EUROPA: NEGOTIATING BORDER MYTHS FOR CONTEMPORARY PLAYWRIGHTING

In the beginning, there was no Europe. Far from being the dying words of an unrepentant Eurosceptic, this stark statement is simply an historical truth that situates the debate in the present. As contemporaries of this immediacy, the task at hand lies in updating the modernity of the playwriting process so as to be able to deconstruct any Eurocentric definitions of Europe as a ‘cut-and-paste’ geography; to be ready to re-think the notions of borders, boundaries, thresholds, bounded space. Extending playwrighting strategies to a diversity based not on ‘otherness’, itself a marker of difference, but rather to ‘all others’, is an important part of the process of a growing cultural mutualism which is able to keep up with the ‘black box’ of contemporary realities - for example, the Balkan wars, the Algerian conflict, Turkish prisons and treatment of the Kurdish population, central Europe and the emergence of the newly-independent States, etc.

Border theories, as argued out in the playwrighting process, rely on thematized sites of negotiation where playwrights can operate as border crossers. Ounce for ounce, pound for pound, the ideological drive of the argument lies in creating the collisions where drama is born, where tragedy and comedy emerge as primary tools to negotiate borders of national identity, class, religion, sexuality, cultural and political domination, resistance, language, home and homelessness, migration, exile, Diaspora, identity and ownership. In a playwright’s Europe of unbounded space, the process of cultural mutualism is related to the context of those economic, social, political and linguistic factors that govern the vision that a playwright brings to the creation of a performance text. Performance writing, in a Europe that has witnessed the global and domestic realignment of politics, with a growing return to market economies, and the aesthetic of the writer as producer of a commodity, means that border consciousness exists in a framework where a new kind of Eurocentrism will gain ground, in a Europe defined by a fixed geography. A slogan which once had only a military connotation has now crept into social, economic and demographic usage. The more that the playwrighting process is brought to re-think and break through Eurocentric definitions of borders and boundaries, then the more that the debate around cultural mutualism will resist a slogan copyrighted by none other than Joseph Goebbels: Fortress Europe.

Speaking from the present, as contemporary performance writing constructs our history for future cultural narratives, it is interesting to examine three keyword notions in the idea of ‘Europa: Negotiating Border Myths for Contemporary Playwrighting’. These are, firstly, Europa and our own historicity as it is understood in the context of the land mass now known as Europe - secondly, the nature of border dynamics and border consciousness - and lastly, contemporary playwrighting in Europe. Substituting ‘European people’ for ‘Latinos’, Earl Shorris’ frame-working of the problematic for Latino transculturation is relevant to the situation in Europe as it expands to take in new member States, linkages to shared experiences, realities accessed through artists is exile, etc.:

“There are no ‘European people’, only diverse peoples struggling to remain who they are while becoming someone else. Each of them has a history, which may be forgotten, muddled, misrepresented, but not erased. Every people has its own Eden, and there are no parallel tracks.”

Thus, in the beginning, there was no Europe. For millions of years the world’s largest land mass was a massive peninsula with no name. The myth of Europa was one of the most important in the classical world. Mentioned in passing by Homer, the subject of Grecian vase painting and of decoration in the houses of Pompeii, immortalized in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and painted in modern times by Rembrandt, Titian, Veronese, Rubens, etc., Europa was a princess from Phoenicia (now South Lebanon), the daughter of Agenor, king of the city of Tyre on the coast of Sidon. The story goes that she was seduced by the Father of the Gods, Zeus, who had disguised himself as a white bull, and then carried her off to Crete to bear their offspring on the continent that would come to be known as Europe. In Herodutus’ more mundane version of the myth we learn that the Cretans are Europeans and Europa herself an Asian woman, this last being due to the fact that in classical understanding the Persians stood for all the peoples of Asia. The fact of an abducted Asian woman giving her name to Europe shows that what had been a divine appropriation in myth was transformed in history to a story of hatred between two continents, the Phoenicians being replaced through the centuries by the Ottoman Turks, who themselves were replaced by the Russians. For Aeschylus himself, the difference between Europe and Asia as well as Africa, was based not only on climate and geography but also on race (ethnos). Europa’s transferral, from the Asian civilizations of the East to Hellas and the island colonies of the Aegean, leads to the identity of Europe as a place. In terms of re-thinking Europe as an unbounded space, it is important that contemporary playwrights exploit this collision of worlds by remembering, firstly, that Europe’s origins are non-European, and secondly, that despite Eurocentric efforts to the contrary, it is impossible to determine where Europe stops and where Asia and Africa begin.

