Magnetic North Keynote Speech/Industry Series
Presented on June 8th, 2009 in Ottawa Canada.
by Nadia Ross
This is a shortened version of the original speech. The text was edited by George Acheson, STO Union’s associate artist.
Welcome. This is a room filled with people who work in one form or another, in the theatre. We may work in many different ways and understand the theatre to be many different things. But no matter what ‘kind’ of theatre we work with, my feeling is that we need this space and time together to remind ourselves that we are not alone in our commitment to the Creative in these precarious economic/cultural times.
To start off with I will show a short video that gives an overview of the work I’ve been engaged with in the last years, since many of you have no idea who I am and what STO Union has been producing. After the video, I will speak a bit and then open it up to everyone, giving us more time than what is traditionally allotted.
VIDEO
STO Union’s working process has been an ‘open system’, where all the elements of a play grow concurrently, starting from nothing. The vision is not about the final result but rather the vision lies in the process. My quest was to find a way to be open enough to the chaos of a work in progress in order to hear what IT was saying, as opposed to saying what I wanted to say. It is a system that requires a letting go of the outcome until it naturally evolves. It’s about listening and being receptive to external promptings. It’s having faith that it will evolve and will be more sublime than translating a personal fantasy into reality.
Working in this way is a response to a deep desire that I have to be ‘free’: I don’t like structures imposed onto me and yet, I want to be free of the feeling of not-knowing or of being out of control. So I create or adopt structures to reassure myself. But then, I want to be free from subservience, from the constraints of daily life, from anything that might hold me back or limit me- I want to be free from the very structures that were meant to reassure me. This building up of structures and tearing down or modification of structures is a kind of drama in itself.
A German theatre critic told me the story of one of the highlights of her career. She went to see a play in Afghanistan. At the end of the performance, the audience erupted in so much joy at the fact that a play was actually occurring that they all ran onstage, dancing. An old system that was meant to provide order and safety was pierced through. Something that was previously forbidden in the name of stability was allowed to see the light of day. The old order was being challenged, and it that moment, had been transgressed.
In my work, my concern has been about this impetus towards freedom and its consequences: the building of structures and rules meant to improve our lives and the subsequent dismantling of these structures and rules because, at some level, they don’t work. My interest has been in what motivates this human drama, or you can call it a comedy, depending on your perspective on things.
As an artist, I was naturally interested in the history of art as it relates to transgressing boundaries in the name of more freedom, and, on the other hand, its function of affirming of boundaries in the name of societal stability.
The 20th century Break with Tradition
Abstraction
The banal becomes Art: Art becomes banal
The 20th century saw many boundaries being breached. In the West, the 20th century saw us break with many of the ties that linked us to the past, to tradition. On my mother’s side, my ancestors arrived in Nouvelle France in 1754 and settled in Kamouraska. There are generations of people in that line who understood the land in Quebec, the climate, who knew how to build houses and grow things. My great grandfather was an expert in grafting fruit and created a new apple, the Wolf apple, in honor of his farm in Riviere du Loup. At some point in my Mother’s generation in the 20th century, all of this knowledge was lost to me.
My husband Rob tells the story of his family, five generations of farmers from north of Toronto in the Caledon hills, and of his father’s decision to join the army just so that he could get off the farm. One day, as his grandfather stood in the fields working, his father, now a pilot, flew his plane so close to the field, his grandfather felt he could touch it.
In art, a significant break with tradition happened as well, exemplified by Marcel Duchamp in his 1917 art piece called ‘the fountain’, a urinal he displayed at an exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists.
His ‘Fountain’, shocked the art world in 1917. Almost a century later, Fountain was selected in 2004 as “the most influential artwork of the 20th century” by 500 renowned artists and historians”
This ‘readymade’ art piece had the effect of bringing art down from its high realm, from its position of being a bridge between the human mundane world and the divine world. From this moment on, there was no difference between art and the rest of the world.
