 Hello, welcome here to this talk. So what I will talk about is alternative dramaturgies for cross-cultural productions and productions representing the so-called other. Our complex world has gradually created an increasing number of lines and borders. Cultural constructs with the function of enforcing order and negotiating land and power but also deliberately separating people from one another. This is something anyone programming a festival with artists from around the globe experiences firsthand. For this festival, artists from some countries didn't even need a visa to travel here, while artists from other countries undergo a process of gathering numerous documents or even doing thorough interviews before they have any chance of being granted visas for a week in Norway. And this year, like two years ago, Norwegian Assetegh was very disappointed to learn that the performance, because we wanted to have all continents represented at the festival and that we learned that the African performance, it had to change and adapt due to visa issues. This curbs artistic voices and diminishes perspectives. The angles most needed are often the ones furthest away. Theatre and performing arts hold the potential to dramatize, disrupt, negotiate and redraw this delineations. However, the colonial legacy in Europe has established a Eurocentric intellectual heritage which shapes specific approaches to production, work, methodology, theory, text, time distribution as well as cultural ideas around ethics and values. In cross-cultural productions, a hierarchical production framework in theatre can easily affect a subject group negatively by undermining essential critical perspectives as well as revealing an inability to address the cultural complexity of a group that is being represented. So a little bit about me. I am myself from a Western European cultural background and I grew up within the frames of the Western European narrative. Three and a half years ago, I relocated from Norway to Cape Town, South Africa to work on an applied theatre program and thereby embarked on a journey that has prompted me to question the value systems and master narratives that I grew up with. My hope is that the integration of reflexivity as part of my work has generated an increased sensitivity towards the micro-politics of cross-cultural theatre productions representing and representation in theatre. And as this talk is limited to one hour, I will move forward quite quickly. However, I hope that in the end I will get a few minutes to discuss because I know that depending on which country you're from as participant in this festival, this conversation may be something you've dealt with your entire life or it may be in a completely new conversation. So the perspectives also within this festival are very different. And first and foremost, I encourage you to regard my talk as an invitation to new ways of thinking and questioning. So why this talk in a theatre festival for children and young people? Because cross and intercultural collaboration and cultural exchange constitutes an antidote to systemic othering in a split world. However, it is evident that we start examining how these collaborations are executed. It matters not only which stories we tell our children, but how we tell them. The structures that informs the stories we tell our children will in turn form their view on the world and on other people. And just to clarify, when I use the terms dominant and subordinate culture, I point to the power imbalance between majority and minority culture. Because often in cross cultural collaboration, the funding for example is predominantly from one country and that already creates a power imbalance that one must be wary of, especially in the current context of Eurocentrism. And then there's a lot of other aspects like work language and which texts you choose to work from. Things like that. I'm very fascinated by this. Okay. In recent years, Europe has undergone extensive and destabilizing processes both economically and politically. In spite of the history of minority persecution, predominantly of Jews, but also other minorities, it appears that dehumanizing mechanisms are once again sweeping across the European society and this time refugees are being increasingly and systematically ostracized and dehumanized. Dramatody in performing arts is concerned amongst other things with how different forms of narratives are constructed and how they in turn affect the spectator. Over the past few years, I have become increasingly concerned with the structural ramifications of the Eurocentric narrative and how it potentially propagates othering. When theater companies in Western European countries such as the Scandinavian countries and Netherlands, Belgium, France, Germany produce theater representing minorities such as refugees and migrants, they work within a Eurocentric tradition within a given political and cultural discourse and often within that hierarchical production framework. And as consequence, there is a danger that cultural imbalance is easily replicated implicitly or explicitly as part of the artistic product. These productions will therefore not necessarily contribute to decreasing or challenging the sovereignty of the dominant culture, but will rather reproduce and confirm the binary us them, which is precisely the structure producers and artists in most cases claim to want to counteract. And therefore, it is essential to question whether decision making is ever truly shared as long as one group has more power than the other. When we talk about inclusion in arts institutions, what are included people invited to engage in? Are they invited to speak truth to power? Are they encouraged to reflect on the social realities of power, to ameliorate the effects of power? And to quote a British educational scholar and activist, Chris de Tiller, it's of great importance to examine various counter, I always find it hard to say hegemonic hedging strategies to oppose the established structures of the art world as the dominating narratives of the art world excludes large consistencies of people and therefore reinforce discriminatory discourses that may remain unchallenged. And from that perspective, curatorial activism can be described as a process to ferret out, to tally, to count and to throw inequities into high relief, laying bare the powerful ideological mechanisms that ensure that some artists are celebrated while others are marginalised. And one essential element here is, of course, to challenge the Western canon. Professor of theatre studies, I want to free myself from this little station here. Professor of theatre studies at Florida University, Raul Fremshaw claims that the Western theatre's attempt to come to terms with the refugee crisis, three performance is already irrevocably implicated with the medial matrix in