Studies in the geography of modern drama show that the notion of place is important in the change from a dramatic search for roots to the transformation of borders into pathways. Through a fluidity of performance mediums, contemporary theatre practice has been adept at delving into these threshold states between categories, working creatively, or rather liminally, in a performance space between an inside and an outside. Of course, the very idea of modern drama and the notion of the playwrighting process being updated to work between categories and an unbounded space, itself represents an imaginary border between the present and what has come before. This is not a disadvantage for the contemporary playwright though; it is simply a case of critically recognizing the potentialities of the past, and those past contemporary realities that have become our history, and in some instances continue as present day realities. In his Short Organum for the Theatre (article 37), Brecht’s exhortations to “defamiliarize” and “historize” further underline his idea that history has the potential to display temporal and spatial distances that can transform the “ordinary” into something “striking”. In terms of re-thinking contemporary border consciousness for the playwright in Europe, the “striking” aspect lies in being able to transform defined border spaces into imaginary pathways between categories: - and this is where contemporary playwrights ‘dig in’ and write the cultural narratives of our times as cultures collide.

The playwright in Europe as border crosser, or rather as border breaker, as traveller - that is, in an ethical sense - as a nomad writing out of the imaginary spaces, the borderless frontiers, in between categories of time and place. Travel is an appropriate term for the playwrighting process that is not afraid to leave aside the historical, political, linguistic and cultural divisions that community and continental living impose. Being able to write these encounters that go beyond ‘otherness’, itself a marker of difference, and actually travel and encounter ‘all others’, is the first step towards fracturing borders and boundaries; it is the performative enactment through writing and textual space of becoming-other. Transcultural contacts between cultures which contribute to the contemporary realities of Europe cannot however be used as mere representational aspects in the playwrighting process. The ideological drive to cross borders, to work in between categories, does not support a sedentary mode of travel whereby the playwrighting process turns the encounter with ‘all others’ into a mission to capture knowledge of the other. The encounter has to remain interactive; not merely facing others in their history, thereby creating an obsessive boundary which separates them from us, but being able to face our own history and its role in their present.

The ritual nature of the encounter lies in inter-activeness, between mimesis and catharsis, memory and identity, that both sides are willing to use as a means to reinforce community cohesion. One danger of crossing borders in the playwriting process is that the notion of defence as it occurs in the encounter with ‘all others’ might well lead to the de-marking of boundaries, but it also might lead to the creation of Crusoe-like lines of defence that are nothing more than dislocations in our effort to live in a community of unbounded space. Where encounter with the other ignores the other, it only captures knowledge of the other, with the result that even the playwrighting process can be in danger of creating a citadel of selfhood, a fortress island within a fortress Europe, making impossible the use of any metatheatrical device which acknowledges the existence of other performance forms, other indigenous peoples and their performance spaces which exist the other side of the boundary. The dialogic clash that occurs when cultures collide - through speech genres, language levels, discourses, itself becomes impossible.

