinsk is to rethink our cultural diversity in terms of cultural mobility: to facilitate the playwrights in working internationally; to foster the relationships between the playwrights so as to enable closer forms of collaboration in relation to writing, translation and production; and to explore both the multi-cultural and international contexts in which we work with the aim of finding innovative solutions and approaches to collaboratively writing within and across cultures. Our method is to visit each of our four cities in turn with our domestic ‘host’ guiding the research by disclosing how existing performance practice is embedded in the context of the ‘city’ and also asking what strategies they themselves use to make work in that context. All four writers generate material for the performance by writing pieces of work in response to each of the four cities, while making adjustments to our working methods through discussion, practice and critical reflection.

Presentation of ‘BerlinLondonKampalaMinsk: Four Writers, Four Cities’ 5-7pm, Friday, 5 June, Goldsmith, University of London

As a result of an informal conversation in 2005, four playwrights have embarked on a journey together to write a play or performance piece, discovering each other’s cultures and approaches to theatre along the way. They meet in each other’s cities, talk to leading theatre makers there and explore why and how each playwright writes for performance.

‘The play’s the thing’ – but the practical question of how four established playwrights from different cultures work together puts into perspective a wider set of questions about intercultural dialogue: Why attempt it? What have they discovered? About themselves as well as the others? What connects them across their differences? And what sort of production will this literally cosmopolitan play become?

On Friday 5th June, the Harold Pinter Centre will be hosting an opportunity to find out what has been achieved so far and about the personal and practical challenges involved. Two of the playwrights, David Lindemann (winner of the Stückemarkt, Berlin Theatertreffen) and Gabriel Gbadamosi (the Pinter Centre’s AHRC Creative Fellow) together with dramaturg/administrator Terry Ezra will be talking about and reading fragments of the playwrights’ work, illustrated by video footage and photographs.

Afterwards there will be the opportunity to talk to the playwrights directly. If you would like to attend this event or to be kept up to date with developments in the project, please email terryezra@hotmail.com.

See video recordings of the discussion and the trailer for BerlinLondonKampalaMinsk: FourWriters/FourCities.

Two Reflections on the Process of Collaborative Writing for Performance:
BerlinLondonKampalaMinsk - FourWriters/FourCities, 5 June 2009 , Goldsmiths

Gabriel Gbadamosi: What Are We Doing Here?

Four writers, four cities, one play. In the course of this project, three children have been born: Gleb, Iola and Caspar.

We’re cooking: This is slow food.

We’ve been in London, then Minsk, and last in Berlin. Gleb was ill after a visit to Cuba so Andrei took part in video conferencing on the Berlin leg.

Kampala is to come.

What are we doing? Getting to know each other. How we think. Working out what it’s like for the other writers operating in their own cities. Putting ourselves in each other’s shoes. Learning.

If nothing else, learning.

On the London leg, among other things, I took the writers to a dress rehearsal of Richard III at the RSC, supper with the literary manager – and Shakespeare’s grave: English theatre is dead. And yet, it lives.

I took them to a Bronze Age burial tomb, the enormous shape of a fish, on the hills in the centre of England above Winchcombe. There’s even a hollowed out chamber to sit in on a visit, 4000 years later. Those people came by sea; they’re still on the move in the belly of the whale; where are they going?

Trying to give the other writers my sense of place, the place in which I happen to have been born, works best by showing them its art, its age, its strangeness. Land art – henges, barrows, churches – has this to tell us: take your time, take the space.

David feels dead and buried before we start…

What’s it like when we come to write? At first, like horses shying at fences. Pull back and go again. Each of us writes in response to place, people, and circulates the text for the next person to revise as dramaturg. Very sensible, but there’s something else at work: like two positive or two negative poles of a magnet brought together…

There’s resistance… and, by turns, compulsion. We’re compelled by the holy grail of the project – to produce a play which could represent a meeting of minds, an overview of our encounters with other cultures, cities, peoples.

What will it be? A conspiracy of writers? A merging of minds? A polyphony of voices? A clash of styles? A convergence of compromise? Do we have to be bound by dependence on our own cultures and languages, or can we break out? Become and create something else?

We throw it out to the people we meet… What should we be thinking about for our project?