There was no more sacred order or hierarchy – it was all perspective. If a urinal could be art, than so could anything else. This was and still is outrageous to many people. There is a still ongoing cry that the world is degenerating since transgressing this higher order; that the world is leaning towards the barbaric, where people throw paint at walls and grunt out loud, also known as modern art and rock & roll.
What fueled these transgressions, in my opinion, was the proliferation of new technologies and the awesome discoveries made by science. Technology during this time brought to the world completely new mediums: photography and film. These new mediums had a serious impact on all of the arts, one that we are still grappling with.
The end of Social consensus: the symbolic order in crisis.
The 20th century threw our collective symbolic order into crisis. The known, the long-standing rules went out the window. Symbols were, at their essence, empty. The medium of the Theatre, a medium whose function had been to reaffirm the symbolic order, began to change.
The theatre had to grapple with this loss of order. For many of us, it affected everything we did in the medium: how we write, how we perform, how we create in this medium.
Many people saw this loss of the symbolic order as a horrible thing. For much of the 20th century, the ‘avant-garde’ was blamed for this loss. But, in my opinion, it was not the avant-garde’s ‘fault’. They just picked up on a shift that was already underway and brought to light the fractures in the social fabric that were already there. Then they considered the new possibilities that such a crisis might open up.
What began as an attempt for more freedom, to tear the veil off the mysterious, to bring down the sacred order in order to be free of its hierarchy, to name and depict God and bring God to earth, had many consequences. Once God was brought down to earth, the heavens came with him. No longer was there a place after death that would be better than here. There was no escape from this world, no other place, no better place. But so desperate are we for freedom, our need for Heaven, now no longer pointing towards another world, that the vacuum had to be filled by something.
The satisfaction of needs, the lynchpin in modern capitalism, held the promise of more freedom for all, through a kind of promised paradise on earth. If God could no longer provide us with the freedom we desired, then maybe the markets could. “Man is ever more powerfully the producer of every detail of his world”, the translator of his personal fantasies into reality, as long as he can afford it. But the closer his life comes to being his own creation, the less receptive he becomes to the world around him, to reality itself.
In the past, there were things and roles that were either too sacred or too essential to the public good for survival to be considered business opportunities. They were protected by tradition or public regulation. These places that were sacred were slowly being eroded from public life, due to pressure from market forces.
This process of relinquishing things that were previously too sacred or too essential to be considered business opportunities, is ongoing. I was able to witness first-hand some of the effects of this process, particularly in the mid-nineties in Toronto.
There was so much fear in the air in Toronto 1995: the conservatives had taken power in Ontario; they called it “The Common Sense Revolution”. Social and arts funding were cut, and, at the same time, pillars of a number of different artist communities in Toronto were dying from AIDS. It went from a vital community that was exploring different mediums and putting out a lot of creative force, to a wounded community, emptied out and afraid.
In response to this fear, art councils began a shift in funding priorities towards creating ‘sustainable’ institutions. There was no saving these institutions solely through public will anymore. The tone was shifting in all areas that were previously separated from the market, such as art, religion and government, going from ideas around Governance and Vision and moving towards a model of Management and Marketing. The sacred places that were once protected were now being dismantled, in my opinion, from the inside, from the very people whose intention was to save it. It was done out of good intention, I’m sure. But there was a kind of resignation to the market, a capitulation to it. There was a kind of sense that artists should no longer be exempt from market forces: everybody else had to contend with them, so why should the artist be special, be kept apart from these forces? If the work was ‘good enough’, then the market would agree and then the work would be supported. It was an amazing thing to see how easily the idea of private/public partnerships was embraced, how easily the idea of branding was embraced, how quickly the last vestiges of art as somehow sacred fell. The boundary between the sacred and the profane had been breached decades before – it was an exciting moment – and decades later we could witness the continued deterioration of this order.
