alt.theatre magazine: 3.3 Sample

vol.3, no.3 December 2004

cultural diversity and the stage

c u l t u r a l

d i v e r s i t y

a n d

December 2004

The Controversy surrounding Behzti (Dishonour).

All contents ©2004 by Teesri Duniya Theatre, except where noted. Bibliothèque Nationale du Québec, National Library of Canada ISSN 1481-0506.

vol.3, no.3

Jaswant Guzder and Rahul Varma address the ideological and political implications of a British Sikh community’s violent protests to Gurpreet Bhatti’s new play that confronts the complicity of social and religious structures in the sexual abuse of women.

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Art the Constant Bobo Vian’s poem reflects on the constancy of art amidst the competing fundamentalisms of past and present.

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Art on the Line: Le Petit Théâtre de l’Absolu on tour in the West Bank.

Gabriel Levine writes about his company’s belief in the need for theatre to do more than simply bear witness to human suffering as they take their puppet theatre into Occupied Palestine.

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s t a g e

Editor in Chief: Edward Little Editorial Board: Rahul Varma, Edward Little, Denis Salter, Paul Lefebvre, Lina De Guevara, Shelley Scott Contributors: Kate Bligh, Jaswant Guzder, Gabriel Levine, Zab Maboungou, Tamar Tembeck, Rahul Varma, Bobo Vian Graphic Design: Tracy Martin Copy Editor: Colette Stoeber Administrative Co-ordinator: Nidhi Khanna

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t h e

Theatre for Education in Oaxaca, Mexico: An Interview with Pedro Guillermo Castellanos Lemus.

Viewpoints expressed by the contributors are not necessarily those of the editor or the management of Teesri Duniya Theatre.

Submissions: Unsolicited submissions that do not exceed 1000 words are welcome, as is any feedback on recent articles. alt.theatre reserves the right to edit all submissions prior to publication. Submissions or article proposals should be sent to the editor of alt.theatre via the address below. Letters to the editor are also welcome. Please include all pertinent information to allow us to contact you, and provide a stamped, self-addressed envelope if you would like your submission returned.

Subscriptions: Annual subscription rates (four issues) are as follows: In Canada: $15 (taxes included) In U.S.A. and foreign: $25 (Canadian funds) For inquiries and subscriptions, please write, email or fax Teesri Duniya Theatre. alt.theatre is published quarterly by TEESRI DUNIYA THEATRE Address: 4324 St. Laurent Blvd. Montreal, QC H2W 1Z3 Canada Tel: (514) 848-0238.

Fax: (514) 848-0267.

Email: tduniya@aei.ca.

Website: www.teesriduniyatheatre.com

Tamar Tembeck speaks with the artistic director of Mexico’s Grupo de Teatro Crisol about that company’s use of theatre as popular education and a catalyst for environmental development and sustainability in remote regions of Oaxaca.

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Cultures in the City or a City of Cultures?

Zab Maboungou reports on developments in Quebec proceeding from Stand Firm—the Canada Council’s strategic initiative aimed at equal access and equal participation by minority artists in the development and dissemination of Canadian arts.

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Flat Categories: A Review of Marc Maufort’s Transgressive Itineraries: Postcolonial Hybridizations of Dramatic Realism.

Kate Bligh takes issue with the enduring colonial assumptions and reductive nature of Marc Maufort’s postcolonial categorization of “Mainstream,” “Multicultural,” and “Aboriginal” theatre in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Magazine Fund toward our editorial and production costs

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Editorial Theatre and Public Response

By Edward Little

InBox I was looking through back issues of alt.theatre in search of readings for courses I’m teaching at Concordia University, when I came across Ted Little’s editorial discussing ali and ali (vol 3.1). It’s the best articulation I’ve heard of the other/self dynamic-argument, which for me is at the heart of the play’s politic. And it’s a facet of the play that no review - rave or pan - got, with the exception of a couple of small alternative papers. In fact, it’s a clearer delineation of the idea that “the other is us” than we the creators have so far managed. Because it’s a theme that continues to dominate my thinking, it’s really gratifying to have it so well explained, and in the future I’m going to include the editorial in my coursepack for workshops on political theatre.

