Studies in Theatre and Performance

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Performing Polis: theatre, nationness and civic

identity in post-devolution Wales

Heike Roms

To cite this article: Heike Roms (2004) Performing Polis: theatre, nationness and civic identity
in post-devolution Wales, Studies in Theatre and Performance, 24:3, 177-192, DOI: 10.1386/
stap.24.3.177/0

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Sudies in Theatre and Performance Volume 24 Number 3 © 2004 Intellect Ltd

Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/stap.24.3.177/0

Performing Polis: theatre, nationness

and civic identity in post-devolution
Wales
Heike Roms

Abstract Keywords
This article discusses Polis, the latest performance in a long line of theatrical citizenship
investigations by its director Mike Pearson, first with Welsh company Brith Gof, national theatre
then with Pearson/Brookes, into the relationship between theatrical and political participation
participation. Whereas earlier performances by Brith Gof articulated this rela-
pedagogy
tionship in reference to a concept of Welsh nationhood, the article argues that
Polis marked a transition from a cultural understanding of nationhood to one reflexive performativity
based on a conception of citizenship, a transition effected by the recent process of Welsh devolution
devolution in Wales. At the same time as devolution has put the perennial quest
for a ‘National Theatre’ back on the agenda, Polis’s participatory and deconstruc-
tivist format was devised as an alternative to current simplistic concepts of a
‘National Theatre’ of representation.

In September 2001, a small crowd gathered at Chapter Arts Centre in the

Welsh capital Cardiff to see Polis, the latest work by the Wales-based per-
formance collective Pearson/Brookes. We were divided into five groups and
seated in taxis that took us away from the theatre to different locations in
the city, where performers were already awaiting us. On our journey we
were given a video camera and were quickly instructed in its use. To
record a video of precisely five minutes of whatever would strike us as sig-
nificant at our unknown destination was all we were told. Upon arrival, in
night-clubs and kebab shops, on street corners and in hotel rooms, at a
police station and a railway station, we pointed our viewfinder at the
social fabric of the city, trying to detect and document the intentionally
theatrical among the flow of everyday performance. Equipped with our
filmic evidence, we returned to the Chapter Arts Centre. In the black-box
space of the theatre long tables displayed maps and diagrams documenting
the radical changes the city of Cardiff had undergone over the past decade
as a result of one of Europe’s largest waterfront regeneration projects,
whilst a soundtrack played theoretical reflections on urbanity. On four
large screens around the room our footage from the journey was projected
alongside those of the other groups. Gradually, from the assemblage of
poorly shot videos, characters began to emerge, and a narrative started to
form, a story of past lovers searching for each other across the city. And
we realized that we had been witnessing the return, after a long absence,

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1. Pearson/Brookes’s
city projects were of Odysseus to Ithaca: a place that he barely recognizes, a place where he
inspired by Cardiff ’s passes unrecognized.
(failed) bid to become
Cultural Capital of
Polis was devised as a multi-site performance for several groups of audi-
Europe in 2008. ences watching different events occurring simultaneously in different
Other projects in this locations in the city. As witnesses to and recorders of these events the spec-
series include
Carrying Lyn (2001), tators were figured as actual co-creators of the work, responsible for the
Raindogs (2002), Who making of the ‘rushes’ from which the multimedia assemblage in the
are You Looking At
(2004). theatre was then produced. The publicity for Polis stressed the participa-
tory nature of the work:

Here’s what we’ll do. We’ll directly involve you the audience in the creation
of a vivid snapshot of the city and its people on one particular evening. [...]
Polis imagines a new, nimble and innovative form of participatory perfor-
mance for changing political and cultural circumstances in Wales.
(Pearson/Brookes 2001a)

These ‘changing circumstances’ refer to the process of devolution that Wales had
undergone. In 1999 we saw the creation of the National Assembly for Wales,
accepted only reluctantly but nevertheless regarded as ‘a historic achievement in
that it gave Wales its own executive forum for the first time in six centuries’
(Chaney, Hall and Pithouse 2001: 4) (albeit one with restricted powers), which
altered the political landscape in this country and focused the debate upon the
nature of democratic representation and participation.
Polis was the latest performance in a series of theatrical investigations
by its director Mike Pearson, first with Welsh company Brith Gof, then
with Pearson/Brookes, into the relationship between theatrical and politi-
cal participation. Brith Gof ’s work had always articulated this relationship
in reference to a concept of Welsh national identity, which laid the foun-
dation for the company’s reputation as, as one Welsh critic has put it, ‘the
epitome of Welshness and of a distinct form of performance’ (Adams
1996: 54). With Polis, however, Pearson appeared to have shifted the focus
of the work away from the figure of ‘the nation’ to a consideration of ‘the
city’.1 It is this shift that will concern me here as it seems to run counter
to the new emphasis that the recent process of devolution in Britain has
placed on the notion of ‘nations’. At the same time as devolution in Wales
has put the perennial quest for a ‘National Theatre’ back on the agenda,
Pearson has seemingly moved away from a theatrical investigation of
national identity. Yet, Pearson/Brookes’s own reading of Polis seems to
suggest otherwise. In their outline of the work’s intentions they state:

Polis is the effective enactment of an ad-hoc, provisional communality built

from the experiences and contributions of those present - those who showed
up, the nation in cross-section - rather than the futile, leaden-footed search
for theatrical metaphors effective enough to represent notions such as
‘nation’ in contemporary Wales.
(Pearson/Brookes 2001b)

