WhatsOnStage.com: Earlier this year, I five-starred The Destroyed Room by Vanishing Point - an incisive piece about our relation to the refugee crisis. Matthew Lenton's take-down of the way we talk around the subject ends with a series of video images. You see people - refugees - struggling against the sea, some in boats, some in the water in life-jackets. They're real people in real danger. All the chatter beforehand seems so self-indulgent as a result.
3 comments:
I want to begin by saying I agree with and support the second half of this article: I love the idea of aiding resettled refugee families by helping them tell their stories.
But I also want to bring up a debate, in response to this article, that I’ve had with other theatre practitioners several times in my life. The first came up with a group of theatre friends in Berlin in response to seeing people playing inside the Holocaust memorial (it IS a structure that, out of its context and purpose, invites play.) The question was: do people’s inclination to play in the memorial indicate a failure of design or artistry?
Similarly, does that author’s unchanged behavior indicate that the piece of theatre has failed? I take his point about theatre being indirect action when direct action is desperately needed, but I firmly believe that, as I did in Berlin, people can’t expect art to do all of the work for them. The memorial didn’t fail… people failed by not coming to the memorial in contemplation. The theatre piece didn’t fail… the author failed to translate his powerful emotions (he said he was shaken and shell-shocked) into action.
Last year for my school’s Human Rights Club, we were joined by Student Task Force, which is associated with Human Rights Watch. The chapter for that year (which is basically the topic for which they would focus on) was the Refugee crisis. So as a club we did our best to promote awareness and spread knowledge about the occurring crisis at hand. Some of the questions that we were always asked, is what a person, especially one who isn’t directly involved with the issue, can do to help, or how can we give/what is the solution to this problem? All valid questions, to which I could say nothing but to spread awareness, an answer really unsatisfying. When we here problems like this from across the world and within our own country one of people’s first responses is how to put a stop to the issue at hand: a quick, simple, reasonable answer. It makes sense, right? Have a problem? Well fix it. But an issue like the refugee crisis isn’t something that can necessarily been seen in black and white for its entirety. There is a lot of waiting and effort, with little to dissatisfied results. It is my belief the best thing anyone one person do is to keep trying: to be more knowledgeable, figure out solutions, making sure that others are aware, because something like this won’t just go away after a few tries. It is going to take years with no perfect solution, but at least not giving up hope is better than jaded. And for many people theatre is a symbol of hope, something they can enjoy in hard times. And I must agree with Trueman, theatre can’t solve crisis, but it can help to find a solution.
This is a problem that has plagued artists throughout time. How do we make our art impactful enough to make a concrete difference in the world? I think that this article gives an interesting and meaningful answer. Having theatre as a whole be able to accumulate messages and change things that way makes a lot of sense. However, single shows still can make a difference. For example, the show mentioned in the article, The Duke makes people really think about what a life is worth by posing that question in the play, and then asking for donations afterwards. This article points out other, less obvious ways theatre can help with the refugee crisis by providing them with free theatre. Making theatre with refugees allows creativity and hope to flourish in their lives, giving some reprieve to the pain they feel. Theatre can’t necessarily solve all of the problems of the world, but they can bring those issues to light and in our daily conversation.
Post a Comment