A 2017 report from the European Union, How Culture and the Arts Can Promote Intercultural Dialogue in the Context of the Migratory and Refugee Crisis, specifies that in ongoing response to the immediate European ‘migratory and refugee crisis’, ‘Art and artists … have a particular role to play – as avant-garde, first movers, experimental “go-betweens” helping interpret refugees’ experiences for the rest of us.’Footnote 1 Its authors also allege that in the present situation of crisis, ‘Experience shows that the arts and cultural projects in particular can create a level playing field to allow persons of different cultural backgrounds to interact, learn and experience on a par with each other.’Footnote 2 Other recent EU reports which make similar claims include The Role of Culture and the Arts in the Integration of Refugees and Migrants Footnote 3 and Report on the Role of Public Arts and Cultural Institutions in the Promotion of Cultural Diversity and Intercultural Dialogue.Footnote 4
This EU turn towards the arts’ and culture's ability to enact intercultural dialogue as frontline response to the so-called European migratory and refugee crisis also coincides with two other major recent trends in theatre and performance studies over the last decade which also focus on migrant-centred performance practices. First, there has been the rise of a ‘new interculturalism’ – a term used by Ric Knowles, Royona Mitra, Lizzie Stewart and myselfFootnote 5 – to describe migrant and diasporic grass-roots performance practices occurring across cultural, racial and ethnic difference in urban centres including Toronto, London, Berlin and Dublin. Second, our field's critical turn towards theorizing what Knowles terms intercultural performance practices ‘from below’Footnote 6 has taken part in tandem with a continuing explosion of creative performance work and research addressing migration and performance, particularly in European and Australian contexts. As Emma Cox and Caroline Wake identify in their 2018 special journal issue of RiDE on Envisioning Asylum, Engendering Crisis, studies of the relationship between ‘performance and forced migration’ have exploded within the past decade.Footnote 7 The recent work of Cox, Wake, Alison Jeffers, Helen Nicholson, Jacqueline Lo, Emine Fișek, S. E. Wilmer, Gad Guterman and others, as well as the International Federation for Theatre Research's 2018 theme of ‘Theatre and Migration’, makes this shift evident.Footnote 8 This body of research addresses migration and refugee-related topics in a variety of ways – thematically and through different uses of aesthetic form that have increasingly exceeded the strictly theatrical, as Cox and Wake also observe.Footnote 9
Our field's own expanded focus on migration (and refugees and those seeking asylum specifically) within the last decade has therefore been steadily matched by the EU's growing interest in the arts and culture as a sphere through which to comprehend and mediate tensions arising from what the European Commission terms ‘an unprecedented influx of refugees and migrants’Footnote 10 in 2015 and 2016 – a dovetailing that needs more sustained investigation. The EU's shift towards the arts as a site for intercultural dialogue focused on connection with recently displaced people even resulted in the European Commission revising their 2016 work programme to include ‘specific measures supporting the integration of refugees’ which took the form of a 2016 Creative Europe funding scheme specifically for refugee integration projects.Footnote 11 This ultimately resulted in a total of €2.35 million being awarded to sixty-two organizations in twenty countries across EU member states for arts projects supporting refugee integration.Footnote 12
But within theatre and performance studies, scholars’ approaches to ‘new interculturalism’ do not always encompass the study of performance by/for/with/about those from backgrounds of forced migration, and studies of performance and forced migration do not habitually or often adopt (new) interculturalism as a theoretical frame of reference. Indeed, only my sustained examination of contemporary Irish performance and migration most explicitly blends these strands of inquiry even while arguing that new interculturalism and performance by/for/with/about those from backgrounds of forced migration are not synonymous, even though they may often be conflated as such in the EU documents and initiatives that I have examined.Footnote 13 Yet the interrelationship and tensions between these discourses are in need of much deeper and comparative examination considering the continuing theoretical ascendance of new interculturalism within theatre and performance studies in parallel with the EU's recent pronounced commitment to the arts as a key tool of intercultural dialogue. Indeed, the lack of cross-fertilization between these discourses risks obscuring the impact of forced migration as the focus of much current EU arts and social policy on migrant and/or minority ethnic artists working on themes beyond immediate crisis; this has made it more difficult for these artists to evolve and actually sustain intercultural arts practices in EU member states, as I will demonstrate here.
