SoundingBoard – Cultivating diversity

When I founded The Big Picture Company seven years ago, it was with the burning desire to create theatre that was, frankly, big. Love, loss, immortality and the human condition were a powerful motive for artistic endeavour, as was the quest for a textured theatrical language arising from the dialogue between new writing, movement, music and film. Exploring or demonstrating the Asian ethnicity of those who created the work, was not. Questions from promoters and publicists about our "cultural identity" `were answered through gritted teeth.

Diversifying definitions

Nowadays, I am slightly more accepting of the company's place within a cultural diversity agenda. I recognise that in attempting to step out of the arena of cultural politics – which we saw as rife with damaging stereotypes and imprisoning categories – my colleagues and I were adopting a political position. The big picture we were asking people to see is that culturally diverse artists need mainstream opportunities and mainstream audiences need culturally diverse vocabularies. Why? Because in modern urban society, cultural boundaries are more fluid than they are in theatre. If society can readily accept that Asian children understand Shakespeare, and that white children can perform bharatanatyam, then a theatre audience will not only accept, but has a right to expect at least the same basic level of diversity. And, unsurprisingly, this is a picture that audiences have always seen without any difficulty.

The company has been most successful when programmers have focused their marketing on the content of the work and on its visual style. Conversely, we have often been tripped up by the cultural diversity agenda: the agenda that says Asian artists are supposed to create work for Asian audiences, or more specifically, particular Asian communities. While comments about the company such as 'they're not Asian enough' afford us the satisfaction that we are challenging stereotypes, it is disturbing when we come across these attitudes informing programming policies, as happened recently with a venue on our touring circuit.

The venue had attracted a good audience for our last production, TAJ, and the manager was keen to discuss future work. She was very excited that the venue was recruiting a cultural diversity officer and, as we would fall under the cultural diversity remit, this person would continue the conversation with us. The cultural diversity officer's approach, however, was to take a range of publicity material for various Asian companies to local community groups and ask which productions they would like to see. Naturally, they plumped for a Bollywood type show, and The Big Picture Company, despite its previous success at the venue with a mainstream audience, was out of a slot.

Clearly, this approach succeeds in getting Asian audiences into a theatre, (though whether it then follows that they will go to see other productions is doubtful.) Where it fails is in raising awareness, broadening horizons, expanding definitions and challenging stereotypes, all of which must surely be key objectives of any cultural diversity strategy if it is to have integrity and effectiveness.

Critiquing critics

Then there is the issue of the knowledge of those whose role is to critique productions with culturally diverse content, once these depart from familiar territory. Ironically, TAJ was a more "Asian" production than our previous work, as it explored contrasting strands of Islamic philosophy as a metaphor for the dilemma of action versus inaction in modern times. However, it drew on areas of literature and culture that proved not to be within a common frame of reference.

Although press reviews for the production were overwhelmingly positive, they mostly missed the wider context of the piece: only two writers seemed to have been at all aware of the Islamic philosophy theme, and while most made mention of the classical style of the text, none observed that it had been interwoven with quotations from the sufi poet, Jalaluddin Rumi. Needless to say, this would not have been the case had it been peppered with Shakespearean references. This was disappointing, not only because of the inadequate representation of the work to potential programmers and audiences, but because when creating work that broadens the scope of culturally diverse theatre, one hopes that the press will provide a forum where the issues can be taken up and debated.

Insufficient cultural knowledge becomes more problematic when it causes the analyser to misconstrue his difficulty as being a lack of cultural relevance in the work. One funding assessor wrote of TAJ 'it won't do much for Bangladeshi waiters at the Mumtaz restaurant in Bolton, because it is too intellectual and far too liberal.' In the context of the debate about the artistic quality of culturally diverse work, it is disturbing that the adjectives 'intellectual' and 'liberal' should be used so negatively, particularly without any reference to the actual audience reaction. As this judgement seems to have been made by someone who cares about the race agenda, it is even more disturbing that his/her perception of Bangladeshi waiters is that they may neither be intellectual nor liberal: the modern Muslim stereotype. It is most disturbing that such comments should be fed back to the Company as legitimate evaluation of the work.

Breaking boundaries

Our experience of the cultural diversity agenda is that it is able to support Asian artists as long as they are Asian in a way that it recognises. Limited resources and the pressure to deliver short-term solutions simply result in another crude system of categorisation and the sacrifice of the sophisticated dialogue necessary for more informed approaches. As a company pushing the boundaries of practice, we enjoy the tension between our work and its perception as a force that advances debate and, hopefully, change. At the same time, the belief we started with, that it is possible to step beyond culture into a world where the work speaks for itself, persists. And is borne out by the success of our productions with those audiences and programmers who approach them with expectations, not of culture, but of theatre that will be moving, thought-provoking and expressive of our collective experience as humanity.

Uzma Hameed is Artistic Director of The Big Picture Company and Associate Director at Derby Playhouse.