Europe on Exhibit

Brett Bailey’s Exhibit B, Festival d’Avignon, 2013. Photo: Ada Nieuwen

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/theater/article-pdf/45/3/3/478758/THE453_01Upfront_FF.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 Up Front

Europe on Exhibit

Tom Sellar

Paris, November 28, 2014: Emerging from the rer regional train in Saint-Denis, a gritty suburb home to many immigrants from sub-Saharan and North Africa, you could immediately sense that a theater had come under siege. Hundreds of riot police stood in formation, creating a security cordon in front of the Théâtre Gérard Philipe. Protesters gathered outside before and during the evening performance, chanting “rac- ist!” and “cancel!” and making speeches through bullhorns denouncing the production. Onlookers massed around them in the square; some appeared to join in. Audi- ence members, including me, were whisked through a side door and searched by the police; suddenly we stood in a tense, supercharged lobby, where the subdued but visibly alarmed staff tried to joke. “Welcome to France,” said an administrator, acknowledging an international guest. The Saint-Denis demonstrators had assembled for the second time that week to demand the outright cancellation of Exhibit B, an immersive theater production by the South African company Third World Bunfight. The previous night, protesters had smashed one of the theater’s front windows, forced their way into the performance space, activated fire alarms, and attempted to stop the show under way. France’s min- ister of culture, Fleur Pellerin, and Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo had issued public statements warning against further attempts to prevent artistic expression or to intimidate audiences. Exhibit B recreates the “human zoos” of the imperial era in Europe and America, in which native Africans with physiques and histories considered unusual by colonial occupiers were exhibited for popular entertainment. Exhibit B’s cast consists primar- ily of black and coloured South African performers, all of whom display statements explaining why they wanted to participate in the project; Brett Bailey, the production’s director (and the company’s artistic leader), is a white South African. Protesters—few of whom had seen the production—focused on the director’s race and the history of the human zoo and concluded that the show’s racial politics were intolerable.

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/theater/article-pdf/45/3/3/478758/THE453_01Upfront_FF.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 up front

Brett Bailey’s Exhibit B, Wiener Festwochen, Vienna, 2010. Photo: Sofie Knijff

Walking through the live installation, it was clear that this was an overtly human- ist work. Live actors, embodying the victims of historical colonial massacres and policies, stood in small separate displays; museum-style plaques or exhibit labels stated the historical facts, underscoring the racial and social injustices of colonialism. For instance, a woman perched among props resembling human skulls, gazing out at spectators; the label explains that she was compelled to collect the remains of her slaughtered kinsmen by the occupying authorities. Elsewhere, men and women appear in chains and cages, examples of the slave trade. Bailey also displayed examples of apartheid-era discrimi- nation and of present-day policies with migrants shackled to airplane seats for forc- ible expulsion from the European Union. Although opponents called the production a white director’s “vanity project,” every element had a clearly instructive purpose: to teach and drive home the history and legacy of colonial racism. Were the protesters objecting to the depiction of the very history Third World Bunfight sought to deplore? Far from the demonstrators’ claims that Bailey was impe- rious, a white director playing casually and irresponsibly with painful memories of oppression, there was nothing unpurposeful about the presentation of these graphic and shocking images. Each was also contextualized in historical and political terms by the accompanying display, and members of the company and theater administration wel- comed spectators with tea and refreshments at the end of the installation, encouraging discussion and constructive dialogue. That said, some legitimate questions remained: Exhibit B has been performed at festivals and theaters around the world, including in South Africa. For this presentation in France, the Festival d’Automne chose to mount the project (which makes use of any given venue’s basements, stairwells, backstage areas, and corridors) in two loca- tions, first for performances in Saint-Denis and subsequently at the 104 art center in wealthier, whiter, central Paris. Why would festival organizers need to show such a

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/theater/article-pdf/45/3/3/478758/THE453_01Upfront_FF.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 sellar

piece separately, to be experienced by different demographics and constituencies, rather than asking the French public to see, experience, and respond to it as one? Did such a presentation encourage these misperceptions? (Smaller-scale protests accompanied the central Paris presentations, and, previously, when the show was mounted in London for a single public, protest threats led the Barbican Centre to cancel performances in the name of public safety.) Exhibit B, ultimately, was created for an international touring circuit and its audiences; why did some European minorities—defensive, excluded, suspicious of the culture industry—receive such a well-intentioned work so badly? Exhibit B intends, among other things, to create dialogue. Why, in the heart of Europe’s vibrant democracies, did cancellation and closure become threats when dialogue and discussion could have been so constructive for all? Just weeks before the Charlie Hebdo attacks in the same city, the controversy over Exhibit B now looks prescient, an indicator of a mood and social con- flict in Europe that will not be resolved soon.