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2. I owe the application

I want to argue that, as this statement proposes, issues of Welsh nation- of Bhabha’s model to
hood continue to inform the work, but that Polis marks a transition from a the work of Brith Gof
to Andrew Houston
‘cultural’ understanding of such nationhood to one based on a conception (1998).
of citizenship, a transition effected by the process of devolution. The politi-
cal intent of the work is manifest in its title: Polis set out to explore the idea
of the ‘political’ in its double association with urbanity and citizenship as
implied in the traditional notion of the ‘polis’. This was a work conceptu-
alized as a kind of ‘polis’, in which an ‘ad-hoc and provisional’ community
would be built from the experiences and contributions made in the
encounters between performers, spectators and the urban everyday. This
emphasis on communality seems at first surprising for a performance
whose dramaturgy actively encourages the fragmentation of the audi-
ence’s experience. I wish to claim, however, that this fragmentation pre-
sents the consequence of twenty years of conceptualization of what a
theatre may be that ‘speaks of, and for, a distinct identity’ (Pearson 1996:
5): an increasing awareness of and challenge to the theatrical representa-
tional apparatus - leading to increasingly fragmented processes of recep-
tion and meaning-making - has gone hand in hand with a growing sense
of the fragmentary nature of the identity that this theatre is meant to rep-
resent and of the community that is formed in its name. For this purpose I
will briefly trace the development of a theatrical address to Welsh identity
in Pearson’s work back through several distinctive phases, of which Polis
was the latest manifestation.

‘Nationness’ between pedagogy and performance

From its formation in 1981 Brith Gof ’s theatrical practice was devoted to
an exploration of Welsh nationhood, or, more precisely, to what Homi
Bhabha has called the ‘intersubjective and collective experience of nation-
ness’ (Bhabha 1994: 2, original emphasis). In his widely influential post-
colonial study, The Location of Culture (1994), Bhabha proposes a
performative model of the construction of nationness which proves useful
for a description of Brith Gof ’s performative strategies in relation to Welsh
national identity,2 as the company increasingly expressed this identity in
explicitly colonial and postcolonial terms. Bhabha’s model is based on his
critique of the essentialist Western concept of nationalism as being inade-
quate for conceptualizing the contending movements of cultural forma-
tions. Instead of nationalism’s insistence on a pre-given, homogeneous,
and historically continuous idea of identity, he reconfigures identity as a
hybrid across differences of race, class, gender and cultural traditions:

It is in the emergence of the interstices - the overlap and displacement of

domains of difference - that the intersubjective and collective experiences of
nationness, community interest, or cultural value are negotiated. How are
subjects formed ‘in-between’, or in excess of, the sum of the ‘parts’ of differ-
ence (usually intoned as race/class/gender, etc.)?
(Bhabha 1994: 2, original emphasis)

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3. Eisteddfodau are
Welsh-language Bhabha proposes that this negotiation of identity, whether antagonistic or
cultural gatherings affiliative, is produced performatively as ‘a complex, on-going negotiation
held throughout
Wales throughout the
that seeks to authorize cultural hybridities that emerge in moments of his-
year, culminating in torical transformation’ (Bhabha 1994: 2). Bhabha’s introduction of the
the Eisteddfod performative into the national discourse creates an ‘interstitial perspective’
Genedlaethol (the
National Eisteddfod), (Bhabha 1994: 2) which makes manifest that ‘the people’ that constitute
a week-long itinerant a nation do not exist in a fixed and static manner, but are produced in
festival of
competitions and what he calls the ‘double-time’ of past and present:
showcases.
the people are the historical ‘objects’ of a nationalist pedagogy, giving the dis-
course an authority that is based on the pre-given or constituted historical
origin in the past; the people are also the ‘subjects’ of a process of signification
that must erase any prior or originary presence of the nation-people to
demonstrate the prodigious, living principle of the people as contemporane-
ity: as that sign of the present through which national life is redeemed and
iterated as a reproductive process. The scraps, patches and rags of daily life
must be repeatedly turned into the signs of a coherent national culture,
while the very act of the narrative performance interpellates a growing circle
of national subjects. In the production of the nation as narration there is a
split between the continuist, accumulative temporality of the pedagogical,
and the repetitious, recursive strategy of the performative.
(Bhabha 1994: 145, original emphases)

This ‘split’ between the ‘double-time’ of the pedagogical and the performa-
tive that Bhabha highlights here creates a liminality between essence and
appearance, history and subjectivity that causes an instability at the very
heart of the nationalist discourse and also troubled Brith Gof ’s theatrical
practice.

Brith Gof ’s early work: performing pedagogy

Brith Gof ’s work always endeavoured to transform the ‘pedagogical’
elements associated with ‘Welshness’, what the Welsh themselves
refer to as y pethe (‘the things’), considered to be central to a tradi-
tional Welsh identity (the eisteddfod, 3 non-conformist religion,
poetry, etc.), into a performative presence so that audiences as repre-
sentatives of ‘the people’ were obliged to reflect on their relationship
with their national past and present. Brith Gof (a Welsh idiom
meaning ‘faint recollection’) was founded in 1981 in Aberystwyth by
Mike Pearson and Lis Hughes Jones in order to

develop a new, vibrant and distinctive theatre tradition in Wales, one which
is relevant and responsive to the perceptions, experience, aspirations and
concerns of a minority culture, and which is more than just a pale reflection
of English theatre convention.
(Brith Gof 1985: 2)

