Immigrant, ethnic minority, asylum-seeker – slivers of insinuation separate the meanings of each term in contemporary Britain. Ethnic minority, black and Asian, cultural diversity – clouds of obfuscation have distinguished contemporary arts in Britain over the past 30 years.
That I draw an analogy between socio-political and artistic terminology is not incidental: socio-political concerns have determined arts-funding policy for the past three decades. Ever since, in fact, the publication of Naseem Khan’s seminal report for the Arts Council in 1976, ‘The Arts Britain Ignores’. This year sees the launch of yet another arts initiative, designed to heap attention on ‘culturally diverse’ arts, aptly titled ‘decibel’ (noise). Why do we need a showcase of ethnic arts? And what noise is decibel really making?
In the same year Naseem Khan’s report was published, the writer Amrit Wilson published her compilation of Asian women’s stories – Finding A Voice. It seems we ethnics are still deemed to be in need of finding a public voice. Hence the decibel showcase, where Arts Council England aims to draw the attention of producers nationally and internationally to work they have hitherto ignored. This despite ‘ethnic’ artists of the first rank making noises in almost every category of contemporary arts, from Anish Kapoor to Ben Okri, Akram Khan to Chewitel Ejiofor, Shobana Jeyasingh to Zadie Smith.
‘Access’ and ‘opportunity’ are the current buzzwords, their roots lying in the best of British liberal sentiments. It is laudable for any society that considers itself civilised to seek to promote an equality of opportunity for all its citizens. But when the wheel is having to be reinvented every 10 years or so, it is time to question the wheel.
In 1976, it was Naseem Khan’s report that drew attention to the arts Britain ignored. In 1983, the Arts Council sought, through its ‘Glory of the Garden’ policy, to enforce a minimum representation of ethnic arts in the arts-infrastructure of the country. In the mid-1990s, the Arts Council adopted the promotion of cultural diversity as a central part of its mission statement. In 2002, the Arts Council’s Eclipse Report aimed to change the institutionally racist face of British theatre.
Significantly, every liberal political measure undertaken so far to correct injustices – the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry into institutional racism being only the most recent – has proven ineffectual. Racism is not an intellectual failure that can be corrected by a greater dose of education. It is a moral value, however much one may abhor such a morality. It is an imaginative construct and so the engineers of the imagination – artists – find themselves in the frontline, their weapons being the pen or the hand or the body or the voice.
But when these troops are divided by ethnicity, it makes the prospect of victory ever dimmer. Just as we forget that Black Africans, Caribbeans and Americans, Indians, Chinese, Afghans and other ‘ethnics’ fought alongside the Allies in two world wars, so by institutionalising ethnic divisions we are prone to forget that in contemporary British arts there is an ever-present ‘ethnicity’ – and forgetting is tantamount to devaluing.
What, if any, is the artistic significance of Bombay Dreams as a West End musical? Is its ability to attract an Asian audience into the West End an artistic value? Is, conversely, Jerry Springer – The Opera anything more than a ‘pakora’ musical: say ‘cunt’ and ‘fuck’ enough times and you’re guaranteed to draw in a youthful audience in droves (mirroring what goes on in the Asian comedy scene, where the mention of ‘pakora’ is a sure-fire route to cracking-up the audience).
A national theatre critic once admitted to me that he came to review our shows not because of the particular play we were producing but because it was ethnic and needed to be brought to wider attention. That was in 1989. Has much changed since then? And will showcasing culturally diverse work – as the decibel initiative purports to do – help that critic to drop his ethnic lens? I very much doubt it.
Of equal concern, however, is how the critic judges: how to evaluate ‘other’ arts. And this is a real challenge. How does one judge, for example, the ‘fusion’ dance of Akram Khan, drawing as much on classical Kathak as it does on contemporary dance vocabularies? This I take to be the artistic value of ‘cultural diversity’ – challenging our preconceptions, our imaginations.
But when a corral is created around cultural diversity we are being fed, and we help sustain, difference; rather than be confronted to explore connections. Merely beating the drum of culturally diverse arts – as decibel seeks to do – will only help to marginalise these artists within the confines of ‘identity’. Identity need not be immutable; it can be in dialogue with other identities. It is only then that we can all participate in the quality of the artistic experience.
The contradictions in arts policies were brought home to me at the recent Asian Women’s Achievement Awards. The title, of course, is very ghetto. But Cherie Blair and other leading New Labour women were there to endorse it – as an instance of the multicultural reality of Britain today. Surely a multicultural, integrated society would honour women’s achievements, or even just achievements. So are we in reality talking multi-culture or separate-cultures?
We in the arts world have become so dominated by marketing gurus – and their dogma of ‘niche marketing’ – that we forget that if I don’t see you in me and if you can’t see me in you we might as well dispense with the abiding hope of the arts: to connect one human being with another. This fetishisation of marketing makes the good ship Arts scythe through the waves of humanism and, like Moses, we stand before a divided sea.
© 2003