Interview with Jonathan Chadwick
Artistic Director, Az TheatreJonathan Chadwick is artistic director of Az Theatre, an international theatre company based in London. Az Theatre seeks to connect the transformative power of the actor to the investigative power of theatre through research development and production projects, based on international and community partnerships. He was interviewed by Visiting Arts about the importance of mobility in his artistic practice, particularly in relation to the War Stories: Alcestis project. www.warstoriestheatre.org
VA: How does mobility contribute to your artistic practice?JC: I'm working on a project which is an exploration of war and theatre. From its inception, because of the nature of its thematic, it has been an international project deliberately involving theatre companies from EU countries (France, Italy, UK) and from the Balkans (Serbia and Kosovo) and from the Arab world (Algeria and Palestine). At previous stages of the project we have brought artists together in Sibiu (Romania) and Belgrade (Serbia). One formative creative experience for our project happened when we asked the companies we had brought together in Sibiu to give an account of their journey to the workshop. All the stories were dramatic and funny but the Palestinian story was an epic. It told us so much about war and theatre there.
This year our project involves us going round to do development workshops in our partner countries. We are working on the theme of recovery from violence, war and conflict and we are exchanging and collecting images and stories, using a multilingual web site to do so. Of course each country has its own war story and what our project is about is finding the dynamic in the differences and similarities between those stories. Moving people around and crossing borders is the essence of the project. During this phase of our project, called War Stories: Alcestis after the play by Euripides we are working with artists, young people and 'therapists and activists'.
Recent work in Italy on the human capacity to recover
Photograph by Jonathan ChadwickVA: I know you have recently returned from Italy. How did this trip develop your work and your thinking?
JC: My recent trip to Italy (11th October - 21st October 2006) involved me in a conference on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder at a Festival of Theatre and Psychiatry in Padua. Our project aims to cross generational and disciplinary boundaries. I was able to make contact with a wide range of therapeutic practice from the extraordinary work led by Massimo Germani with victims of torture in the refugee community in Rome to the Sri Lankan group working with victims of the Tsunami and also the Montreal-based Centre for the Arts in Human Development. We were invited to bring our work to the next festival in 2008. This is not just an organisational contact but is based on a deep sharing and, perhaps most importantly, an extension of basic values and principles. Since the aim of our work is international this human contact is vital to it. The next part of my journey in Italy involved me in directing workshops with Il Torchio, a company based in a town on the slopes of Vesuvius near Naples. Here working though physical images we arrive at a form of dance expression. The work takes off into a realm which surpasses language. This search for and discovery of a physical language cannot take place without the confrontation that my journey has brought about.
VA: Does technology obviate the need for travel?JC: We have created a multilingual and interactive internet space to act as a gathering place for the work we are doing in diverse places. This is practically and symbolically important. However we have discovered, especially in Algeria, that the internet is a space that needs to be made more accessible to people. There are many obstacles to people gaining easy access to our work. These can start to be overcome by the personal face-to-face contact. In this case technology - internet and air travel - has become the focus and motive for our need to make direct contact with our artistic partners.
We are unable to go to Gaza where our partners Theatre For Everybody are based to complete the current phase of our work. So we are planning a day-long event linked by video in London and Gaza where we will explore the theme of closure, checkpoints, borders, immobility. In a way this is an example of technology replacing actual face to face contact, but this event is only possible because it is based on past travel and contact: a combination of artistic, cross disciplinary, cross generational mobility complementing the need to travel.
VA: Does mobility threaten or enlarge your own sense of identity?JC: I recognise in answering these questions that mobility for artists is not just to do with crossing geographical, political or cultural frontiers. Millions of people cross frontiers to seek pleasure and significance. The internationalisation of artistic work involves both an 'inner' and 'outer' mobility. From Dante to Jazz to Hip-Hop the mobility of cultural forms has clarified our place and identity in the world. There is no contradiction between the threat to identity and its enlargement. In fact the challenges and renewals that take place and our belonging to a number of intersecting communities all give a welcome relief to the rigidities and certainties of identities based on race, religion and nation. These latter elements are in crisis and grip tightly in their losing struggle for the soul of humanity.
Related link www.aztheatre.org.uk
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