It's somewhat disconcerting for an interviewer to be told that their subject is taping their conversation, because he and many of the people featured in his work have received death threats owing to what they have said, or been accused of saying.
Lloyd Newson, artistic director of DV8, was inspired to create performance piece Can We Talk About This? after a dinner party, where he spoke to his left-leaning friends about his then current project To Be Straight With You.
“I was looking at the three Abrahamic religions in terms of their attitude to homosexuality,” he says.
“There was a survey in 2009 with the Centre For Muslim Studies and [pollsters] Gallup across 500 British Muslims, which asked whether they thought homosexuality was acceptable. Zero per cent said they did.
“When they asked non-Muslims, 58% said it was.”
When he tried to raise the point, he was surprised by his friends’ reactions.
“Everyone was agreeing how terrible the Catholic Church was towards homosexuals and the child sex accusations,” he says. “But when I raised these statistics their response was, ‘Don’t be Islamophobic.’ “They were happy to criticise other religions, so why this reticence to avoid Islam? That is why I wanted to make the work – I felt it was being suppressed in left-leaning circles by people who I felt were feminists and liberals.”
Can We Talk About This? researched people involved on both sides of major news stories concerning issues of multi-culturalism, Islamism and freedom of speech between 1985 and 2011.
Included is the controversy surrounding Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, the sacking of Bradford headteacher Ray Honeyford in 1985 due to articles he wrote about the failures of state multiculturalism, and the fallout from the infamous Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed.
Among the contributors are Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a former Muslim and member of the Dutch Parliament, whowrote the 11-minute film Submission with director Theo Van Gogh about abuse of Muslim women apparently sanctioned by verses in the Koran. She has since received death threats over its content,while VanGogh was publicly murdered by an offended Islamist.
There are also contributions from Maryam Namazie, the director of One Law For All, which fights for the rights of women and against Sharia law’s introduction in Britain; Jasvinder Sanghera, who runs Karma Nirvana, an Asian women’s centre campaigning against honour-based abuse and forced marriage; and lecturer Usama Hasan, who received death threats after suggesting Darwin’s theory of evolution was compatible with the Koran.
But Newson has ensured both sides of the debate are heard – interviewing Islamist activist Mizanur Rahman, who was jailed for six years for inciting violence as he protested against the Danish cartoons, and Ishtiaq Ahmed, the former general secretary of the Bradford Council of Mosques, who facilitated the burning of The Satanic Verses in the city.
“The work isn’t concerned about what you can’t say about Islam,” says Newson. “It’s concerned with freedom of expression.
“We use an extract from an existing interview with Anjem Choudary [spokesman for Islam4UK] asking why he and other Islamists [were] not being allowed to demonstrate during the homecoming parades at Wootton Bassett.”
Newson is an advocate of freedom of speech but believes a line should be drawn when it advocates violence against others.
“If there’s an Islamist who says homosexuals should be executed, then should he be coming into this country? That’s crossing the line.”
The show is based around excerpts from interviews about all these subjects.
“I recorded the interview’s salient points and gave them to my performers to listen to on headphones,” he says.
“I asked them to listen to the words, repeat them and improvise.”
The process went on for five and a half months, as the company built up movements in relation to the text. “You have to make sure the movement and text support each other,” says Newson. “I wasn’t interested in dancers who pretend they are mute – as soon as a rehearsal finishes they communicate with each other. I wanted a truthful form of theatre. It would be difficult and unsatisfactory to do this piece without using words.
“With freedom of speech it is important we have those opinions and debates and hopefully, through ridicule and intelligent debate, the best ideas will survive.
“It’s to be expected that people will have strong opinions about this piece – and if they didn’t, then we would have failed.
Corn Exchange, Church Street, Brighton, Thursday, May 24, to Saturday, May 26
Starts 8pm, with 2.30pm matinee on Sat, tickets from £17.50. Call 01273 709709.
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