Interview with Marc Cabourdin
and Director's Notes
What drove you to direct a play on human
trafficking?
Primarily two things: first of all it’s
community theatre - something I do and enjoy doing, so the narrative and my focus
has been social commentary. Why Innocent
Flesh, because for the past eighteen months I’ve been doing work with
migrants. I’ve been looking at human trafficking from that kind of aspect, so
when I was given the opportunity to talk about human trafficking but from that
layer of sex trafficking, that made it an ideal play to take on and get to
work.
Aside the fact that
Wesley Ellul was the one who presented the script to you that brought it on . .
.
Wesley and I work together. The formula we try
to stick and keep doing for the first time and for the first year is to create
theatre, and to re-create a company that’s not just say comedy. It’s finally a
model where you have the piece that can bring in the money, and when one does
that, you have before you your artistic piece and your community piece, and Innocent Flesh was the community piece,
as simple as that.
Copyright © Diandra A. 2013
As the director, how
did you manage to develop the play onto the stage? When you read it did you
envision it? Was it a developing process that came along in participation with
the actresses?
Yes, you read the play many a times, and you
study it; you know it and you know it inside out, and before you actually get
to read it with the actors you have a beautiful vision.
I am a firm believer of creating a piece
organically, and that the starting point of every actor in developing a story
starts from the self. What happens
then is it changes, so what you do is you play upon the strengths and the
weaknesses of the characters and the actors you have. So what you would have
tuned is leaning to the self, because if we were to present it with a different
set of actors, the piece would change dramatically.
I always go about starting from the self. The
process used when we first started rehearsals for the first few weeks was very
much first studying the self rather than the characters. We asked questions of
ourselves, saw the places in our lives as a teenager where maybe there was a
moment where life could have taken us onto a different path, and when we found
that moment we were able to invest into the characters that were in Innocent Flesh.
Remember, Innocent
Flesh was nearly partly a piece of theatre. When Kenyetta had written it,
the text - the words were very much the true words of the girls she had actually
encountered and worked with. We had to create that value of reality and what I
call the ‘currency of truth’, what
is the currency we were using.
In order to allow the people to be invested in
it and to have the spectator engaged, first we needed them to see that these
are real people. Hence to start off from a real person you have to start from
yourself, and that is the value the actors actually found, discovered and
nurtured throughout the process of the piece: how to be real. Not to be
performers, not to be entertainers, not to be re-enactors but how to be
artists; to be actors – to be anthropologically correct, to be journalists. The
system we use is starting off by playing games, the game of objects that
Stanislavski speaks about, to discover our truth.
The theatre is not life; it is life as it ought to be. You take it so
much higher, it’s got to be up there all the time.
I noticed in the production
that there were patterns of provocative-ness to innocence to each
girl telling her story. How did you bring into action this synchronisation? Did the script help you in some way? Copyright © Diandra A. 2013
The thing is, it was because the people are organic.
When you are starting on very strong foundations and you invest in the time, in
the people and in what their story is, in what their objective is, when you
have the four different actors talking about them, talking on, telling us their
story and not just telling us but driving
- because that’s what it means, to drive the story, the richness of such a piece
is for it to be very indulgent. So it could be all about like, “Oh look at me. I’m
a poor prostitute and my mummy doesn’t love me and I want to go back home”, and
that would have been polished. That would have otherwise been your regular teen
soap opera, you know - ‘dramm’.
What allowed for those images you just spoke of was the fact that we always played, and technically speaking it’s
a little incorrect to say this, but we always went against the ‘vain’ of the
text.
One of the tricks we used, let’s just say if in
one of the scenes it’s read as though one of the girls is in pain, we played
against the pain. So what we did is like, “Ok, there’s pain. We’ve got to cover
it up with humour”. And
that is how those vignettes started getting created, because then what happens
is that when you see something truthful happening – and also do remember what
an artist does is primarily holding up a mirror, saying ‘this is what I’m
seeing’. When the actors gave me what they were giving me that is what you then
start creating. In that sense, as much as it was scripted, the beauty of an
organic piece is that I take lots of lightness into changing things around, and
that is only because I use its strengths and
weaknesses.
