{"id":470,"date":"2018-09-11T18:28:17","date_gmt":"2018-09-11T18:28:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/storming-utopia.seh.ox.ac.uk\/?p=470"},"modified":"2018-09-11T18:28:17","modified_gmt":"2018-09-11T18:28:17","slug":"a-conversation-with-wes-williams","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/storming-utopia.seh.ox.ac.uk\/index.php\/2018\/09\/11\/a-conversation-with-wes-williams\/","title":{"rendered":"A Conversation with Wes Williams"},"content":{"rendered":"

Interview conducted by Elizabeth Lindberg<\/span><\/h3>\n

Wes Williams is a lecturer in 16<\/span>th<\/sup><\/span>\u00a0and 17<\/span>th<\/sup><\/span>\u00a0century French language and literature at St. Edmund Hall\u00a0at the University of Oxford. His interests are in early modern and Renaissance literature. His first book,\u00a0Pilgrimage and Narrative in the French Renaissance: \u2018The Undiscovered Country\u2019<\/i>\u00a0(1999), was about pilgrimage and travel writing, while his most\u00a0recent\u00a0book is\u00a0Monsters and Their Meanings in Early Modern Culture: \u2018Mighty Magic\u2019<\/i>\u00a0(2011). Professor Williams is also a playwright and a director. In 2015, he collaborated with Pegasus Theatre in East Oxford to put on a\u00a0show\u00a0titled\u00a0Storming Utopia<\/i>. Williams worked with a group of eleven to nineteen-year-olds to create a short play\u00a0triangulated by Montaigne\u2019s essay on Cannibals (1580) and\u00a0inspired by a backdrop of Thomas More\u2019s\u00a0Utopia<\/i>\u00a0(1516) and Shakespeare\u2019s\u00a0The Tempest<\/i>\u00a0(1611).\u00a0The play explored utopia\u2019s relevance in contemporary Oxford. Professor Williams is currently working with Pegasus Theatre in order to make\u00a0Storming Utopia<\/i>\u00a0into a full length play. On November 28, 2016 I spoke with Professor Williams at his office in St. Edmund Hall. At the time, I was taking a tutorial on Thomas More\u2019s Utopia and the history of utopic thought. I was eager to hear about Professor Williams\u2019 project and to learn more about how he uses theatre to explore utopia\u2019s relationship to Oxford University and the surrounding community.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/h4>\n

EL:\u00a0So first, how did\u00a0you become interested in utopia? What led you to the concept?\u00a0<\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

WW: I am\u00a0an early modernist by profession. My thesis was on travel writing and on pilgrimage. I started by thinking about space\u00a0and metaphor\u00a0in a\u00a0fairly high\u00a0theoretical sense\u00a0and then I gradually became interested in\u00a0situated,\u00a0embodied relations to\u00a0space, to place and\u00a0in\u00a0cognitive mapping:\u00a0how one imagines oneself to be somewhere\u00a0as opposed to somewhere else. That all turned into\u00a0what was in the end\u00a0a fairly\u00a0hardcore historicist-plus-narratological\u00a0account of Christian pilgrims traveling to Jerusalem in the 16<\/span>th<\/sup><\/span>\u00a0century. Through that, I got interested in the broader world of travel in the 16<\/span>th<\/sup><\/span>\u00a0century,\u00a0and\u00a0in particular how to understand pilgrim\u2019s subjectivity,\u00a0their understanding of themselves as exemplary, as both writers and travelers at the same time, and how this sense of self gets modified either through actual journeys \u2013 actual shifting from one place to another\u00a0\u2013\u00a0or the work of retrospective memory or even through\u00a0imaginary journeys.\u00a0Utopia<\/i>\u00a0then figures precisely as, amongst other things, an at once imagined and actual journey. Many people believed it to have been a first person, eye-witness account of a real journey, but also many people did not,\u00a0and knew that it (also) belonged in a\u00a0particular genre: that\u00a0of\u00a0imaginary, or if you like, hypothetical\u00a0travel.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Over the last few years,\u00a0I\u00a0have been part of a number of different research projects\u00a0that have looked\u00a0at the early modern European reception of More\u2019s\u00a0Utopia<\/i>\u00a0\u2013\u00a0the\u00a0French, Italian, and\u00a0Dutch reception,\u00a0as well as\u00a0the\u00a0English\u00a0ideas or\u00a0literary games that come out of\u00a0Utopia.<\/i>\u00a0My particular expertise is in French writing.\u00a0In respect of the French uptake of Utopia, it makes sense to begin with\u00a0Rabelais’s\u00a0Chronicles, where\u00a0there are many references to utopia,\u00a0both\u00a0by name and by structural game.\u00a0Another absolutely central figure in the story is\u00a0Montaigne,\u00a0whose\u00a0Essais\u00a0<\/i>feed\u00a0into\u00a0The Tempest,\u00a0<\/i>which in turn develops\u00a0the idea of utopia itself;\u00a0the history of all this is a history of\u00a0figures and\u00a0tropes\u00a0and characters that\u00a0migrate across different languages and different genres.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0What led you to make a theatre production inspired by utopia?\u00a0<\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

