In Place of War Network meeting
Pristina, Kosovo, June 2010
Alison Jeffers
National Theatre(ish)
Since 2004 I have been researching refugee theatre in the UK. It is thought that there are approximately 15 million refugees in the world, mostly in Asia and Africa, and a further 826 000 asylum seekers. This research has had a profound effect on my life and the way that I think about theatre and about my role in theatre making. I’m going to begin with three pieces of information and then move on to some very speculative ideas about theatre, nation and stories. I hope that the title becomes self explanatory.
The first piece of information.
The first thing I’m going to do is to try to give you some idea of my own national identity. I was born in the geographical island of Ireland, in Belfast seven years before the start of `the Troubles' in Northern Ireland when institutional inequalities combined with nationalist claims to a united Ireland to begin a messy civil war. I have a British passport largely because my family is Protestant but no passport to any easy national identity. I cannot be Irish, not really, not least because I can't believe it, locked out of that definition by religion and culture. I'm British I suppose except that any Scottish, English or Welsh person would usually say that they were Scottish, English or Welsh before they would say they were British. Besides Northern Ireland isn't strictly part of Britain because the official title of this northern archipelago is Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Maybe I'm UK-ish. Ish suggests a suitable sense of approximation. It's like when you say ‘we’ll eat at 6ish’. A colour might be described as blueish/grayish or the weather as warmish. Ish…round about, approximately, kind of.
Second piece of information
This is a short extract from a piece of theatre called Hope by desperate optimists two Irish exiles who, among other things, make theatre that tries to explore their identity as exiles.
I am sitting at a table and I am looking at a map. How do things look on this map? Very clear and peaceful, and uncomplicated. I can't see any signs of life - no traces of human suffering - just a surface, showing outlines of different places. What am I thinking? I am thinking isn't this wonderful and I point my finger to a place on this map (any place, it doesn't matter where!) and I say `See this place, doesn't it look good? I want to live there. Tell me, what do I have to do to get there? I am prepared to do anything.'
In their work the actors, two Irish exiles, explore their (national) identity and sense of exiled dislocation through a series of multiple narratives, storytelling, disagreement and confessions directed at each other and at the audience in a very conversational tone. In their work `Records are played, tapes are listened to, statements are made, Polaroids [photos] are taken, a scene from a play is attempted and dialogues are engaged with in the endeavour to retrieve for themselves, and for the audience, a lost landscape of origin' (Andrew Quick, 1997: 27).
Their pieces often fail or unravel as their own narratives fail to make sense or to be coherent. They recognize that they are probably doomed to failure in what they are trying to do because there can be no neat and tidy ideas about personal or national identity and their messy and untidy theatre reflects this. At the end of their pieces the stage is often left covered with discarded objects which they have taken up to try to explain something but thrown down again when this doesn’t work the way they thought it would. Desperate optimists’ theatre of dislocation uses their position as exiles not to set up and explore some romantic ideal of Ireland as ‘home’ but to question all ideas about ‘home’ beyond metaphors of nationhood.
Piece of information number 3
Melilla sits on the north coast of Africa, surrounded by the waters and territory of Morocco. By some accident of military conquest more than 500 years ago, this city is geographically African but is legally part of Spain. As a small Spanish enclave, and part of the EU, it is protected against the rest of Africa by two 4m high fences topped with razor wire, motion sensors and 106 video cameras as well as being controlled on one side by the Moroccan police and on the other by the Spanish Civil Guard. Hundreds of African and Asian migrants squat in the forests around the perimeter of Melilla waiting for their turn to try to get in. They used to be sent on to Spain where they could ‘disappear’ but this is no longer allowed. Now anyone who manages to get into Melilla becomes stranded there and their presence is thought to act as a deterrent to other migrants considering a similar journey. One journalist has described this as a kind of performance.
‘Melilla has become a kind of theatre, acting out the most intense human dramas which are calculated to send a message of deterrence to that great global audience of the hopeful poor. The message is: “Don't be fooled by the wide avenues and beautiful fountains of this Spanish city. None of this is for you”….To protect our jobs, the EU authorises Melilla to be a theatre of cruelty’.
Now the speculative bit.
What do we have here? Three maps, some theatre, huge global inequalities and countless stories. Two artists who are examining their sense of identity without resorting to easy narratives of nationalism. Thousands of African and Asian migrants who are risking everything to get them to a bit of the map that seems to promise a better life. One uneasy academic/practitioner trying to make some sense of all of this.
I don't know exactly how to link these pieces although I know there is a link; indeed I think there are many links. But I want to resist neatness: to resist a neat paper just as much as I want to resist neat theatre. I think I'm looking for a national theatre of ish. A messy speculative theatre with lots of rough edges. A theatre that asks more questions than it gives answers. A poetic theatre that demands the right to be open to interpretation. A theatre that puts into question the mechanisms that construct notions of identity that `opens out the confining limits of representation and articulate[s] a broad politics in the arts of dis-placement' (Quick, 1997: 27). Maybe it's a theatre where people can be a bit ish…a bit british with a touch of refugeeish; a bit irish with more than a hint of english; europeanish or africanish; or none of these things.
The national theatre of ish can't have any sort of manifesto obviously but it probably doesn't look like the kind of theatre that you might see in most professional theatre venues. It probably doesn't follow one story from beginning to end but is made up of multiple narratives told in a whole variety of styles. Its stage is definitely peopled with people rather than actors; not that actors aren’t welcome. Indeed actors have a lot to offer to the national theatre of ish as long as they're not too precious about their training. They understand the complicated manoeuvres involved in theatrical representation and they can put these into language that everyone can understand.
What the national theatre of ish offers is time and space to tell stories. Time and space to explore what participants want to say. Time and space to develop a voice to tell the stories that we want to tell and a style of playing. Time for an audience to locate their own senses of identity and place during the playing of the piece. Time to leave the map, the known, and to wander around a bit, to think, to imagine, to play. De Certeau says that ‘what the map cuts up the story cuts across’ (1984: 129). The map imposes boundaries and borders. They're real enough. People die trying to cross them. They separate and divide. But the story has the time and space to supersede the exigencies of the map. Stories are delinquent and do not respect place. Stories play a double game, says de Certeau. They do the opposite to what they say. Stories ‘hand the place over to the foreigner that [they give] the impression of throwing out’(1984: 129).
Now I’m not entirely sure yet what all this means but that’s the point. A national theatre needs to live and breathe and it needs time and space to think. But that’s not time and space to think and then come up with an answer, or a solution, or an explanation. I don’t want someone to explain what all this is about but I do want time and space and opportunity to work it out with other people and to work out ways to tell this story to more people. And, most importantly, I want us to give ourselves permission to be a little bit –ish, a little bit uncertain, a little bit confused.
Anyone who is interested in the work of desperate optimists can find them on the internet at account oftheir work comes from Andrew Quick’s essay ‘Performing Displacement: desperate optimists and the Arts of Impropriety’ in Performance Research Volume 2 No. 3 Autumn 1997. The account of Melilla can be found in Nick Davies’ story ‘Forbidden City’ in The Guardian Weekend, 17th April, 2010. The quotes from de Certeau come from his book The Practice of Everyday Life which is published by the University of California Press.
Alison Jeffers, University of Manchester 1st July 2010
1