Can Art Transform Society?

Article by Andrew Todd, in conversation with Florentina Holzinger & Christiane Jatahy
The NXT Magazine: Transformations of Care

Theatre and film director Peter Brook was a noted revolutionary of the stage
from the 1950s onwards, railing against the Vietnam War in his polymorphous 1966 protest-spectacle US. Revolted by injustice and racism, he often became personally involved in conflicts, bothering police in communist Poland and – in pre-revolutionary Iran – engaging in a physical altercation with the head of the Shah’s army after his troops had molested Brook’s performers.

I was therefore very surprised to hear him – then well into old age – say the following:

–The mistake of 1960s theatre was to think that it could change the world.
Theatre is not a medium for transmitting ideas, for saying what you think, for convincing. Nobody knows Shakespeare’s opinions, and this is part of his greatness.

Had the great contrarian sold out? Or was he in tune with something deeper than when he was one of the leading minds of the 1960s countercultural rebellion? How does Brook’s 1997 statement resonate in our very difficult – and very negative – context?

I thought it could be worthwhile to ask seven of today’s leading creators – with a wide spread of age, from 39 to 87 – to reflect on this. What tools work best? Is there any way to monitor impact? Is there any point in doing anything? What are the effects of art on society at large and on the corpus producing it? I propose – by way of introduction to the subject – that we look at two of these seven protagonists who intersect with and distinguish themselves from each other in rich and interesting ways.

FLORENTINA HOLZINGER
Art is not therapy

Austrian director-performer Florentina Holzinger, 39 years old, is viewed by some as an enfant terrible of shocking, sexually explicit, self-harming horror theatre, emerging from the Berlin S+M underground and now stalking the main stages of big institutions around Europe (including the 2026 Venice Art Biennale, in which she will represent her home country). In person she is calm, thoughtful, precise, responsible, caring and manifestly admired by her troupe – who are also deliciously gentle, in contrast to the risk and harm they inflict on themselves and each other on a nightly basis in their work.

Her stagings are spectacular and vastly ambitious, taking on topics such as female-oriented aqueous mythology (Ophelia’s Got Talent) or Catholic imagery relating to women (SANCTA). She told me that “the purpose of my work is to deobjectify the female body” – something she and her troupe of regular performers do with polymorphous glee, celebrating differences in size, weight, age, skin colour and orientation in bacchanalian tableaux which have a peculiarly liberating and levelling effect. After hours of dreamlike scenes – naked women making love to a flying helicopter, violent sea creatures turning tanks of water red, a naked woman (Holzinger herself) suspended inside a real bronze bell, being used as the clapper – I found that I no longer noticed the nudity, certainly not in a prurient way, despite the tsunami of sexuality flooding the stage.

She has attracted the ire of religious figures for alleged blasphemy, and was – when we met in Paris in July this year – in an unfolding crisis relating to the censorship of her 2023 show about Ophelia. Rather than pushing societal boundaries outwards, she felt them closing in on her world.

–In Paris – of all places – we have to tiptoe around like motherfuckers. I’m not a statement person – I’m happy for the work to speak for itself – but it was important for me to tell the audience afterwards that it’s not the show we wanted to bring to them. It’s perverse – especially for the children in our cast, who the authorities thought they were trying to protect – that we normalise nudity in our work and then have to cover up whenever the kids came on stage. They are our kids and have done the show 95 times. Now they are wondering if there is something shameful or illicit about their mothers’ bodies.

Holzinger’s community of performers – including children, acrobats, circus performers, a small person and older performers, one with Parkinson’s disease – maintain agency and presence throughout the work, often confessing their own life stories. Biography and myth are mutually supportive, coming from “a stark need to locate the old stories, the myths, the canons within our own lives. This is what we owe an audience; we don’t do the repertoire for the sake of repertoire, we do it because it plays an important role in our lives right now – and we’re maybe not even aware of that.”

It is not a cathartic or therapeutic practice:

–I despise that. Art is not therapy, you should seek a medical professional if you need help. It’s not trauma release either. I’m not working with professional actresses or dramaturges; we’re sincere witnesses working from within society rather than from some judgmental, superior cultural ‘outside.’ Take the church: SANCTA is not conceived looking at Catholicism from the outside in, because it’s a strong part of the world, of our families, especially in Austria. We are taking control of familiar narratives where women have typically been treated as passive, and we’re drawing on what’s around us. One of my teachers from art school – who advised on the project – is very religious and trains priests how to perform Mass, how to bless people. It’s through him that we ended up with the holy robot holding candles and crosses and levitating the first lesbian Pope, because they were actually considering using industrial robots during COVID to perform Mass.

CHRISTIANE JATAHY
You can’t change a collective, but you can change an individual

Christiane Jatahy is a Brazilian director and actress almost a generation older than Holzinger (57). She is widely considered to be her country’s leading contemporary theatre creator. Frequently finding it – by her own account – “impossible” to work in Brazil, notably during Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency (2019-2023), her professional nomadism across the leading stages of the world is different from her European contemporaries in that it is not necessarily willed or frictionless: she is sometimes forced to relocate her base or just keep moving. Her work exists in a fluctuating, unstable, non-national interspace, and resonates deeply within these conditions, often proposing resistance and foregrounding marginalized narratives.

Curiously (and similarly to Holzinger), this marginalization is most often examined through timeworn classic texts and adaptations – Chekhov, Shakespeare and Homer have all proved recurring sources for her work – and she has adapted von Trier’s Dogville as a stage play (Entre Chien et Loup).

Live and recorded film is almost a constant in Jatahy’s work. The Odyssey, retitled as The Overflowing Present, takes place as much on screen as on stage, certain actor/characters constrained to the screen by dint of being actually stateless – exiles through war or politics, unable to tour with the show.

–The film is not fixed: I am on stage and editing live every night, and there is additional material we brought into the show as it evolved in dialogue with audiences from different places. Our work involves a being-with – first with the company in rehearsal, where the only rule I apply is for everyone to be fully present – and then with the audience, who bring their own experience and perspectives to the work. But you can’t change a collective, you can only change individuals. I was really touched when a group of young people approached me after the show in Brussels to explain that it had changed their views on immigrants. We don’t work as a collective – I take full responsibility for initiating the projects, for making final decisions – but we act collaboratively, a collaboration that often extends into the real world. Syrian actress Yara Katish got a Brazilian passport thanks to her work with the company, so her circumstances were positively transformed. And the Amazonian villagers we have often engaged with kept the film equipment we brought with us. They are starting to broadcast their own voice and make themselves heard, which delights me, as there is a danger as an artist that you go to a conflicted place and extract material the same way that we extract physical resources.

---

ANDREW TODD

FLORENTINA HOLZINGER

CHRISTIANE JATAHY