The liminal performance space between an outside and an inside, where the play text is written between categories and in an unbounded space where encounter with ‘all others’ is possible might in itself seem to imply that communication through the play script and the theatre experience depends entirely on a referential, or rather mimetic, relation between art and reality as others live it. As a means of slippage into encounter with all others, the relation between art and reality necessarily exists in the play script, but the point is that the act of re-thinking the dynamics of border crossings, border consciousness, actually allows the playwrighting process, whether through dialogic clash or updating of the macaronic phenomenon, or through linkages to shared realities, to open a clearing within the play script that is specific to an unbounded space. If that sounds like a contradiction in terms, it should be taken as a way of side-stepping certain biases of mimetic theory that oblige the playwright to seek a source of artistic representation in the subject matter of the play, thereby developing characterization and plot in a set of abstract truths. This is true of the whole pendulum of script modes, going from text-based scripts with established author ownership, text-based scripts where there is no question of final ownership and where people are free to fit the play to the production context, plays where both text and authorship are dispensed with and production created from the acted impressions of the actors on a given subject, and lastly, plays created in the form of collage, in the manner of Tadeusz Rozewicz’s method of inviting actors and directors to participate in the creation of the play.

Mimetic theory then, for all that it is worth, is hardly capable of de-colonizing the encounter between cultures, or the transferral of other performance forms to the stages of Europe; that is, not without locking beyond-border cultures into a definition of otherness and difference where their actions remain outside our drama. Aristotle defined tragedy as the imitation of an action, and the co-reflexive expressions of imitation and action show all the ambiguity of mimetic theory and its limited usefulness in negotiating a clearing space for encounters in an unbounded Europe marked by pathways rather than borders.

A further consequence of this drive to re-think the dynamics of border consciousness in the playwrighting process is that the formulation ‘Contemporary European Playwrights’ should read ‘Contemporary Playwrighting in Europe’. The three dominant cultures in Europe in terms of language publication are Anglo-American, German and French. And although they may well account for their own contemporary realities, they do not directly account for other economic, political, linguistic and cultural realities in the rest of an unbounded Europe. Other languages in the European context, such as Croatian, Polish, Basque, Portuguese, Spanish, etc., not to mention European languages by possible future political extension, Turkish for example, have just as much a valid claim to the need of re-thinking borders and boundaries, in textual space as much in physical topographies.

The challenge lies in landscaping the geography of the playwrighting process, where the idea of unbounded space actually does fit, or rather accommodate, a consciousness of borders and boundaries that has been transformed into an awareness of pathways. Historical, political, linguistic, cultural and ritual pathways have relevance, if not direct links, to sites of negotiation - conflict, exile, mutilation, homelessness, etc. - which affect our human need for community. What follows are a number of specific instances to enhance the geography of the playwrighting process.

The updating of Macaronic literature is a case in question, with its focus on bilingualism having implications for cultural mutualism in the new playwrighting of Europe. Teofilo Folengo, 1496-1544, was an Italian poet whose fame rests chiefly on his Macaronicae, a work that provided a prototype for burlesque traits and types of personages, not in itself an innovation, but the style he employed was grossly satirical and borders on the sacrilegious. Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable defines Macaronic Latin as Dog Latin, or modern words with Latin endings, and Macaronic verses as a text in which foreign words are ludicrously distorted and jumbled together. This kind of burlesque composition is interesting in that its hybridity is derived from a mixture of languages, surely an attitude worth promoting in new playwrighting strategies. An unbounded contemporary Europe has direct links to the traditional historical, political, linguistic and cultural divisions of Europe through the ages. Any Community or unified social group consists of some members, individuals or Member States, where fluency in more than one language tends to produce texts that mix languages. Historically-speaking, the so-called Strasbourg Oaths of A.D. 842, which brought two of the heirs of Charlemagne’s empire into agreement after years of civil war, were confirmed in oaths spoken in the language of the other party, Romance and German. The macaronic phenomenon is also reflected in the Lindisfarne Gospels, where the Latin Vulgate text of Scripture is presented together with an interlinear gloss in Old English. The macaronic focus on bilingualism and the mixing of languages is not only restricted to the lyric, but also occurs in Piers Plowman, and more interestingly, in view of implications for theatre practice in general, in a number of stage works. A number of the Corpus Christi cycles and the morality plays include linguistic mixture: for example, in the former, plays 21 (Christ and the Doctors) and 22 (The Baptism), and in the latter, Mankind, Wisdom, The Castle of Perseverance. The fact that dialogic clash in the play script occurs when language levels and speech genres collide is the ideal framework for further developing a macaronic instinct based on bilingualism and language mixing. As a term, macaronic derives from macarones, that is, dough made up of flour, cheese and butter, and which is thick, coarse and rustic in texture. The macaronic input in the playwrighting process is thus to provide fat, coarseness and gross words, an innovation which might help both defamiliarize and historize the provocations of In-Yer-Face theatre, in Britain and in its continental equivalents.