In Minsk, we meet University students, ranged in their packed classroom… eager for any connection to something outside. ‘Germany ? London ? Africa ? Yes! And please, tell us, what is the same and what is different?’

Sameness and difference… Is that what connects us? Our differences are visible, outward, occasionally a little edgy; how are we the same?

I have an edgy conversation with Andrei: when he dies, and dies young, he says, he wants to have written and left behind a library of books. I point out that Charles, too, thinks he’ll die young but he’s older and running out of time. And anyway I question the wisdom of spending your life building a mausoleum. He says he doesn’t want the writing you can find in newspapers, his writing is about the soul.

Charles launches an internal email coup: I as the instigator of the project have to do some leading… Everyone is ready to write, how should we start?

We’re on the scent of something, like greyhounds. Perhaps we should be a bit competitive? My scene, your scene, his scene… And why, by the way, are we all blokes?

That’s my fault. I asked people whose minds intrigued me, who were different from me, thinking only of our geographical and cultural distribution: one African, two European, one Irish-Nigerian; everybody spoke English; each coming from a strong theatre culture… Women might have cut through a lot of the bullshit.

But maybe there’s a parallel project, of four women writers? Or one where gender is not an issue? Or it is the issue, and men and woman confront it? Is our project about men? Is that how we’re the same?

I decide we’re a travelling circus. Our mobility as artists and writers is a rationale for me of the project. Our theme is ceaseless, restless movement. How to bring the diversity of our acts to bear on writing to our increasingly, technologically globalised society?

Even in mono-cultural Minsk, two languages – Russian and Belarusian – secretly vie for space… The title of one of David’s plays is Kuala Lumpur, it’s in German, I can’t read it. Charles, who I met in Kampala, is at University in the States… I am an Irish Nigerian Englishman born into the cultural diversity of South London.

Ours is an Odyssey… Our protagonist is Odysseus. I ask everyone to take an episode to reflect on our own cities.

Andrei takes Circe and is writing about love – because he argues that Belarusians have an emotional problem; they make even political choices on the basis of their emotions and not reason.

Charles takes The Slaying of the Suitors – after five years in the US, a new generation of Ugandan writers have taken his place. How does an African émigré return home after being away in America? Charles doesn’t accept this thesis and won’t yet reveal what he intends.

I take Cyclops – not because our prime minister has one eye, but because we as a country in the midst of financial and political crisis are fearful and can’t see what’s coming around the corner; fear can blind you.

David s writing The Sirens – and not just because as a German your hands are tied and you can’t react whatever you feel to the Israeli bombing of Gaza. How can a new generation of Germans, emerging from the division of their own country, face the world without feeling strapped to the mast of Germany’s history?

It’s slow work… We’re on a journey. Wherever it’s taking us, can that still be described as home?

And what does this performance look like? If it doesn’t belong to any one place, can it capture the belonging to movement?

David Lindemann: We Are Not All Going To Arrive At The Same Point

Gabriel said: this is slow food. Yes it is.

But food, the culture of food, has different levels.

One thing is to buy the ingredients, find a good recipe or invent something new, but in any case to follow the basic rules of cooking. In the end you may have a proper meal, be it English, African, Belarusian or German. You will find somebody who likes this in each of the places. Like a well made play: it will find its audience somewhere. But the significance of a well made play is limited.

This is not what we are doing, and besides the fact that our meal is cross-kitchen we have to keep in mind that the culture of food contains more than cooking and eating. It’s always about meaning. Every culture is about meaning and the constant production of meaning.

I remember us visiting a Nigerian restaurant in London.

Eating with fingers, spicy food.

A man in a black suit sits next to us. He is, as Gabriel tells us later, from Nigeria, and this obviously is his lunch break. He tells Gabriel in Nigerian language [pidgin] that we are doing it good: he means eating.

Who is he to judge what we are doing?

Why does he not say: nice shirt? Or: You have to wear a black suit like mine in this restaurant, or: Interesting subject, what you are talking about?

This restaurant is Nigerian ground, like an embassy, and Gabriel has to take over the role of the diplomat. He is translating. And he is pleased, seems to be.

The man in the black suit works like an audience.

You cannot know what impression the audience has.

What meaning do you produce by adopting a cultural practice which is not yours?

How to find a common language to put the difference into words?