WW:\u00a0This particular project\u00a0represents for me\u00a0a utopian\u00a0experiment\u00a0connecting up\u00a0different\u00a0parts\u00a0of\u00a0a working\u00a0life.\u00a0For about thirty years I have been working in the theater as\u00a0a\u00a0director and playwright. The Pegasus theater, which is in East Oxford,\u00a0is somewhere I have worked for a very long\u00a0time on a number of different shows, but only once before on anything directly connected to my academic work.\u00a0I thought,\u00a0ok,\u00a0it is time to try and bring\u00a0things\u00a0together more substantially, to\u00a0maybe even thematize\u00a0the bringing together\u00a0of the theatre and\u00a0my\u00a0academic research\u00a0through\u00a0a kind of utopian\u00a0understanding of the university, but also a utopian understanding of Oxford. Because\u00a0Oxford\u00a0has such a history as\u00a0an\u00a0ideal space, a space that is rich in tradition, and that seems to have held on to aspects of a Golden Age, but also gets regenerated, remade \u2013 a golden age utopia that is reinvented by each new generation of students.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>It changed my life, coming here. For me, it has been a very fine, empowering place to be. But I am also aware\u00a0that\u00a0one can be in Oxford for many, many years and actually never get outside the\u00a0little island that is either\u00a0the\u00a0university or even individual colleges. And also that many people who live here have next to nothing to do with the University which has made this place famous throughout the world. So this project is an opportunity to think about Oxford as a somewhere made up of a number of different islands. It is an attempt to think about\u00a0The Tempest<\/i>, about\u00a0Utopia<\/i>, about Montaigne, about\u00a0a range of early modern texts, but to do so in the context of contemporary Oxford. And in particular, the knowledge economy, but also the\u00a0political geography of Oxford: how Oxford is fruitfully thought of as an archipelago \u2013 a bunch of islands \u2013 where there are some very famous bridges, but where there is also a many actual and imagined rivers, and many, many walls. There is the Bridge of Sighs,\u00a0modelled of course on the bridge in Venice, but\u00a0also\u00a0Magdalen\u00a0Bridge\u00a0and Folly Bridge at different ends of the town\u00a0center.\u00a0Crossing the water over each of these bridges makes a difference. For\u00a0instance, if you cross Magdalen\u00a0Bridge, on the left of this old map of Oxford,\u00a0and you are not in the university anymore. For some people it\u2019s another town.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Last year we made an early version of the show at the Pegasus, as part of a Jamboree of youth theatre work, and the pitch of the show was simply:\u00a0imagine yourself in a situation where\u00a0there has been a kind of eco-disaster; Oxford is flooded and it becomes something like Venice.\u00a0In the map, this means imagining all the white sections as water.\u00a0The\u00a0Bridge\u00a0of Sighs spans real\u00a0water, and all\u00a0the roads\u00a0in the ancient city\u00a0center\u00a0are transformed\u00a0into\u00a0canals.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Oxford\u00a0is flooding. This means that you have to leave your house. Probably, you have to leave the university, too. Everyone in the center has to change where they live and where and how they work.\u00a0It is a destruction phantasy,\u00a0if you like.\u00a0What\u00a0we,\u00a0who have long inhabited the lower\u00a0ground,\u00a0have to do\u00a0is move to the hills. <\/span><\/p>\n

