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Dec. 16, 2011
30 years of Headlines
Artistic director David Diamond speaks with JI.
DANA SCHLANGER
“I’m a theatre guy. For me, it’s not about fixing everything ... but you wake up in the morning and do whatever you can to leave this place better than you found it.” – David Diamond.
Fresh from finishing another thought-provoking theatre production – Us and Them, which had a three-week run at the Cultch – Headlines Theatre artistic director David Diamond took time with the Jewish Independent to look back at the company’s 30 years of producing community-based, issue-oriented theatre, dealing mostly with violence, racism, injustice, homelessness and addiction.
Theatre for Living is a concept that Diamond developed from Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, and it is theatre for social change.
“Headlines began 30 years ago doing agit-prop, work that has very clearly defined enemies,” explained Diamond. “We were a group of politically active artists and had no idea we were starting a theatre company. We all had housing problems and wanted to do something socially relevant and we created this play, Buy, Buy, Vancouver. Surprisingly, it became this massive cult thing. This led to other projects and, in 1984, shortly after we established Headlines, I encountered the work of Brazilian educator Paolo Freire and theatre director Augusto Boal and this changed the direction of my work and life.”
In the process of adapting Boal’s message and method to a Canadian context, a gradual evolution occurred. “Theatre of the Oppressed was very grounded in the oppressor/oppressed language,” said Diamond. “For Headlines, invitations to do workshops were coming primarily from First Nations communities who loved the Theatre of the Oppressed work but were asking if there was a way to change this language, because they found it polarized their communities.... The request was to not build a piece where a certain character was portrayed as a complete monster, but rather as a real human being in real life crises; in this case, often having come out of residential school experiences, having been parented in a very violent way at every level and now being that kind of a parent. There stood a human being who needed healing, inside a family that needed healing, inside a community that needed healing: the boundaries between oppressor and oppressed weren’t helpful inside the community.
“So, about 12 years ago,” he continued, “out of respect to Augusto, I stopped calling it Theatre of the Oppressed and came up with the name Theatre for Living, because it had evolved from needing to have clearly defined enemies ... to viewing the world through a systems lens and working in a more complex, integrated model in which we recognize that all the various aspects of oppressor/oppressed are within the living human community.”
These ideas are fully developed in Diamond’s book Theatre for Living – The Art and Science of Community-based Dialogue, published in 2007.
Diamond views Us and Them, the 2010-11 Headlines Theatre production, as a culmination of many years of journeying. He said, “The original impulse for this project was personal and the point of the whole undertaking was to explore humanity’s need to create ‘the other’ and to recognize that there is only an ever-evolving ‘us.’ However, I don’t want to suggest that oppression doesn’t exist in the world – of course it does – but the great oppressors, the Hitlers, the Pinochets, they don’t come from outer space, humanity grows them. What is it, inside us, that makes it possible to walk past a person in Vancouver going through the garbage and think that’s got nothing to do with me ... that’s ‘them’? It is self-protection, it’s the way we manage to ignore terrible things happening to people, the way we manage to condone really violent acts to individuals and groups of people: it is because we create a separation between us and them. Nature, in fact, teaches us that those boundaries don’t exist, those boundaries are a human-made construction.”
In the workshops, Diamond has to navigate the interactions of the audience with the performers, or with other members of the audience, keep it balanced, relevant, interesting and entertaining. “The Joker” is the leader of the evening, a moderator as well as a provocateur, constantly pushing the emotional and physical language of the theatre, reminding people that they have to allow themselves to feel and immerse themselves in the characters.
“I’m trying very hard and sometimes am successful at not being overly instructive because, in an event like this, your perceptions create a different reality for you than for the person sitting next to you,” explained Diamond. “And the more I name things, the more I exclude people in the audience. The attempt – and it’s hard – is to keep it open. I think this type of event is more powerful when people walk away and have it percolate inside them and have it translate, in small ways, into the way they see the world and function.”
