On the first morning of our wonderful, inspiring week in Bologna, we were all asked to say what theatre meant for us. Ida Strizzi, from our host organisation Teatro dell’Argine, responded that theatre for her was “giving people another point of view”. For the rest of the week, and since, I’ve been using this idea as a way of thinking through and developing what we are trying to achieve in the CRE-ACTORS project and beyond.
On one level, Ida’s idea can be literal. On the second day, we were working with the challenge that our stage was limited to the top of a white stool, with everything around it considered invisible. In one glorious moment, Xevi Ribas walked his fingers across the stool as a man moving towards a tree, and the stool then rose up and was held behind his face so that we could see him bite into the apple he had picked. It was like a wide shot cutting to a close-up, but achieved with the simplest of theatrical means (which are, of course, the key to theatre’s transformational magic). The stage was no longer horizontally in front of us, but vertical, behind Xevi’s face. Literally, we saw things from another point of view.
Later in the week, Micaela Casalboni took us through a full day of improvisation and writing around our personal experiences of the Covid lockdowns. Each of us had a personal space within the room, which came to represent the confinement of those times. Micaela offered all of us the same stimulations:
What is here?
What is missing?
What oppresses you?
What has to be here?
What do you see
through the window? (If there is a window).
What would you like
to see?
What was extraordinary about the task was how deeply varied the responses were. This was partly because of the diversity of the group - we had people from four companies and many cultures in the room, including the renegade Sweden - and partly because different psyches respond in different ways. Again, this theatrical storytelling enabled us to look at our experience from a different point of view, particularly as the task then developed into writing in response to other people’s experiences, or writing your own story from someone else’s viewpoint. Taking us out of the subjective and into a wider, more varied community of experience was both personally therapeutic and politically potent.
It’s not all about you. See this from another point of view.
At the end of the week, we were treated to the results of a discussion the facilitators had held with each partner organisation as a group. There was a very simple game: with Teatro dell’Argine, there is always an apparently simple game. We went through the alphabet, finding words for each letter that seemed to resonate with our organisational identity and purpose. It was exciting and provocative to do this with Hanna, Kunle, Lucy and Sandra, to hear another point of view on the company I had established. But even more exciting was to hear Sandra’s recorded voice on that last afternoon, reading the witty and perspicacious text that Nicola Bonazzi had created from our mundane list of alphabetical words.
“A for ACTIVISM:
because you have to move bodies and heads to move the world
Once again, we saw things from another point of
view.
B as BORDERS: to be crossed, broken up, eliminated
C for CHALLENGING: because every challenge shapes your actions
D for DOUBT: everything begins in doubt…
...I as INDIGENOUS, those native peoples often marginalised by history but surviving and therefore to be respected, or as INTERCULTURAL, which means mixing with others. I also for IRELAND. Why Ireland? In Ireland also there were natives expelled from their lands. But we, Border Crossings, we kicked ourselves out of England when England kicked herself out of Europe. A kind of sad joke. In short, we did our…
JOURNEY with the J and we were welcomed.”
Once again, we saw things from another point of view.
Michael Walling - Border Crossings
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