Now as you will have seen from your own experience, within the political geography of Oxford,\u00a0there are\u00a0two hills in particular\u00a0close to the center\u00a0\u2013\u00a0Headington\u00a0is one kind of hill, and the other hill is\u00a0Cowley.\u00a0(There are others, like Boar\u2019s Hill, and Cumnor, further out beyond the ring road.) Headington now has Brookes University planted on it and is fairly prosperous. Cowley, on the whole, is distinctly more socially disadvantaged than the areas around either of Oxford\u2019s two universities. So the\u00a0plot is\u00a0very simple:\u00a0you have an internal migration as you do in\u00a0The Tempest<\/i>. You have a group of\u00a0for the most part privileged\u00a0<\/span>characters, who make their way to higher ground, or in the case of\u00a0The Tempest<\/i>,\u00a0 make their way to\u00a0an island that they believe to be largely uninhabited. And they land, and in so doing effectively colonize the \u2018new\u2019 territory, only to find that there are already inhabitants there\u2026 <\/span><\/p>\n

We follow this process in the original show: we are reimagining\u00a0The Tempest\u00a0<\/i>through a sort of reimagining of the political geography of Oxford.\u00a0What if Oxford, and what if the university in particular, didn\u2019t stop at Magdalen\u00a0Bridge and at Folly Bridge,\u00a0at Christ Church?\u00a0It is \u2013 I hope ! — less of an imperial fantasy,\u00a0and more a hypothetical utopian realignment: It\u2019s not so much a question of\u00a0\u201cWhat if we took over the whole world?\u201d; it\u2019s more like asking: \u201cWhat if there were bridges that took you beyond the \u2018central\u2019 bit between the two rivers at the ancient middle of Oxford, and\u00a0what if the old university were displaced from its central position? What would become, then, of the archipelago of islands that now make up the city of Oxford?\u201d\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0So\u00a0when you imagine this\u00a0eco-disaster,\u00a0it is not only\u00a0something that compels\u00a0an expansion of the community of Oxford\u00a0University, it is\u00a0also\u00a0something that forces a mixing of two communities?<\/b>\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

WW:\u00a0Yes. And that is, as it were constitutionally, part of the point of the exercise. Within the\u00a0university organization, the funding for this project comes from The Oxford Research Centre for the Humanties (TORCH), and an initiative called Knowledge Exchange. This initiative encourages university experts in particular areas to move beyond the university walls,\u00a0to make a link with an institution \u2013 a cultural institution\u00a0for example, like the Pegasus —\u00a0learn what they do, and gain from their expertise, too: in this way, knowledge is exchanged. In that sense the project is in alignment with\u00a0the\u00a0official ideology — or strategic objectives, to put it differently — that the university is promoting at the moment: that of outreach towards the wider community. And this is potentially a very good thing.\u00a0 I have been\u00a0working for and at the Pegasus for years,\u00a0but I feel that there is\u00a0precious little connection between the university and East Oxford.\u00a0Knowledge Exchange is one way to enable, or \u2018force\u2019, as you say, communities to mix.<\/span><\/p>\n

One way to think about how \u2018unmixed\u2019 Oxford communities are is in respect of schools. The school situation in Oxford is from one perspective pretty\u00a0grim in the sense\u00a0that it is strongly oriented towards the private sector, and this is enhanced by the presence of the Colleges of the University and in some cases, and by money and direct support from them, too. In other words, the kind of inequalities that subsist in schools education in Britain\u00a0as a whole are writ large\u00a0in this\u00a0place. It is, for instance, not insignificant that the two colleges in which Harry Potter was filmed support and give their names to private schools in Oxford.\u00a0You might think: \u201cOh university town. Oh there will be really good, well-funded primary schools,\u00a0and\u00a0really good, generally well supported and funded secondary schools.\u201d\u00a0It does not work like that. The situation is changing and there is a lot more interaction between the university and state sector secondary schools than there used to be. But one small index of the continuing need for change — and one that matters to me — is that the success rate of students from state schools in Oxfordshire to come to study in this university is really, really low.<\/span><\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0And that emphasizes this idea of islands\u2026<\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