Marcus Youssef is a freelance theatre-maker, journalist and community educator in the thick of his first year of university teaching at Concordia.

As I write this, the horrendous suffering in the wake of natural disaster holds a faint glimmer of hope that at least some of the enduring political violence in South Asia might — if only for a brief moment — be put aside in the interests of facilitating relief efforts. For the time being, our common humanity stands to outweigh our competing fundamentalisms.

Looking over the articles for this issue of alt.theatre, I am reminded that the heartbeat of theatre is a common humanity — that theatre’s essential concern with individual responsibility, social justice, and quality of life is predicated on multiple ways of seeing and being in the world. It is precisely this diversity — often falsely characterized as a malicious attack on values — that challenges and threatens the single-mindedness of competing fundamentalisms.

In this issue, the political and ideological fallout from the violent “religious” protests and subsequent closure of a Sikh play in Britain raises complex questions about the moral obligations of both state and cultural institutions vis-à-vis religious tolerance, protest, and freedom of expression within a pluralistic society. Theatre has a long history of bringing to light the inherent hegemony and potential for oppression within unexamined socially or culturally prescribed notions of what is to be considered “public” and what “private. The closure of Behzti, marks a victory for the fundamentalist mindset.

On the other side, a children’s puppet theatre touring Israel and occupied Palestine reminds us that a theatre of solidarity can provide a strategic balance to a theatre of protest — that, especially in times of war, we need a range of options beyond merely reiterating representations of violence and trauma. A participatory theatre for social change in remote Mexican villages similarly speaks to the power of theatre to bridge difference, and to the role of artistic expression as a means of channeling anxiety away from violent reaction and towards considered actions that encompass education, communication, collaboration, and examinations of complicity.

In advocating plurality, one writer endorses the Canada Council’s Stand Firm initiative towards increasing cultural diversity in Canadian arts on the grounds that it has been designed so that the artists themselves will work together to direct planning and actualization. Another writer criticizes a European analysis of the impact of cultural diversity on theatre in Canada on the basis that reductive categorizations pertaining to “mainstream, aboriginal, and multicultural” perpetrate a colonialist and ultimately divisive cultural politics.

And a poem speaks of art as a perpetual search into the human condition.

As these articles suggest, theatre is charged with bringing to our collective attention the complex ways in which indoctrinated ideas, media, world events, and even the languages we speak in turn influence and “speak” us. For many artists today, identifying the socially and culturally specific nature of these hegemonic forces is essential if we are to guarantee public support for individual rights within pluralistic societies. The articles in this issue suggest the potential — and even the necessity — of adopting a range of approaches to avoid the trap of engaging in a discourse of single-mindedness on its own terms: the comparative and divisive good versus evil of religious fundamentalists that is increasingly the domain of politicians and mass media.

The power of theatre lies in comparatively small acts of face-to-solidarity that enable us to experience multiple perspectives simultaneously, to imagine multiple solutions, and to find common ground from which we might debate and challenge single-minded opposition to diversity. In celebrating our common humanity, theatre often confronts injustice and bears witness to horrible trauma and violence. It might use humour, satire, allegory, and metaphor — or graphic and shocking directness. Theatre can engender solidarity, pleasure, lightness of being, anger, and outrage — as well as commitment and meaningful participation. It can challenge us to examine our complicity in hegemony. The writers in this issue draw to our attention the importance of a theatre that keeps its focus on our common humanity and resists the temptation to become diverted into quibbles about relative values within competing fundamentalisms. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, we may have to lie in the gutter, but we must keep our eyes on the stars.

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alt.theatre

The Closure of Behzti:

TIMELINE The Birmingham Rep Theatre Photo courtesy of www.bbc.co.uk

1998: Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti begins writer’s attachment scheme with the Birmingham Repertory Theatre

2001, October: Bhatti’s first play, Behsharam (Shameless), opens at the Birmingham Rep.

2004 December 9: Behzti (Dishonour), Bhatti’s second play, opens at the Birmingham Rep. The run is scheduled to close December 30.

December 18: After ten days of peaceful protests, demonstrators storm the theatre, resulting in the intervention of riot police and the evacuation of the theatre in mid-performance.

