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