Crossing the Foreign

When we encounter an unknown culture, very different from our own, the feeling generated facing this obscure reality can be overwhelming. We don't know where to start. We lack the tools to communicate, to know how to be immersed in other customs. It can be hostile, intimidating, too big to embrace over the course of a project, over a lifetime. Any first step is a good step. We enter and follow the innumerable threads of these cultures which, at certain points, intertwine and begin to form a map - always flawed, always incomplete, but motivated by curiosity and the desire to share. We ask them to teach us languages, songs, dances, to show us films and pictures, to tell us about their lives here and in their countries. Over time, often without us realizing it, what is strange has become familiar even if it is not fully grasped. ‘Crossing the foreign’ is essentially spending time with that which is different from us. We remember, at the beginning of the project, feeling intimidated, uncomfortable in the sessions we gave to many Asian men in the greenhouses. We didn't know how to be surrounded by turbans, incomprehensible looks, ambiguous demonstrations and difficult communication. Right now, when we cross paths on the street with men from Punjab, from Pakistan, from Nepal, we feel a comfortable familiarity. We don't remember the moment when this change happened. It unfolds over time. More than transforming those we meet along the way, ‘crossing the foreign’ means to be transformed by these strangers. It requires time and energy. It requires habituation to the strangeness of the other, to their culture, their way of thinking, their way of living, without forgetting our differences but seeing them as points of encounter rather than of distance. The performance is the result of this passage. It could not exist if we did not venture, if we did not open ourselves to new practices, new aesthetics present everywhere in all the people involved, and in all the senses. To ‘cross the foreign’ is to launch ourselves into the unknown without forgetting where we come from. In the book Radical Hospitality: From Thought to Action, which served as inspiration for the creation of the first BOWING performance, philosopher Richard Kearney proposes a balance between that which is strange and that which is familiar, an even playing field in which a valid notion of identity and strangeness co-exists: "Don't let the foreign become too foreign, or the familiar too familiar." To ‘cross the foreign’ is to have curiosity and attention for that which is not yet visible. It is to start walking in a direction without yet having any clues about the destination. It is to move through cultures we have never explored, without trying to transform or subvert them, but with the openness for them to transform us. When there is that encounter - that contact - the foreigner will also be transformed. The relationship is always reciprocal. It is this openness, this curiosity for the other that until then had never crossed paths with us, that will allow different cultures to collaborate in a construction that is between them. It belongs to everyone and to no one.