The GTP Diaries: #3

  • June 13, 2012 4:52 pm

Of Rape and Strike

In 2008 we decided to participate in the global VDay initiative created by Eve Ensler.  Bringing together over 40 US and international students, community members and theatre artists we created 6 events throughout the city which brought attention to the issue of violence against women.  There were exhibits, readings and children’s puppet shows.  The major centerpiece of the week was a production of Ms. Ensler’s ‘The Vagina Monologues’ which we performed in Italian and English with 28 women from 8 different countries.  The majority of whom were Italian and US university students.

The mission behind this project, raising money and awareness to eliminate violence against women and girls, was an easy one for everyone to stand behind.  But it was the creation of the play, the delving into the emotions, the building of a community that was going through a creative process, which solidified a group of people who never would have met, let alone spent this type of rich and valuable time together.  Some of the women spoke both languages, some only one.  But bonds were made regardless and a common commitment to creating and then sharing their work was palpable.

This event did something else however, it brought US students into relationship with the Florentine and international expatriate community.  It helped erase some of the perceptions about American students so deeply held in Florence.  There was respect for the girls which was a new experience for many of the adults of the group.

On closing night, after the performance, the set was being struck.  Everyone was in the theatre and the lobby packing up and working together.  It was 1am.  I was in the lobby packing a box when a student came up to me:

“Bari, there is a girl in the piazza with a guy and he is trying to kiss her.  She is drunk.”

A few of us went to check out the situation and, indeed, there was an American student with long blonde hair, the typical very short skirt and very high heels being slowly dragged into the alley by a man in his 30′s.

We chased him away, grabbed the girl and brought her into the lobby.  We would have sat her into a chair, but she was too drunk to wait for that.  She slid to the floor unable to say her name, unable to hold up her head.  Her wallet had no ID.  I had seen girls this drunk before.  It is terribly common in Florence.  And terribly dangerous for them.  They drink like they are on an extreme sport team for alcohol consumption, then they loose all their senses and they loose something else…. control of what happens to them.

This one was lucky.  She was saved.  This time.

And who was she saved by?  American students in Florence at 1am doing something quite different.  Striking a set with a community of residents who respected them and came to hold affection for them.  People who built something together of value and made an impact together in the community.

We all stood over this girl with no name who was blurting out her inner chaos to us in inarticulate phrases and I thought, ‘how ironic.’  Here we were: myself, American students, Italian actresses and the theatre manager staring down at the sterotype.  Until this project came into their lives this is exactly how the actresses and theatre manager thought all Americans behaved.

But now they knew better.  Now they had the experience to break a stereotype.  They could never have a conversation again with their friends or family which went ‘all American students disrespect our city and don’t care about other cultures.  They are all so self centered.  They all come here to drink and not to learn.’   They couldn’t have that conversation without their new response which would go something like: ‘No, not all are that way.’

Because, as we stood over the inebriated lump on the lobby floor, we knew she was only one person with a problem.  Not ‘all’ of anything.  So we called for help, poured her into a cab home with her roommates, and went back to striking the set.

 

The GTP Diaries: #01

  • April 23, 2012 3:46 pm

Politics and Art

I remember, several years ago, I had a student in Creative Campus named Georges.  Georges was from Egypt and studying international law at the European University in Florence.  He wasn’t an artist.  But he was curious and passionate and he had an immediate understanding of the impact artistic experiences and collective experiences have on society.  He became very involved in a great deal of what we did.

One of his projects, which he created with a girl from the states, was in response to our Creative Campus project ‘the effects of the global economy on the environment.’  This was a theme one of the local professors was interested in seeing developed creatively and I was intrigued as to what the kids would come up with.  Georges and his friend stood in front of the Duomo (the main cathedral of Florence) and handed out a small sheet of paper to passersby in three languages with facts about the effects of smog from over abundant tourism on the over 500 year old architectural wonder.  Then they photographed the responses of people to the paper . . . reading it, throwing it into a ball, discussing it with others.  And these photographs along with their narrative of direct responses to them became their installation at our event.

What struck Georges and his partner most was a comment of an elderly Florentine man who read the paper, looked at them with tears in his eyes, and thanked them for bringing attention to something of such importance which, in his lifetime of living in his city, he had never heard asked before.

A few weeks after the presentation we had a Creative Campus gathering with an important local artist, Marco Fallani, who was speaking about the commitment to a creative life and a creative society.  Georges asked why it was that when dictators come into power they kill the artists first.