For this reason, this article takes a comparative approach which examines intercultural dialogue's core precepts of bottom-up dialogical transformation translated into performance practice by three theatre companies’ sustained intercultural theatre practices, each operating within distinct ‘performance ecologies’ of (current) EU member states:Footnote 14 Outlandish Theatre (OT) Platform (Republic of Ireland), Terra Nova Productions (Northern Ireland) and Kloppend Hert (Belgium). Crucially, while the work of these companies has emerged against the landscape of EU social interculturalism, their aesthetic and methodological approaches also resonate with and test the characteristics of new theatrical interculturalism as outlined by Knowles and others. Significantly, all three nations also share colonial/post-colonial legacies, with the Republic and Northern Ireland's history and living experience of these regimes of course deeply co-implicated. While a full consideration of these contexts and the precise interplay between them lies outside the scope of this article, my selection of companies from these particular member states for comparative study indeed intends to signal the urgency of not decoupling acknowledgement and continued reckoning with the living aftermath of colonial history within either new intercultural paradigms (as indeed has been so far characteristic of the work) or a broader consideration of the migratory and refugee crisis and its resolution in the EU and beyond. Also, by taking a comparative national approach, I am able reflect on the particularities of each nation's funding landscape, arts infrastructure and political histories concerning migration in order to make evident how macro-level EU policies – like social interculturalism and intercultural dialogue – are often in tension with the experiences of, in this case, local arts practitioners of minority ethnic and/or migrant backgrounds.
From social to new theatrical interculturalism via the ‘social turn’ in performance
OT Platform, Terra Nova Productions and Kloppend Hert work at the intersection of professional and community/participatory performance practice, working with both minority and majority ethnic collaborators, although with an emphasis on minority ethnic perspectives in the work they make. Similar to the minority- and migrant-led practices that Knowles traces in Toronto, these companies use performance as a ‘heterotopic space for alternate ordering’ and the work of each company reveals for each location how ‘new identities and social formations are performatively forged out of the crucible of traditional performance forms, the technologies of contemporary theatrical practice, and the daily (hard) work of negotiating across real and acknowledged social and cultural difference’.Footnote 15 They all begin their processes of theatrical creation at the grass roots and in partnership with non-professionals who may or may not perform in the final work.
These companies’ shared working model across different EU member states maps onto the investment of both social and new theatrical interculturalism that social and theatrical change must emerge from below in order to trickle outwards and upwards. The insistence of these companies that the theatrical work that they do is resolutely professional (with different development and participatory levels for varied stakeholders) also speaks to their shared desire that this grass-roots work with non-professionals might transform the larger professional theatre/performance industries in which they work by broadening representational and thematic diversity within wider ‘national’ performance ecologies and making available more professional opportunities for minority ethnic artists.
Of course, these companies’ mutual decision to practise what we might also term applied, participatory, relational, socially engaged, documentary or other overlapping genres of performance making is also broadly in line with what Claire Bishop describes as a ‘social turn’ in contemporary relational art practices,Footnote 16 which (as Shannon Jackson, Jen Harvie and Nicola Shaughnessy have demonstrated) has increasingly influenced contemporary theatre-making. However, what is different about how these companies mutually engage this social turn in their contemporary performance work is that their collaborative and multidisciplinary compositional approaches also bring their companies’ missions (and aesthetic practices) directly in line with the lofty promises and utopian logics of social interculturalism. Jackson claims:
Performance's historic place as a cross-disciplinary, time-based, group art form also means that it requires a degree of systemic coordination, a brand of stage management that must think deliberately but also speculatively about what it means to sustain human collaboration spatially and temporally…Footnote 17
These observations, I argue, could also be mapped onto projections for intercultural dialogue's imagined catalytic impact throughout civil societies. But while Jackson observes that ‘political art discourse’ too often focuses on ‘social disruption at the expense of social coordination’, intercultural dialogue's enlisting of performance and the arts’ possible role in forwarding this practice aims for precisely the opposite, instead seeking out how ‘art practices’ might ‘contribute to inter-dependent social imagining’.Footnote 18 This opens up both utopic and contradictory possibilities that emerge out of the timely overlap between these companies’ performance practice and the intercultural social policy ideals with which their work resonates.
In analysing the three companies, I will first consider how an embrace of performance practices that are at the intersection of the professional and participatory animates the ideals of social interculturalism as a grass-roots and dialogic practice, but also reveals blockages within national arts landscapes that disrupt these possibilities (OT Platform). Next, I will continue to develop how local (i.e. national) funding limitations can interrupt the macro-ideals of EU-led social interculturalism and intercultural dialogue in both the short and long term (Terra Nova Productions). I will close by considering how a longer-term, fully resourced and not reactive embrace of performance practices as a grass-roots site of intercultural dialogue may indeed hold promise as a practical paradigm, but only if both longitudinal and comparative approaches are taken into account (Kloppend Hert).
