Review/Opinion - Edinburgh International Festival
Jamie writes…
AN EXHIBITION
Many years ago, I was on a choir tour of the Deep South of America. In Atlanta we had some free time, so one of my bass colleagues and I decided to go off in search of a place I’d heard existed. Long before satnav, the internet, or even mobile phones, we got horribly lost as we paced the dusty back streets. We had to admit to being a little scared. This was not a place for a couple of young white men from an English Cathedral Choir to be aimlessly wandering, but we figured that, if we explained our destination to anyone accosting us, we had a suitable pass:
“We’re looking for the Martin Luther King Center for Nonviolence Inc.”
We got there eventually and found the whole experience far more spiritual than any of the music we sang at the concerts and services during our tour. But visiting the places associated with the story of segregation was an eye-opener, and Martin Luther King’s commitment to non-violent resistance became one of the most impactful philosophies on my pacifist ideals. King was assassinated weeks before I was born and, while this may sound melodramatic, it seems this event has reverberated throughout my life.
It took most of my childhood to wait for America to honour this great man with a national holiday, and that was matched with the great Stevie Wonder’s crappiest song that gets dragged out whenever any average fucker has a birthday. I bet Humpty Trumpty plays it to himself once a year, even though he had to be prompted to acknowledge the MLK Holiday this year. Talking of Trump, how the hell has America managed to end up with such a pitiful selection of Presidents, culminating in one so unfit for office the epithet ‘arch-racist’ is but one of many derogatory nomenclature worth appending to this pitiful person.
Ever since my visit to that ‘Peace Center‘ in Atlanta I’ve always maintained that America has done nothing to reconcile its unpleasant past, apart from honouring Martin Luther King every third Monday in January. However, I wasn’t aware of the work of the Equal Justice Initiative, their various ‘Legacy Sites,‘ and The Legacy Museum, all of which contributed to a major event in this year’s Edinburgh International Festival: The Legacy of Slavery Exhibition. Although comprehensive and informative, this was only one fifth the size of the actual museum in Montgomery, Alabama.
Including a nod to Scotland and Edinburgh’s complicity in the slave trade, there was nothing especially new to me in the displays, images, quotes, and videos, yet it was the scale and detail that hit me. The presentations moved through depicting slavery to public lynchings, racial segregation, injustice and bigotry, ending with the death penalty which it described as “lynching’s stepchild.” This is not hyperbole when faced with the statistics; it’s also a stark truth about how the 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery, left a loophole that allowed for hundreds of years of continued persecution.
The myth of racial impurity began in slavery, yet by regarding people of colour as inherently criminal, this has more than perpetrated the myth; it allowed it to evolve.
Yet there is hope.
Whether America will ever apologise for its past (unthinkable under the current regime) the EJI has made steps towards promoting justice and reconciliation. Moreover, the importance of Art, its ability to transform hearts and lives, its power to overcome humiliation, and its commitment to Truth, gives a sense of hope in this rather bleak exhibition.
The final video presentation, discussing Jazz at Lincoln Centre (also represented in the EIF programme) showed how black people historically produced great art while enduring terrible cruelty. As Wynton Marsalis points out, “We can’t change America without full participation in The Arts.” And this was the raison d’être of the Edinburgh International Festival when it was first set up: to transcend political and social boundaries through The Arts.
HANG TIME
One aspect of the above Exhibition was explored in a directorial debut from the Pulitzer Prize finalist Zora Howard. In Hang Time the absence of tree, rope, or noose is where its strength lies: this is a story of three black men who, for a long hour, ‘shoot the breeze’ while stuck, motionless, in an implied scenario of a lynching. The power is in what is not shown. Instead, we get to hear their stories, their thoughts, their relationships (with others and each other) and we experience their humanity.
It’s a tough watch. In the chocolate box environment of the Kings, the only distraction is to look around the theatre just to give the eyes a break. In between the monologues and dialogues the characters perform “twitching” movements that bring alive (paradoxically) the reality of their situation. The base of the contraption they’re strapped to moves down to allow their feet to dangle. In agony.