Little did Georges know that his creative inquiry in front of the Duomo was a part of the answer to his question. Or, as Robert Frost so aptly put it:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Our Team Gives Thanks

  • November 23, 2011 7:50 pm
A-picture-of-journalist-A-002

Often working on a show and involving yourself in other people’s stories causes artists to view their own life differently. I asked our team if they are thankful for anything specific after spending time on our rehearsals for the bilingual performance portion of Especially Now: Create the World Together. The replies are beyond inspiring.   -Cindy Marie…

The Fiddler

  • November 13, 2011 10:02 am

Last night I went to see my friend’s daughter play Golda in a high school production of ‘Fiddler on the Roof.’   This play was first performed the year I was born.  And, of course, I have seen many incarnations of it since.  I have always loved this piece but last night there were a few things that struck me about the entire experience.

The first was the energy in the lobby when I entered.  The excitement, the joy, the sense of expectation.  These are feelings and expressions so rarely experienced in professional theatre.  It was thrilling to be within this moment just as a play was about to be shared.

But it was the play itself that really struck me.  Many of us know the story.  It takes place in a small village in Tsarist Russia where Jewish and non-Jewish Russians learn somehow to live with tolerance of one another until forces push them into positions from which they can’t return.  Traditions are threatened, lives change, major societal changes and power struggle are in the background of people simply trying to live their lives.  The Jews simply wish the world to do what it will and leave them to their peace.  But the world has other plans for them.  And they are forced to abandon their lives as they have known it for centuries and move from their home into the great unknown of a changing world.

This is likely not the way I would have explained the story when I first saw it.  I would have seen a piece about Tevye and his 5 daughters, the shifting relationships with the three eldest as they express and follow love for their future husbands, and Tevye’s faith and love of a god who he personally knows and loves in his own, humorous way.  I never would have felt so strongly, as I did last night, that this story of Fiddler on the Roof is a story about humanity, not simply Jewish identity and tradition.  And that its narrative is continual and current.  Expressed in many languages and in many cultural/religious scenarios even as I write this. 

 When I thought about a particular scene I am directing called ‘Chechnya’ from ‘A Stubborn Woman: a theatrical memorandum on Anna Politkovskaya,’ which we are about to present, I was struck by the similarities, although of course presented in a musical-theatre fashion, to what ‘Chechnya’ also speaks to.  The ‘clearing of the Russian woods’ of the ‘blacks’ (as the Russians referred to the Caucasian Muslim Chechens).  A continual movement of people from land mass to land mass, or a destruction of them entirely.  There is the importance of dehumanization in order to do this.  Either dehumanization of ‘the other’ or dehumanization of one’s self as is demonstrated by the Constable’s insistence to Tevye that he has ‘no choice.’  Which led my thoughts to the Syrian military pressured to shoot into crowds of unarmed protesters or suffer death themselves at the hands of their superiors.

Although life is not a musical, Fiddler on the Roof became for me a powerful statement of how significant theatre can be in the depiction of the human evolutionary progression.  Is there any people who have no suffering in their background?  No moment of struggle for survival, or historic circumstance with which they have to defend their right to exist on this planet?

Tevye is, of course,  followed by his Fiddler…. his ‘Jewish soul’ who can not become a separate part from his suffering.  But who can withstand the test of time and cruelty of humanity.  The music continues…. even as a whisper in the background of the chaos we create against one another.  It continues as a memory and as a promise.  To us all.

I am deeply grateful I saw this production last night.  It has informed me of two things.  One, that we as professional theatre artists must continue to find ways to create theatrical events which people are as thrilled to be at as parents and friends are at a high school production.  And two, it confirmed for me that my presentation of ‘A Stubborn Woman: a theatrical memorandum on Anna Politkovskaya,’ must have its own ‘Fiddler’….. its line note of hope to follow us both into the darkness and lead us out of it into the light.

Acting Together

  • October 5, 2011 6:18 am

At the very start of my acting career I remember participating in an anniversary memorial of the Holocaust in Rochester, NY at the GeVa Theatre.  I was asked to do it on the theatre’s dark night by the Festival Artistic Director, Anthony Zerbe.  Of course I said yes.  But when I read the material and we began to rehearse what would be a very simple staged reading, a sense of shame began to grow within me.  I felt I had no right to stand on a stage in front of people and act out circumstances of a hell which they actually experienced.

The evening came and hundreds of people were in the audience.  When it was my time to step forward I remember speaking the words and having the sense of splitting in two.  One part was doing the best I could to infuse the text with life, respect, honor and dignity.  The other wanted to run and hide from the growing sense of shame that was rising within me.  By the time I stepped off that stage I was so deeply inconsolable from the sense of disrespect I was sure I just enacted that I tried to hide in the lobby during the reception.