From professional to participatory: Outlandish Theatre (OT) Platform
From the early to late 2000s, it appeared as if theatrical interculturalism might be gaining traction in the Irish theatre through the semi-regular appearance of professional works on this theme featuring migrant and/or minority ethnic participants. As of the 2016 Census, 17.3 per cent of the Irish population was born abroad, with 16 per cent reporting as ‘non-nationals’, figures that stand in sharp contrast to the 2002 Census which recorded a less than 5 per cent non-national population, but which remain more or less steady with the 2011 Census. Despite these statistics, which reflect large-scale demographic changes to racial and ethnic diversity in the Republic of Ireland, the place of migrant and minority ethnic artists and characters in the contemporary Irish theatre is contested and remains nascent.
Indeed, despite the Arts Council's 2010 publication of an inaugural Cultural Diversity and the Arts: Policy and Strategy, migrant- and minority-ethnic-led arts practice has arguably only been further deprofessionalized rather than resourced by this policy. For example, currently the Arts Council states, ‘cultural diversity sits in the area of arts participation,’Footnote 19 and most targeted Irish Arts Council funding schemes highlighting intercultural arts and/or cultural diversity have been run by Create, Ireland's national development agency for collaborative arts in social and community contexts. These usually involve provision for ‘Artist in the Community’ scheme projects which ‘encourage meaningful collaboration between artists and communities of culturally diverse backgrounds, as well as artists working within the context area of cultural diversity’ – a definition that posits a relationship between a professional artist and ‘community’ participants (who often are the subjects providing the cultural diversity for the project, although some of those funded have been minority ethnic artists).Footnote 20 The location of migrant and minority-ethnic-led arts practice within this genre of work on the one hand recognizes the work ‘across real and acknowledged cultural difference’ that must be done in mainstreaming these stakeholders within professional Irish creative industries, but it also risks delaying this process by ghettoizing minority ethnic individuals as ‘participants’ first and foremost rather than artists in their own right. OT Platform's working structure directly addresses this paradox by combining the value and necessity of participatory arts practice with culturally diverse groups within a professional theatre company structure, a dual agenda that has repeatedly presented structural blockages to the continuation of their work within the Irish arts funding landscape.
Dublin, Ireland-based OT Platform co-founders Maud Hendricks and Bernie O'Reilly observed in April 2018 that they did not realize they were migrant women until they went to the Abbey, Ireland's national theatre, and could not find themselves onstage.Footnote 21 Hendricks (originally from the Netherlands) and O'Reilly (originally from the UK of British-Irish descent) met while training as actors at Trinity College, Dublin and formed OT Platform in 2010. OT Platform is based in the neighbourhood in which they themselves reside, Dublin 8 – a culturally, racially and ethnically diverse inner city neighbourhood. They work through ‘experimental and participatory processes’ which are characterized by ‘long-term partnerships with local communities, actively inviting inter-generational diverse community participants as vital co-creators in the experimental process’.Footnote 22 They are also the first theatre company ever in residence at the Coombe Women and Infants University Hospital, one of the city's largest maternity hospitals, a partnership through which they aim to create an arts hub in this neighbourhood.
OT Platform's highly politically engaged body of artistic work (which ranges in form from theatre to film to installation) depicts individuals’ identities as shaped by ‘intersectional interculturalism,’ as their works dramatize ‘how an individual's constellation of identity factors results in crucially differential legal and political statuses within national/international regimes of intelligibility, particularly for migrants and/or minority ethnic subjects’.Footnote 23 Intersectional topics explored in the company's collaboratively created work so far include Arabic/Muslim women's experiences living in Ireland as ethnic and religious minorities in a low-income area (Megalomaniac مَهْووسٌ بِالعَظَمَة, 2016; BLW+, 2015; Between Land and Water, 2014, which was funded by Create's Artist in the Community Scheme),Footnote 24 and gendered experiences of housing rights, experiences and politics for locally born residents (Come Into the Gardens, 2013; EX-hib-IT-US, 2015; YOUtopia, 2016).Footnote 25
Initially, OT Platform made no distinction between the company's outreach aspect of their work and their professional theatre practices, for which they apply for project funding from the Arts Council. However, they found over time that this approach deeply impacted their ability to be funded under the professional theatre stream.
Iman Aoun as Noor in OT Platform's Megalomaniac مَهْووسٌ بِالعَظَم . This was co-created by self-identified professional theatre-makers and community participants, written by Maud Hendricks and staged in the Coombe as part of the 2016 Dublin Fringe Festival. Photograph by Futoshi Sakauchi.