Another instance is Koteba, Kolokelen in particular, and the work of Adama Bagayoko and the group Psy, part of T.R.A.C.T., the Malian association for useful theatre. Koteba is a traditional Malian form of theatre expression that focuses on socialization and healing. Adama Bagayoko is an author and coordinator of Koteba, and his medicosocial use of this theatrical mode of expression is mainly in Kolokelen, which deals with madness, and in Jama Jigi, which deals with Aids prevention. The theatrical use of Koteba as a therapeutic tool brings to mind Artaud’s definition of theatre and its origins as being “the age of evil”, and Antoine Vitez’s later extension to “place of the impure”. The interactive nature of Koteba in a therapeutic Kolokelen environment is that evil, and madness in its human form, is rooted out in the individual, specifically in a process between mimesis and catharsis, memory and identity, where the afflicted person is led to ‘construct something for themselves and with others’. This process implies a medical dramaturgy that influences socialization and healing in both the individual and the community at large, not to mention it being an innovative tool in the construction of a consciousness of just what it means to be a citizen and a useful member of the City. The use of Koteba, and Kolokelen in particular, is thus a medicosocial pathway in Malian society that has direct bearing on medicosocial realities in Europe. Other such pathways exist as linkages to realities shared by Malian society and both immigrant and dominant ethnic culture communities in Europe, specifically France and Britain. Don is another of the T.R.A.C.T. groups and one of its creations deals with the barbaric practice of FGM, Female Genital Mutilation. Female circumcision is an ancient blood ritual that exists in a variety of severities; cliteridectomy, excision and infibulation. Although this barbaric practice is commonly imputed to Islamic and African traditions, Europe has its own history of controlling women’s sexuality. From female slaves in ancient Rome who had rings threaded through their labia to prevent them from becoming pregnant; to the Crusaders who brought the chastity belt to Europe in the twelfth century; to Victorian Britain where cliteridectomy was the surgical ‘remedy’ for female masturbation; to cases of forced sterilization in a number of European States; to present-day France and Britain where female circumcision is illegal but is still rife and is secretly practised by several ethnic groups. In this regard, realities exist which create the pathways for understanding and tackling a practice common to contemporary Malian society and ethnic group communities in Europe, and to the unbounded space that the playwrighting process is capable of landscaping. Cultural landscaping is all about transcreation in order to deal with shared realities. The practice of FGM is known in the jargon of barbarity as The Small Wedding, and, lest male minds protest that female excision is comparable to the circumcision of baby boys, the reality is that FGM involves the amputation of a woman’s clitoris and labia, and that the equivalent male mutilation would not be removal of the foreskin but the cutting off of the entire penis. The fact of a play script being capable of working liminally in between categories, through playwrighting strategies that take account of pathways where shared realities cross the borders of theatre and ritual, is also important, because instead of opposing theatre and ritual as two phenomenologically and mutually exclusive activities, it becomes possible to see the two phenomena as located on the same performative continuum. Performance writing in unbounded space here becomes a unifying concept which privileges interaction in the community rather than exclusion.