But I couldn’t and was approached by individuals who, with tears in their eyes, held my hand and thanked me.

And then I realized, of course, I had been wrong.  Deeply wrong.  I was a part of their healing.  My role was to voice their pain publicly, to honor their history and to participate in a narrative of common memory.

This is what theatre can do.

And, as I sat last night in a presentation of Acting Together on the World Stage, a documentary of how theatre is used to bridge humanity from our violence to a place of commonality and peace, I remembered that moment from 20 years ago and think of it in context of my artistic life today.

As an ‘average American’ artist I come, as so many of us do, from a history of inflicted violence against  ‘my people.’  However, I am also privileged and deeply fortunate enough to be generationaly distanced from that history.  I can, in many senses, choose my relationship to it.  So what can I bring to my work as it is defined by The Global Theatre Project?  How can I legitimately develop a process which engages US artists and students to approach collective work with a cultural and historic sensitivity that they may also feel distanced from?

These are among the questions I ask myself as an artist and Artistic Director.  I reflect on this, as I reflect on the position of the United States at this moment of human history and our place within it.  We have so much to learn.  And yet, in my heart I feel it is so simple.

We breathe the same air and are formed of the same physical material.  We are humanity.

I acknowledge that it is from my safe position as an American, that I have the luxury to put my focus and work toward this perspective.  But I am beginning to wonder if it is also my obligation.  For those of us in the arts fields who don’t create our work from desperate need to be heard or seen, to have our time on this planet not forgotten completely, or our suffering purged for our children and children’s children’s sake, we do have an obligation to consciously engage in the formation of the global story.  In whatever way we choose, whether it is directly or indirectly, we must use our talent, our ability to see the world and its potential within and around us.  We must use our verbal, physical, visual, musical story-telling-gifts to move humanity forward.  To progress.

 That progression will only occur when we do, truly ‘Act Together.’  When we take action to see and hear and feel one another in the telling of our stories.  In the purging of our pain and in the development of our future.  For my part, my small contribution to that is The Global Theatre Project.  Some roots of which, possibly, were born that night in Rochester, NY at the GeVa Theatre when I was ashamed to use my talent in honor of those who hungered to be remembered and to, collectively, mourn in order to move forward.

Thank you to Theatre Without Borders and Brandeis University for bringing this important international and national work to light.  If you are interested in information on either the text or the DVD or in presenting the DVD to your school or organization you can become further informed at the Acting Together On The World Stage website.

In Memory and in Questioning

  • September 10, 2011 5:43 pm

On September 11, 2001 a horror happened on US soil which, in  my observation, did two particular things.  It woke us up and it closed us in. 

I watched back then as the extremity of positions were identified and then held with no middle ground.  The left, the right – everyone took sides.  Up to that moment I generally followed the lead of my party.  I voted without thinking, I believed ‘we’ were in the right and ‘they’ were in the wrong on any given issue.  But my observation after 9/11 was that this became even more extreme.  And that, as each day went by, ‘my side’ looked and sounded very much like ‘their side.’  The words were possibly different, but the energy and fear behind it all seemed very much the same.  And that is when I stopped.

For about a year I didn’t sign petitions, call my representatives, write letters without reading as much as I could about the facts.  I stopped believing just because I heard it on the news, whatever ‘it’ was and whoever was reporting ‘it’, that truth was being reported.  I questioned everything and everyone.  And, for a long time, I took very little action.

I believe that, clearly, The Global Theatre Project is a result of the events of September 11th.  A slow decade-long development of a response to a day that I, like all others in our country and many around the world, will never forget.  Too many things were put into motion that day.  We could no longer collectively deny that there were some who truly hated us as a nation and a culture.  In our terror we looked to our borders and began, slowly, to close them.  But in those ten years something else has happened.  We stopped talking to each other and started screaming at each other.  We stopped discussing.  We took positions, found the borders which gave us comfort in confirming our sense of self.  And we held our ground.  Immobile.  Right.  All others… wrong.

Also during that time we have lost a good deal of respect in many foreign countries, and are now a military nation weakened both in our economic power and our legitimacy as the shining, pristine example of democratic values.  And during that time we have watched a generation of young Americans entering college who are defined over and over again by their parents and educators as having too strong a sense of unearned entitlement.

