Much of the world was glued to their radios and televisions during the first week of June 1967. For those who paid little attention to the Middle East, the Six Day War (as it was called then) seemed to come out of nowhere. For others, more attuned to developments in the region, the war was evidence of ‘brinkmanship that went over the brink’, as historians Roger Louis and Avi Shlaim wryly observed.Footnote 2 The Arab–Israeli War was also a reminder that the Cold War still divided the world, with the West lining up behind Israel and the Soviet Bloc behind President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt and the Arab coalition.
Even as the US and Soviet United Nations (UN) ambassadors became as familiar on television as the casts of favourite shows, another event of international consequence was unfolding in New York. The city was hosting the Twelfth International Theatre Institute (ITI) World Congress, the first time this gathering had ever met in the US. A non-governmental organization (NGO) of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), ITI was established immediately after the Second World War by a group of internationally minded theatre leaders, primarily from the US, Western Europe and Canada. At its twelfth World Congress there were 140 delegates from fifty countries representing forty-one ITI centres. Three countries being considered for ITI membership sent observers: Ceylon (Sri Lanka by 1972), Malaysia and Uganda. The congress, titled The Theatre of Tomorrow, met for a week; beginning on Sunday, 4 June and ending on Sunday, 10 June, it coincided almost exactly with the Arab–Israeli War (5–10 June). In between panels there were business meetings, banquets, gossiping and visits to New York theatres. After the congress closed, delegates were taken to the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in Connecticut and the Bucks County Playhouse in Pennsylvania.
The [final] meeting closed promptly, but the Congress continued to meet, talk, and strengthen the bridges built between theatre people around the world … The XIIth Congress had difficulty in ending, and, as far as the US Center is concerned, it will continue as an extraordinary and revealing experience into the future
was ITI president Rosamond Gilder's summary later that month to the board of and donors to the US Center.Footnote 3
The ITI delegates got along much better than did their fellow delegates twenty-one blocks south at the UN. Downtown, vociferous arguments as old as the UN itself raged about Israel and its Arab neighbours. Comparing the simultaneous meetings, Georgy Tovstonogov, the artistic director of Leningrad's Gorky Theatre, reflected that theatre had more to offer the world than politicians.
We are witnessing most important and world shattering meetings, the Security Council of the United Nations … I hope a day will come when … the wonderful buildings of the United Nations should be … for theatrical congresses and the Barbizon Plaza … should be the place for the Security Council.Footnote 4
These comments at the concluding panel (the day the war ended) were met with laughter. While Tovstonogov's comment was probably meant as a joke, and was received as such, it was, however, the humorous version of what the World Congress had explored more seriously. What if theatre was just as important and meaningful a global endeavour as assemblies of state officials? What if theatre assemblies were just as likely to influence and lead their nations as governmental ones? What if, as Romanian actor Radu Beligan pithily inquired, ‘the world was ruled by artists?’Footnote 5
The 1967 ITI World Congress was, in fact, a meeting of world leaders as consequential as the one happening at the UN. This claim is not based in a facile equivalency, that the ITI delegates had the power to affect the outcome of the Arab–Israeli War, but that in a much wider context they were influencing how nations were defined and how citizenries had agency in geopolitics. The global questions and conversations that constellated at the World Congress were no less momentous than the ones at the UN. The ITI delegates knew that theatre everywhere was addressing the global issue of defining the ‘people’. Theatre-makers in the late 1960s saw first-hand how the people were articulating their hopes and demands in new ways, both observing and effecting change, from the reinvention of nations to the creation of new ones.
Tovstonogov and Beligan's provocations were not ones scripted by the planning committee. Archival documents from the congress, however, demonstrate that their comments nonetheless anticipated the debate over the idea of artists as national leaders. One panel in particular, The Responsibility of Theatre to the Progress of Society, on Friday 8 June, offered an opportunity for the delegates to wrestle with this difficult and challenging idea. The participants included artists from a range of countries – old and new, East and West, North and South, large and small – and engaged with a number of key ideas: how audiences were witnesses to national reinvention, how theatre could serve as a pedagogical form, and how the intersection of these two allowed audiences to see themselves as citizens. In order to understand the significance of these discussions in the context of the congress as a whole, I will focus first on ITI's place in the geopolitical moment and then on the contributions during the conference and after by a specific set of artists from diverse countries, including the US, India, France, Morocco and Nigeria. The conversations at the 1967 ITI World Congress were messy and disorganized. But in this, they also represented a profound articulation of how theatre was influencing the complex ways in which nations were identifying and defining themselves and their citizens.