I’ve had the privilege of touring the world with STO Union shows and I can report that very profound questions are being asked in all different parts of the world. We are asking ourselves: how can we live in this world and sustain it? Can we live in this world and tolerate different points of view in a peaceful way? Is there enough food and water for all of us? Have we done irrevocable damage to the planet? How do we feel about the fact that our Western way of life has been possible only because we’ve used people in other parts of the world for their cheap labor? Have we overstepped some kind of final boundary in our quest for more freedom?
Here we are, simple human beings, thrown into a complex world that we feel we can’t control. For centuries, we’ve created systems and forms that would soothe us, societal rules that would govern us, taboos that drew lines in the sand, warnings of where not to go. The structures we humans create are, in some way, doomed to fail. There are always so many forces at play – too many to control – for us to be able to point the finger at one thing and blame it for our ills, or to believe that our actions can make the world a better place.
A friend of mine went to Costa Rica where he met a woman who had decided to build a butterfly sanctuary, as a way of ‘helping’ the world. She had huge windows at the sanctuary so that she could see the butterflies. The problem was that the parrots would fly into the windows and fall to the ground, at which point her dogs would tear them to pieces. There were simply too many forces at play to be able to control and to hammer into a human’s vision of paradise.
So, maybe now, we’ve reached a kind of limit. But what is fascinating about this limit and particularly exciting for artists, is that this limit is not man-made. It is not a structure that we’ve created. As I see it, this ‘limit’ is something that has always united us.
What actually may bond us, the one thing we all share is the vastness of what we don’t know. I don’t know what the next moment holds and I don’t know how I will react to the next moment. We all experience not-knowing and uncertainty, and theatre people experience it a lot – we can repeat the same words every night, repeat actions and movements, but we can’t predict what will happen: we can’t predict if we’ll feel nervous, if a lighting cue will or won’t work, if the audience will react warmly or indifferently. And every night is different. In this sense, we, as theatre people, by necessity find our own relationship to not knowing.
Part of the job of the artist is to make form out of chaos. In order to do that, artists spend time with chaos, acknowledge it, and become receptive to it. The job of getting out of the way so that the Muse can visit us and speak is humbling. And it is not so much what we bring back from the unknown that is important, or what the Muse says, it is the fact that we have enough inherent trust to let go, to get out of the way, to experience our own personal will disintegrating and being replaced by a larger force.
It is the uncertainty of our times that is the gold of the artist. Uncertainty is a fissure, a crack in the wall – it is the entry point to the whole. This is what the artist was designed to do: to go through the fissure, to go towards the uncertainty and to do this in full trust that we’ve got nothing to lose. Duchamp went through a fissure at the beginning of the last century – the uncertainty of that time, the crumbling structures of that time. Our time has its own openings; structures are crumbling all around us.
By honoring theatre with a festival we are honoring the Muses and we are allowing the public to come and gather and to collectively get their minds out of the way so that they too may have the chance to open up to the unknown. Our job here at this gathering is to create for the public the kind of creative space where they can enter the chaotic unknown and be replenished by it, where they can feel enough trust to let go of the relentless need to be ‘in charge’. It is a privilege to be part of the creation of such a space.
If there is anything I can impart to you, from my experience, is that all of the great things that have happened to STO Union and to myself, all of the international touring, the fact that we were able to survive with minimal funding, the great collaborative relationships that grew out of the vision of the company – all of these things I did not make happen. I could tell you story after story about how luck or fate or whatever you want to call made the thing happen. If I have learned anything from the last two decades of working in this medium it is really this: there has always been something else in charge of how things happened and it wasn’t another person or an institution or a government agency. So my lesson has been to let go of my illusion that I made this happen and to, over time, trust how things unfold and to let things move the way they naturally are moving.
In closing, I want to thank you and thank whatever forces at play that gave me this privilege, that has given all of us this privilege, to spend our lives in this ancient and powerful art form.