Artistic Director Michael Walling talks Border Crossings’ 30th-anniversary celebration ‘CHECKPOINT’: “Theatre is an empathy machine”

The company honours three decades of existence with an upcoming showcase revisiting some key pieces in its extensive repertoire. Guillermo Nazara chats with one of the group’s creative leaders to learn more about its long-standing mission — bringing unity in an increasingly fractured world.

How does it feel to be celebrating a 30-year legacy?

Before we started, I had wondered if it would all feel a bit fusty and dusty, like clearing out the home of a dead relative, but actually it’s incredibly invigorating and revitalising. I’ve been discovering for myself just how much the company has achieved and realising the depth and quality of those achievements. Last week, I edited the video of BULLIE’S HOUSE so the East 15 students could watch the show. I was working with raw footage we shot 21 years ago and had never got around to touching since.  I’d forgotten what an extraordinary play it is, and was genuinely amazed by how compelling the acting was, even filtered through fuzzy out of date technology. To be passing that to young theatre-makers and seeing what they find in it makes this a celebration of the future just as much as the past, so I’m glad you call it a “legacy”.

How would you define your company’s work throughout these last three decades?

There are some clear threads that run through it all: international collaboration, intercultural dialogue, and an emphasis on the communal and ecological values present in Indigenous cultures. There are other themes that emerge more slowly over the 30 years — ways of viewing and being in the world that have developed through the encounters we’ve had. Our theatre is becoming evermore a place of immediate, democratic encounter between people who wouldn’t otherwise meet, where voices that have been excluded or marginalised on a global scale enter as equals into a space that is profoundly shared. And, to return to the word you used in your first question, it’s also become more about celebration. We’ve run a lot of festivals, and that’s taught us a great deal about the importance of ceremony, food, and fun.

Despite these efforts for interculturalism, you believe nothing has changed. What do you think has caused this latest wave of rejection towards foreigners?

Actually, I think quite a lot has changed, just not all of it for the better! On the positive side, back in 1996, we did Mahesh Dattani’s play BRAVELY FOUGHT THE QUEEN, and it was considered incredibly “niche” because it required an all-Asian cast. Now, we have Indhu Rudhusingham as the Director of the National Theatre — that would have been completely unimaginable 30 years ago.

But there is, as you rightly say, an upsurge in anti-migrant feeling. Your question about what has caused this is a huge one, so I can only make a few observations on it, but I hope they are useful. The first thing to say is that this is not just an issue in the UK: it’s global. Trump’s America is deeply racist and isolationist, and all across Europe we’re seeing the rise of right-wing parties who stigmatise migrants. Like all prejudice, it’s rooted in fear, and fear in turn is rooted in ignorance. That’s why it’s so important that there are arts and social projects like the one we’re doing next March, SUPPLIANTS OF SYRIA — spaces where people can actually encounter real people who happen to be refugees and migrants, and to engage with them on a human level.

What’s exacerbated the problem recently is that the small number of absurdly wealthy people who control global media have aligned their interests with the far-right, who of course also believe in cutting taxes and dismantling regulatory structures, so as to push this dehumanising agenda. We’ve just seen two senior figures at the BBC being forced to resign for not following Trump’s propagandist stance, and when we announced the new play on social media there was a flood of hatred directed against it. The manipulation of these media to push specific (and toxic) political agendas is incredibly sophisticated and has to be resisted: Carole Cadwallader’s remarkable exposé of Cambridge Analytica demonstrated very clearly how it swayed the Brexit vote, using exactly the same scaremongering against foreign migrants. 

The whole thing feels even more disturbing when, as we do, you work internationally and so spend time with people in the countries from which migrants travel. When they are fleeing from conflict or persecution, the deep roots of those conflicts are almost always related in some way to past or present colonisation. Syria, Iraq, Palestine, Sudan, Congo — you can trace every one of these conflicts to the creation of artificial states by former colonial powers and the ongoing exploitation of their natural resources at inequitable prices. The same is true of the so-called “economic migrants”: people who are fleeing poverty. This is happening in the context of that same media discourse, which, of course, portrays Europe and America as incredibly affluent, luxurious, and easy. That used to be at best a distant myth — now people in Africa and Asia are carrying the myth in their pockets. So of course they want to travel to these lands which seem to offer untold riches, and of course they resent that those riches have been taken from their own lands to colonising spaces in order to preserve a massively unjust and inequitable way of living. 

If we don’t do something very drastic very soon, I think we may find that we are the last generation before a global revolution on an enormous scale. I’m talking about a massive redistribution of wealth, proper taxation and public services on a global scale, climate justice, reparations for ancestral enslavement and the like. Not that any of that is likely to happen, so….

Can art really make a difference?

I don’t think art directly changes the world, but it does change the way people think and feel about being in the world, and that in turn can bring about real change. Theatre is an empathy machine: you can’t hate somebody once you’ve heard their story.

Are there other challenges multiculturalism in the arts is currently facing?

I think the biggest challenge is that our society has settled for multiculturalism and is scared stiff of interculturalism. For the entire 30 years of the company’s existence, the Arts Council has prioritised work from minority cultures aimed at audiences from minority cultures. That absolutely has it place, and there are some subjects that benefit from being aired in a room where only those directly affected are present. But the larger societal question, both locally and globally, is how, after the shocking and ongoing histories of imperialism, enslavement, despoliation and so on — how after that can we jointly inhabit our shared global space? How can we actually, really, share it? Those questions can’t be answered by putting people into separate silos: we have to create a space that allows for an equal and frank exchange. That’s what Border Crossings aims to do.

What can you tell us about this year’s showcase? What’s the process of selecting the repertoire been like?

It’s been a process of simultaneously looking back and looking forward. We wanted to revisit some of the early pieces, just to see what 30 years had done to the characters: those are the short plays at the end with the professional performers. But we also wanted to take this opportunity to engage the next generations of theatre-makers, and that’s why we’ve brought in the two schools and the two drama schools. They are looking at performances from our archive and using them as a stimulus to make their own short pieces in response. What’s been fascinating is to see how the material we made ten or twenty years ago becomes something vital and immediate when it’s filtered through the experience and eyes of young people.

What are the company’s new goals and prospects for the future?

We’re working more and more closely with communities, finding ways to bring them into the performance itself, without it appearing “amateur”.  It’s to do with recognising everyone’s expertise: the theatre-makers are experts in theatre, while the community members are experts in their own lives.  SUPPLIANTS OF SYRIA was initially developed in Turkey with a group of Syrian refugee women. They can’t travel to London – or anywhere, actually – so they appear in the show on a huge screen, both as a Greek chorus and as individuals telling their own stories of displacement. We set them in dialogue with the actors, who are young men with little experience of the Arab world. And they in turn are set in dialogue with the audience, which will include local refugees as well as other opinion formers. This show is an experiment in theatre as a means of practising democracy. Our politics is anything but democratic right now, so we’re keen to develop that aspect of our work.

In your opinion, what are the checkpoints theatre should always follow?

I’m not sure it’s useful to lay down hard and fast rules for any art form. But I am increasingly careful to check in on who we actually are in relation to the material we’re dealing with. For the kind of theatre we do, at the present moment, that feels essential.

Why come see ‘CHECKPOINT’?

Discover the entire story of a theatre company in one evening.  See what happens when writers and actors revisit characters they last engaged with thirty years ago. Join the theatre-makers of the future in responding to the theatre of the recent past.  Have a good drink and enjoy some amazing Mauritian food.

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CHECKPOINT: 30 Years of Border Crossings will play at London’s Hoxton Hall on 28 November. Further information is available on the following link.

By Guillermo Nazara