Feel Resistance and Discover Beauty

by Simon van den Berg

‘You are not alive unless you’re blazing a difficult trail. And you can tell how alive you are by how difficult your path is.’ With a dazzling array of one-liners, director Peter Sellars opened the discussion Resistance or Rituals: Performing Arts and Social Change, held at the Companietheater on Sunday evening. In honour of Frie Leysen, the winner of this year’s Erasmus Prize, Sellars (Erasmus Prize 1998) shared the floor with a select group of international theatre makers, also friends of Leysen. As a prelude, the Amsterdams Leerorkest – comprised of schoolchildren from Amsterdam Zuidoost supported by professional musicians from the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra – gave a short concert featuring the overture from Carmen and the theme music from Pirates of the Caribbean.

A Shared Space
As debate moderator Neil Wallace later remarked, Sellars employs broad brushstrokes to sketch a dark and violent picture of the arts. Sellars touched upon a great many themes in his keynote speech, which concentrated on the importance of art that takes difficult roads, specifically within the historical framework of the period since World War II. According to him, the genius of the Holland Festival, the Wiener Festwochen or the Edinburgh Festival is that they were created as a response to Auschwitz. After the war was over, humanity’s absolute nadir forced Europeans to think about the question, ‘Who are we?’ A common space had to be created anew, in order to be able to look at each other again. Otherwise, how could we see our enemies as human beings again, or even as friends? And that’s what theatre is all about.

All for Nothing
‘Theatre is a place of absolute equality in which we can enter difficult territory,’ says Sellars, ‘because nobody is safe until we’ve all gone to the difficult place together.’ For the most part, Sellars was optimistic, sketching examples of the power of art to reveal beauty in ugliness and convinced that people who can see that beauty make different choices, vote for other representatives and thus shape their country differently. But in light of the results of the American congressional elections held a few days earlier, even he had to admit that the efforts of artists and their advocates have had little effect. What we are seeing in his country and Great Britain, said Sellars, is what happens when you take art off the daily menu. You get angry, fearful citizens, whose only pleasure comes from hurting other people. For 30 years, Frie Leysen had done fantastic work to create international platforms, and in those same 30 years, the angry electorates of his country and her country had come to the opposite conclusion. ‘Frie,’ exclaimed Sellars, ‘your 30 years of work have arrived exactly nowhere.’

A Different Approach
The praise Sellars lavished on Frie was thus coupled with an appel: We must do new things. We need new strategies. Those new things, according to Sellars, start with a deeper sense of reciprocity in the arts, not only between artists and the public, but also between artists in the West and the rest of the world. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘we are inviting artists from South America, Africa and Asia to begin a conversation. That’s fine if you don’t know each other very well yet. But now is the time get past beginning a conversation and start building meaningful, lasting and reciprocal relations.’ This kicked off the discussion between Frie Leysen, the Iranian director Amir Reza Koohestani, conservatory director Paulo Zuben (Brazil) and theatre director Seong-Hee Kim from South Korea.

Going Against the Odds
Leysen spoke about her first experiences with resistance, when as director of the DeSingel theatre in Antwerp she was determined to bring new, unconventional and international productions to the fairly traditional theatre scene in that city. ‘I had a conviction, she said, ‘and was too naïve or too stupid to realize that maybe it would not be easy.’ Resistance means something different from an Iranian perspective, interjected Koohestani: ‘What you call resisting, we call living.’ Referring to Sellars’ wise observation that you should take it as a compliment when powerful people try to stop you, Koohestani reflected on his conflicts with the authorities. Which is why he finds presenting his productions in Europe so problematic: You can say anything in the West, but as a result, you can’t change anything.

Zuben talked about the function of art for young people who are stuck in a social situation. According to Zuben, they caught in the trap of repetitiveness. If you introduce them to Bach’s music and teach them how to play it, they learn something different. That opens new perspectives. Zuben started out as a composer, but became an avid champion of opening the world of music to underprivileged youths. ‘That changed my life. I’ve no desire to return to the solitude of composing.’
Seong-Hee discovered during her studies in the West that what passes for modern art in her homeland of Korea is actually only an imitation. For her, it was imperative to set up a platform for exchange in order to nourish the art scene there. ‘But the Asian way of thinking is different: stability and safety are more important than your opinions and innovation,’ she says. ‘If you want to get something together, no one will support you.’ Yet she succeeded in setting up a new theatre festival and attracting a new audience. The conventional theatre-going public came, but didn’t understand it at all. Often, they didn’t even think it was theatre. Nonetheless, she found a big new audience amongst art enthusiasts – architects, people in the humanities, and so forth.

Wallace questioned Leysen on ‘the difficult place’ mentioned by Sellars. For Leysen, it has to do with not being troubled about wanting to be liked. ‘We want to please everybody,’ she declared. ‘And I think in the arts we should not please. Art should show where it hurts; it should be a disturbing element in society. You must be prepared not to be liked, and that can be very lonely. Politicians use fear in order to tame us. And that works all too well.’

Universal Themes and New Perspectives
Leysen emphasized that internationalism is not a goal in itself; it’s about searching for universals. Koohestani backed this up with an anecdote about his first international production. He made it because a girl had left him and there was something he still wanted to say to her. So this wasn’t even a local or national theme, but the show had great success abroad. ‘I realised,’ he said, ‘lots of people have problems with their girlfriends.’ To which Zuben added that international collaboration is essential, even if only because you’re taken much more seriously in your own country as a result.

The talk then turned to future developments. Seong-Hee sketched a broad picture: In terms of culture, the 20th century belonged to Europe. But in the 21st century, the logic behind the cultural and political hegemony of the West is being challenged. Economic power is shifting, bringing other ways of thinking to the fore, along with knowledge that is now the preserve of minorities. The idea is not to establish a new hegemony, but to let a great diversity of cultures and opposing ideas flourish. Leysen confirmed this view, saying that when she’s in Lebanon or Egypt she often hears artists discussing the philosophies of Deleuze or Foucault, and then she wonders what happened to aesthetics or the history of Arab art. In Asia, however, she sees this changing. People there realize that if they continue on the present course, they will lose very important things, such as their special relation with nature or their way of dealing with death. You sense a growing movement in Asia to save this while it’s still possible.

In the Spirit of Art
At the end, Sellars rejoined the discussion, and a clear difference of opinion between him and Leysen became evident. According to Sellars, one dissimilarity between our generation and the next is that young people no longer have to manifest themselves through confrontation. They band together in solidarity and work from the grassroots, which takes much longer, but the result is participation across a really deep segment of the population and different types of ownership. He mentioned Kansas City, where artists give dinners in order to help one another out and initiate social projects, such as a workplace where kids can assemble new bikes for themselves out of old wrecks. To which Leysen countered, ‘The arts are not there to solve problems that that politicians haven’t solved. You shouldn’t take that responsibility. We have other things to do.’ Sellars replied, ‘But that’s precisely the difference between the West and Asia or Africa. For them, art is already part of the building process. These artists aren’t rebuilding the bicycle, they’re rebuilding the person that builds the bicycle, and therefore they build communities. It’s not a material problem they’re solving, it’s a spiritual problem.’


The participants in the Resistance or Rituals debate. From left to right: Paulo Zuben, Frie Leysen, Seong-Hee Kim and Amir Reza Koohestani. Photo: Elmer van der Marel

English translation by Jane Bemont (Elegant English)