WW:\u00a0It absolutely does. To the degree that some of the private schools in the town are, as I said, historically and still today very strongly affiliated with Colleges in the university. But even though some mechanisms for outreach beyond the islands of privilege into the larger communities are being developed, many of the members of the Pegasus Youth Theatre, for instance, will have little sense of what the university does or is for.\u00a0And\u00a0we need to change that.\u00a0When we did our first version of Storming Utopia<\/i> in 2015 in Worcester gardens, many of those who came, along with their families, had never been invited inside a College or university building before. <\/span><\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0I was going to ask about the title: Storming Utopia<\/i>?<\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

WW:\u00a0What does it say to you?\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0Well in terms of the word storming, I\u00a0thought about\u00a0The Tempest<\/i>.\u00a0I\u00a0also\u00a0thought of storming or breaking into the\u00a0idea of utopia,\u00a0which is a bit untouchable.\u00a0We\u00a0don\u2019t\u00a0seem to\u00a0use\u00a0the term utopia very seriously anymore, so the action of storming\u00a0it is\u00a0interesting to me.<\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

WW:\u00a0That\u2019s all good!\u00a0Yes. The storm is\u00a0The Tempest<\/i>, but it\u2019s also a verb, as you say, \u2018to storm\u2019. You storm a citadel. You storm somewhere to try and break down some walls or make a breach into it. I think\u00a0we need to \u2018storm\u2019 utopia, because\u00a0of course utopia is not an uncomplicated vision.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0I don\u2019t\u00a0have a single definition\u00a0for the term utopia.\u00a0Sometimes I consider it to be more of a question\u00a0of \u201cWhat is possible?\u201d rather\u00a0than a concept\u00a0about\u00a0the impossible<\/i>.\u00a0If you are explaining\u00a0utopia\u00a0to students at Pegasus, what\u00a0do you say about it?\u00a0I wonder\u00a0if what you say changes depending on the context?<\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>WW:\u00a0In More\u2019s\u00a0Utopia,<\/i>\u00a0it is an island. In the history of the concept, people have associated utopia with Timaeus, with Plato, with Atlantis, with the\u00a0Fortunate Islands\u00a0\u2013 what we\u00a0now call the Canary Islands \u2013 in\u00a0other words, islands due west of Europe\u00a0somehow on the way to the \u2018New World\u2019.\u00a0In this line of thinking the question of whether America is or isn\u2019t an island is a big question. It speaks both to an isolationist \u2018America First\u2019 policy, and to the question of whether America is the culmination of a historical, cultural movement westwards towards perfection. That is, as I say, one line of the reception of utopia: as\u00a0an\u00a0island that it is beyond Europe, and\u00a0maybe imaginary, but is nonetheless an ideal place that is yet to be found and yet to be made.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Whether Utopia is \u201cto be found\u201d in the sense that it is already there and has yet to be dis- or un-covered, or whether it needs to be invented from scratch depends\u2026 But either way, all of those utopias are geographically elsewhere, thought of as actual or metaphorical islands, at some distance from the mainland. And the\u00a0sort of break, if you like — the expanse of water between the mainland and the island — is part of the configuration of the utopia. It is a long way away. It is a place of novelty or refuge or both. It takes some time to get there. It is probably quite hard. But it is probably worth it.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>And yet\u2026. interestingly, as people have pointed out, if you look at early illustrations of Utopia and also if you think about what More says, it is not necessarily that far away from what we already know. More\u2019s Utopia was once a peninsula and the inhabitants decided to dig a ditch to make of their connected land an island. And indeed in the\u00a01518 version\u00a0you can see the mainland, close by — which is where Venice comes in. Because in a\u00a0sense, Utopia<\/i> may be set in a Western European port, and reach out towards America, but it\u2019s also a) set in the Mediterranean, and b) located within a lagoon \u2013 in other words it is one island among many within an archipelago. <\/span><\/p>\n

