Art that transforms cities into playgrounds of the imagination Helen Marriage
We live in a world
increasingly tyrannized by the screen,
by our phones, by our tablets,
by our televisions and our computers.
We can have any experience that we want,
but feel nothing.
We can have as many friends as we want,
but have nobody to shake hands with.
I want to take you
to a different kind of world,
the world of the imagination,
where, using this most powerful
tool that we have,
we can transform both
our physical surroundings,
but in doing so, we can change
forever how we feel
and how we feel about the people
that we share the planet with.
My company, Artichoke,
which I cofounded in 2006,
was set up to create moments.
We all have moments in our lives,
and when we’re on our deathbeds,
we’re not going to remember
the daily commute to work
on the number 38 bus
or our struggle to find a parking space
every day when we go to the shop.
We’re going to remember those moments
when our kid took their first step
or when we got picked
for the football team
or when we fell in love.
So Artichoke exists to create
moving, ephemeral moments
that transform the physical world
using the imagination of the artist
to show us what is possible.
We create beauty amongst ruins.
We reexamine our history.
We create moments to which
everyone is invited,
either to witness or to take part.
It all started for me
way back in the 1990s,
when I was appointed as festival director
in the tiny British city of Salisbury.
You’ll probably have heard of it.
Here’s the Salisbury Cathedral,
and here’s the nearby Stonehenge Monument,
which is world-famous.
Salisbury is a city that’s been dominated
for hundreds of years by the Church,
the Conservative Party
and the army.
It’s a place where people
really love to observe the rules.
So picture me on my first
year in the city,
cycling the wrong way
down a one-way street, late.
I’m always late.
It’s a wonder I’ve even turned up today.
(Laughter)
A little old lady on the sidewalk
helpfully shouted at me,
“My dear, you’re going the wrong way!”
Charmingly – I thought –
I said, “Yeah, I know.”
“I hope you die!” she screamed.
(Laughter)
And I realized that this was a place
where I was in trouble.
And yet, a year later,
persuasion, negotiation –
everything I could deploy –
saw me producing the work.
Not a classical concert in a church
or a poetry reading,
but the work of a French
street theater company
who were telling the story of Faust,
“Mephistomania,” on stilts,
complete with handheld pyrotechnics.
The day after, the same little old lady
stopped me in the street and said,
“Were you responsible for last night?”
I backed away.
(Laughter)
“Yes.”
“When I heard about it,” she said,
“I knew it wasn’t for me.
But Helen, my dear, it was.”
So what had happened?
Curiosity had triumphed over suspicion,
and delight had banished anxiety.
So I wondered how one could transfer
these ideas to a larger stage
and started on a journey
to do the same kind of thing to London.
Imagine: it’s a world city.
Like all our cities, it’s dedicated
to toil, trade and traffic.
It’s a machine to get you
to work on time and back,
and we’re all complicit in wanting
the routines to be fixed
and for everybody to be able to know
what’s going to happen next.
And yet, what if this amazing city
could be turned into a stage,
a platform for something so unimaginable
that would somehow
transform people’s lives?
We do these things often in Britain.
I’m sure you do them wherever you’re from.
Here’s Horse Guards Parade.
And here’s something that we do often.
It’s always about winning things.
It’s about the marathon or winning a war
or a triumphant cricket team coming home.
We close the streets. Everybody claps.
But for theater? Not possible.
Except a story told by a French company:
a saga about a little girl
and a giant elephant
that came to visit
for four days.
And all I had to do was persuade
the public authorities
that shutting the city for four days
was something completely normal.
(Laughter)
No traffic, just people
enjoying themselves,
coming out to marvel and witness
this extraordinary artistic endeavor
by the French theater
company Royal de Luxe.
It was a seven-year journey,
with me saying to a group of men –
almost always men – sitting in a room,
“Eh, it’s like a fairy story with
a little girl and this giant elephant,
and they come to town for four days
and everybody gets
to come and watch and play.”
And they would go,
“Why would we do this?
Is it for something?
Is it celebrating a presidential visit?
Is it the Entente Cordiale
between France and England?
Is it for charity?
Are you trying to raise money?”
And I’d say,
“None of these things.”
And they’d say, “Why would we do this?”
But after four years, this magic trick,
this extraordinary thing happened.
I was sitting in the same meeting
I’d been to for four years,
saying, “Please, please, may I?”
Instead of which, I didn’t say, “Please.”
