If someone asked me what this week’s festival was about, my answer would be fairly simple: “it was a celebration of the arts for social change.” Kronos Quartet: celebrating music as a way to connect across borders, as a way to define oneself and one’s nation, as a way to express oneself when words are censored. Tony Kushner, Politics as Story: celebrating theatre’s ability to transform peoples’ thoughts, beliefs and actions. Salman Rushdie, Freedom to Write: celebrating our (relative) freedom of expression, and rallying for those who are without. All of these events recognized and celebrated the arts as activism.
As he was talking about the power of theatre, Tony Kushner explained that theatre could impact the audience in a way that a well-written novel, or essay, could not. Theatre has the ability to change the world—slowly—it is not a tidal wave; it changes people’s thoughts through their feelings and emotions, to help them understand the world they live in. As he put it: “any true representation is going to show that justice is a desirable thing, that injustice is a terrible thing, that inequality is a problematic thing,” and so on.
Still, he continued, theatre could not do as much as citizen activism, which creates a sense of agency and empowerment for the audience. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love Tony Kushner, but I beg to differ… theatre can create agency.
To generalize and simplify this idea: what separates the artist from the audience is the ability to create. What brings them together though, is their shared sense of humanity, citizenship, and community—so what happens when the audience is invited to create? What happens when they are not just invited to watch a representation of humanity on stage, but are invited to perform it themselves?
Consider this: for the time that the audience is in the theatre, they are removed from normal time, normal societal constraints, and they have effectively left the “real world.” Or, at the very least, like Kushner explained, they have entered a world were “real and unreal” become blurred. Either way, they have entered a “time (and often place), which is clearly distinguished from ‘normal’ time. This frame opens up for reflexivity.”
This is not to discount the role of the artist or the author, but instead of reacting to wrongs being committed, they act as “moral and social innovators,” showing the world as it should be, creating a new “knowable community… redefining otherness.” This was one of the state perceived “dangers” of art that Kushner described—the ability of art to blur the lines and reconstruct history.
As performance and reality come together, memories are re-imagined, and art exercises its power over human memory, and thus over human history. When these memories have been crafted by the state, or when the state has an interest in preserving a certain image, this leads to the worst case scenario of censorship, and a myriad of abuses against artists, and ultimate the freedom of expression.
So what happens if you let people participate in the deconstruction and reconstruction of what’s real and what’s not; what is and what should not be? In other words, if you give the audience the capacity to “order their world…to create, reproduce, change and live according to their own meaning systems.” Isn’t that just another way of describing a sense of agency?
And if Benedict Anderson is right, and nations are no more than imagined communities, then shouldn’t inviting the audience to participate in the process of collective self-discovery, and identification, help capture them as fully engaged citizens rather than subjects of a state? Feeling as though you have something to contribute—being reminded you have something to contribute—isn’t that all it takes?
I can’t speak to every event, but after each presentation, there was a general question/answer/conversation session. At this point, it wasn’t about the audience being able to ask questions, it was about continuing the experience and being a part of the conversation. But it didn’t end there: everyone took this experience outside of the room and shared it through whatever forum, to continue the conversation. That (to me) is what was so great about the festival—it confirmed its own theory—that art has the ability to change the conversation and to motivate people. In other words: it proved itself.
