World(s) Theatre(s) Day(s)
By Samara Hersch
I am drawn to the plurality of things.
Although, around me, there is an insistence to talk in binaries, about left or right/this side or that side/ them versus us, now more than ever I want to find a way to speak and think with nuance and complexity and to acknowledge the entanglements of our worlds, our bodies and our futures.
Therefore, on World Theatre Day, I want to think about worlds, theatres and days, not as something we can singularise, but as an ongoing acknowledgement of the ancient and diverse rituals of coming together and sharing our worlds and stories across all kinds of days and times; the immediate, the urgent, the mythic and the planetary.
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Worlds
I write this text whilst on an aeroplane, flying across the world from Melbourne to Frankfurt. I am moving through time zones that bring me from the future to the past. From the Fall to the Spring.
There is a sense of heightened tension amongst the passengers, as we co-exist in this confined space in the time of the pandemic. Our bodies are more aware of each other, more afraid of each other and more dependent on each other’s sense of care and responsibility.
These questions: How can we ‘be’ together? How do we behave together? And how could theatre invite us to be together differently? - are fundamental to my practice.
Questions that have taken on an entirely new meaning in the last couple of years.
These questions, I do not believe theatre can fully answer, nor should it.
Yet, through theatre, I experience acts of assembling, of sharing and of witnessing that force us to confront each other and in doing so, address our intrinsic need for each other.
As I move across the physical world, I share space with so many world views, so many embodied experiences, so many beliefs, fears, desires and expectations.
How do we find each other? How do we see each other? How do we learn to listen to each other?
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Theatres
This theatre of listening is what I am searching for.
A theatre that listens: to the questions, to the silences, to the uncertainty, to the ones who don’t always speak, to the ones who often aren’t invited to speak, to the old, to the young, to the fears and to the hope.
I want a theatre that welcomes us to sit in the dark, with our hunger, our restlessness, our fantasies, our rage, our vulnerabilities, our differences, our knowledges, our power and our grief.
I want a theatre that rebels against a neoliberal world of speed, profit, distraction and isolation. A theatre that slows down, abstracts, imagines, breathes…
I want a theatre that remembers our inter-dependencies with each other and with the more-than-human species with whom we share this endangered planet.
I want a theatre that cares, not about the subscribers or the marketing campaign or the Very Important People. I want a theatre that acts with care. A theatre that asks, are you okay? And, how can we make spaces to also sit with the not okay-ness together?
A theatre that asks: how can we learn from each other, hold each other up, protect each other, empower each other and transform each other?
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Days
These days are bleak. I cannot ignore that there is yet another war. Nor can I find words to speak about it. Nor am I sure I am the one to speak about it. But to be silent is also not an option.
My grandmother, a Russian Jew, fled Eastern Europe before World War Two. It was not safe then to tell her stories, to practice her rituals, to be in the world differently.
These days feel unbelievable. And yet here we are… again and again and again…
In my desire to think in plurality, I want to reject the idea of a ‘History’ that repeats itself, but rather about histories, and futures and lives and species that intersect, inform and ultimately depend on each other.
Throughout these histories, stories continue to be told.
Across worlds, across theatres, across days….
Some with the intention to destroy and to divide and some with the intention to resist, to heal and repair, to imagine differently and to affirm our need to keep showing up, to keep assembling and to keep listening… with others.