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4. Early works by Brith

The company’s early work wove together elements of Welsh literature, folklore Gof were based on the
and history4 with physical actions that were derived from everyday patterns of ancient Welsh collec-
tion of myths, the
work, play and worship and objects that were taken from the paraphernalia of Mabinogi (Branwen
traditional rural life. In one of the principal shows of this period, Rhydcymerau (1981), Rhiannon
(1984), for example, the famous poem of the same name by Welsh poet (1981), Manawydan
(1982), Blodeuwedd
Gwenallt5 was juxtaposed with actions based on traditional carpentry (‘two car- (1982-83)). These
penters worked throughout the performance, their sawing and hammering were followed by pro-
ductions with subject
counterpointing the pattern of poems and stories concerning rural decay’ (Brith matters such as the
Gof 1985: 3-4)), and objects such as an old sewing machine, a washtub and a impact of land enclo-
sures (Gwaed Neu Fara
clothes-line. This juxtaposition would allow the audience to translate their affec- (Blood or Bread)
tive identification with the familiar pedagogical narratives of their historical past (1982)) and afforesta-
tion (Rhydcymerau
to the still present, but rapidly disappearing (to borrow Bhabha’s parlance) (1984)), the erosion
‘scraps, patches and rags’ of their daily life in order to turn both into signs of a of an agricultural life
coherent Welsh national culture (and, in this case, metaphors for the acute style (Boris (1985)),
the hardships of emi-
threat of its loss). gration (Ymfudwyr
Such culture was here still figured as rural and Welsh-speaking, rela- (1983-85)) and war
(Gernika! (1983)), and
tively homogeneous and historically continuous. By the late 1980s, the decline of the coal
however, Brith Gof had become increasingly interested in the bilingual industry in Wales
(Pandaemonium: The
aspects of Welsh culture, its urban and industrial heritage which had pre- True Cost of Coal
viously been excluded from their understanding of ‘Welshness’.6 The (1987)).
company’s aims were now rephrased as follows: ‘to develop a new, vibrant 5. Rhydcymerau dealt
and distinctive theatre tradition in Wales, one which is relevant, respon- with the influence of
the British
sive and challenging to the perceptions, experience, aspirations and con- government’s
cerns of a small nation’ (Brith Gof 1988: 3; emphasis added). Brith Gof afforestation
programme on rural
consequently underwent a far-reaching reconsideration of their theatrical Welsh communities in
approach. The result was a number of so-called ‘large-scale site-specific’ the 1950s. One of the
regions worst affected
theatre works,7 often presented at a defunct industrial site symbolizing the by the enforced selling
decline of the heavy industry in Wales8 and involving vigorous physical of land for the
action and, under the influence of new company member Cliff McLucas, a purpose of planting
trees for future
trained architect, an ambitious stage design at the scale of civil engineer- military efforts was
ing and relating to the architectural dimensions of its surrounds. the area around
Rhydcymerau (near
In their previous works, the company had already been preoccupied Llandeilo) in mid-
with an exploration of real locations. Wales. The place
became a potent sym-
bol for what was
[...] I think it’s within the history of Brith Gof not performing in theatre regarded as the grad-
ual disappearance of
spaces. That’s for a number of reasons. One is that there aren’t a large Welsh culture for the
number of theatres in Wales. There’s a limited circuit - and almost all of sake of England’s eco-
those theatres are problematic in one way or another. They were all built nomic and military
interests and was
within three or four years of each other, but actually nobody had thought made prominent by
about what theatre might be in Wales. [...] [W]e went to live and work in a Gwenallt’s (i.e. David
James Jones’s) poem.
small village in West Wales, and began to think about manifestations of
6. It is possible to specu-
theatre that were not theatre-bound. We were making performances for late about what had
farmhouse kitchens, for the Post Office counter, and so on. [...] I think it motivated this
change. The
would be the venues in which a Welsh, particularly a Welsh rural audience,
economic problems of
would feel more at ease - rather than sitting in rows in the dark in a theatre. the 1980s had
(Pearson as quoted in Kaye 1996: 209-10) affected the whole of