Up until 2018, OT Platform's productions were funded primarily by Dublin City Council, local businesses and Create (the national development agency for collaborative arts), and through partnerships such as with the Coombe. In 2017, OT Platform inaugurated Open Theatre Practice, which is free and open to everyone every Wednesday evening at the Coombe, making a distinction for the first time between development work with ‘non-professionals’ and their professional performance projects which also involve non-professional collaborators. The Open Theatre Practice group (which has a fluid and ever-changing membership of participants who come and go from their weekly sessions) create work in their own right while their shared practice also influences the development of OT Platform's flagship professional productions. Given the Open Theatre Practice group's open remit, their performance work may not be as easily identifiable as intercultural as some of OT Platform's earlier works, including Between Land and Water and Megalomaniac. For example, their recent Beckettian piece, Nothing, featured ‘[n]ine performers … on the way from the womb to the tomb’ having ‘a conversation about nothing’,Footnote 26 but did not explicitly address migration or interculturalism thematically. This dimension of OT Platform's practice also helpfully pushes on new theatrical interculturalism and intercultural dialogue to accommodate practices and processes comprising culturally diverse participants that may stray ‘off topic’ in pursuit of the same convictions: transformation, accommodation and inclusivity.
The potential direct involvement of community members as spectators and participants is what makes the arts sector so attractive as a site of mobilization for EU proponents of intercultural dialogue, and OT Platform's aspirations for their own practice replicate this same commitment. For EU intercultural dialogue and OT Platform, the arts as a natural connector between individuals and groups make it ideal as a vehicle to directly involve community members in bottom-up debate and structural transformation regarding social and political issues, including but not limited to integration, racism and Islamophobia. Yet, when OT Platform put into practice intercultural dialogue's explicit aims for the arts as a channel of cross-cultural communication and connection through the theatrical work they do, the manner in which they recruit participants, and where they are based in the community (a public hospital), they have found themselves constrained, by Irish definitions of professional versus participatory theatre practice and the kinds of attendant company structure that are habitually set up to accommodate each, including available funding streams within this national landscape. These practical industry binds – that limit the work that OT Platform desire to do and have carried on with nonetheless – are unique to one particular location: the Republic of Ireland. But if intercultural dialogue is meant to be a transportable practice only enhanced in its transportability by being spread through the arts, then the practical limitations of this idea in specific EU member states matter significantly because they threaten the underlying logic of the whole enterprise. And OT Platform do not stand alone in their experience of the contradiction between the professional and the participatory in new intercultural work and its reception and funding.
Fulfilling the intercultural (funding) script: Terra Nova Productions
Terra Nova Productions describe themselves as Northern Ireland's ‘only intercultural theatre company’ and were established in 2007.Footnote 27 Of the three companies, Terra Nova's working model and chosen aesthetic come closest to blending ‘old’ and ‘new’ models of intercultural performance practice: they are primarily text-based and make use of both local and international intercultural exchanges, as well as repeatedly using Shakespeare as the vehicle for their intercultural exploration. Artistic director Andrea Montgomery currently describes their work as having three overlapping circles integral to Terra Nova's vision: community engagement, emerging artists and professional arts. But as she observes, ‘If you don't have that third circle, you're ghettoizing people.’Footnote 28 Tellingly, Montgomery reports that it has been consistently more successful for Terra Nova to get funding to lead community workshops based around intercultural dialogue than to fund their professional theatre activities.Footnote 29
Terra Nova's previous work includes It's Not All Rain and Potatoes (2007), a three-year international drama project with Macwac Theatre and young people from the SAR: Macau Young Creative Voices on the theme of decolonization in Macau (2007–9); the Ulster Kama Sutra, a puppet show addressing sexuality based on interviews across Northern Ireland (2011–13); and the Arrivals series (Arrivals, 2014; Arrivals2, 2015; Arrivals3 – Mi Mundo, 2016–17; Me You Us Them, 2018). The Arrivals project was created ‘to bring together writers, actors and members of Northern Ireland's new multicultural communities to share experiences and support each other to create a new intercultural canon’ of original theatrical works which ranged from one-acts,Footnote 30 to an immersive play followed by a workshop on intercultural dialogue for audience members, to a two-hander explicitly focused on race and racism in Northern Ireland. Terra Nova Productions have also more recently focused on intercultural Shakespeare with the Belfast Tempest (2016), which was ‘Northern Ireland's largest ever Shakespeare production’.Footnote 31 This success has already generated a follow-up intercultural Shakespeare project which will be ‘the largest Shakespeare event ever organised in Ards and North Down: a specially created Midsummer Night's Dream featuring culturally diverse community participants living in Belfast and beyond’.Footnote 32
Melissa Dean (Angela) and Robert Bertrand (Patrick) in James Meredith's Secrets, staged as part of Arrivals2. Photograph by Terra Nova Productions.
