Institute for Non-toxic Propaganda — ——– Society for the Promotion of Human Rites

Disclaimer:
The postulate behind ‘Guerilla Shakespeare‘ seems clearly an anathema to good theatre practice. Ensembles are to be nurtured. It cannot be best policy to banish rehearsal time, to forbid all group exploration, and expose the most vulnerable moment of the rehearsal cycle as t’were a worthy spectacle.

Those who nevertheless wish to witness: a stripped down, elemental, rehearsal-free KING LEAR to help inaugurate the initial season of Truth & Beauty Evenings at Westminister HUB – New Zealand House, Haymarket, London UK, are of course welcome. Sunday 26th November, 1800 hrs.

http://truthandbeautylondon.tumblr.com/kinglear

Lear – me,
Duke of Burgundy – Anton,
Kent – someone called Andy,
The rest of cast = a inconveniently anonymous collection of great unknowns!

The organisers allow for a frightful mess; but that somehow small moments of inspired beauty might coalesce out of the quagmire. Why such chaos should constructively illuminate the fate of tyrannical patriarchs in the latter days of the colonial project, escapes me. It smacks more of an ungrateful younger generation usurping time-honoured tradition and opting for yet another lark to serve as blogg fodder.
(The rationale for importing a decidedly balding, but not quite yet 80, actor into a land full of gifted Shakespearean veterans, also bodes utterly peculiar.)

And worse it might be yet…
The day when actors first leave their scripts to stumble empty-handed and zombie-like around the stage, is usually a disaster. At this point, finally making eye contact with ones fellow players remains a horrific distraction rather than the viable life raft that it is meant to be. We are to be are naked, abandoned and dispossessed. Within the inner tempest in our skulls, we will frantically strive to bridge the half-secure constructs worked upon in our several garrets with the merciless realities of a, for many, unvisited performance space. For this recipe to provide anything akin to a visionary evening is beyond presumptive.

To break this impasse, the traditional solutions posit direction.
However, this role too has been jettisoned as unessential, decadent paraphernalia.
That said, as titular King, we can but instinctively grasp for our forlorn crown. The way forward is unforgiving; adulterating the alchemy of youthful hubris, by forcing into the distillate the secret ingredients of a lifetime, may prove fateful. We should not anticipate gratitude.

Stockmann Process Event #I – Undercurrents of the Meeting
When the annual Hardanger Peace Symposium convened in the picturesque fjordside village of Jondal, the Institute for Non-toxic Propaganda served up an aperitif. 
The long weekend’s format was well-rehearsed – veterans of various guises of the peace movement would gather for fresh insight from a row of greying professors, a dash of politicians and a flock of the young and eager. The result was probably equally preprogrammed: we as individuals would emerge after three days with a head full of frightful facts. We perhaps would head home with rekindled outrage, we might have brushed into kindred souls.

Invited by the International Women’s League for Peace and Freedom, our non-toxic contribution was a two stage workshop that framed the event as its very beginning and its utter end. The task of the workshop was to extract concrete, coordinated efforts that would supplement the purely informative nature of the symposium model.

Under the title ‘Peace is Movement’, stage one was an 1 1/2 hour gathering with 29 symposium participants who arrived the evening before. Wenche Dorethea Haukeland, our resident eurhythmy teacher, contributed an accessible physical interpretation of the workshop theme, and we were off and creatively stumbling. The desire was to counter the inherent paradox in a meeting of activists who are so often rendered passive by the microphone lecture powerpoint presentation format.
The strategy was to parallel an actor’s homework analysis to find playable actions that would deepen the significance of being there. I introduced the idea of conspirators seeking concrete accomplishments that could realistically be performed within our timeframe. This search would then provide a super-objective that would colour the ‘actors’’ motivation throughout the four days. This classic tool of an actor’s sub-text could unify the efforts of our band of ‘positive conspirators.’
The questions posed are less existential – eg.: What the devil is my motivation?;
and more based on a pursuable objective : What actions must I pursue in order to emerge with a satisfying grand finale?

Frankly, at the start we seemed far too great a number to form a convincing sub-group of behind the scenes fixniks. However, the very fact of addressing the issue of : ‘Is there a collective goal around which we could we wish to emerge from this gathering?’, enabled much valuable getting-to-the-point. To render this process visible, we hung a large roll of paper across the back wall of the meeting room. As the lectures unfolded, participants wrote and pasted up crystallizations of their concerns. On the evening on the second full day, a subcommittee edited and ordered the comments into issue based constellations that indicated avenues that called for concrete follow up.

After the final Monday afternoon dinner, a group of 15 diehards remained for our closing session. Within a succinct, focussed hour everyone had their primary concerns addressed and clear commitments were made as to how to concretely support each others projects. The creeping passivity that so easily invades the human forum, had been circumvented by a few deft strokes.  New constellations of working groups had emerged that would promote tangible action in the coming year.

Once again, faith in the process proved a decisive element.

“Are you an indignado?” I ask Nikkos Kokkalis, using the term coined by young Spanish protesters to express outrage at José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero’s austerity plans, now swiped by the Greeks. “I’m a super-indignado,” he almost shouts. A 29-year-old graduate who lives with his parents, Nikkos has never done a proper job – just menial tasks for a website and an internship for a TV station. “There are 300 people over there,” he waves at the MPs’ offices. “Most of them make decisions without asking the people.”

