Can We Talk About This?
Reviews
Superb performers pack a political punch
REVIEW ... Sydney Opera House
by Deborah Jones
The Australian | Monday Aug 29 2011
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CAN We Talk About This? is choreographer and theatre-maker Lloyd Newson's latest and most potent provocation.
He asks a question he believes is answered too often in the negative in Western society. All around him he sees Western nations allowing radical Islamists rights and freedoms they refuse to accord others. He sees abuses against women and children excused as cultural practice. He sees the discussion of such things labelled as racism. He sees appeasement.
In this new work from DV8 Physical Theatre, which received its world premiere last week as part of the Sydney Opera House's Spring Dance festival, Newson argues passionately these are things we need to take on. In effect to stop censoring ourselves.
The work is grounded very specifically in recent British and European experience. Events discussed include cases that are familiar to Australians: the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the explosion of violence that followed the publication in a Danish newspaper of a cartoon depicting Mohammed, the death of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh and the threats against Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who collaborated with van Gogh.
There are also less familiar situations that are no less important: the excoriation of a British headmaster who said he believed multiculturalism had gone too far and the hurdles faced by those working to expose the practice of forced marriages in some Asian communities in Britain.
It's important to say at this point Newson isn't conducting a wholesale attack on Muslims or Islam. And the need to say that illustrates the problem exactly. When any questioning of behaviour and attitudes is construed as attack, how does one have a reasonable conversation? And how does a society that prides itself on accepting a plurality of views deal with groups for whom only one way of thinking is correct?
These are serious, knotty, crucially important matters.
Newson has been thinking about such things for a long time. Can We Talk About This? is in a direct line from his 2007 work To Be Straight With You (seen at the Adelaide Festival in 2008). That piece explored attitudes towards homosexuality in similar form to the current work.
Newson, in an interview with The Weekend Australian last month, spoke about conducting interviews that formed the basis of To Be Straight With You. "I found it intriguing to hear that many Muslims who feel that there is rampant Islamophobia were often the same people or the same community that were also very willing to condemn homosexuals, and [express] quite reactionary views on women. So, on one hand, people were asking for respect and tolerance, but I didn't necessarily see it being given back," he said.
The opening salvo of Can We Talk About This? will be much discussed wherever this work is seen, I imagine. With no preamble a man asks the audience members whether they feel morally superior to the Taliban. Hands up if you do. (The program tells us writer Martin Amis was responsible for this highly charged question.)
At the first performance last Thursday a few people raised their hands, a number estimated by the performer to be about 15 per cent. So few?
If you'll forgive the analogy, it was as if a little bomb had been thrown into the audience to disturb its equilibrium from the start.
Newson, who developed Can We Talk About This? with the superb performers, creates a gripping physical dimension to make exterior the conflicts, confusions, anxieties, certainties and attitudes of those speaking - the performers often relate the words of real newsmakers - and being spoken about.
Newson's melding of text and dance is exemplary. One needs the tool of language to delve into the social issues of great moment that interest him, but it's exhilarating to see how movement illuminates and expands the experience.
At times the performers appear as automatons, at others to be turning themselves inside out.
All the while they speak, in full command of voice and body. One delightful section finds a way to show calm, decent, rational thought in the face of self-interested opposition: Joy Constantinides, playing former member of parliament Ann Cryer, makes quiet observations about her campaign against forced marriage while Kim-Jomi Fischer acts as her armchair and her side table (to hold her cup of tea of course).
Constantinides, a tiny woman, is supremely and alertly balanced as she sits on Fischer's slowly shifting body, sitting high on his back, or perched on his upraised feet.
The piece also includes documentary film and sound, nothing more illustrative than a discussion - attempted discussion - about culture clash in which the participants mostly talk over one another. As the moderator (Jeremy Paxman I think) is forced to say fairly wearily: "We're not getting anywhere." Can We Talk About This? packs a huge punch in a highly disciplined 80 minutes or so. There's not a wasted moment nor an indulgent one. It's one of those rare shows that demands and gets complete attention and absorption from its audience.
After the short Sydney season - it finished yesterday - Can We Talk About This? goes to Hong Kong (from Thursday) and then to Europe. It opens in Berlin in late October, just a year after German Chancellor Angela Merkel said multiculturalism in her country had "failed totally". Shortly after she backtracked, saying diversity had made Germany stronger but immigrants had to be better integrated. Now that will be an interesting night.
