‘To Be or not to Be: Art on the Frontline’
Published Macau, China, August 2021
In 2005, I travelled to Haiti and when I told people that I worked in theatre, they were somewhat baffled. They didn’t really understand that it was possible to do theatre for a living, as a job. Haiti was – and still is – a place devastated by disastrous foreign interventions where basic necessities are scarce and acute poverty is the norm. Theatre seemed so luxurious, an activity in which only rich nations could indulge.
I experienced a similar sensation during the Covid-19 pandemic restrictions. Although I mourned the dark theatres and the subsequent unemployment for so many, I could not help think that we theatre artists were surplus to requirements. In a crisis, we need nurses and doctors; art will not really help us to bury our dead.
Yet as we emerge from confinement, I begin to wonder. At the close of last year, theatre director Ian Rickson suggested to me that when all this is over, ‘artists will be on the frontline’. He meant that people will have a strong need to come together for a live, collective experience in a theatre. He meant that we will want to immerse ourselves in stories again and live vicariously through other lives on stage. He meant that society craves this and that we can’t live for long without tending to our spirit. Once our medics have nursed the body, art steps in to feed its soul.
What does it mean for theatre artists to shoulder the responsibility of nourishing society’s soul following an unprecedented time of existential reckoning? In lockdown, who among us did not ask ourselves some of the big questions: what really matters, who are my people, and what is life – my life – really about? Now more than ever, artists have to ask: what will we bring to the post pandemic world? What will we do differently, what we will try to change, how will we practise and what will we offer to help us hold onto insights we have gained? In an essay entitled ‘The Habit of Art’, the writer Toni Morrison invites us to look for humanity’s own future in a ‘reconfiguration of what we are here for. To lessen suffering, to know the truth and tell it, to raise the bar of human expectation. Perhaps we should stand one remove from timeliness and join the artist who encourages reflection, stokes the imagination, mindful of the long haul and putting her/his own life on the line to do the work of a world worthy of life’.*
Morrison offers a mission for our moment: an invitation to step out of the parts we have always played and consider how we might configure ourselves anew.
*From The Source of Self-Regard.