Metropolis - Site International / International Site

Walther Tjon Pian Gi

Metropolis Conference Rotterdam

Panel introduction

Friday 30 November 2001

Ladies and gentlemen,

I am very honoured to speak to you today at this congres and I would like to thank the organisation who entrusted me with this task. I seem to have become the artist who stopped practising and got engaged in arts policy. And that is subject to suspicion from the artists' point of view. So let me try to tackle your Friday fatigue not with a general enunciation on the policy of cultural diversity but with a personal story. This personal approach is facilitated by the fact that in the Netherlands the development of multicultural arts policy more or less coincided with my own growing awareness. Awareness of the fact that the ease with which someone like me from a multi-ethnic country like Suriname lives with cultural diversity was not the general experience in this new country I made my home.

In 1972 a couple of friends studying at the University of Leiden formed a theatregroup. I was among them, at that time reading philosophy and Dutch literature as a break from my studies in civil engineering. Out of that group grew Dogtroep, then and even now one of the Netherlands' leading theatre export products. Dogtroep made site-specific theatre, based on a combination of images, music and movement.

We were often invited to stage a spectacle on midsummernight, most frequently in France where the Feu de la St. Jean was still a tradition in quite some towns and villages. But most of these pageants had degenerated into simply drinking and dancing around a huge pyre in the central square. Talking with older people gave us ideas about how it used to be way back in order to create a new celebration which was different from the past yet very much recognizable to the present population. Apart from our purely artistic mission, we had a sense of the necessity to belong to the community for that short span of time we stayed with them; making not a spectacle for them but with them.

Dogtroep was an exception in the Dutch theatreworld. The scrappy images, the lack of traditional dramaturgy, the illogical sequences, the mix of in and outdoor performances, streetinterventions and parades; they did not fit the parameters and criteria set for the profession of theatre. This wasn't theatre, it wasn't Art. So funding was hard to get and that was ironically one of the reasons we were abroad so often: there we could earn the bulk of our money. It was only after we had convinced committees that we should be judged by what we wanted to be, wanted to achieve and how, not by what they thought we should be doing as a theatregroup, that we started getting regular funding. So, great, it was theatre, it was Art, after all.

Without realising it Dogtroep also was a 'multicultural' group avant la lettre. I belonged to the artistic nucleus and I was of non-Dutch origin. We worked with freelancers from Israel, Britain, Yugoslavia, Armenia. Our music was inspired by the Balkans, Cuba and Senegal, I had studied dance in South East Asia.

But were we multicultural or international?

In fact, like many artists in the North Atlantic cultural tradition, we used other cultures to enhance our own artistic achievements, we stole from them, robbed elements, without giving something in return. What exchange? What two-way nature of integration? We travelled abroad and came back like the old Dutch trading ships loaded with spices. And as you know, we only carried bricks to balance our ships on the outward journey. We could even perform the journeys in our airmchairs in front of the TV or by browsing through books. We wanted to make theatre that everyone in the world could understand, sort of international.

Maybe we weren't that bad. Maybe we really tried to understand those other cultures, those local artists we spoke with, danced with, made music with. Maybe we left something behind. But we inevitably would go back home and incorporate what we learned, in our efforts in the arts or in our daily life, and the direct cultural exchange would be gone.

The most important argument however that we, Dogtroep, weren't multicultural was that we didn't even realize that at the same time we were developing our company and our own style, the gouvernment had started a multicultural policy in the arts. And that all those cultural exchanges could have taken place right here in the big cities of the Netherlands, that were rapidly changing demographically.

Most exposures to other cultures affect us without us consciously realizing it. But do they change us to the bone, or even at our skin? The changes aren't the result of our sincere interest in other cultures but simply of our economical power. And with the ease with which we buy new clothing and throw away the old ones, we use of other cultures what we think is to our benefit and discard them when we're through with them. But weren't artists the very persons to scrutinize what they're doing?

I left Dogtroep after seven years, after a season I thought I could never surpass in quality and artistic satisfaction. I did some freelance work and then got the job of director of a new foundation called Scarabes. Scarabes was the result of the gouvernment policy for a more multicultural approach in the arts and our task was to assist artists of non-Dutch origin in their efforts to cope with the Dutch theatreworld and bureaucracy. We taught them how the subsidysystem worked, how to organize their company, how to sell their products to the theatres, how to network, and we coached them artistically. Later on we were also asked by the gouvernment to advise the regular arts organisations on multicultural policy, a task that was way to heavy for the 5 persons working in our offices. Especially since there was no incentive of the gouvernment towards these organisations except for a simple letter of advise to go multicultural.

At first I looked at my job in a mere professional way: I was teaching, guiding, coaching beginning artists and that was great fun and tremendously satisfactory. But I came to realise that these artists of colour were being systematically excluded from the Dutch theatreworld and that there were potential coloured audiences that did not benefit from the arts funding by the state. I had told my clients of my own experience: Dogtroep had had a hard time in the beginning, so has every starting group. But this was something different; it seemed a daunting prospect to the white theatre community to share subsidies with artists of colour, with their different criteria for quality and beauty. And with the different colour of their skin: theatre is an artform in which the artist him/herself is a visible part of the work of art. A black Othello, allright, a black Hamlet, nonsense.

