ph. John Cobb
Border Crossings
(Ireland) is a new theatre company
based in (or, perhaps more accurately, “based out of”) Sligo: a small town on
the Atlantic Coast, with fewer than 20,000 inhabitants. 5.5% of the population forms the significant
Polish minority, and 4.1% are described by the census as “people from countries
outside the EU”. The census statistics
date from 2016, so the latter figure does not yet include British people. It’s
not the sort of place that is usually associated with intercultural theatre:
that tends to be the preserve of large cosmopolitan cities with histories of
migration and complex populations. But
Sligo is surprising. As you walk from
the centre to the railway station, you pass a bust, given by the Indian Embassy
in 2015, which portrays the Bengali playwright, poet, painter and educator
Rabindranath Tagore.
Tagore is celebrated in Sligo because of his
friendship with W.B. Yeats, who throughout his peripatetic life considered this
his true home, and who is buried just 5 miles up the road in Drumcliff
churchyard. A hundred years ago, in the
upheavals that led to the creation of the Irish Republic (and to the partition
of the island on religious lines - a fateful decision by colonial Britain that
would also find echoes on the Indian subcontinent), Yeats was at the forefront
of the cultural ferment around Irish nationalism. From the perspective of today’s Ireland,
which draws much of its strength and dynamism from a commitment to the EU and
which is home to a rapidly diversifying and internationalising population,
Yeats’s approach to an emerging post-colonial identity could be regarded as remarkably
long-sighted. Rather than espousing an
entrenched, inward-looking nationalism of religion and resistance, Yeats sought
to locate his poetry and theatre in an international context, drawing off a
wide range of cultural traditions, both within Europe and beyond, in order to
articulate an emerging Irishness. As one
of the founders of Ireland’s National Theatre, the Abbey, Yeats directed
Tagore’s The Post Office in Dublin.
His own plays were often inspired by Asian forms, particularly the
Japanese Noh. At the Hawk’s
Well, which he wrote in 1916, employs the Noh form to stage an
episode from the Ulster Cycle. His
designer for the production was a Frenchman who had taken British citizenship,
Edmund Dulac, and the crucial role of the Guardian of the Well was performed by
the Japanese dancer Michito Ito.
Ito was not actually a Noh artist, but
had arrived in Dulac’s circles via his study of Dalcroze’s “eurhythmics” and
his association with Nijinsky and the Ballet Russe. Nor was Yeats’s work in any way “devised
theatre”: he employed “Oriental” aesthetics and forms as a means to develop a
very personal authorial vision. From a contemporary perspective, it would be
quite easy to accuse him of “cultural appropriation”. But his desire to seek
intercultural perspectives, to search for theatrical form as a means of
articulating emerging identities in the aftermath of the colonial era: this
continues to offer a model for what theatre can and should do in Ireland, in
Europe and beyond.
Sligo today has two theatres. One of them is called The Hawk’s Well, in
a tribute to Yeats’s experiment with the Noh. The other one houses Border Crossings’
registered office, and has an altogether more functional name: The Factory. Yeats’s theatre was an
early example of esoteric and patrician interculturalism from above: a
tradition of Western borrowing from other cultures in search of something
“universal”. Border Crossings locates
itself in a different approach to interculturalism. This is an interculturalism “from below”; an
interculturalism informed by encounters between artists collaborating in
egalitarian structures to make work without a single author; an
interculturalism that gives greater regard to the material and historical specificity
of post-colonial politics, and so to theatre’s
role as a site of performative becoming.
In relation to Ireland, this is particularly
important, since the Sligo company operates in close dialogue with a much older
sister
organisation, which has been
operating in the UK for a quarter of a century; producing theatre made through
international collaboration, conducting community work across London’s diverse
cultures, and producing the biennial ORIGINS Festival of First Nations. At a moment when the UK - or perhaps it would
be more accurate to say England - is retreating so drastically from European
collaboration into a re-ignited dream of exceptionalism and neo-imperialism, it
is crucial for artists in both of these islands to re-think the role of theatre
in relation to cultural and political identity.
By operating two distinct companies within different national
jurisdictions as a means of facilitating cross-border collaboration and the
emergence of theatre that is not bound in to national mythologies, we are
responding to pressing intercultural concerns on an European and an
international stage. There’s a symbolic
as well as a practical value to this structural innovation.
The most recent play to be produced by Border
Crossings (UK) in 2020 was called The Great Experiment, and dealt explicitly with the tensions of intercultural
performance, as well as with the historical indentured labour migrations from
India to other parts of the British Empire in the aftermath of the abolition of
slavery. Two of the five
creator-performers were Irish: Tony Guilfoyle and Tobi King Bakare. The fact that Tobi, a Black actor who might
conventionally have been expected to play an enslaved man, did not in fact have
enslaved ancestors but was an Irishman of Nigerian heritage, jolted our
audiences out of the easy assumptions that are often made around identity,
culture and ethnicity.
Also in the cast for this complex piece of
devised intercultural work was Nisha Dassyne: a Mauritian performer with
indentured Indian ancestry, who is also my wife. Nisha studied Fine Art at an Indian
University in West Bengal, called Santiniketan.
Its founder was none other than Rabindranath
Tagore.
Michael Walling - Border Crossings
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