To say, this food is spicy, or, this food is hot, may not mean anything in a culture of food in which everything is hot.

Like in theatre: this is a political play, a philosophical play, discursive or whatever each person imagines. To say, a play written by Andrei is about the Russian soul, doesn’t mean anything: every Russian play is about the Russian soul, according to him.

We talk about different things even if we think we talk about the same thing.

That is an outcome of our project. We are working on the impossible. We are not all going to arrive at the same point but somehow cross each other in the dark.

This is our task, to make the most out of this situation.

Not to write the most meaningful play, because we cannot control meaning.

Our diversity is our significance.

*

Dramaturg, HYDROPONIC


Hydroponic developed as an artist-centred project aimed at broadening the forms of dramaturgical support available to culturally diverse playwrights and performance artists. Based at South Street, Reading and funded by Reading Borough Council and the Arts Council, South East, the programme of work was devised and delivered by myself as dramaturg in collaboration with writernet.

Gabriel Gbadamosi - AHRC Creative and Performing Arts Fellowship Projects

Rethinking how work can be created and developed on its own terms, independently of the commissioning process, Hydroponic began by modelling new developmental processes and routes to production for culturally diverse artists. The programme fostered

  • peer-to-peer learning among participating artists
  • the strengthening of work through sustained critical engagement
  • exposure to wider theoretical and practical approaches to the craft of playmaking
  • input from a wide range of industry professionals

Performance workshops and ultimately production were made an integral part of the development process, integrating artists into the industry and promoting effective routes to production.

In the first phase of Hydroponic,four playwrights were commissioned to take a play from initial concept to first draft. Provided with analytical tools to reflect on their process and enable continual revision in group and one-to-one sessions, they engaged with input from industry professionals, a curated programme of master-classes and an intensive floor-based dramaturgical process. The four plays showcased through public readings at South Street, Reading and at Soho Theatre were Four Seasons by Linda Brogan, Thirteen Months by Dawn Garrigan, Roscoe Powell by Anita Franklin and Shah Mat by Nirjay Mahindru. All four writers took risks and were innovative in their practice, with Linda Brogan, for example, going on to develop her use of live action and puppetry in her next play, Black Crows (Clean Break, 2007).

Gabriel Gbadamosi - AHRC Creative and Performing Arts Fellowship Projects A second phase of Hydroponic shifted to providing one-to-one dramaturgical support for a wider range of play-makers, and enabling production as the active element of learning and development. Rap poet Jonzi D and dancer Jane Sekonya’s Ivan was produced at Sadler’s Wells (2006), David Hermanstein’s Safe at the West Yorkshire Playhouse (2007), Dipo Agboluaje's For One Night Only and Rukhsana Ahmad’s Letting Go at the Oval House (2008), and Ronald Fraser-Munroe’s The Resident at South Street (2009).

The strong outcomes of Hydroponic lay in supplying artists with the critical tools to trust in their own practice.

The Fence/JANUS


Gabriel Gbadamosi - AHRC Creative and Performing Arts Fellowship Projects

The Fence is a network of European playwrights and new writing facilitators set up in 2003 and curated by writernet of which I was Chair. The network has developed through a series of twice-yearly meetings at theatre festivals and events across Europe with a focus on rethinking cultural diversity in terms of cultural mobility.

In fostering relationships between playwrights and facilitating them to work across cultures, The Fence has created a series of international collaborations, including Acts of Translation, a series of exchanges between playwrights in Paris and London exploring common ground and structural differences in order to rethink the role of the playwright in our culturally diverse societies, and the experimental, collaborative writing project, BerlinLondonKampalaMinsk.

A further project, JANUS, was an international investigation into the mobility of playwrights and playwriting conducted by The Fence. Sixteen plays from emerging and established playwrights drawn from across Europe were translated in close collaboration with fellow playwrights and staged at theatre festivals in Finland, Austria and the UK during meetings of The Fence with the support of the West Yorkshire Playhouse (UK), Tampere Theatre Festival (Finland), Uni-T (Austria) and Theater Instituut Nederland (Holland).

Gabriel Gbadamosi - AHRC Creative and Performing Arts Fellowship Projects

Documentation of the project was published in JANUS European New Writing in Translation by Alumnus (2007) with an introduction in which I outlined the critical concerns and ethos of The Fence together with the specific aims of our JANUS project.

