Australia’s Fascist Attitudes

Keyvan Rahimian has just been released from 5 years gaol for teaching and organising an underground university because Baha’i youth are banned from University in Iran. His brother and sister-in-law were also imprisoned for the same ‘crime’. His wife died of cancer while he was imprisoned, leaving their daughter without her parents.

I recently read a post by a professor of health sciences, here, in Australia, suggesting that the Australian government should force religions to bring doctrines in line with ‘secular’ laws. I am constantly amazed by how supposedly well-educated people in the west are so ignorant of some of the basic reasons why secular democracy works:
1. the separation of state and religion (States should not make religions);
2 states that dictate everyone’s lives and organisational processes are no longer secular nor democratic but fascist or stalinist or maoist.
And yet these same people will parade their ‘professorialship’ to the public as if they are the expert on government, sociology, religion, democracy, and “what is for our own good”. The Iranian revolutionary Council certainly believes that their dictation is “for our own good”. There are some that believe that this attitude only lies with religious extremists. No, it belongs in the attitudes of ordinary scholars here in Australia. We could shrug it off by saying, “so lazy of that scholar” but that “laziness” has much of the current world without worthy leadership from the learned class, and our institutions in Australia fail people every day because of that.

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Stand for Discourse

While the great religions have been attractive to a certain type of person, mainly men, who see it as career, status, and power, the great religions have always fostered an idea bigger than that, and so we can also see that the great discourses and services to humanity have come out of religion.

The inability for many of us, religious or not, to reckon with the forces of culture – the normalisation of social behaviours that might exploit or disadvantage or even attempt to annihilate another group; and the failure to be able to provide access to everyone in the discourse, is at the heart of disenfranchisement and leaving so many people vulnerable to the ‘wolves’ of this world.

Nonetheless, there is a huge well-educated class of people who can foster discourse among ourselves in a vulnerability about our own experiences and beliefs, without fear or rancour. That is there for us to be, and when we can be that discourse among each other, then there is no one with desire for power, political or status, that will not be moved to be at least that their welfare is tied to openness and participation and equity.

The Role of Government in a Democracy?

It occurs to me that, in a democracy, the role of the politician and the government is not to be gatekeepers of society but rather to provide for the needs of the people as they demonstrate that need.

As a principle, it is not for politicians to save people from themselves, nor to maintain a status quo. It is for politicians to ensure that no expression of a need of one group forces any other person or group to forgo their need or perform an action against their will, when the need of the latter does not prevent the expression of the need of the others. For example, the need to hold certain beliefs cannot over-ride another’s need to hold differing beliefs, and neither beliefs can over-ride another’s need to live their life fully;  the need to have a full life cannot over-ride the need for others to appropriate levels of sleep; the need to have money cannot over-ride the need of others to ownership.

Needs may even be categorised according to importance. Water, food, shelter and clothing against elements, and sleep because of their absolute importance to survival, must surely rank first, regardless of any other needs of any other person or group. Occupation, purpose, education, freedom and agency might rank as second and of more importance to those needs that ranks third or fourth or fifth, to get married or have a partner for life; to have the best entertainments, to build huge reserves of wealth.

We tend to call these needs “RIGHTS” but in doing so we often fail to recognise the levels of importance, projecting all needs onto a ‘rights’ banner. While I might concur that level 1 and 2 needs are indeed “Rights” in the sense that a ‘right’ is a need without which one cannot function adequately in society. I cannot see that level 3, 4, or 5 needs are, in any way “RIGHTS”.

Otherwise, given that a request for the fulfillment of a need is made of government, the governments first role is to ascertain the consequences for others of fulfilling that request. Once the consequences are ascertained, the second role is to resolve the conflicting interests. The third role is to write a law that provides and protects the access of the supplicants to the resolution of their need, and delimits the expression of that need or other’s need as relevant to prevent that expression being harmful or impossible to fulfill.

A BOLD Presentation

March 8 – 12 2017 saw the inaugural BOLD Festival in Canberra, Australia. The BOLD Festival, celebrating the legacy of Dance in Australia, is the brain-child of Liz Lea, dancer, choreographer and event organiser.

As a new comer to the dance theatre scene, a ‘mature mover’ (over 50), and facilitator of dance and performance, I was honoured to present and perform at the BOLD Festival.

The invitation came about through the successful project, “The Forging of Men”, designed and performed with 6 rural men, under the directorship of career theatre-maker, Sue Hayes.

