Julian Mesri

I’ve started writing a new play. It’s still in the early stages, but right now it seems to be a polemic on theatre and its abuse of space. I’m curious to see where it takes me, but before I wrote it, this came out. It’s a preface to the work that I wrote to remind myself why I write – here it is:

Art and Injustice

preface to “the Occupation”

1

To write today is to write from a place of privilege. When the means of expression are themselves products of institutions that guarantee those means to individuals, any individual with that ability to do so – with the time, the energy, the education and the intention – does so from a privileged vantage point. To ignore this privilege, or worse, to act as if art erases it, is to participate in injustice.

2

When we write we address the world we imagine to be speaking to, but when we write words that are meant to be spoken, the world we speak to is not imagined, but very real, and the tired ears that are hearing our words, they are also real. And yet this is the real that is buried under our complex worlds that we fill with stories. We sit and are talked at rather than talked to. But the time for any kind of talking is running out.

3

Theatre is the art of public action. The “act” of theatre is not the collection of events in the text or the history of the world we create, but what we do to our audience at the moment of performance. It becomes a singular action that is subjected to a mass of individuals. Therefore there exits in every performance a historical before and after. Every performance is a history – and like history, it speaks to our world. It, like every event that occurs, is not exempt from social and political consequences – and must be held accountable just like any other event.

4

Just because art feels good and brings us closer to each other, does not mean it is not immune to injustice. If, from this place of privilege – from this luxury of reflection, we create work that mirrors back only that which edifies the very structures that allowed it to come to be, we are creating an action that sings over, rather than about, the injustices below us. Above all, arts’ residue is pleasure, and in a comfort society, pleasure itself is also a privilege.

5

If we do not stop ourselves mid-sentence, we risk re-composing the arias that brought us here. It is art’s duty to protect those it cannot speak for, by seeking to interrupt injustice by containing it within the work itself – even if that means destroying the standards of merit by which that work is judged in said society.We must allow injustice to occupy us. It is time to ruin our well-made chapels with well-aimed rocks.

6

I am bored of a bleeding heart that can only stain pity on our stages. I am sick of the camera that claims to speak for me when all it does is tell me what it thinks I am. We are in a strange age, where our voices are once again our own – but we must also work to hear these very voices over the din of compression and conformity. We have reached a point where neither institutions nor experts have the power to dictate dogmas. But we must turn back on ourselves and see that we have constructed ourselves just like an institution, and must turn our back to this too.

7

Art can be society’s whore or its saint. It can sing for the glories of oppression as well as it can for liberation. All it is is song, all it amounts to is  beauty if we do not turn it against itself and weaponize its capacity to seduce by risking ruination. To sing against oppression is not to sample the political, but embody the action of a revolutionary movement whose purpose is to destabilize an institution that perpetrates injustice. We must perpetrate this same action on our forms – on our language, and do so excellently.There is no exception, for Art will choose the side of its support mechanism if we do not force ourselves to turn it.

8

Let us try to forget our institutional dependencies and make work no matter what. Let us make forms from our refuse, and ruin our stories with the remnants of life that haunt every open and shut case. Our goal is not perfection or a mirror but a shard. A shard that catches reflections and light and draws blood from anyone who dares grasp it.

We must make our forms bleed, and ruin art to truly see the injustice in all of us.

- Julián