THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
"It is no nation that we inhabit, but a language. Make no mistake; our native tongue is our true fatherland."
So said 20th century Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran. Contemporary times are teaching us this may be more a point of departure than a point of arrival: borders may not (consensually) shift (much), but people and ideas are very much on the move. Emil was clearly right anyway; isn't French spoken in Morocco? Arabic spoken in Paris, English in Holland?
Beyond this, we are learning that while languages occupy a central place in national cultures and identities, we are limiting our understanding when we treat either languages or identities as fixed – even though attempts to protect, revive or pin down national identities have become a popular mission in many places across the world.
People on the move are reminding us that language, and the cultural flows it underpins, does not align neatly with national identities, let alone borders or any other fixed and bounded entity, personal or social. In other words, language behaves dynamically rather than as a fixed overlay on nations. The nature and central enabling function of language and culture is fluidity. And what is enabled is personal and social change.
At the Voila! Festival, we are interested in an understanding of the interplay of language and cultural process beyond ‘multicultural’ or ‘multilingual’ because we are interested in culture as joined-up change and language as joined-up process: as active interrelated modes of continual adaptation to a changing world.
Académie Française notwithstanding, everyone across the world uses words and expressions that have gained currency only recently: fake news, woke, MAGA, jihad… As such, this runs contrary to the idea of culture as a thing – something that can be preserved, eroded, celebrated or appropriated.
Even when we think of culture as a space rather than artifacts or traditions, we are used to thinking of culture as a noun. With a big C, as cultural products: the Royal Ballet, an Oasis concert, the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace. Or with a small c, as "ways of life" involving things like marriage, food, livelihoods, holidays, fashion. But even then, we treat culture as a noun: as mythical bounded entities – Greek culture, male working-class culture, trans culture, corporate culture, etc.
Our understanding of language at Voila – and our choice of panlingual over multilingual to describe the festival – derives from our conviction that culture, big C or small c, is better understood as a verb than a noun. Like language, culture is not something we own; it’s something that we do.
From this point of view, it is no more possible to appropriate someone’s culture than it is to appropriate their love for their child.
To "culture" as a verb means to grow, to develop something: a garden, a new vaccine. Culture with a small c isn’t about fixed, bounded entities at all. It’s just as much about change. In fact, culture is the space where we do our changing. It’s where we evolve. Just like culture in a petri dish, we replicate and reproduce our lives – but with subtle changes that enable us to adapt to the world. Culture enables us to change by making variations small enough, and gradual enough, that we sustain who we are. Culture deploys change in bite-sized chunks. So, we change – without threat. We change in order to stay the same.
You can easily try out this idea of culture as imperfect replication. Small c first.
Think of any radical social change over the past 50 years. The advent of same-sex Christian marriage, for example. How did it actually come to be normal? There were legal changes, sure. But these came as the result of bottom-up social pressure for change exerted, very often, by people hijacking the "traditions" of the marriage ceremony. There would be a same-sex couple in front of a celebrant, just like in a church, and very likely a same-sex couple in miniature on top of an otherwise wholly traditional wedding cake. While society at large, the Church and the government all continued to raise eyebrows, culture with a small c, far from holding everything in place with its iron assumptions and unbreakable traditions, itself became the Trojan horse for new ways of imagining life; cultural praxis (adjusted) became the agent of change.
When we want a change, we do the same ritualistic things – just slightly differently. And then the legal adjustments that follow, the ideological corollary to changes in praxis, complete the cultural shift. (Marx would have added another element – the vested interests and power relationships at stake. Who is a given cultural construct actually for? Whose interests does it serve? Who has to move over to let the legal adjustments take place? But that’s another story…)
Or consider Culture with a big C, where the ideologies that underpin our everyday group identities are (we are taught) endlessly repeated. Consider Orson Welles’s 1936 production of Macbeth for the Federal Theatre Project in Harlem: the traditional Shakespeare play, just translocated from Scotland to the Caribbean with an all-Black cast. Suddenly mainstream white group identities expand to acknowledge African-American theatre with the "Voodoo Macbeth." Voila!
This is why, at Voila!, we talk of panlingual theatre. While "multilingual" suggests lots of defined languages, complete in themselves, side by side, panlingual suggests linguistic fluidity as people and ideas cross boundaries – physical, political and personal – as we all mutate to survive. Theatre has long been tied to ideas of "national identity," but in a global, multilingual world, those borders are becoming increasingly porous.
Orson Welles and same-sex marriages taught us to stop treating culture as a possession and start treating it as a shared space. Now, we at The Cockpit produce Voila Festival (this year 470 artists, 110 shows, 8 London venues and 70 languages) to find out what happens when we start treating culture, quite explicitly, as something we all have to do in order to adapt.
The first step to enabling us to understand language – and by extension difference itself – as bridges rather than barriers, is to understand their relationship to culture and to understand the essential function of culture in sustaining group identities while enabling change.
When the tectonic plates of the world move too quickly, we experience earthquakes; when they move in bite-sized chunks, a bit at a time, we get a chance to find our place in a changing landscape.
Current times, and people on the move, are reminding us we have only two modes of change: catastrophic or cultural. Voila!
Voila! Theatre Festival, Voila!, London’s largest platform for international and multilingual theatre, runs until November 23 across eight venues. For more information, visit www.voilafestival.co.uk