Geopolitics as performance
Georgy Tovstonogov was not the only World Congress delegate to comment on the war in the Middle East. Most of those who did raise the issue did so in conventional ways that relegated theatre to an irrelevant distraction from serious global events. Some speakers described a sense of helplessness. Others ‘were paralyzed by thoughts of theatre's irrelevance and frivolity: How could we talk theatre when the world was blowing up’, as US ITI then-staffer (later president) Martha Coigney remembered decades later.Footnote 6 But there were those who extended Tovstonogov's joke into a serious consideration of theatre's potential for efficacy in global affairs.
During The Responsibility of the Theatre to Society, panellist John O'Neal, co-founder of the Free Southern Theater in the US, took an opposite view to Coigney and offered the serious version of Tovstonogov's observation:
The frightening thing to me is not so much that the purposes of this assemblage and of various … work in the theatre seem to pale before the significance of what is done at the United Nations. The frightening thing is that what is done at the United Nations seems so irrelevant to what happens in the world. And it seems more like the kind of drama we would create on our stages.Footnote 7
Someone yelled out from the floor, ‘Theatre of the Absurd’, but O'Neal did not specify what kind of theatre he had in mind. Whatever genre he was referencing, he reversed the stereotype of theatre as frivolity and claimed for theatre the serious space of inquiry and change over world legislative bodies. Theatre, O'Neal implied, is not the place where you lie, posture and grandstand. Instead, as US playwright Arthur Miller observed in his address at the congress opening, ‘perhaps in this art … society does create an image of itself, and it has virtues in that respect’.Footnote 8 Theatre, O'Neal and Miller suggested, can serve as a key site of national and international leadership precisely because the work it does is ‘relevant’, to use O'Neal's word, to the struggle over who we are, who we want to be, and how to get there.
To posit that theatre is a key place of Cold War leadership seems to fly in the face of the historical record. Theatre is almost ubiquitously viewed as Coigney described it – as ‘frivolous and irrelevant’, especially when compared to war and other internationally devastating events. What O'Neal and his colleagues were valorizing, however, was less the size of the audience or access to legislative power, than theatre's ability to recognize and mobilize new constituencies and publics. Political leaders across the globe were striving to consolidate their new nations on the one hand, or prevent them from fracturing under the weight of protest on the other. Theatre leaders, some ITI delegates argued, offered sophisticated and effective models for those struggles.
What made this historical moment particularly complicated but ripe for intervention by ordinary citizens and artists was that the Cold War had shifted profoundly in the previous ten years. Since 1945 the idea that one of the two superpowers would inevitably start a world war (each side believed it would be the other) had been ubiquitous. This led to an unprecedented mobilization of governmental and private resources on both sides of the Iron Curtain to prepare for national defence. In addition, the two superpowers began to carve up the globe into spheres of influence, each promising freedom and security to its client states. But as the 1950s ended and the 1960s began, that polarizing division was challenged. Citizens in many countries were increasingly asking questions, and asking them increasingly antagonistically, about government decisions with regard to war, colonialism, human rights and political reform. From the global protests against the US war in Vietnam, to the resistance of the non-aligned nations to the US and the USSR, to more local actions like the Algerian fight for independence, the Cold War was no longer driven solely by the opposing ideologies of capitalism and communism. The twenty years preceding the World Congress had been a time of major decolonization, and nation formation was a pressing global issue.
One facet of this complicated political moment was that by the 1960s ITI was no longer an organization with much impact. It had not been designed to withstand these complexities, and artists were increasingly finding other ways to learn about one another's work. Pan-Africanism or pan-Arabism had little interest in the sedate NGO with its hierarchal governance structure of national centres, a main office in Paris, and an executive committee elected by member centres. The structure of ITI was more like that of the UN than Tovstonogov's joke admitted. Its determinedly ‘non-political character’, as defined in its charter, was no longer attractive to those making art that addressed the geopolitics of the 1960s.Footnote 9 It was a mid-century people-to-people organization in a late-century moment of non-alignment, decolonization and revolutionary protest.