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Wales across the

divides of language, Pragmatic reasons for performing in non-theatrical spaces and an interest
geography and indus- in the different forms of communality these spaces bring with them are
try. In 1984, at the
height of Thatcherism
here closely linked to fundamental aesthetic considerations (‘What theatre
in Britain, the bitter might be in Wales’), and these for the company had always inherently
protest of the Miners’ been linked to political considerations. But in the late 1980s Brith Gof
Strike and the severe
poverty it provoked began to work in different types of location, in what we may call the archi-
caused Welsh nation- tectural remnants of Wales’s industrial past. Not only did these venues
alists to express their
solidarity with the have a different history from the rural locations used previously, their
South Wales miners. history was also often the product of complex and at times ambivalent eco-
The change was man-
ifested in Brith Gof ’s nomic, political and cultural developments. This changed the nature of the
move from rural, relationship between venue and performance, which became endlessly
Welsh-speaking
Aberystwyth to
problematized, reworked and elaborated in both Brith Gof ’s practical and
Cardiff, which is theoretical explorations of ‘site-specificity’ (see, for example, Brith Gof
located in the 1995; Pearson and McLucas in Kaye 1996).
predominantly
English-speaking and Most of the theoretical attention Brith Gof has received has focused on
industrialized this phase, so I will not go into great detail here. The shift from the early to
southern part of the
country, in 1988. the site-specific works was indeed a significant one, both aesthetically and
7. The following site-spe-
politically. But to figure it as a radical change overlooks some of the conti-
cific shows were nuities that link these two phases: in the company’s site-specific works
created during this once again the narrative inspiration for the performances came from
phase: Gododdin
(1988-89), Los classic Welsh texts or important incidents in the history of the Welsh
Angeles (1990-92), people,9 which Brith Gof combined with the application of objects and
Pax (1990-91),
Haearn/Iron (1992), Y task-based activities, only this time taken mainly from the world of indus-
Pen Bas Y Pen trial labour. Gododdin, for instance, Brith Gof ’s first large-scale site-specific
Dwfn/The Deep End The
Shallow End show (1988-89), took at its starting point the earliest poem in the Welsh
(Television language, Aneirin’s Y Gododdin, which commemorates the fate of 300
production, 1995),
Tri Bywyd/Three Lives
Celtic warriors from the ancient tribe of the Gododdin who in 600 AD
(1995). were defeated by an invading army of 100,000 Angles. In the perfor-
8. These included a rail- mance, oil drums became castles, wrecked cars were used as chariots and
way station (Pax, car bonnets served as shields. In between them took place an extraordi-
Aberystwyth (1991)),
a disused car factory nary physical performance of ‘berserking’ bodies who were battling
(Gododdin, Cardiff against a rising water level. In the spectators’ experience of the juxtaposi-
(1988)), and an
abandoned iron tion of this energetic performance with the pedagogical narratives of the
foundry (Haearn, defeat of the Gododdin, an affective identification with both the (historical)
Tredegar (1992)).
narrative and the (still-present but disappearing) objects and sites of the
9. Gododdin was based industrial age was sought that referred to both as signs for a Welsh
on the earliest surviv-
ing poem in the national identity. The mythological narratives of cultural birth, defeat and
Welsh language, rebirth which the Welsh-language culture had cultivated were thus linked
Aneirin’s Y Gododdin;
Haearn dealt with ‘the to the decline of industrial culture in Wales.
making of industrial
man and woman’ in
the process of
Splitting performance and pedagogy
nineteenth-century In Brith Gof ’s site-specific practice there is an obvious attempt to think
industrialization; Y beyond narratives of origin and essence and to focus on cultural differ-
Pen Bas Y Pen Dwfn
combined extracts ences by bringing together the ancient and the modern, the rural and the
from Defoe’s Robinson industrial, the English-speaking and the Welsh-speaking aspects of
Crusoe with the story
Welshness, united as common victims of the cultural and economic

182 Heike Roms

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of the drowning of the

exploitation of Wales by England. ‘Site-specificity’ in Brith Gof ’s work Welsh valley of
stood precisely not for a seamless ‘fit’, but for an incongruity between site Tryweryn by the
Liverpool Corporation
and performance (an epic poem in a car factory, an opera in a former steel in 1965 as two narra-
works) caused by such difference, which created a defamiliarization that tives of English
enabled signification. This overt address to difference had been absent colonialism; Tri
Bywyd revisited the
from their earlier work. However, these earlier works were neither as aes- story of afforestation
thetically and politically congruent as they may appear at first. that had concerned
the company in
The most significant realization of Brith Gof’s early practice was that, in order Rhydcymerau.
for the ‘scraps, patches, and rags of daily life’ to become signs for a Welsh
national identity, they had to be defamiliarized. It is only through establishing a
semiotic differential (différentielle signifiante to use Kristeva’s term) between the
familiar and the non-familiar that meaning can be established. Pearson described
this process at the time as one of manipulation and mutation:

[Brith Gof is] drawn naturally to a theatre of physical expression and visual
imagery. Yet the Welsh are a verbal not a visual people. To create the visual
dimension in our work [...] our props are the implements and simple posses-
sions of rural peoples manipulated in unexpected ways to create strong and
eloquent metaphors; our physical rhythms are the rhythms of work, play
and worship, mutated, given new emphasis.

(Pearson 1985: 5)

This process of defamiliarization was necessitated by the fact that, in

Brith Gof ’s opinion, Wales did not have a theatrical tradition that was
truly reflective of a distinct Welsh identity and not merely ‘a pale reflec-
tion of English theatre convention’. However, as Brith Gof pointed out
repeatedly, although lacking an indigenous theatre, ‘the Welsh are used
to performing’ (Brith Gof 1985: 3). It is significant here that ‘y pethe’,
such as religious singing and preaching, oratory, poetry recitation and
choral song, from which concepts of a Welsh national identity have tra-
ditionally been fashioned, are already conceptualized as inherently per-
formative. The two main sites for these cultural performances are the
chapel and the eisteddfod, ‘the twin pillars of Welsh-speaking society’
(Pearson 1985: 3), where a sense of identity is experienced and affirmed
by the recurrent performative presencing of the Welsh language (fixed in
the pedagogical forms of poetry and the Bible) through various tradi-
tional techniques of oratory. For Brith Gof, such examples of cultural
performance could serve as ‘building blocks’ (Pearson 1985: 5) for a
new Welsh theatre aesthetics. For theatre to similarly affirm Welsh
national identity, therefore, Brith Gof proposed to juxtapose such famil-
iar forms of cultural performance (‘the verbal’) with theatrical elements
involving actions and objects (‘the visual’) in the manner described for
Rhydcymerau above. As McLucas, who was to join the company a few
years later, recognized:

