Volume 25 Issue 6 - March 2020

Here, I confess, is what I think is the real reason for my personal
reaction. I think, in the end, I realized that I couldn’t bear to
absorb, in even the mildest possible dose, this tiny, tiny check on
my autonomy – absurdly tiny – having to deal with the suggestion
that I wasn’t welcome to review a work of theatre. It was infuriating
to me. And I was a bit ashamed to realize that. More than
a bit ashamed. I realized that privilege, and the assumption of
privilege takes many forms, and is very insidious. It’s not just
about the imposition of an inherited cultural framework – it’s
about the assumption that everything in my world should be open
to me, that I had the right to be and go anywhere I choose. To
understand that there are things that aren’t for me, or about me,
was a lesson it was about time I learned.
So, I can understand and fully endorse Bonnell’s initiative to
create a supportive mental and emotional infrastructure for works
of art that are harrowing, and vulnerable, and open to being
misunderstood. But that’s not quite the end of the story for me.
Because, as much as I can sympathize with the reasoning behind
Bonnell’s statement, I worry about it becoming the default position
in the relationship of mainstream audiences and non-mainstream
art, or to put it more baldly, (perhaps too much so), the
relationship between the audience of the oppressors and the art
of the oppressed. Art is a vehicle for celebrating many aspects of
humanity: from forming community among people of like experience
(one of the stated goals of bug), to allowing different points
of view a vehicle for expression, to providing forms of entertainment.
Above all, art is primarily a vehicle for the liberation of the
imagination – the imagination not just of the artists making the
art, but the imaginative landscape of the audiences absorbing it,
reflecting upon it, eventually critically reviewing it. If Bonnell’s
statement (and others like it) are simply making a plea for, and
an argument about, the expansion of the cultural diversity of arts
reviewers, I, for one, am not going to argue with her.
But there is another point at play here as well, I think. Art is
at its most valuable in its ability to disturb preconceived notions,
to expand the emotional and imaginative range of people stuck
in a depressing sameness of mental and cultural viewpoints, to
jiggle and jostle and storm the bastions of hatred and prejudice
and limits – limits of empathy, limits of understanding. That is
the most important work we have for ourselves these days in our
complex, multivalent society. And it is work that art is uniquely
positioned to do.
It might be unfair to impose on Yolanda Bonnell the expectation,
even the demand, that bug radically alter the perception of
people who might otherwise be ignorant of, and unintentionally
Performer / playwright Yolanda Bonnell in a scene
from bug, Luminato Festival June 2018.
diffident about, the circumstances that gave rise to her art. In
fact, she has done a great deal of that work already by simply
making her statement and taking the stand she did, to considerable
personal hostility, as she has reported. Eventually, we need
to find a way to create a landscape of equivalence and equality, of
righteousness, to use a very old-fashioned word, in our society.
Exclusion cannot be a permanent vehicle to get to that hoped-for
state. But Bonnell and her creative team, in a very courageous way,
have helped all of us begin to understand what exclusion is, the
many levels on which it operates, and the hurt it occasions. For
that, we should give her sincere thanks.
Robert Harris is a writer and broadcaster on music in all its forms.
He is the former classical music critic of the Globe and Mail and the
author of the Stratford Lectures and Song of a Nation: The Untold
Story of O Canada.
GILAD COHEN
Considering
Matthew Shepard
The true story of an ordinary boy: an oratorio
passion honouring Matt’s life, death and legacy
Considering Matthew Shepard,
by Craig Hella Johnson
Pax Christi Chorale featuring Megan Miceli & Simone McIntosh,
sopranos; Krisztina Szabó, mezzo-soprano; Lawrence Wiliford, tenor;
Phillip Addis, baritone; and the Toronto Mozart Players
SUNDAY, APRIL 26, 2020, 3:00 P.M.
George Weston Recital Hall, Meridian Arts
Centre (formerly Toronto Centre for the Arts)
5040 Yonge Street
BUY TICKETS ONLINE AT
PAXCHRISTICHORALE.ORG
thewholenote.com March 2020