ITI had grown out of a post-Second World War historic moment that was determined not to repeat the mistakes of the interwar years. This time, leaders across the globe averred, nations would pull together to prevent a repetition of the horrors of the first half of the twentieth century, and the arts would do their part to ensure this vision of the future. The idea of correcting the past motivated the establishment of the UN and UNESCO, and throughout the 1950s this vision persisted. In 1956 US president Eisenhower observed,
If we are going to take advantage of the assumption that all people want peace, then the problem is for people to get together and to leap governments – if necessary to evade governments – to work out not one method but thousands of methods by which people can gradually learn a little bit more of each other.Footnote 10
As the Cold War endured, however, that simple ‘people-to-people’-type diplomacy was challenged by a series of events and shifts including the non-aligned movement, the emergence of new nations in the global South, global student protests and anti-colonialism. By the mid-1960s, as historians Campbell Craig and Fredrik Logevall observed, ‘the Cold War consensus was breaking down’.Footnote 11
The idea that if people simply met each other, that if they had knowledge of each other, war could be averted had not held up well in practice. For the colonial powers, including the US, it had meant less an equal exchange and the possibility for change than the assumption that encounters through cultural diplomacy were a chance to further geopolitical goals through ‘soft’ power. ITI, founded as it was on the principle of people-to-people/nation-to-nation exchange, did not make the transition into the late 1960s very well. It had not been organized to address the emergence of new nations or challenges to the global geopolitical order. ITI was more of a clearing house for information, especially for smaller or poorer nations, than an incubator for new, globally developed ideas about the arts.
The artist delegates who attended the World Congress attended with the official state imprimatur. This is not to imply that they were mouthpieces for their states, and many were significant artists with international reputations in their own right. Their presence at ITI, however, did mean that they had negotiated some sort of relationship with the state, no matter how precarious that relationship might be. The delegates also operated under their own state's relationship with other states. At the 1967 World Congress many of the delegates’ attendance costs were paid by US philanthropic foundations including the Ford Foundation, which underwrote ITI members from North Africa and Europe, and two Rockefeller Foundations which supported delegates from Latin America and Asia.Footnote 12 That state-recognized private entities were funding the attendance of delegates from countries where the US state was spending development dollars was not likely lost on their governments. This did not necessarily align the artists of these countries with the US but it did mean that ITI was not inured from larger geopolitical forces.
If ITI was becoming more and more moribund and less and less connected with the politics of the moment, then why was the 1967 World Congress significant? In many ways it was significant because it was an anomaly. Thanks to the tireless efforts of US-ITI head Rosamond Gilder, who was one of the organization's founders, the congress was very well funded. Gilder had secured significant financial resources from the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the John D. Rockefeller III Fund and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. The League of New York Theatres donated Broadway tickets for the delegates.Footnote 13 She solicited welcome letters from the president of the US, Lyndon Johnson; the governor of New York, Nelson Rockefeller; and New York's two US senators, Robert Kennedy and Jacob Javits. The generosity of the foundations had ensured that attendance was broad and that many of the artists who attended were significant figures, including the French director Roger Planchon (the Ford Foundation), the Colombian director/writer Enrique Buenaventura (Rockefeller Brothers Foundation) and actor/director/playwright Sombhu Mitra of Bengal (John D. Rockefeller III Fund).
The US had never hosted a World Congress so Gilder and her colleagues were determined that this gathering would be one of the most impressive. In addition to The Responsibility of the Theatre, the programme included the typical ITI World Congress panels that had been offered in various guises since the first congress in 1948. The Open Stage: Aesthetic and Technical Problems Facing the Playwright, Director, Actor, Designer; The Problems of the Actor: Stanislawski, Brecht, Artaud – Synthesis or Conflict?; and After the Theatre of the Absurd, What? New Forms or None were not panels that lent themselves easily to a discussion of any of the topics that emerged in the panel this article discusses. The narrow Eurocentrism of the panels’ focus may have dismayed those delegates who were creating theatre for their new nations and who were throwing off the hegemony of European theatrical traditions.
By contrast, The Responsibility of the Theatre panel reflected changes happening in UNESCO that had not yet reached the interior of ITI. As historian Paul Kennedy describes, UNESCO's founding mission was, like ITI's, ‘a remarkably wide cultural agenda’ established with the ‘ambition and optimism of the time’.Footnote 14 As the 1950s became the 1960s the membership of UNESCO expanded. The USSR joined in 1954 with most of the Eastern Bloc following, and the 1960s saw the influx of the new nations of Africa and Asia. Sixth director general René Maheu, formerly a professor of philosophy in France and Morocco, welcomed these new members and accommodated the political shifts they brought. Maheu ‘was much admired by the leaders of Third World countries’, historian Chloé Maurel documents.Footnote 15 These changes made UNESCO a controversial global presence. Kennedy notes wryly that the new identity was ‘immensely ironic. [UNESCO] was founded to reduce cultural and ideological misunderstandings and to bridge prejudices rather than increase them’.Footnote 16 The increase of tension was, Maurel emphasizes, because ‘third-world countries worked tirelessly to transform UNESCO into an instrument for decolonization’.Footnote 17 Unlike the UN, where wealthy countries dictated outcomes, particularly in the Security Council, or Cold War interests favoured inaction, UNESCO became the global venue for both anti-Western sentiments and the voices of the newly decolonized.Footnote 18 It was in this context, with the questions of nation, geopolitics and global power hanging in the balance, that ITI assembled in New York to discuss theatre's role and future.