In the last instance, it is question of the Algerian playwright, director and actor, Slimane Bena?ssa, now considered as one of the most important Algerian theatre practitioners of his generation. A few years ago, I attended a theatre conference on theatre and exile, and where some of the invited delegates, from Bosnia, Croatia, Slovenia, Algeria, etc., pointed out that there is tragedy, as it exists as genre in the Western dramatic canon, and tragedy as it is lived in everyday life in a country going through conflict. As the Algerians also made clear, Algerian theatre itself was not in exile, only the artists themselves. Bena?ssa has been living in exile in France since 1993. Since the beginning of the still ongoing conflict in Algeria, a number of Algerian playwrights and directors have been assassinated, amongst them Abderkader Alloula, and others have gone into exile, mostly in France. The Belgian publisher Lansman has now brought out a boxed edition of Bena?ssa’s Theatre in Exile - I myself am translating these five plays into English. Bena?ssa’s theatre vision encapsulates much of the reflection in Algerian theatre practice as it has evolved since the first years following the war of Independence, notably the role of theatre in working-class education projects, and in particular the way in which present-day theatre practice is anchored in a dual reflection based on traditional cultural forms and the tension of political and social realities as they evolve towards a universal modernity. Bena?ssa’s work perfectly displays the trend, evolved through both conflict and exile, to base character and scenic construction on the halqa (a circle stage place made up the spectators themselves as they stand around the storyteller). It is not the idea of the halqa itself that is developed through Bena?ssa’s work, but rather the way in which this form relates to script and production construction and privileges a multiplicity of points of view, as opposed to the static state of Western theatre forms as they were first implanted and adapted in North African theatre at the beginning of the twentieth century. Bena?ssa is an Algerian artist in exile in France. That is a reality. However, in a quest to re-think border dynamics and border consciousness in the playwrighting process, the questions of identity and ownership become paramount in the work of an artist in exile, in plays written in exile and which reflect realities directly related to the country of refuge. When Bena?ssa brings his theatre visions to bear in France, sensibilities honed in war, conflict and the post-colonialist theatre trends of Algeria, it becomes apparent that the constitution of borders is entirely a man-made invention. In A Common Man for Four Particular Women, Bena?ssa was working to a commission that took place in a Refuge for women who had suffered domestic violence. Bena?ssa has said that he writes for the women of Algeria, and besides the cross-gender insights he brings to a text written by a man examining male violence towards women, his acceptance of a commission in the host country raises the question of to whom the text belongs to. In a playwrighting process where the geography of unbounded space gives no priority to political titles such as nationality, refugee, exile, clandestine, etc., the only reality that is valid is the ‘black box’ of the situation being written up. In terms of playwrighting discourse, the theatricalization of the plot is derived through characters that are eminently stylized and constructed by the nature of the language and the speech genres and discourses. In a play text written in France by an Algerian artist in exile, only a vision of dramatic writing that takes account of unbounded space, shared pathways of domestic violence, the playwright as border crosser, only in such a playwrighting process can questions such as the identity and ownership of the text be made redundant. As Bena?ssa has said: “The theatre is the only place where conflicts can be brought out into the open, and where citizenship is forged.” Re-thinking borders thus comes down to re-thinking citizenship and how we share realities with all others in the City. A playwrighting process capable of producing strategies that create new forms of communication; a metaphor that is symbolic of the irreducible part of us which is left after all differences have been stripped away, and which is beyond and beneath all that is social, political, economic, religious; new pathways from old borders: - such is the ideological role of the playwright in the scripting of realities.

Theatrical space, from the ritual circle of the Greek orchestra to site-specific performances, to border dynamics that establish linkages to shared historical, political, linguistic and cultural realities: all are useful metaphors for consciousness of community. Other metaphors can be found in other instances that involve unbounded space in the playwrighting process: for example, firstly, the plays of Biljana Srbljanovic where the dilemma is a universal one - how to construct a moral life from conflicting, imperfect choices; secondly, configurations of theatre and performance writing in cyberspace; and thirdly, the state of in-between-ness which characterizes the aesthetics of latino performance, and which has made ‘Latina’ an allegory for dual national and artistic identities. There are other instances, but these are for another paper, and for another failed attempt at brevity.

© Josip Rainer. Playwright/dramaturg, theatre researcher and translator. Josip Rainer was a political prisoner in South Africa during the struggle against apartheid. He now lives and works in France.