These, of course, are my personal observations.  How do they connect to The Global Theatre Project?  Because my burning question based on these thoughts has been: given where we are, what do we do now?

I believe there is only one answer to this question.  Which is to learn a deeper truth than ‘us’ and ‘them.’  To step away from positioning and holding ground which continues to remind us that the world is a hostile place, while we participate daily in its growing hostility.

We are all connected.  The question is do we choose to continue creating a world where our most significant connections are based on violence, territorialism, intolerance and injustice or are we ready to make a sincere effort toward a global change that is, in my mind, the only one which will secure a healthy future for us and, yes, as importantly, our neighbours.  That sincere effort requires new systems and approaches which lead us to an understanding that our connection is found through exploring what common ground we stand on.  Who we are…. As individuals, cultures and nations and how that serves an expansion of our understanding of what we are as a common humanity.  From there we can shape our future proactively, not reactively.  In my mind, this is our only hope for survival.

The Global Theatre Project launched its work by bringing attention to the situation in Belarus and the struggle and enormous courage and talent of the Belarus Free Theatre.  Our most recent project included staging a work by Florentine playwright, Stefano Massini, which was inspired by the murder of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya in ‘Una Donna Non-Rieducabile’ (A Stubborn Woman).  With each piece the artists, students and the public associated with it expanded their knowledge of suffering in the world.  But to me, that is not the true point of their work.  Or of ours.  The true point is not to bring attention to suffering so we can point to it from a distance.  The true point is to FEEL their situation and know it is our own suffering we feel.  Human suffering.  Needless and pointless.  But it exists.  It exists for as long as we choose.  And, in order to even begin to imagine that it could change, we must take a look at the core of this issue.

The anniversary of 9/11 has inspired us to take a theme that has strongly emerged for me this year at The Global Theatre Project and expand it into a multi-year inquiry.  That theme is ‘Who Is The Enemy?’ which I am announcing now as an open inquiry which we will explore in various ways over the course of the next five to ten years.  It will include everyone from children to adults, it will partner with varying institutions, cultures and individuals, it will reach beyond the discipline of theatre and of the arts,  it will evolve into its own life.

In the scene from ‘A Stubborn Woman’ entitled ‘The Intelligent People,’ Massini demonstrates so elegantly and devastatingly that taking sides is an intellectual decision and that, in the end, the viciousness of the Chechnians and the viciousness of the Russians is simply. . . viciousness.  At the graves of children and innocent people, taking sides becomes utterly irrelevant.

Ten years ago I began to see that the view from one immobile position might make us feel secure, but it requires demonizing ‘the other.’  There is no future in that.  In order to move a way from this view, we have to be courageous enough to look ‘the other’ in the face and ask ourselves in as many possible ways as we can imagine ‘Who Is The Enemy?’

Possibly with this question, we can find a reason for the loss of life on September 11, 2001.  And the loss of life that, needlessly, continues.

In memory and honor of Laura Rockefeller.  Who I made theatre with when I was young.

——————

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Permesso

  • September 2, 2011 6:23 pm

In my last post I spoke about the challenges of Italian doors and the lessons they provide for that initial moment when we are facing the unknown of a new culture.  The step just after we must ‘observe the door’ in order to discover how to open it is, of course, to walk through the portal. 

However, in Italy you don’t simply enter another person’s space without saying a very important word: ‘Permesso.’  In other words you are asking permission.  Clearly stated, and expected. . . whether you are entering an office or a home.  You can not enter and be considered a respectable person without this word.  Whether the person is standing right in front of you, or you are slowly peeking around an open door and announcing your presence, that word must be said.

I have to admit it took me quite a long time to feel comfortable with this expectation.  And often times early on in my Italian experience I didn’t do it.  But in not doing it I was putting my discomfort and embarrassment (as well as my cultural habits) in front of what my hosts needed in order to believe I held respect for them.

It takes a great deal of courage to let go of our self-identity when entering other worlds.  It is, of course, the one thing we want to cling onto most (either consciously or unconsciously).  But that is why, as artists, The Global Theatre Project is positioned to bring a level of awareness and risk-taking to the collaborations and entries we make with our international colleagues, partners and audiences.  However, at times, we don’t always see that initial situation of  ‘permesso’ clearly enough in advance.

On the very first evening of our Global Voices project with University of Texas, we had a special dinner at a very ‘local’ type of restaurant.  Mixed among the 15 Texas students and 2 professors were 9 residents and artists of Florence.  The evening was going beautifully, everyone getting to know one another with the intention clearly focused on integrating the students and professors as quickly as possible into the world of the city. 