Terra Nova's location in Northern Ireland places the company in a precarious position in a number of ways relative to their intercultural aspirations. First, at the time of writing, Brexit's implementation has not been resolved, but it is expected that as was decided by referendum, Northern Ireland and the UK will soon no longer be part of the EU, rendering the company's place in this comparative profile seemingly no longer relevant. However, one might also say that the example of this Northern Irish company remains important precisely for this reason, given the pivotal and ongoing role that debates over inward migration and the EU migratory and refugee crisis played in the Brexit vote. Terra Nova's long-term concerted attempt to embed intercultural dialogue as theatrical (and social) practice in Northern Ireland's theatre industry powerfully combats the xenophobia characteristic of Brexit backlash through theatre, and did so for almost a decade prior to that vote. But in addition, the history of conflict between Catholic/Nationalist and Protestant/Unionist communities complicates the meaning of intercultural dialogue in Northern Ireland. Continued mediation between the two ‘communities’ (as they are referred to in Northern Ireland) shapes any official programme of intercultural dialogue being attempted in this region. As such, it may actually be a challenge to keep racial and non-white ethnic minority stakeholders at the forefront of intercultural dialogue in Northern Ireland, as, for example, the (white) Catholic/Nationalist community are also technically a minority ethnic group.Footnote 33 But there are slow signs of shift. The Arts Council of Northern Ireland implemented an intercultural arts strategyFootnote 34 focused on minority ethnic artists of colour explicitly following on from the Racial Equality Strategy (2005–10).Footnote 35 Nevertheless, Terra Nova, like OT Platform, has faced challenges with stable funding streams due to the company's work occurring at the intersection of professional and participatory arts practices. In fact, in order to fund Terra Nova's core artistic activities, Montgomery leads workshops based on their methodology with other Northern Irish companies and centres, including Eastside Arts and ArtsEkta, a necessity that she feels distracts attention from the core ongoing work of the company and their potential development.
The funder requirements that Terra Nova is beholden to for their current A Midsummer Night's Dream project powerfully illustrate the practical challenges that artists may face even when benefiting directly from a deliberate instrumentalization of the arts, as in these policies. The major funding for Dream has come through the most recent round of European PEACE IV Peace and Reconciliation Funding, a stream inaugurated in the aftermath of the Troubles to aid ‘peace and reconciliation’ as well as ‘social and economic progress’ in ‘Northern Ireland and the Border Region of Ireland’.Footnote 36 In light of the demographic shifts in Northern Ireland post-conflict, intercultural dialogue has now become part of the peace and reconciliation project, with the PEACE IV programme specifying the need to ‘increase tolerance and respect to reduce the levels of sectarianism and racism’ as part of its core aims.Footnote 37 Montgomery reports that their PEACE IV funding is tied to extremely specific expectations related to demonstrable impact in terms of a total required number of participants and the kinds of encounter that they must experience as part of Dream. Similarly to intercultural dialogue's instrumentalization of the arts, the PEACE funding necessitates transferable skills articulated as an outcome of the artistic practice, with Terra Nova offering ‘free workshops in singing, dance, acting, craft and more for groups, schools and community organisations’ in order ‘to help people enjoy themselves, learn new skills and join an aspect of the project’.Footnote 38 So while the PEACE funding makes Dream’s realization as a large-scale cross-community and grass-roots-engaged theatre project possible, the funder requirements script their dialogic intercultural encounters so tightly in advance that the company have found it somewhat limiting for their artistic process and desired depth of engagement with participants. Like OT Platform, before being able to engage with the ‘daily (hard) work of negotiating across real and acknowledged social and cultural difference’ in the rehearsal room,Footnote 39 Terra Nova must pre-script these encounters to various funders’ agendas, rather than allowing the work of intercultural dialogue to actually happen either in the room as facilitated by theatrical processes or post-performance amongst audiences. The necessity of this fraught reverse engineering as a precondition of the company's survival (as measured by sustainable funding) threatens to strangle the potential of any meaningful alliance between intercultural dialogue and the arts. And since Terra Nova is the only migrant and minority-ethnic-focused theatre company regularly and strategically producing work with roles for minority ethnic performers in Northern Ireland, this company's continuation holds long-term significance for keeping momentum going for the diversification of Northern Irish stages.
