The title of this talk is "Old Schools, New Masters, well, Old Schools greater than New Masters
does not equal New Futures" I stole it from a production I'm working on right now with some young people in Manchester at Contact Theatre. How many people saw the show yesterday, "Hillbrowfication"? So I got a little message from the future yesterday while I was watching it. Someone from, she's from Durban and she said, During "Hillbrowfication" yesterday, I got this message from Future. You might al
so call her the Oracle. She told me actually the kids aren't alright. Especially those second and third generation new Europeans. They're tired of being forgotten. While some shows get accolades for misusing South African kids, for example, traditions and stereotypes. She also said, and I quote, "I saw the show in Joburg. My ears hurt and I was bothered." I won't name her name either. But so, I digress, I'm supposed to be here to talk about
Urban Dramaturgy. So I'll give you a little theoretica
l background in terms of the work that we do and what we use as a basis for the work that we do and then I'll end after. So, intersectionality. How many people are familiar
with intersectionality as a term? Alright, that's good, that's already a start. Intersectionality is a term that is currently being bantered around with more and more. Definitely in the last... definitely since 2016. Especially in the cultural sector. Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw - she is a professor of law and critical race
theory at UCLA and
Columbia University, She came up with this term in the 80's while she was working on a case. Intersectionality has always been a thing. You had people like Claudia Jones. You had people like Paul Robeson, Audre Lorde who have embodied... James Baldwin, who have embodied intersectionality. But Kimberlé Crenshaw in the late 80's coined the term. These three women... I've shown this before for those who were at IETM so this is the time to prove that you were paying attention. Wh
ere are you? Oh there you are! So who are these women? I don't remember. I understand, you have a busy life. So these three women have been really crucial the last few years, definitely since 2012 or so. These three women are the founders... well they don't call themselves the founders but they're the ones that initiated, in a way, the "Black Lives Matter" movement. Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi and Patrisse Cullors. Very interesting, if you all get a chance, check out their website and the platform
statement because one of the things that they do is they work around this idea of diffused leadership models. So I think it's really interesting especially for our cultural sector. I use them today just because they also are very much steeped in the idea of intersectionality and this is something that they say. I don't know what happened there but that's okay. "We believe in elevating the experiences and leadership of the most marginalised black people, including but not limited to those who ar
e women, queer, trans, femmes, gender non-conforming, Muslim, formally and currently incarcerated, cash-poor and working-class, disabled, undocumented and immigrants. In recent years we have taken to the streets, launched massive campaigns and impacted elections but our elected leaders have failed to address the legitimate demands of our movement. We recognise that not all of our collective needs and visions can be translated into policy but we understand that policy change is one of many tactic
s necessary to move us towards the world we envision. "We can no longer wait." So this to me is one of the... there are many other individuals who say it differently but this embodies intersectionality, especially intersectionality as we live in 2019 and moving forward with problematic individuals in the U.S., problematic politicians in France, problematic politicians in Hungary, problematic politicians in Belgium, it's really crucial to remember the work that's being done in a lot of communitie
s. This is a U.S. example but there's also Black Lives Matter in Denmark, there's also Black Lives Matter in London and there's also, of course, besides Black Lives Matters there are other initiatives that we need to keep in mind and try to find ways to ally with and not be scared off by the Black Lives Matter. There's a reason for that by the way. So, like I said, we use these theoretical starting points as a way to inform the work that we do, or at least I do. I could speak for my other collea
gues but I won't, I'll just speak for the work that I do at the KVS - the Royal Flemish or the City Theater of Brussels. In 2016, using this concept of intersectionality, I asked Sabrina Mahfouz to be one of the first artists to lead this idea that I came up with together with Michael De Cock,