At the diametrically opposite corner of Europe, and buffered by an embarrassing trade surplus, my local riff-raff just won’t feel the same visceral despair as the crowd in Athens or Tunis. Here, we are all too well bribed. Here, even the death metal bands are naively charming. Still there is work to be done…

AS yet we haven’t cooked up our slogans: “Give us some Cake” may work for a while, but what’s next?

DRAMATIC INTERVENTION IN INTERNATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION EFFORTS

To what degree do selected ‘Theatre for Development’ projects correspond with recommended treatment strategies for Post-traumatic Stress Syndrome?

An examination of cross-references between the healing stages prescribed by the therapeutic tradition and the practice of theatre practitioners working within communities in reconstruction.

In 2002, I took a rewarding sojourn in the field of academia. It was a pleasure to spend intensive time thinking about issues for which I care deeply. Attending the Theatre for Development course at University of Winchester as a mature student, I emerged with of all things, an MA with Distinction. More importantly, I had written a comprehensive dissertation that, while starting with the above enquiry, built towards the additional observation that strategic applications of theatre tools are sadly underemployed. That we too, as theatre artists, are in denial.

This dissertation and the accompanying report:
Scenarios for Human Rites — Dramaturgy for Development:
Listening Stations & FiNGOs
available on request at author.

(See Osijek/Baghdad Friendship Society)

Residents of war-ravaged Eastern Slavonia share
their expertise at living under prolonged bombing,
with FiNGO team from TV Iraq.

March 25th, 2003.

Minimal Theatre supporting People’s Movements

A Listening Station : Creating Human Rites
The situation is familiar, one meeting flows benignly into the next meeting. A mere week after landing in Eastern Slavonia, my short guided tour through the concerns of the Coalition for Human Rights in Croatia, cross-faded into the inaugural gathering of the Citizens’ Initiative ‘Enough War’. ( The previous week the Anglo-American military machine had ploughed northward out of Kuwait.) Two days earlier a frustratingly sparse and toothless demonstration had been held in a neighbouring town (Three quarters of the four of us at this meeting comprised over 20% of the participants). We discussed the pull to passivity. If only in defiance of this pull, it seemed important that the citizens of Osijek, a society that some twelve years previous had itself been besieged and bombarded while the world watched, did not leave it up to others in the nation’s capital or around the world to react. A demonstration was necessary, but we feared gathering a similarly tiny proportion of citizens. How would we raise the masses with limited resources, and with so short a time?

Orchestrating demonstrations is obviously well within the natural habitat of the ‘poetically correct’. At this initial planning meeting, the familiar local recipe for a standard demo was trotted out. There was a fear that a small group of people on the main square would drown in the Saturday crowds. As one third of the central committee, I was invited to comment. Several ideas were bashed around as how to make much out of little. I sketched two people standing in an oil drum both as an instant crowd and as an ‘attention gatherer’. I suggested that, instead of endless, internal discussions about predictable slogans, we meet participants empty-handed, holding an active slogan clinic where blank placards would be publicly painted as part of a ritualised pre-march preparation. Some of my better ideas were kept until further into the process.
Continue reading →

It has been an illusive quest. Once again my child transforms: the new title for Professor Uncle Herre Doctor Bwana Forget Zis Extracting Entusiasm Guerilla Lecture Party Piece Experiment has become “A Kindly Boot”. Please forgive me.

A few summers ago, I was hired by FN Sambandet Vest (Western Norway office of the UN Association) to lead a three day expedition. Our mission was to investigate the prevailing change of climate occurring along the route of the nefarious collective transport marathon through the magnificent fjords, the almost legitimate tourist magnet: Norway in a Nutshell.

norway_nutshell
– the pre-voyage brochure

We retraced the stations of the cross-paths; the frayed surface where both travelers and the natives seemed destined to exchange cultural values.  It was shocking. We became advocates of Slow Tourism:

Plots were made to make shoe-removal the only acceptable custom at Class A historical monuments such as Borgund Stavkyrkje.  If people found it hard to comply, we could offer to wash their feet in goat’s milk. — “You would certainly do so at the Taj Mahal.”

Plans were hatched to establish pirate fleets of environmental awareness activists. Returning veterans from the UN/NATO wars, would complete their mandatory society-reintegration course after service curtailment with a six month training in ‘Guerilla Think Tanks‘.  From the idyllic banks of a tight fjord, ocean-going kayaks shall surround and board unwitting vessels of the cruise ship trade that ply that part of the coast in the summer months.  For three hours, our guerillas will hold up a ship in mid-itinery, while they will present a participatory, democratic discussion workshop – teaching key skills such as Universal Community Rebuilding Strategies.

As with many of our non-toxic FiNGO (fictive NGOs) solutions, the threat is often as effective as the carry through…

Please note the small print.  The banner under which these very skilled individuals meet, proudly proclaims their myopia.  They haven’t been paying attention and don’t understand.  The Institute for Non-toxic Propaganda has clearly been enjoying the good life for too long – within three years the banner must read : THE END OF GROWTH. Tactical considerations to be discussed herewith…

Yes, I write my own press clippings department:
Bembo Davies has been at this business for several years, his acting style is unpolished and foolhardy.  Dramaturgically, the closest genre to his ‘guerilla lecture party piece’ might be stand-up — save that his turf is the loosest of rocks on an avalanche prone mountainside.
(for Issi’s wonderful comments see : this)