Diversity As A Method Of Re-Distribution
Dan Friedman, Artistic Director, Castillo Theatre, USA
Delivered at the International Drama/Theatre and Education Association (IDEA)
Conference Belém, Brazil, July 21, 2010, IDEA 2010
[+DOWNLOAD] Diversity is an effort to engage all the different peoples and movements and social strata in the world to share what the world is up to. This is the case whether the organizing you’re involved in is local, national or international.
One way of looking at diversity is as a method of distribution. It’s taking all the cultures, all the ways of seeing, all the histories and experiences, all the emotional structures, all the knowledge and ways of knowing available in any given organizing situation and sharing it with everyone involved.
Distribution is, by anyone’s standards, the major economic and social problem that remains unsolved. No matter your politics, everyone can see that the distribution of material wealth is grossly unequal on a world scale and within virtually every nation on earth. Without solving the distribution problem, starvation, poverty, crime and human underdevelopment—none of which is any longer necessary—will continue.
As educators and cultural workers we understand that unequal distribution is not only an economic problem. It may be rooted in economics and reinforced by the political structures and institutions generated to protect those who benefit from unequal economic set-ups, but, as I assume we would all agree, economic inequality has profound repercussions in the educational and cultural spheres, in who gets to learn, who is exposed to the cultural wealth of the world, who is able to create art, who is exposed to new possibilities and who is able to become more worldly and sophisticated.
That’s where our work, as educators and cultural workers, comes in. And that’s why diversity is so important in the work we do.
Given all the inequalities, repression, oppression, even genocides embedded in the history of every community and every nation, organizing diversity is, for those concerned with progressive change and human development, a necessary and important—and difficult— task.
There is also a qualitative dimension to diversity. No discussion of diversity is complete without raising the question of what is being distributed. Put another way: what is the creative process involved when bringing diverse individuals, communities and social strata together?
Diversity and its political label, multiculturalism, are sometimes understood as simply bringing different cultures together and respecting them all equally. The culture of the poor and the middle class, of the oppressed people and the dominant people, all sitting around the same table respecting each other. A good and necessary prerequisite.
Then what?
It seems to me that the challenge of cultural distribution, of diversity, is inseparable from the question of what is being distributed, in other words, what is being created by diversity.
For me and my colleagues at the Castillo Theatre and the All Stars Project in New York City multiculturalism is not simply about respecting each others’ cultures and histories, it is about creating something new together, something that is not simply determined by the culture and history we bring into the rehearsal room but that is qualitatively other when we complete the creative project.
At Castillo we bring Blacks, whites, Latinos, Asians; Christians, Jews Muslims and Hindus; immigrants and the native born; gay and straight; the highly educated and the hardly educated; people with special needs and those without, the very poor and the very rich (and many in between) together to create theatre and other cultural projects. We don’t then, for example, put up a Black play one month and a Jewish play the next; instead, through creative activity we figure out together what a Black/Jewish play will be. The encounter, the engagement is active and open ended. We work to create an environment in which we are not simply seeking to assert who we are but to discover what and who we might become through our encounter, our engagement, our creativity. What we might become, of course, draws on where we come from and who we are, but doesn’t stop with that. It transforms who we are and where we come from into something that is qualitatively new—and, hopefully, unexpected.
This active approach to diversity and multiculturalism is important, we think, because solving the world’s distribution problem is inseparable from the question of what we are distributing. We cannot solve the world’s distribution problem with the ethics, the emotional structures, and worldviews that grew out of and reinforced inequality in the first place. We must find ways to collectively create new ethics, new emotional structures, and new meanings if the task of redistribution is to become possible. The creation of those new meanings is what we at Castillo see as our work, and most probably, relates to your work as well.
We are creating activities, encounters, conversations, projects, productions, plays, institutions, social spaces where diverse peoples can actively encounter each other and together create qualitatively new ways of seeing and being together. Diversity, when understood as an active creative process, is thus both a prerequisite for solving and, in its methodology, the means of taking on the world’s distribution problem.
My point is simple but important, I think: diversity, if it is to do more than simply allow us to feel tolerant and self-satisfied, needs to be an active engagement through which we use our differences to create qualitatively new meanings, new ways of being.
We need to go beyond who we are to discover what we together can become.
And I think diversity, in this active sense, is vital to not only to our work as educators, cultural workers and artists, but to the ongoing development of humankind.
Questions and Responses to Dan Friedman
Diversity Roundtable
IDEA Congress 2010, July 21, 2010
[Based on Notes: Not Verbatim]
Israeli Graduate Student and Moderator of the Roundtable: Aren’t you afraid that if you succeed in what you’re suggesting, you’ll be doing away with human difference?
