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Dear all,
Many thanks for the opportunity to assist to such an inquisitive and
stimulating debate about performance in relation to notions of terror and
violence. Many threads to follow, I choose to start with the one closest to my
heart, and pick up again the creative powerlessness, but from a slightly
different angle.
As a professional and human being, my contact with excessive forms of terror
and violence has been mediated through various artefacts and/or mass media and
whilst they had a strong impact on me, I was always aware and perhaps grateful
for the mediation. Because it happened and, in a selfish way, because it was
mediation and not direct contact.
Personally I have experienced a slow terror, staged in a less spectacularly
manner than what ISIS does now, yet arguably as horrific in its rippled
effects. A terror perhaps more insidious, with consequences that were/are long
lasting (more so than anybody ever imagined), as I grew up in Romania during
CeausescuÕs dictatorship. I was a teenager in the 80s, when people were cueing
for 12 - 14 hours for 1/2 l of oil and 0,5 kg of sugar, when it took two hours
to get your daily bread, when meat or cheese were a delicacy. And this happened
not because the country was going through a war, but because the political
system lead by Ceausescu and its secret police was at war with its own
citizens, aiming to subdue them totally. Survival mode was key and perhaps the
only mode allowed. Beyond the food crisis, there was a housing crisis, a local
transport crisis, a gas crisis, and many other crisesÉ Life was kept precarious
on purpose, in all its aspects. People were terrorised, reluctant to speak
about what they thought and how they felt even in family circles (you never
knew who was cooperating with the secret police, when and why). Theatre plays
or films or books were immediately forbidden if there was a slightest hint of
critique of power that the many censorship committees would grasp. Even
listening at home to the music hour broadcasted by Radio Free Europe each
Sunday was considered a crime, it lead to investigations by the secret police
and possibly to jail. Yet, interestingly enough, people were resorting to
culture to survive, more and more throughout that horridly grey decade. And for
many of us it became, in the late 80s, equally important to get food on the
table as well as to have access to forbidden books, texts, music or visual art
albums, which luckily was possible due to a particularly discrete form of
cultural samizdat that had developed in the country. I learned through
experience that the effects of terror could be very diverse. That one might
survive physically the unending sense of life as a series of absurd roadblocks,
maybe even experience a momentarily sense of happiness for that (there was a
secret sense of pride and joy people had for being able to secure food, a good
book, etc., and maintain a minimal sense of normalcy of the daily existence),
but souls were traumatised and, after a while, numbed. And the ability to think
critically in general was seriously endangered. Speaking out was excluded. I
learned as a child and a teenager much too well that there is such a thing as
negative imagination, that violence can come in many varied forms, all aiming
to annihilate. That there is no dialogue possible with violence and terror.
That confrontation, even if peaceful, is impossible. Yet, through isolated
dissident examples that all of us knew well of through the grapevine, I learned
that asserting oneÕs beliefs and feelings, in spite of being apparently
Òsuicidal,Ó putting the body in danger and leading to social exclusion, was the
only solution to keep the mind and the soul alive. And that such acts of
dissidence and assertiveness had positive ripple effects for the rest of the
silenced crowd. Other modes of asserting, used by more people, were indirect
and based on humour. There was a lot of humorous talk in the late 80s in a grey
country, with its citizens on their knees. I also learned sadly, after the
exhilarating 1989 moment, that the effects of such terror exercised on a
nation, for decades, were/are more long lasting and diverse than we imagined in
the 80s. It took 25 years of foggy transition and a new generation to grow up,
until a civic conscience, strong enough to act efficiently against the maze
developed by the post-communist political system, could have its say in spite
of all odds. Until the country decided, through voting on the 16th of November
2014 to elect the first president not connected to former structures of power,
to hit the ÒresetÓ button and thus stand a chance to break with its traumatic
past. Even now the country is divided between those (usually older and from
social strata with less access to information) who are still completely subdued
to the effects of post-communist propaganda and terrorised by the thought of
change and those who are strongly motivated to embrace and determine change.
I guess what I am trying to say with this example is that terror and violence
can be symbolically aliked to multi-headed monsters, and whilst their ultimate
goal is to annihilate the citizen, who is perceived as Òthe other,Ó the ripple
effects of their actions are long lasting, insidious and diverse. So finding a
way to speak out against terror and violence is an act of both social and
personal sanity. And whilst art, in any form, cannot take the role of politics
and most probably cannot enter in direct confrontation with the source of
violence and terror, it can stimulate thinking, perception and foster a state
of mind that leads to action, through the empowerment provoked. And that it is
unique power. Culture and art are utterly dangerous for any state or political
system that ossifies following a rigid set of beliefs and then attempts to
annihilate its citizens, whether turning them into obedient consumers, faith
followers or simply sheep.
So, to me, art and culture that deals with terror and violence are
fundamentally life-affirming acts and contribute to social and personal sanity.
This is an essential role that pertains uniquely to these fields.
And to move to performance, two key modes seem to me essential here, both
strongly connected to an ethos of anti-annihilation:
1) Artefacts based on documentation of terror and violence, which give a voice
to the abused and perpetrated, contribute to the development of a cultural
memory closer to the reality of terror, and stimulate empathy and critical
thinking.
2) Performative actions of activist nature that empower people and stimulate
action and agency.
A lot of examples have been discussed here that fall into one or another
category, and many others are around us, so I will not go into further
enumerations or nuances, as they already exist in the discussion. Perhaps this
categorisation can be further developed, I do not pretend this to be
exhaustive. It is just an opinion based on embodied, personal knowledge.
One particular approach, though, has not come so far into discussion and I
think it is worth mentioning in this context. It relates to the work done using
the TO (theatre of the oppressed) system developed initially by Augusto Boal.
Falling into the second category proposed above, the work developed using the
TO system has proved highly effective in a diverse range of settings, from
various work in disenfranchised communities, to work against trauma and
depression, to work in zones of war, and the list goes on. In Theatre of the
Oppressed (1979) Boal offers a pertinent critique of the mechanisms of power
pertaining to the medium of theatre and its related techniques, and proposes a
system that uses that power to generate social change. The dramaturgical scheme
is actually very simple, the format of work interactive and dynamic. The aim is
to empower the protagonist (the oppressed) to look for concrete ways to
overcome the oppression provoked by the antagonist, in a landscape where
witnesses are also key, as they also hold the possibility to move from
passivity to action. Dialogue and debate, agency and action are key ingredients
here. Spectators become spect-actors, solutions for change are being tried out
and discussed. And even if ideal solutions are not found for a particular
situation, a debate is stimulated at the level of the community and a sense of
collective empowerment is generated. Arguably this would be the aim of any
artistic approach that aims to engage with oppressive issues. Of course, the TO
system might have minuses and limits, and, as it has been franchised across the
world for more than three decades now, it took many shapes, some more effective
than others. I am not saying it is ideal. Just that it is an effective artistic
tool for action against violence, oppression, even particular forms of terror,
as it is based on dialogue, agency and an acquired sense of empowerment for the
communities they address.
And perhaps as I was indirectly suggesting before, assertiveness is key towards
establishing a dialogue not with terror, but with those still left alive, who
feel traumatised and disempowered, whether they are in close physical proximity
or at a distance, but who could have a chance to act.
More from me after I read the posting in the last 24 hrs, I have been
travelling to UK.
Warm regards,
Aristita
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