... spitting distance?!

the morning after attending a public forum entitled:
‘opening our theatres to ethnic stories and players’


***###%%%@@@@???!!!???!!!
shou??!!

who is asking the question?
who is considering doing the opening? on whose terms?
whose theatres are ‘our’ theatres?
who are ‘ethnics’? and what does that word mean again?!?
etc etc etc

although these days i am not actively / consistently engaged in performance making (apart from another recent gig with auburn poets and writers for sydney writers festival 2008) - and although my voice is no longer my voice (it will take a long time before i grow up and become a writer...) i realize that most of the sistas and brothas are not primarily performers or performance makers.

i always get unsettled at events like last night, though now thankfully to a lesser degree. i usually feel like a mad woman in a vacuum, who no-one responds to (or who gets patronizingly placated). i think the last time i had to speak about 'our stuff' at a so-called mainstream (white) event, was at a performing centres’ national conference in 2006 held at the wharf in sydney, which ended up being just after the massive israeli invasion of lebanon AND on the very same day of the opening of the T'FOUH… exhibition at mori gallery (which i also had to speak at). did I feel like the weirdo majnouni on that panel on that day or what??? ouffffff!!!!

... so you wake up and think to yourself, is it worth engaging with those same-old same-old frameworks and boring-binary questions? is it worth the effort of writing semi-coherent responses to be possibly included in their publications (as i was encouraged in foyer talk?)

then the morning after - a baraki - i get a great email from fatoum and i immediately and decisively stop wondering: NAH! NO WAY!

i see the publicity for 'in spitting distance' for the first time (by palestinian writer taher najib, to be performed in arabic at the sydney opera house - yay!) and my heart leaps and i think:

yeah, performance in all its forms IS still important to me...

yeah, these are the kinds of stories i do wanna hear...
from the storytellers that i do wanna listen to...
hopefully to be experienced with the people i wanna share the listening with...

then the previous rhetorical questions dissolve, and i no longer care about the problems of almost-dead-white-mainstream-theatre (and cultural institutions in general) - they gotta work out their own stuff - especially if they are running out of their own stories and are keen to appropriate those of 'others'...

mmm, no need for gratefulness here...

which reminds me: at that forum last night, i felt so conscious that 'the sudanese' people in the audience were being spoken ‘about’, but they did not speak for themselves – but mind you, that is possibly a good tactic (that i could strategically learn), because then they are not uttering words from within the audience being set up by the rinso/omo interlocutors...

yeah, yeah, i know, we gotta keep organizing public discussions and cultural spaces in our own terms ... and, if we are feeling generous and hospitable (as we are culturally reputed to be), open up to all from the east, the north and the south, as well as from the west…

… and we do not have to feed them ok?!