December 19: Birmingham Rep. affirms that “short of ‘blatant censorship’ and canceling the production, it could not have done more to appease the Sikh community.” The theatre maintains Behzti is a work of fiction and not a comment about Sikhism. Community leader Mohan Singh counters, “When they’re doing a story about a Sikh priest raping somebody inside a gurdwara, would any religion take it?” (news.bbc.co.uk, 19 December 2004)

December 20: While Sikh community members meet with police, the Birmingham Rep. maintains the production of Behzti will continue.

Religious leaders, including the Roman Catholic Diocese, urge people to boycott the show.

Later that day, citing concern for the health and safety of its employees and audience, Birmingham Rep. cancels its production of Behzti. Sikh community leaders applaud the decision; free speech advocators express shock and concern.

December 21: Birmingham’s Old Stage Company and London’s Royal Court Theatre both express interest in staging Behzti if Birmingham Rep. does not repeal its decision.

alt.theatre

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Behzti: Dishonour in Birmingham A short commentary by Jaswant Guzder.

hen Gurpreet Bhatti’s play Behzti (Dishonour) was closed in December 2004 before its premiere in Birmingham, it had already become a significant cultural icon for the diaspora. The silencing of women’s voices is certainly not a new theme among the subcontinent cultural communities. Indian women writers can draw upon their long legacy of censorship or look to contemporary pioneers like Ismat Chugtai, charged in 1947 for including a lesbian theme in her short story “The Quilt,” and, more recently, Deepa Mehta, who endured controversy and riots for creating the films Fire and Water. The darkest issue emerging from Gurpreet Bhatti’s predicament of riots and death threats implicates us all: the undermining of the right to individual freedom of voice in a democratic society.

The successful closure of this play by a subgroup of conservative elements among the divided Birmingham Sikhs—who used violence and threats to assert their affronted religious sensibilities—was an action that implicitly appropriated the voice of an entire community without a democratic process. Akin to the outrage and fatwa directed earlier by extremists towards Taslema Nasreen, the threads of politics, social order, freedom of speech, post-colonial realities, diasporic tensions, and secular values are all woven into the scenario. But the right to freedom of speech is still the fundamental issue: the dissenting group justified its actions by suggesting that its vision of cultural and social peace takes precedence over open dialogue.

Like any work of artistic imagination, theatre bears witness to all aspects of human nature in a dialogue that deeply resonates both with our fantasies and with external reality. But more immediately, theatre at its very heart is a living conversation with community. The outrage— centered on the religious implications of setting a play in a gurdwara—seems questionable given the lack of any basis in Sikh scripture or theology for equating a temple space with the sacred status of the Gurbani. The events of this play are not in the same category as the storming of the Amritsar Golden Temple and the burning of the scriptural legacy of the Sikhs in the assault of Operation Blue Star, nor of the horrific 1984 raping, murder, and pillage of the Delhi Sikh community in the wake of Indira Gandhi’s assassination. But somehow this play was able to stir a high level of passion. In a community that is often seen as a model among visible minority immigrant groups, Sikhs have culturally accommodated without assimilating. Yet they have also had to endure many negative projections raised by such issues as the Air India crash off the Irish coast, racism, and the turbulent times of the Khalistani movement. While an earlier British film—the fictional Sikh vignette Bend It Like Beckham—had been careful to censor the implicit lesbian relationship to avoid inflaming passionate outrage, Behzti was forthright and confronting. Perhaps the temple is an unconscious mirror of the predicament of izzat (honour), which embodies a part of masculine or community honour in the temple of a woman’s body. All cultures have after all constructed resonances of sacred spaces, and perhaps the theatre itself has such a status in the Western imagination, resonating with the Greek mythic world where the principles of democratic process evolved.

In fact, there are abundant Sikh shabads and stories, starting with those of Guru Nanak, who challenged religious zealots of Hinduism and Islam in the fifteenth century to reconsider rituals and caste prejudices that lacked essential humanity, equal treatment of all persons, and spiritual intent. Contrary to the views of the mobs that stormed the Birmingham

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theatre, Sikhism is grounded in respectful coexistence and egalitarian values between genders. One of Guru Nanak’s seminal lessons is in the story of his visit to Mecca, where he lay down with his feet facing towards the sacred Q’abba. When the surrounding faithful chastised him, he persuaded them to reframe this provocative moment with his answer: place my feet then in a direction where God is not residing.