Close to the end of the meal one of the professors stood up and suggested the students sing the UT song for their new Florentine friends.  And, that before they sing, they should ‘hook ‘em.’  What she was referring to was making the hand sign of the Longhorns (UT sports team) and the sign looks like this:

The reaction of the residents and owner of the locale was immediate and very strong.  They were shocked at seeing 17 hands holding a sign that they interpreted as offensive.  Clearly they felt the need to educate the newcomers that what they were doing had a very different meaning to Italians and that they should never ‘hook ‘em’ in front of an Italian if they don’t want to be offensive, insensitive or disrespectful. 

The sign that the Italians thought they saw looks like this:

Too close for their comfort and close enough to see what they registered as a vulgarity.  But the energy of the room at that moment was quite ‘collegiate’ and over-rode the definitive clues that were being given by the locals.

It was a perfect, and of course in hindsight, humorous moment of culture clash.  But it was also an opportunity missed to realize that …. even as we enthusiastically want to share our pride of identity with our hosts, when they open the door we must ask ‘permesso’ and if we forget, or do something incorrect, when they try to guide us in a direction right for their comfort….we should pause, take a breath and realize we are in their home.  They actually are the perfect guides for us to take those first steps over their portal with confidence and openness. And with a sense of belonging.  We need to allow our hold on our sense of identity to loosen a bit.

The project ended wonderfully with many friends made because, as the sensitivity of the students grew and developed during their stay, many doors opened to them.  In their own ways each of them learned their level of asking permission. 

‘Permesso’ goes far.  In Italian or any language. 

 

Observe the Door

  • August 18, 2011 8:39 am

We just completed our 8 week collaboration with the University of Texas on our Global Voices project in Florence, Italy. 

For the work of The GTP, Italy could not be a more perfect entryway for honing and perfecting the processes and structures of our projects and initiatives.  Or a more perfect lesson for visiting students, professors and artists who either have never left the United States or have never created work abroad having to deal with a local ‘reality’ such as Florence offers.

Approaching a new culture, whether it is globally or within our own country, requires that we check our ego, our ideas of how things ‘should’ be, and our ideas of how we ‘want’ things to be at the door.  We need to let go, open our eyes, our ears… all our senses…. including our heart…. and allow the truth of where we are to enter in. 

In Italy, when you are standing in front of a door…. ANY door… it is unlikely there will be an obvious way that it will open.  Unlike in the US where, for the most part, we have a door knob which is situated at hip height to your right and one turn will give you access…. that is NOT how Italian doors work.  So what does that mean?

It means you have a choice.  You can either stare at that door and become terrified, angry, frustrated, confused, insist it be ‘the door you know’, or you can…. simply…. observe the door.  You know it is a door.  You know it opens.  You just don’t know (yet) HOW. 

And that is the key issue for entering a new culture.  And, most certainly, for creating something of any relevant value there.  Accept that you don’t know.  But trust that you will.  Italian doors are magnificent things.  Many of them are physically beautiful.  Some of them are huge old horse carriage doors.  Others are so small they are half the size of our own.  Some have opening mechanisms in the center, some to the left, to the right, some turn, some push, some lift.  Some open by looking away from the door to the wall on your right or left for a gold or black or copper or red button.  But the one thing that holds true…. it will open.

In order to truly enter a new culture.  You must ‘observe the door.’  There were so many moments with our group from Texas where this challenge was beautifully presented, both actually and metaphorically.  Healthy international engagement on a creative level… on any level …. requires a level of relaxation.  You must let go of the ideas you have of how things are done and, even, who you are in the doing of them.  The opportunity presented, in many ways, is for you to be brave enough to admit you don’t know.  Until you learn about where you are.  And who you are with.  Take a breath, let in that information, see the shiny copper button just at eye level waiting to be pushed, and then. . . walk through.

At that point, you can begin to collaborate.

 

Introduction

  • October 6, 2010 3:36 pm

In this blog we will look at the issue of theatre arts and its affect on the international community, both here in the states and abroad.  As issues are brought to light, and as The Global Theatre Project grows, more information will be included which I hope will add to a roboust, productive and proactive discussion.  The inquiry is: how can the theatre artists and students of our country actively, creatively, positively and joyously develop their work and their selves along side their international peers in a way which enhances and benefits the local community in which they are doing their work.

I, of course, invite those of you who have content, ideas, images or video you would like to add to this discussion to please do so by contacting me or putting your comments below.

With regards and thanks,

Bari Hochwald
President and Artistic Director