[Dialogue] Satyagraha, Opera and Wall Street.

[Jeanette Stanfield]

Hi Gail, 
Thank you for sharing Phelem's letter with us .  What a powerful opera Satyagraha must be.  I can just imagine Gandhi, Tolstoy, Tagore,
King together in one moment in time. 

Jeanette


On 2011-11-20, at 4:40 AM, icataiw at ms69.hinet.net wrote:

> A friend and colleague from the UK who is in the theater business, is currently in New York City preparing for his second appearance at the Met.  I saw a video of the production 3 years ago.  This one at this particular time portends to be even more powerful.  Don't miss if if you are anywhere near!
> 
> Gail
> 
> 
> 
> From Phelem:
> It is an amazing time to be here in NYC. As you may remember three years ago we came here and mounted our Philip Glass opera "Satyagraha" which some of you saw. At that time we had a great ad campaign which was almost cheeky in it's proposition:
> 
> "could an opera make us stand up for the truth?"
> 
> (Links here to the publicity and poster:
> 
> http://www.metoperafamily.org/metopera/news/features/detail.aspx?id=3624
> 
> http://www.metoperafamily.org/metopera/news/features/detail.aspx?id=3674 )
> 
> "Satyagraha": At that time in NYC no one knew what the word even meant! How times have changed.
> 
> Glass's piece is a thirty year old opera about Gandhi's Satyagraha campaign which first emerged and was enacted in South Africa. The Satyagraha protests involved the burning of record cards and the Newcastle march changed the rights of Indians in South Africa forever and was the beginning of the movement which brought India out from beneath the oppression of the British Empire.
> 
> At the time of first doing the Opera I was so drawn to it because of the personal connections to working with open space and it's power to help "peace break out". I was excited by how I saw that Gandhi's idea of Satyagraha meant how leadership, activism and protest starts with work on the self. The intangible "inner work cooking" that if we are lucky can happen whilst opening space for transformation and self organisation. All these are open space practices. All these are Satyagraha practices. A discipline of forged vulnerability or "soul-force", "truth-force", "love-force." I felt it was important to do the piece as it re-imagined and stated the true nature of what had become mistranslated and interpreted incorrectly as  "passive resistance" an unhelpful term to truly explain Gandhi's concept.
> 
> Now just three years later we are remounting the production whilst an open space/Satyagraha movement breaks out around us and worldwide.
> 
> The irony that our production will be playing to the Metropolitan Opera house audiences whilst Occupy Wall Street is so near cannot be avoided! I am fascinated to see how the audience will respond to the piece this time around, especially as many of them no doubt could well be considered to be part of the "1%".
> 
> I have also found myself feeling how strangely complicated the politics of this piece playing in the opera house is for myself and here of course the fifth principle seems all the more important and helpful to me.  I ask myself what am I doing not down on Wall street but inside an opera housed doing a piece about activism and protest portrayed by singers with amazing voices. Is this just decadent?
> 
> "Wherever it happens is the right place."
> 
> I have found myself in the past questioning during extreme times what is the point of doing theatre? This thing that can seem so frivolous whilst world events seem so overwhelming. However it is in theatre that I first experienced the transformative nature of space, atmosphere, silence and emergence. True theatre holds space for the imagination, dreams and the future when events, despair or beliefs could close that space down. This is the frontier I personally have known since childhood where a true conversation with the unknown and chaos can be had (as David Whyte says) and the imagination can be the first step towards opening space beyond my own prejudice and limiting beliefs into possibility.
> 
> So I have realised how important this piece is to perform right NOW because it manages to communicate what is behind or beneath a Satyagraha protest: this is the power of Spirit. How important it is to speak from my own place of truth. To be present in this a-causal connection with world wide events and to let theatre do what only theatre can do: to communicate the mysterious nature of the spirit that exists out there as the space opens. To speak tangibly of the spirit that so easily can be dismissed or made invisible in media coverage or polarised reactions. To use art to do what its purpose is: to say the unsayable, speak the ineffable.
> As Gandhi sings in the opera (in words from the Bhagavad Gita)
> 
> "These are the Athletes of the Spirit"
> 
> Love
> 
> Phelim
> 
> www.improbable.co.uk
> @openspacer
> 
> 
> -- 
> Gail West
> ICA
> 3F, No. 12, Lane 5, Tien Mou West Road
> Taipei, Taiwan 111
> 8862) 2871-3150
> SKYPE   gwestica
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> 
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