Then they resume their conversation. This Becket-like absurdity gives shape and rhythm to the piece, but it also makes the audience work very hard. I suspect anyone seeing this performance without having been to the exhibition would have had a different experience. Either way, this was another Festival must-see that, sadly, the people who need to see it probably never will.
CLOWN SHOW
The final production for the EIF I went to was also at the Kings Theatre, but a far more lavish affair. This show might have been what it said on the tin, but given I’m discussing the state of America, here’s a joke from my teenage days:
“What’s the difference between Macdonald’s and The White House?”
“Nothing: they’re both run by clowns called Ronald.”
I barely need to say how this joke is yet again contemporary, with just a change of initial.
There’s something slightly malevolent about clowns, their needy melancholy that presents itself as harmless tomfoolery. In this show’s scenario there is a further menace, since all the other performers have departed, and the only the clowns are left. A blatant comparison with American democracy? Certainly, although we are being fooled, literally, in this case not by their Trumpian stupidity but their immense talent.
This piece of theatre was the very best of the thousands of shows on offer in Edinburgh in August, demonstrating why the International Festival is The Festival: a curated programme of world-class artistry. The clowns used song, dance, mime, live music, acrobatics, puppetry, magic, illusions, and much more. There was a huge revolving turntable at the centre of the stage, positioned between a set of bleachers on either side adorned with toys and dolls and props and static characters who, nonetheless, got shot by pistols, aka bananas.
I was lucky to attend a show that not only had BSL signing (the multi-lingual script putting interpreter Rachel Amey through her paces) but also a post-performance discussion with the crew and cast. At which point I discovered the biggest ruse: the performers weren’t clowns at all. They were simply musicians and actors so immersed in the roles that they even decorated their own changing rooms in character. Certainly, this Clown Show was a sumptuous feast.
Yet in the spirit of Brecht the fourth wall was pretty thin throughout, and the audience was fully aware of the show’s intended outcome, to end in anarchy. Like the state of current American politics being run by a real-life clown, albeit dangerous and depraved, the show was, at best, shaky from the start. When it started to unravel the analogy became ever clear.
In a bold pièce de résistance one of the clowns was (supposedly) shot from a cannon into one of the box-seats, stage right, after which this character climbed down into the stalls and delivered a powerful monologue while clambering around greeting – and hugging – members of the audience. It was all well-meant, but full of platitudes, and ended with an apology that the most special guest was unable to be with them that night.
It transpired the special guest was a vast inflatable planet earth. I later learned that this prop had burst on the first night, its deflation providing a seemingly perfect metaphor.
When Clown Show was commissioned from absurdist, illusionist American theatre-maker Geoff Sobelle after his last production for the EIF, he realised there were two old men wanting to be the American President and so, wanted to do a contemporary show. Often ‘clownshow’ is used by political opponents as a derogatory term, so the aim was for making a big mess, an overwhelming sense of too muchness.
This was achieved, and the ending was a long, painful decrescendo. The final song, ‘The Best is Yet to Come,’ was a singalong, equally hopeful and sinister.
Sobelle explained that, as the whole tent (ie, theatre) falls apart, the hope is that, since all American atrocities will at some point come down, “there is a sense of purging; the last gasp as the Empire falls, like diarrhoea.” Which, as Sobelle pointed out, “is a bit what it feels like to live in America at the moment.”
I can’t imagine what it’s like to live in America right now. We've had our share of clowns in British politics, and may still have to endure more. In my hope that something better will come after the current shitshow, all I can do is turn to poetry…
Turning and turning
Within the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart
The center cannot hold;
And a blood dimmed tide
Is loosed upon the world.
Surely some revelation is at hand!
Surely it’s the second cominga
nd the wrath has finally taken form.
For what is this rough beast,
its hour come at last,
Slouching toward Bethlehem to be born.
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Joni Mitchell, after W.B. Yeats
NOTE: these are the author's opinions and do not necessarily reflect the views of Edinburgh Literary Salon.
The Salon welcomes open conversation.
Comments