If you start to think of utopia like that, then it is much less other-ing and exotic; it is much less weird and wonderful and futuristic and \u201cto-be-made.\u201d It is less some remnant of Eden, or a classical paradise, and is actually a more visible challenge to the existing status quo because you can see the mainland from there, and you can see it from the mainland. There has to be trade between it and the mainland. You could even build a tunnel or a bridge, just as you once dug the channel which now separates you. In this case Utopia\u2019s insularity becomes less a geographical feature, which could get moralized as hard to traverse and so on: it is a more straightforwardly political question about choice and access: who gets to go there, and who doesn\u2019t? How hard is it to cross the water?\u00a0What are the tolls, the taxes for going? And does it have walls around it? Or does it not have walls around it? And once you are on the beach or the rocks, can you just walk in? Or are there police guarding it\u2026 <\/span><\/p>\n

From here you are into dystopias \u2013 to 1984<\/i> and the Handmaid\u2019s Tale<\/i>, for example — fairly quickly. But even so, if you imagine Utopia as not far away and distant but as an island that is not in some absolute sense separate from the mainland, more, as I say, like part of an archipelago, it becomes a quite different kind of space.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Then, if you just ponder islands for a while, and you think about even the history of the word \u201cisland\u201d\u2026\u00a0I got excited awhile back\u00a0when I realized that in Juvenal\u2019s\u00a0satires — so in descriptions of ancient Rome — Juvenal\u00a0talked about the dreadful housing conditions of the Roman poor, and talked about the blocks of flats in which they lived.\u00a0He called them islands \u2013 \u201cinsulae\u201d in Latin. This is interesting because the Romans\u00a0recognized both that a substandard housing block might actually isolate people, and is also a kind of island in itself within the larger city. <\/span><\/p>\n

Islands, in other words, aren\u2019t just far away and beautiful, or far away and difficult to get to. Instead, they might actually be right next door. And then of course, this leads to another set of moves: \u201cOh! Perhaps I live on an island, and I did not realize it.\u201d\u00a0Or, Caliban\u2019s claim in the Tempest<\/i>: \u201cThis island\u2019s mine\u201d; or again, it might lead you to thinking \u201cI am an island\u201d; or to being reminded of John Donne\u2019s proposition: \u2018No\u00a0man is an island.\u2019\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

So then, this is a really long answer to your question, but I suppose,\u00a0what I am interested in in terms\u00a0of\u00a0storming utopia\u00a0is to upset; to put more water into the whole thing, have a storm, knock some buildings down, but also to upset the geography\u00a0of it a bit; the imaginative and the ideological geography of it. What would it be like to stop thinking that utopia is a blueprint for the future,\u00a0or that it is a distant place, and to start thinking of utopia instead as a reflection on, and a way of thinking about the here and now, about contemporary lived experience?\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0<\/span><\/strong>I wonder\u00a0why you\u00a0choose to\u00a0begin\u00a0these plays\u00a0with a fiction. For example, in\u00a0Storming Utopia<\/i>, you begin with the fictional story\u00a0from\u00a0The Tempest<\/i>. Why\u00a0re-imagine\u00a0a fiction\u00a0as opposed to\u00a0thinking about Oxford independent of an already\u00a0existing\u00a0utopia?<\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>WW:\u00a0This is a really interesting question. I saw a challenge to this question presented at the Pegasus just recently.\u00a0There is a new Oxford-based theatre company called Mandala Theatre, a diversity-led theatre company, who did a piece about two\u00a0eighteen-year-olds\u00a0who were in\u00a0the\u00a0refugee-asylum system in Britain. Within\u00a0this system, the way things work here is\u00a0that once you get to eighteen, social services aren\u2019t responsible for you anymore; so the play was centered on that moment of both liberation and being cast adrift. In a sense it was a really traditional, \u201cwell-made play\u201d, set on one night and in one room. It was a powerful piece. One of the characters, the girl, had been doing her A-levels and had been studying\u00a0Shakespeare\u2019s\u00a0<\/i><\/span>Pericles<\/i>. At a certain point in the play she started\u00a0telling the boy about how\u00a0Pericles\u00a0<\/i>is a version of their situation. And it was a really interesting moment because\u00a0I thought\u00a0\u201cAh good. Finally this play is actually dealing with some big stuff and it is showing that there is a history to all of this.\u201d\u00a0And\u00a0the boy said\u00a0something like: \u201cWhat\u2019s the big deal? Just because some guy in history wrote about it does not mean our situation becomes more important. My life is just as important as the life of the character in\u00a0Pericles<\/i>.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

