12/17/2018
Tonight at 7pm!
I’m circulating the poster for tomorrow’s event one more time.
But I also want to say a little more about it.
”Manifesto for Another World” was published in 2004 by Chilean-Argentinian émigré poet, playwright and novelist, Ariel Dorfman.
Technically, it’s not a play, but a staged reading (though I’ll refer to it as a ‘play’ for convenience here). It arranges interview material from several human rights activists into a conversation of eight ‘voices’. A ninth voice, generically named ‘Man’ introduces, comments on, and tries to undermine these voices. ‘Man’ recurs variously as a cynic, negative critic, figure of disinterest or disengagement, bully, and torturer. His primary characteristic is a lack of ideals and of human attachment.
The activist voices in the play engage with three main questions:
1. How does one come to engage in a life actively defending human rights?
2. Where does one find the strength to cope with the realities of such a life: arrests, beatings, torture, disappearances, constant uncertainty?
3. How does one deal with fear —not only fear of death, injury or imprisonment, but also the fear (voiced cuttingly by ‘Man’) that, after all, one’s work may come to nothing?
Many of those whom you’ll hear voiced are still active. One or two have since died: one was subsequently murdered for her work (Digna Ochoa).
Normally, this play is staged with nine readers. But not our version. Ours came together when just four people met for a casting call, and decided that, damn the torpedoes, we would commit and go full ahead regardless. These four are Ozgur Cinar, a seasoned director from Ottawa now living in Lethbridge, and three people whose acting experience runs the gamut from minimal to none: Sahar, Christopher, and me.
We faced bad odds starting out. When we committed to the project, a performance date was already set, and Ozgur had a very short timeline to whip us into some sort of shape. It was already the holiday season. Work pressures, plus ‘life’ (and in one instance, a death) intervened.
The four of us are from widely different social, cultural, geographical, linguistic and personal backgrounds. We have very different sorts of life experience, and we inhabit different social statuses.
Rehearsals could be gruelling. Two of us had to learn to ‘voice’ eight very different figures from around the world, and bring them into conversation with each other and with their nemesis, ‘Man.’
Add to that another difficulty. Ozgur made it plain from the beginning that we were not to get all stagey about our characters; not try to imitate or dramatize; not put on artificial personae. We were to bring *ourselves* to the voices we were reading, even as we struggled to understand and crack open doors to their disparate worlds, and also to respond authentically, in voice *and* in person, to each other.
I’ll speak briefly to my own rehearsal experience as an example. My parts include accounts that witness, however briefly, to beatings, jailings, torture, killing, and sexual and economic exploitation. How could I, a relatively privileged academic, full citizen, member in good standing of settler society, having led a reasonably safe and uneventful life, inhabit these voices? I’m painfully aware, with every word I speak in my flat, everyday Canadian accent, that I *do not know* their worlds at all well; do not know if I could do what they have done; face the dangers they’ve faced; make the commitments they’ve made.
But here’s the thing: Neither. Did. They. They DID come to know what they could and did do. But at first (and sometimes recurrently), they didn’t.
Flip things around, however, and another question appears. As I read the voices assigned to me, I have to ask: could I be, have I ever been, the cynic, the comfortable one, the know-nothing, the one with a million excuses? Or, the exploiter? Or the one who assaults, rapes, tortures, murders? I’m too Canadian, too nice a guy for that, right? RIGHT? Huh.
Whose labour; whose exploitation is my comfort built on? Can I really say I’ve *never* looked the other way? Never used others in damaging ways, by commission or omission?
So, then. Are we ready for tomorrow night? Yes, in the technical sense of being as prepared as three multi-roled, somewhat nervous but committed amateurs, under skilled and rigorous direction, can be after several afternoons and evenings of intensive rehearsal over no more than three weeks.
But are we ready to respond adequately to the big questions this play raises for its readers and hearers? No. We’re all still in various stages of THAT struggle.
So what you’ll see and listen to tomorrow night won’t be polished entertainment to clap for at the end, or exchange a few niceties about over some food and drink after (though there WILL be edibles and opportunity for conversation!).
No. Rather, we invite you to witness and take part in an ongoing struggle. The struggle of the activists voiced in the play to commit to others, make things better, make meaningful change. Our own struggle to present their voices as honestly and as effectively as we can. Your struggle with the questions the activists ask, of themselves, us, you. And your struggle with questions they’re asked by ‘Man’, by each other, by us ...and by you.
One of the themes of the play is that sometimes it’s not WE who find opportunities to commit to others or chances to defend and extend human rights. Sometimes, the opportunities find us. Sometimes subtly, sometimes roughly.
I think that more and more of us will be thus found in the days, weeks, months, ahead. Right here in Lethbridge, as well as in other places. Will we know when we’re found? Will we find the *courage* to know and to respond? Will we find or make good ways to encourage each other, to respond effectively ...together?
