Cosmopolitan, progressive city of Gdasnk is calling out to South African theatre
Earlier this week I travelled to Gdansk in Poland, where I met with festival organisers and theatre producers who would like to host South African theatre makers and other artists over the next few years.
These are exciting prospects indeed — although not without complications.
Walking through the old town in Gdansk, you might be tempted to make comparisons with other European cities that boast a combination of medieval history, contemporary urban creativity, streetside cafés, the quiet bustle of markets, the grandeur of arches and gables and towers and steeples (mostly reconstructed after the Second World War).
The image of bella Europa has gone in and out of fashion over the past few hundred years. It seemed a decidedly false notion during those lengthy spells when the nation states of Europe were tearing each other apart in the 19th and 20th centuries. It was resurgent following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the establishment of the EU. Many in the postcolonial global South are rightly sceptical about the “best” of Europe because we know the damage done by the “worst” of Europe — the two are intertwined.
As Walter Benjamin famously put it: “There is no document of civilisation that is not at the same time a document of barbarism” (imperial apologists tended to ignore European barbarism).
Nonetheless, as Europe has begun to change in its racial, religious and linguistic demographics, it has become easier for people from Africa and Asia to embrace the contradictions embedded in what George Steiner called “the idea of Europe”. The EU, for all its flaws, recognises this in promoting opportunity, human rights and equality. For precisely this reason, those who feel that Europe should be white and secular-Christian have developed a disliking for the EU.
You’ll hear economic arguments in discussions about rising anti-immigration, isolationist and nationalist sentiment in Europe, but this is not much different from specious attempts to explain Americans voting for Donald Trump in economic terms when it’s all too clearly about white fears of (and resentment towards) black, brown and “other” people.
Right-wing populist parties have come to power in Austria, Hungary and Italy. Poland could arguably be included. The governing Law and Justice Party is accused of “trafficking in xenophobia” and interfering with the judiciary.
President Andrzej Duda has invoked the spectre of a Brexitstyle referendum about the country’s EU status. The people of Poland are not impressed; according to polls (of Poles) over 80% want to remain in the EU. Their economy has expanded at a higher rate than that of any other member state since they joined in 2004.
If Poland’s economic boom is attributable to the EU, then so are its changing cityscapes. Large chunks of Polish cities like Gdansk are construction sites, replacing the vestiges of communist-era dilapidation.
And yet that is not the full story of Gdansk, which has cherished a measure of autonomy balanced by pan-European co-operation since it joined the Hanseatic League in the middle ages. Its position on the Baltic coast gave it obvious mercantile advantages, and even today it is an industrial riverside hub with a thriving harbour.
No wonder that this has implications for the city’s arts scene. At the magnificent Gdansk Shakespeare Theatre, I watched an Iranian production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream performed in Farsi with surtitles in Polish and English.
The fun and games of this perennial favourite took an unusual turn at the end as the gender-bending found in many of Shakespeare’s comedies was recruited to aim a teasing “up yours” at Iran’s homophobic laws. The audience applauded joyfully.
I’d previously wondered how South African performing and visual artists would be received in Gdansk. The answer, I can confidently affirm, is: with great enthusiasm.