The topic of Us and Them can lead into a discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. During the fall of 2010, the production went through a series of 23 public inquiries on the various experiences of “us and them.” No script, no actors, no play – everything came from the audience each night. Within the series, which spanned almost every form of perceived “otherness,” there was an Israeli-Palestinian inquiry hosted in a private home.
“There was nervousness about bringing people together to look at this issue and some thought it’s going to become scream-y and volatile, but it didn’t,” said Diamond. “Much like, a few years ago, I did a Power Play [six days of rehearsals and it goes to performance] called Palestine, Israel and Me and people were coming to me after the show, both Jews and Palestinians, shaking, saying, ‘I was terrified to come to this because it was just going to be another screaming match’ and it wasn’t. The feedback was that the level of dialogue was profound: in that cast, there were Jews and Palestinians who had never been in the same room with ‘the other.’ I think the evening of the Us and Them inquiry had the same power.”
In the journals of the Oct. 27, 2010, evening, which are published on the theatre’s website, Diamond mentions that only two people from the Palestinian community attended. He also notes, “I wish it didn’t need to take so much courage to come to an event like this, but I know it does.” When asked if the courage is needed to cope with being stigmatized in their community, Diamond reacted strongly: “Of course it is, just as I have been stigmatized in the Jewish community for doing this kind of work. It’s likely that the Palestinian participants would experience the same thing, it’s human nature.”
Being vocal about retiring the binary lens of “us and them” and advocating a unifying approach has not stopped Diamond from being vocal about his opposition to Israel’s politics in the region. “That doesn’t mean that I think the wall should not come down, that I think the occupation should not end!” he said. “I don’t think it’s possible to have real peace in the area when the accessible land has been fragmented to such a degree that a person going from the equivalent of downtown Vancouver to Coquitlam has to pass through several military checkpoints. Imagine if that was happening here.”
When Diamond participated in a theatre festival in Ramallah and three days of workshops at the University of Bethlehem, he did not attempt to visit Israel itself, feeling that the work he was doing in the West Bank would red-flag him for entry.
“I only go where I’m invited and I was not invited,” he repeated several times. “And I won’t lie when crossing a border, I won’t do that. Look, that experience left me very sad at a profound level.... I went to Jewish school from kindergarten to Grade 6. I remember many of my teachers had been in [concentration] camps and I remember the miracle of the state of Israel – as told by the teachers, [and] growing up with it as a small child in the Winnipeg community and giving to Keren Kayemet once a week. And, from that miracle, to [have it] turn into the armed camp that it’s turned into ... when I was crossing those checkpoints, I felt I was in a mechanized, dehumanized camp. For the miracle to have become that is truly tragic.”
When pressed on the fact that he has not really experienced the other side at all, he conceded: “I am very aware that there are many Israelis who want a real and just peace there and that the actions of the state do not necessarily represent the will of the entire population but, when one looks at the map of the land mass and the loss of access that Palestinians [have] had over the years, it’s very graphic. Having had free rein and now having slivers of disconnected land – if you know anything about the First Nations story here in Canada, the parallels are remarkable.”
Diamond continued: “When do we recognize that it’s only ‘us’ here? I think it hasn’t happened anywhere yet. We do need a planetary revolution and it means growing up individually.... Communities are living organisms, made up of individuals, but there’s a larger consciousness and things need to happen at both those levels. I keep returning to what Freire wrote really eloquently, how the challenge isn’t winning the revolution, that’s the easy part; the hard part is, having won the revolution, not to become the very thing you fought against. I believe that happens over and over again during history because we think we’re prisoners of the structures that we inhabit and our activism aims to change those structures, but nature teaches us that it’s patterns of behavior that create structure, not the other way around. I’m not suggesting that we don’t work to change the structures, but if we ignore the patterns of behavior, we’re just doomed to recreate them all over again.”
Dana Schlanger is a freelance writer and director of the Dena Wosk School of Performing Arts.
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