Risking Trust

Trust, like love, is often measured by its loss or lack. One of the reasons the IETM (the International Network For Contemporary Performing Arts, still known as IETM for its original organizational title, the Informal European Theatre Meeting) exists is to provide a supportive organization so its global members can relieve any lack or loss of the assurance and reliance needed to produce the best work, allowing these members in turn to work together in the best ways, collaborating and connecting internationally. The question of trust and — more specifically, who do we trust — exercised the minds and hearts of the six hundred IETM members who met this spring at its plenary in Dublin. The three-day conference brought together participants working in performing arts fields from fifty countries. It took on the structure of a festival with multiple overlapping performances, events, and presentations, based at Project Arts Centre and at a scattering of local venues such as The Ark, The Abbey Theatre, Smock Alley Theatre, Dance House, and Irish Film Institute. Irregular venues included the Phoenix Park where a discursive run was held, and “an honest open conversational” swim happened in Dublin Bay facilitated by theatre and dance practitioners.

The IETM holds its international plenary twice a year and they offer this compelling possibility — to link performance with discourse in a shared space where new ideas can be created, presented, theorized and critiqued, all within the same context and at the same time. The intensity of the event’s layered structure generates an atmosphere rich with creative and critical encounter where interconnections are easily nurtured and where audience response to work can be readily gleaned. For artists, this audience also happens to be one of the most discerning and potentially useful assembly of spectators in the world, made up of performing arts programmers, curators, directors and peers. For this vital audience, the artistic program was curated by Cian O’Brien, Artistic Director of Project Arts Centre, in close collaboration with colleagues and the local performing arts community. The live artworks and performances were chosen to exemplify the range of pertinent work being made at the moment in Ireland by artists and companies who stand at the incisive edge of current movements in theatre, dance, and music in performance and theatre. Michelle Browne selected artists for her live art and performance art event Between You Me and The Four Walls, Dylan Tighe selected musicians and sound artists for his Let the music do the talking. Dublin’s Fringe Festival curated a series of off-site works, unique events for the delegates that would give them a different perspective of the city and the artists working there.

Talks and Meetings

Thematically, trust and its questions — How do we trust and why? What are the limits of trust in collaboration? What is the potential of trust in society, in culture, and what are its consequences? — became the topics for exchange in the discursive sessions and the subject matter for performances and artistic presentations. The question of “Who, after all, do we trust?” was posed before The Big Debate, a marathon three-day open forum moderated by Eugene Downes (Ireland), a performing arts producer, and Anne Bonnar (Scotland), an arts consultant, with freelance theatremaker Ida Daniel (Bulgaria) as provocateur responding and pushing the limits of the interchange.

IETM members flowed in and out of these sessions raising questions of our trust in citizenship, its responsibilities, and productions, and our trust in authority, as societies in Europe continue to change due to recession, austerity cuts, revelations of clerical or institutional abuse, and the rise of fascism. Artists, curators, producers, and cultural workers debated their mutual trust and distrust of one another, and of the structures built to support the production of artwork in a global climate of funding cuts to the arts. Responders identified a need for audiences to be shown how to trust artists and a necessity for agencies and cultural funders to trust and support the development of new types of work and models of presentation.

The panel, along with its itinerant recurring...