which it exists. According to his view, not only indigenous people, but also refugees and migrants have become, and he's quite harsh in the way in what he claims, has become creatures of the mass medial imagination in which images and narratives of individuals suffering feed emotional concerns but do not call for systemic change. And such does the West by means of a post-traumatic deconstructed theatre, often keep commenting on itself rather than shifting focus to that which is different. Fremshaw goes as far as to state that Western's theatre, like Europe, has fashioned a moral image of itself which it aims to defend. And he says that at such the theatre has become a simulacrum that relies on internal representation that both enforces its sense of sovereignty and exposes its radical contingency and fictiousness. In productions representing refugees or other minorities, they are seldom given the mandate to lead or make decisions in the production process. And often, even in theatre aiming to debate the issue remain nameless and voiceless, seen as refugees but seldom as individuals or as artists. And this can be regarded as a repeated abuse, since the lack of mandate is a core issue for any refugee and this becomes particularly problematic in theatre productions that want to problematise refugee rights but instead have the same dynamics rooted in the operation of their institutions or the way that they produce. From this point of view, some of the most central questions concerning representation of minorities in theatre then become. What does it mean to provide space for a minority group in theatre production? What does it entail to offer a mandate within the framework of Western theatre creation? Or to turn it around? What becomes the requirements of the framework itself? And over the past few years, so it's not all, you know, this is quite harsh and critical but there is also many artists that aim to challenge these frameworks and ways of storytelling. And especially over the past few years, I don't know how many of you that have heard of, for example, Ways of Sea, at least in one of the Nordic countries you've probably heard about it. It was a Norwegian production created in 2018 that's created, or, yeah, I won't go too much into it because I tend to be unable to stop when I start talking about it because it still fascinates me so much but it was, basically it was an artistic collective, it was an artist with migrant backgrounds and artists that did not have migrant backgrounds and they created a performance where they really directed harsh criticism towards the Norwegian far-right and the way that, how you say, they kind of pinpointed and really dissected the power systems of the far-right and, yeah, so, and that created a chain of political events that eventually led to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, he had to leave his job. And that's very interesting and I've also been thinking what provoked so much and I think part of what provokes, of course it was, it had a very, how you say, distinctive like dramaturgical frame that was provocative but I think also what provoked was that the people with migrant backgrounds and former refugees, they didn't perform on stage the way that we were used to see them because we're not used to see criticism and that they really take mandates and appear in a different way on stage. Anyway, that was like a long, let's go back to what I really wanted to talk about and other performance. The Danish independent theater company, Fix and Foxy, had produced a play, Spring 2019, called Dark Noon, and where they had the aim to disrupt and problematize Eurocentrism. And there is an interactive and immersive level in the work of Fix and Foxy that breaks with the concept of either looking or being looked at. It creates a more tangible, multi-sensory way of interacting that unsettles the line between performer and spectator, which may become problematic when the audience represent the majority culture and the performers, the minority. And the dramaturgical frame aims to highlight and accentuate the problematic power imbalance between the global north and the global south and binary issues such as colonialism and decolonization, black and white. The performance is based on the myths that Europeans have created about the African continent, about Africans and about themselves, and it has the aim to dismantle these fictional stories. And this approach to turn the tables by inviting a group of South African artists to tell their wild and lawless, tell the wildest and lawless story of Western civilization from their perspective. And in the making of Dark Noon, the director Tuvi Bjarre teamed up with a South African actor, teacher, composer and choreographer, because it was important for him to kind of... He didn't want to be the only director because he understood the fragile position of that, so he really, yeah, he co-directed it. And he also considered it essential to initiate artistic partnership with people from the black community in order to create an understanding of the perspective, narrative and cultural context of black South Africans. For the same reason, the first block of the production took place in Johannesburg, but Bjarre admittedly still found himself captured in the European narrative. And this is a quote from an interview that I did with him. I have to admit that our European narrative is difficult to escape. To a certain extent, we are condemned to our European frameworks to be able to convey the perspective of the other in a relatable way. And within that lies the form of repetitive abuse, which is problematic. But if we cannot entirely escape it, we're all the more obliged to problematize it. In Dark Noon, we attempt to do precisely that by telling the story through perhaps one of the banalist narratives theories, the Western. According to Bjarre, the Western format gave an opportunity to highlight the limited notions Europeans have about Africa and how Europeans still tend to imagine a continent as wild, lawless and dangerous. And another quote, as a European, you carry with you this exalted notion about yourself. So by placing the European colonist in the position of the cowboy, this adventurous troublemaker with a gun in his belt and a reckless thirst for gold, you force the spectators to look at the armed Europeans who suddenly turned up on the African continent and claim their right for land in a different light. By drawing on the European immigration stories, the European ethno-romantic feel-good version, the European dream of Africa, soon turns not so feel-good. And as part of confronting the Danish audience with their history and inherited privilege, Dark Noon, as mentioned, it had an immersive form, where the audience stand, walk and are given particular functions and actions throughout the piece. They're