Spectators as witnesses
The Responsibility of the Theatre to Society was where these investments and understandings of the three worlds were articulated. Nothing in the archive documents who selected the panellists or what selection criteria were used. Every panel that week was balanced across geopolitical divisions – East/West, North/South, First/Second/Third Worlds – with the exception of gender parity. Of the forty-two speakers listed in the programme, only three are women, about 7 percent. This kind of institutional sexism would be targeted by the feminist movement in years to come. The 8 June panel was no different. Of the eight speakers listed in the programme, two were from the Soviet Bloc, three from the US, one from Western Europe, and two from the Third World. None were women. The composition of the list is not indicative, however, of where the intellectual, artistic and political force of the panel would emerge.
The first speaker was Mikhail Tsarev, head of the actors’ union, president of the Russian ITI, and director of the Maly Theatre. His remarks were a stiff, circumspect Soviet history of the Russian theatre delivered in French. ‘Socialist realism implies the greatest variety of efforts, of tendencies, of individual options. It requires but one thing: the inspiration must reflect life in all its tendencies and show the logical victory of the new world’.Footnote 19 Tsarev omitted to mention the controversial artists who had so captivated the West in the 1920s and early 1930s but whose deaths at the hands of Soviet authorities had rendered them invisible in contemporary Soviet theatre history. There was no reference to Vsevelod Meyerhold and constructivism, Vladimir Mayakovsky and futurism, or Solomon Mikhoels and Jewish theatre.Footnote 20 This opening to the day's deliberations is significant not because it set the agenda for the day or precipitated an argument, but because it was completely ignored. Tsarev was a generation or two too late. The historical moment of the 1920s and 1930s when Western European and US artists thrilled to the words of Soviet artists was long over. Soviet theatre was no longer in the vanguard, and the response was unenthusiastic. Tsarev spoke very little that day and no one referenced his remarks.
Instead it was a speaker from a new nation, responding to a US artist, who framed the day's discussion and provided its most powerful trajectory. Alan Schneider, the US director whose international reputation came from his close collaboration with playwright Samuel Beckett, expressed the liberal line so common in US theatre. He supported progressive change but remained unconvinced of theatre's ability to bring it about:
For the past two or three days, as I looked at the drama of the events surrounding us, and even at the specific drama of the events taking place in the similar meeting room of the United Nations, it seemed to me at my most despairing moments, that the responsibility of the theatre to the progress of society was very minor compared to other forces or aspects of our lives. Nevertheless, I would not be true to my own concern and love of theatre if I were to deny that I still believe in its responsibility and power. My difficulty comes in defining a specific role for the theatre on social issues or on social institutions.Footnote 21
This traditional view – that theatre plays a ‘minor’ role in society, that it does have some power, but vaguely so – speaks more to Schneider's kind of theatre than to theatre's possibilities. He further emphasized liberalism's false neutrality, implying that not to claim a politics is to be neutral. Schneider continued, ‘I do not believe it is essential for each artist to commit himself with each work of art to the … immediately local, specific, or political issues that at that moment happen to obtain’.Footnote 22 As the day unfolded, it became clear how simplistic Schneider's view of theatre's commitment to politics was and how much his stance was derived from his own First World privilege.
It was director Tayeb Saddiki from Morocco who transformed Schneider's pedestrian comments about theatre and politics into a liberatory stance that embraced multiple uses for theatre.
Mr. Schneider has just uttered the most important word, the word of ‘commitment’. Commitment to the theatre. I think that it's a word that has been dished up in many ways to us; for a young country … I am speaking of Morocco … our theatre is a young theatre, and this particular public, when it deals with a new form of expression, automatically identifies itself with the characters. It is no longer a mere spectator who comes to the theatre for the sake of coming to the theatre. He becomes a kind of witness.Footnote 23
The notion of an audience as a ‘witness’ was one that was particularly important to Saddiki as it encapsulated his own intellectual, artistic and political transformation.