the artistic director of the KVS and it's called SLOW - Slam Our World. Michael was like "Hey Tunde, can you help create something using slam poetry and working through this theatre so SLOW was a result o
f that - Slam Our World. So what happens is, for example, an artist like Sabrina Mahfouz who is Egyptian and British based in London, invite her to do a three week residency in Brussels and in that three weeks meeting with local actors, local players, a diverse array of individuals so it's not just like going into a city and picking artists and transporting them to a place like Dresden. That's not the participatory ideas that we need
these days, sorry to say. Sabrina Mafouz came and she worked
on the first SLOW in 2016 and with each SLOW we ask... we're now on the fifth SLOW coming up in 2020 and with each SLOW we ask the question we ask a different question and the question that we asked in this one was "In the context of Brussels, what is Muslim feminism?" As you all might remember, 2015 was the bombings that took place in Brussels, if I'm not mistaken. Thank you, March 2016 of course, yes, thanks for that. So what I was going to say is that very pertinent question "what is Muslim f
eminism?" in that time and still I think until today, a very urgent question that we need to
continue to ask ourselves. What is the intersectionality in that question? For those who understand intersectionality. We only have 45 minutes so... Don't be shy. I saw a few hands. Now all of you and going to be shy to raise your hands later. I think it's looking at feminism and at Muslim, the combination of Muslim and feminism. Okay yeah, so the intersectionality would be... So what intersectionality
does is it looks at individuals, it looks at groups of individuals, so you're almost right. But what it does is that it looks at
individuals and groups of individuals so the question is "what is Muslim feminism?" so the intersectionality in that question is what are we looking at - we're looking at gender, we're looking in this case mostly at ethnicity and we're also looking at the intersection of religion. So you have... I don't have three hands, Alice if you can help... So you have these diff
erent intersections. So you have ethnicity, gender and religion. Thank you very much Alice, I didn't know that was going to happen but that's why you get paid the big bucks. So religion, of course, in progressive Western Europe is often something that we like to act as if it is no longer a thing but it is very much a thing. Not only because of Muslims living in Western Europe but just because of the fact that it shapes our very well... your very institutions. I can't claim Western Europe, I stil
l have to claim the US. So it still very much shapes our institutions, our holidays and our practices, although we like to act as if it doesn't - abortion anyone? Anyways, I digress. I digress a lot, just so you know. Part of this project, this first SLOW was also going out as a city dramaturg and interacting with individuals like this, interviewing individuals like this with hijabs, without hijabs, Muslims, non-Muslims and asking this question. The website actually... we created a website coll
ecting the interviews called whatismuslimfeminism.com on tumblr but, last I heard, something was happening with tumblr so I don't know if you can still find it. So it's really important to make sure that the power dynamics really shifts. That it's not me as a city dramaturg as part of the artistic team of the KVS determining the layout of the whole project. That it is Sabrina Mahfouz, along with the individuals that she meets along the way, that determines the outcome of the project. Another way
that intersectionality seeped into our programming was in October of 2017 with "Beyond the Binary" when we asked the Warrior Poets, a Brussels-based queer organisation, lesbian organisation inspired by Audre Lorde, to curate a night looking at the intersection of queer identity, ethnicity, gender and also class. So those different four intersections. The Warrior Poets, a collective of two women, invited individuals - a Somalian poet based in Amsterdam, a femmes dancer, performer from Afghanista
n based in Amsterdam also, and Sorry You Feel Uncomfortable - a collective in London who pretty much took over the KVS box space. It really shifted the way, not only how this night was presented by the communication team in the KVS but also I remember my colleague from the technician team saying "You know, I've never worked like this before, but I'm really glad, I'm really amazed at the outcome and I'm really glad that we got to do this type of project in the KVS". So participatory is not just,
