Praxis Theatre is currently on hiatus! Please find co-founders Aislinn Rose and Michael Wheeler at The Theatre Centre and SpiderWebShow, respectively.
July 21, 2010, by
3 comments

Now how do we address global ethical issues?

by Michael Wheeler with photography by John Lauener

I am a very different citizen than the one who attended the Informing Content workshop presented by Volcano Theatre with Deborah Pearson in conjunction with University of Toronto’s Centre for Ethics as part of The Africa Trilogy at Luminato.

One weekend I was an upbeat artist interested in how we could consider tough ideas to create an artistic response to difficult questions facing us as global citizens. The next weekend I watched all manner of Torontonians interested in solving these same problems criminalized and incarcerated in hundreds of civil rights violations throughout the city.

So there is a whole different version of this post – half-finished, abandoned in the middle of the Charter-rights meltdown that was G20. It considered each of the works presented, the moral questions they were trying to consider, and my response to them in as a middle-class Canadian. It would probably have been an excellent resource for final reports for grants.

I erased it, because the new me, the one that is horrified at the violent resources my country is willing to invest in stifling peaceful dissent (vandalism and violence are not equal or necessarily related), isn’t really interested in a hollow play-by-play of theoretical issues and responses.

All of the pieces created through the inFORMING CONTENT workshop were an attempt to deal with the imbalances and contradictions in a global economy. Ravi Jain’s T.A.K.E. looked at the role wealth has in a global adoption industry, Michael Rubenfeld’s If You Were Here looked at how distance separates us from achieving common goals, an unnamed project devised by Claire Calnan subjected single participants to a whirlwind tour of causes to support – having to choose to donate to just one. Even the waiting area in the courtyard outside the performance area was permeated by global concerns, with pictures of soon-to-be-extinct animals available to be coloured with crayons.

The weekend after this workshop, leaders representing the vast majority of the world’s economy came to Toronto. In response, citizens that are invested in solving all of these problems exercised their guaranteed rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and free speech to implore this gathering of the Most Powerful People In The World to address some of the most troubling ethical issues of our time: Maternal health, foreign aid commitments, the toll global warming will have on both species and the world’s poor, etc. The exact same issues that participants in the inFORMING CONTENT workshop had been hoping to address the week before.

Toronto is still coming to grips with what happened next, but one thing is for certain: Civil rights violations occurred on a massive scale. Amnesty International has already called for a full inquiry and YouTube videos of police brutality have flooded the internet. The lesson from G20 in Toronto is this: If you protest, if you exercise your right to free speech to rectify the world’s imbalances, you will be violently arrested and thrown in a cage without access to a lawyer.

Cop with no ID
This image shows police who have removed their identification tags confronting and arresting citizens at the designated protest site at Queen’s Park. This is a conscious tactic, also used by police at the 2005 G20 in London, to avoid accountability for human and civil rights violations.

This reality has completely transformed the way I consider the questions raised by the inFORMING CONTENT workshop. Before I was content to consider the ideas from more of an intellectual standpoint, assuming that if I truly threw my resources into solving one of these problems I could have an impact.

I am much more cynical now – uncertain of how to address these great ethical questions of our age.  Clearly our governments don’t want to consider them. Clearly they are willing to throw more money than you can imagine to stifle and silence people who speak out about them. Clearly this is a really big problem for those hoping to affect change.

In Mumbi Tindyebwa Otu’s W.4., a group of eight audience members are taken to a waiting area outside a room full of severely traumatised individuals. Not all the audience is permitted in: some are forced to simply listen to the sound of despair from the outside. Others are invited inside, but end up becoming an inmates in the room themselves. On the other side of G20, this piece speaks best metaphorically about the problems we face as global citizens facing ethical issues.  Those of us on the outside are locked out, and those of us that try to get in are locked in cages.

How do we impact the great ethical issues of our time in this era? Certainly identifying, discussing and analyzing them is part of a response, but that can’t be it. What else should we be doing now in these given circumstances? I have no answers to these questions, but it’s what I’m left thinking about after experiencing two very different weekends trying to address the difficult ethical questions facing the planet.

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3 comments:

  1. Michael Wheeler says:

    I wrote this piece several weeks ago. Looking back now, it doesn’t address the fact that the workshop was fairly amazing. I have to admit I was skeptical when I heard the idea, imagining one group after another emerging on The George Ignatieff stage to expose the brutality of global injustice through a series of scenes filled with pathos.

    This was totally not the case. The “choose your own adventure” immersive nature of the site-specific pieces was really effective and this level of interactivity lest itself to to a much greater connection to the work. The whole team should feel pretty good about a surprisingly effective evening of socially relevant theatre. I hope it becomes a regular annual thing.

  2. Elizabeth says:

    Thank you for this. I’ve been thinking about this in relation to the U.S., where I live. The scope of what our government has done and is doing w/r/t prosecuting “the war of Terror,” and of course, the response to the G20 in Seattle have left me with a huge sense of shame and outrage and impatient with theater that claims to be political or to address global themes.

    I would love to read more about your experience with the workshop. There is a huge need for this kind of action.

  3. Michael says:

    Thanks Elizabeth.

    The only the thing that has stayed consistent about this website is the quote from The Empty Space at the bottom of the sidebar on the right. We can’t blame the clay if it isn’t used to good effect. Shakespeare, Brecht, Boal, off the top of my head all managed to impact the politic zeitgeist of their societies with theatre. If we’re bad at it we should just get better at it. It’s not impossible. 

    For more context on the Informing Content workshop you should totally check out this post by workshop leader Deborah Pearson:

    http://theafricatrilogy.wordpress.com/2010/06/08/informing-content/