instructed to play the roles of churchgoers, barclay and tell, and even lion dancers. At one point, the audience also tear on what they not yet understand is a slave auction, and they're encouraged to Instagram this with their cell phones. And in this way, the audience is confronted rather briefly with the Danish past as contributing colonizers of the African continent. They are exposed to this history first hand from the African perspective in the face-to-face situation of a shared physical space. The overall aim is that being exposed in this way will make it much more difficult for a Danish audience to disregard the Afro-Sentic perspective as irrelevant and inauthentic. And then I could mention numerous artists and directors that work with conceptual dramaturgy as a way to form new narratives and challenge the old, and edit Kaldur in her performance at the Chinois. It's something I won't go into now, but it's really something to check out. For the audience to follow the story, they have to learn phrases in Mandarin. And what she wants to problematize is the feeling of not how fragile you are, where you don't know the language of the new culture, and you have to adapt. So it's kind of very comic, very funny and interesting piece. It's not very new, but it's really good. And also it's also interesting, well, most pieces play redeploying the power balance, finding different ways of turning things on the head. Milo Rao, he works differently. He's very well known, as you probably many of you know. He's become quite a mastodont himself, like being a white, powerful male, which is a little bit ironic, but again, yeah. So, but he has, for example, he has the Congo tribunale is where he, what he does is that he creates enactments of historical events, because he really tries to avoid the us them or even redeploying us them. He rather wants us to investigate history and try to, how you say, by looking at historical events and kind of analyzing them, recognizing the tendencies in our own time. The theater can mount a direct challenge to help people of the majority culture through the gaze of the other are confronted with how they appear in the world. And this insight often uncomfortably contradicts how they wish to perceive themselves. These performances do not deal with racism through dramatic text and character depictions, but just as much by the visual, media and spatial dramaturgical choices and how these choices structure, shape and highlight the themes and overall messages the artists want to convey to the public. In order to tackle the mechanisms of othering in the theater, we have to ask ourselves what the opposite of othering is. If othering is alienation and exclusion, then its opposite must be belonging and inclusion. But belonging is emotionally determined and entails the experience of having a meaningful voice and the opportunity to participate in the design of cultural and social structures. The experience of meaningfulness can only be determined independently by the subordinate group themselves. From this insight, how can we create belongingness in our theater spaces? This may be a core question which allows us to move away from the idea of mere representation towards the concept of co-creation as some kind of premise. And then let's look at how we can change the narrative. From a dramaturgical point of view, is it even possible to imagine dramaturgical frameworks in Western Europe that are entirely detached from Eurocentric pervasive thinking, or are we ever caught in dichotomies? If we believe that this is somehow achievable, where do we start with working towards achieving it? What dramaturgical strategies can best serve the process of countering structural othering in theater making? How can one establish an equal ground for creative cross-cultural processes to flourish? I have tried to, but this is kind of some aspects meant to function as propositions, perhaps guidelines for equalization in cross and cultural theater, but it can also just be a way to try and see things in new ways. So it's not, I really don't want this talk to be this is bad, this is good, but rather try and look at things from a new perspective. Cultivating reflexivity. One cannot expect to identify the structural patterns and hidden power hierarchies of Western contemporary theater without the willingness to continuously examine how Eurocentric discourses reinforce decision-making and power distribution within Western theater institutions, within productions and within intercultural collaborations. Here, of course, critical whiteness is a central theory to turn to. Critical whiteness has particular relevance for raising awareness of the fact that whiteness as a cultural and social political construction expresses a privileged position of power often exercised on a subconscious level. However, while critical whiteness is just a partial means to the goal of inclusivity, it is all too often regarded as the goal. The way critical whiteness theory is often interpreted, this reflective critique of whiteness and white privilege often remains the focal point and the goal in and of itself. And this can create a perception that it's enough to be aware of a talk about injustice and express gratitude for one's privileges all the while avoiding taking active stance or action against this injustice to counter it effectively. The conversations can become an excuse and a buyout from responsibility. As such, critical whiteness may be used instrumentally to conceal imperialist motives. And I mean this is not more in an unconscious way than in a conscious way. Much like in theater, self-reflexivity and critical introspection can serve the instrumental purpose of primarily handling negative feelings connected to guilt and privilege. And the point that I want to stress here is that alternative cultural perspectives are neither identified, explored nor integrated into society by introspection alone. One of the recurrent causes for systematic othering is the lack of acknowledgement of alternative perspectives and an unwillingness to incorporate these. Am I talking too fast? I never talk this much in a road, so I'm kind of like, a little talking. Yes, so the Norwegian dramaturg and theater professor Torevangen Lee in his publication Reflexive Dramatogy, a cheats for the performing arts in A Time of Change, is concerned with how there is a receipt procl. I can't never pronounce that word. Receipt, yeah receipt procl. You know what word I mean. Impact between the theater production apparatus and the artistic investigation which may develop into a kind of gravitational force that is in itself powerful enough to override even the strongest directorial concept. And this gravitational force, he says, is produced not just by material and practical constraints such as space, time limits, financial circumstances and other framework