When pride comes tumbling off the great white stallion
Tony Joe White
You move closer to the truth
This week, I’ve been thinking about Fada Theatre, a company of Syrian asylum seekers who performed at ICAF in 2017. It was a powerful experience that helped me understand some things about co-creation by professional and non-professional artists that I wrote about in A Restless Art. I’ve come back to that evening because I see now that there are things I didn’t say then that are as important as what I did say. There was a personal dimension to my response to Fada’s work that I didn’t recognise as relevant or even legitimate in the context of the book I was trying to write. But, by not acknowledging my own family’s refugee experience I told a partial story, one lacking some essential truth. I did not meet the performers’ honesty with my own and so kept a distance that, if not the same as ‘Us and Them‘, comes from the same place.
As I work on A Selfless Art, I see myself trying to correct misperceptions that have shaped my thinking about co-creation in the past. It’s not that what I’ve written before is untrue, but it is incomplete. In different ways it is a partial story and therefore misleading. I hope that A Selfless Art will complement A Restless Art, the yin to its yang. Looking at what I wrote about Fada Theatre six years ago, I found the seeds of what might become A Selfless Art. Here, for example, is a short post that could have been written for the new book. I like the sense that the new book is in conversation with the old one, as I am in conversation with the person I have been, the people who influenced me and the experiences that formed my beliefs. I hope that this path will take me to a more complete understanding of the nature and value of co-creation. Not the whole truth, for sure, but a little closer to it.
Photo of Fada Theatre by Kevin Ryan
François Matarasso 