So they had\u00a0this internal\u00a0debate within the play about this\u00a0kind of referencing of Shakespeare. It was a debate about whether existing, powerfully-charged cultural narratives give weight and authority to contemporary experience. And I was challenged by this debate. Because I had to recognize that this was the key moment for me: it was the point where I got interested in\u00a0the play not just as a\u00a0story, but\u00a0as a play<\/i>. In other words, I am a scholar and a writer and a theatre-maker who is interested in the friction between fiction and lived experience, different moments in history, and\u00a0different ways of conceiving things. So for me to start with a fiction and then to test that fiction against contemporary reality is a way of not being in too much service, if you like, to contemporary\u00a0reality, and\u00a0also not simply providing a version of the news.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I think, in other words, that there is a\u00a0vital, life-giving tension between the facts and contours of contemporary experience on the one hand, and\u00a0the kinds of hypothetical imagining that you have to do to engage with fiction on the other. I want to say that\u00a0thinking about this, experimenting with this kind of imagining, and with a critical history of the imagination, is not just enjoyable, it also has a kind of poetic force, and is even a political necessity.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

So yes it is true, I always will start\u00a0with a set of existing fictions. In other words,\u00a0even as I am pleased or I feel it is important to engage with texts of the past that have a certain degree of value assigned to them, I am also concerned to reassign some of that value. Shakespeare\u2019s play-making\u00a0does not just belong to officially sanctioned theatre. The stories and images and moment and characters and relationships \u2013 all the questions that early modern people were intrigued by still matter, to us all, today.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0I was\u00a0thinking about Thomas\u00a0More\u2019s\u00a0Utopia\u00a0<\/i>and about what it meant during his time to create a fictional place.\u00a0More has been accused of lacking a\u00a0commitment to his context.\u00a0The claim is that\u00a0by\u00a0constructing an\u00a0imagined, alternative society,\u00a0he side-stepped any direct critique of 16<\/b><\/span>th<\/sup><\/b><\/span>\u00a0century England.\u00a0At the same time,\u00a0More\u2019s\u00a0Utopia<\/i>\u00a0<\/b><\/span>addresses some very practical questions about politics and society. <\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

It seems that\u00a0Storming Utopia<\/i>\u00a0does the same: it is based off of the fiction of\u00a0The Tempest<\/i>\u00a0to begin with, but it asks questions that are very relevant to contemporary Oxford.\u00a0You have noted, for example, that\u00a0Storming Utopia<\/i>\u00a0asks questions like\u00a0\u201cWho runs the city of Oxford?\u201d\u00a0and\u00a0\u201cHow\u00a0it is governed?\u201d\u00a0I wonder how\u00a0you think about these\u00a0very\u00a0practical questions when moving within a fiction?\u00a0<\/b>\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

WW:\u00a0First, there are some very straightforward ways of thinking about this in rehearsal.\u00a0You propose a game for members of the group, whether they are eleven or seventy years old, to play: \u201cFor the next half an hour, let\u2019s all play the\u00a0game of \u2018You Are in Charge\u2019.\u201d\u00a0That might start as a physical game whereby you give people the right to write words for others to say, or to move other people\u2019s bodies around in certain ways, or to make them construct things, or perform dances or other actions and so on, but it will move very quickly into psychological territory, too, the world of feelings and thoughts \u2013 the\u00a0Caliban and Ferdinand stuff in\u00a0The Tempest<\/i>. You say: \u201cOk you are Prospero, you have that magical power, and you can get people\u00a0to act according to your will\u201d.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