Saddiki was Morocco's most significant director. He had trained in France although he was shedding his Eurocentric focus and, theatre historians Khalid Amine and Marvin Carlson argue, his
approach to theatre underwent a distinct change in the mid-1960s reflecting his growing consciousness of the tensions of creating theatre in the post-colonial world and coming to terms with the hybrid condition of the colonial subject resulting from the traumatic wounds that were inflicted upon him/her by the colonial enterprise.Footnote 24
Theatre, for Saddiki, was no longer what he had learned from directors Hubert Ginioux and Jean Vilar in France. Theatre scholar Hassan Mniai points out that Saddiki ‘was suddenly transformed into a proponent of Moroccan/Arabic theatre that would benefit from the potentialities of Western theatre, on the one hand, and construct its own form through an appeal to heritage, be it history or a theatrical form, on the other hand’.Footnote 25 The distancing approach that Schneider recommended was not for Saddiki, for him theatre artists had to do something with the weight of the histories they inherited. Witnessing, in these terms, became an ethical practice where artists spoke actively to their audiences about the issues they faced and choices that needed to be made.
Israel was another young nation where live witnessing and the physical presence of an audience had special value. Theatre critic Leah Porath described for the gathering a production about German reparations to Israel. Despite the play's flaws, the audience connected and discussed the issues fervently. Porath emphasized,
this play didn't bring up any idea that had not been brought up in so many editorials in newspapers, magazines, and journals. But I think this is the force of the theatre, and the strength of the theatre, even when it is not a very good one, that it reaches you … on an entirely different level, and with an entirely different impact than an editorial in a newspaper does.Footnote 26
Porath directly rejected Schneider's doubts about the efficacy of theatre by focusing less on the artist than on the audience. In her experience political impact and change came from the ways in which people were roused to action by artists’ work.
The Israeli government too emphasized the importance of audience access to performance. It ensured that theatre reached across the entire country and was not concentrated in urban areas.Footnote 27 Both a national movement and a government agency, Omanut Laam (Art for the People) declared,
We believe that by spreading art and culture and by making it accessible to all the citizens of the State, we will strengthen the citizens’ sense of belonging to their community in particular, and to the country as a whole, and we will strengthen the Israeli roots, and thus there will be more openness, understanding, and tolerance among the entire population at all of its sectors.Footnote 28
In both cases, Morocco and Israel, theatre artists and audiences were a people empowered, even entrusted, with transformative change.
Definitions of theatre as a powerful force that constitutes people as ethical witnesses with agency resonated with artists in First World nations who were working from a resistant and activist position. For African American artists, live performance of every kind had long been one strategy for speaking to each other and back to the larger culture about racism and oppression. US playwright and director Douglas Turner Ward had just co-founded the Negro Ensemble Company (NEC), which would become one of the most respected companies in the US and helped launch the careers of many artists, including actors Mary Alice, Esther Rolle and Denzel Washington. The previous year in the New York Times Ward had called for theatre made from an ‘unapologetic Negro viewpoint’, as part of ‘a committed program of social and economic revitalization of the slums’ in order to ‘infuse life into the moribund corpus of American theatre’.Footnote 29 An audience of empowered witnesses was exactly what he was trying to create with the NEC.
Ward was a US citizen, but he was also part of society that had been historically and contemporaneously disenfranchised. Most people of colour in the US at this time felt they had more in common with those in the emerging Third World than with their fellow citizens:
I think we all could possibly agree on the general responsibility of the theatre for the progress of society. As long as it is couched in generalities and abstract concepts. My problem, and I'm a playwright, is that I mistrust generalities and abstract concepts. I … write as if [my people] were going to hear and witness what I have to say … I think we can debate and discuss the responsibility of theatre for progress, but unless we talk about the specific situations that we are all involved in, it won't mean very much.Footnote 30
Ward's observations refuted Schneider's position. Rather than value art unfettered by immediate needs, Ward argued for the specific and the engaged. Like Saddiki, he pointed to those whose needs theatre must serve, their audiences.
Free Southern Theater (FST) co-founder John O'Neal jumped in to support his colleague. In its original 1961 manifesto the FST reminded its constituency that: ‘A combination of art and social awareness can evolve into plays written by a Negro audience, which relate to the problems with the Negro himself, and within the Negro community. Through theatre, we think to open new areas of protest’.Footnote 31 It was at this point in the panel that O'Neal made the point quoted in the introduction, that the World Congress was the vital global gathering and that the UN was simply politicians preserving the status quo. He reminded his colleagues that while, like Ward, ‘as a black artist in this country’ his ‘primary concern is with a black audience’, no one can
remain aloof from what seems to me also a basic fact of existence. That is that the world is kind of dominated right now by a couple of major power blocs, you know political and economic power blocs … Are we willing to address the fact that the world does not develop by itself? It is not an autonomous thing that runs on by itself. People and forces form the world and the shape it is going to take. And the question for us is, shall we … by virtue of our roles in the theatre … speak … to those people who manipulate those forces demanding that they be responsive to the people of the world in their various constituencies?Footnote 32
O'Neal refused the kinds of abstract notions of power that others had embraced. Those blocs – a reference to Cold War geopolitics – are ones that people control; as O'Neal notes, they are not naturally occurring arrangements. If people made them, people can unmake or change them.
