WORK|OUT European Students’ Review

| Paula Kramer (BERLIN). Instead of wasting time with arguing about the mutual exclusiveness of art and politics, I want to propose to position art and politics as siblings ultimately born by the same mother: the desire to engage with life. My sense is that in Germany — and maybe this is true for Europe — the arguments continue to circle around either the l’art pour l’art approach (no politics may interfere with art) or the “art must be political or it is useless” standpoint of socially engaged artists. I found a much more relaxed and productive approach towards socially engaged arts in the theatre and arts community in South Africa.
Southern African traditions of praise poetry and story-telling have linked the performative with the social since long before the arrival of colonial style theatre. More recently, theatre was an influential and very powerful tool during the struggle against apartheid to inspire, mobilise and inform political activists and the general public alike. Additionally it was a place where work was developed collaboratively by individuals of diverse cultural backgrounds, an act of conscious subversion in an entirely segregated and oppressive larger political setting. With the end of apartheid, however, that clear vocation vanished and artists needed to reconsider from where to draw the strength and the drive for their artwork and their raison d’être. Cape Town writer and performer Malika Ndlovu explains: “I think a lot of us have just been completely conditioned into a sense of responsibility — what you do with your art. And I think that’s fabulous. Balance is what I’m talking about.”

   So, let’s talk about balance: It is easy to agree with the criticism that educational art is boring and often amateurish, failing to access one of arts most powerful potentials — to inspire us. In my experience that often happens — Germany being my main base of experience — if political activists decide to functionalise art to get a message across. That is, if the message ultimately overrides the art, I believe that there is no need to choose an artistic medium as a form of expression. What I learned from South African theatre makers is a commited trust in the power and possibilities of their art form, while very seriously engaging with the social world in which the work is placed through accessing local stories. What exactly does that mean? It means to start with the creative process, the art, the imagination, while knowing that the pressing issues at hand will always emerge. Caroline Calburn, the South African national co-ordinator for Phakama, an international youth theatre project (www.phakama.com) told me about a project where participants were asked to bring a random object to the first meeting and how through working creatively with these objects a piece about slavery emerged — the triggering object having been a spice bottle. The opposite route would be to start out by saying: let’s create a piece on slavery.
   The members of fth:k — from the hip: khulumakahle, a small theatre company from Cape Town made up of individuals with diverse racial and cultural backgrounds (www.geocities.com/from_thehip) gave me another example for working with the potentials of art as art — but not only for art’s sake: the mixing of various cultural currencies into something new. They experiment with fusing traditional South African dance — (Zulu and Xhosa traditions) with North-American/Western-European elements of Modern Dance, creating a new style, which they refer to as Afroconfusion. One of South Africa’s greatest challenges continues to be the creation of mixed communities. The heritages of segregation and inequality of both colonialism and apartheid continue to be deeply ingrained in the fabric of society. Through processes of fusing different cultural traditions, songs and languages not only is something aesthetically new created, but a connection between individuals of previously segregated communities is built.
   I don’t mean to weigh art against politics here, I rather want to point out that it is the integration of both into one endeavour, an understanding of their proximity, which can make art a powerful transformative tool. Learning from South Africa means in this case to understand that theatre needs and is both: a serious artistic process and an active engagement with the social world that surrounds us.

| google links: Phakama