conditions. Rather, it's a force that carries its own payload of inherent conceptions like sediments, its own meta-narratives in which this has the capacity to activate its own dramaturgies. Okay, that's a long and complicated sentence, but he says something about the, I think it's very applicable to how Eurocentrism works. Lee calls with urgency to discuss how power and structure affect artistic processes and the way stories are formed and portrayed. He stresses that the theater cultivates a false image of itself but that reflexive dramaturgy can serve to identify and articulate the structures that set the limits for the aesthetic experience and artistic investigation. Lee talks about sones of productive uncertainty, by which, I think he means, a new dramaturgical conceptual thinking sparked by the unsettlement of the classical production hierarchy of western theater as a result of, amongst other things, increased interdisciplinarity. And he refers to Pierre Bourdieu and how dramaturgy has much to gain from sociology. And he also quotes an essay by Norwegian sociologist Magne Flemmen on Bourdieu. The world with all its dominance relations seems natural to us. The task of sociology is to reveal the arbitrary privileges and how they are reproduced. The power must be rooted out of the dark discognition and be exposed to what it really is. If we understand the mechanisms that maintain this dominance, we might be able to change it. And I think performing arts very much also have this potential. However, I would say one can only achieve this by pushing through the structural changes that critical whiteness sets us in the directional. The subject-object relation between majority and minority, dominant and subordinate culture, has to be renegotiated, unsettled and shifted. Such a shift entails the will to let go of power, to listen, and to be humble. Humility in practice is about a vigilant form of active listening and the will and ability to remove oneself and one's agenda and urge to control as a frame for the artistic process. Only then does looking become a political act in favor of the subordinated suppressed and discriminated. And I just want to emphasize here that I, of course, I don't mean that this is necessary in all types of performance in any way. It's more about opening up the perspective to other ways of producing. Redistribution of power. It is evident to direct significant attention to the choices made in dramaturgical process methodology in cross and intercultural theatre production. There is much to suggest that the answers for equalization, which seems impossible to find by searching within the western Eurocentric narrative, might be found by the dominant cultures will to adapt towards this subordinate. As such, devising can constitute an interesting alternative to text as a starting point in theatre production processes, where a minority is represented due to the fact that devising is a process-led dramaturgical practice. In devised work, the content structure and form are gradually determined as a process and false. There is no contractual hierarchy or other working structure imposed on the makers. Instead of the ensemble being subordinate to a director's vision, the material is generated by the ensemble's intuitive response to various impulses and stimuli. And while this stimuli and tasks in most cases are still designed by the director, it has still undergone, the production structure has still undergone radical moderation. Devised work involves a shift in the performance function from merely constituting a part of another's vision to becoming co-creators of its design. And in this respect, there is a tilt from subject-object method of working towards a subject-subject approach. Additionally, an experienced ownership of the theme is crucial for the cause to be able to generate ideas and creative material. Thus, the level of experienced ownership in a devised process can be directly linked to the quality of the end product, which as such functions as a litmus test on whether the process generated a fruitful group synergy or not. In theatre aiming to represent the so-called other, devising can, I can contend, contribute to an equalisation of power between dominant and peripheral culture, self and other. However, the method of devising requires the production apparatus and director to accept a significant loss of control. Devising is an interesting method for acceptance and inclusion of various lenses or windows of the same work. In devising, the lens of acting, dramatising or directing is separated from the person. While it is true that the director is the person who makes the final decisions about how the play is put together, this aspect of control and power can be negotiated in various ways. Since the devised performance usually does not depart from or comment on a canonised script familiar in the dominant culture, it also opens up the possibility of a non-verbal, methodological approach in the early days of a production process. This means that the ensemble may start working from specific improvisation exercises that do not even include verbal language. In cross and intercultural productions, where it is often the language of the dominant culture that forms the basis of communication, this establishes a common ground from where a unifying group vocabulary of movement and gestures can emerge. Devising poses an intentional challenge to the dominant model of an autonomous, all-seeing, all-knowing director-author and look to establish a more pluralist approach to performance-making and improvisation. As a non-hierarchical framework, this approach is interesting because rather than imposing external notions or layering preconceptions onto a creative ensemble's work process, devising seeks to locate compositional form and decision-making from within the experience of the practice itself. One can argue that the framework of devising fosters a creative universe where the hierarchical structure of the outside world does not apply. It constitutes both a sort of conflict and a productive element, and thereby opens up a third space. I don't know if you have heard of Baba, whom Baba went the way he talks about the third space, which is of course a very different thing. But still, if we depart from Baba's cultural theory, hybridity and the third space stands as the central figure, Baba sees hybridity as an active challenge to the dominant culture. In relation to dramaturgy, the question then becomes, is such a concept applicable to the dynamics of devising and similar approaches taken to escape the Eurocentric hegemony? Is it called hegemony or hegemony? Hegemony? Who cares? In cross and intercultural theatre production, how could this idea of a third space lead the way towards the development of new dramaturgical ideas, concepts and frameworks? From this, in the creation