like I said, once again, about bringing individuals in and showing their traditional dances but it's really about how does it shape the working structure also of the institution - from the technicians, to the communication, to the artistic team. I'm very proud to present to you SLOW number five. My two other colleagues took over SLOW number three which was in Kinshasa, with Kinshasa artists and Brussels-based artists and SLOW number four which was a Mexican-based artist, Rojo Córdova and now I'm
going back to my roots so I'm doing SLOW number five. SLOW number five is going to be with the Beirut's based haven for artists. I'm really excited about it. Hopefully it's a good product but just the fact that we're
able to do this is really exciting So I'm going to be going there in October and they're coming in 2020 and we're going to be focusing on the idea of queerness and the understanding of courage and power with this SLOW number five. So those are some of the ways that intersectionali
ty is being used within the KVS context, within the work that I do at the KVS. So the next theory that I would like to frame for you all is the understanding of decolonisation, anti-colonisation and post-colonisation. Anyone familiar with these terms? Look at you like "I don't know, I don't know if I should be raising my hands" Why are you shaking your head? "Because, I thought, because I've heard of that" You've heard of that, OK The thing about these terms is, once again, intersectionality, ac
tually even more than intersectionality, these are hot buzz words these days and depending on the circle that you are in it also determines how you feel about these terms. I was at a school, a very important school in Antwerp that trains actors and theatre makers, I won't name names because I try to behave sometimes, and I was supposed to start teaching in 2019/2020 so we had a first meeting and besides the fact that I was informed that one of my future colleagues, who's one of the gods or kings
of critique in Flanders, he was there and apparently a student has decided, a student of colour has decided to no longer go to his class. He said "Yeah, she doesn't come to my class anymore" and I said "wow you're very flippant about this reality, you should be worried" and so when I said that the 'coordinatrice', coordinator, feminist, woman - not feminist - woman coordinator said "Yeah, she doesn't go to the class anymore because he used the n-word". That's problematic and that's something th
at we need to take seriously because that for that student who, I later found out, is a young Moroccan woman of colour, twenty-something years old, that for her, hearing this white man in his 60s using the n-word is a form of aggression and she doesn't feel safe in that space
so we should be worried about that and then later on the other coordinatrice said "In addition to asking you and others to come and teach this class, we would also like to organise a symposium. But we're not going to call
the symposium "decolonisation" because decolonisation is an aggressive word. Just saying, I'll let y'all... exactly. I don't know what that means but I like that. This is something that, I don't use the term all the time but it's a really important term in terms of the work I do and in terms of how I see myself and where I come from. So Frantz Fanon can be seen as one of the, well kind of the father of this idea of decolonisation, also the author of Black Skin, White Masks. This is Professor Gl
oria Wekker. She was the former head of the Gender Studies department at Utrecht and she also wrote this book, if you have not read it, please do read it, it's called White Innocence. 'Witte Onschuld' in its Nederlands, for any Dutch speakers, I think there are like two in here. Definitely do read it because it looks at the Dutch context in terms of colonisation and how the colonial project still informs society today. So part of what she says in that book is she says, "An unacknowledged reservo
ir of knowledge..." I love people who talk, I give classes and actually they read these quotes so if anyone loves to read just let me know I won't read it so so you can read it out loud, just let me know. "An unacknowledged reservoir of knowledge and affects based on four hundred years of Dutch imperial rule plays a vital but unacknowledged part in dominant meaning-making process, including the making of the self, taking place in Dutch society." So replace Dutch society with German society. Repl
ace German society with French society. Replace French society with Belgian society. Replace Belgian society with Norwegian society. You kind of get the point.