Yet in a British urban setting in 2004, vocal and enraged members of the Sikh community took offence to a passage in Behzti that used the setting of a community place of worship to bear witness to abuses against women that have been hidden from open discourse. The news reports of authorities intimidated by a breach of social peace and a playwright who fled into hiding simply amplified the misguided and distorted interpretation of such violence. If these rioting crowds were better informed about Sikhism, they would have celebrated the right of the author to speak without fear or enmity—among the sat sang or in a theatre space—as well as her right to bear witness to the tragedies she has chosen to bring to a wider public audience.

Silencing is a powerful tool, used to both impose oppressive control and maintain a social order that has for centuries used the concept of izzat to suppress, mutilate, or murder women with the impunity of patriarchal outrage. Shauna Singh Baldwin’s novel What the Body Remembers, set in the Partition’s traumatic times, recalls the story of her grandmother in a fictionalized account that raises similar dilemma’s of loyalty and honour. The themes of Behzti are hardly limited to Sikh women, but rather they are a prevalent concern of We don’t women throughout many parts of the have to Middle East, Africa, and Asia, and they continue to re-emerge among various celebrate diaspora communities throughout the world. or agree These abuses certainly cannot be generalized with regard to all families or with the works and groups of these societies, but it is underideas of artists or standable that they are sufficiently alive to have inspired the playwright to create individual voices, but Behzti. I recall in my own childhood the stories of young women similarly beaten we must defend their and molested in our Canadian gurdwara, and the implicit collusion to diminish right to write or speak the implications of these transgressions. openly” These were collusions to preserve izzat while the molestation and abuse of women silently continued to occur. Just as the periodic disclosures of sexual abuses by priests in the Catholic Church have distressed the congregations who have hoped for the absolute sanctity of vows, the East has its own history of periodic deviations from benevolent familial values. No cultural community is immune to human transgressions. The powerful denial of injustice or related shadow issues by communities or individuals is a universal trait, but the healthy counterpoint of blindness in the social space is the freedom of a democratic and imaginative discourse and the imagination of artistic spaces. We don’t have to celebrate or agree with the works and ideas of artists or individual voices, but we must defend their right to write or speak openly, as when Gurpreet Bhatti opened discourse with a contemporary imagining of a current social predicament.

For centuries, the unpleasant wounds of injustice have been the inspiration of playwrights throughout the world, whether in ancient Greece or modern India. Britain has indeed been a special beacon of active theatrical traditions since Shakespearean times. When Thomas Beckett was murdered in the cathedral, or when the Guantanamo Bay prisoners were known to be held in inhumane conditions and without rights to trial, the British theatre did not shrink from bringing them alive on the stage to speak among us.

The misguided violence and outrage in Birmingham has been successful in silencing a contemporary British Indian playwright, and we need to state clearly that we cannot collude with this intimidation. This was an ominous and negative blow for all of us who believe in preserving our voices in democratic and humane societies.

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December 22: At the request of Bhatti, who feared “increased threats to her safety,” the Birmingham Old Stage Co. abandons plans to remount Behzti.

December 24: The Sikh community denounces threats made to the safety of the playwright and the Rep’s general manager. Sikh leaders urge the culprit(s) to withdraw their threats.

Sources: Profile: Playwright Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti. news.bbc.co.uk. 20 December 20 2004 Theatre stormed in Sikh protest. news.bbc.co.uk. 19 December 2004.

Theatre attacks Sikh play protest. news.bbc.co.uk. 19 December 2004.

Theatre ends play in Sikh protest. news.bbc.co.uk. 20 December 2004.

Police meeting over play protest. news.bbc.co.uk. 20 December 2004 Protest play could find new venue. news.bbc.co.uk. 21 December 2004.

Sikh leaders criticize threats. news.bbc.co.uk . 24 December 2004.

Dr. Jaswant Guzder a board member of Teesri Duniya. She is an artist and mother, and is active in the divisions of Transcultural and Child Psychiatry as an associate professor of Psychiatry at McGill University and head of Child Psychiatry at the Institute of Community and Family Psychiatry in Montreal.

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