The presentation to The Bold Festival was in the form of a short Pecha Kucha (powerpoint slides presented within 5 minutes). Below is the text to go with the slides. To enjoy the presentation, please open the slides and arrange them beside the text below

Slide 1	Cover slide: This presentation is about my recent journey into dance.
Slide 2	From my years of health work I recognised that a healthy community requires robust empathetic leaders who are the enzymes for bringing that community into integrity and discourse.
Slide 3	ACTUALLY being fully alive, being fully human, is a function of wonder, inquiry, creativity, and performance / action. Novelty, the surprised recognition of a distinction, is the source of wonder and a vital ingredient for brain development and learning.
Slide 4	Performance is that we are in action in the world and there are witnesses. Performance is where we get to become adults, leaders, and dancers. Performance is the wonderful, human thing about life.
Slide 5	The performing arts can be a fantastic access for ethics and leadership training by: ·      supporting the empathetic imagination of the live of others and; ·      the possibilities of self as leader through the conditions for wonder, inquiry, creativity, and performance.
Slide 6	Over the past 7 years I have designed human sized board games, as a fun approach to movement training, and a way of seeing the world through the body.
Slide 7	2011 – My first dance project with Jess Jones on the Atherton Tablelands. The project was an awakening for me to the possibilities for facilitating dance theatre work with untrained people. DANscienCE 2013 was an inspiration – a motivation to develop my own skills as a mature aged dancer, and find that breakthrough into establishing a community dance group.
Slide 8	Mastery – the ability to recognise and perform as by the finest distinctions as a function of performance before increasingly discriminatory witnesses. Taking any age you were and any skill (technical or creative), plotting novel and masterful experience over time might give some indication of your actual neural and physical ageing robustness.
Slide 9	I have been creating small dance programs for the middle to older aged person for a few years. From that came a vision and a model for an inclusive dance training program that I call rEvolve with connotations for dance as transformative in life.
Slide 10	In my rEvolve program I work with several characteristics of training and design to allow the most embodied expression of an idea. The team works by building through exercises by collaborative feedback until eventually, there’s the performance.
Slide 11	I recently began to feel it is time for me to take a stand for a male culture that is authentic and embodied. At stake is the flourishing of our communities and nations.
Slide 12	In 2015, I found three men who were interested in attending work in dance / physical theatre . We called ourselves ‘Men in Motion’ We won a grant to bring theatre-maker Sue Hayes weekly from Cairns to Atherton to building a performance about our male identity After we had commenced the development of the work, a further two men turned up, and so a performance was developed, “The Forging of Men”.
Slide 13	The men were, mostly, inexperienced in theatre, dance or any type of performance which gave us a perfect conditions to trial a ‘proof of method’ of the rEvolve model.
Slide 14	There was a moment in the project when Sue Hayes turned to the men and said, “Okay men, tonight you are going to touch each other.” The contact exercises essential to physical theatre is another potential boon to a transformed male culture.
Slide 15	As the project progressed, one of the men told me, “You’ve been a bit bossy lately. I’m not enjoying myself.” The group conversation that resolved that tension showed up in the performance in what the audience saw about the team work.
Slide 16	I’m now facilitating two groups of about 12 dancers in total: ·      the all-men group for the contribution to male culture that could continue to make; and ·      there’s now an all-in group. FINE

 

The Big Me Dances

The universe, the world, is how it all occurs to me as a happening, an event, a contingency.

Recalling the words of Baha’u’llah as I would apply them to myself, “… the world is my unawareness of the Godhead and my absorption in aught else…” and that truth is founded in the primary spiritual attitude of the unfettered search: detachment from tradition; avoiding backbiting, boastful people, and evil-doers; cleansing the heart from love, hate, and pride; and living in prayer, patience, resignation, and forgiveness.

My experience gives me the sense that the Godhead operates for me through my declaration (to myself or others) in abandonment of all untrue considerations, for an enthusiasm, passion and joy.

I believe that I am living in the world, a universe of elementary materials, from which has derived my organic construction as a capability for the flourishing of a metaphysical being. I am the root growing through the soil of human life, drawing sustenance for that budding fractal splicing and looping through all the dimensions beyond time and space, all the dimensions of eternity. I believe I am both contingent and eternal, always to be “unaware” and “absorbed by”, yet also to be a sense of Godhead through how I am in truth.

And so , I dance.