You need, of course, to set boundaries to the experiment, and to have developed trust within the group. And then it can be really revealing, exciting, and\u00a0even empowering both to be in the positon of the one\u00a0who says\u00a0\u201cOk do this, now!\u201d,\u00a0and to know that your time as a servant will come. Depending on the age group and depending on the\u00a0people involved, this proposition can be taken in all sorts of different directions.\u00a0Some of that work will find its way into the performance\u00a0if only in a sort of method-acting way. I mean by this that whoever\u00a0gets to play the Caliban character, who in our case was a waiter in a caf\u00e9, remembers those\u00a0exercises\u00a0and\u00a0carries them through into performance, and other people on the stage\u00a0in that\u00a0scene will remember also,\u00a0and\u00a0will try and bring some of\u00a0that\u00a0energy into the\u00a0scene.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

That is one way in which\u00a0those\u00a0questions about\u00a0who owns this place — who is allowed\u00a0to work here, and who has their\u00a0papers and so on — are addressed in our work. In other words, we transpose.\u00a0Another case like this was the character of Ariel. One of the principle locations in the show, as I said, is a caf\u00e9.\u00a0Prospero is a woman who runs the caf\u00e9 and Ariel\u00a0is\u00a0someone who works in the caf\u00e9. If you remember from\u00a0The Tempest<\/i>,\u00a0Ariel is constantly looking for his or her freedom. In\u00a0the 2015 version of Storming Utopia<\/i>, the caf\u00e9 owner has Ariel\u2019s passport and won\u2019t give it back. The two\u00a0clearly get on fine for the most part, but every now and then\u00a0there is just this niggle\u00a0from Ariel\u00a0about:\u00a0\u201cSo\u00a0when will\u00a0I get my passport back?\u201d\u00a0That came out of a moment in rehearsal when we were looking at what kinds of bondage and\u00a0what kinds of enslavement operate within\u00a0Oxford.\u00a0That is a very clear form of servitude, whereby people from all over the\u00a0world are working in service industries; and in some instances the traffickers who brought people here, to what they thought was Utopia, won\u2019t give\u00a0their\u00a0<\/span>passports back: they can\u2019t either move on, or make themselves legally at home.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Another way to approach the kind of questions you are asking is even more straightforward. That is simply to embrace utopian modes of discourse directly: in one rehearsal game we were invited to make two proposals about how to make Oxford a place better.\u00a0For a few minutes, performers just shouted out: \u201cIf I were in charge of Oxford, I would improve the transport system, or build an underground railway, or knock down several walls, give free sweets to everyone\u2026\u201d Then we agreed through discussion what the best five proposals were, and found ways to embody them on stage. For instance, with some umbrellas and some cartwheels, we had a new-fangled train that made its way around the audience.<\/span><\/p>\n

You can, in other words, take those quasi-legislative moments\u00a0in\u00a0Utopia<\/i>\u00a0and transform them into a wish or into a fantasy about being in charge, from where it looks at first very straightforward. Some of the kids just wanted free sweets, others wanted a proper transport system, and others wanted free access to higher education\u2026\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0EL:\u00a0Have\u00a0you\u00a0been surprised by\u00a0any part of the project? Its initiation or reception?<\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

WW:\u00a0The surprising difficulties are nearly all to do with exactly what the project is about. In other words time and space<\/i>: time-tabling different rhythms of life with different groups of people, and then the walls, the doors, the locks and the keys to rooms. All of the Pegasus Youth Theatre stuff runs on a school timetable that is not the same as a university timetable, which is not the same as working life for those no longer in education. So, for instance, trying to get university students to commit to something that takes twelve\u00a0as opposed to eight\u00a0weeks is almost impossible. To try and get Pegasus to alter its rhythm from a twelve-week rhythm to an eight-week rhythm so that it can work with the undergraduate university? Also not possible.\u00a0So you then realize we really are living on islands which are in effect timetabled islands<\/i>.\u00a0This was (for me) a real surprise, and proved to be the major practical problem. <\/span><\/p>\n