I said, “This thing that we’ve
been talking about for such a long time,
it’s happening on these dates,
and I really need you to help me.”
This magic thing happened.
Everybody in the room somehow decided
that somebody else had said yes.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
They decided that they were not
being asked to take responsibility,
or maybe the bus planning manager
was being asked to take responsibility
for planning the bus diversions,
and the council officer
was being asked to close the roads,
and the transport for London people were
being asked to sort out the Underground.
All these people were only being asked
to do the thing that they could do
that would help us.
Nobody was being asked
to take responsibility.
And I, in my innocence, thought,
“Well, I’ll take responsibility,”
for what turned out to be
a million people on the street.
It was our first show.
(Applause)
It was our first show, and it changed
the nature of the appreciation of culture,
not in a gallery, not in a theater,
not in an opera house,
but live and on the streets,
transforming public space
for the broadest possible audience,
people who would never
buy a ticket to see anything.
So there we were.
We’d finished, and we’ve continued
to produce work of this kind.
As you can see, the company’s
work is astonishing,
but what’s also astonishing is the fact
that permission was granted.
And you don’t see any security.
And this was nine months
after terrible terrorist bombings
that had ripped London apart.
So I began to wonder
whether it was possible
to do this kind of stuff
in even more complicated circumstances.
We turned our attention
to Northern Ireland,
the North of Ireland,
depending on your point of view.
This is a map of England,
Scotland, Wales and Ireland,
the island to the left.
For generations,
it’s been a place of conflict,
the largely Catholic republic in the south
and the largely Protestant
loyalist community –
hundreds of years of conflict,
British troops on the streets
for over 30 years.
And now, although
there is a peace process,
this is today in this city, called
Londonderry if you’re a loyalist,
called Derry if you’re a Catholic.
But everybody calls it home.
And I began to wonder
whether there was a way in which
the community tribalism could be addressed
through art and the imagination.
This is what the communities do,
every summer, each community.
This is a bonfire filled
with effigies and insignia
from the people that they hate
on the other side.
This is the same
from the loyalist community.
And every summer, they burn them.
They’re right in the center of town.
So we turned to here,
to the Nevada desert, to Burning Man,
where people also do bonfires,
but with a completely
different set of values.
Here you see the work of David Best
and his extraordinary temples,
which are built during
the Burning Man event
and then incinerated on the Sunday.
So we invited him
and his community to come,
and we recruited from both sides
of the political and religious divide:
young people, unemployed people,
people who would never
normally come across each other
or speak to each other.
And out of their extraordinary
work rose a temple
to rival the two cathedrals
that exist in the town,
one Catholic and one Protestant.
But this was a temple to no religion,
for everyone,
for no community, but for everyone.
And we put it in this place
where everyone told me nobody would come.
It was too dangerous.
It sat between two communities.
I just kept saying,
“But it’s got such a great view.”
(Laughter)
And again, that same old question:
Why wouldn’t we do this?
What you see in the picture
is the beginning of 426
primary school children
who were walked up the hill
by the head teacher,
who didn’t want them
to lose this opportunity.
And just as happens in the Nevada desert,
though in slightly different temperatures,
the people of this community,
65,000 of them,
turned out to write their grief,
their pain, their hope,
their hopes for the future,
their love.
Because in the end,
this is only about love.
They live in a post-conflict society:
lots of post-traumatic stress,
high suicide.
And yet, for this brief moment –
and it would be ridiculous to assume
that it was more than that –
somebody like Kevin – a Catholic
whose father was shot when he was nine,
upstairs in bed –
Kevin came to work as a volunteer.
And he was the first person to embrace
the elderly Protestant lady
who came through the door on the day
we opened the temple to the public.
It rose up. It sat there for five days.
And then we chose – from our little tiny
band of nonsectarian builders,
who had given us their lives
for this period of months
to make this extraordinary thing –
we chose from them the people
who would incinerate it.
And here you see the moment when,
witnessed by 15,000 people who turned out
on a dark, cold, March evening,
the moment when they decided
to put their enmity behind them,
to inhabit this shared space,
where everybody had an opportunity
to say the things that had been unsayable,
to say out loud,
“You hurt me and my family,
but I forgive you.”
And together, they watched
as members of their community let go
of this thing that was so beautiful,
but was as hard to let go of
as those thoughts and feelings
that had gone into making it.
(Music)
Thank you.
(Applause)