American theatre critic Martha W Coigney spoke to Yasmine El-Rashidi about theatre and peace When Martha W Coigney was awarded the UNESCO Picasso Medal in 1995, speaker André- Louis Perinetti, secretary-general of the International Theatre Institute, described her as a sailor. "She has unfailingly steered that course of understanding others, those who are different from ourselves," he said, "remaining ever responsive to the imperious need to keep up exchange, whatever currents or storms might arise." The statement is more apt than ever. Once again, amid the global upheaval and regional discontent at anything "US", Coigney was invited back to Egypt for the pre-selection of international works submitted to the 16th Cairo International Festival of Experimental Theatre (CIFET), which closed last week. "One of the reasons I keep getting invited back here is because it's so evident I love the event and I love what it represents," Coigney announces. "In this day and age -- the event is now 16 years old -- it's been one of the meanest periods of international communication since the early 1970s, so CIFET's existence here is paramount because it brings work together from nearly 50 countries each year and some of it is extraordinary and some of it isn't, but the fact that it gets here, and the fact that people get to see each other through what they do on stage -- it's an extraordinary gift to a world that is otherwise pretty fractured and pretty hateful and paranoid and ignorant." Coigney is president of the International Theatre Institute (ITI) in New York City, an organisation created to bring theatre-related people from different parts of the world together, be they performers or funders. "I got into international work, and theatre work, because it captured my imagination," she recalls. "I went to a school that had one of the few theatre departments in America back then, 50 years ago, Vassar College. So I fell in there and it really marked my life, not in a flash of brilliant light or anything, but it was something I did well and something that attracted me because no matter what you learn you can use it if you're in theatre. And 10 years after starting work I joined ITI and it added another dimension to my idea of what I wanted to do; I just didn't know it before then!" It is this idea of working in theatre as a mode of engaging with the world that has propelled Coigney to the place she holds today -- a peace activist whose efforts have been globally celebrated. "Where else can you meet a parade of extraordinary people that always change?" she asks. "The fact that people get to see each other through what they do on stage," she says, shaking her head, pointing out the seductiveness of what she does. "Also theatre really does convey knowledge about a culture, it just comes and does its thing and that's what theatre wants to be known as" -- a gesture of opening the self to the other through the stage, something Coigney believes will, in its own subtle way, play a pivotal role in the world's quest for peace and understanding. "When I started coming here I had never seen an Arab play, I had never seen work from an Arab country, or anywhere in the region," she explains. "And it really should be seen, because some of it is quite brilliant and will undoubtedly change perceptions of people in America and around the world. On every level Americans don't realise the depth, and the growth as well, that's happening here. When I was here the first time eight years ago to be on the festival jury, the work from Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt and Lebanon was highly competitive and very much a part of the strength of the festival at the time. But in the last four seasons, what has really emerged is work from otherwise silent regional partners: Bahrain and Qatar and Saudi Arabia -- countries where theatre is 15 minutes old in some ways, because it wasn't allowed for so many years and wasn't done except as a household diversion. But suddenly people like Soleiman Al-Bassem found their voices, and they've since developed a theatre vocabulary that's quite vibrant and strong. That has been exciting, to see this new community standing up and yelling at you. It's wonderful." Coigney is animated in her speech and enthusiastic in her intonation. "The possibility of seeing people get together through the art of theatre, well," she says, "it saves lives. Because the minute you know another culture through its art, or particularly through theatre, which is that part of its culture that talks, you know what that culture loves and what it hates." But she's realistic. "Through the Cold War ITI was immensely blessed because it really became an instrument of communication between governments that would've been impossible without it, and it was because they ignored this stupid little theatre organisation which didn't have any power and couldn't change somebody's politics, but we could get the Poles out during Marshall law and we could get the Soviets out when nobody else was allowing them to come out. It's silly: one at a time things like that seem small, but it really wasn't, because it was this kind of communication that couldn't be stopped." It's a communication whose impact and reach have yet to be fully appreciated as it repeatedly encounters political obstacles. "I don't think enough people are recognising the power of communication through the performing arts. I think the artists who experience it gain enormous strength from it. I know that, as Americans, we are known as profound isolationists. And it's mainly through ignorance, and the fact that the distances within our country are so great that why bother getting out of it because you can go 4,000 miles and still be in the US. But intellectually and emotionally we really are quite hesitant to go much further out than our own borders, partly because we were thrown out of most of the countries in the world on the way to the US, so we didn't get there in the right state of mind, we mostly got there because we were saving our behinds! "So it's a country that in a sense was populated by quite angry people and dispossessed people, and that I think has affected the way we view the rest of the world, whether it's the old countries or the new countries -- we don't have much trust, historically speaking. And when we get a leader who plays on this insecurity and paranoia, then it makes us stupid in relation to the rest of the world. I think we're still a force for good, but we skew it around and make it punishing to people we're supposed to help." This internal isolation is not simply defined by the borders of the United States, but equally by the boundaries of the states within. "I think a lot of Americans know their town, and maybe their region, but that's where it ends." And it is here, in this paranoid culture and its imperial role in dictating the affairs of the world, that theatre comes into play. "Artists don't have that kind of geographic limitation," she says. "I think they need to break all of the barriers and meet each other, because theatre people are trained to express what's going on and to express the human dimension in any society and if you get that, it's harder to kill people if you know them. You can know them and hate them but it's harder to do away with them if you know them and know their history." Yet history must be looked at in depth, if the world is to use the stage as a platform for peace. "An African American on the panel yesterday was talking about African American playwrights who came along in last 40 years," she says, referring to CIFET's fringe activities. "And he said, 'America as a country is allergic to history, we all came and had a good time provided we dropped our history from the old country. We came as sort of virgin territory -- very dangerous. If we don't recognise a history because we don't have a long one, if we don't begin to delve into what history means for us then it's no wonder we treat the Middle East in the way that we do, because we don't acknowledge that Palestine and Israel have had a terrible time probably since the Crusades if not shortly thereafter. We don't get it, we don't understand why they're making trouble because we don't acknowledge that they've been there for a long time, and the trouble started centuries ago'." Through the partnering of groups from around the world, Coigney hopes to tackle this very shortcoming, facilitating exchange. "Events such as this one are crucial, they open the countries of the world up to each other. Theatre in this day and age is more important than ever because it connects human experience, and sometimes and most blessedly it connects it with laughter because that finally is the greatest strength of theatre -- its ability to make us laugh," she says, elaborating on her vocation. "I come here as part of a committee of three and we screen 60 to 70 tapes a week. Not to decide quality since you can't tell good theatre by video alone, but it's to try and find through the video some indication that the work is experimental, and that could mean simply that it's a first -- experimental because they've never done theatre before. And when you get to older theatre cultures, you can see if it's conventional and well done but there's nothing new there." At times what is new is simply the discourse. "I'm finding works are beginning to become more political, but much more so from the European works. The regional turmoil is not really reflected in works from the area because there's a time lapse between when people get angry and when it's written about. In the last couple of years, work coming out of newer theatres in the Arab world included parodies and satire elements against the US, and there were some really angry voices," Coigney shares. "Which is absolutely marvelous because that's really when a culture finds its voice, when they get angry on stage. It's what the stage is for."