New interculturalism over time: Kloppend Hert and Haider Al Timimi
My final example concerns Kloppend Hert, a Belgian company whose founder, Haider Al Timimi, became involved in theatre at a younger age through the company Union Suspecte, which sought to ‘give voice to diverse cultures in Flanders’.Footnote 40 We end with his personal long-term trajectory and its continuing impact on Kloppend Hert's working practices today (and particularly their work with youth) as Timimi's story demonstrates the longer trajectories and sustained forms of support actually necessary for joining the work of intercultural dialogue with the work of the arts across time and across EU member states.
Kloppend Hert (Ghent, Belgium, established 2012) describe ‘interculturality’ as ‘an essential part’ of their mission, an assertion that becomes even further complicated by Belgium's unique local, regional and national history. Belgium is ‘multinational and a polyethnic state’ comprising ‘three distinct regions – Wallonia, Flanders and the Brussels-Capital region’, and further subdivided into ‘ten provinces (five French-speaking and five Flemish-speaking) and 589 communes (cities and towns)’.Footnote 41 These layers of internal complexity, similar to Northern Ireland's, fracture aspirations toward any coherent national identity which might pre-exist the introduction of other minority ethnic groups through inward migration and multiply out even further the ‘inters’ that intercultural dialogue needs to address in the Belgian context. Belgium has been shaped over more than three decades by inward migration of various kinds, ‘labour migration, freedom of circulation of European citizens, asylum seekers, family reunification, foreign students and so on’,Footnote 42 with 18 per cent of the population estimated to be immigrants in 2012.Footnote 43 While the largest proportion of that cohort hail from Italy, France and the Netherlands, other significant groups include those from Arabic and/or Muslim backgrounds formerly resident or with family heritage in countries including Morocco and Turkey, among others, which is the minority ethnic cohort that Kloppend Hert's work most directly concerns. Within Belgium, ‘rights on access to nationality, all other dimensions of immigrant and integration policy were devolved to the communities and regions in two steps, in 1980 and 1994’.Footnote 44 This means that, as in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, all Belgian turns toward intercultural dialogue have to be first understood in the deep local and/or regional rather than supranational or even national context.
Situated within the Flemish Dutch-speaking region, Kloppend Hert theoretically represents a company working in the majority language of Belgium, but the company members’ and collaborators’ largely minority ethnic status obviously complicates this position, even while they hold responsibility as representative of the Flemish majority's responsibility towards intercultural dialogue with other regions and language traditions. While a full consideration of these layers as manifested within Kloppend Hert's body of theatrical work is outside the scope of this article, Belgium's particularities again signal that intercultural dialogue cannot ever be assumed to be the smooth transportable practice that EU documents such as the ones examined in this article claim it to be. Intercultural dialogue's limited transportability seems a reality once again best elucidated through a turn to the deep ‘social coordination’ required by intercultural performance practice which aspires to ‘contribute to inter-dependent social imagining’,Footnote 45 the ideal repeatedly at the centre of Kloppend Hert's approach to making work.
Helmed by Haider Al Timimi (a choreographer, director, dancer and actor), Kloppend Hert also comprises Bart Capelle (dramaturge), Brigitte Mys (business manager) and Fien Mombaerts (production management). They describe their work as ‘visual, moving, musical theater that starts from deep human stories, under which a contemporary social, economic and political reality lurks’.Footnote 46 Kloppend Hert emerged out of Timimi and Capelle's involvement with Union Suspecte, a theatre company which Timimi describes as a collective seeking to give voice to ‘diverse cultures in Flanders’ that operated between 2001 and 2012. Union Suspecte's core members were Chokri Ben Chikha, Zouzou Ben Chikha, Mourade Zeguendi, Ruud Gielens and Timimi. Their work began at Nieuwpoorttheater in Ghent with the support of then artistic director Geert Opsomer, with seminal works including De Leeuw Van Vlaanderen (The Lion of Flanders), Onze Lieve Vrouw Van Vlaanderen (Our Lady of Flanders) and Broeders Van Liefde (Brother Love).Footnote 47
Lourdes Orozco and Peter M. Boenisch cite Union Suspecte's practice as part of the second generation of theatre-makers they identify as the ‘Flemish Wave’. Orozco and Boenisch argue that the Flemish Wave ‘blended forms, blurred aesthetics and invented then unknown performance formats’, with the authors citing Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Wim Vandekeybus, Jan Fabre, Jan Lauwers, Jan Decorte, Luk Perceval, Michael Laub, Ivo van Hove, Guy Cassiers and Alain Patel as forerunners of this genre.Footnote 48 Where Union Suspecte's work was distinct within this second Flemish Wave was in its politicized focus on minority ethnic identity as a theme across the work, and the company's enfranchisement of minority ethnic performers as theatre-makers, performers and writers. Timimi came to Union Suspecte after becoming attracted to breakdancing; previously, he worked as a mechanic and pursued a degree in informatics. He initially did not identify as a theatrical performer and did not pursue formal training in theatre or later dance, even after professionalizing as an artist through working with Union Suspecte. And he was not alone in this trajectory, as many of the other practitioners came to Union Suspecte as young and then non-professional minority ethnic performers.