The Art of Diplomacy

Alexandra Ripp

After over fifty years of stalemate between the United States and Cuba, with no rec- onciliation in sight, President Obama announced on December 17, 2014, that America was “choos[ing] to cut loose the shackles of the past so as to reach for a better future— for the Cuban people, for the American people, for our entire hemisphere, and for the world”—and was restoring full diplomatic relations.1 While the two nations had been in secret negotiations for eighteen months, to the public their bond seemed to have suddenly and miraculously transformed: both declared that they were prepared to send ambassadors, reopen embassies, and begin bilateral discussions. The United States agreed to ease restrictions on remittances, travel, and banking, and Cuba agreed to allow its citizens greater Internet access and to free fifty-three Cubans identified by the United States as political prisoners, as well as releasing us government contractor Alan P. Gross. On June 2, 2015, the United States formally removed Cuba from its list of state sponsors of terrorism, to which the country was added in 1982. While not everyone applauded the détente and the continued improvement of relations, those in the performing arts had reason to be excited. Thanks, ironically, to a powerful socialist government that limits expression, the island country is a hub of creativity—the state backs art and music conservatories offering extended rigorous training, cultural centers in each of its nineteen provinces, and 265 museums.2 However, restrictions and bans on

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/theater/article-pdf/45/3/3/478758/THE453_01Upfront_FF.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 up front

travel challenged—though never erased— Cuba-us cultural exchanges of artists. This happy shift soon proved complicated. On the day of Obama’s announcement, the performance artist Tania Bruguera, a Cuban-born artist who splits her time among Cuba, the United States, and Europe, proposed restaging her project Tatlin’s Whisper #6 in Havana’s Plaza of the Revolution on December 30, 2014. Treading, like much of Bruguera’s work, on a border between art and activ- ism, the piece consists of a podium and microphone at which anyone can speak her thoughts for precisely one minute. By resisting the Cuban government’s repres- sion of free speech, Tatlin’s Whisper #6, in Bruguera’s words, “aims to transform audience members into active citizens.”3 Given the renewed relations, the restaging, alongside Bruguera’s Internet platform #YoTambiénExijo, would allow Cubans to discuss their country’s future at a sym- bolic political site. On December 29, 2014, Bruguera’s official request to use the plaza was denied. She declared her intention to proceed. The subsequent events offered incontro- vertible proof that Cuba’s new relationship Tania Bruguera with the United States had not softened its long-standing limits on free speech. On the Poster, 2015. morning of December 30, 2014, about five hours before her performance was scheduled, Design: Rolando Pulido. Courtesy authorities detained Bruguera at her mother’s house. She was released December 31, of the artist 2014, but authorities confiscated her passport and detained her twice. Yet, unfazed, on May 20, 2015, just two days before the Havana Biennial’s public opening, Bruguera again challenged the Cuban government by staging a hundred-hour reading of Han- nah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. Timed to occur just before the international art elite were to descend on Havana, Bruguera’s action threatened to reveal as false the Biennial’s supposed engagement with public space. On May 24, 2015, the police again temporarily detained her. After weeks in legal limbo, she returned to the United States in August 2015 to participate in Yale’s World Fellows program in the autumn.

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/theater/article-pdf/45/3/3/478758/THE453_01Upfront_FF.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 ripp

The international response, particularly from the arts community, was one of outrage, but as Cuban American interdisciplinary artist and scholar Coco Fusco has observed, the English-language media’s apparent “assumption that a government’s politics and practices could be transformed so quickly is politically naïve or disingenu- ous.” Anyone aware of Cuba’s long-standing restrictions on expression should not, she asserts, be surprised by Bruguera’s treatment. Bruguera is just one of many artists detained in Cuba for performing without official authorization, and government- sponsored blogs spewing anti-Bruguera vitriol use, Fusco writes, “sadly familiar and paranoid nationalist rhetoric.” Fusco also notes that such state control is not unique to Cuba: even the United States has rules prohibiting unauthorized demonstrations or cultural events in public spaces.4 But what to do about the plight of artists in Cuba? Fusco suggests it may well be time for art world cognoscenti who have for so long been charmed by Cuba’s eccentrici- ties, anti-imperialist rhetoric, and relatively cheap art prices to consider what, beyond the convention of indignant public letters, might serve as a valid response to a state that imposes draconian measures to enforce its hegemonic control over public space and discourse. Artists and institutions in the United States must, then, ascertain their ethical duties. Does boycotting cultural exchange with Cuba achieve anything—or simply reinstitute the stalemate of the past fifty years? Should the new capacity for cultural exchange take precedence over politics, in hopes that artistic expression will in turn influence issues of state? While the Bruguera affair, as it has come to be called, has highlighted distinctions between the realms of art and politics, it may now be time for their connections to be tested.

Notes

1. White House, Office of the Press Secretary, “Statement by the President on Cuba Policy Changes,” December 17, 2014, www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/12/17 /statement-president-cuba-policy-changes. 2. John M. Eger, “The Arts Thrive in Cuba,” Huffington Post, January 28, 2015, www .huffingtonpost.com/john-m-eger/the-arts-thrive-in-cuba_b_6410682.html. 3. Frank Expósito, interview with Tania Bruguera, Artforum, February 28, 2015, artforum.com/words/id=50350. 4. Coco Fusco, “The State of Detention: Performance, Politics, and the Cuban Public,” e-flux, www.e-flux.com/announcements/on-the-detention-of-cuban-artist-tania -bruguera-by-coco-fusco/ (accessed February 15, 2015).

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/theater/article-pdf/45/3/3/478758/THE453_01Upfront_FF.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021