There's a lot of work that needs to be done. In understanding this idea of new meaning-making, this new meaning-making process, this project that was started by my colleague Kristin... tell my mom I'll call her back later. Together with Sukina Douglas who is a poet rapper from London. "Rise Up" was started in commemoration a year after t
he bombings in Brussels to start a discussion not only with the bureaucrats in Luxembourg Place (Place du Luxembourg) but also with the Muslim or non Muslims
living in Molenbeek, or the kids living in Anderlecht, the kids living in poverty in Koekelberg, wherever. So to start a discussion through slam poetry workshops and then have the final process shown in the KVS cafe. So that's a way of this understanding of new meaning-making, bringing different people, different communities, different cla
sses together. So it's both de-colonial, anti-colonial, anti-racist and also intersectional in its approach. So that's my colleague, so it's not just me, just to let you know I'm not just the crazy one in there, that's doing this kind of work. This is just not really relevant but I wanted to show it especially because of this space that we are in with these castles - wow, this is amazing and pretty but where does that gold... I saw, I was walking and, was that Frederick or something? That big, g
old horse statue. If only you could melt that statue... no don't go crazy and go melt that statue but if only we could melt that statue and pay for another participatory project
or another theatre piece. Anyways, I didn't tell you to do it. So this is the statue that was done by two women of colour, two African women of African descendant women in Denmark. It was the first statue of a black woman,
I think a black person, on a square in Denmark in Copenhagen. It's called Queen Mary of the sugar
burn pointing to the colonial past of Denmark which for so many years they liked to deny just like Germany denied its connection to that colonial past. So yeah, this is Queen Mary of the Fire Burn. What one of the artists says, La Vaughn Belle, was, "Who we are as a society is largely about who we remember ourselves to be. This project is about challenging Denmark's
collective memory and changing it." Another way that the colonisation as a theory is used was in this production "Malcolm X" whic
h was the sort of, coming out, I can't think of a better word, coming out of the new KVS team. Together with my colleague Kristin I did this dramaturgy for this piece and it's a piece that was directed and conceived by the South African, Belgian Junior Mthombeni and the script was written by Fikry El Azzouzi who some of you might know. He wrote the book "Drarrie in de nacht". It's also translated in German by the way. Anyway, so it involved individuals like Sukina and Muneera from Poetic Pilgrim
age who are two London-based "Hip-Hop Hijabis" as well as other individuals based in Belgium itself. I would show the trailer but that's not really necessary. So the last term that I would like to
address is "exotification". So we saw a perfect example yesterday as many of you loved it, so it worked perfectly for my speech. So exotification. Professor Joachim Ben Yacoub, who is a... what would he be... Tunisian, Flemish professor. What he said in relation to Muslim festival Is there a question?
If there's any question just interrupt me and let me know please. I'm not so dictatorial. So he said, "In his study Orientalism (1978), Edward Said warns not to underestimate the consequences of a widespread internalisation and reproduction of the dominating Western cultural discourses embedded in the canon. Can one thus construct a new consciousness,
as proposed by the festival." In this case Muslim festival. Or maybe one can also look at the festival, this out whatever festival here. So, "..
.as proposed by the festival, by referring time and again to a normative body of work and normative concepts without reproducing the entrenched historical power relations?" So some of you might be wondering or maybe not be wondering "why is Hillbrowfication a problem?" It's a problem to me. I don't know the background, I don't even know the artist and I wish
I had time to talk to the artist, but it's a problem to me because I see inherently a problematic power relation in terms of who gets to d
ecide where the money comes from and who gets to decide what is done with that money. So that type of exotification, hopefully we try to move away from. Kind of exploring that was this piece in 2016 also that it did the dramaturgy for with Sachli Gholamalizad who is an Iranian Flemish actress and theatre maker. This piece was called (Not) My Paradise. So really kind of exploring this extrapolation... no sorry ...mapping of exotic realities onto her body and what she is expected to play as an Ira
nian descendent individual. So she still gets roles as - or she used to and she says no to them or tries to - get roles as a hijab wearing terrorist. She was just recently in the Brian De Palma film that was straight to video where she played actually what she called a "smart terrorist". So this understanding of exotification and who ..... is something that we need to question especially as practitioners of participatory projects or cultural projects in general. So this is the context of the cit
