Битеф
inseparable from life, like the violent theatre these gentle artist make. ■ January 1994. John Berger
THE EART SHOWS UP THOSE OF VALUE AND THOSE WHO ARE GOOD FOR NOTHING Nobody can reasonably argue for the preservation and maintenance of the traditional peasant way of life. To do so is to argue that peasants should continue to be exploited, and that they should lead lives in which the burden of physicial work is often devastating and always oppressive. Yet to dismiss peasant experience as belonging only to the past, to maintain that peasant experience is marginal to civilisation, is to deny the value of too much history and too many lives. The remarkable continuity of peasant experience and the peasant world, acquires, as it is threatened with extinction, an unprecedented and unexpected urgency. It is not only the future of peasants which is now involved in this continuity. The forces which in most parts of the world are today eliminating or destroying peasantry, represent the contradiciton of most of the hopes once contained in the principle of historical progress. Productivity is not reducing scarcity. The dissemination of knowledge is not leading unequivocally to greater democracy. The advent of leisure - in the industrialized societies - has not brought personal fulfilment but greater mass manipulation. The economic and military unification of the world has not brought peace but genocide. The peasant suspicion of progrès«, as it has finally been imposed by the global history of global capitalism and the power of this history even over those seeking an alternative to it, is not altogether misplaced or groundless. ■ Historical afterword from Pig Earth by John Berger
WHEN I WAS SIX death wouldn’t have me... I fell août of the loft onto a threshing floor hard as cement. To my sisters who picked me up and my father who looked on helpless, I was as good as dead... That was the day my father was getting ready to fetch the commune’s bull from Maruienne... >lf she dies<, my father said >go ask the carpenter to make a coffin, and we’ll bury her when get back«. My father was not a heartless man; he was good, generous, and charitable. Of his six children, I was the favourite, but in those days our mountain
peasants led such harsh, wretched lives that death could hardly move them; and besides the village depended on the commune’s bull for its existence. In that light, a child’s death didn’t amount to much. ■ Abridged from A Wild Herb Soup - The Life of a French Countrywoman by Emile Carles as told to Robert Destanque, Victor Gollancz
THE PEASANTRY consists of small agricultural producers who with the help of simple equipment and the labour of the families produce mainly for their own consumption and for the fidfilm eut of obligations to the holders of political and economic power. ■ Peasants and Peasant Societies, Theodor Shanin
COLLUSION BETWEEN CELEBRANTS Theatre de Complicité is one of three intimate touring group which quietly revolutionised British theatre and rendered it less insular during the course of the 1980 s (the others are Shared Experience and Cheek by Jowl). Complicité’s influence has been memorable in impact, spreading from their own brilliant but almost literally indescribable shows into productions at the Old Vic, English National Opera, the West End and the Royal National Theatre. They are zealots and preach what they practise. They have worked with actors, directors, designers, peasants and children, and could no doubt make theatre with critics, audiences, programme-sellers and car-park attendants if required. In Oxford they drew a performance of Romeo and Juliet from 30 schoolchildren whose knowledge of the play had been simply that it had a party, a balcony, ballroom dancing and »I love you« in it, and that everybody died at the end. In Chile police scratched their heads in the middle of the road while the disruptive actors melted into the laughing crowd; motorists in Sao Paolo, driving too fast and wildly distracted by sidewalk performances, smashed up each other’s cars. The actors swiftly transformed themselves into witnesses offering strident and spurious evidence as to what had occurred. Complicité - complicity - is a form of collusion between celebrants. Like the performers of the Venetian Commedia dell’arte