Some Reflections on our Politics

Caption: Manal is sitting among an audience she is smiling and pointing towards the front.

Written by Manal Younus

I first began acting with ActNow on the Responding to Racism project in 2014. I was 19 and eager to explore this fusion of storytelling and interactive education. I was part of the team, along with the then Director Edwin Kemp Atrill, and actors Nicole Orr, David Andre and Lochy Maybury. The work was devised with the intention of creating a forum theatre piece that would prompt by-standers, the audience, to speak up. Because racism stops with them. 

In 2016, after 3 years of touring with the work, I decided I would no longer be involved. That year was particularly turbulent for me, with a number of experiences where I was silenced or personally attacked in rooms full of white people trying to end racism. These experiences were having a big impact on me and the evolution of my politics. I found that I had more opinions and more to say but I hadn’t yet learned how to speak about these opinions in a way that would make people listen. I needed the space and the freedom to work it out without constantly having the same message, the same process and the same violence shoved in my face. 

Educating requires stagnation in a sense. It requires repetition, a constant return to the things that you know to be true and sharing with others over and over again as though it is new.  But when you and your experience is the subject of the education, it isn’t always a healthy place to revisit over and over again. It begins to consume your personal space and time to grow as an artist or as a person. 

This is a common phenomenon amongst artists from marginalised backgrounds, particularly those of us who feel we have a responsibility to people from our respective communities. When our resident artists come in with an incredible idea of how they want to use their time and money to uplift their whole community, we let them know that it’s an incredible idea but that they don’t have to do it. We let them know that they can be selfish and use this opportunity to create their own art, as an individual not as an ambassador AND that their success as an individual is a success for their community. 

It is so important for us at ActNow to try to alleviate those burdens. We aspire to be an umbrella that covers our communities from the torrential racism and homophobia outside our office and provide another opportunity for them to just be artists.  

…Except when we don’t. 

Our Cognitive Dissonance 

As an organisation, this is a source of cognitive dissonance — as medically diagnosed by yours truly. You see, the Responding to Racism (R2R) program was initially part of the Racism it Stops with Me campaign and it was created to educate white people about what racism is and to provide them with tools to speak up and make changes around them. Overtime, particularly with the number of people of colour in audiences increasing and as different facilitators like the current Artistic Director Yasmin Gurreeboo have influenced the program, the facilitation has evolved to be more conscious and inclusive of people of colour who may be present. But the fact is, it’s still about the white people in the room and it causes a lot of harm to the actors of colour who are in the show.

Performing in R2R is often the first experience that an actor has of working with us. For these actors, it’s almost a trial by fire before they move on to our other programs or into the arts. Some of them have experiences similar to my own.They are excited by the program at first and feel empowered, but after a while they realise they and their character have no power, they become tired, they step down from the role and sometimes take a step away from ActNow. 

Suddenly we’re looking for another First Nations actor to accept being called names, having stereotypes placed all without defending themselves. Why? To teach white people how to act. We’ll find ourselves holding audition after audition to find another hijab wearing Muslim woman who’s confident enough to act in front of a crowd, and we ask her to be the opposite of what she is, vulnerable and submissive. Why? To teach white people how to act. 

The worst part is, the people in our organisation who are mostly from marginalised communities ourselves, we see it. We do our best to curb it and to support our artists. We have frameworks in place to deal with racism during shows and we try to ensure that we have enough actors so that people can take breaks as they need to. And we continue. We continue because it actually helps to create change. We continue because it empowers conversation. We continue to sacrifice the wellbeing of ourselves, our actors and other people of colour, like many have for generations, so that the wider community can learn humanity, decency and to decentralise themselves and their own experiences. 

While R2R is a fantastic and effective program, we’re creating less work like this. In our most recent Theatre in Education piece, Jumu’ah, we focused on centering the stories of people of colour. The work was written by Lur Alghurabi and myself and we decided that we don’t want the play to be about victimhood and saviours, but rather about honest stories that explore the diversity of the Muslim communities. It’s a play where the characters have agency over what they do and the consequences faced and it was written with Muslim and POC audiences front of mind. While this program is still not perfect and does not have the same sort of interactivity as R2R - perhaps it is a step closer to where we need to be with our politics. 

Our work moving forward will look more at how we make space for artists from our communities to share the stories that they want to. To create stories that are not about speaking to white people or raising awareness to the powers that be, but rather, shift the focus, change the audience, change the centre. Afterall, margins are just about perspective.

Manal Younus is an Associate Director at ActNow Theatre.