of non-hierarchical dramaturgical production platforms, the overall goal becomes to foster entirely new communities, which lifts us up out of the ordinary and creates the possibility of new meetings, human to human, questioning constructs. Is it possible to take elements from devising and develop them further to serve productions that specifically aim to address and question social constructs? There is a clear line from the history of colonization, the establishment of different forms of social constructs, racial and patriarchal thinking to capitalism, neoliberalism and the current structures within western theatre institutions. Looking at contemporary Europe through this lens, our current world becomes a multi-layered web of spatial syntaxes full of visible and invisible cultural and political fences that separate us into a web of groups and subgroups. However, when we tell stories in our theatres, these structures often remain unaddressed. We speak about destinies shaped by specific structures, but we seldom speak of the structures. In relation to refugees, this becomes particularly evident. Refugees are attuned to the fragility of the social structures upon which they stand. They know that whatever is fixed today can be torn away tomorrow. By creating a dramaturgical frame where one makes use of improvisational and experimental principles of play structures and enactment, I believe that one can promote an understanding of citizenship as a spatially negotiated practice. However, one then has to translate the way in which citizenship and non-citizenship is performed in western societies to the performative language of the theatre. From a bird's eye perspective, a dramaturgical frame highlighting these structures can provide an understanding of the ways in which we inhabit our identities and ourselves. This can be achieved by investigating and underlining the relation between structure, pattern and human interaction in order to spark new artistic and political conversations. By doing this, one can also prompt awareness within the western theatre production apparatus as to how constructed systems in our societies and the world reflect within the theatre space. This dramaturgical approach to theatre making aims to highlight and problematize social structures as part of the process of analyzing what enables mechanisms of othering. To sum up, the spatial aspect of dramatogy and the way in which space can be utilized, negotiated, charged, changed and manipulated between the performers in a piece can serve to highlight how citizenship and non-citizenship is a negotiating practice where power or lack of such enables or deprives individuals from taking up space on this planet. Establishing community. If the ambition is for the theatre to serve as a space of belonging across cultural borders, then how can this be achieved and what does it require? If the artistic potential is separated from the reliance on any external factors stemming from western theatre tradition, what new creative tools may emerge as a result? What most certainly will remain are the bodies in the space and the value of the totality of creative resources and cultural perspectives that constitutes the ensemble's common capacity. To draw further on the ideas of devising and viewpoints, even if the concept of universalism is dismantled in post-traumatic theatre, within cross and intercultural theatre making, the quality of the encounter between the participants in the production is essential. However, such encounters require an authentic meeting between humans on equal ground, as such. Is it not evident that we should search for the universal parameters and unifying elements amongst all people? Creativity, collaboration, imagination, adaptability, and flexibility are quality everyone shares. For the theatre space, these capacities are ideal. How can we best mobilize them methodologically and endorse them in intercultural creative projects? However, that is a more complicated issue. By starting a production process with the establishment of a common vocabulary of movement gestures or other types of ways to create norms for creation within the group, one promotes an experience of community, ownership, and belonging that in cross-cultural projects representing minorities is hardly possible from within a hierarchical form of production. The development of ensemble cohesion and rituals constitutes a part of the equalization of the creative space. By creating a common vocabulary and an altered state of consciousness, not as a spiritual condition, but rather as a method of removing the mind from the purely remote cerebral and analytical towards a now orientation and a more physically anchored, intuitive, and collectively oriented creative condition. These ideas are not new. 20th century physical theatre theorists Grotowski, Ato, Nicholas, Nunes, and Alexander Fersen all drew inspiration from different techniques, ritual techniques, and practices in order to explore alternative approaches to perform a community. However, while these methods seem to have many common denominators across cultural and geographical borders, they have not been much included in the practices of larger western theatre institutions. When a creative group generates rules of their own rather than conforming to existing norms, they can thereby create a sense of filling the gaps amongst each other. And then I think actually I may have to hop a little bit further because yeah I think I may have to jump because it still takes a little bit more time than I thought. I could go more into depth with this but I think you got the idea of building a collective space, rethinking distribution of time and space. As mentioned before, classical western dramaturgy builds on the perception of time as a temporal horizontality, a journey from one moment to the next on a horizontal line or trajectory. However, there are cultural differences around the globe that have resulted in different approaches to dramatic and dramaturgical structural thinking including process dramaturgy and preferred ways of structuring a creative process. The bottom line here is to open the western mind to alternative approaches to the understanding and structuring of time both within the creative production process and in conceptual thinking around performance dramaturgy. Thus by cultivating the notion of time as context and culture dependent and promoting the ability to question the traditional western ideas of time efficiency and time management in creative processes one takes yet another step towards an equalization moving away from the cultural representing representing towards the culture being represented. And I very much experienced that because I've produced, I made a Norwegian South African co-production and the way and also later on I've experienced how I as a Norwegian want to structure