y that we live in. Brussels, as you see is a city with multiple capitalist realities but also of multiple ethnic realities and multiple class realities, multiple religious realities and so on and so forth. That's myself in 2016 with my colleague Kristin Rogghe and Gerardo Salinas. Some of you will see "Invited" later, so Kristin did the dramaturgy for "Invited". We get around basically. And so living in a context like Brussels, it is no longer okay to have an ensemble, to have a theatre company,
to have one of the most important theatre institutions in Flanders be non-representative. This is the ensemble of the KVS as it stands today with different individuals from different cultural backgrounds, different countries, because it's important that what people see on stage reflects... the people that live in the city need to be reflected on the stage that we are "beheerders" of - I don't know what "beheerder" are. What is "beheerder"? - control? - not control but that we manage. The stages
that we manage. So you have Moya Michael the South African choreographer based in Belgium, you have Mesut Arslan, the Turkish
theatre maker based in Belgium, you have Junior Mthombeni the South African
based in Belgium - sorry born in Belgium. And you have Sukina Douglas the London-based,
Jamaican descendant artist who is also one of our, we call it "open ensemble" or the "KVS faces". So it's really crucial that in 2019 your ensemble looks like this because having an ensemble like this also
is kind of looking at power and who has the power and resources from the major institutions to tell the stories that they want to tell and how they want to tell it. This is the last part of my speech, or whatever this was, a presentation. This is Bell Hooks. "All About Love" and a lot of other books. With that reminder, what Bell Hooks says is, "The desire to make contact with those bodies deemed other, with no apparent will to dominate, assuages the guilt of the past. Even takes the form of a d
efiant gesture where one denies accountability and historical connection... The desire is not to make the other over in one's image but to become the other." This is from her essay "Eating the Other". I was asked to come and talk about urban dramaturgy and I hope that you have a better understanding of the work that's being done at the KVS. But I also found it really crucial - because I kind of knew what my audience would look like - I found it very crucial to ask very, hopefully, critical quest
ions that hopefully make you all question the work that you do and how you do the work and the space and the power that you occupy. With that reminder from Bell Hooks in mind, I would like to move to the next part of my speech. The last two weeks I have not been able to be excited about the prospect of giving this speech. First of all, coming to the realisation that my co-conspirator Pelin Basaran, Pelin Basaran was not going to have enough time to create her video message as she tried to balanc
e work and taking care of her six-year-old son. Pelin left Istanbul and the path-breaking Garage festival to find more secure ground in England and not to mention love. But one can't help but think about the oppressiveness that was looming when she left the country in 2016 with Erdogan’s rising authoritarianism beginning to rear its ugly face. Showing my face in front of, yet again, a mostly white audience made it hard for me to want to give this speech. Since 2017 I have, in one way or another,
been disrupting the status quo without ever wanting to be that guy. I have been deviating from the Royal because I just can't sit comfortably while I watch power being consolidated in the hands of all the major cultural institutions like the KVS, De Singel, Kaaitheater, Vooruit, Concertgebouw Brugge, La Monnaie/De Munt, these are all Flemish institutions by the way, Royal Ballet of Flanders and of course, your boy Milo's NTGent. None of them have even a white woman as an artistic director. So t
hese are like eight institutions? None of them have even a white woman as an artistic director, let alone a woman of colour. Though Royal Ballet of Flanders does have the magician Sidi Larbi Cherkouai as its artistic director. The Flemish organisation Engagement for the Arts takes it one step further. They found "Out of 198 boards of art organisations in Flanders, 157 has a male president. That's almost 80 percent. Of these presidents first names, 23 appear at least twice and not for the same in
dividual." Have you all heard about the default man principle? No, okay. Google default man. So out of small and large art organisations even their boards... somebody found it... So out of small and large art organisations even their boards are not fully representative. By the way, you can find Engagement's survey on the online version of Rekto Verso magazine. I share all of this to quote the words of the great Civil Rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer. "I'm sick tired of being sick and tired." I'm
sick and tired of writing articles about the whiteness of the cultural sector. I'm sick and tired of talking about the need for intersectional perspectives. I'm sick and tired of trying to convince people, mostly white crowds, that power needs to be decentralised, the mind needs to be decolonised. I'm sick and tired of sitting with allies and accomplices like Petra Van Brabandt, Shari Legbedje, Rachida Lamrabet, Pelin Basaran, Angela Olodo, Job Rietvelt, Jija Sohn and many others to try and fin