In the wake of the multicultural policy of the gouvernment people now started looking at me in an other way. All of a sudden they wanted to recognize multicultural aspects in Dogtroep's work in the past and even in the present. 'Your influence, in particular your Chinese background was clearly visible in Dogtroep's work', I was told. 'What do you mean?' 'The colours, those typical Chinese opera colours.' 'Well, we had to compete with all kinds of background images when we worked in the street, that's why we used those flamboyant colours. Probably the Chinese also used them since they were streetperformers too.'

My background did play a role in the development of Dogtroep's work, but far more implicit, so well hidden, that only after I stopped working with the group and was involved in multicultural policy I discovered how it had functioned. Here is an example.

Dogtroep often walked parades as part of our activities and we always had arguments about what these should look like. One of my collegues thought I wanted to move too much; we were not dancers, he said, but a group of sculptors. I thought he wanted to look too much like an frozen image that was dragged through the streets. I later realized that his idea of a parade was based on a German carnival float and mine on that of a Rio sambaschool; an image that moved in itself and therefore moved ahead. Interestingly enough, in Suriname we have clear ideas about the Rio carnival, but we have rarely seen it on movie or tv screens, let alone attended it in real life. Still the notion is so grinded in our Surinamese minds and bodies that it served as a reference for me rather than any Chinese concept.

When I talk about Dutch society in the sense of that arrogant and dominant part that runs the show with North Atlantic pomp, I talk about 'we'. Do I feel myself that traditional Dutch that I would even like to take blame for all the negative aspects? Yes, part of me does. On the other hand I have my Surinamese-Chinese background, which reminds me every now and then that I am quite different from the bulk of the original inhabitants of the Netherlands. I have my travel experiences and long term studies in New York, Bangkok and Bali, making me feel like a citizen of the world. I became the cultural activist who with parochial fervour accused the white arts-elite of never accepting the cultures of newcomers as part of our country's heritage. I switch identity all the time.

Identity is about loyalty, and how can I be loyal to all these different cultures, etnicities, groups? I can't. So at least I have to be loyal to myself.

As director of Scarabes I turned into a spokesman for the artists of colour, their promotor. For the institutions I became the expert on cultural diversity in the theatre, the symbol of multiculturalism in white committees, the token nigger. But I did not care. In some cases it could be used. It was interesting to discover that my sheer prescence resulted in an all time high in project subsidies for artists of colour during the time I was a member of the theatre section of the Arts Counsel of the Netherlands. Yet when it came to the more structural 4 year funding, the criteria of quality, whatever that may be, still was the argument to keep black groups out. Other criteria and functions were not considered. So the black Amsterdam based theatre group DNA got a negative advice based on their poor performances, although their actors training program, which was an integral part of their activities, was very succesfull. The committee declared that their meetings were about art and thus not the place to discuss the training aspects. Where that should then happen, was not our business.

In a way it was in procedure not different from the experience with Dogtroep: one was not judged by what one wanted and intended, but by the irrelevant expectations of those in power. Only here the differences were even bigger.

But too often one 'Ali Alibi' doesn't work, and then 'alone' can be 'bitterly alone'. When I was on the board of the Fund for the performing arts I had cultural diversity put on the agenda constantly, but the board always managed to talk about general operational technicalities until there was no time left for 'such an important issue which needed much more time for a profound discussion'.

Not that nothing was done. The director of the fund kept a keen eye that always some culturally diverse projects were funded. In a country of regents rather than democrats, that is the way things go, even in the arts.

The next director wasn't an improvement. Although the secretary of state for culture had launched a broad campaign of cultural diversity, the efforts to finally come to a policy of cultural diversity within the fund itself resulted in creating a separate organisation, called the Phenix foundation. Last month's founding speech of the chair of the Phenix was a sad deja vu: it sounded similar to the opening statement of Scarabes, formulated 14 years earlier!

This touches upon an issue that is key to most policies that concern the demographical changes in our societies of today: there is no long term committment, so every now and then we start all over from scratch. Every four year gouvernment arts plan is mastered by a new secretary for culture with his own new ideas. We think that with one or two incentives the cultural diversity job is done and we can go back to our own business. We aren't investing in processes in which we have to shift horizons in order to find new common grounds for our acts and behaviour.

It is a valuable asset that arts education in school has become an issue. Fortunately Dutch theatre for the youth was of tremendous quality some years ago, both artistically and in the way it captured young and old with its mulltilayered concepts. It was an art form that knew exactly who its audience were. Untill it became selfindulgent. Parallel to its development, education programs were conceived that were not just receptive, but actively put the kids at work. Especially for children from culturally deprived surroundings this was of great imporance.

One project I got involved in had recent immigrants tell the story of their childhood in their country of birth in the classroom, while drawing objects from a 'nightstand that used to be from their grandfather'. After the performance the teachers worked with the children on stories of their own, constantly crossing the thin line between reality and fantasy. In that way the kids started to know more about each other's background, but also about each other's dreams and fantasies.

Another phenomenon was that groups of youngsters were trained to play theatre for peer groups, which sometimes resulted in community theatre with a message, sometimes in inventing new ways of communication. And though the outcome might sometimes look horrible to us today, we should be open to these new expressions. Because probably the surprising hybrids can only pop up with completely new concepts, with people who are not corrupted by our grand cultural heritages. People that only have their personal histories to find their way in the metropolis of today. Their efforts are crude, even ugly, but isn't every new attempt in a way revolting?

Today I am the manager of Multicultural Television Netherlands. One of the projects we make for the viewers in the four major cities of the Netherlands is 'Wuzzup'. We gave kids a camera to tell their own story, always at the border of reality and fiction, and in that way commenting on and coping with the metropolis they are living in.

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