Will I Pass?

Crossing by train from Belarus to Lithuania, from one round of guards and documents and checks along the fenced-in miles of track to the next stop of dogs and uniforms and questions, something happened to the subdued voices of the people in my compartment: they stopped. Silence came in through the open windows. It entered as palpably as the coolness of the night coming on, the rhythm of the rail settling down once more into its long haul, the look of the landscapes sliding backwards. It could be heard, and you could see it. Or was it because, speaking no language that left with me from Minsk or linked to Vilnius, I heard the silence of papers, travel passes, permits rustled and re-evaluated, and saw in the faces a silent, unspoken, underlying anxiety of travellers at the prospect of borders – Will I pass?

I’ve been passing as a European in Africa and an African in Europe a long time. That I look different – an outward sign, difficult to read, of a stranger, someone you don’t know – has meant I’ve been able to use visible difference as a cloak under which to pass as invisibly as I can about my task, as a writer, of silent translation – I am, like you, someone who falls silent at borders.

The legendary Polish writer, Ryszard Kapuścińsky, who was born near Minsk before Poland was translated westward by the Second World War, spoke of this silence on approaching the border areas of his own country at a time when the Cold War and its Iron Curtain had divided Europe into estranged and opposing camps:

… how silent the border zone was. This mystery and quiet attracted and intrigued me. I was tempted to see what lay beyond, on the other side. I wondered what one experiences when one crosses the border. What one feels? What does one think? It must be a moment of great emotion, agitation, tension. What is it like, on the other side? It must certainly be – different. But what does “different” mean? What does it look like? What does it resemble? Maybe it resembles nothing that I know, and thus is inconceivable, unimaginable? ... I wanted only one thing – the moment, the act, the simple fact of crossing the border.
(Ryszard Kapuścińsky, Travels with Herodotus, Penguin Allen Lane, 2007, p.9)

The borders of Europe changed again after 1989, when East Germans invaded Czechoslovakia to escape through to the West and brought down the Berlin Wall by voting with their feet. In a sudden burst of renewal, people started to move – crossing borders, talking to each other, informing each other in new ways. Silence was no longer an option in the economic and social revolution of digitalisation that followed. Conversations in every direction imaginable became possible. Europe was on speaking terms with itself again. But borders have a way of retrenching themselves (as many sprang up as disappeared), and new questions arose about the political, economic and social project of European integration: What are the borders of Europe? Is Europe a good idea? Do I have any say what happens? Who are we in this Europe with?

I was Chair of writernet when it organised and launched The Fence, a network of European playwrights and facilitators which met regularly to ask these questions and foster those new conversations. We were interrogating together the idea of a common European future as artists whose medium – the social space of theatre – most directly focused its challenges. Our chosen themes of cultural diversity and the mobility of the artist were played out through a process of meeting together in different European cities – cross a border and you experience them for yourself. Once playwrights from across Europe (and from outside Europe) are talking and collaborating with each other, where will it end?

Out of this heady mix of informal meetings, the building of relationships, visits to European theatre festivals and exchanges of thinking about our practice arose the desire to directly experience one another’s work. The issue of translation arose, and in response to it came the idea that as playwrights we could be the translators and adaptors of one another’s plays. Playwright to playwright we could become creative collaborators in spiriting our plays across the borders of language and cultural context, giving them new lives that reflected the inter-connectedness of ours. Rather than thinking of translation as a mechanism for circulating products in the form of play texts, our focus was on the movement of people. The resulting project was devised to make the act of translation one which treated both writers as whole artists possessed of their own social, cultural and theatrical contexts, and one which would produce work which looked both ways – the Janus project. Theatres and festivals in Finland, Austria, the Netherlands and the UK became host to meetings of The Fence in which the experiences of the Janus translations unfolded as rehearsed readings, discussions and feedback from the playwrights. What happened when they met? What did they discover? What was lost in translation? What was gained in the exchange?