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10. ‘Learner’ refers to a

learner of the Welsh
language as opposed
to a native speaker.
Brith Gof has always worked in this hybrid way, bringing at least two things
together which normally don’t collide; between the two, a spark ignites, an
eternal irreconcilability, contemporary radical performance welded onto a
very traditional non-theatrical culture.
(McLucas in Savill 1993: 129)

There are, however, testimonies of audience reactions to Rhydcymerau that

reveal that it was precisely the particular performative presencing of the
familiar Welsh poems and songs which created an uneasiness in the Welsh
audience:

It would be fair to also say that many of the audience attending Rhydcymerau
had an intimate knowledge of the eponymous poem and suffered an embar-
rassment concerning the style of its rendition, and a feeling of disquiet about
the accent of a learner10 [i.e. the performer Nic Ros] which seemed to disrupt
the rhythm structures compared to the familiar, traditional ways of recita-
tion.
(Savill 1993: 113)

Here the particular defamiliarization of the poem through its performative

rendition by a ‘learner’ of the Welsh language hinted at the liminality that
exists within any conceptualization of Welshness as an essentialist, homo-
geneous and historically continuous identity - a liminality that can be
described with the help of Bhabha as the result of the displacement of
domains of difference, in this case the difference between the languages
and concomitant cultures of Welsh and English. It also reflected the
complex linguistic and cultural make-up of Brith Gof themselves that was
hidden behind their status as a ‘Welsh-language company’: both artistic
director Mike Pearson, an immigrant from England, and performer Nic
Ros, who was born into an Anglo-Welsh family, were ‘learners’ of the
Welsh language. This called into question the assumption of a homoge-
neous community based on a shared sense of identity to which both audi-
ence and performers belong and that formed the basis for Brith Gof ’s early
work - as Pearson claimed for this work: ‘Our audience is specific and
finite. [...] Our audiences are not faceless; we may know many of them by
name’ (Pearson 1985: 3). Rhydcymerau thus expressed not only Brith
Gof ’s intention to affirm a Welsh national identity, but also a desire to
partake in it.
Brith Gof ’s early works were therefore haunted by the ‘split’ that
Bhabha has identified between the pedagogy of the nation as a historical
and political object of cultural tradition and a performative subjectivity
formed in excess of the ‘sum of the “parts” of difference’. Although the
company’s later site-specific works seemed to acknowledge the ‘internal
difference’ (to use a term coined by Welsh literary scholar Wynne M.
Thomas) that exists within contemporary Welsh culture and society
(although here still primarily defined as the difference between English

184 Heike Roms

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11. In Germany, for

and Welsh, neglecting other cultural presences in Wales), it figured this example, where
difference largely as ‘antagonistic, conflictual and even incommensurable’ Gododdin was shown
in 1989, the
(Bhabha 1994: 2). In these performances the audience was again representation of a
addressed as a community of spectators, but a shift from a familiar, homo- heroic defeat with the
geneous rural audience to an unfamiliar, heterogeneous urban one had help of a performative
celebration of physical
made it necessary to consider its role anew in each performance. The exertion evoked mem-
audience in this case did not participate actively, as was to be the case in ories of the
iconography of
future performances, but it became a semiotic element in the work, often German fascism,
(inadvertently) embodying a particular role, for example that of the which created a
strong antagonism.
(English) enemy in Gododdin. Cultural differences were here embodied as
unresolved antagonisms (mainly between colonizer and colonized) in the 12. This notion of
cultural invention
confrontation between performers and spectators.11 clearly reverberates
with echoes of
postcolonial theory,
Prydain: nationness as performance with Anderson’s
In the last Brith Gof publicity booklet (Brith Gof 1995), both McLucas and widely discussed con-
cept of the ‘imagined
Pearson, then co-directors of the company, refer to Welsh identity in the communities’ of
context of ‘a constant renegotiation’ (1995: 11), as ‘endlessly problema- nationality (Anderson
1983), for example. It
tised’ (1995: 67), and, time and again, as ‘hybrid’ (1995: 66). This under- also alludes to a theo-
standing of identity self-consciously evokes Bhabha’s (1994: 2) model of retical discourse
hybridity as the ‘sum of the “parts” of difference’ in between which or in closer to home, Welsh
historian Gwyn Alf
excess of which identity is formed, a model that now allowed Brith Gof to Williams’s influential
acknowledge and embrace the differences that were at work in their own theory on Welshness
as a project of inven-
position as a Welsh-language company which, after the departure of first- tion: ‘This is the first
language Welsh-speaker Lis Hughes Jones in 1991, was run by two immi- point to grasp about
the history of this
grants who had both been born and raised in England. The figure of people. Wales is
antagonism between Englishness and Welshness that had dominated the impossible. A country
called Wales exists
site-specific work gave way to a concept which acknowledged the ‘pres- only because the
ence’ (see Hall 1990) of English culture within Welsh culture as the Welsh invented them-
product of a long and complex history of colonization, immigration and selves. [...] They
survived by making
economic change. In an article written at the same time as the 1995 and re-making them-
booklet, Pearson states: selves and their Wales
over and over again’
(Williams 1988
Like all colonies, Wales has a tradition of inventing itself. The creation of [1985]: 3, 5).
identities - personal, communal, national - is a complex daily endeavour of 13. DOA (Cardiff/Wales,
Durham/England,
negotiation and adjustment, of making choices between traditional and con-
touring (1993)),
temporary, religious and secular, indigenous and imported, minor and domi- Camlann (Cardiff,
nant, Welsh and English ... ‘Welsh culture’ is [a] hybrid. Recklinghausen/Germ
any (1993-94)),
(Pearson 1996: 5) Cysanu Esgyrn/Kissing
As Pearson himself points out, this notion of Welsh culture as a con- Bones (Neath/Wales
(1994)), Pen Urien
tinuous reinvention12 is at odds with the orthodoxies of a nationalist dis- (never performed pub-
course based on ideas of origin and historic continuity. A growing licly), and Arturius
Rex (Cardiff (1994)).
scepticism about essentialist identity politics, triggered by contemporary Thematically, the pro-
events in the Balkans, became the focal point of the company’s investiga- ject dealt with the
ethnic war in former
tion into the complex politics of nationalism, first in the Arturius Rex cycle Yugoslavia, read
(1993-94)13 and then in Prydain: The Impossibility of Britishness (1996), through the
the last large-scale site-specific work of the company before Pearson’s narratives around the