As an Iraqi-Belgian from a background of migration, Timimi's helming of Kloppend Hert along with Capelle continues and develops Union Suspecte's core values of inclusion and of reflecting the racial and ethnic diversity of Belgian society, but accomplishes these aims through even more conceptually driven work than was characteristic of Union Suspecte's theatrical repertoire. In addition, Kloppend Hert's large-scale professional productions focus more centrally on Timimi as the semi-autobiographical figure at the centre of each work,Footnote 49 even as the productions are developed in collaboration with a wide range of creative partners, as I detail below. To date, Kloppend Hert's productions include Ich Bin Wie Du (2013), Total Loss (2014), Bite the Hand That Feeds You (2016), Layla's Fool (2016) and Utopera (2017). These non-linear concept-driven productions have crossed genres encompassing theatre, dance, opera and performance art, as is characteristic of much contemporary Flemish and more broadly contemporary post-dramatic performance practices. These works tackle themes as diverse as ‘humanism 2.0’, the meaning of the Lebanese singer Fairuz's following in the Arab world and diaspora and how her continuing status might recuperate erasure of Arab art and culture (Ich bin wie du), the collapse of the welfare state and worldwide economic crisis (Total Loss), Frank Lloyd Wright's abandoned plans to build a major opera house in Baghdad (Utopera), and human domestication as a metaphor for migration management (Bite the Hand That Feeds You).
Haider Al Timimi in the midst of his self-transformation into the Lebanese singer Fairuz in Ich bin wie du (2013). Photograph by Bart Grietens.
Kloppend Hert's work is very politicized, but any agit-prop aspirations and what Timimi describes as the ‘anger’ driving his earlier work are perhaps tempered in the company's current approach to staging politics. He reflected in April 2018 that when beginning with Union Suspecte, ‘I went for this anger within that wants to do theatre’, but he found that he ‘stopped thinking of myself as an artist; I was an activist’.Footnote 50 As Timimi's performance practice developed working with Union Suspecte, he also became drawn to contemporary dance, which resulted in his going on a world tour with renowned contemporary Belgian dance artist Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, noted above as part of the Flemish First Wave's vanguard practitioners. This was a turning point for Timimi, and for the development of Kloppend Hert's current direction. For Timimi, working with De Keersmaeker ‘helped me to let go a bit of the activism and find out what more of an artistic language I could develop apart from that anger’, but ‘it all came back together later on’.Footnote 51 I understand this shift within Timimi's thinking and practice as a transition from an interculturalism 1.0 (the period of his work he characterizes as driven by anger and a direct address of social and political issues in his work) to an interculturalism 2.0. He describes his most recent phase of work as focused on ‘using the power of difference without erasing it’ while ‘also looking for similarities and universal ideas’,Footnote 52 but through a centralization of Arab and hybrid Arab cultures.
Similarly to Union Suspecte (and Terra Nova Productions and OT Platform), Kloppend Hert make developing routes of access to professional arts practice for minority ethnic youth living in Belgium a key tactic of their professional and community engagement, and recognize this long-term development work as the key way to practise and cultivate interculturality within Flanders. Jong Geiwei (or ‘Young Antlers’) is the youth platform that Kloppend Hert now run in tandem with the company's major productions. In addition to Jong Geiwei, Timimi and many of Kloppend Hert's key artistic team (including Cappelle) also run Transfo Collect, another youth performance platform based in nearby Brussels (part of the French-speaking Brussels-Capital region). These two groups produce their own performances which arise out of weekly workshops, but their mutual exploration also centrally informs the research process for Kloppend Hert's major professional works. As Timimi puts it, there is ‘solidarity towards each other but also materials’ in the relationship between Jong Geiwei, Transfo Collect and other collaborators.Footnote 53 Kloppend Hert also share their process openly with the public (while also soliciting their contributions to the development of the work) through events that the company run, such as autumn 2017's Bal Mosquee which was a day-long open research sharing event that combined performance art, installation, screenings of documentaries and expert talks that sometimes blended art and life in support of the development of Kloppend Hert's upcoming productions and their current focus on the theme of ‘humanism 2.0.’ Through Bal Mosquee, the cross-pollination of ideas and practice between Kloppend Hert, Jong Geiwei and Transfo Collect was laid bare not only between these groups, but to a much wider public – a participatory arts-inflected event whose curatory logics again draw our attention to how the arts (and performance specifically) provide models of encounter that exemplify and amplify intercultural dialogue's aspirations for best practice with lasting effects.