One writer describes himself has having ‘lent’ his voice to the playwright he was translating, a situation in which he was effectively providing a ‘visa’ through an act of ‘ventriloquism’ for it to pass to a new audience. In reaching for metaphors to capture the experience he finds a conspiracy of writers akin to people-smuggling – if lending someone a visa and speaking for them at immigration does describe something of the way identity, voice and belonging are policed in our theatre cultures. Another writer describes her collaboration as having involved her as one of ‘two mothers nurturing the same baby’ – a domestic situation which appears to challenge orthodoxy, but not if we reflect on the role of the wet nurse. Have we lost sight of other approaches to creativity in the nurturing of our theatre cultures? The insights contained in this book’s account of the Janus project are open to revision and reflection on the part of all its participants and the reader who encounters the project here.

For me, as a participant in The Fence, the Janus project represents a move away from the idea of translation as an equivalent of the theatrical ‘quick change’. Translation now involves a slower, more collaborative and thoughtful exchange of clothes, fabrics, feels, customs, costumes, identities and possibilities between the players. The travesty is no longer a bad translation, but the deliberate strategy – the temporal drag of two playwrights focused on the process of one play becoming naturalised in another language, theatre culture and place than the one that gave it birth. And it lies in the moment, the act, the simple fact of crossing the border.

Gabriel Gbadamosi, Introduction, JANUS European New Writing In Translation (Alumnus, 2007)

Presenter, Night Waves, BBC Radio 3


Night Waves is the BBC’s flagship arts and ideas programme on Radio3. As a freelance presenter for the programme (Sept. 2006 - July 2008), I interviewed a wide range of writers, artists and critics on issues of contemporary performance practice for a national audience. Archived at the BBC, these conversations were informed by my practice and research in contemporary cross-cultural performance and engaged themes as diverse as the influence of European theatre on British playwriting, African responses to Brecht and the impact of new media on performance.

Guests included, Suzan-Lori Parks , Augusto Boal, Bonny Greer, David Edgar, Alan Bleasdale, Michael Billington, Shelagh Stephenson, Wole Soyinka, David Farr, Tom Morris, Aleks Sierz, Michael Frayn, Maria Delgado, Simon Stephens, Richard Bean, Gary Taylor, Felix Cross, Peter Hall, Susannah Clapp and Bill Viola.

Oga’s Ark

Oga’s Ark

Dramaturgical work on the interaction of European and African performance practices in my play, Oga’s Ark, began in April 2008 with Debbie Seymour as dramaturg and director, and culminated in a week-long exploratory workshop with actors in Studio 3, Goldsmiths College (15-19 Sept, 2008), involving mask work by Sue Dacre, music by Ayo Thomas, dance by Peter Badejo and voice work by Claudette Williams. A workshop performance was held on 19 Sept, 2008 for an invited industry audience and departmental colleagues followed by discussion of modes of transcultural performance in the African diaspora and their impact on British theatre practice.

Oga’s Ark is a play which explores the failure of the state and the fate of its actors. Following the attempts of a theatrical troupe after their bus has crashed to improvise a new performance of George Orwell’s satire on Stalinism, Animal Farm, their use of African masks to compensate for the drastically reduced cast size implicitly links failed states in Africa to the collapse of the communist state in Eastern Europe.

A post-modern mosaic of African and diasporic voices, concerns and performance idioms is threaded with consciously recycled Western/European elements, replaying and subverting ideas of self and other. For example, the suggested recycling of masks from Disney’s Lion King to serve an improvised African masquerade performance.

The play explores ways in which an ostensibly African performance can be played to European audiences so as to collapse illusions of distance and difference. The testing and development of Oga’s Ark across borders, in different languages and cultural contexts, helped to probe alternative approaches and responses to the play and establish the terms of its transcultural as well as its local significance within each culture.

The play was given a rehearsed reading in Russian translation at the Lubimovka Playwrights’ Festival in Moscow (2004) and published in Bulgarian in Homo Ludens (Sofia, 2005). A rehearsed reading with Scottish actors was held at the Glasgow Citizens Theatre (2005) and dramaturgical work with mask, dance and African performers culminated in a workshop production at Goldsmiths College (2008).

Response to the play in Russia was deeply divided between acceptance of the play as relevant to Russian experience (“It’s about us”, Maria Kozlovskaya, translator) and rejection of its subversion of the distinction of self and other (“The play is bright, hot, foreign and un-Christian”, Elena Gremina, dramaturg).