Dan: What I’m afraid of is human beings getting stuck. Right now we’re killing each other all over the world over our differences. We need to build something new—new ways of seeing, new ways of being—with our differences, not hang onto them. Hanging onto them doesn’t advance anything. All change brings a loss, but given the current state of things, we should be willing to take the risk of giving up some of our differences we seem to hold so dear.
Activist from Australia: When I work with white and Aboriginal youth, I give precedence of the Aboriginal youth. One is the oppressor and the other is the oppressed. You can’t ignore that.
Dan: I’m not advocating that we ignore history or power relations in our societies or in the smaller groups we’re working with. But I don’t think labeling people as oppressed and oppressor moves anything forward. It keeps people locked in the past. Besides, it’s hardly fair to relate to a white youth as an oppressor because of what his parents or grandparents did. Certainly the white youth comes into the workshop with more societal privilege and authority, but instead of stigmatizing him, why not work to build with his privilege? At the All Stars we have a concept that we find very helpful in this regard. We call it radical acceptance. It means honestly coming to terms with who we are at the start of a process—not trying to either cover it over or romanticize it, whether it be our privilege or our poverty or our underdevelopment. It’s hard to go anywhere if we’re not accepting of who we are, because that’s what we have to build with. What we have to build with is the pain, the violence, if you will excuse my language, the crap of our lives—because that’s what we have.
Brazilian Leftist: How can you work with pain if you don’t feel pain? I don’t understand you. Pain is pain, it doesn’t go away. The Revolution is based on pain. [Walks away angry]
Young Man from Ceará, Brazil: I resent being called crap. I’m from Ceará. Ceará is known as the crack state. I used crack for years. My father lived on the street. I lived on the street. The only way I was able to break out of the cycle was by getting involved in a theatre group. Through performance, I’ve been able to transform. I’m able to talk here even though I’m trembling.
Dan: The key word you used is transformation. Performance allows us to transform the crap, the pain, into something new, something growthful. I work with poor young people in New York City. Some are homeless, some involved with drugs and, like you, we’ve figured out how to transform all that through performance. But that’s hard to do if we’re not honest with ourselves about where we’re starting from.
Question [don’t know who asked]: You say you bring all these different kinds of people together. What do you exactly do with them?
Dan: [Tells the Crown Heights story in detail, from the riots through the creation of the play with Black, Jewish and Latinx kids, its production by Youth Onstage! and the conversations the production sparked.]
Israeli Theatre Professor and Activist: How do you know they don’t go back to their old prejudices after the production? How do you know if you’ve really changed anything?
Dan: I don’t. What I do know we’ve done is provided the young people with the experience that they can perform. They now know they can make a choice to be other than who they are, another version of themselves. They have a method of transformation that they can use at home, at school, in their communities. What they do or don’t do with that is up to them.
Same Israeli Theatre Professor and Activist (follow-up question): You say you rehearsed Crown Heights for three months, why not for six months? Studies show that the longer a project lasts, the more impact it has.
Dan: I’m sure that’s true. On the one hand, there’s the issue of how long young people from poor families can commit to a project given all that’s going on in their lives. But more to the point, we feel it’s important to put on a show, to create a product as part of the process. It gives the young people a sense of accomplishment and that’s part of what’s developmental about doing theatre. We work to develop young people, not purge them of all their backward ideas. You can’t do that in three months, six months or six years. We get them performing and they’ll do with that what they will.
Same Australian Man: I had an Aboriginal youth, I worked with him for seven years and he wrote a monologue where he said he didn’t want to fit into white society because if he does, it will control him. It took him seven years to say that.
Dan: I think there can be a value in giving voice to your sense of oppression, alienation and rage. It might be a beginning but not where you want to wind up. In the U.S. in the 1960s and 70s there was a lot of that kind of separatism expressed. There was, I’m sure you know, a strong Black nationalist movement. But it’s a dead end. It doesn’t help develop the Black community to glorify its rage and its victimization. Nor does it help the country as a whole to develop.
Woman from South Africa: I don’t think we can build anything with white people until they apologize for their crimes.
Dan: Then I don’t think you’ll get very far. Holding onto the past is not a way forward. White people can get down on their knees and beg forgiveness. They can flog themselves, but that doesn’t change much. How can they even begin to understand their history if you don’t creatively engage them?
Man from Sudan [This didn’t have much to do with the specifics of my talk, but was, as I heard it, a reaction to the theme of diversity over all]: (angry) Sudan lived for many years with diversity. Soon we will split up like the Soviet Union. What good did diversity do? It doesn’t work! Will the U.S. split up too? (He starts to walk out.)
Dan: I can’t predict the future, but I don’t think the United States will split up. I’m no expert on your country, but it seems to me that the situation you’re facing has to do with what the person of Australia brought up earlier, that is, recognizing the power differences between the dominate and the oppressed people. You didn’t find a way for the people of the North and the South to use their differences to create new possibilities. When you hang onto your differences and don’t build with them it leads to conflict.