O'Neal's rejection of a distinction between the UN General Assembly and the ITI World Congress was not an attempt to inflate theatre's importance or simplify state impact, but to point out the commonalities of the two. Both were international bodies taking up questions about how the world should operate and what roles nations and individuals played in those operations. It was also an articulation of one of the larger trajectories of the Congress itself. The delegates were asking, in this time of political turmoil, who are the people and how do we define a nation?
Theatre as national pedagogy
The valorization of national self-definition – that is, the right of individual nations to chart their own courses regardless of colonialism and imperialism – was almost as old as the twentieth century. US president Woodrow Wilson had included the idea in the fourteen points he brought to the negotiations ending the First World War. The League of Nations embraced it (to little effect) and the UN inherited self-definition as one of its foundational ideals. It was the end of European colonialism and the rise of new nations, however, that came closest to realizing the ideal. National self-definition, for the new nations emerging in the global South, owed less to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment than to theorist and revolutionary Franz Fanon's understanding of nation as determined by the people, their pre-colonial history and their culture.
For Fanon and those influenced by him, nation was an expression of the people less focused on ‘political parties … concerned with daily reality’ than on ‘reclaiming the past’ in order to ‘trigger … a change of fundamental importance in the colonized's psycho-affective equilibrium’.Footnote 33 Fanon focuses his discussion of nation on culture. For him, nation was articulated through culture, and culture was what the people made out of their lived experiences. The two are inextricably linked:
We have witnessed the emergence of a new energy in the cultural sphere. We have seen that this energy, these new forms, are linked to the maturing of the national consciousness … The nation is not only a precondition for culture, its ebullition, its perpetual struggle and maturation. It is a necessity. First of all it is the struggle for nationhood that unlocks culture and opens the doors of creation. Later on it is the nation that will provide culture with the conditions and framework for expression.Footnote 34
The kinds of witnessing that Saddiki claimed for theatre are the kinds of cultural work that Fanon argued would lead to a nation. Culture is the process through which a people teaches itself to be a nation, and live performance would be a key cultural expression that new nations were using to define themselves, create new heritages and explore new ideas. What the ITI delegates who spoke for theatre as having a responsibility to society were valorizing was less the size of the audience or access to legislative power, than theatre's ability to recognize and mobilize new constituencies and publics. They knew first-hand that what Fanon defined as the ‘colonized's psycho-affective equilibrium’ was transformed by seeing what Fanon called their ‘dignity, glory, and sobriety’, embodied live in front of them. Cultural work, Fanon emphasized, had ‘undeniable pedagogical value’.Footnote 35 Theatre offered sophisticated and effective models of pedagogical work, as both O'Neal and Saddiki had been arguing during the panel.
For Barbara Heliodora, a theatre critic from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, theatre was part of a larger project to identify and understand a people and a nation.Footnote 36 While few critics were in attendance at the Congress, those that were clearly identified with artists as fellow citizens. Heliodora was known for holding artists to the highest standards and was unafraid to use her position to dismiss work that did not meet them.Footnote 37 Her often withering prose did not mean she did not share their goal to create a Brazilian theatre, of and for the people. Like Porath, she looked to theatre to understand how people were constituting themselves as a nation. ‘I believe that certainly in my own country, where the theatre now is deeply worried about Brazilian problems, we are becoming more and more aware of ourselves as a people, a nation’.Footnote 38 She equated the people with the nation, a formula less often seen in the US, where the idea of the nation as representative of all the people was being challenged by the civil rights, student and workers’ movements.
But for others, especially those linked with the Third World-ism initially advanced by Nehru, Nasser, Sukarno and others during the emergence of the non-aligned movement in the late 1950s, historian Dipesh Chakrabarty observes the anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism of the post-war world was a ‘moment in … history when the idea of nation was something people aspired to’ achieve.Footnote 39 Theatre was an essential part of national self-definition for Som Benegal of India, who served on ITI's executive committee. He pointed to the Indian People's Theatre Association (IPTA) production of Bijon Bhattacharya's 1944 New Harvest. This play was one of the first in India to put the underclass's grim reality onstage, in this case the devastating 1943 Bengal famine that killed as many as four million people. The production ‘carried the people beyond their immediate tragedy and gave them hope. I think that this is one of the great things theatre can do, and it can do it only when it tries to reflect and to carry forward the people's vision and their hope’.Footnote 40 A director and journalist, in the 1970s Benegal would move away from his theatre career to become central to India's Cooperative Craft Movement. As historian G. R. Madan notes, this shift was an extension of Benegal's understanding of theatre, since the ‘cooperative movement is first and foremost an educative and social movement … Joining a cooperative can never be a passive act; it is an act of participation’.Footnote 41 Benegal's beliefs echoed Porath's in that both saw theatre serving people in a more vital way than newspapers (despite Benegal's own work as a journalist), but he also saw theatre as constituting the nation, as did Heliodora. He emphasized that ‘beyond the public debate in the political forum or the newspaper, it is the theatre alone which can tell [the spectator] which way he should turn, and to offer him a solution’.Footnote 42 The artists of Morocco, Brazil, India and Israel were all using theatre to invent the nation in which they wanted to live and to define the nation's people.