A lot of time, especially in the Maltese scene,
if you don’t speak in a particular way, if you don’t stand in a particular way,
they’re considered weaknesses. But they’re not. That’s human. They’re frailties
that make you true, rather truthful. You play with that. You try not to hide
it, you know? You try and hide a big hole in the wall you’re just going to make
a mess of it. You just expose the wall, and turn it into a piece of art and
say, “no I wanted that hole there”; give it its relevance and to just not shy
away from it. Just go with it, be bold. You’ve got to be bold, not be shy of it
and play with what you have.
Speaking on developing the characters.
You start from the self. We still do not know
or I may be generalizing, but a lot of people think because you sing and dance
and you do something like this you’re an actor. But no – one has to understand
that this is between a performer, an entertainer and an actor. That’s three different elements altogether;
it’s like you’re talking of a musician, a painter and a singer, they are three
distinct disciplinary arts.
With Innocent
Flesh what I would like to think is that it does climb one more round
towards being an actor. So that is what we used and brought up; it’s the
actor-artist apart from himself. It started from there, it’s what we used. And
then yes we started creating bits of variables of the text. In the sense, being
a play and being in a play, we are allowed to do things that in life we’re not
allowed to do, hence referring previously to playing and boldness.
Starting from that, if I had to be faced with
such a situation and I wanted to go for broke, how would I face it out? What
are all the options? How would I drive that to its fullest? And that’s where we
picked it off. So it wasn’t from what are the rhythms of this or how do you
stand – no. Not all that, because if you're real it just happens.
You made Candace and a
particular sub-character Maltese - but mostly Candace. Talk abit further about
that decision of making one of the characters local.
That was a decision I had taken previously,
even having held auditions. Ideally I wanted them to be four different voices,
to have four different nationalities.
I think actually with Candace that is an
example of what I was talking about before, especially in the English-speaking
theatre world. The idea is if the currency we’re dealing with is truth, and for
this you have plays in Malta who could expose the situation and the reality
that is alive in Malta, you could not have had anything but a Maltese girl
there.
Anything less would have been rubbish; would
have not been real. So Candace specifically was made to be that from the very
beginning and I wanted to have a Maltese-speaking actor, rather than an English
speaking actor speaking Maltese. That was a very specific decision. I tried
looking for different ethnicities, but it was very hard to come by. They didn’t
turn up for the auditions.
We did our
research - anything less is not art. Hence it is why we worked with the Women’s Rights Foundation.
not some sort of a
myth,
not something only
found in movies.
It’s there.
It’s real.
Of course – absolutely! There’s a lot of
information, even if you want to scratch the surface. You understand and realise that the stories that were put up
during Innocent Flesh are actually
truthful.
I still
remember when I started reading the script,
I thought,
“Well, is it relevant to Malta
Then you realise . . .
What’s written and true to L.A.
it’s true to Malta
it’s true to Rome
it’s true to Moscow
These stories happen the world around.
It’s a modern day reality
which also probably goes
beyond
the socio-economical-political reality
that we face with,
what’s been happening these past 10, 12 years
and
unfortunately,
the situation is only
going
to get
worse.
What do you personally
think is the main factor that drives and keeps human trafficking striving on
today? –
Money.
It’s a 1.5 billion dollar industry. Globally.
It’s about
making money off people; something that has been going on forever.
It boils up
to primarily just that.
Money to be
made off the living. It’s something that somebody wants to buy.
Money and
Lust.
How do you think we
individually need to stop this?
To say “to stop” is a very finite statement. Unfortunately
I don’t think it’s ever that easy.
But what one can start doing is something very
simple: using art to expose. That is what the artist does. The artist is not
there to judge or to justify, but to say, “Look, this is how things are”. As a
result, when you meet people like Innocent
Flesh, you might pick somebody to actually start thinking about it and reflect
about the person, their situation and their background.
A lot of times these girls do it willingly.
