As Michelangelo said during a time of explosive human evolution: “I am still learning.” That is what I am doing.
I’ve been wrong about my definition of my work. I have to be wrong because the times we live in are demanding that I am not only wrong but dangerously so.
I have always thought that The Global Theatre Project does not do political theatre. I was against that idea. I stood on the premise that we do social-awareness theatre – theatre that woke people up to our world reality and encouraged personal responsibility and action. I believed that politics were for the politicians. About that last sentence, I was wrong.
In this moment of human history we are our politics. We have created forms of government tied just closely enough to the will of the people that our responsibility is to ensure those ties are never severed but made stronger. However, if they are not made stronger by a conscious empathetic citizenry, if they are ties of fear and ignorance, then what our politicians and governments will become is a direct result of our lack of human development both individually and collectively.
The imperative is two-fold: 1) that we, as artists, now guide our communities toward a sense of inter-connectivity, creative and intellectual celebration and communal harmony. This is the necessary political action, protest if you will, that The Global Theatre Project is focused on. 2) that, as a US Not-for-profit cultural organization we recognize that cultural export is politics. And that it affects our lives back in our small towns and large cities because it effects our international relationships.
In 2009 I sat in the office of the Consul General of Tuscany with a project to connect US students and artists with the local community as a counter to the alcohol-binged evenings many of our young people participated in. She wasn’t interested in supporting this work. There was a time, prior to Ronald Reagan, when the United States had cultural centers around the world sharing our art and artists, our intellectual inquiries and discoveries with the hopes of demonstrating the value of a functioning democracy on the international community. Since Reagan those centers have been closed. And yet we still export our culture – through studio film, network television, corporate dominance and warfare. This perspective of our culture is not complete. And it is a danger to us.
We can not necessarily stop the political power machines around us from doing what they are doing…. because they are controlled by people who have lost their sense of connectivity to the planet and to other human beings. But we can, as political protest and necessity, strengthen our tools and our intention and become the social-political artist-activists that are desperately needed right now. We need to . . . , as my mentor and partner in The GTP Institute, Mack McCarter, says: “we need to grow healthy human beings.”
So here I want to say clearly that I was wrong. The Global Theatre Project does do political theatre. In fact, we are building an army to act on this political stage…. Creative Corps. Our first line of attack is the demonization of refugees and those in forced immigration with the project An Explorer’s Desire. Fear and hatred will never solve this issue. Our efforts to work in our communities and to export this project world-wide will hopefully demonstrate that.
Please join us #WeRCreativeCorps #ExplorersDesire