Performing Polis: theatre, nationness and civic identity in post-devolution Wales 185
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historical and mythi-

cal King Arthur. The departure in 1997. As the programme for the latter states: ‘After the
performances divided break-up of former Yugoslavia, can the idea of nation have any credibility
the standing and
moving audience
when unspeakable acts were committed in its name?’ (Brith Gof 1996b).
along the lines of cul- But whilst the Arturius Rex cycle presented an often bleak picture of the
tural or gender politics of national identity, focusing on its aggressive nature, its use in
affiliation, playing
self-consciously with political propaganda and its role in genocide, Prydain, in the company’s
audience placement, own estimate, exemplified ‘a new set of optimistic attitudes in Brith Gof ’
perspective and the
complicity inherent in (Brith Gof 1996a). The show was performed several months before the
the process of watch- British General Election of May 1997, which was to endorse Labour’s
ing.
plans for a Welsh Assembly, and the potentiality of self-government was
14. Iolo Morganwg (i.e. already tangible in Wales.
Edward Williams,
1747-1826), Welsh Prydain in many ways anticipated the thematic and formal concerns of
writer who invented Polis, and a more detailed discussion of the piece will help me to identify
the Gorsedd of the
Bards and was associ- the shift from a ‘cultural’ to a ‘civic’ definition of nationhood that I have
ated with the claimed as being present in the latter. ‘Prydain’ is the Welsh word for
Gwyneddigion, a soci-
ety of Welsh patriots ‘Britain’ - and it was the creation of a ‘British’ national identity in the
founded in London eighteenth century in between or in excess of its constituent cultures and
under the influence of
the political
languages (an excess marked here by the use of the Welsh term), which
radicalism that led to paved the way for the rise of imperialism and industrialization in the nine-
the French teenth century (see Anderson 1983), and its current ‘impossibility’ as a
Revolution.
viable political concept in a ‘post-colonial, post-industrial’ age, which
interested Brith Gof. The programme notes for Prydain outlined these con-
cerns:

What do you know about Britain? It’s an island. It rains. It’s violent.
Shakespeare. The usual clichés about a post-colonial, post-industrial Britain
exhausted by its own history. But as one Britain ends, so another might
begin. Exactly two hundred years ago poets, politicians and preachers began
to imagine new futures for this country. In a Europe in turmoil, visionaries
such as William Blake and Iolo Morganwg14 dared to construct new utopias,
to invent nations. Prydain is inspired by their vision, proposing new agendas
in performance and politics. A theatre in the making, a work of invention.
Not for the faint hearted, Prydain urges participation. For deep in the crowd
something is stirring ...
(Brith Gof 1996b)

Prydain was performed in a vacant and empty warehouse on a new indus-

trial estate in Cardiff. At the start of the show a van entered through a
large doorway. Subsequently everything that constituted the ‘perfor-
mance’ - performers and musicians, technicians, all equipment, building
materials, props, lighting - was brought out of the back of the vehicle into
the performance space. The whole show was constructed ‘from scratch’
before the spectators’ eyes using only those materials, attempting to draw
attention to the mechanics of theatrical representation. What had begun
as a search for an alternative to a non-English theatre convention had
now grown into a more fundamental investigation into the nature of the-

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atrical representation and its close link with conceptions of identity.

Prydain proposed nothing less than a reconceptualization of the theatre
event in which, instead of representing its pedagogy, ‘the nation’ was to be
explored as a complex strategy of cultural identification and discursive
address made in the act of performance itself. What distinguished this per-
formance from its predecessors was that the pedagogy of nationness was
thereby transformed into a performative event that was revealed as having
no stable existence prior to or outside of its performance. (It was apt there-
fore that the work displaced ‘Welsh national identity’ as its referent by
examining national identity in reference to Britishness rather than
Welshness.)
This was connected to a reconceptualization of the role of the audi-
ence: Every night fifty special tickets were sold to so-called ‘audience-par-
ticipants’. They carried out vital parts of the physical choreography of the
work: they were asked to lift performers, move around parts of the set, join
in a staged political protest, etc. All instructions for these actions were
conducted during the performance, led by Brith Gof ’s performers, in full
view of the rest of the spectators. At the beginning of the show, for
example, one of the performers recited William Hodgson’s eulogy on
equality, freedom and human rights of 1789:

All men, when they come out of the hands of nature, are equal and free. This
freedom and equality they can never infringe without committing injustice
to themselves; they ought always to remain equal and free: no distinction
ought to exist amongst the citizens but what is conducive to the general
utility and happiness of society; any privilege, therefore, granted to a
member of society for his own particular advantage becomes an injustice to
the rest of the citizens.
(Hodgson, as quoted in Brith Gof 1996a)