In Bulgaria, where publication was accompanied by a workshop-seminar at the Varna International Theatre Festival (2005), the play was accepted and understood in terms of Bulgaria’s historical multi-culturalism and the post-modern.

The response of both actors and audience at the Glasgow Citizens’ Theatre, Scotland revolved around issues concerning the ownership of culture (Scottish actors taking ‘black’ roles) and the impact of a state-promoted, devolutionary nationalism on Scottish identity politics. Political discussion appeared to mask an anxiety about how to frame the play’s demands: a black play, a Scottish play, or a play about people?

Use of an African and black diasporic cast at Goldsmiths initially threw the London audience into thinking of Oga’s Ark as a trans-national ‘black’ play. Discussion focused on the play’s exploration of transcultural performance – its multivalent possibilities as a play in Eastern Europe, Africa and Britain – and particularly its introduction of modes of transcultural performance from the African diaspora to a British context.

Download a poster of the event (pdf).

BME Theatre in the 21st Century?


[Lead article, Published in PROMPT Issue 42, Theatrical Management Association, October 2006]

Waiting for us, the practitioners, to change it, the Arts Council England uses the term BME (Black Minority Ethnic) to describe the creative work of artists originating from Africa, the Caribbean, Asia and East Asia. Further, BME is often contracted to, and used interchangeably with, the single word Black. You can be Black as Japanese and Minority Ethnic as Indian in Leicester, but you can not be BME as Irish in Kilburn, Albanian in Finsbury Park, or Polish anywhere you happen to have migrated in the UK. We are clearly operating in a field of colour: BME is aimed at a broad geographical spread of non-white peoples. It is an attempt to describe, and counter, discrimination as it occurs across British society on the basis of colour.

Unfortunately, as BME accompanies and discloses the fault lines of, effectively, a colour bar (making what operates invisibly as discrimination visible by labelling the people it targets), it tends not only to counter but also to reinforce a discriminatory version of the world. One extreme outcome of this is the ghettoisation of BME funded work: BME, non-white, black people must have some small corner of funding to cover their minority interests and audiences – over there, among themselves. The colour of your skin starts to operate instead of you in determining the scope and meaning of your creative work – born of discrimination, marginal in its concerns. Such a view closes minds and limits horizons, denigrates the work and does a disservice to all who see the legacy to our society of the last century as an openness to diversity – a diversity including (but not limited to) its Caribbean, Pakistani, African, Chinese and Turkish influences.

Something is needed to break open the stifling contradictions of BME terminology – lumping the interests and outlooks of the artist identified as Vietnamese together with the practices and development needs of Trinidadian steel bands. How can BME account for the slide away from fixed cultural identities in the collaborations between Irish playwrights and African dancers, Philippino and Polish puppeteers, black British actors and a Sri Lankan director? Does BME begin to capture the excitement and complexity of these new encounters in our society – here, now, in Britain today – encounters between artists and peoples drawn from Columbia and Brazil, out of Eastern and Southern Europe, let alone Africa and the wide continent of Asia?

It is my hope as an Irish, Nigerian, British writer that our BME voices will become as central to the future and prosperity of Britain’s cultural life as they are to global popular culture – from hip-hop to the Hindi musical. When we speak of BME as of the poor, the marginal and the oppressed, holding that as our understanding of how to pay lip service to diversity, we miss rather an important trick. Both the language and the mind-set prevent us thinking through the relationships between, say, the multicultural and the international in scope and ambition. Who, for example, is in a ghetto whose work opens windows on South India, the West Indies, downtown Lagos? Analysis of the shifting demography of our major towns and cities points already to local hubs of a globally-focused range of creative and cultural practices – in music, certainly, but also in dance, literature, and performance. The potential for cross-fertilisation among our artists is the great white hope of multicultural Britain. Our diversity is the laboratory of future culture. And it involves everyone – in that everyone is changed by it.

The success of London’s Olympic bid was built on a snap shot of our athletes and the aspiring young people of the East End as multi-ethnic, multicultural and multi-talented. For creative artists unburdened by the narrow parochialism of British racism, to be transcultural in Britain ought to put you up on a world stage beside our Olympic athletes – at the cutting edge, in global competition. Yet any survey of so-called BME theatre over the last few decades would have to conclude, at the very least, that the sector as a whole has failed to thrive. Why that should be – and why Black and Asian theatre, as it used to be known, has never managed to completely die out in despite of conspicuous failure – is really a question worth asking. Though I can imagine when a theatre that doesn’t employ you takes over the telling of your story that you don’t like it, and you want to take back your sense of self in your own theatre.