These boys do it willingly too. But one has to see where it’s coming from.
It’s a chicken-and-egg situation. What do you
stop – the victim or the perpetrator? Who is actually the victim and who is
truly the perpetrator? It’s like saying ‘how do I stop crime’.
With human trafficking per se, it’s about
keeping your ears open, keeping your eyes open; not dismiss it and not thinking
that this thing never happened.
On my director’s notes of Innocent Flesh I placed the quote, “not in my backyard”; yet you
can be surprised. There was a situation, over a year ago, there were girls kept
as/by criminals in a flat in Paceville. We’re not talking about in the middle
of a desert here.
Can it be stopped – I don’t know.
Should we stop it – of course
absolutely!
But I think the most
important thing to do is allow people to be aware of the situation without
judging. Without passing any judgement, without saying what is and what
is not, but just tell them, “listen, this is what’s happening”. And then people
will make their own mind up.
-.-.-.-
'NOT FOR SALE' - Philip Leone-Ganado's article on human trafficking in SundayCircle.
SUPPORT Chris Dingli's project Palermo - Palermo Team Website
How Palermo came to be - Film Treatment
Mira Sorvino's Speech against Trafficking
Few films worth watching:
- 'Human Trafficking' starring Mira Sorvino & Donald Sutherland (Trailer)
- 'Trade' starring Kevin Kline
- 'Sex Traffic' starring John Simm
'Watching Sex Traffic is not a horrible experience because it works well as a thriller
so it's exciting and you are always gunning for the good guys - but you can't escape
the fact that it's a depressing subject matter". John Simm
-.-.-.-
Director’s Note to Innocent Flesh:
“Not in my backyard!”
Surprisingly enough it is
not as uncommon as we think. Paraphrasing Dr. Lara Sciberras, of the Woman’s
Rights Foundation, “there is more of them than there is of us”. What did she mean?
Our first conversation leant towards the socio economic reality of girls and
families that find themselves in dire situations and resort to the oldest job
in the world. But there is more to it than that.
It is very easy for the
bourgeois class to tut in disapproval and turn their heads in shock horror. The
truth is that the sex trade is worth 31.5 billion dollars globally. Let us not
fool ourselves that sex trafficking and slavery is alien to Malta
When Wesley approached me
with Kenyetta’s script, my
first reaction was to think that the piece was not Malta
We all know of the street
in Gzira, but there is more to it than that. It is very ‘comforting’ to think
that that is our only reality. Yet we have all heard of a salon or of a guest
house or of a flat or of a club . . . but as an island nation we are happy to
not think too much about it.
“What? Girls kept prisoners
in a flat in Paceville? As if . . . How’s that possible? U ajma can’t they just run away?”
you protest. If only life were that simple. So black and white.
It does not take much, to
really see what is happening in Malta
For the 4 young actors
playing these girls, it wasn’t as daunting or as far-fetched, as they had the
will and daring to invest fully into their characters. The process of the piece
revolved around their own personal journeys as teenagers. In the back of the
cupboard of one’s emotional lock up, one always finds a moment were an event
was the catalyst for a choice and a new path trodden.
We are not here to justify,
judge or comment on the truth. We are simply exposing it. As an artist it is my
duty to hold up a mirror to society, and in turn let is bask in its glory, or
balk at its failures.
Technically the piece reads
very much like a radio play, with its rich eloquent text, and theatrically it
is great work and a pleasure to devise the moments and vignettes that you will
see develop in front of you. The design and aesthetic of the piece mirrors and
juxtaposes the inner thoughts of the girls and drives the action and narrative
poetically.
Nadia, Tina, Sarah Jane and
Simone brought all of themselves. They come together as a chorus, they break
way in to their respective roles and they mirror each other’s character’s
journey. Their generosity, focus and specificity have allowed me to shape up
the piece for the theatre in its purest form.
Marc Cabourdin
-.-.-.-
To read Part 1 click here
Innocent Flesh to be performed again
on Saturday 15th March
MITP Theatre, Valletta
Copyright © Diandra A. 2014