a creative process. It's very different from how you may want to structure a creative process in another culture. And that's also just to kind of be aware not necessarily dismissing everything but just to be aware that creative processes doesn't necessarily have to be structured the same way. And really be aware of what you may impose because you haven't thought about it. Every time we haven't thought about it we easily impose things on others. A creative process constitutes jumps in time and one performance may consist of multiple times multiple through lines we give together into a non-linear narrative emerging from the artistic findings or occurring at its own pace. The redefining of the parameters parameters for measuring time and space in this context again points to the shift from linear to non-linear dramaturgies and the movement away from the dominance of western culture towards the unknown unpredictable and unfamiliar. In performance time can be structured in a variety of different ways and as previously stressed the dramatic question is often no longer the core of the narrative and the relation between images and episodes form circular associative or spiral like structures. Furthermore the notion of space and spatial dramatogy is another aspect where bias and presumption often blur the western mind like I was just mentioning. Again people in everyday life encounter each other through a system of entities that have emanated from episodes of interaction. In this sense the space itself becomes an actor an entity which in and of itself is both a social product and an active part of social organization created by the dynamic relationship between subjects and hold the power to affect socialist socialization. This becomes evident in the architecture of places cities and societies with vast demographic inequality. Here the structures formed over time and which one unwittingly adapts to become a narrative that is manifested in spatial patterns even as inhabitants of a specific space were also subjected to that space. This makes it relevant to try and reformulate spaces of citizenship and uncouple the structural dynamics of the world system and its historical processes through the means of performing arts such as physical theater or dance theater. For example if we depart from a definition of choreography as consisting of distributing bodies and their relations in space the body becomes an actor that participates in the production of a specific social reality. As such social choreography as a term can point to the expanded choreographic concept of movement in social and societal spaces. This is a form of thinking that again can spark new conceptual ideas around the potential of spatial dramaturgy in theater representing refugees and other minorities. Imagine futures the dream as activism and political resistance. To continuously question the structures and circumstances of the present and to insist on the dream of an imagined future as a one-day achievable alternative to the current reality is for minorities refugees and other discriminated groups in society perhaps the most radical form of resistance as well as possible the hardest to retain. The migrants dream of survival as a form of afterlife as explained by Baba stresses this point. However the baggage and traumatic imprints of austerity racism and structural discrimination and the legacy of displacement can easily foster an over determination of the past in the imagining of the future. Furthermore stories told in the theater reinforce beliefs around placement identity and what is possible and not possible and here Afrofuturism constitutes a potent potent contemporary art form academic theory and dramaturgical possibility on the basis of which one might change the historical trajectory and reframe the Eurocentric master narrative by moving away from the potentially reinforcing loop of retelling and reliving past suffering and victimization towards narratives reclaiming power and the right to take ownership influence and dream one directs critique towards Western culture and the colonial history at the same time. This constitutes a wish for theater to point towards what reality could be and can become not only to what it currently is and now right now in South Africa and people are really exploring Afrofuturism and how that can constitute kind of a new way of thinking dramaturgy and thinking storytelling and because yeah there's a lot of South African artists that I know and I've spoke to they are really tired of performing their own suffering that's how they get funding that's what the western world wants to see and so it's kind of a repetitive and the more you repeat the story the more true it becomes in a way that's the narrative that kind of traps you so that's why the Afrofuturism have now yeah it's not a new thing but it's a quite new thing within theater and performance uh first through understanding representation as a form of co-production and abandoning the misconception that a dominant culture can succeed in any form of representation without actively striving towards the culture it wants to represent both in the artistic process in method and all other aspects of production it is crucial to be extremely aware of and challenge the extensive bias within theater productions representing the so-called other shared decision making can constitute a way to create political and social change through art you don't merely consume history you interact with it reflect on it and gain you understanding of it by developing dramaturgical production frameworks that through different methodologies aesthetics and artistic approaches serve the purpose of highlighting social construct and which makes us rethink our position within them as dramaturgs directors and performers we can address the master narratives and overarching structures of the world to which we're all subordinated what is required is the cultivation of reflexivity redistribution of power and the fostering of community within production the continuous questioning of western master narratives social constructs and western presumptions when it comes to distribution of time and space as well as rebellious imagining of different futures both in and outside of the creative space the need for directors theater makers and dramaturgs with the capability to truly comprehend their delicate intermediary position of cultural hybridity with all the responsibility humility and insight that entails mediation negotiation cultural cultural translation and visual vision is crucial in our broken world if theater holds the position of creating fictional universes it is also obliged to show that other realities uh oh sorry i jumped i jumped over that um other realities other ways other worlds are possible that was my talk and i know it was kind of dense kind of academic and uh and