Censorship enslaves our minds
Re: ‘Direct blow to artistic freedom;’ director slams jazz festival, July 7
Pity theatre innovator Robert Lepage for artistically thinking that creative freedom would produce such delights and instructions on stage that it might reveal the history of slavery in a new musical way and thereby teach us to never let its human horror happen again. Unfortunately no such luck with such artistic ambition. The unsophisticated understanding of certain minds that only representation mirroring the demographics of the original sources is proper stagecraft has cancelled the show. Thus the triumph of ignorant literalism of the few has once again ruined the artist’s democratic freedom of expression to educate the imagination for the rest of us. Now we will not experience a new creative probe of the suffering of slaves and how they used their original art of song to cope and transcend their pain.
This missed theatrical opportunity of SLAV is a serious cultural mistake. Critics silencing the past words of slaves in any human mouth currently willing to sing their plaintive cries of resistance is a betrayal of their indomitable spirit. Surely singing their songs today is more valuable culturally than who gets to sing them. Socially — through identification with the art — we are able to transcend our demographic limits. That is a public good art bestows on us.
Tragically, irony best defines the enslavement of our minds that censorship inflicts on our democracy. Actually slaves used musical art to defeat their oppressor’s cruel bondage. But now ironically self-identifying champions of the slaves’ history censor artists using their talent freely to show solidarity with the victims of slavery. Moreover, instead of being appreciated, original artists are openly smeared as racist exploiters. Such is the ironic tragedy censorship produces, which turns good intentions into bad outcomes. After all, art educates through identification with its subject. Instead, censorship deprives the audience of the knowledge it could use to identify with the victims of slavery. Hence the use of censorship by anyone is self-destructive to their social interests because it halts moral progress and society suffers.
Lest we forget, slavery is a crime against us all. All, no matter our demographics, should sing the old songs to protest its injustice. Otherwise the enslavement of our ideas in mind and body will continue as in the past. Tony D’Andrea, Toronto Robert Lepage is dead on when he castigates the Montreal Jazz Festival for a “direct blow to artistic freedom.” He points out, rightly, that “theatre has been based on a very simple principle, that of playing someone else.”
Lepage is a gifted, colour-blind director — witness his scintillating production of Coriolanus at Stratford, with the exciting African-Canadian actor André Sills as the Roman general.
A black actor can step into the shoes of a white Roman general, and a white singer can step into the shoes of a black slave. That’s theatre. Marjorie Gann, Toronto