But ultimately Bal Mosquee is an event that is not weeks or even months in the making but decades, as Kloppend Hert's momentum for experimentation through this kind of model was made possible only through the groundwork of Timimi's practice with Union Suspecte over two decades into the formation of Kloppend Hert. Kloppend Hert had also at the time of Bal Mosquee recently received a five-year structural-funding award not tied to outcomes specific to intercultural dialogue but rather purely arts-based. This puts them into a highly advantageous funding situation compared to Terra Nova Productions and OT Platform, a situation that one could attribute to the more recent histories of large-scale inward migration in Northern Ireland and the Republic as well as differential (and less favourable) arts funding structures. But yet all three nations are covered equally at the time of writing by the EU's turn towards the arts as a vehicle for intercultural dialogue – a blanket coverage that I think needs to be more rigorously tested against the working conditions and opportunities for minority ethnic and/or migrant artists in these member states, as made visible through the work of companies such as these who serve those aims but may risk being eclipsed by them.
Conclusion
Ultimately, OT Platform, Terra Nova Productions and Kloppend Hert provide crucial correctives to the current EU-led emphasis on crisis as the most compelling catalyst for turning to the arts as a tool of intercultural dialogue. Instead, all three companies demonstrate how new intercultural performance methods productively address a much wider range of minority ethnic and migrant experiences than immediate crisis/displacement through the performance work that they produce and have produced over time. As Marilena Zaroulia puts it in a dialogue with Emma Cox, ‘Because we fantasize and fetishize the moment of arrival we fail to perceive what comes after, the transition of the homo sacer, the pharmakos to the citizen.’Footnote 54 Refreshingly, this long-term and often fraught transition for migrant and minority ethnic artists and characters forms the subject and the working conditions of all three companies’ new intercultural performance practices.
Intercultural dialogue's alliance with the arts in the EU has been opportunity, annoyance and sometimes mirage in terms of its impact on the actual workings of these theatre companies, the funding streams available to them, and the public appetite for the intercultural work that they do, however differently they may define this work themselves in their theatrical approaches. It is ultimately my hope that EU intercultural dialogue's optimistic turn towards the arts might eventually be matched by sustainable structural provision in and for the arts which recognizes more realistically the broader resourcing and sectoral rebalancing that the work of Terra Nova Productions, OT Platform and Kloppend Hert demonstrate are necessary for making new intercultural work that actually enfranchises minority ethnic and/or migrant subjects as drivers and not just instructive subjects of the work deployed in response to crisis (even if billed as equal participants). Instead these companies take the most positive and hopeful aspirations of intercultural dialogue as a bottom-up and transformative process at their word by bringing together non-professional and professional artists to make work to multiply the narratives and images and bodies which may claim space in the Northern Irish, Irish and Flemish theatres.
But the challenges faced in keeping these companies running does make evident the way in which intercultural dialogue's transformational ideals need sustainable and unconditional support within arts industries that facilitates those identified as migrant and minority ethnic artists moving beyond performing crisis in perpetuity. These companies’ experiences over time demonstrate the difficulties of minority ethnic artists and the companies they lead to get work and funding if their work is not explicitly on themes of crisis and identity – an imperative against which Kloppend Hert and Timimi have begun to push more actively and subtly as their own work has developed. To return finally to Jackson, further and more comprehensive investigation of the ‘stage management’ of intercultural dialogue on the ground as a material set of practices made visible through the funding conditions and artistic processes of theatre companies like these three is still urgently needed. As this article has argued, a multi-member-state perspective would be highly instructive in our evolving understanding of the possibilities and limits of this rhetorical/policy shift vis-à-vis interculturalism and the arts in a political moment that one could only describe as charged regarding immigration and long-term attitudes to cultural diversity in Europe and beyond.