also kind of revolutionary do you have any questions comments do you want the microphone thank you very much that was very interesting talk um i didn't understand the concept of social choreography can you explain that yeah uh i can try yes um well it's more maybe it's more about thinking korea choreography in a more through a more social sociological from a more sociological point of view and maybe um i don't know it's i i really find it hard you know when you sometimes i've worked through something academically and then it's not it's not easy to say the normal words so that's what i struggle with but but um yeah but i think it's very much that that you look at choreography in a through a more sociological lens and um yeah what do you want to achieve by doing that um i think i just think that uh the theater has a potential to um in a way trans translate what's what's happening in society now i'm explaining this in a bad way but i don't manage to do better right now but what what you see physically in society into the theater space not through stories but more through images if you know what i mean and those images can be the way you contribute space on stage and you think spatial dramaturgy or it can be something that influences the way you think choreography i was thinking about how does it think about different people in the audience because the way you explain that yeah yeah that's a good question i the thing is i actually i i met them when they were producing the plane johannes book i didn't i haven't actually seen i've just seen the work of it but i haven't seen the finished performance i've just like read a lot of descriptions of it but um when i read from those descriptions what that is that's actually one of the things that they succeed with that they don't look at them they really take that into consideration that it's not only white danish people it's it's danish people from different backgrounds so yeah so i but i don't know exactly how they navigated this situation i just know that when when i um when i was watching the the performance rehearsal and then they they i was kind of forced to suddenly participate because it's immersive right so i was pretty ready to just sit and observe and take notes and think and suddenly i was on the floor forced to do this kind of african in a very serious amai i don't know if you saw this pictures of her when he really feels super white so and that was kind of there was something interesting there in the way that was uncomfortable so yeah so i think that's kind of the tension that they worked with but i'm sure that he's yeah about who is the audience and not always imagining in a european context the white audience exactly i think that's very important as well and i think a lot of these productions the the the risk with the with productions that try to turn the turn things upside down is that they still see a world that is decotomized where is it still it's still us them even if you turn it upside down it's still them and us and you know and how can we go around that i think it's very important i was wondering how what you would say about the relation between the theater institutions or the scene in general and the education the theater education because i think especially when you talk about devising methods yes and it's crucial that you have also educational field which not only reproduces the hierarchies which are there in the institution yes and that's yeah absolutely and i think that's that's the conversation that is really necessary yeah and this talk is also based on to be honest it's based on my master's in international dramaturgy and i tried to kind of jam it's i've left out a lot of things a lot of aspects of course but it was very much credit criticized in the institutional theater because we know that in the independent field the hierarchies are often completely different and they are much more flat and it's much starting from meeting to meet the person meeting another human and then that's already maybe the start of production so i think it's i think my talk is maybe more than anything a critique of of uh yeah of the pitfalls of of the western theater institution but it's of course everyone knows that systemic systems are really hard to change even if you want to do you think in norway there's a special challenge because like free groups can find that funding than in other european countries i think i think i think it's an important conversation for everyone and for me as well i think i'm i'm only like learning i don't i don't have any answers this is just a reflections based on the past three and a half years of my life but none of this i would say do this and what you have done is wrong you know what i mean so that's important for me yeah um you want the microphone oh no i don't know i i think it's okay i because i think there are many aspects here that are still very very problematic for example uh that most of the uh theorists that you refer to are white men and that the examples you mentioned also are very problematic like the pixie and foxy performers for example because that's what happens with that is that you use the black performers as a tool for the white people to learn more about themselves and that in itself is not unproblematic no it is the same with that to your bidding uses oh i'm white male i'm caught in the european narrative how can i get out okay i get a co-producer or co-director who's black you know okay then it's okay so you know like there's there's so many layers as to these examples you mentioned are also very problematic also ways of seeing have a hierarchy in it which has nothing to do with the with the plava that happened after it but it's actually in the performance yeah so i think and also by using only white male theorists that's also a power thing absolutely because if you had chosen to use a black female for example yeah but in my in my masters i i in my masters i i did not use only but it was very i was very conscious from my side that i you know sara ameth of course is essential and also a lot of other theorists and a lot of other aspects so i could have mentioned these in this talk as well but it's important for me to stress that i see what you're saying and i think you're right um i think you're right and in a way it's like it's it's um and that's why i'm emphasizing that this is not what i'm talking about i'm not talking about that performance because it was great and because it was right it's more about also to stress how hard it is yeah but then i think you need to problematize what is difficult with that performance like what is the problematic aspect of it yeah no no but yeah i could have said more about that in my talk that uh that is uh that is a problematic aspect but i think i do think from a euro eurocentric perspective i think we're more or less trapped and i think