Whilst this text was spoken, the other performers were approaching
the audience-participants with gestures of caress and embrace, establish-
ing a sense of camaraderie and inviting the audience to listen to the words,
as if to impress their meaning onto their bodies. The first performer began
to cut off his clothes with a knife. While gradually exposing his flesh he
was simultaneously revealing the markings of text written all over his
body. He was then blindfolded, two open books were placed in his hands,
and the books were set on fire. The performer began to move across the
space with his arms stretched out, balancing the two burning books in his
hands, impeded in his movements by cold, darkness and fire.
The utopian writing which inspired the performance, with its anticipa-
tion of an ideal nation and its implicit call for political action, was thus
transformed into a performative event. The performer was literally carry-
ing the marks (and thus the burden) of these historic visions on his body.
In return, the performer’s body became the site where the ideals of nation-
hood were scrutinized. The relationship between the pedagogical and the

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15. Houston puts forward

a detailed reading of performative that was characteristic of Brith Gof ’s previous works was
the somatic/semiotic thus problematized by calling into question the relation between utopian
process of meaning-
making encouraged
writing and the (political) action it is meant to motivate. Text was shouted
by Prydain, based on a through megaphones, whispered in ears, scrawled on walls and floors,
discussion of Eugenio inscribed on the naked bodies of the performers, set on fire. Actions over-
Barba’s model of pre-
expressivity, see laid and compromised the text, no movement or speech was allowed to
Houston (1998). See reach conclusion or resolution.
also Roms (2004).
The effect of involving the audience as co-performers in this scenario,
as Houston has argued, was that for the audience

this event had as much meaning through their proxemic and haptic experi-
ence as the signifying process of [the] narrative. The axis is made here
between a psychical and physical materiality of the “body as vision of nation-
hood”, and the audience must find a way to accommodate this gesture in
their thinking about nationhood within Britain, and more immediately in
their performative involvement with the work.
(Houston 1998: 258)15

As Pearson himself claimed:

Instead of making a performance which is meant to be about something -

about the conflict of these many opinions and perspectives of Britain - we
decided we had to make a performance which is something, that is the expe-
rience of this situation. It occurred to me that perhaps the only way to deal
with these conflicting opinions and perspectives was to try to ‘embody’ what
is going on in Britain. That is, to create a situation where some people are
willing to participate, and push things a little, and some people are more
likely to watch. [...] Ultimately we decided to go to work on the form of an
experience rather than trying to find a line on the subject matter.
(Pearson as quoted in Houston 1998: 255, original emphases)

The conflict of difference to which Pearson alludes here - the linguistic and
cultural division that undermines the imaginary unity of ‘Britishness’ -
was embodied in the performance again through the use of English and
Welsh, but this time not in the antagonistic manner of Brith Gof ’s site-spe-
cific works. In Prydain, the performers were able to choose the language in
which they wanted to deliver their speech. Thus the ideal of a British
nation was scrutinized in its possibility (and impossibility) as a negotiation
of the differences between its constituent cultures and languages (here
those of English and Welsh) ‘in between’ or in excess of which individual
subjectivity is formed. Hence Prydain assumed no prior sense of commu-
nality based on a shared identity (or a clearly defined antagonism) from
which the work could be understood, but rather manifested the desire to
create a temporary community of ‘the people’ in performance, albeit one
which might only have relevance in the space and time in which it was
taking place. For this purpose Prydain looked at the model of ‘rave culture’,

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16. McLucas remained

with its ad hoc gatherings of large, participatory crowds: ‘The notion that artistic director of
in a period when we have been led to believe that the only safe place to be Brith Gof until his
untimely death in
is in one’s home, here is actually a conscious rush to the communal’ 2002, continuing to
(Pearson in Brith Gof 1995: 23). The very act of bringing people together investigate notions of
in one space and at one time for Pearson had become inherently political, Welshness in
performance (Lla’th
an act which offered the opportunity to transform communal energy into (Gwynfyd) (1997-99),
political change. Y Dyddiau Olaf, Y
Dyddiau Cyntaf
(1998), Llais Cynan
Polis: performance as pedagogy (1999), Draw Draw yn
... (1999)). Pearson,
Prydain encountered such negative responses from spectators and critics meanwhile, turned to
upon its première in Cardiff that Brith Gof themselves referred to the piece autobiographical solo
work, exploring his
as a ‘failure’, in the aftermath of which the company split.16 Pearson upbringing in rural
himself located the performance’s failing in the audience’s inability to Lincolnshire (for
come to terms with its challenging dramaturgy. example, Bubbling
Tom, performed in
Pearson’s home
There’s a performance I’ve struggled to make ... and failed. Why? [...] village of Hibaldstow
in 2000), before
Perhaps because theatre itself is knackered, on its knees, ill-equipped to deal embarking in 2001,
with the complexities of post-colonial society, a society where we’ve been led in collaboration with
Mike Brookes, on the
to believe that the only safe place is ‘at home’. [...] Unfortunately, however current series of mul-
exciting the choreography, you get stuck in the same institutionalised rela- timedia works on the
theme of the city.
tionship with what’s going on. And we all know our place. [...]
Unfortunately, it’s all beginning to fall to pieces. And theatre is disappearing.
And the critics don’t know which way to turn. And who is watching whom?
(Brith Gof 1996c)