I ask myself from time to time, do I believe my work to have been limited by being perceived as a BME artist in the prevailing circumstances of British theatre? Ask a silly question… but I come up regularly with two quite different answers. Perhaps the obvious one is yes, I should have been white. And what’s more, if I have to be Black, I should have been Blacker than I am to profit from the ongoing, if sporadic, attempts at positive discrimination and funding. But I’m not gangsta enough to do that. The other answer is no, the life of a playwright is notoriously short, a kind of mayfly that has its moment and vanishes, and I had my day. I and every other playwright I know has had to reinvent themselves in order to keep working. The problem has never been being Black but staying Young. The new Young playwright has often been at it for twenty years, and nothing rejuvenates likes success. So why bother railing about something like BME terminology, let alone the mind-set? Who cares what the industry thinks when all bets are off with a hit? Don’t get mad, get made in the West End. And besides, a good BME show is always a hot ticket because people feel it ought to be there, somewhere.

But if success is not the solution to BME failure, what is? There appear to me to be two positions on this. That society as a whole has exercised poor judgment in its management of the whole multiculturally diverse thing and ought to do it more but better. Or, it’s been a mistake from the first and society had best figure out how to retrench in native, core British values that can then be rolled out to the take-it-or-leave-it edges. Either way, there is some work to do. What are those values to be for the neo-nativists, or how to do failure better for the diversifiers? Both of these positions fail to grasp, from my point of view, the reality that our diversity is native. Diversity subsists not in a segment of our society but throughout it, in its very nature. British theatre as a whole has failed to reflect its society.

Following a recent Arts Council England sponsored consultation with the BME theatre sector, Baroness Lola Young’s report, “Whose Theatre?”, recommended the development of a network of buildings for BME work into the 21st century. I chaired the presentation of that report to the Arts Council and the initial engagement of BME artists with its various recommendations at the Theatre Royal Stratford East once the Arts Council had decided to back it. Whatever else, the conversation around the issues raised in the report is very lively and instructive. I think it’s fair to say, on the matter of buildings – bricks and mortar, bums and seats, safe houses for beleaguered work – some people will believe it when they see it. Some existing theatre companies would rather shore up their own tenure on buildings. Others voices want clarity on the inclusive or exclusive remit of the buildings in relation different interest groups within the BME sector – who gets to use these buildings and for what?. And some others see new occasions for infighting over scarce resources. But the sector as a whole has said it wants these buildings and that is where the matter rests for the time being.

My own suggestion for this network of buildings – given, among other things, the demand for them outstripping supply among BME theatre practitioners – would be to focus on their programming. Rather than encourage yet another round of unreflective and unproductive ‘ghettoisation’ of BME-funded work, it may be possible to solicit bids from consortia of BME-led artists and/or producers to run each of the venues on a rotating basis, say, for three years. Free to think outside of the BME box, the remit might be to develop and program work that in their view reflects the diversity of our society – their own or from across the British and international theatre scene. It would be the content of the work and not the colour of the skin that leads in asking what should British theatre be doing to reflect its society? We might then have a network of theatres that describe us now and give us a glimpse of our future.

Gabriel Gbadamosi
AHRC Creative and Performing Arts Fellow, Goldsmiths, University of London

Valediction

Valediction

Published BRAND Literary Magazine, University of Greenwich, Winter/Spring 2009

The roots of my habit
Inhabit the time
My father smoked
In the closed rooms of his lungs
When we were young
And could float
On blue carpets of smoke
That rose
From the mouth and nose
Of adults
Disclosing their invisible secrets.

Older now, and short of breath,
Those blue
Bravura clouds are gone.
I know the likelihood of death,
That in my mouth
A cigarette's
The ectoplasm of a fraud
That all began when I was bored
And made a séance
Of a childhood trance.

Once, on reaching
For my father's hand,
I woke
To realise he was dead
And lit instead a cigarette,
As though
To finally give it up
I’d to let go
Of what I’d lost –
The rope of gently rising smoke
I tried
To hold his breathing ghost.