in a way whatever take we it's it's really hard it's i think it's really really hard to do something that no one can point to it and say but what about this what about this what about this i think it's it's almost impossible but still we have to try but i i i do and then it's the american professor thomas de france is a professor at duke university in dance and african-american studies he said if you to be really radical about these questions you give you give away power you step aside exactly you know and that's that's the radical yeah you know and that's not any of the performances no and no yes i yeah and because we are trapped you know it's problematic everything but no i just want to answer i would just want to answer you because i i do think you're right um and the end of my master dissertation was pretty much what you say so um and i could have emphasized that on in more in my talk but i do think that it's i think it's important to do both i think actually when it comes to a question of power i think that is because everything else than redistributing power is actually just fluff you know it's just fluff it's just works but it's more like how do we do it and what what steps are we taking in the process towards getting there because i think it's i really think it's important to do both and i think both things also happen but i think i think it's one step in the right direction is to think differently about co-productions and all the aspects that are in place in in cross-cultural productions because i really think the level of reflection in many ways is quite low and that's what i was also saying i'm just learning and i know there's some more layers to take away yeah yes yeah thank you for the talk as well and now it's kind of interesting this very yeah and we could go on and on but i think that there is some the ethics here which i also believe that you're talking about but but that that might be the next step to because you're talking about redistributing and rethinking time and space and emancipation and so on and maybe it's also about time we start to rethink the ethics of dramaturgy and of working with theater absolutely and initiating collaborative processes like devising and so on and i'd also like to say that when you bring in the afro futurism aspect as well yeah that's the way of emancipating also so i do think that you also you already have that aspect in your presentation of also listening and bringing less problematic sort of perspectives into the presentation yeah yeah i hope so but i appreciate your comment because i really think i really think it's you're pinpointing something and you're really like you know and that's where we want to go because people are too nice to each other in these conversations and it's a problem not to say that you're not nice but it's like you're you're you're honest you don't like tiptoeing you're wrong yeah yeah i think i would just uh so comment what on there talked about before with uh with them would like the other independent field more better to do this kind of project but i think one issue that was raised in Cape Town at the congress was a seminar about where do the money come from you know how if no way is the same it is like that to the arts council of the institutions and then you initiate a project and go somewhere you still have you are the one having the money you are going to have to answer something in your country so some kind of in some way you get kind of power through that as well so i think that's very the financial system is really not supporting new ways of of creating pieces yeah but i also think a lot of people have said to me when you work and talk with us you can't really win you know people are gonna criticize you whatever you say and i think that is right because that's what i experienced but it's also really important and i think when we make work with this you have to kind of dare to not be popular and dare to fail really dare to fail because yeah because even if it's friction that's occurring and you're at least trying you're at least exploring new narratives yeah can i just answer of course i don't mean that why the black people should not cooperate but i think it has to do with perspective you know where is the story told from not only co-operate but operate because it's exactly that he's the only the co-director not the yeah yeah yeah but but then again if you have an answer that's also a conversation that returns a lot is that you create you create a parallel theaters parallel organization parallel this and that that are run by you know and that's not always the answers answer either and then i mean parallel i mean like and that's i'm not saying that of course one should support you know artists that are from minorities and really like their own productions and be ready for the message but i think that's also kind of a tricky part with funding that you create a parallel universe but it was nothing i didn't mean no you didn't cooperation yeah i just would say either you go to yelling also co-director yeah or you call both directors so that's yeah i i i agree with that i agree with that but then you will probably not have the narrative that's in there exactly and what and no matter where how much many times you turn it upside down he is still the boss of that production yeah in a way yeah and that's a problematic part of it okay it's hard i shall be agree on that no thank you so much for coming oh yeah yeah and i think as long as i thought i was like all the non-white people are the refugees on the non-white people people don't feel like it's the non-white people that don't have to make sense that essentially the whole conversation is continuing the same thing exactly and i think like this idea like collaboration like thinking about or having to report back to your own government it's like your own government look at them and all the non-white people who are non-white people and you look at them and like you're a British and it's like i think it's that thing it's like looking at where we've seen ideas other than exist even within the way that we think about how we're going to approach future collaboration or how they approach it absolutely and also i think it's like supporting people in the new like feeling kind of like that as well like making and i think and also somebody mentioned the word radical and stop thinking of it as radical because like people equal shouldn't be better than what they should be living in yeah and i think that's that's why it's really important to use the word Eurocentrism is you know like it's it's a master narrative that is still existing as an overarching master narrative i would say in western europe but that doesn't mean that there's not a lot of other narratives that's not the only one that exists shall we end i think so thank you so much back to the picture before