And then the next one\u00a0is rehearsal space. It would\u00a0be really easy to do all of this in the space of\u00a0the Pegasus rehearsal room. To get permission from the parents to take their kids into a different space, say at the university,\u00a0on a Wednesday evening, to get insurance to do that,\u00a0and\u00a0to make sure that everyone who is working there is\u00a0police-checked is not straightforward\u2026\u00a0 We regulate and put walls around the spaces where our children gather, for often very good reason. But these walls also mean that there are all sorts of limits to the possible points of connection between different groups of people. But there are also the discursive surprises about what you are and aren\u2019t allowed to talk about with certain age groups. And again, having worked in a university all of my life, I am not used to that. So, literal walls, temporal islands, and discursive boundaries. Negotiating these practical constraints of time, space, and linguistics borders has been my hardest battle. <\/span><\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0 So, there are the questions about fiction and questions about logistics, too, and they are connected. Which in some sense\u00a0goes back to the\u00a0conception of\u00a0utopia\u00a0you mentioned earlier, in which utopia is not some far-off island, but actually somewhere close by, but that it is nonetheless, logistically, a place that is really difficult to get into.<\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

WW:\u00a0Right and it goes back to that idea of a utopian island that is inside another island,\u00a0or inside an\u00a0already existing, archipelago-like structure. It\u2019s partly a question of ease. It\u2019s easier to run a creative experiment just within a theater, or even just within a school or university. We have found that when the experiment is all about imagining what it would be to live, move, and work creatively both within and between<\/i> places and times, then it becomes much, much harder.\u00a0It probably shouldn\u2019t have been that much of a surprise. But it was.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

EL:\u00a0As these\u00a0institutional and logistical barriers have emerged more strongly, has your view of the community changed?\u00a0<\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

WW:\u00a0Yes.\u00a0There is a specific sadness about how much effort and time things can take, but there is also a bigger political sadness. I would want to start by saying that I do think it is great that this sort of thing is happening now, and that Storming Utopia is just one of several experiments. It is great at the level\u00a0of raising aspirations for eleven to nineteen-year-olds to think to themselves:\u00a0\u201cOh maybe I can go through those walls.\u201d It also helps encourage those\u00a0from the university\u00a0who have \u2013 literally or metaphorically \u2013 not crossed the bridge to the mainland to start the journey into a different conception of utopia and of community; to take a step or two beyond the island. And \u2013 and this is becoming clearer as the project develops further — it is also about connecting with others who live and work mainly within university. It\u2019s not just about being inside or outside the city or college walls. <\/span><\/p>\n

There are islands within the university, too: most of the people who work in the college kitchens, for instance, are not white, whereas most of the students they cater for and to are. This simple divide is endemically part of the long history of service and servitude than underscores the relationship between the city and the university. In this context, even tiny little projects like this one, might bring about a little realignment of the forces, the balance, the weight of Oxford.<\/span><\/p>\n

The key thing is to keep asking the utopia question: who gets to come in, who gets to work here, who decides who has access to conversations, meals, books, computers, gardens, secret spaces, and unencumbered time <\/b>that utopias of many kinds afford. So even though projects like it have to involve contracts, and lawyers, and surface level agreements, and DBS clearance for this or that meeting in this or that place, that is utopian work at a kind of community blueprint level as well. You have got to do that work, too; it has got to be about the practical stuff as well as the transformative power of fiction, and of theatre.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Interview conducted by Elizabeth Lindberg Wes Williams is a lecturer in 16th\u00a0and 17th\u00a0century French language and literature at St. Edmund Hall\u00a0at the University of Oxford. His interests are in early modern and Renaissance literature. His first book,\u00a0Pilgrimage and Narrative in the French Renaissance: \u2018The Undiscovered Country\u2019\u00a0(1999), was about pilgrimage and travel writing, while his most\u00a0recent\u00a0book […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/storming-utopia.seh.ox.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/470"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/storming-utopia.seh.ox.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/storming-utopia.seh.ox.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storming-utopia.seh.ox.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storming-utopia.seh.ox.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=470"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/storming-utopia.seh.ox.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/470\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":471,"href":"https:\/\/storming-utopia.seh.ox.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/470\/revisions\/471"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/storming-utopia.seh.ox.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=470"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storming-utopia.seh.ox.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=470"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storming-utopia.seh.ox.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=470"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}