d ways to have power redistributed and re-imagined. I'm sick and tired of seeing allies, accomplices and colleagues like Angela Olodo, who put their all into their cultural institutions trying to use them to change the socio-political situation of their communities, only to have them burn out due to the toxic nature of the work floor of the institution they work for. Which in her case is led by a white man in his 60s and in many cases are led by white men in their 60s. In other words, I'm sick a
nd tired of individuals like Milo Rau playing genius when in fact they were just white saviours and missionaries. Papa's got a brand new bag. I'm sick of tired of white men, especially those on the left, progressive and having real power playing victim instead of taking heed to the criticism that's being offered and using their power and their proximity to whiteness to change things. #metoo anybody? I am sick and tired of performances like Hate Radio, Orestes in Mosul, aCORdo and CRIA from Alice
Ripoll, Hillbrowfication and many others that use black, brown and the bodies/pains of others as a template to live out their purported de-colonial/anti-capitalist/oppressive dreams when in fact they are just the devil dressed in a new suit. I am sick and tired of playing the Magic Negro saying yes to continuously pressed... saying yes to speeches like this because I feel like solving the above listed shortcomings need to be continuously pressed and cannot wait. I am not worried about not being
invited to someone's next major conference that helps them fill in the diversity and participatory check box. I am also not interested in being a troublemaker or interested in the performativity of our disagreements. Instead my dream is that one, two or many of you, especially the white men in the room who have real power in the cultural landscape of Europe, stop the discursive fiction and engage in real action that will stop us from just using the images of women in hijabs or black bodies in c
olourful outfits to sell our participatory wet dreams and instead give individuals like those real power, resources and space to create their own projects that they can see and execute
according to their own guidelines. Even better, I am more interested to see more individuals like Gorki Theatre's Shermin Langhoff leading major and small cultural institutions throughout Europe. To drive the point home, I would like to invoke Fannie Lou Hamer herself and in doing so, show you what good meaning,
progressive, white men, in this case President Lyndon B Johnson an ally to Martin Luther King, do to get in the way of progress, especially when it's led by women of colour. How much time do I have? Ten minutes, perfect. So Fannie Lou Hamer. I'll show this real quick. At the end of that speech in 1964, she asked as tears welled up in her eyes, "...All of this is on account we want...
to become first-class citizens, and if the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America. Is th
is America, the land of the free and the home of the brave where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hooks because our lives be threatened daily because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?" Sadly without over-dramatising, in a Europe that has foreign ministers sending immigrants from Ghana, Sudan and even Jamaica back either to abject poverty or to their deaths, we need to ask ourselves in this Europe as cultural practitioners, is this the Europe that we envisioned? Are
we OK with foreign ministers like this one from Belgium, sending... Are we OK with foreign ministers like this one from Belgium sending individuals back to countries where they eventually meet their death? I don't mean to be dramatic but I am sick and tired of being sick and tired and I am sick and tired of the semantics. We need radical change and as cultural practitioners especially the mostly white men directors of institutions, I implore us all to do some deep soul-searching and start really
affecting/effecting change not only by the things we create. Instead of focusing all of our energy creating participatory projects, plays that will allow us to "empower" an individual, quote-unquote, or groups of individuals, we need to spend more energy thinking about and devising ways to give our power away to disenfranchised and under-represented groups. We need to find, devising ways to give our power away to disenfranchised and under-represented groups. To end, I would like to quote the gr
eat Audre Lorde lesbian poet and activist. "...If we restrict ourselves only to the use of those dominant power games which
we have been taught to fear... then we risk defining our work simply as shifting our own roles within the same oppressive power relationships, rather than as seeking to alter and redefine the nature of those relationships. This will result only in the rise of yet another oppressed group, this time with us as overseer... it is our visions which sustain us. They point the wa
y toward a future made
possible by our belief in them... There is a world in which we are wish to live. That world is not attained lightly... That world is not attained lightly... If as black feminists we do not begin talking, thinking, feeling ourselves for its shape, we will condemn ourselves and our children to a repetition of corruption and error."
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