But despite Prydain’s ‘failure’, Polis, made five years later, revisited the
earlier work’s preoccupation with the deconstruction of the ‘knackered’
theatrical representational apparatus and its concomitant reconsidera-
tion of the performativity of identity. In the case of Polis, however, the
status of such an identity had altered substantially, influenced by a
change in political discourse in Wales in the wake of devolution. Welsh
historian R. Merfyn Jones anticipated this change in an article pub-
lished in 1992: ‘The Welsh are in the process of being defined, not in
terms of shared occupational experience or common religious inheri-
tance or the survival of an ancient European language or for contribut-
ing to the Welsh radical tradition, but rather by reference to the
institutions that they inhabit, influence, and react to’ (Jones 1992:
356). Wales is becoming, as he puts it, ‘a place with citizens, not a
cause with adherents’ (Jones 1992: 357). This model proposes, there-
fore, that ‘being Welsh’ must no longer be defined in reference to an
originary pedagogical object (such as culture, language or religion), but
by the very performance of ‘Welsh citizenship’. Such a performance,
however, potentially opens up the prospect of a post-national concep-
tion of citizenship (see Isin and Turner 2002). The rather more prosaic
reality of the Assembly today and its struggle to overcome old divisions
between the cultural communities of Wales and register with the major-

Performing Polis: theatre, nationness and civic identity in post-devolution Wales 189
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17. See Hannah Arendt’s

discussion of the polis ity of voters in this country, suggests that such a redefinition of Welsh cit-
as the public realm izenship is as yet far from being a political fact.
where ‘everything
that appears in public
But as a somewhat utopian concept, this redefinition was at the very
can be seen and heart of what Polis attempted to explore. A performance of citizenship can
heard by everybody’ no longer be simply ‘represented’ in a theatrical performance (because it
(1958: 50).
lacks the referent that could be the object of such representation). Instead,
it can only be ‘rehearsed’. Prydain had already proposed a model for such
a rehearsal, but in reference to a still culturally defined concept of nation-
ness. Although the city, or more specifically Cardiff, was now the explicit
referent of the work, Polis was similarly still concerned with the formation
of subjectivity and communality in performance. In Polis, however, subjec-
tivity was no longer formed through a negotiation of cultural difference.
Instead, it was constituted as an experience made in a social encounter
between performers and audience and their fellow citizens on the streets
(and as such clearly inspired by the French situationists).
Unlike Prydain, Polis problematized the notion of ‘communality’ that
such a performance of citizenship engenders. It addressed both the need
for communality as a condition for political action and the growing diffi-
culty of achieving a sense of community across an increasingly social frag-
mentation in the absence of a stable referent for ‘identity’ in whose name
such communality could be organized. By relocating the (small-scale)
encounter between audience and performers from the streets into the
theatre space, from a live moment to its mediated reproduction, Polis
revealed it in its ambivalence as both a desire for a genuine exchange and
as a desire to control it. It pulled apart the moment of communality
between performers and audience and manifested it as an always already
reproducible event. The performance thus expressed a sceptical view of
what constitutes the civic realm of the ‘polis’ in a post-national and post-
postcolonial age of globalization and increased mediatization (two weeks
after the events of 9/11). The involvement of the audience primarily as
recorders hinted at the omnipresence of surveillance cameras in today’s
‘public space’. (For the Ancient Greeks, the ‘polis’ was the place where one
was ‘in full view’ of others17 - on an average day in a large British city, a
person can be filmed by more than 300 cameras from up to 30 closed-
circuit television networks.)
In conclusion, in its address and challenge to the limits of theatrical repre-
sentation and mediatization whilst holding on to a belief in political change, we
may say that Polis perches on the cusp of a shift from a modern to a postmodern
sensibility that Kershaw has identified for radical performance today:

An up-to-date politics of performance should, in fact, recognize the contigui-

ties between Brecht and Baudrillard, between, say, a vision of theatre as a
dynamic arena for social experiment and a view of the social as an experi-
ment so thoroughly imbued with the potential for a sense of reflexive perfor-
mativity.
(Kershaw 1999: 84)

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Indeed, Polis, like Prydain before it, can be regarded as a postmodern

revisitation of Brecht’s ‘Lehrstück’ model of a participatory theatre in
which ‘two utopian concepts meet: the theatre as metatheatre, and society
as changeable’ (Wirth 1999: 113). Polis aimed to create a sense of reflex-
ive performativity around the notion of a civic nationhood, making perfor-
mance, in the Brechtian sense, a method of teaching citizenship, a
performance of political pedagogy. The performance was devised as an
example of what theatre may be (artistically and politically) in post-devo-
lution Wales, which was offered as an alternative to current (rather sim-
plistic) concepts of a ‘National Theatre’ of representation.

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Suggested citation
Roms, H. (2004), ‘Performing Polis: theatre, nationness and civic identity in post-
devolution Wales’, Studies in Theatre and Performance 24: 3, pp. 177–192,
doi: 10.1386/stap.24.3.177/0

Contributor details
Heike Roms is currently Lecturer in Performance Studies at the University of
Glamorgan. She will take uo a lectureship in Performance Studies at the University
of Wales, Aberystwyth, in 2005. Contact: Dr Heike Roms, Department of Arts and
Media, School of Humanities, Law and Social Sciences, Block A, Ty Crawshay,
University of Glamorgan, Pontypridd CF37 1DL, E-mail: hroms@glam.ac.uk

192 Heike Roms