Roger Planchon situated his own work similarly and prized his connection with his community about all others. A French director who had refused to move his work to Paris, Planchon resisted the pressure to align himself with the cultural and political capital of the national capital. Instead, he stayed in Lyon's suburb of Villeurbanne and invested in theatre for the people, decentralized theatre and theatre of resistance. In Western European theatre, he argued, ‘there is a trend, tendency, which is becoming stronger and stronger which has been expressed here. The trend to believe that the theatre can no longer solve anything by means of the traditional dialogue’.Footnote 43 Director (and later performance studies scholar) Richard Schechner picked up on the idea of moving away from theatre as dialogue.
And the whole notion of political commitment, the whole notion of theatre becoming a mirror of what our political or social … reality is then becomes a question of how we can bring into a celebratory space, a theatre space, these multiple messages, this multi-dialogue, this multilogue, rather than dialogue.Footnote 44
Both men were engaged in work that upended theatre, opened it to new possibilities, and most importantly new ways of finding and defining audiences. Neither were invested in reinscribing onstage the very politics they were fighting against offstage.
What no First World director had first-hand experience of, however, was the literal invention of their national context. For Uganda, independent since 1962, and Nigeria, independent since 1960, theatre made a nation by working with the people to create a culture of their own, one not imposed on them by an oppressive power. Theatre, for Dr Okot p'Bitek, the head of the National Theatre in Uganda, ‘means … doing away with what we may call social imperialism. The British colonizing powers instituted a British culture that had nothing to do with Uganda – for example, “Baa Baa Black sheep” made no sense to Ugandan children because they use sheep for meat, not wool’.Footnote 45 A refusal of even a children's song, he stressed, is a significant action: ‘this again is part of a movement which swept the whole of the old colonial world, in which the ruled people began to ask themselves, what am I, socially, culturally? What are we?’ and he concluded, ‘the theatre movement in Uganda is part of this attempt to discover the African personality’.Footnote 46 As Chakrabarty pointed out, national aspirations were, for those freed from colonial imperialism, an articulation of liberation and a rejection of oppressive practices of the past. In addition, national aspirations were about struggling with the cultural inheritance of colonialism and imperialism. The legacy of oppression endured long after the oppressors had left.
Dr Joel Adedeji, president of the Nigerian ITI and professor at the School of Drama at the University of Ibadan, reflected on the similar challenges Uganda and Nigeria experienced in using theatre to establish a new nation:
within our university theatre we have also developed the playwright. A playwright, people who write plays using English as their medium. They have a reason for doing this. It isn't because they love English better and their own language less, it's simply because of the heritage, the colonial heritage … They use a form which is foreign. And because the form is foreign, the plays are very much liked by foreign people.Footnote 47
Adedeji's comments are contiguous with Planchon's and Schechner's in that they emphasize language. Language, however, had a different connotation in nations where the most common language was that of the colonizer.
A people is partially constituted through shared language. When that language has been part of the apparatus of oppression, people create resistant ways to think and act within the language they have inherited. This was part of the process of decolonization throughout Africa and Asia. As Chakrabarty argues, this process ‘produced a style of politics on the part of the leaders that can only be called pedagogical. From Nasser and Nyerere to Sukarno and Nehru, decolonization produced a crop of leaders who saw themselves, fundamentally, as teachers to their nations’.Footnote 48 He continues, ‘the pedagogical aspect of [Nehru's and Nyerere's] politics had to do with their desire to see their respective nations take pride of place in the global order of nations’.Footnote 49 Theatre has a long history of being integral to national self-invention, and this historical moment was no different. What both Adedeji and p'Bitek described – revising daily actions and assumptions, as well as finding new forms to express their new experiences – were the kinds of pedagogy for which theatre was well suited. The pedagogy of decolonization demanded performance as a model of national embodiment.
