DV8 Physical Theatre in Can We Talk About This?

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I found this piece dangerously simplisitc, intellectually unstructured and wilfully ahistorical in its exploration of the issues raised. The deck is immediately stacked by the fact that DV8 explores these questions through some of the most mediatised conflicts surrounding multi-culturalism of the past twenty years. As a result the performance does little to cut through the standard hyperbolic...    Read moreI found this piece dangerously simplisitc, intellectually unstructured and wilfully ahistorical in its exploration of the issues raised. The deck is immediately stacked by the fact that DV8 explores these questions through some of the most mediatised conflicts surrounding multi-culturalism of the past twenty years. As a result the performance does little to cut through the standard hyperbolic treatment of the issue. If anything, it caters to an easy sense of outrage that has become a rather standard response to these issues within western Europe. For all its emphasis on the documentarian, there were important voices and perspectives missing here as well as voices that were not explored with equal nuance as those who DV8 seeks to heroicize for daring to challenge multiculturalism. In a sense the besieged MP or feminist Muslim activist are quite easy for an audience of contemporary dance to understand. More difficult would have been some exploration of the appeal - admittedly problematic -- that radical Islam might offer to first-generation, Muslim youth who face difficulties in acculturation due to the racism and xenophobia of their home countries as much as for any community's willful isolationism. As well, in jumping all over the globe for its examples, the piece walks a dangerously thin line of equating radical Islamism with Islam itself, rather than as a historical, twentieth-century phenomenon related -- in part -- to European and US imperialism. If one bases a piece on a call to dialogue as a universal value, more effort needs to be extended in contextualizing where this problem - perhaps the most pressing cultural issue facing Europe and "the West" today -- came from in the first place. As well, the responses to Islam or Islamism of figures like Wilders or van Gogh -- as well as those of the growing political movements that voice their same positions -- are far more complicated and potentialy intolerant a phenomena than the simple call to dialogue that they are presented as in this performance. Finally, the responsibility of an artist, social thinker or documentarian is to do something more than simply take people at their word. It is to investigate, reflect and digest those words in order to offer something that opens up to complexity, history, and ambiguity. What I got with this piece was the same well-rehearsed, entrenched positions based on a desire for simple absolutes. This played easily to the sentiments of a contemporary dance audience; an audience who would leave the theater without being challendged to think about their own biases in any discussion of these exceedingly complicated issues.   Collapse

3 October 2011