In my introduction, I asked what the implications would be if theatre were considered as important a global endeavour as assemblies of state officials. The challenges that the theatres of Uganda and Nigeria faced were the same as those their governments confronted. The ideas that the theatres of those new nations, as well as those of Morocco and Israel, and even older nations like France and the US, were grappling with were the same ones their governments faced. Israeli director Peter Frey challenged his colleagues at the Open Stage: Aesthetic and Technical Problems Facing the Playwright, Director, Designer, Actor panel accordingly:
I think … that we … shall have to address ourselves … to the question of a more active participation of the audience in the performance. We rely on the principle of identification [and] empathy. We are coming close to the audience in the open stages, the thrust stages. I think we may have to come even closer. I think that the experience of the happenings, the be-ins, and the love-ins, is a significant phenomenon and one that we have to deal with … [W]e must address ourselves to the problem of what are we going to do tomorrow, with the audience all over the world, which perhaps for the first time in history is coming into its own.Footnote 50
The idea that the audience ‘is coming into its own’ is a provocative one in the larger political and historical context of the moment. It implies that, should the audience seize its power, then conditions, productions and intentions could change quite radically.
New audiences as new citizens
The concept of a new audience maps well onto the struggles that O'Neal, Sadikki and Planchon described. How does theatre embody a people and how does that constellation have bearing on the citizenry? The theatre artists were confident that there was an influential and consequential relationship. That confidence would continue to inform their work. In the year after the congress many of those on the Responsibility of the Theatre to Society panel would make radical national interventions.
Many of the delegates at Theatre of Tomorrow would create theatre and/or organizations that provided national political leadership as much as performance and arts administration. Five months after he left New York City, Tayeb Sadikki would create Diwan Sidi Abderrahman Al-Majdub, drawing on the poetic and theatrical traditions of pre-colonial Morocco. The play is still considered, as Amine and Carlson document, a ‘landmark of Moroccan theatre, as it opened a new field of research possibilities and experimentation’.Footnote 51 John O'Neal would return to the Free Southern Theater for its sixth season, which included one of Douglas Turner Ward's plays.Footnote 52 The theatre would deepen its relationship with its New Orleans home and help its poorest residents discover their own artistic voices and political agency. In 1968 Som Benegal would publish A Panorama of Theatre in India, a sweeping history that brought together different theatrical traditions, and the first of its kind.
The year 1968 was an explosive one of change for France, and Planchon played a major role in those events. When the French government fired those artistic directors who had allowed their theatres to be used for political meetings as part of the larger volatile civil unrest that had engulfed the nation, Planchon invited the directors to Villeurbanne. Disillusioned with the ways in which the French state had limited their ambitions and redirected their efforts into supporting the status quo, the directors crafted La déclaration de Villeurbanne. This document had two primary demands – for finding a new audience, one that had not previously attended the theatre, and for a completely new canon to perform for this ‘non-public’, as they termed the new audience:
Any cultural activity now seems to us to entirely in vain if it does not have the avowed aim of politicization: that is to ceaselessly invent, in view of the ‘non-public’, opportunities for them to raise their political awareness, to make a free choice of themselves, to transcend the feelings of impotence and absurdity constantly aroused in them by a social system in which human beings are almost never enabled to invent together their own humanity.Footnote 53
They wanted work that could ‘modify existing relations between men’, or the kind of art that took into account the new audiences, new people and new performances that had been so much on the minds of the world's theatre leadership the previous year in New York.
Rosamond Gilder told the New York Times after the World Congress that she ‘was especially pleased … that the Middle East crisis did not divert delegates from the questions before them’.Footnote 54 Given the discussions the delegates did have, the Arab–Israeli War galvanized rather than diverted them by foregrounding what was at stake in their work. Benegal confirmed this sense of renewed commitment when he wrote to Gilder a little over a month after the Congress had closed. ‘Thus this sharing of problems, achievements and aspiration, I hope, has started a new dialogue … which will in the long run make the theatre of tomorrow a better theatre, a more dedicated theatre, a theatre which fulfills the ideas illuminating our charter’.Footnote 55 The war reminded them that there was an urgency to what they did.
They were building new nations and bringing languages to the theatre that had never been there before. They were redefining what it meant to be ‘people’, how one collaborated with them to create performance, and what kinds of performance were needed at this moment. They were using theatre to challenge oppressive state practices and to express solidarity with one another. The delegates of the Twelfth World Congress of the International Theatre Institute may not have had the statutory authority of the General Assembly of the United Nations, but they had no less authority to take up the same ideas and offer approaches that were as significant. Given that we seem to face the same issues half a century on, perhaps it is time to ask once again, what would happen if ‘the world was ruled by artists?’
